Shadowman Sucks

 

I managed to knock yet another game off the endless stream request list and it was such a slog to play through that I feel compelled to write a thing about it.  Shadowman was released in 1999 for N64, PS1 and PC with a Dreamcast port also coming out a few months after the initial release.  It's a massive piece of shit that a decent number of people seem to have played but seemingly very few people have actually finished and after finally beating it for myself its extremely easy to understand why.  

The plot of the game is that Jack the Ripper is helping some asshole build a big fuck off castle in the land of the dead and this going to cause an apocolypse so you, playing as Shadowman, have to go and collect "dark souls" and shoot some guys in the face with a gun in order to save the day.  If you thought a game with such a simple plot would be a simple experience then you are quite mistaken.

From some of the footage I had seen prior to playing I had expected the game to be a generic 3rd person action shooter but instead Shadowman turned out to be a weird Metroid-like.  You start the game and make your way into "Deadside" where you are being blocked at almost every turn by soul gates or environmental obstacles that you do not have the skills to get past.  As you slog through you'll collect dark souls to unlock the gates which will unlock more areas which will contain items and skills that allow you to get to more areas to get more dark souls.  Standard stuff.  Part of the issue though is that none of the items or skills you get are interesting at all.  For example, in Metroid when you get the ice beam a number of core things about the game are changed all at once and suddenly you have a lot more options.  The gun is stronger which is satisfying and now you can use enemies to make platforms so your brain might light up as you remember some out of reach areas you might have seen previously.  In Shadowman, I slog through some boring ass beige dungeon to find a knife that lets me use teleporters.  I find about 3 of the fucking things and then the knife sits in my inventory for the rest of the game just as unused and unloved as I imagine Micheal LeRoi to be outside of his time as Shadowman.  The other major things you find, Shadowmans version of finding the Varia Suit, are tattoos that grant you certain abilities such as being able to walk on fire or swim in lava.  Two out of the four of these upgrades, which are a real pain in the ass to get, are only used briefly in very specific sections of the game,  so while in Metroid the varia suit is only useful in a few rooms, at least it has the knock on effect of reducing your incoming damage as well.  The toucher ability in Shadowman, for example, does nothing outside of its stated using and practically speaking it means that you push about 4 cubes and can shimmy across one ledge.  What a fucking waste.  

Maybe none of this would be an issue if it was fun to explore but that sucks massive shit too.  The levels have 2 themes, beige looking caverns or rust colored interiors.  That is the only thing you'll be looking at for the majority of your playthrough.  This isn't just visually boring to look at but causes an issue because this game is labyrinthine as fuck and doesn't give you a map at any point so the samey looking environments just cause constant confusion.  There was one level near the end of the game where there were 3 rooms in a loop and I didn't know I was looping because every corridor looked like the previous one so it was only when I hit the entrance again after about 30 minutes of exploring did I realize that I had double backed on myself.  This then led to another 30 minutes of scanning the muddy graphics for a hole in a wall that I had missed.  Maybe if any effort at all had gone into the visuals or a map button had been implemented maybe so much of my life wouldn't have been wasted.  

Then there's the combat and like every other aspect of this title, it sucks massive dicks.  Your main weapon is a pistol that shoots blue blobs and is the only thing that can kill monsters in Deadside.  You do get a regular pistol, shotgun and machine gun but I don't think I used them a single time since they can't actually deliver the killing blow.  I THINK the idea is that you equip one "real" gun in one hand and your soul pistol in the other and then weaken then enemy with bullets before killing them with shadow-powers.  That still doesn't make any fucking sense though because you also find shadow weapons in Deadside that can kill monsters in exchange for the use of some MP or some shit.  All of these weapons are hot dogshit and I got some use out of ONE of them against the games singular large enemy type but otherwise, total waste.  The pistol powers up as your soul meter goes up and allows for a charge shot so there's basically no reason to use anything else.  When the weapons aren't out here being ass though, the combat itself, along with the rest of the controls are basically unusable.  Most of the enemies in the game will just stand in place and shoot at you or run at you in a straight line so you don't feel just how bad it is but every so often a boss will turn up that is significantly more mobile than you and things get real miserable real fast.  Shadowman controls a bit like a tank which is fine for the most part.  Like I said, most enemies just stand and shoot so controlling like a S.T.A.R.S. member with broken legs is manageable.  But then you get some enemies that are fucking Dragon Ball Z teleporting around the arena on you and shooting your from all angles and you just have to sit there and impotently watch your life bar decrease as Shadowman takes 4 business days just to turn 180 degrees.  The final boss in particular is flying around a giant arena while shooting homing missles at you from directions that the camera can't see so good fucking luck with that.  Thankfully, if the final boss kills you, instead of returning to a check point you just get a bad ending and after I saw what I was up against I just threw up my hands and let the world end.  

The thing that really killed my enjoyment of the game though, despite all of its awful design, was the bugs and technical issues.  If I had a dollar for every time I got stuck on some level geometry and was unable to move then I could provide the Alzheimer's charity that we are raising money for here a pretty significant research grant.  Then there's certain enemies that look like they should be just minor annoyances but can kill you in seconds because Shadow Man doesn't get any I-Frames on hit.  Tiny fish in bodies of water and dogs, enemies that seem like they are designed to harrass you and deal minor damage while a bigger threat leads a big attack are actually the most dangerous thing in the game as they can drain your HP from full to zero in a matter of frames.  The worst technical problem, though, came in the form of a wall in the final temple en route to the upgrade that lets you swim in lava.  In that temple there is a wall of rotating blades.  The blades move slow and you have to shimmy across a ledge suspended above a death pit to reach the other side.  It's a pathetically easy trap to avoid but due to the gaps in the ledge the game just bugs the fuck out and Shadow Man gets stuck between the two ledges.  Being locked in places means you cant avoid the blade and then the blade knocks you into the death pit.  SOMETIMES the bug doesn't occcur and you can just shimmy through but its basically a dice roll every time and there's a easy but lengthy platforming section you have to restart from EVERY. FUCKING. TIME. the bug kills you.  When the environment isn't killing you then sometimes bosses or enemies might push your shit in because the targetting system just decides to take a day off in the middle of a fight.  It happens mostly with flying enemies  where Shadow Man just gives up on the fight because I guess he has chronic neck pain.  Maybe these complaints aren't true for the Dreamcast and PS1 versions but I'm sure as shit not suffering this crap game again just to find out 

What blows my fucking mind is that this piece of trash got a remaster.  Who the fuck was out there wishing they could replay Shadow Man again with beefed up graphics and a morsel of extra content.  Weirdos, that's who.  If this game ever gets requested on my stream again you can catch my ass taking a voluntary trip to Deadside

Grandia 2: A Deeply Flawed Classic

 

Not too long ago I finished Grandia 2 on the Dreamcast.  It was a game that I had beaten before a long time ago, probably during my high school days, on the PS2 and giving it a revisit in 2024 almost felt like playing it for the first time again.  While my memory of most of the story beats were pretty hazy, going in I remembered pretty vividly really being sick of it by the end and unfortunately by the time I reached the end of the game, that memory had turned out to be correct. 

The game follows the adventures of Ryudo, a "geohound" (a sort of monster slaying mercenary, I think) as he accompanies some chick from the Church of Granas as they go on an adventure to put an end to an evil god called Valmar.  On the way they meet a burly furry, a little boy and a robot and together they have to deal with all manner of evil as they go around beating up Valmar's individual body parts that have been locked away in seals.  It's a simple story with plot twists that you could see coming from several thousand miles away even if you had just suffered massive head trauma in a car accident but for the most part it gets the job of pushing the player from dungeon to dungeon fairly well.  

The game has a number of cool things going for it, mainly in the combat department with one of the most interesting implementations I've seen of the standard ATB that I've ever seen.  Instead of just waiting for a bar to fill and then taking a turn, all enemies and party members in Grandia 2 share the same ATB meter.  The meter is split into two sections with a wait mode and a command mode.  When your character reaches the command line you tell them what to do and then they will either execute right away if you're doing a basic attack or there will be some charge time if you're doing a spell or special move.  What makes this so interesting is that both you and the enemy can knock you out of your command with certain skills so aside from the usual strategizing that one does in every RPG of what to use and when, there's also a timing element to all your decisions.  There was one major boss fight, which I won't spoil, where it had an extremely damaging attack that could bring all of my party members to near death in one go except he was never able to pull it off after the first time because every time I would see him charging it up, I would knock him out of it.  The move I would use to do so would deal less damage, but not having to waste time healing up every time he did it made the fight, overall, much more efficient.  Grandia 1 had the same battle system and the only game I can think of outside of these two examples that does something similar is 2014's Child of Light that basically ripped off the battle system wholesale from Grandia.  

Usually I like to shit on English voice acting in modern games because most of the people that seem to work in that field have about as much vocal talent as a used up kitchen sponge but Grandia 2 has some decent performances going on in the dub.  Mainly because the majority of the main cast is made up of Metal Gear Solid voice actors such as Cam Clarke and Kim Mai Guest as well as many others so even though the script in the latter half of the game is so painfully cringe-worthy I nearly turned myself inside out, its softened by at least having voice actors that are easy on the ears.

But Grandia 2 also suffers from a lot of issues.  The writing is a big glaring one where it seems OK at first but then turns into a 14 year olds first story in the latter half but the gameplay is where most of the bullshit in this game goes down.  The dungeons are short, boring and uninspired.  There's a few cool ones but the vast majority of them require no thinking and don't even have that much in terms of explorability so after 5 or 6 of them they just become sort of grating.  Not to mention that whenever Ryudo has to climb a ladder or push a block the animations for these things are PAINFULLY fucking slow.  You can go and find a life-partner, have a child, raise the child and watch your child graduate university in the time it takes for Ryudo to push a cube a few inches or in the time it takes for you to watch the party climb up or down a ladder one by one.  Thankfully its not to prevalent throughout the game but any dungeon with cubes or ladders can go fuck itself.  

Another big issue is the grind.  You don't NEED to grind to get to the end, for the most part you can just get a couple of things and get to the end if you want but who plays RPGs like that really?  The game throws so many skills, spells and passive abilities at you that all need to be upgraded using coins you get from combat that if you wanted everything you would be grinding for HOURS.  At first I was trying to upgrade everything to max before moving on but the amount of coins needed to stay up to date was so insane that I ended up just finding one battle strategy that worked and then telling everything else to fuck off.  I didn't even unlock a single one of burly furry mans skills except for his first one that could knock enemies out of there charge time because the amount of coins I needed for Ryudo's "win the game" button along side the passive skills to make sure he doesn't eat shit was just too much.

The combat though is where one of the games biggest problem lies though.  As interesting as the battle system is, almost every skill and spell in this game is accompanied by a long, unskipable cutscene of the magic flying around the battle field doing its thing.  I was playing via an emulator for the Retro Achievements and even with the power of emulator speedup, by the time I was at the end of the game I was about ready to eat buckshot for breakfast if I had to watch that fucking ZapAll spell effect again.  This is true for enemy skills too so while you can kind of make regular combat not as tedious by only spamming regular attacks and the early skills with short animations, if an enemy wants you to watch a 90 second cutscene of the sun exploding then you better hope to fuck your cancel skills are ready or your time is being well and truly wasted.   It's a fun bit of spectacle at the start but by the end of the game you'll be begging for a way to skip them.

But despite all of those complaints I did genuinely enjoy my time with Grandia 2.  It's deeply flawed in a lot of ways but its charming and cozy.  Maybe it wouldn't appeal to todays RPG fans who are far more used to either extremely dull real time combat found in the likes of modern Final Fantasy or snappier turned based systems found in games like Persona 5 but if you're willing to exercise a bit of patience then Grandia 2 is a generally pretty good game that's worth checking out. 

2024: The Year of The Dreamcast

 

I haven't published any posts to blog in a hot minute and that needs to change.  Not that I haven't been painfully aware of my lack of games writing but I'm so busy with streaming, YouTube, making my own game(s), work, baby and a ton of other shit that sadly this has fallen completely to the wayside.  No excuses though, let's change that.

I decided two things at the start of the year.  The first being that I would not play more than a single game at a time when it comes to going through my backlog.  For the last couple of years I tend to have a bunch of games on the go, I peaked at one point at 7 concurrent playthroughs of different things and while I don't struggle to remember the goings on of each game for the most part, it does mean that the rate at which I complete stuff becomes immensely slow so this year I want my playthroughs to be a bit more focused.  The second is that I want to focus in on the Dreamcast this year and explore its library a bit more closely.  

Around Christmas last year I was wandering around the retro game stores in Nagoya and while going through the aisles of a Super Potato I started looking at all the Dreamcast games.  The Dreamcast was a system I owned back when it was new, I remember vividly the birthday that I got it with a copy of Powerstone and I played the shit out of that thing, there's a lot of fond memories tied to Sega's final piece of hardware.  But one thing I realized when looking at the selection of titles in Super Potato is that my experience with the system as a child barely scratched the surface of what the system really has to offer.  Sure, I played a ton of Powerstone 1/2, Dynamite Cop, Shenmue, Resident Evil: Code Veronica and other stuff but really I was only scratching the surface.  There are tons of interesting looking titles, a lot of which were locked to Japan and even if I could have got hold of them back then, my younger non-Japanese speaking ass wouldn't have been able to get a lot out of them.

But now its 2024, I live in Japan, fluent in the language and Dreamcast games are easily obtainable, I can go hog-fuckin-wild on this thing and get real intimite with it's library.  There's stuff that I have lined up that I have never heard of like Visual Novel JRPG deSPIRIA or Diablo clone based on an anime Record Of Lodoss War as well as games I always new about but have never had a chance to try like Blue Stinger and Cannon Spike.  A quick google of "obscure games for the Dreamcast" has led me to quite a number of interesting titles that I can't wait to try out.

I did decide to be boring though and kick things off with a game I've already finished once, Grandia 2.  I haven't touched a Grandia game since my high school playthrough of Grandia 2 on the PS2 and since it was sort of a big deal on the DC back when it launched I figured I'd kick off my year with a trip down memory lane.  It's an extremely good game but maybe I should have played a bunch of shorter stuff first to get some completions under my belt instead of jumping right into a meaty JRPG, but oh well, not gonna stop now.

If you are interested in my exploration of the DC and how my individual playthroughs are going then I talk about it in my weekly backlog vlogs so give those a gander if you want to see what weird and obscure shit I come across over the course of the year. 

If there's any stuff you think I should play, leave a comment or tell me in my stream or something.  Between exploring this system and some of the new stuff on the horizon I'm pretty excited for this year in games

MDK: Flaws becoming Vibes

 

I just recently finished MDK on PC for the first time.  Despite the game being moderately well known and despite the fact that I played the demo for MDK 2 on Dreamcaste and loved it, it has taken me this long to finally play one of them to completion and I'm glad I did.

The game was released in 1997 by Shiny Entertainment who are the people also responsible for Earthworm Jim and they certainly did have a bit of a talent for making uniquely strange stuff.  The game is about some dude called Kurt who is wearing what is probably the strangest space suit I've ever seen.  A dude with a gun arm and a hand vaccum for a head if there's one thing Shiny were good at it was designing interesting looking main characters.  Kurt must venture into a number of Land Crawlers, giant alien space ships that are destroying parts of the earth and shoot them up until they aren't doing that any more.  There may be more to the plot than that, but I'll address that later.

Gameplay is a pretty basic run and gun type affair.  Run through the level until you see something moving, hold down the mouse until it isn't moving and then move on.  Each stage is basically just a number of arenas that are broken up by corridors with an occasional puzzle haphazardly slapped in there to try and vary things up but the puzzles usually get no more complicated than "shoot the thing wot we hid".  My favorite stage in the game was the one where the monotony gets broken up by surfboarding segments where you drop cows on gun turrets and the soundtrack plays a knock off James Bond theme, it was a lot of fun.   Also the powerup for dropping the cows was an Earthworm Jim head so that was a nice little nod to their previous work. 

I think though, that if I had played MDK around the time it was new I would have become bored with it very quickly.  The game isn't overly long but every level is the same thing of just rooms of enemies connected by corridors.  The visual designs of the rooms are varied and can throw you for a loop sometimes but that doesn't prevent the gameplay from feeling a little stale by the end.  Yet, playing MDK in 2023 I didn't get that sense of boredom I might have done playing it at time of release.  PC gaming of that era has such a vibe to it, a feeling I can't quite articulate properly but you can FEEL it when you play these games.  Unreal Tournament has it, Thief has it, Deus Ex has it and MDK certainly has it.  I think it has something to do with early 3D combined with the way games were designed back then, the only way I can describe it is as "a vibe". 

I did discover after actually finishing the game though that I had been playing kind of a gimped version of the game.  Like with a lot of games from this era there are issues of compatibility and MDK was no different.  When you fire up the game on Steam you are given the choice between the regular version and the "Glide" version.  Instead of looking up what that was I just went ahead and played regular but apparently the regular version is missing cutscenes and things like that.  I realized something was wrong when I killed the final boss and the game just abruptly cut to main menu.  No ending, no credits roll or anything but by that point I was already done and not about to go back.  I have a quad digit backlog over here, if I care that much I'll go watch it on YouTube.

Anyway, nostalgia is one hell of a drug.  Not a drug that usually works on me usually, I've found that my opinion on the N64 has soured dramatically over the years, for example, but it certainly got me real good with MDK.  Worth a play if you haven't already but might be worth just playing the console version if you can't be bothered wrestling with the keyboard bindings like I had to.

The Second Worst Way To Play Mahjong

 

If you know me, even in passing, you may be aware that I am a big fan of playing Japanese Mahjong which is also known as Riichi Mahjong.  I like it so much, in fact, that during my time at university me and 2 other dudes would travel around Europe going to tournaments for it which led to some pretty interesting adventures.  

If you're unsure what Japanese Mahjong is exactly then to cut a long and complicated explination as short as possible it's sort of like Poker.  It's played typically with 4 people and each of these players have to take turns drawing and discarding tiles to create hands and when one player wins points are exchanged.  You do this for about 8 rounds and then a winner is decided by whoever has the most points.  It's a lot more complex than that are there are a lot more hand variations than there are in Poker but that's the basic gist of it. In actuality it's a lot closer in basic play to Gin Rummy, another card game but every time I ask people if they have played that they say no so Poker is probably the easier to understand comparison.  The wikipedia page for Gin Rummy says its one of the most widely played 2 player card games to this day but I'm almost certain that's total bullshit.

Mahjong has a fairly large popularity in Japan so of course companies came long to make video games of it.  Probably the most famous example of Japanese mahjong in video game form can be found in the Yakuza games where people complain at length that they can't get 100% because they just cannot figure out how to play it properly. But if you dig through the fairly large library of retro Mahjong games you'll find that they are all this weird 2 player head to head variant of the game that is just immensely boring to play.  You may look at an early Mahjong game on the Famicom or something like that and think something like "oh well they had to make it 1on1 because of the system limitations" but that's dogshit because 4 player Mahjong for the famicom exists as a separate game

Also there is this weird abundance of pervy Mahjong games that were exclusive to various arcade machines.  It's the same boring 2 man variant of the game but when you win you get to see some titties or something.

Nowadays it's not something you see very often, if at all.  Mahjong games for modern systems are almost always 3-4 players and in the arcade both Mahjong Fight Club and the Sega Mahjong game are 4 players and the cabs are hooked up to the internet so you can play online, the two player type being the norm on consoles and arcades is long gone, I think.  Maybe there are some 2 player Mahjong games on the Switch or something that I've never heard of but no one gives a shit about those as the market for these kind of games is basically dominated by Konami and Sega.

In the title I said that 2 player Mahjong is the second worst way to play the game,  if you're wondering what the first is, it's that stupid tile matching thing that you get on windows PCs and is sometimes offered as shovelware on some portable systems.  A lot of people just know it as "Mahjong" even though it has very little to do with the actual game, some people call it Shanghai and some people know it as Mahjong Solitare but the point is that this form of it is just a complete waste of time and I'd rather have painful dental surgery than waste my time playing it.

Gargoyle's Quest 2

 

As I've been working my way through my 100 game NES challenge on stream, I've started to lose a little faith in the system overall.  It's a system held in such high regard by most people in retro game circles but the thing is absolutely teeming with really awful, trash games that are borderline unplayable.  But then Gargoyle Quest 2 came along and reminded me just how good games on this system can really be.

You play as Firebrand and you are tasked with going through the Ghoul Realm to stop something called the black light.  A simple plot for a simple game but we aren't really here for a detailed narrative experience now are we? We're here for that sweet platforming gameplay.  

The game is split into two sections, top down overworld exploration and side scrolling platforming.  In the overworld sections you walk around a big map, find towns, talk to demons, get items etc. and then when you reach a place of importance the game switches into the side scrolling mode.  When you're platforming you have a standard shot attack to kill enemies and you have a wing meter that lets you hover for a limited time after a jump.  The hover mechanic takes a little bit of getting used to at first but when you get good at it it becomes really satisfying.  As you play through the game you get upgrades that allow you to jump higher, shoot stronger, make platforms and float longer and as you aquire the game throws obstacles at you in just the right intensity to allow you to get used to your new abilities before tasking you with some pretty challenging stuff near the end. 

Now you might recognise Firebrand from a different game, Ghosts and Goblins, also on the NES and as most people know it's a LEGENDARILY difficult game that requires not only precise platforming and some really annoying enemies, but also two consecutive clears to get the proper ending.  This may lead you to believe that Gargoyle's Quest 2 is equally hard but have no fear because you'd be quite wrong.  With the exception of maybe the final two stages, most of the levels in this game are an absolute breeze and even then the last two levels are nothing compared to what the rest of the main series has to offer.  The hover makes a lot of the platfoming extremely lenient and even if you do find yourself struggling, you can farm "vials" in levels and on the world map to buy extra lives very quickly.  The bosses in each stage are also an absolute joke most of them dying in a small number of hits and with patterns that are extremely easy to figure out.  Even the last guy, with his one hit death orbs is an absolute joke when you realize that, by that point, you have infinite hover and anything dangerous he throws at you can be countered by just shooting it.  That said it's not a complete walk in the park but you probably will never end up in a position where you have to repeat a stage ad nausium because some bullshit enemy keeps killing you like in GnG.

It seems that this game is pretty well known and pretty well regarded and I can't believe it took me so long to dicover it for myself.  If you've not played it and you're looking to kill an afternoon with an NES game, then this is a pretty good one to fire up.  Also if you really like it and wan't more, Gargole Quest 1 is avaliable on Game Boy and a sequel to this game called Demon's Crest on the SNES is also waiting for you.  I've not played either of those but I enjoyed this one so much I'm about to go give them a try

Moonlight Syndrome

 

If you've listened to me on the stream or read this blog extensively you may be aware that one of my favorite games of all time is Killer7.  Killer7 is the brainchild of Suda Goichi, or Suda51 as he's more commonly known and he's the guy responsible for games like No More Heroes and Killer is Dead, games famous for being a bit weird to say the least.

Suda51 before starting his own studio, Grasshopper Manufacture, actually got his start making games for a company called Human Entertainment and so I decided to go back and check out some of his past work and the first game I decided to sink my teeth into was Moonlight Syndrome on the PS1.

It may have been a mistake to start with Moonlight Syndrome because from what I can understand, it's a sort of alternate universe type story based on a game called Twilight Syndrome but I was already an hour in when I realized so I just kept going.

The game follows the adventures of a high school girl called Mika who lives in a town where a series of progressively fucked up things are happening.  Mika takes it upon herself to investigate these strange happenings after a road accident kills one of her class mates and we get to join her on her weird and dark misadventures.  

Game play wise there isn't really a lot to talk about since Moonlight Syndrome is essentially a visual novel.  You control Mika or one of the other characters moving left or right along each of the games areas but there isn't really anything to do other than watch the walking animation and listen to the loud footstep noises.  You do this until you meet another character or hit an event trigger and then more story plays out for you.  They story is presented in a number of chapters and while the main characters lines are all denoted with text NPCs all get weird PS1 CGI and voice acting.  There are a couple of moments in the game where you have to solve a "puzzle" which usually involves finding an event trigger or talking to a specific character.  For example there's one bit when Mika is investigating an apartment building and you have to find someone living in room 9 on a certain floor.  If you just count the doors you go down you'll end up at the wrong door because in Japanese apartments a room 4 doesn't usually exist and the idea of calling that a "puzzle" is a bit sad really.

 Overall though, Moonlight Syndrome is a weird game that I think is worth checking out if you're a big fan of Suda51s more modern titles.  It's fun to go back and see what he was doing early in his career.  As far as I know though, the game doesn't have a fan translation and was never released outside of Japan so unless you can read and understand Japanese you may be shit out of luck.  If you do though, give it a go, it's not overly long and it's quite an interesting little game.  MAYBE check out the previous titles first if you really want to get into the series though.

Parappa the Rapper is Shit (still love it though)

 

I have fond memories of Parappa the Rapper, as a kid I had a demo where I would play the first stage with the onion man over and over again.  I also have fond memories of playing the full game through during my first year of university but rhythm games have come a long way and going back and playing Parappa now feels like pulling teeth.

We do however, have to give the game some credit for being essentially THE FIRST rhythm game ever made and while playing it now feels terrible it and it's popularity essentially put the groundwork down for all the rhythm games that we enjoy today.  Also you cannot fault Parappa for it's music, the tunes found in each level are wholesome, catchy and stick in your head for YEARS.  I can still personally sing the entirety of stage 1 and 2 from memory and will, even today, find myself occasionally humming bits of the baking stage or the flea market.  Most of the content is Parappa is fun, bright, memorable and will never fail to put a smile on your face.

But it SUCKS as a rhythm game

Rhythm games are supposed to be a simple concept.  Music plays, notes appear on the screen and you make the inputs in time with the music.  This happens in Parappa, prompts appear at the top of the screen in time with the music and you push those buttons but it's basically a crap shoot if the game gives you a positive or a negative evaluation at the end of each bar.  I'm not bad at rhythm games, I play an absolute shit ton of them both at home and in my local arcades so I'm fairly confident that I don't just lack rhythm but after the first stage Parappa the Rapper just does whatever the fuck it was.

Out of curiosity I looked up videos of people getting Cool ranks in every stage and to my utter dismay it seems that getting good scores in that game have very little to do with the prompts.  Spamming inputs semi in time with the tunes is what seems to get you a good score and after the first displayed it almost doesn't matter what you do after that.  When you eventually DO get a cool rank the prompts just fuck off altogether and you are left do freestyle, which I suppose fits the theme of being a rapper but doesn't really make for a good rhythm game experience.

As a rhythm game Parappa the Rapper is fucking awful and it got away with it by basically being the only one of its kind.  That of course quickly changed but the catchy tunes and wholesome vibe of game basically left rose tinted memories in the brains of everyone that had a PS1 back in the day.  One thing I am probably going to do after this post though, is go and dig out my copy of Um Jammer Lammy to see if the timing problems that I have with this game, carried over to later titles.  It would be interesting to test it with Parappa 2 on the PS2 as well but I've not been able to find a copy of that.

Maybe I'm being a BIT harsh when I say it's shit because there is a lot to like about Parappa, it just sucks that it fails so hard at the one thing it's supposed to be good at which is being on rhythm

Sweet Home

 

Sweet Home for the NES has quite the bit of buzz surrounding it with it being a sort of inspiration for the Resident Evil franchise and finally I got to play it.  This is not to be confused with the recently released Sweet Home TV series on Netflix which is a Korean drama about a monster based post apocalypse, I made that mistake when looking through my listings but more on that another day.  

Sweet Home is an RPG about a group of people going into a haunted mansion to try and un-haunt it.  To do so you must solve a bunch of puzzles and fight a bunch of monsters gaining strength through levels along the way so you can exorcise the big bast ghost at the end.  It's a NES game for fucks sake, the plot isn't that involved.

What is quite involved however is the gameplay.  At the start of the game you have 5 characters, all of which you can name yourself.  Each one of those 5 characters has an item that is specific to them.  For example one guy has a lighter for opening paths, one guy has a medkit for curing ailments and one gal has a key for opening locked doors.  On top of that each character gets 2 free inventory slots and a weapon slot so managing equipment and puzzle McGuffins/healing is an integral part of the gameplay.  But, to make things just a little more intense, the game features perma-death.  So if one of your guys falls in battle, they are GONE, for good.  You won't find yourself stuck because the game provides regular versions of the character specific items so you can progress, but if that happens you are two inventory slots down, a weaker party AND you have to manage your shit even more meticulously than before.

The puzzles Sweet Home range from insultingly obvious to so obtuse I have no idea how the fuck you are supposed to solve them without a guide.  There's one bit in particular where you have to use the look command on a fountain and on the second or third try the fountain starts spurting blood which changes a thing for progression.  What I imagine most people do there is look at it once, decide it doesn't do anything and then get stuck for HOURS until they look at a guide and find out they have to spam the look command a few more times for it to work.

Overall though Sweet Home is a pretty good game and you can see the little aspects of it that were lifted for Resident Evil, almost like looking at the rings on an old tree stump.  The inventory, the way items are managed (identical to RE0 pretty much) and even the little animation that plays when you unlock a door for the first time.  Yeah, it's got some jank to it but it's not that long either so go give it a try. 

Independence Day (PS1)

 There are some games which have a bit of a reputation that are a bit undeserved in my opinion.  The ones that spring directly into my mind are Nightmare on Elm Street and Silver Surfer on NES.  Given the reputation unfairly due to YouTubers like AVGN making videos on these games and then large numbers of twats not being able to think for themselves piggy-backing the opinion despite having never tried the games for themselves.

Sometimes however the hate a game gets is completely deserved and Independence Day on the Playstation is one of those games.  A truly cursed title that I hate so much that I'm hoping that everyone involved in its development are now suffering from mild back problems.

The first thing I don't get about it is that other people and the game itself refer to itself as "ID4", which despite making a little bit of sense once it was explained to me, still manages to simultaneously still make utterly no sense.  The I stands for "Independence" and the D stands for "Day", seems obvious but the 4 stands for "4th of July" which I know is the American holiday of the same name but that's got nothing to do with the title of the movie...right?

Well doing a quick google search for the movie poster I found this fucking thing.  So does that mean that the ACTUAL title of the movie is ID4: Independence Day? In which case that's a stupid fucking title and however came up with it should be ashamed

Anyway I'm talking about complete and utter bollocks just to fill post space so lets talk about the actual fucking game.  It's a dime a dozen flying game, sort of like those free-fly missions from Lylat Wars. The game gives you a couple of things to blow up and then you get in your plane and you go blow them up, easy, right? No

The first few missions aren't so bad but then the game just bombards you with enemies and dodging anything becomes an actual impossibility.  When you do get hit, in addition to losing HP you also get shunted around like a puck on an air hockey table so you're probably going to take some additional damage from smacking the floor or a nearby building.  The game tells you when an enemy has a lock on you but there are so many enemies on the map at any given point that even if you shake one, the next one is just going to lock you right away, there's basically no point in time when you aren't being bullied by some alien bastards wanting to shove lasers up your arse.  Also your bullet weapon appears to do fuck all of nothing.  I can fire bullets until the town underneath is flooded with shell casings and it would have maybe done about 1 point of damage to an enemy ship.  The only effective weapon is missiles and you only get 20 of those and once you're out and you've picked up all the refills on the map, you can get fucked sonny jim.

At first I thought it was because I was trying to be a big-dick "pro gamer" and playing on Hard.  So I turned it down and still got equally wanked on with Normal mode.  After I stopped the stream I thought I'd see what easy mode was like since that's what the game defaults to when it starts and it didn't change diddly jack shit and I still got wrecked.  I thought maybe there was something fundamental about the game I wasn't understanding so I took to YouTube to find some videos of people playing it.  I found one group of people who struggled with easy mode only to get to the exact level I was stuck on and then they just started cheating! Don't blame them but that's not the solution to the problem I was hoping for.

It's a viewer request so I WILL beat it, even if I have to wear down the skin on my fingers to dust to get there but holy good lord Jesus Christ the internet was not joking about this one, this really is a stinker.

Sonic Adventure

 

Nostalgia can be a strange thing.  I remember owning Sonic Adventure for my Dreamcast back in my younger days and I remember it being quite good.  At least I remember the Sonic sections being quite good and then the rest of a game was sort of a blur.  After finishing it on stream recently I can safely say that while I did have a bit of fun with the Sonic sections it was considerably more jank than I ever remember it being.

In my head Sonic didn't really get completely screwed until Sonic 06 and before that, Adventure and Adventure 2 while not the best games in the world were still solid attempts at making a 3D sonic game.  But I can safely say now that Sonic Adventure is just as broken and also suffers from being really really fucking boring.

When the game starts out and you only have Sonic to play with things are sort of OK.  You run very fast down a path, dash at enemies and then watch a badly voice acted cutscene and everything is great.  But once you finish his stages, in order to see the real ending of the game, you have to play as all of Sonic's stupid fucking friends.  Tails is sort of the same as Sonic, Knuckles is stupid McGuffin hunting, Amy is boring, Gamma has a cool idea that is over the moment it starts to get going and Big the Cat's campaign houses the worst gameplay segment of any game on the system and I say that as someone who loves Sega Bass Fishing.

What really surprised me though is all the weird buggy type things.  Often at points in the game the characters would get stuck on...the floor? I'm not entirely sure what was going on but often I'd being trying to navigate the hub world into the next stage and my character would just start flailing around, unable to move as the game struggled to work out how floors work.  The other big thing that I could have sworn wasn't a problem back in my teen years was loops.  Whenever a character had to go through a loop they would get half way and the forget how their legs worked and they would just stop dead.  This would cause them to fall off and usually result in a death.  Thankfully the game is piss easy and showers you with 1 ups but its still horribly annoying to have to play the same segment 4 or 5 times while the game works out how to get the character around a 360 degree piece of terrain.

So while we all like to rag (rightly so) on Sonic 06 for being a glitchy mess, let's not forget that Sega were practicing those techniques here first, because I sure as hell did.  

The N64 Was A Bit Crap

 I still remember the Christmas I got the N64 from my parents.  I ran downstairs, hooked that shit up and spent my entire morning playing Mario 64 and having a grand old time.  Later I was given copies of Banjo Kazooie, Goldeneye and Zelda: Ocarina of Time and I remember playing these games with friends and having quite a bit of fun.  However, despite the fond memories, looking at the N64 now and even thinking back to how it was back then, the system was actually just a bit shit.

First of all the hardware itself was just a bit shit.  The N64 is home to what is probably one of the worst controllers I've ever had to use to play a game with.  Sure, we all got used to it and in the end it was fine but that doesn't change the fact that it's clearly designed for a weird species of Octopus people that live on the ocean floor.  Plus the addons can also suck a fat one the expansion pack can suck an especially large fat one.  I remember my friend coming to my house after school and bringing Majoras Mask with him but he forgot his expansion pack so we were just up shit creek and I had to wait another 2 weeks for him to come over again before I got a chance to play it.  

Which leads nicely into the next issue which was pricing of the damn games.  Literally nobody that I knew growing up who also had an N64 had more than about 3 or 4 games because the carts were quite literally DOUBLE the price of anything else at the time.  You would walk into a game store and all the new games were about 30 Pounds and then there were the N64 games in their stupid ugly rectangular cardboard boxes demanding that you fork out 50 or 60 Pounds.  On a side note, the SNES boxes can also suck a fat one but that system was actually good so I'm not as bitter about it.

But all of that shit is in the past, all that REALLY matters are the games.  Well, it's not much better in this department.  The lifespan of the N64 according to Wikipedia was 6 years and whenever anyone talks about the system the same games always come up; Zelda: OoT, Goldeneye, Banjo, Mario 64, Lylat Wars (sometimes Mario Kart, sometimes Mario Party) and that's fucking IT.  6 years of life and the number of games people actually give a shit about can be counted on one hand.  There are a few more games than that, but not many and even of those most of them feel like utter shit to play now.  Have you tried actually playing Goldeneye 64 today? It's grueling.  Granted it was cool as all hell at the time but playing it now is the gaming equivalent of putting toothpicks under your fingernails.  The Dreamcast, again according to  Wikipedia, had half the lifespan of the N64 and yet there are significantly more games on that system that were good and still feel good to play even today.  

I understand people having fond memories of the thing and I have to admit that despite it's absolutely embarrassing library the games that were good were VERY good (except Goldeneye, fuck off) but lets stop looking back on the system like it was some overall landmark of gaming quality.  It was an overpriced piece of shit that mad a fat man in overalls go "wa-hoo" and that's all it was ever good for 

Snake Rattle and Roll

 

When you think of "the worst NES games" what usually comes to mind?

Silver Surfer?

Dr Jeckle and Mr Hyde?

Action 52?

Yeah, screw all that, THIS is the worst game to ever curse the NES.

Snake Rattle and Roll is a game where you have to slither around eating balls in order to make yourself heavy enough to hit a bell attached to a High Striker in order to open a door to progress to the next stage.  There are a couple of stages that don't do this and instead opt for straight platforming challenges and all in all you've got to get through 10 levels of the stuff before you can see the ending.

There are 2 problems with this game, one minor and one major.  The minor problem is the perspective.  The game has this sort of isometric camera that was probably really cool to see on the NES back in the day but in a game that needs precision platforming, the camera makes it sort of hard to judge where you are in relation to platforms and enemies at certain points.  I call this a minor issue though because it's the sort of thing you can just get used to after a short amount of play time.  The major issue though is the ice physics, probably the dumbest, most obnoxious ice physics in all of video games and I say this without hyperbole.

The last 2 levels are these icy gauntlets that are full of one hit kill rocks coming at you and the balls you must put in your mouth to reach the end of the stage are flying, so while you're slipping around trying to eat them you're liable to fall of the stage A LOT.  The game also has a garbage respawning system so more than once I would die only to respawn off the ledge again and fall right to my death.  The big problem though is the ice itself because you never EVER get a break from it pulling you all over the place, meaning that the ice physics are working on your snake EVEN WHEN YOU'RE IN MID-AIR.  So if there's a small platform you need to hit, you'll always either undershoot it and slide back down whatever hell mountain you were climbing or you'll over shoot it and fall to an instant death.

The game only has a handful of continues too so if you mess up too often on those ice stages, enjoy being knocked back to stage one every time.  Also don't give me any shit about the stage 8 warp because actually hitting that is a pain in the ass as well.

Sometimes playing shit games is fun because having a nice controlled rage at something obviously shit can be cathartic.  Sometimes they can be so jank that they sort of come full circle and become weirdly entertaining in their shitness.  Snake Rattle and Roll isn't cathartic to yell at and it isn't jank enough to be fun, it's just shit.  Shit in it's purest form, unfiltered and untainted by any traces of quality game design, just a massive pile of doo doo.

There is a version on the Mega Drive too but I've not played that, so I dont know if it's any better.  But to be honest, after the experience I had with the NES one, that version can suck at a fat one.  Don't play this game, it's not good

Monster Party

Now that I've finally finished Famicom Wars my NES 100 game challenge continues and the first game out of the 100 years war was a weird little title called Monster Party.

The game starts innocently enough, your character gets approached by a weird gargoyle dude who tells you that his world is full of demons and he wants you to go there and deal with the.  You get swooped into demon land and then have to play through 8 stages beating enemies and killing bosses until you get to the end.

All but one of the levels is your standard move to the left and kill all the enemies and throughout those levels are little doors.  Going into a little door will take you to a room that will either have a boss enemy or nothing and the goal is to find all the bosses, get the key and go to the next stage.

What makes this game so weird is that it seems almost as if it was developed by two entirely different people.  One of these people was trying to make a sort of cutesy platformer about a young boy and his gargoyle friend beating some monsters and the other guy was trying his damn hardest to make a spooky horror game complete with some really gruesome imagery.  If you've ever played a game called Eversion it has a sort of similar feel to that in places.

This is spoiler territory but the game gets really weird in its final cutscene where your gargoyle friend gives you a treasure box that, upon opening you find a princess inside.  Mail order princesses for heroes is weird in and of itself but after that she begins to melt, corrupting the area around her and causing you to melt as well and all this accompanied by some quite harrowing 8 bit imagery.

Despite the games sort of fucked up nature in places its actually really fun to play and if you get find a way to get your hands on it then I recommend it!  It's not very long but its a great way to kill a few hours.

Windjammers

If you follow the site/twitter/twitch much you'll know that I have an absolutely massive backlog of games to get through and because the list is so huge, it's not very often I allow myself to just sit and enjoy more simple games that don't really have an "ending" as such.  Sure, there's a single player mode in Windjammers where you beat all the characters but in a "sports" game like this or a fighting game, finishing it isn't really the focus so titles like that tend to fall by the wayside for me.

That said though, I recently sat down at a friends place and just enjoyed some good old fashioned arcade action and one of the games we spent a pretty significant amount of time on was Windjammers and good Lord is it amazing.

Windjammers is an extremely simple game since essentially it's just a supped up version of Pong.  There are 6 characters to chose from that each have a different power and speed stat and then you play up to 3 sets of 30 seconds each (by default) trying to throw a frisbee into the goals at the end of your opponents side of the court.  There are 3 point zones and 5 point zones and you can also score some cheeky points by making your opponent fail to catch the frisbee.  Each character also has a sort of special move where they will charge their throw and then launch the frisbee in some kind of physics defying way.

That's basically it, there's some other things like being able to throw the frisbee crazy fast and a couple of times me and my buddy got the frisbee to sort of curve in a weird way but we weren't playing long enough to really figure the specifics of those moves but for the most part that's the entire game.  Like Pong, Windjammers, especially when played with a friend, is the kind of game you can just kick back and play for a good few hours without it getting boring.  It's easy to play and understand too which means that it also makes for a pretty good party game.  Matches are short so there won't be much sitting around, it's fast paced and occasionally some crazy stuff can start happening once both players start launching supers all over the place, it's an all around solid experience.

My only real criticism of the game is the price tag.  It's available for PS4 with a price tag of $15 which is a little steep considering how bare bones it is but if you're the kind who has guests around a lot to play games, this is a great one to break out and it's something that even the less experienced members of the group can enjoy right away.  Also considering it was originally released as an old arcade game, the price tag won't be an issue for....certain users.

It doesn't look like much at first glance but Windjammers is easily some of the most fun I've had with a multiplayer game in a long time.  Grab a copy, grab some friends and go have yourself a grand old time.

Quake

A while ago I decided to replay Quake so I'll take a moment to blog about it.  It's a short and simple game so this will be a short and simple post.

I don't really feel like I need to introduce Quake in any sort of way.  If you're interested in games and you've not at least heard of Quake then you must have been living under a rock this entire time because this is one of the big bad granddaddies of FPS games.  It's basically Doom but with proper 3D which isn't really surprising since they are both made by the same people.

As fun as Quake is, and it still is a ton of fun to play even today, this game is really, REALLY ugly.  The level design itself is up to the usual id standard for these kind of games at the time but the graphics are all just brown, ugly castles full of swamp water.  Doom, by contrast, while still sort full of dingy corridors on space stations at least had some variation to its color palate.  The levels in Doom manage to maintain some kind of visual interest while Quake just looks like you're staring into a pool of sewer water the whole time.

Complaints about the old, brown graphics aside, the core gameplay is still really fun and the game itself is a classic.  You can actually get the collection of Quake games on Steam for about 5 pounds and with that there's all sorts of mods you can apply to make it look nicer/play a little better than it used to.  So if for some reason you've NOT played Quake in 2019, go ahead, pick it up and give it a spin.  They don't make 'em like this anymore

Tau and Friends Play Silent Hill Part 8

The Playstation Classic Isn't THAT Bad

I never thought I'd do a post advocating in favor (sort of) of an overpriced emulator in a box but here I am.  Before I start, in case you don't know, Sony have followed Nintendo's lead of releasing mini classic systems with their own Playstation Classic.  The list of 20 games that are preloaded onto the system were announced and people are NOT happy about it.


There are some really well known titles in the lineup such as Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy 7 and Oddworld: Abe's Odyssey but then there's some slightly less popular/well known games such as Jumping Flash, Intelligence Qube and Mr Driller.  There's no real game on there that's really bad, despite some people telling me that Rainbow Six is dicks but I remember having fun with it (not played in a long time, mind you), so why are people so mad?

From what I can tell it seems to be that people are pissed because games like Puzzle Fighter 2 got put on the system over things like Spyro, Crash, Silent Hill or one of the other many great games in the PS1 library.  These are the 3 big titles I see popping up in every little comment but I don't understand how you can be mad about those because Crash has been remade for PS4, Spyro is about to be remade for PS4 and Silent Hill is owned by a company so inept that they nearly got sued over voice rights for their own remake of 2 and 3 so lord only knows what kind of licensing issue lies in that one.

My problem with people complaining about it in general though is that people only seem to want obvious shit on their classic systems.  For example, the SNES classic is a cool piece of kit but I'll never buy one because it only contains games that I've already played to death.  Obvious picks to keep the fanboys happy, so that people can go on social media and post stupid shit like "erh mah gerd do you remember Mario?!"  At least Sony had the balls to put on some lesser known titles like fucking Jumping Flash or Intelligence Qube, so that maybe once you've had your little nostalgia rush you can explore a few gems of the system that you may have not heard of.

I would have considered buying a SNES classic, for example, if Nintendo had made let's say, only 10 of the games safe bets like Earthbound, Metroid, Zelda, Mario and the rest as things like Illusion of Gaia, Terranigma and Ogre Battle.  Syphon Filter, Wild Arms and Super Puzzle Fighter are good games, why are you so afraid to broaden your horizons a bit?  The only "shit" game on that entire list is Revelations: Persona and that's only because the localization was a complete botch job, not that the game itself is shit.  Maybe its an updated version and then what I said about it being crap isn't even true. 

If you're THAT pissed off about it just go and emulate stuff.  The emulators for PS1 are actually pretty good so just make your own PS1 "Classic" and play the games you like.  Also the list of games in Japan is much different and contains things like Parasite Eve and G Darius.  The lineup here is so good I might even pick one up once the price tag goes down a little bit. 

Play something new, it won't kill you, you might even like that Wild Arms thing.

The "Joys" Of Old PC Games

Last night I got a weird urge to replay Max Payne on PC again.  The first game was released in 2001 and gathered a lot of attention due to the fact it's one of the first titles to make use of bullet time.  I don't think I need to go into much detail about the game itself really, it's pretty iconic with 2 sequels and a god awful movie featuring Mark Wahlberg.

Now getting old games to run on newer systems used to be a MASSIVE problem, especially for the less computer savvy members of the gaming community but now thanks to services like Good Old Games and Steam this has become a lot less of an issue.  That said however, sometimes a title does like to be a bit of a pain in the neck and Max Payne was certainly one of those games.

I reinstall the game from my account and hit play and I wait a few moments for the title screen to pop up but nothing happens.  I click it again only to get the message "Max Payne is already running" which was a weird thing to read considering I'm looking into my desktop.  So I fire up task manager and sure as shit, there it is, but nothings actually happening on screen.  So I end the process and try again, same thing, nothing.

This is where I start to go on forums or hunt for patches and usually people are pretty good with this kind of thing, there's usually a fix somewhere to be found.  So I google my problem and get a few posts that mostly say the same thing.  "Put it in comparability mode for Windows 98/ME and run as administrator".  Seems like an obvious fix and I gave myself a little kick for not trying that first so I go ahead and do that but still the same result, nothing.  So then I start trying all sorts of weird shit like making .BAT files, renaming files and folders, sacrificing people to the sun God but none of it makes the game run.

Eventually I get it to work.  If you want to know what my fix was it's click on it lots and lots until it actually decides to show up.  I have no idea what I did or how I made it work, and I still don't but if I click on it enough times and restart Steam once or twice eventually it'll just be like "oh, go on then" and let me play.  Once in game it runs fine but with weird audio issues that I know there's a patch for but at this point I'm too lazy and I'm OK playing with gimped audio.

If anyone enjoys old games for PC I can guarantee they've had this happen AT LEAST once.  You just want to sit down and replay an old game that you remember fondly but the task of getting it run becomes a project that requires hours of research and tinkering that just eats your entire afternoon or evening.  Sometimes it can be enjoyable, like solving a puzzle but often it's just a pain in the butt because you just wanted to play a game without having to do a whole course on computer science.

Still, like I said, these problems are a lot less of a thing now we have Steam and Good Old Games giving us versions that just work from the get go.  There's also plenty of remakes kicking around nowadays which means you can play a version that's actually been made for modern systems, but where's the fun in that?

Retro Game Snobbery

Snobbery is something I think anyone who is seriously into gaming is guilty of in at least some form.  If you really like a series or a specific title and you know a lot about it then it's impossible for it not to manifest at least a little bit.  People who enjoy retro games are no exception to this but for some reason it's this group of gamers where the levels of snobbery are the absolute worst.

I'm no angel myself really, if you start talking to me about Silent Hill or Shin Megami Tensei then I'm going to find it at least a little difficult to reel myself in on that topic.  Lord help you if you say something like "Homecoming was best Silent Hill" or "Persona is better than Nocturne" because I might pop the fuck off and bore you to death with series factoids and long drawn out plot explanations but that's about the worst of it.

I understand this kind of reaction though.  If you really like a thing and then you FINALLY meet someone who also likes a thing but they aren't quite as up on it as you think they should be, you want to sort of "educate" them.  It's not a case of belittling their opinions but it's a case of trying to help them appreciate the thing as much as you do.  A lot of the time however, it never really comes off that way and things get out of hand pretty often, it's why I don't like talking to "fans" of even things I enjoy doing.

But with people who enjoy retro games this is a completely different barrel of fish.  Now for the most part, people from the retro game community are actually extremely friendly and accepting.  A bunch of people who love sharing their love of old games from their youth or even accepting younger gamers who enjoy that retro style of game and want to learn more.  But when a retro game snob does rear their ugly head good lord the best bet is to run away.  For these people, retro gaming isn't so much a hobby as much as it is a competition and they just HAVE to let you know about it.

For example I saw a post on a retro gaming group that said "Some "so called" retro gamers didn't know you could put two NES advantages into the system at the same time" thus implying that if you weren't aware of this one fact then your entire love for the sub-hobby of retro gaming is now brought into question.  I never had an NES as a kid but I thought that plugging in two controllers would have been pretty simple.  The point is though that for a retro game snob, you cant just enjoy games from the past, you have to be constantly judged on what you play or even how you play it.  Forget controller knowledge, if you bring up the idea of playing on an emulator for convenience then you might as well be sent to the firing squad.

But that level of snobbery, while obnoxious, is sort of similar to what I said before. What really gets my back up is the CONSTANT one upmanship that these people also employ.  For example I met a guy once who, if you brought up a deal that you found for literally ANY retro game, he always had found one better.  You could say "Yo, I'm so happy today, I found X for Y price" and he would respond with "oh yeah? well I was on holiday and got it for Z price" where Z is always at LEAST half of whatever you said Y was.  I've seen other examples of this with people saying stuff like "oh well you can't REALLY call yourself a retro game fan if you haven't at least beaten Takeshi's Challenge on original hardware, can you?" completely straight faced and unironically.

Like I said, most retro game fans are fine people who are helpful and will be happy to suggest their favorite obscure gems to you so that you can discover some cool new games but if you encounter one of these special breeds of gaming snob run for the hills and sound the Silent Hill siren because no one needs that shit near them.