Yeah, I had the first PSP one and it was so good. Honestly one of my most played non-monhun PSP games.
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at some point i’ll get my PSTV out of storage and see how it plays at native resolution. you might actually get the best results on PPSSPP, since I think you can go wild with upscaling & still keep the UI looking crispy. on the PS4/5 emulated release, the UI is bilinearly filtered, and it looks like shit. weirdly, there are sometimes a few frames where the filter is turned off (seems to happen during replays in tunnels), and the sharp pixels look infinitely better than the vaseline shit sony decided to go with. in addition, the new rally-x minigame is totally crisp - they turn the filtering off for the arcade minigame. see, it wasn’t so hard. just give us the option. if this version had the option to see the UI with regular pixels, it would probably close to the perfect version of the game, but without that, PPSSPP is probably the optimal experience.
also!! the filtering causes ugly little artifacts on the screen. it’s just a bad trade! stop being afraid of pixels, aaaaaagggghhhhh
anyway i’m sure this game rips on a PSP or Vita, you just won’t be able to see details on the horizon as well
7 Likes
i could probably write a lot more about R4 versus RR2 - they are interesting to compare
should have noted in my first draft, but a big difference is R4 is 30 FPS whereas RR2 is 60 FPS. this alone gives RR2 a huge edge, but it does well for itself in other areas as well
R4 has more grip-style racing, which RR2 largely eschews in favor of more drift focus
R4 is definitely more of a “console game” - it’s got the team selection and chief banter, but i really honestly never cared about any of that stuff, so RR2’s more direct, “portable” experience is preferable for me
soundtrack is basically a wash
graphics kind of depend on your preference. i think the PSP one looks a little more attractive due to the higher resolution textures on the road, but R4 with PGXP and upscaling does look very nice, indeed, and it doesn’t have the same LOD issues the PSP one has due to its handheld provenance - mainly noticeable on the AI cars that pop-in on the horizon and then become more than a formless blob when they get a bit closer - you probably couldn’t really tell on the PSP’s screen
the PSP game definitely has more “content”, but it’s just kind of there. a conveyor belt of really good racing, but zero flash or pomp to go along with it. the presentation of the content in the PS1 game is definitely superior, but the racing is just so goddamn slick in RR2
oh and there’s the whole nitrous thing. i love it, personally, but if you dislike the nitrous mechanic, you’ll definitely prefer R4
6 Likes
I played the hell out of the PSP Ridge Racers and I have RR2 on my computer’s PSP emulator. They are incredible. This was my first Ridge Racer and so everything else is hard to compare it to, probably because it is the best. They called RRPSP the best launch racing game ever, and I think I agree.
3 Likes
yeah i recall 6/7 getting sneered at as “lol ridge racer launch title” but they were good too
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would be curious to see a list of racing games that are also launch titles!!!
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a lot of them are ridge racer titles lmao
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Wave Race: Blue Storm comes to mind
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Got to a boss and realised I was being extremely generous with Star Ocean The Divine Force. The second I lost to a slightly difficult boss with multiple phases and had to retry I lost all interest. I was just breezing by on easy mode and tolerating a lot of shit I probably shouldn’t have:
- Long cutscenes where everyone states everything through the longest sentence structure possible
- Philosophical discussions of bodily subjectivity none of my characters would believably engage in
- Long linear teleporter dungeons
- A skill tree that locks your input for a second or two every time you upgrade a character, you often have to choose 10 upgrades every time you visit the tree.
The last quarter of the game goes into space and we spend our entire time learning about a borg-like entity called Scorpium except it’s benevolent and you can only join it with your consent. They say Scorpium about 56,784 times. Scorpium has a minority faction that starts assimilating people by force so we got ourselves a villain we didn’t know about for the first ¾ of the game.
The bad guys are mostly characters we barely ever see or know, the main bad guy showed up 95% of the way in. The stakes are intangible since either the entire universe is ‘good’ Scorpium and could just overpower the ‘bad’ or we’re in a life-or-death fight with an objectively more powerful race of machine hybrids that we mostly defeat very easily.
Relieved to quit the game.
I think I needed to get a genuinely mediocre play experience out of my system so I could reset my compass and find something I really want.
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I will have to see what right clicking does! I still always forget that’s a common button in pc games
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damn they weren’t kidding about 120fps monster hunter rise on ps5/xsx huh what the fuck. why would this have the most in depth graphics menu i’ve seen on a console game wtf
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I keep getting fucked up in arma because this mod we just got adds a whole ass right click interface to the game master UI that wasnt there before and it has TONS of useful options. and i play PC games!! they just have such hard controls!!!
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right clicking feels to me like, opening the console. like it’s a outside-of-mechanics option, like it can only be accessed by pausing the entire game world. not something you merely click for a helpful menu that you should be using often!! computers are for work keeps leaking into my pc year of leisure
8 Likes
I strongly feel that a videogames ui shouldnt remind me of using windows
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UT99 main menu crying
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It feels almost like the closest thing we’ll get to Ridge Racer HD (as in what Wipeout HD did for that series). This was exactly the game I have been looking for recently. Approaching Outrun 2 levels of Pure Drifting Bliss here. Thanks for the write-up and getting me off the fence.
6 Likes
Okay finished up Axiom Verge 2 yesterday and I want to comment on a pretty interesting decision it made: boss fights are for the most part purely optional and not designed to really halt your progress in any meaningful way if you don’t want them to. You know how usually in a Metrovania boss battle there will be a door out of the room that only opens when the boss is defeated? In almost every case that door is just open, you get upgrade points and a trophy for defeating them if you decide to. There are two boss battles that are tied into the story enough that they can’t be skipped, but in both these the respawn point is inside the boss room and damage/progress isn’t reset. I can see that irking some but I respect that they decided they didn’t want the bosses to wall off progress and came up with a way to avoid that.
Other than that it is as I said before, solid but sorta lacking a big hook. I also think there is something about how they design their maps/worlds that don’t make them particularly memorable in terms of layout and that becomes a problem when you have to find the one lock you just gained the key for, even when it is nearby as you can stumble upon other optional locks if you go the wrong direction which can lead you rather far astray with no natural way back.
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Arcade Archives Shanghai III (PS4; original 1993 Sunsoft)
Until I saw the Activision © and TM on the title screen I hadn’t realized the video game “Shanghai” ™ was an American invention: originally a free 1981 mainframe game dubbed Mah-Jongg, and generically today called Mahjong solitaire Mahjong solitaire - Wikipedia , it was probably simply invented from a pile of mahjong tiles by the programmer from Arizona who sold millions of copies of it for '80s home computers through Activision, who trademarked the brand name “Shanghai.”. Sun Electronics aka Sunsoft licensed it to for Japanese arcades, and here we have Shanghai III, in Japanese, by far the most difficult version of Mahjong solitaire I’ve played, with monolithic piles of tiles in twelve almost equally daunting layouts, blurry tiles (seriously, I could feel the eyestrain), and music guaranteed to keep you just sane enough to keep inserting quarters.
Not used to playing under time pressure! Even after setting it on Easy and then lowering the speed of the timers, it still took me ages before I got better at spotting 4-of-a-kinds and could clear a puzzle.
So why would you get this version now when even Sunsoft themselves these days sell a non-trademark-infringing, relatively modern version of Mahjong solitaire–not to mention that there are probably about a billion super cheap or free ones–heck, even Microsoft has adware and freeware ones they want you to install.
Well, maybe because those newfangled ones look so bland and innocuous as to feel somewhat pointless next to the hopelessly brutal boards that crush you under a relentless mass of tiles in Shanghai III. Had to put all the settings down to the easiest possible and STILL took 1.5 hrs to start getting to the point where I finally got through ONE puzzle. Then I somehow cleared two in a row. It felt big. Also I felt kinda sick. Also, the zodiac animals you get to see when you win are kinda cute.
If you want a chance to submit your score online the manual I think says you can’t continue, so you either have to wait for the slow game reset, or go into the menu and reset it manually. Slightly annoying.
For some reason, Hamster Corporation did not put in their usual, separate Hi Score mode, so everyone is free to post high scores using the easiest settings (although these could nuke your scores a bit for all I know), and, worse, simply to pause the game and peep at their tiles through the transparent menu, pretty nearly completely circumventing the game’s strict time limits. Hamster’s usual Hi Score mode prevents pausing, so it’s baffling they didn’t put it in here. Maybe they thought the game was just too hard so they’re encouraging everyone to cheat that way?
Admittedly, at the most generous settings the options allow, once I got used to it, in the end I mostly lost simply due to running into a move dead end–no take-backs–rather than to running out time. And I’m pretty bad at the game. So the menu-peeping probably doesn’t matter all THAT much; why would you really bother when you could probably just go get an easier free Mahjong solitaire game, if winning easier was what you wanted?
Well, it kept me up half the night and I barely got anywhere but I guess I enjoyed it in the end in a masochistic sort of way.
I really shouldn’t be straining my abused eyes at those blurry tile bitmaps any more, though. Dar. (Checked and I definitely had the Archive’s graphic filter off; Sunsoft just drew those tile markings in a slightly blurry way.)
I did like the loud snap of the tiles, and the intense but somehow not annoying background colors, against which the tiles themselves stand out really well.
14 Likes
The funny thing is, I also played Shanghai last night in a late night, sickfeeling stupor. The early Saturn version, which I think is close to the same as this Arcade Archives version.
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still going hard… i started running errands to get the class reqs. for dancer and ninja cause i wasnt terribly enamored with leveling thieves archers and geomancers… and then i kept going so now i have a black mage with dual wield +2 ma staves. ramza’s doing cool monk and samurai stuff bc i felt like those were good skillsets for his big solo fight… 
umm idk… i feel like once u get this far on the job tree there’s not a lot impeding u… i do really wish the game gave u enemies with like… commensurate skillsets ig thats what the hardtype mods do probably but i feel like they go too far maybe all i want is like… guys who have access to the skills u do and actually use em effectively
this is def one of the absolute most compelling progression loops of any rpg so like… its not a bad thing ig that a lot of the midgame fun is stuff like “ummm a wizard with TWO staffs???” ugh so good goated game
4 Likes