the garden absolutely is tricking me into caring about cheevo hunting. kinda mad that it’s cuter and more appealing than several actually interactive virtual pets
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I played two games, Barbuta and Devilition, and was so OUTRAGED that these games were so “old” that they did not have theme music on their title screens that I refunded it. (I satisfied my curiosity and shouldn’t be buying new games right now.)
Barbuta is inscrutable and paced so slowly that it’s very funny that they put it as the first game. Devilition is neat but maybe a little longwinded.
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it took me seven hours to beat rock on! island, but i have done it. the cherry requirement is very funny, but of course tower defense games are just mathematics so it is entirely achievable. i’m not doing it though.
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Haven’t got this one yet since I kinda want it on Switch but everything I’ve heard sounds like it’s the best thing from this year I haven’t played.
Kinda wanna see if I could have the restraint to play one game a week in a more dedicated fashion and play it for a whole year.
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I wouldn’t hold my breath on this coming out on switch. The games all have a resolution that wouldn’t upscale very well to 720p. It would be fine docked but I’m betting it won’t be on a Nintendo platform till at least switch 2.
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After several instances of dying on basically completed floors of Valbrace because I couldn’t find my way to the throne/exit again, I finally caved and made myself a map for the final floor. I have no idea whether I have graph paper somewhere so I installed a “pixel art” app on my tablet:
I screwed up the alignment on the bottom right of the map because you first enter it from a teleport room, which caused me to waste some keys
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wasn’t really feeling this vs picking random famicom or pcengine games off the romsets but valbrace is v cool
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I think the reasons to play these instead of ROMs of actual old games are:
- They’re old-fashioned/unfair in only one or two ways that are chosen to be aesthetically interesting, instead of all of the ways at once
- You can expect to beat most of them within an hour or two; the ones marked “epic” are 4-10 hours.
- In contrast, most actual old games are very long and repetitive experiences, likely because they were individually sold for $40 in 1980s dollars and would get more complaints if they were short. I actually beat lots of these, whereas with most of my favorite NES games I wind up just anticlimactically giving up and moving on at some point (certainly today, but even most of the time in the 80s/90s as I remember it).
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Yeah like I’ve been thinking about how much I’d like to play a top down 8-bit tiny car game like Onion Delivery but I also knew I’d never actually finish any of 'em for various reasons so something like this is perfect for me.
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As an old Klik n Play head I feel like a lot of these games are just finished versions of KnP ideas.
Which fucking rules. Even if it’s not how i imagined it, it’s cathartic to just see
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ooooh i love Rakshasa – it’s in that “combat-oriented” platformer genre that doesn’t get made that much anymore. like Ghosts n’ Goblins or Rygar where shit is constantly spawning and overwhelming you. your jump is a fixed arc, you pause a bit when you land. feels stiff to move like Castlevania.
it has a nice gimmick where you have “deaths” instead of lives, and you play a little dodging mini-game every time you die to revive that gets harder with each death. so as you get better, you effectively get access to more lives, too.
really well done!
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I dunno, I think this is a bit of a mischaracterisation of both old games and UFO 50’s games. Like, sticking to just the underbelly of the NES catalogue, there’s plenty of short and/or interestingly hard games to stumble on. Air Fortress, Cocoron, Moon Crystal, Hyaku no Sekai no Monogatari, Gradius II… maybe I’m conveniently misremembering on a couple of these, but there’s still lots of stuff to see that doesn’t need Legacy Of The Wizard levels of commitment (or Hoshi Wo Miru Hito levels of bad design). And there’s a bunch of “short” UFO 50 games that you can’t really bust through with your first few playthroughs, like Star Waspir or Caramel Caramel.
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when you press A to lift off in Campanella 2 but you’re currently the pilot so you leap off a cliff…
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I think the finished Klik n Play games description is dead on here. Each of these is a weird sketch expanded into a full painting.
It’s really good at figuring out how much meat a concept has and exploring it so far too, in a way I don’t expect from random retro games.
A great example of this is Multiplayer. I haven’t seen too many people here mention giving this a spin. Some of them are straightforward, but a ton fundamentally change the game with pretty minor tweaks.
A handful are exactly what you think, Ninpek has two ninjas instead of one, big whoop.
But Kick Club? The bubble bobble game with a ball? In multiplayer not only do you each have your own score, but there’s one ball between you. Turning this into a bizarre cooperative/competitive tug of war where you are now optimizing movement, ball launches, and score items, completely differently just because the second character is there. It’s not the two of you doing your own thing, it’s fundamentally changed the space the game is operating in.
Mooncat seems to be exactly the same but there are two mooncats now and they can jump off each other. this is as weird as it sounds.
The Waldorf’s Journey competitive mode is like…scorched earth meets smash brothers meets joust. It has so much possibility space and feels out of control but so good when you win.
Seaside Drive turns into lucky and wild, one player shooting, the other driving. Which now means you have to be able to figure out what the other is going to prioritize in a split second.
I haven’t even touched the clearly intended to be primarily multiplayer ones yet like Bushido Ball yet. It’s bonkers.
There’s a lot going on here besides the retro aesthetic and framing.
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I think this goes to the point made earlier about this being “safer” than randomly going through games on itch or whatever. But imo its less that those games don’t exist on older systems/can’t be curated, but if ur randomly picking games off a romset or just looking to explore, the odds of the game being something along those lines is not at all high, and there’s no real way to know other than investing a lot of time or seeking extratextual info. Which obviously, the people on this forum are fully capable of doing both more than most, but sometimes…its nice when someone else does the legwork.
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probably counter to your point but uhhh you got any more of those NES recommendations?
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Got em. The endgame in this is terrifying. Also it has some of the best music that almost nobody will ever hear
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great job! i finally finished trying all the games so i’m excited to get back to this one.
i played the games in a shuffled order so i feel like it’s very serendipitous i got this game last:
it’s a Pocky and Rocky!! the powerup system borrows some ideas from Waspir except it doesn’t devolve into collecting the same thing over and over. there’s a bunch of references to other games in the collection in the form of enemies, powerups, music, etc. it remixes one of my favorite tracks in the game, the theme of Magic Garden. the spritework is adorable. it plays great. all the music is really good (is it the same composer as Magic Garden?) couldn’t ask for a better capstone.
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Welp, guess I need to buy this now.
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