The Classic Video Game Players Thread

mrtomaytohead wrote:
m0nk3yboy wrote:

Looks like the RetroN5 is now having a December 10th release date.

Hey, that's my b-day! Too bad I'd rather get my computer working right again, or a WiiU first.

I am thinking about sticking it on my christmas wishlist and hoping for the best. But the GBA slot makes this a must have since there are a few great looking GBA games I never got to play since I generally loath handhelds.

Once the pre-order went up, it went on my wishlist and mentioned it to the wife.

Looks like it has been pulled from Amazon?!?!?!

Rykin wrote:

Looks like it has been pulled from Amazon?!?!?!

Huh?

I guess they just removed it and relisted because the earlier link wasn't working.

Ah, so that's the item that "was deleted from your wishlist because it doesn't exist".

New listing doesn't have black But we've got a months to sort things out.

Rykin wrote:

But the GBA slot makes this a must have since there are a few great looking GBA games I never got to play since I generally loath handhelds.

Even though I have a DS Lite, I'm in your camp. I can tolerate handheld gaming, if the game is really engaging, but that's about it.

Some guy posted a huge Flickr library about his life growing up with arcades.

If you are a child of the 80s like me, prepare to feel all of the nostalgia. All of it.

My memories of arcades are more of going to a specific place to play a specific game other than big arcades. We had Showbiz Pizza and later Chucky Cheese and the arcades in the malls but those all had the same old machines it felt like. The one in the nearest mall was a Namco place it felt like during my late teens. They had just about every Tekken and Time Crisis game ever made but only had a couple of the Capcom fighters.

I used to love to go places with my mom or grandma when I was younger just because they had a certain game there. For instance there was a laundry mat that had the original Street Fighter along side the required Galaga and Ms. Pacman arcades and they also always had a pinball machine and for a while it was a really great one based on the Outrun game. And there was a pizza place across the street that had Michael Jackson's Moonwalker. I also liked going to my great aunts because there was Hydra and S.T.U.N. Runner in the tiny arcade they had in the mall there.

The last arcade like place I was in was a Dave & Busters and that was big let down. 90% of the games were ticket winning games and there wasn't a single fighting game in the whole place.

We had Time Out at the Staten Island Mall. But most of the time I was at Pinball Inferno which actually only had a few pinball machines. They had everything else from Crystal Castles to Joust to SubRoc 3d. It was great. I would deliver a local paper call the Islander and spend my entire pay (about $25 a month) there.

Yeah, I only grew up with tiny arcades in malls, bowling alleys, and bars (my dad liked to take us to a spot every Friday for their fish)--I never got to go to proper arcade. It was basically Gameworks and Dave and Busters for me, and my experiences with both are similar to Rykin. The only saving grace is that I could drink by the time

Picked up Zombies Ate My Neighbors for the SNES this weekend.

Just a quick note for everyone out there using Mac OS X. OpenEmu is a very nice application for a lot of your emulator needs. Currently it mostly supports Nintendo and Sega systems but it makes things quite a bit simpler and nicer. Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, Ristar, and the Sonic games look pretty sweet with the SABR filter running. Here is a look at it running in 1080p (linked for size):

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/dagOrg6l.png)

It looks a little weird in a screenshot but it looks great in action.

Rykin wrote:

Just a quick note for everyone out there using Mac OS X. OpenEmu is a very nice application for a lot of your emulator needs. Currently it mostly supports Nintendo and Sega systems but it makes things quite a bit simpler and nicer. Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, Ristar, and the Sonic games look pretty sweet with the SABR filter running. Here is a look at it running in 1080p (linked for size):

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/dagOrg6l.png)

It looks a little weird in a screenshot but it looks great in action.

How does it compare to Snes9x and the lot of those?

The sale at GOG was awesome. Really enjoyed getting all those 90s games that I either played or never got a chance to. Pick up the rest of the Wing Commander series, Age of Wonders, the rest of the Infinity engine games.... really looking forward to diving back into them after the holidays.

Got Faxandu and Battle of Olympus for Christmas. In all these years it never occurred to me that BoO was a re-skinned Zelda 2 until just now when I checked out the Wiki.

Warriorpoet897 wrote:

Got Faxandu and Battle of Olympus for Christmas. In all these years it never occurred to me that BoO was a re-skinned Zelda 2 until just now when I checked out the Wiki.

How do those play these days? I remember being very interested in Faxanadu when I was younger, and then recently seeing it on a list of Metroidvanias renewed my curiosity.

Faxanadu was one of my all time favorite NES games. I rented it for a week way back when and played it every waking hour until it was finished. It's about mid-difficulty as NES games go. Mainly linear if I remember correctly, but you can grind and backtrack to buy the best upgrades. The only NES game I remember more fondly (other than Zelda and SMB, which are exempt) is a weird hybrid of shooter and zelda-alike called The Guardian Legend.

Faxanadu was a great game -- I played the heck out of that, until it mysteriously walked away.

Another NES favorite of mine: Crystalis. Anyone remember that one?

Went to the Barcade with some friends this weekend, dropping some quarters here and there on a few games. It's interesting to go back to some old games and realize how poorly put together they are. Double Dragon and Golden Axe may be classics, but they play like crap today. On the other hand, despite being a major challenge, Smash TV has such pleasing mechanics and presents its challenge through sheer hordes rather than having to fight the controls themselves.

ccesarano wrote:

Smash TV has such pleasing mechanics and presents its challenge through sheer hordes rather than having to fight the controls themselves.

Big Money, Big Prizes!

Crystalis is one of my favorite games ever. I wish I'd managed to beat it. And I loved Guardian Legend, but I got it after we had the SNES and I didn't put nearly as much time in as I'd like. Both of those games deserve modern remakes.

Homard wrote:

The only NES game I remember more fondly (other than Zelda and SMB, which are exempt) is a weird hybrid of shooter and zelda-alike called The Guardian Legend.

Awesome game. I beat it for the first time a few years ago when I finally bought a used cart for myself.

As for Battle of Olympus, it certainly does share a lot of Zelda II stuff, but it has a lot more of the obscure what do I do next or how do I do that moments. Final boss still sticks out in my mind.

gravity wrote:

Crystalis is one of my favorite games ever. I wish I'd managed to beat it. And I loved Guardian Legend, but I got it after we had the SNES and I didn't put nearly as much time in as I'd like. Both of those games deserve modern remakes.

Never played Crystalis, but +1 on TGL remake.

I just started a retro gaming phase and the experience has been surreal. I'm playing games that I know I've played before but there's a twist: I remember very little about them. It's like I'm playing them for the first time.

I recently completed Mega Man 1 and Sonic the Hedgehog 1.

mrtomaytohead wrote:
Homard wrote:

The only NES game I remember more fondly (other than Zelda and SMB, which are exempt) is a weird hybrid of shooter and zelda-alike called The Guardian Legend.

Awesome game. I beat it for the first time a few years ago when I finally bought a used cart for myself.

That game can actually be completed? All I remember is death. But I was probably too young to figure out what to do.

Iridium884 wrote:

How does it compare to Snes9x and the lot of those?

Well one of the cool things about it is that it is using SNES9X for SNES emulation. Here is a blurb from their website:

OpenEmu is modular, and thanks to the work of other great open source projects, it can emulate a wide variety of video game systems (we call them 'cores'). Currently, the following open source emulation projects are used to power OpenEmu:

CrabEmu
DeSmuME
FCEU
Gambatte
Genesis Plus GX
Higan
Mednafen
NeoPop
Nestopia
Picodrive
Snes9x
TwoMbit
VisualBoyAdvance
... and more!

Basically they are just doing an iTunes like front-end for other emulators to make the whole process more user friendly. For some systems they even have multiple Cores available to pick from so if game X runs better in Core Y you can set that game to use that Core while running other games in the other Core for that system.

Mystic Violet wrote:

I just started a retro gaming phase and the experience has been surreal. I'm playing games that I know I've played before but there's a twist: I remember very little about them. It's like I'm playing them for the first time.

I recently completed Mega Man 1 and Sonic the Hedgehog 1.

mrtomaytohead wrote:
Homard wrote:

The only NES game I remember more fondly (other than Zelda and SMB, which are exempt) is a weird hybrid of shooter and zelda-alike called The Guardian Legend.

Awesome game. I beat it for the first time a few years ago when I finally bought a used cart for myself.

That game can actually be completed? All I remember is death. But I was probably too young to figure out what to do.

Yeah, I played it back when it came out a lot on a friend's cart, then years later on an emulator and it still took me until 2010 to finally beat it. To be fair, it's a pretty big challenge just getting through the opening blur- I mean level.

merphle wrote:

Faxanadu was a great game -- I played the heck out of that, until it mysteriously walked away.

Another NES favorite of mine: Crystalis. Anyone remember that one?

Same with me. About to fire it up again in a few minutes.

Crystalis is one of my favorite games of all time. The battery backup in mine is kaput, so I'm thinking of getting one of those replaceable ones to put in it. That teleporting cheat was the only way I could proceed through one part fairly early on. I'm curious to see if that was because I was young and just couldn't figure it out.

I remember renting Crystalis as a kid and enjoying it. Only thing that sucked about it was some of the bosses required you to be above a minimum experience level before they'd take damage from your sword or even show up. I remember the soundtrack was pretty good too.

shoptroll wrote:

I remember renting Crystalis as a kid and enjoying it. Only thing that sucked about it was some of the bosses required you to be above a minimum experience level before they'd take damage from your sword or even show up. I remember the soundtrack was pretty good too.

So I put about an hour and a half into Faxandu last night. Really enjoying it. The difficulty is not overly racheted up unlike many NES games, and the world and story are minimalist and charming. Then I spent about 30 minutes farming experience and gold off of some of the first creatures in the game only to suddenly die when my wife unexpectedly came in unannounced asking me a question. When I was revived, 8000 of my 9000 gold was gone as well as 2/3 of my XP. Game got shut off for the day.