Last Retro Game You Played? What Retro Game Are You Currently Playing?

It's a utter classic, and I did read that as Dark Cloud which I would have said skip but Chronicle due to art-style holds up.

Dark Cloud 3 is like the last big surprise Sony could drop.

Dark Chronicle is fantastic, one of my favourite RPGs of all time. Definitely stick with it!

Might only be for Jay this one as after watching Castlevania and then playing Bloodstained CoM, I fancy playing another Castlevania.

Now I could buy Requiem but #FucKonami, I'm going to try & get Lord of Shadows on Xbox 360 used (again) with it being BC but just wondering as someone who didn't play the GBA or DS much

If they're any I should maybe check out from those or any other console that isn't SOTN as that's the obvious answer would be great.

Edit
Just remembered Super Castlevania IV is on the SNES Mini and I could play Rondo on my PSP, Rebirth on WiiWare but wait to see what you guys say

Yeah, the best Castlevanias outside of SotN are on GBA/DS, so it's well worth trying to dig a few out. They're all in the SotN Metroidvania style, just so you know.

Aria/Dawn of Sorrow are heralded as two of the best that the series has to offer. It's got a pretty interesting story for a Castlevania game - it's set in the future, for one, and there's a couple of neat twists in the storyline across the two games. The gameplay resolves around gathering souls from enemies which you equip for new abilities and attacks. It's a pretty neat system.

Portrait of Ruin is my personal favourite. It ditches the souls system for having two playable characters - one is a classic vampire hunter like the Belmonts, another is a mage who uses spells for her attacks. It makes for some fun gameplay switching between the two and using their abilities when needed. The castle is a treat to explore with it acting as hub world for smaller areas in which you tackle bosses and advance the plot. It's dead fun.

One thing to add is that PoR and DoS - not sure about AoS - both have a couple of bonus modes where you play as different characters which totally remixes the game, so you'll get a lot of mileage out of them. I think AoS is on Wii U, but you'll need to pick up a DS cart for the other two.

I'd trust Jay on that, he knows his onions. All I can add is that Super Castlevania IV on your SNES Mini is an absolutely brilliant playthrough, its definitely worth a couple of hours of anybody's time. And, though it's not quite as good, you'd do well to find a way of playing Castlevania: The New Generation on the Mega Drive.

Yeah might be worth me looking at the WiiU VC as just looked and Aria is £50, both Portrait and Dawn are £25 which isn't that bad of a price but still more than I would like for DS games.

I once owned New Generation, now I see how much that costs also good to hear SCIV holds up as watched some videos and it just looked like brown.

I don't know how you got on with your Final Fantasy games Jay but I might do similar but with Castlevania.

I finally managed to get Typing of the Dead: Overkill working on my laptop and I didn't realise just how hilarious this game is. So much fun - the only negative being that typing on a laptop isn't quite as good as a standard keyboard. The Football Manager DLC just adds to the pure zaniness of it all. Typing "flat back four" or "excessive salary demands" whilst a zombie attacks you is incredible.

On a SEGA-related note, I also gave Yakuza Kiwami a bash on PS4 - wow. Just, wow. It's basically the perfect Grant game. Stupid humour, manic beat 'em up action, hilarious dialogue, enough of a Shenmue influence yet isn't clunky or corny. Looking forward to sinking my teeth in to this series.

Couple of gems right there.

That's one game I should get for my Dreamcast and another I should give a go but I didn't like Zero.

I've "purchased" Kiwami on the free PSN thing, but haven't downloaded it yet. Very tempted! Not enough time though - I can't be a Yakuza man and a Robot Horse Killing lady at the same time...

I was planning to play a lot of Castlevania and I've now got the Lords of Shadow Trilogy on Xbox One along with a few others spread over a few systems but...

Final Fantasy XIII Trilogy is now backwards compatible along with being X Enhanced that I started XIII last night which is a bit odd playing a Final Fantasy on an Xbox.

I did the first chapter and it looks so good (you'd think it's a remaster), you'd guess it came out 2012 or something not 10 years ago and I think it actually might play well, not sure I can say that about some of the characters haven't aged well though.

Vanille? It's totally Vanille you're talking about.

Funnily enough, I felt the same way playing FFXIII back on 360 when it launched - it didn't feel like it should have belonged on Xbox, but then again, that might be because of the scarcity of JRPGs on the platform. I remember chatting to one of my mates about the graphics being mind-blowing, which is funny looking back on it, but I guess our chats must have held some truth!

Yep her and Hope.

Actually the crazy thing is, now looking back at the 360 it had loads of JRPGs and other game's from Japan that nearly all my backwards compatible games are Japanese and nearly all the games I would like to see are as well.

I guess due how well the 360 did it was always going to get a lot compared to let's say the Xbox One which is only just getting them.

The 360 verison actually suffered in the graphical department compared to the PS3 and the crazy thing is MS have gone & used PS3 assets now when the game is played on a Xbox One which helps it looking as good as a remaster would.

I'm just starting Chapter 4 and I'm really enjoying, I think more so now as it's not a open world game like everything is now.

Ah, Hope gets better. Vanille... does not.

I do think the linearity in FFXIII takes the biscuit at points, but then again, FFX was similarly linear in that you're barrelling straight forward throughout the whole game. It did a better job in hiding it by interspersing combat bits with puzzles and towns, whereas FFXIII was all about battling up until the later chapters where exploration was actually an option.

I'm working my way through the NES library on Switch, and have got to Ghouls and Ghosts and Goblins or whichever 2 it is. Hypocrite that I am, I Google things in games that are 80 hours long but have a branching point at 40 hours (that sets you off on the Good Ending or Bad Ending thus locking you out of bits of game), but NES games I'm treating as precious commodities, using the save states only as ways of keeping where I got to (so that I try and "git gud" at a game rather than brute-force my way through). However, despite being a "classic" this genuinely seems unfairly difficult; I've taken damage to a Nothing At All on a couple of occasions, and some baddies spawn in a way that, as far as I can tell, impossible to avoid. I just want to get to the bottom row of the alphabet, where Mario and Zelda are sitting!

Super Ghouls and Ghosts is far superior - not just for being a SNES game, but that its difficulty doesn't seem to rely on as much random bullshit as its NES predecessor.

Went round my buddy's place for Super Nintendo, Pizza and beers. We olayed through Turtes in Time, we played Super Mario Kart (man thats hard) and we had a bash at a DBZ fighting game.

Still playing FFXIII which my main game at the moment.

I've just started Chapter 6 (8.5 hours in), Hope does seem a bit better of a character and can see what there trying to do with him with Lightning.

Really enjoying still as even though I did play on PS3 (not sure how far I got), it does feel newish and the story even if a little confusing is interesting enough.

Drunkalilly wrote:

and we had a bash at a DBZ fighting game.

Super Butoden? It's one of the better DBZ fighting games - decent spritework too, if I remember rightly.

We went with Hyper Dimension because it's older and more unique, but he has like 5 or 6 different DBZ fighters.

Ah, I've not heard much about that one! What made it more unique?

You can fly and stuff so it can take place over a large battlefield, somrtimes going splitscreen. As I understand, later games are more strraight Street Fighter clones.

Ooh, that sounds a wee bit like Supersonic Warriors on GBA in that it's not as ground based as other 2D Dragon Ball fighters. The split screen element sounds pretty cool.

On my PS4, I'm playing Horizon Zero Dawn, in which the main character is trying to find answers to the slaughter of her tribe, the origins of her foster father, the mystery of a civilisation that has long-since disappeared and yet seems to be responsible for a wide range of artificial life forms, and whether all three tie back to her, and possibly a mother she never met, or thinks she doesn't know.

On my Amstrad CPC Emulator, I'm playing Biff, in which you're a chimp who had an argument with his mum and got chucked out of the house, and now you need to do tasks for her to sheer her up so she'll let you back in.

Do we really have it better now?*





*yes of course we do

About 5 mins of Battle Arena Toshinden which has aged as well as Another Rock and Roll Christmas.

Then I went straight to Metal Gear Solid which I have to say in some ways holds up amazingly such as the footprints in the snow that enemies will spot, Snakes breath being visible in the cold.

However it's a nightmare to control with a d-pad, I've only got to the first heart attack that after awhile I may get used to the OG controller but did find myself trying to use sticks that weren't there.

As you may have seen in the yesterday I bought thread I bought an Xbox 360 and a PS3. Now they're not really retro but last gen, however when you think about it some of the games I was playing yesterday are up to 14 years old that it is a bit of grey area.

Anyway, first I plugged in the 360 which I have to say the dashboard is great and baffles me how this is so much better than the Xbox Ones. I went through the store and I've got to say there are loads clearly missing that has been pulled over the years such as Blur and if a game works on Xbox One it has a little logo. Meaning I found very little I owned that I couldn't play on Xbox One.

I found Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix which is the same game as the one which would come to Switch for almost 4 times as much. SSFIITHDR looks great and I did find a game right away online against someone in Japan who basically just let me win, then went through arcade mode with Cammy and it's fine but not sure I'll really come back.

Next up was Hydrophobia which seems decent from the 30mins or so I played and I do think I'll go back to it soon.

Last up was a game on disc, yep I only found 2 downloads worth playing before putting in Magna Carta 2 which looks good from the boxart and thought it look sort like FFXII but no it's grey as hell which makes it look worse then a PS2 game and the characters are in the style of One Piece but because it's sudo-realistic (like Final Fantasy) they look really weird. I can't really see me playing this much if at all.

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Then it was the PS3's turn which I also headed to the store to find it to be updated to be the same as the PS4's which is cool but makes it slow as hell to do anything, did find a bunch to download from the 750+ things I "owned" (I also don't think that includes PS4 stuff from the looks of it) but as those are rather big I only got Flower downloaded yesterday.

Disc wise, I installed everything and found Folklore doesn't have trophies that makes me less likely to replay it compared to something like Metal Gear Solid 4 which now has trophies.

Killzone 3 looks great and has 3D which is odd as I've been playing in VR and of course watched thing's like The Hobbit in 3D but I found really uncomfortable which I was little surprising, also the online for Killzone 3 and Resistance 3 are no longer up.

Last on PS3 was Remember Me which is something I wanted to come to BC on Xbox One for ages, as I had this feeling it be a game we go back to now and it is better then we thought or remembered. Got to say RM looks fantastic and easily the best looking game I played yesterday that they'd have to do very little for a remaster. It starts very much like Life is Strange as in walking down a hallway, credits playing along with some music.

I did decide to put in my copy of Metal Gear Solid and it looks & seems to run miles better then it does on the PS1 Classic plus I can use an analog stick.