Last Retro Game You Finished And Your Thoughts

gjones wrote:

The early 3D football games are definitely an interesting bunch, and unfairly overlooked these days. Nobody's remastering FIFA 96 like they did NHL 94. Probably for the best, as it was decent at the time, but not actually fun (like the Sensible Soccer games were).

Euro 96 was also my earliest memory of a football tournament, and I remember getting the wall chart and filling in the scores. It was a great summer, although I do find the nostalgia surrounding it a bit much. We have multiple documentaries on the tournament, where we got to the Semi's. I just can't imagine a nation like Germany or Spain having the same obsession. Similarly, hearing pundits saying they expect England to win Euro 2024, despite not playing well for a while now, is just opening us up to failure, and ridicule.

Unless England go on to win it - which I still fancy them to do, all truth told - I don't think there'll be any nostalgia for this tournament. It's been mince!

~



UEFA 2000 on the Game Boy Colour…I mean, what are you expecting here? Things start poorly when you see it’s published by Infogrammes and developed by the same maker as such reputable and high-calibre titles as “Inspector Gadget Racing” and “Baby Felix Halloween”. Yet the condition turns critical when an 8-bit graphic of David Beckham and David Seaman having a cuddle pops up, and the whole thing dies a violent death when an England crest Brexits its way onto the screen emblazoned with the notice/warning that the game is “an official licensed product of the England team”. It’s the worst start to a game I’ve ever seen, and that’s just in the first fifteen seconds.


On the pitch…once again, what are you expecting here? It’s an uninvolving and very unchallenging tournament football game where tactics and training don’t matter. It’s not that the game doesn’t function – I’ve played worse on more advanced hardware – but it’s no hassle at all to hammer your opponent 9-0 in a three-minute game. Football computer games that are goalfests can be great fun, but not when you can stroll by the defenders with no opposition.


I don’t have any lasting memories of EURO 2000 and I’d like to immediately forget about UEFA 2000. 3/10.

If I saw a copy of that GBC game next time I was rummaging through cartridges, I'd actually fancy it. I could do with just playing as England and hammering some teams.

The Cappuccino Kid wrote:

Unless England go on to win it - which I still fancy them to do, all truth told -

The Euro 2004 tournament in Portugal was another classic case of ‘No Scotland, No Party’. I and millions of others were starting to get used to a familiar feeling of Scotland not qualifying for a major international tournament; history books show that this would be the second of nine consecutive championships where Scotland took no part. 2004 was a low point for sure, coming after an absolute scudding against Holland in the playoffs and being the dark days of Nigel Quashie getting international starts, Kenny Miller being essentially our only option up front, and – of course – "Christian! Christian!"

In the world of video games EA’s FIFA Football franchise was regaining its reputation at this point, having benefitted from a new gameplay engine, a refreshed style and presentation and from much-improved graphics. The reviews in the magazines were positive, but nobody cared though; Pro Evolution Soccer was everybody’s darling, and it was only football game that I and everybody else I knew needed. That said, without PES for competition I might have given UEFA Euro 2004: Portugal a Blockbuster rental if it had come out on GameCube. Alas, like 95% of third-party games it did not, and so I’m experiencing it on PlayStation 2 for the first time here in 2024 courtesy of my local CEX in exchange of a fifty pence piece.

I tell you what, UEFA Euro 2004: Portugal is a proper trip back in time – and I don’t just refer to the teamsheets. Nowadays, it’s an unfortunate reminder of how limited a piece of kit that the PlayStation 2 really was. Fair enough, the player animations and the audio commentary have aged, that’s always the case with old football games. Yet with the experience itself there’s drawbacks galore here. The unappealingly dull visuals, the long load times, the even longer amount of time it takes to save your progress to the memory card, and the distracting drops in the framerate really detract from the quality that the game might have had. It’s poorly optimised, and I doubt that was because EA didn’t have the resources to make a better game.

Euro 2004 is regarded as a great knockout tournament. It had a totally surprising champion, it was a showcase for many of the era’s emerging superstars, and it had a well good Nelly Furtado theme song. The video game though, much alike the current 2024 tournament, it sadly lacks the same memorability. 4/10.

Of course Cappa's got all of the dedicated Euro Fifa games
I remember getting FiFA 2004 on the GameCube, that being the first FIFA game in about 6 years, and it felt like they were going through the motions with that; there was a weird Z-button "highlight a player to cross to" which was absolutely fucking useless, assuming you want to go out with a clipboard and do a quick survey of your forward players' availability for the next minute. And the squad selection page only fitted 10 player names on the screen. I've not played the Euro version, but it sounds like it's worse - it's almost like they press a "make special tournament button badly coded" button. We did switch to PES soon after.



Oh, I finished Wario Land 3 - I'd previously played 4 and loved its subversive nonsense, but thought the original (i.e. the third Mario Land) was a bit clunky. This was a really pleasant surprise though. The imagination in this is great, really it's a giant adventure game but split over levels - a MetroidVania almost. Very clever stuff, and I had passers by both laughing at the sprites (i.e. when Wario gets squished) and laughing at me when I landed in the fire pit, only for me to explain that I set myself on fire on purpose! Yahaha/5

Wario Land 3 was an absolute cracker right enough, it’s the game that convinced me to get a Game Boy Colour with my summer holiday money (in 2000, I think). It was just what I needed at a time when I was growing out of Pokemon, when I was unimpressed by the N64’s future release schedule and when I was basically killing time until the PS2’s launch that winter.
 
I went through a fair few pair of batteries with Wario Land 3…although I think I prefer Super Mario Land 3. Whereas I'll probably drop what I'm doing to have another playthrough of the first Wario Land when that eventually comes to the Switch's Game Boy app, I've had Wario Land 3 sitting there for nearly a couple of years, without feeling the urge to give it another go.

Wario Land 4 remains the only one I've played, I ought to try some of the others.

The Cappuccino Kid wrote:

growing out of Pokemon

Does not compute.

Buskalilly wrote:

The Cappuccino Kid wrote:

growing out of Pokemon

Does not compute.

We must have misread, right? Doesn't make any sense otherwise.

That's how I missed the GBA ones

Balladeer wrote:

Buskalilly wrote:

The Cappuccino Kid wrote:

growing out of Pokemon

Does not compute.

We must have misread, right?  Doesn't make any sense otherwise.

 
I was just starting academy in fairness. Pokemon hit the UK in late 1999 when I was in Primary 7 and for six months all of us at school were all obsessed with the Game Boy games, anime cartoon, trading cards, stickers and the rest. We all had a lot of maturing to do in Summer 2000 though, and Pokemon just wasn’t the “cool” thing to be into as a nearly-teenager back then. I remember feeling a bit sad about that, and feeling disappointed to be putting the cards away into a big shoebox and the soft toys into the back of the cupboard – but I knew it needed to be done. That said I remember very discreetly renting Pokemon Snap – which I’d been looking forward to for well over a year since it's NTSC N64 Magazine review - from a Blockbuster in a different town miles away, because I didn’t want to risk getting seen borrowing it by anybody I went to school with. After that though, I was done with Pokemon for about a decade.
 
I’d say the attitude has changed now though. I work in secondary schools and meet plenty of young folk who are into Pokemon.


~


All the Wario Land platformers are well worth playing btw. Especially from the second one onwards, they’re unique to the other Nintendo 2D platformers. That’s like with the invincibility mechanics, puzzle-ey level design and the branching paths where there’s different ways to finish the game. I’ve always thought the one on Wii would be worth an HD update too, the artistic design of that game is still superb.

Its still the general pattern of a Pokémon fan, and I'm well aware Balla and I are the exceptions. All of my elementary school students are into Pokémon, then very few of my Junior High kids, then all the High Schoolers are back to being happy to admit.

Yep. Buska I can only presume knew he'd be cool regardless of whether he played Pokémon, and I knew I'd never be cool (to the point of having far too many soft toys for a tweenage boy anyone).

Olympics games, because...Olympics.




Track & Field wasn’t the first button-mashing athletics video game but it might very well have popularised a genre that endures forty years later (albeit through NFTs and eSports shite). Featuring six easy-to-learn but hard-to-master events, gold medals and top scores on the ranking boards are achieved by pummelling an action button as fast and as hard as you humanly can, before then more delicately and considerately using a second action button to perform the movement of, for example, leaping over a hurdle or angling the trajectory of your javelin throw. Just like you would the levels in a platformer or the tracks in a racer, you play the game’s six events in sequence, and it’s a very addictive and quick game for it. I have many fond memories of playing Track & Field’s XBLA port with mates back when we were teenagers and I’m very happy to discover that it still satisfies now. One of the great ‘early’ games, 8/10.

 

1996's International Track & Field similarly tests your speed, reactions and accuracy – as well as the durability of your controller - but updates the series into 3D while adding a handful of new events. It’s deservedly regarded as a multiplayer classic from the era, being a fantastically entertaining laugh that retains the accessibility and competitiveness of its 1983 prequel. Even on my puff I massively enjoyed revisiting it ahead of typing up this quick review, although its brevity reminded me as to why it was never something you’d see for full-price in the shops (even as a Platinum game it was always cheaper than £20) and as to why copies it seemed to flood the second-hand shops of the day. That said, I don’t load up these sorts of games looking for an absorbing multi-chapter experience; I just want to jump high, run fast and throw things far to get high scores. It’s a very playable and pure adaptation of an already brilliant game. 8/10.

 

Lastly is the series’ long-forgotten twenty-fifth anniversary reboot, New International Track & Field. I’d forgotten about it anyway, except for one curious thing. I don’t know why, but the Spar down the street from my house had an absurdly big section selling DVDs, CDs and computer games. It was never selling the newest release, I’m guessing all the stock was procured straight from suppliers and their clearance lines. For reasons that I’d say are both totally inexplicable and perfectly explainable, a couple of copies of New International Track & Field stayed on sale there well into the 2010s, well past the point when the DS was out of production and into the period when the 3DS was in full-flow. It was just an odd sight that’s stayed with me. In this seaside town community who’d be going to Spar for their Daily Record, their Fray Bentos and their New International Track & Field?

Exclusive to the DS, it’s a mostly approachable and arcade-minded Olympic-‘em-up that unfortunately lacks those timeless qualities of the 1983 original and 1996 revamp. There’re two things that I think spoil New International Track & Field for me just a little. Firstly, while they’re responsive and warrant some credit in the sense that they try something different, the scribbly touch-screen controls just don’t really let you perform the best you can. Traditional button controls are selectable in the options screen, but the button mapping was uncomfortable on the DS Lite that I used to complete the game’s 24-event Career Mode. Either way, the controls lack the immediacy that I think it’s essential for game such as this, and neither method that the game offers particularly satisfied. For the discus event I genuinely couldn’t work the controls out via either means, or with a tutorial, or even after watching a part of a YouTube longplay video. I fluked it thankfully, but I’m not an idiot and I know how discus is supposed to work…why was it so complicated here? That’s just one example.

The second downer is just simply a consequence of the passage of time. New International Track & Field was built around online play, and was supposedly one of the very best examples of that on the DS. As you’d expect, the servers have long since been shut down and due to that a lot of the game’s merits and broader enjoyment is missing today, long gone.

I appreciate its quirkiness and with its many retro sound effects and unlockable characters I think it’s a very good celebration of Track & Field and Konami history as a whole. It’s not successful in everything it tries and therefore it’s not a medal-winning performance. However, it still a qualification-worthy effort. There’s just about enough going on and going for it to justify giving it a go if you’re in the mood for this type of thing. 6/10.

Cracking write-ups, as per.

I played one of these kinds of games on the Mega Drive, got very nostalgic for the digitised voices and then played a bunch of one of them with Muss and my pals on the Wii VC. I can't for the life of me remember what it was called; I don't think it was an actual T&F game.

Feel every one played International Track & Field on PS1.

Me and my older brothers loved the track & field games back in the day, if Konami weren't stupid then they'd partner with Nintendo to do T&F 99 game.

Track & Field 99 would be superb. I could envisage lots of gimmicks and fun twists that would adjust Track & Field so that it always remained balanced between players and well-matched to the other 99 games that have appeared before.

~



 
In another thread Jimbob recently queried “is the N64 actually the worst culprit in “games that are impossible to play if you don’t have the manual”?”. That provided food for thought, but I ultimately disagree. That culprit, for me, is the Commodore 64; a system that I’ve always found utterly impenetrable. How life’s so difficult on hardware where the commands can essentially be boiled down to ‘Up’, ‘Down’, ‘Left’, ‘Right’ and ‘Action’ is hard to explain, but the vast majority of the C64 games I’ve played completely and totally confuse me with how they play.


At first, Summer Games was another example of this. Playing it on Evercade, it’s just as well that all that systems’ compilations come with a printed manual. Even though I have no nostalgia with Summer Games itself, the experience of playing an old-timey game with a well-explained manual just like in the ‘good old days’ was quite an evocative one.


My sentiment ends there though. I’d understood that Summer Games was regarded as something of a milestone in Commodore 64 gaming, having presentation, animation, graphics and gameplay that were a true enhancement on what was otherwise experienced at the time. That’s all good and well for 1984, fair dos. And with the Evercade’s instructions and in how it’s been slightly adapted for that hardware, at least I could understand and eventually finish all of Summer Games’ eight events. However, I just found much of it to be an extraordinarily fussy to play today. It’s a game where your button inputs must be perfectly timed and your margins for error simply don’t exist. The learning curve is too steep for my tastes, and even after plenty of practice there were a couple of events where I couldn’t consistently perform well. I can respect that it’s a popular and influential Olympics-inspired title, but I can’t say I enjoyed Summer Games forty years after it’s release. 4/10.



 
Eypx followed Summer Games up with several cross-platform sequels, one of the more interesting of which was World Games. Far from being a standard multisports title, World Games takes you on a globetrotting adventure to put your athletic skills in traditional events typically practiced in specific countries. To name a few, there’s unique and charming takes on Bull Riding in Spain, Sumo Wrestling in Japan, Log Rolling in Canada and – oh aye the noo! – the Caber Toss up there in the Scottish Highlands. Just like in Summer Games, the controls and their movement/speed/actions vary slightly between each event. They’re understandably limited in their scope and they overall lack finesse, but for the most part they’re simple and intuitive enough after some practice. If World Games has a major drawback it’s that there’s once again a massive learning curve, which makes a fair proportion of the events frustrating – especially those where you really need to tune in to some sort of metaphorical rhythm with their gameplay. In the end though, I felt able to handle its quirks. I found World Games to be challenging and rewarding, and a big improvement on Summer Games. 6/10.



 
California Games is much more up my street, I’m much more familiar with it and particularly it’s Mega Drive port. Unlike in the previous Epyx Summer and Winter sports games and their conventional representation of Olympic events, California Games focuses on variety and adapts more ‘casual’, extreme-minded sports such as Skateboarding, Surfing and BMX Racing into a sunny summery Golden State setting. Counterbalancing those are really fun representations of Hacky Sack, Frisbee and Roller Skating – it’s a nice mixture of games that don’t really conform to the same design as one another. That said, the performance, playability and presentation of these events is uniformly brilliant, and refreshingly for a sports game compilation there’s not a duff event here. The officially licensed Louie Louie soundtrack never gets old too, I could listen to that all day. It’s cracking stuff, and deservedly regarded as a Commodore great. 8/10.

…it’s safe to assume we’re not getting Mario & Sonic at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, aye?

As far as simple, accessible and family-friendly sports minigames compilations go, all of the Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, er, games did their job and played out their roles to varying degrees of success. I have vivid memories of multiplayer magic with the original 2008 version on Wii, and the Winter Olympics game for Vancouver in 2010 was a totally brilliant extension of that – at the time it was genuinely one of the best games on Wii. As time passed and new bi-yearly updates were released however, I felt that the Mario & Sonic games were increasingly lacking in variety, surprises, personality, and depth. The 2016 and 2020 editions were, looking back, pretty ordinary and inessential altogether.

Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games doesn’t ring much of a bell. I’ve still got my GAME receipt for it that’s dated 10th July 2012 yet I don’t remember anything about buying it. Likewise, the saved data on my Wii says that I got 6.8% of the way through the game and tells me that I last booted it up during September 2013, yet I’ve got no recollection of that either. Without really knowing much about it or having much experience of it, I think I’d convinced myself at some point over the last twelve years that Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games was a really good game. That might be because it was a really fondly remembered Olympics, I don’t know.

But if anything, it’s honestly that missing link between the excellent 2010 Winter Olympic Games and the frustrating and confusing mess that was Mario & Sonic at the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympic Games on Wii U. I think London 2012 is where the series started to turn. My main criticism is that there’s a load of recycled visual, audio and gameplay content from the previous two games, and it’s desperately short of new features. It poorly registers the movement of the motion controls too, which I think is a bit naff considering that the Wii was five years old by this point. You think they’d have cracked it by 2011, but they didn’t in Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games. On that topic I’m confused that the MotionPlus isn’t used at all, I think it was a good couple of years old itself by the time this rocked up. There’s a small handful of new debuting events – Football, Canoeing and Showjumping, if you can contain your excitement – but they play and control as waggly as you’d imagine, and they’re nothing I’m eager to play more than just the once. Everything else functions as it did before, which further exasperates that feeling of repetition and stagnation. There’s no Story Mode either, it’s instead replaced by this weird and unexciting London Party mode that’s got a board game structure and where winning depends on filling out your sticker sheet. It’s a bit reminiscent of Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival, in that it’s a slow, clunky and underdeveloped idea that’s got the depth of the long jump sand pit.

At least the imaginative Dream Events are of a much higher standard and quality, being loosely based on actual Olympic events and incorporating level designs from the likes of Super Mario Galaxy, Sonic Heroes, Yoshi’s Story and more. Alongside that it’s the customarily excellent Mario & Sonic soundtrack, creating nostalgic yet fresh tunes that blend iconic themes from both the franchises in a variety of styles. I urge anybody to listen to the remixed music that was made of these games by the way, they’re almost all really enjoyable.

Dream Events and music aside though, the whole execution of Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games left me feeling disappointed. I’m sure that playing solo detracts from the overall experience, but even if I was surrounded by mates I don’t think it would have generated the competitive and engaging excitement that it really could and should have. 5/10.

Alas, the Olympics commision (much like FIFA) have decided NFTs and Mobile Games are the future, so no Mario and Sonic.

I don't think I ever played London. I remember reading about the Dream Events, and of course it was cool that Mario and pals were in Britain, but after only getting a couple of sessions from the original game, i never went back for any subsequent entries.

Buskalilly wrote:

Alas, the Olympics commision (much like FIFA) have decided NFTs and Mobile Games are the future, so no Mario and Sonic.

Just as everybody else is realising they're a bad fad.  Classic sports board stuff. (He says with his deep knowledge of sports boards.)

Like skateboard, surfboard, snowboard, longboard?

I remember being disappointed by Mario & Sonic 2012 Blah Blah Etc., not specifically because of the controls (I mean it was always going to be waggly, "Track and Field" was the genre the Wii controller was invented for) but how basic-ass everything was. There was nothing about any of the game that actually looked like the London Olympics, or London in general really. I guess that ties in with the party mode - I don't think we even attempted to play it once in our family, predicting what it was going to entail.

Weird tangent: given that I'm not exactly finishing my current game project, I was thinking about game-i-fying a sport that only turns up at the Olympics and that we don't watch any other time. Track cycling or field hockey or Rugby 7s etc. Actually the first one sounds the most promising if I make it look like Tron. Anyway, sorry, don't know where I'm going with this but I'm not deleting it now

Been playing a little bit of PS3, got a few MP videos up on my YT and have picked up a few games like Sleeping Dogs on it. And whilst I had the PS3 on, played for the first time Remember Me from Don't Nod when they were Dontnod and know one knew who they were either.

Anyway, RM is a 3rd person action adventure game with a few different mechanics all around a story about memories. You have combat which is two buttons of Square and Triangle then you use them into combos but unlike any other game there's only four combos, and you slot moves into them, which also have traits to them like this move will make my abilities refresh quicker or this one will give me health.  

It's trying to be clever but I found it meh, and an odd boss fight I've had to swap combos around as can only beat a boss with a certain ability that I would both moves as getting that to refresh as quick as I could then swap back to ones with extra damage when I could attack.  

You also have puzzles that use memories you've found, and you can even go into memories to remix stuff that has happened in the past, that now a character is on your side etc

I enjoyed the game and I kinda want to say hidden gem for PS360 as not been ported to PS4ONE like most of the top tier stuff, it isn't a JRPG or PS 1st Party game such as Infamous that people still talk about it. Yet when I think of those stuff like Killer is Dead, Lollipop Chainsaw, Binary Domain not Remember Me it is a tier below that but think you may seek it out more than some thing of that era.

Still looks quite good as well, loading times are awful, music is fine like everything is fine or ohh it's a good 7/10.

Your write-up there pretty much gels with everything I've ever heard or read about Remember Me. Did it have a quirky charm that might put it in the Deadly Premonition zone or is it too dry for that?

Not even same league of Deadly Premonition, that might be a game even above likes of Lollipop Chainsaw, Binary Domain of the tier list of Hidden Gems. Though as DP is a cult classic, that I'd think a lot people would know about, not sure call it a hidden gem but it's not Red Dead, Bioshock etc