Confused About Retro

So I've joined a couple of retro gaming groups on Facebook recently and thanks to their stream of delightful posts now filling up my feed it got me wondering, just what constitutes a "retro" game? 

When I think about retro I think about stuff that looks like this 

This 

Or this 

Hell, I guess at this point you could even consider PS2 kind of retro although I hate to admit that because it makes me very much aware of just how old I'm getting.  

What I found interesting is when a post came up saying "What retro RPG would you like a remake of".  The usual slew of SNES games and things like that came up but then one guy came along and said "Lost Odyssey".  This made me raise an eyebrow because that game is on X Box 360, surely that can't be retro, I mean look at it

At first glance it doesn't exactly scream retro does it? For arguments sake I decided to ask my wife how old something has to be for it to be considered retro to her.  She said that anything older than 10 years she would consider retro.  This would place Lost Odyssey, a game released in 2007, in the retro category.

However I also did a Google search and found a forum where a number of users agreed that anything older than 2 console generations is retro, which would then place Lost Odyssey in the category of modern game.  

The lack of consensus presents an interesting topic for debate but becomes a real pain in the butt when it comes to things like streaming on Twitch.  For example I'm currently streaming Ys Origin which was released in 2006.  Now streaming under "Retro" would be preferable because more people would be watching there rather than the individual game.  But Ys Origin isn't a game I'd consider retro really and I wouldn't want to piss off Twitch admin or viewers by streaming in the wrong category.  

To me, retro is pre-PS2/GameCube/XBox is retro and that era is old but old enough quite yet to be considered retro.  I'm always interested to hear other people's opinions on it though.  Like I said before I think I don't want those systems to be retro because it makes me feel old but I'm sure to some younger gamers those consoles are ancient history. 

I miss Instruction Manuals

A lot has changed in the gaming scene since I was a wee lad, some for the better and some for the worse.  However the one thing I miss more than fucking anything is proper instruction manuals.

Back in the day, when you'd buy a game I always thought the manual was something to look forward to.  A lot of the manuals for games I bought had things like backstory or character profiles in them as well as instructions on how to play the game.  When I was a kid, I had to take a bus into the city center to go to my closest game store to pick up a title and after my purchase I'd read that shit on the way home.  There was something really satisfying about opening a new game case and flicking through that nice glossy manual.  Even the smell of the damn thing as incredible as weird as that sounds.

Hell, I've even bought games based on the quality of their manual.  I remember discovering The Elder Scrolls for the first time at a friends house.  Yeah, the game looked cool as fuck and all but the manual was just full of all sorts of information that really drew me into the idea of playing the game and then on top of that it came with a sick as fuck glossy map of the world.  I had that Morrowind map on the wall next to my computer pretty much up to the day I moved out of that house.  Neverwinter Nights was another example of a game I purchased purely based on the manual.  I was at the same friends house when he got it as a gift from his dad. He opened that box and there was a fucking thick tome that you could kill someone with inside there with instructions on how to play.  I didn't even have to read the fucking thing to know that I wanted that damn game.

Nowadays, getting a new game is a bit of a disappointing experience.  A lot of my purchases, especially for PC are digital so there's no way in fuck I'm getting a nice manual there.  Even if I purchase of Good Old Games or something where they have the manuals, it's just not the same when it's in PDF, I wanna hold the fucking thing.  For other systems it's probably even worse than nothing at all.  Usually when I open a box there's usually just some legal information, an insert for the controls and a card advertising some DLC or some shit.  Even if the game is amazing, opening the box upon purchase brings nothing but sadness.

I wish they'd bring back proper manuals but I guess that's a practice that's long dead and will never return.  If a company put a big proper manual in a game now I'd probably buy it regardless of what the game was just to support the practice.

The Neverhood

Usually when I write about a specific game title, it's something I'm playing or I've just completed, but today I'm going to talk about a game I beat about 4 years ago.

So chances are, you have never heard of The Neverhood.  I know when I first was introduced to this game by a friend at university I had never heard of this fucking thing before but holy shit I'm glad I found out.

The Neverhood is a old point and click adventure game that was released in 1996 and from what I understand on the Wikipedia page it wasn't released in Europe which explains why I had never heard of the damn thing, but it could be wrong.

Anyway, the whole thing that made this game different from every other PC point and click adventure game is that the whole thing was done in claymation, and it was really good claymation too.  Everything from the settings to the characters and animations were completely done in clay, I dread to think how long it took to record all that shit for the game.

At this point I'd talk about the story but sadly it has been too long since I last played this game so I don't really remember it, at all.  I do remember enjoying it but I can't remember what the fuck happened.  It's not the kind of story that people would get their games as arts hat out for, but it was a competently written little adventure.  There is a complete plot summary on the wiki page if you care that much.

The gameplay was pretty standard point and click stuff, but the puzzles were pretty good.  They weren't the stupid moon logic puzzles that you would see in some point and click games on the PC (Necronomicon is a game like that which sticks out in my mind) but they were challenging enough so that you felt satisfied about solving them.  The only really annoying thing about the game play is that there is a part where you have to find tapes, and to get one of the tapes you have to pass through a 38 screen corridor filled with game lore on the wall.  You don't have to read it (I didn't read all of it to be honest) but you absolutely HAVE to get the tape at the end, and it's a little tedious.

Finally the absolute best part of this game, the thing that triggered my memory and made me want to write a big gushy post on it is the music.  But I'm not going to tell you how good the music, I'm just going to post a track and have you judge it for yourself.

Anyway if you can find this game, give it a go, it's fucking amazing.  No amount of gushing I do will do it justice, just go find it.

I miss the floppy disk

God damn do you remember these things?!  Well we have reached an age where there are now a significant number of people who fucking don't, and that's sad.

These plastic squares could hold an absolutely massive 1.44 megabytes of data and it was the games came on for shit like the Amiga and other systems.  I never owned an Amiga myself, but I do remember having some kind of computer thing with a green and black screen that played some kind of golf game that came on a floppy disk, that was the shit back then.

Back in my old school days, I remember we used to get a free floppy disk from the library, and we'd fill it full of stupid pictures from some picture website and go giggle at them at home.  It was dumb but I have a lot of fond memories with this old file storage format.

The best thing about these damn things though was the sound it makes when you put it in the drive.  It would make this awesome kind of click sound, pushing one of these bastards in was so satisfying.  On top of that, one way to stave off boredom during the IT classes was to flick the metal bit on the top back and forth, I could do that shit for hours.

But alas, the floppy disk is no more, but I'm glad I got to experience the tail end of their existence.  Maybe one day we can have something that looks like a floppy but has shit tons of storage on it, that would be nice.

Castlevania Series Run: Castlevania 2

What a horrible night to have a SHITTY FUCKING GAME! HOLY CRAP THIS SUCKS SO BAD!

OK, cruise control out of the way, yeah, the second game as part of my Castlevania series was obviously, Castlevania 2: Simons Quest.  This game is so bad it makes me want to cut off my own hands for having played it, it's a disaster of a game and was barely worth my time, but still, I couldn't say I did a proper go through of the series if I didn't play it.

Anyway, before I start talking about how awful this game is, lets go over some good things about this game, and surprisingly there are a few.  First of all we have the day and night thing, which is surprisingly an awful thing and a good thing at the same time.  See, it's a cool idea and it does a lot for building tension when your low HP and quite far from the nearest town to heal in, but it's so badly implemented it kind of just falls flat, but more on that later.

The other good thing is the soundtrack, most notably Bloody Tears.  When ANYONE thinks of Castlevania, they think of that damn song and this is where it all began, as an overworld theme in the daytime segments of this shitty game

But unfortunately, that's about it for the good points behind this game, so time to dive headfirst into the shit.  So yeah, back to that day and night shit.  Sure, I said it's a cool concept, but the problem is that every time the game transitions between phases, EVERYTHING stops and you can't do shit for like a good 15 seconds.  It's a pain in the ass and it really adds a lot of unneeded length to an already arse game.

Leading me onto my second point, GRINDING!  Now I'm a bit of a glutton for the grind.  I used to play the shit of World of Warcraft back in vanilla and Burning Crusade days and hell, I've even had my fair share of hours on those free Korean grindfests, but THIS is a pisstake.  Basically you need hearts to buy important shit that you need to move on.  However these hearts take fucking ages to get and the only thing you ever really want to do is walk back and forth between 2 sets of enemies hoping one of them drops a big heart so you don't have to grind as long.  What's super double bullshit turbo is that if you die, you lose all your goddamn hearts, so you have to grind out those 4,000,000 skeletons AGAIN! fuck this game...

So when you do eventually get your shit together, you get to go questing in what is quite possibly the worst designed levels fucking ever.  There are 4 mansions in this game, each housing a bit of dracula that you have to pick up.  The first 2 don't even have a boss and you just have to fight your way through some easy mode skeletons and slimes or whatever.  Then when you finally do hit a boss, it's so easy it may as well have not existed in the first place.  But your worst enemy in this shitheap game, is the floor!  Some of the blocks you just fall through and you either day or have to backtrack like 5 minutes to get to where you were, and by that point you're so angry you forget AGAIN and fall down AGAIN.

Writing about this game is actually giving me pretty much ever disease ever, so I'll wrap up with this last point, and that's the puzzles.  Holy shit the puzzles.  This is the most cryptic as shit game that you'll ever play, more cryptic than Z grade point and clickers from the 90's.  Unless you have gamefaqs (which lol, you wouldn't have done if you played it new) or a copy of Nintendo Power (lol, enjoy spending more money, dickface) you were just fucked up the ass with a broomstick.  There is NO WAY you would ever figure out from the hint "hit your head off the cliff" to go buy a red gem, and duck in front of it for 5 seconds, and that's just the most famous example.  There is so cryptic shit in this game that it could take up a good 10+ entries on the "Thats some BULLSHIT" bit I'm doing.

So yeah, that's Castlevania 2, and if you're still interested after all that, here's one last thing to maybe put you off the game entirely.  The final dungeon has no enemies or traps, and you can stunlock Dracula with fire until he dies.

Fuck this game, and fuck everyone associated with its development

Castlevania Series Run: Castlevania

What's that? Is that come Castlevania?! HOLY SHIT ITS SOME CASTLEVANIA!  Basically, since before I came to Japan me and a buddy have been slowly working out way through the Castlevania games.  Most of these playthroughs are replays for me as I've already played the ever loving shit but the series is always a ton of fun and I can't get enough.

So the story so far is that I've beaten Casltevania 1,2 and 3 along with Super 4, Dracula X and Bloodlines.  Once I finally finish slogging through R-Type tactics I plan to move onto the Rondo of Blood remake on PSP and then Symphony, Aria of Sorrow and all the games after that.

So what I thought I'd do, was retell my experience replaying this series.  It's been mostly rage, but that's OK, it would be boring if every post read "beat it in like 3 hours, game's well easy" so at least my lack of skill makes things interesting.

Well, the best place to start I figured would be at the beginning of the series, so about 3 weeks ago I fired up Castlevania for the NES!

Now before I continue, reviewing old media has been kind of played out and it's not something I want to spend a great deal of time doing.  Granted, I've been playing video games since the age of 4, so old games have been a big part of my life, and using this blog to reflect on them would be fun, but it's not something I want to get bogged down in.

Anyway moving on...HOLY SHIT THIS GAME IS SO DAMN GOOD!  One thing I really love is a hard game, and Castlevania is one hard goddamn game.  Most of the time the challenge isn't too bad, but other times it's just complete bullshit, but that's fine, when you do beat this beast of a game it feels satisfying as all hell, like you really earned that win.

Anyway, the story is simple NES stuff, you play as Simon Belmont, professional vampire killer and you have to storm Dracula's castle and go wreck his shit.  On the way you'll fight all sorts of shit like bats, mummy's, gorgons, Frankensteins monster and all sorts of shit.

Now with NES games being limited in space it's not exactly a long game, so of course its hard as all damn hell.  Like I said before, mostly the challenge is fair except for one thing that really makes me want to go and smash my face against the closest flat surface, and that, is the damage jump.  What I mean by this is when you take damage, you fly backwards, and when you fly backwards, you usually end up in a bit or some spikes or whatever, and you die.  The level design is actually really good for this game but it's so hard to appreciate it properly when you die for the god knows how many time because of that damage jump.

That said, I think I've gotten a lot better at this game since I last played it because this time round I got through the game with little to no problem.  There is one corridor, that's famous for being the ultimate in 8-bit dogshit, where there is these resilient axe throwing enemies, and their backed up by flying gorgon heads and getting through that corridor is a real trail in patience and skill, however, CHECK THIS SHIT OUT!

This is a screen shot I took to show my buddy of me getting through that godawful corridor without taking a damn hit, pretty proud of that crap right there.

Anyway, it doesn't matter how proud you might be of pulling that off because the boss right after that is Death, which is something that always confused me a bit.  Death himself, takes orders from goddamn Dracula, how does that even work?  I mean, Dracula's pretty strong in this series, but why is the deity of death itself taking orders from one goddamn vampire, surely Death is stronger than Dracula?! but whatever, Death makes a good boss, albeit an annoying as shit one in the older games

So you kill Death, go through some more annoying as shit stages and then you fight Dracula.  Dracula has 2 forms, one where you gotta hit him in the face, and then some big monster form...that you have to hit in the face.  In all the older castlevania games you ALWAYS have to hit Dracula in the goddamn face.  You think after being killed and coming back so many damn times he'd have one of his minions make him some kind of metal face mask or something, but no, I guess he's not that smart.

So you kill Dracula and his castle crumbles, you watch the credits and then you can walk away safe in the knowledge that the world is safe from evil Vampire bastards.  Castlevania 1 is a brilliant little game and it's a shame that a lot of the fans of Lords of Shadow or the newer metroidvanias, the younger fans that is, probably haven't played this. 

So go buy it or emulate it or whatever, just play it, its really goddamn fun.

Next time I'll be recanting my tale of Casltevania 2.....oh dear