Retro gaming

This is where you can deliberate anything relating to videogames - past, present and future
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Alex79
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Re: Retro gaming

Post by Alex79 »

If you've got access to a PSP the Ridge Racer on that was brilliant fun. Much better reviewed than the shoddy Vita version, too.
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Suits
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Re: Retro gaming

Post by Suits »

Alex79uk wrote: January 19th, 2020, 4:36 pm If you've got access to a PSP the Ridge Racer on that was brilliant fun. Much better reviewed than the shoddy Vita version, too.
I don't sadly but did notice a few RR games on that system 8-) .
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OldBailey
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Re: Retro gaming

Post by OldBailey »

Suits wrote: January 19th, 2020, 5:27 pm
Alex79uk wrote: January 19th, 2020, 4:36 pm If you've got access to a PSP the Ridge Racer on that was brilliant fun. Much better reviewed than the shoddy Vita version, too.
I don't sadly but did notice a few RR games on that system 8-) .
I'm playing through the first psp entry at the moment. It's amazing. I'd forgotten just how good this series is (was:cry:)
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Alex79
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Re: Retro gaming

Post by Alex79 »

That was the game that convinced me I needed a PSP. We got one for the kids at work and after taking it home for the weekend with Ridge Racer I had to get my own as soon as possible.
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Flabyo
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Re: Retro gaming

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Ridge Racer was a launch title, it’s 30fps isn’t it? I have vague memories that the early copies of Ridge Racer Type 4 came with a new version of Ridge Racer 1 on a bonus disk where they’d redone it using however many years of extra experience working on the machine they had, and it was now at 60fps and with a better draw distance.

(Type 4 is *glorious* by the way, I remember the day an import copy of that turned up in the office, gathered a crowd of our PS1 coders who were all ‘how are they *doing* that?)
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Stanshall
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Re: Retro gaming

Post by Stanshall »

These RR posts and the PSP special have been really making me feel like I would enjoy a PSP. Or would a Vita be more sensible? I've no real interest in emulation on either, I just want to play some PS1/2 era stuff and I think it'd look better on handheld than on the telly. Is that the value of this kind of thing or am I missing the point?
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OldBailey
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Re: Retro gaming

Post by OldBailey »

Stanshall wrote: January 19th, 2020, 8:58 pm These RR posts and the PSP special have been really making me feel like I would enjoy a PSP. Or would a Vita be more sensible? I've no real interest in emulation on either, I just want to play some PS1/2 era stuff and I think it'd look better on handheld than on the telly. Is that the value of this kind of thing or am I missing the point?
Honestly it depends on whether expense is a priority for you. The vita is the obvious choice as it gives you access to a good majority of the psp library too, but will still set you back around £100.

You can pick up a psp easily enough for around £30 however, and there's enough good stuff to keep you busy for a long time and gives you the ability to play PS1 classics which look amazing on the psp's screen.

I got myself a psp go last week which I found locally for £30 including an extra 16gb memory card. It comes with 16gb internal storage too which the other models lack. It's a lovely little device and still feels weirdly high tech to me.

If you're not bothered about owning physical copies then I'd recommend the Go for the improved battery life and extra portability. The lack of umd drive also means you have no moving parts to worry about in terms of maintainance.
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Flabyo
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Re: Retro gaming

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I have a suspicion if I dig out my psp that the battery will have died a death. Read a few things suggesting that those first generation machines had batteries prone to swelling and failure.

I don’t even know where in the flat the thing is... heh.
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Re: Retro gaming

Post by Stanshall »

Thanks @BaileyBoy. That's very helpful!
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Re: Retro gaming

Post by Magical_Isopod »

I've started watching this really interesting series called Chrontendo, which is a chronological review of every single NES/Famicom game, well, in order of release.

Now I typically don't have much reverence for NES games, like, at all. For me, I think the NES is simply too primitive - if I were 10 years younger, I probably wouldn't have been a "gamer" until the SNES, Genesis and TG16 came out. THAT BEING SAID, it's damned fascinating to watch how these games evolved - and how long it took for games to begin resembling what we know today. I'm just starting into 1986, and I think Super Mario Bros. is the only one so far that I've been able to say, "Yeah, that looks like something I'd play." Well, that and Binary Land, a weird penguin-themed puzzler. That actually looks cool as heck.

Early NES games though... Man oh man, are they ever basic. It's incredible how long it took before things like horizontal scrolling or *endings* to appear, and even longer before they became the norm. Imagine if things stayed single-screen arcade games?
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Flabyo
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Re: Retro gaming

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The NES was basically designed around ‘can we do Donkey Kong on it’. Until the concept of bank switching came around (extra hardware in the carts to let you switch what sprites are in the machines memory quickly) you really couldn’t *do* much other than single screen games.

It can handle horizontal or vertical scrolling, but not both at the same time (natively I mean, you can do it yourself by, yup, adding more hardware to your cartridge).

By the time you’re getting to games like Super Mario 3 there’s probably more silicon in the cart than there is in the console.
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hazeredmist
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Re: Retro gaming

Post by hazeredmist »

That's super interesting RE the NES. So you're essentially able to go way past the console's capability.
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Re: Retro gaming

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All the cart based consoles did it to an extent, but it was a necessity on the nes.

If you can find the book ‘I Am Error’, it goes into more detail about its hardware design than you probably ever need (including the sad fact that the added region lockout on the NES meant losing the audio pass through pin from the Famicom, which is why the Famicom Zelda and Castlevania games, amongst others, sound better in their Japanese versions)
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Magical_Isopod
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Re: Retro gaming

Post by Magical_Isopod »

hazeredmist wrote: January 20th, 2020, 10:52 am That's super interesting RE the NES. So you're essentially able to go way past the console's capability.
Kinda-sorta. If you think about it in ultra-distilled terms, the connection between system and cartridge is merely a transfer of I/O - inputs and outputs. So long as you're supplying sufficient power to the cart - 5-24VDC is probably all you need - the cart can ostensibly become a console unto itself. Carts are circuit boards, and the different chips process different data. So if you're having the chips on the cart do all the number crunching, and the data you're outputting is simple data like "place this colour in this pixel under this condition," you can do a lot of neat stuff.

We tend to think of games as instructions for the console hardware, but at least when it comes to cartridges of the 80s and 90s, the games were oftentimes hardware in and of themselves -- more akin to the commonality between the Genesis and Sega CD than between the PS2 and a DVD.
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Flabyo
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Re: Retro gaming

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Yeah, machines that used big chip boards in their cartridges were often more than just storage for the games code and data. Some are really obviously carrying extra stuff, like Starfox on Snes and Virtua Racing on Megadrive. But plenty of other carts are doing things like maybe adding some extra memory, or a simple FPU to take some of the load off the console etc...

It’s often a surprise when I open up a Megadrive cart to clean it to discover it has more than the usual single chip in there.
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Re: Retro gaming

Post by Flabyo »

Been watching the rather silly FFTBattleground twitch channel a bit lately (you bet fake coins on the outcome of battles between ai controlled teams) and decided its maybe about time I finally got around to playing all the way through the PSP version of Final Fantasy Tactics.

I’d played it a bit before, but while it adds a lot of good things (new cutscenes, a more coherent translation, extra stages) it also uses a weird aspect ratio that messes up the art a bit, and also has a lot of weird audio/visual desyncs on the heftier spells. Both of which had irritated me enough to not want to continue.

Did some poking around, and found there’s a way to live patch the game to fix both issues without needing to go through the faff of making an iso from the disc and patching it etc...

And it works. So I shall likely be playing one of my all time favourite games again.
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OldBailey
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Re: Retro gaming

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I put about 50 odd hours into this game on release before reaching a boss encounter that was literally impossible to beat with my character. If I recall it's the only encounter in the game that has a save point right before the fight so there's no way to back out to level up etc and it's a HUGE difficulty spike.

It was shaping up to being one of my favourite games of all time and this just killed my playthrough. One bad design decision in an otherwise phenomenal game. I was legitimately heartbroken.
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Flabyo
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Re: Retro gaming

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Yeah. It’s pretty legendary for that. First time I played through the original PS1 game I had a second save from a couple of days before so I didn’t lose too much progress going back to that and grinding some levels before retrying the boss, but a lot of people didn’t use more than one save slot and got stuck.

Any subsequent play throughs I’ve done I’ve rotated through half a dozen save files...
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OldBailey
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Re: Retro gaming

Post by OldBailey »

I actually picked up a PSP Go recently so I'm planning on revisiting it at some point. Looking forward to playing Tactics Ogre too, which I've somehow never played despite being a big fan of Matsuno's games.
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Re: Retro gaming

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I bought the special edition of Tactics ogre at launch...I don’t think I’ve ever even played it...

That’ll be something to fix this year as well.
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