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.

Threaded | Flat

I'm finding myself wondering when the first time was when I felt that newer games were overcomplex and that the era that I grew up in was dying off - saying all new games are worse than older games is an untrue blanket statement, but there's definitely some sort of apparent magic missing from them compared to when they were new and mysterious things while I was growing up. It's strange to think of the same logic being applied to older points in time, and a game that would have been in the 16-bit golden age for me instead being a modern and overcomplex jump from the "classic" 8-bit era.

I think that the last game that really amazed me compared to what I'd seen before was Unreal Tournament in 1999, and how the apparent smoothness and noise of it compared to the earlier first-person shooters that I'd played was a huge surprise to me - but I was stepping directly up from playing things like Rise of the Triad, and UT's new ideas about how a multiplayer first person shooter should be run were huge jumps for me. Later than that, I remember being excited about the release of Soul Calibur 2 and it being the first time that I'd actually cared about a game being released for a while... I can't define a hard line between the stuff I grew up with and the "modern" era, but the difference was probably somewhere in the couple of years that I almost stopped playing games altogether, at about the start of the PS2 era. No doubt my ignorance of the just-released set of next-generation consoles (which are all nearly three years old) will eventually hit me by surprise once again.

Additionally, I've got to play this - I saw it down the road and nearly bought it but got Hotel Dusk instead, which I still haven't played as I'm still working my way alternately through Sonic Chronicles and Phoenix Wright.