kjorteo | (no subject)

My God, Retro Game Challenge has in-game nostalgia. I had previously said that it's rewarding to talk to your friend at every turn just for general retro culture, but around the time Haggle Man 3 is "released," he starts saying how magazines don't cover cheats and secrets as much anymore, and new games are getting increasingly complex. (Given the fact that the first Haggle Man looks and plays like this, whereas Haggle Man 3 looks like this and is a Metroidvania, he could be on to something.) He then says he periodically replays his old games to relax. He even flat-out tells you in a chat with him the ultimate cheat for Cosmic Gate he just found (which sounds suspiciously like a "I heard it from my friend at school" style urban legend, but I tried it and it actually works,) which isn't in the magazine because Haggle Man 3 is all the rage when he finds it and Cosmic Gate is several orders of magnitude of old news by now.

It truly has something for everyone--I actually caught myself agreeing with him and replaying the older games, but at the same time, Guadia Quest and Haggle Man 3 are amazing. Last night, I replayed Cosmic Gate to test the cheat he had told me, then beat Star Prince, and finally ended with a bit of Haggle Man 3. I still want to beat Guadia Quest before I get too far ahead in Haggle Man 3, though, and I still need to actually beat Haggle Man 2 and Rally King SP (as I kind of flew through the challenges because I wanted Guadia Quest to be released.) At any rate, it's convenient that by the time you actually make it to the later games, the older ones have been unlocked in freeplay mode, so by this point it basically provides whichever variety I happen to be in the mood for at the time.

I take back anything I may have said or even thought that questioned the game's approach. ("Why not just give you the whole collection up front? Why make you play one game at a time before unlocking the rest? If there are games that are basically strict improvements with identical gameplay but better graphics or something, like Haggle Man 2 and Rally King SP, why bother including and making us play the original Haggle Man and Rally King?") The way it's handled is nothing short of brilliant.

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I don't think I grew beyond thinking I just like video games and actually recognized the difference with retro games in particular until I was in college--I had the original PlayStation and the Nintendo 64 with me, but I left the NES at home. (And I completely can't remember whether I had the SNES or not.) I found myself missing the NES games, and then I realized "hey, wait a second...."

The last game to completely blow me away with how amazing and groundbreaking it was was Mario 64. It was Mario's first foray into 3D gaming, of course, and the worlds felt positively gigantic and immersive. Each individual stage was massive, and I frequently stalled on actually finding all the stars just so I could explore everywhere as much as I could...and that's not even getting into the between-stages hub world which consisted of the castle, the entire front yard/castle exterior area, the second floor, the basement...! The 3D Mario games since then have been a major disappointment, though. (Mario Sunshine was just Mario 64 with a water gimmick and IWBTG's difficulty, and Mario Galaxy was just Mario 64 IN SPACE with millions of The Little Prince-sized microplanets instead of coherent big levels, which is the exact opposite of why I liked Mario 64....)

Interestingly, I sort of live in both worlds at the same time now...I definitely still get excited about upcoming releases, even if they're obscure ones (not caring about Bioshock because I was counting down the days until Etrian Odyssey II was out comes to mind, and of course Guilty Gear XX Accent Core + is almost out...!) but I am obviously also a huge retro gamer.

The thing that surprised me about Retro Game Challenge is that it manages to somehow capture both mindsets in one game. If the presentation was just a menu and all the games all at once, there would have been literally no reason to include the original Haggle Man, for example--Haggle Man 2 is literally the same game with better non-essential graphics (the sprites are the same, but there are backgrounds now and the stages look nicer) and expanded gameplay (much larger stages that can scroll vertically as well as horizontally, the ability to save your scroll attacks instead of them activating as soon as you collect them, etc.) and much higher difficulty. However, thanks to the presentation feeding you games individually as they're "released," I actually like the original Haggle Man because of nostalgia now. Nostalgia. For a game that's in the exact same collection as all the others. At the same time, I'm still impressed with the "advancements" in the later games (Haggle Man 3 is incredible,) but the classics are still...classics! I don't know how it's possible to achieve that with entirely original games that are all part of the same collection, but there you have it. At this point, I can fully appreciate each game in the overall collection in its own way.

At any rate, if you remember the NES and are the kind of person who makes posts on

videogame_tales, then you are definitely the target demographic for this game, and I highly recommend it! (Though you'll have to tell me how Hotel Dusk turns out, since I was considering that but still haven't actually played it.)

As I seem to say all the time, I have the strange situation of having followed the development of console games quite closely without ever actually having been really part of them myself, never having one up until the original PS - most of my nostalgia for them is either through my emulation phase or through one of the very few decent games-related TV shows that Britain has ever had, Bad Influence. And I remember them specifically insisting that the gameplay of the new Mario game on the Ultra 64 (as it was then called) wasn't a technical demo or cut-scene - that it really was based around giant-for-the-time 3D environments. Actually, here's that very video - I tried playing it through myself fairly recently, but only ever got about halfway through.

It's odd how much better things can seem when they're released compared to looking at them now... Mario 64 only looks slightly like it's built out of Lego, and it's easily one of the best-aged of the early 3D games. Other games that I glimpsed then seemed to deteriorate dramatically over time - did we really think that Resident Evil looked decent just ten years ago, for example? Even my memory of the non-live action cut-scenes from that - particularly, the one when you interrupt the first zombie from his meal - was of something approaching PS2-era smoothness, rather than the sad sort of crude 3D sock-puppetry that the game actually contains. (I started playing that recently as well, but couldn't continue because it was too hilarious.) Meanwhile, Lomax still looks incredible.

The games you listed as being excited about... there's something different about them, but I'm not sure what it is - they're still new games, but... acceptably retro-styled? I don't know what it is. (And are they seriously naming the next sequel XX Accent Core Plus? How long is this name going to get?)

I'm also very impressed at the mention of The Little Prince! It seems to be less obscure than I had first imagined. I must have read it about ten years ago, and it had some wonderfully thought-provoking commentary - my mum loves it, and has it in three different languages.

The best proof of how quickly we forget the questionable nature of 3D graphics' infancy is still the fact that this was considered sexy. Although, really, who can blame people for thinking that? I mean, just look at her. Mmm, that's hot.

Mario 64 was mostly spared from that because it has a distinctly cartoonish style--it's more than a little blocky, but it's clearly not trying for something that actually looks human and failing the way other games of the time did. Also, it's forgiven because it really is that good a game--everything that lady said about its vastness and immersion in the Bad Influence video still feels true even today, at least to me. And yes, Lomax looks surprisingly decent...that was PlayStation? I'd never heard of it, but...wow.

And Accent Core Plus is in a bit of a precarious position as far as its name--it's basically Accent Core (the gameplay is identical, no new moves or rebalancing or anything) but with extra stuff (most notably a story mode, but also survival and other things) and the return of Kliff and Justice. The story mode is an actual continuation that actually takes place after XX's story, and includes all the characters who either weren't around yet or didn't get stories last time. (Mostly Robo-Ky, A.B.A., Order-Sol, and Kliff. Here's Kliff talking to Order-Sol in either Kliff's or Order-Sol's story mode. Yay!) Had this game come first, the fact that it's an actual sequel for the first time since the original XX, along with the other modes and stuff, should more than qualify it for the fact that it should just be called X3 by now. However, the fact that it's the same game as Accent Core but with all this other stuff too means they more or less have to call it Accent Core Plus, because calling it X3 and then saying it's the same as XX Accent Core sounds disingenuous and weird.

(Also, there's the problem that XXX sounds like Guilty Gear Porn and X3 looks like a smiley that

ravenworks would use.)

Edited 2009-05-02 22:48 (UTC)

That's Violet Berlin - from Micro Machines 2, oddly enough. The thing that really jumped out at me when I watched that video again was when she said that Nintendo was hoping that the design of the controller would encourage developers to think of entirely new ways to play games - something that they were to do much more visibly later on with the Wii and DS! I always thought that the design of the N64 controller was... awkward and insane, mostly, but when it's said that way, I can see the thought behind it. It's rather a shame that the other reported feature of learning people's gameplay styles and being able to mimic them was just a mistranslation, because that sounds like it would have been a very interesting idea as well.

I'm afraid I'm unable to come up with any more embarrassing video game crushes than I have already - I did own Tomb Raider 2, which was a slight improvement, but she still looks a bit weird and uncanny - and I'm sure that I honestly played it more for the actual game than any aesthetics, particularly as I was running it at 320x200 at that point.

Lomax was excellent, and I really want to play it again now - it came out fairly unnoticed as far as I remember, because it was a very SNES-styled game (but with more shifting about of graphics than the SNES could have technically coped with) among the Playstation's 3D concentration, only using its third dimension to move in and out of the screen to different planes. Actually that's one of the latest games that I find myself having nostalgia for - it came out in the middle of the PS's life, but I don't think I ever realized how good it was until much later.