(no subject)

[kjorteo]

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.

Comments

[kjorteo]

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.)

[davidn]

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.