Retro gaming thread

It does look nice, but the catalogue could have used more games from the post-2600 era (we have played those for ages already), as well as some games outside of Atari's own titles.

Granted, I have no idea who owns the rights to some of those forgotten games nowadays. I guess they would have needed to do a lot of digging there. And would have probably been too expensive to get the rights anyway.

Well, that shows how much you know.  I will have you know I caved last night, bought it, and have already played at least 3 minutes on a couple of the games - mainly as the first minute was trying to work out what the hell was going on, but still, your wrong

Tbf I could spend hours playing Montezuma's Revenge or Mountain King for the Atari 800. And they did get good versions of Frogger and Qix, too.

Of course, those specific games are not on the list, so.

I wonder what it would take to make some of these forgotten old games available again?

How are you getting in with the Pocket after a few days? I keep seeing YouTube vids popping up on my feed and I get close to ordering one until my sensible brain kicks in.

Anyone else picked this up?

How are the games playing on modern systems?

Spent a few days attempting a few runs of Dungeon Hack, an old 1993 D&D game that is basically a real time version of Rogue. The only difference is that you can save anywhere and your saves are not deleted upon death, meaning it's well possible to save scum your way until the end. But the game is plenty hard regardless. Even on the easiest difficulty, I kept getting my ass kicked by the 4th-5th floor, and the minimum amount of floors is 10. Might as well give it up now.

The game was pretty meh anyway. Graphics are nice, but the puzzles were usually just about finding keys for doors, sometimes finding illusory walls, and combat being based on AD&D means that most of your attacks will miss, which is not very exciting. Also, unlike games such as Shiren, it's a lot harder to identify items, which makes equipping new items feel a bit arbitrary. Until you get something cursed. As the game needs you to have at least one free hand to use items, good luck if you end up with a cursed weapon and shield.

By the way, it was made by the same devs as Anvil of Dawn, and it shows. It's basically a more rudimentary version of that game. The automap still needed work - it doesn't keep track of locks, and can't be written on.

Are the Mega Drive Mega Man games on the Switch as unresponsive as the originals? I don't know what it is, but it seems so severe that entire inputs go ignored. I haven't bought the NES versions on Switch, but I don't remember them feeling like this on the NES versions on Wii/Wii U.

Yeah, the MD collection was outsourced to the same dev that made most of the Game Boy games.

Mega Man games have this thing where he doesn't start walking immediately when pressing left/right, but waits for 1/10 of a second before. Is that what you mean with the unresponsiveness? It would fit the bill because they made that delay longer in the MD version.

Unfortunately if you are using a modern display (LCD or OLED) you are sure to gain 1-2 frames of lag. Add in controller lag of a frame and old games reliant on perfect inputs are less responaive at the best of times. Generally emulation adds between 2-4 frames of lag. Perfect emulation is only 1 frame but you wont experience that with those collections.

I have played the GBA e-shop castlevania games on Wii-U and found them really unresponsive at times. Same with Donkey Kong on the snes-mini. It was all playable but felt "oilly" or sluggish. Sadly this does mean you often feel like games are worse then they were back in the day.

Wow. Talk about timing. I might just have to commit and see if those play any better.

For those who might be interested, The Force Engine is now on release 1.0. That means you can now play Dark Forces with all kinds of bells and giggles typical of source ports, and presumably without outstanding bugs.

Support for Outlaws is also coming, eventually, in version 2.0.

Alas, I wish I liked Dark Forces more. The game itself is great, but I never liked how you only have two speeds: very slow walking, or high speed sliding with no friction. Feels like Doom on ice.

Christ alive, as if this qualifies as retro. But I'm currently playing FFXIII, ostensibly my least favourite Final Fantasy... and I'm actually quite enjoying it...

13 years later it turns out that a breezy linear RPG is a bit of a breath of fresh air (it helps that it's actually not quite the straight line narrow corridor that I remembered it as). Graphically it's also aged really quite well for PS3, and the story definitely lends itself better to a second playthrough.

Vanille can still fuck off though.

The funny thing is I tried to play it again about a year ago and I had some sort of visceral reaction to it and couldn't last five minutes. The recent DF video convinced me to try it again and it's sticking.

Yeah, I always thought they were great. The linearity didn’t bother me back then either, as I had already played FFX, which was similarly linear.
Agree that Vanille has always been obnoxious though.

Silly question, but is your drive writable?

I ask as when leaving the menu I’d expect a local cfg file to be created.