Oh my god that was so stupid. Even with the Difficulty Mod and silly-but-fun combat I couldn't get more than three or four "zones" into KoAR. I still feel bad the game tanked but only for all the developers it put out on the street and the treasury of the entire state of Vermont; I saw absolutely nothing of value in the IP itself. R.A. Salvatore should stick to writing shitty D&D fanfic.

Anyone got recommendations for PS1 games?

Thoughts on Brave Fencer Musashi?

I'm currently playing LoK: Soul Reaver and every so often hitting FFIX

Games I'm considering replaying: Legend of the Mystical Ninja (other SNES recs welcome), Crash Team Racing, Gex 2 & 3, The Emperor's New Groove, Hercules, Star Wars Demolition

On the note of Ps1 games, I played through crash bandicoot 1 with a friend recently on his old, somehow still functioning, big, chunky ps1. Fuck it was fun! Perhaps more of a nostalgia trip than anything else but eating doritos, drinking beer and playing crash bandicoot; rad times.

I remember liking the Gex series a lot as a kid (I think 2 was my favorite), but that was what, like 15-20 years ago? Hard to tell if they still hold up, history hasn't been nearly as kind to them in gamers' memories as Crash and Spyro, so it's probably a gamble. Crash Team Racing, on the other hand, is fucking great. Way better than it has any right to be for being such an obvious knockoff of Diddy Kong Racing. Crash Bash was fun too, but didn't hold up quite as well next to its inspiration in Mario Party.

I've actually been playing the first Spyro lately, and it hasn't aged as well as I'd hoped. There's no progression, you don't learn new skills or power ups or anything as you go, and the flight levels are the only thing resembling a break from the action. You can 100% clear each and every level as soon as you get there. It's still pretty fun but my memories tell me that the next two games are superior in every way.

Agreed on CTR, though surely you mean Mario Kart?

I just played Driver 2 for thirty minutes. I had it when I was ten or so. It's fucking terrible. Everything you do results in the cops tailing you, which doesn't end until you 1) outrun them, which is difficult seeing as how the whole game chugs, making it feel like you are going 15mph and turning on ice 2) they kill you. Awful. How I got to the second to last mission as a kid idk. And I was just in free ride mode this time...

Legend of the Mystical Ninja is eh. The charm is wearing thin after 2/9 levels. Wander through town, kill townspeople for their money, explore shops, kill boss.

It's been like 15 years but I recall CTR having an open hubworld type thing with distinct worlds and areas plus different types of races and vehicles, which is straight DKR instead of Mario Kart.

Fair enough; wasn't into it so I wouldn't know.

Emperor's New Groove's nothing good. Disappointing morning for video games.

Of the Disney games, I remember A Bug's Life... well, existing. It was one of the games my grandma kept around for when the grandkids came over but I don't actually remember if it was any good or not. I just know I played it plenty. Might have just been lack of available variety though.

You ever played Tenchu: Stealth Assassins? That was a gold standard favorite of mine as a kid. I revisited it a few years ago and it DEFINITELY makes you appreciate the fact that games figured out how to use two joysticks to fluidly move in 3D. Going back to a game before that time is practically torture. It makes the stealth unnecessarily difficult (not helped by the fact that Rikimaru is like a six and a half foot tall "ninja", so it's crazy easy to be spotted), and it does the thing that Deus Ex: Human Revolution would catch a bunch of shit for in that the levels all focus entirely on stealth and quickly and quietly dispatching enemies, but then the boss battles come around and you have to completely change up your skills, reactions, and arsenal because it turns into a standard action game. So yeah it didn't exactly age well, but if you're a fan of the PS1 era then it's definitely worth playing.

It was fantastic stuff, though my fondest memory of it comes from one of our lovely news outlets reporting it and Doom 2 as being "hyper realistic recently released murder simulators.". In around 2011, over ten years after both games were released.

It's not really something I'd go back and play any time soon, though. The controls always felt a bit weird to me.

Wow, the name of this game sprung into my head the split second before scrolling to this post. The first time I've even thought about that game in over a decade.

It absolutely had its share of problems, even for its time, but shit, I have fond, yet hazy memories of it. Leaving food in a guard's path then grappling hooking the fuck out of there. Umm. Can't remember much else.

It's kinda crap.


Great choice. Hope you played Blood Omen first though!

So I don't want any Dark Souls 3 spoilers, even the slightest thing that would give me any insight into the game, but I am doing a first with Dark Souls 3. I'm recording the entire playthrough of me going in the game blind. Just to archive it and for some fun.

So here's the playlist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AUuQrL ... sDhoGSxAdh

No matter how good I may get at the game, this is going to be evidence that I was once a crappy newbie.

What was crap about it? I remember wanting to play it when it was featured in PSM eons ago but never got the chance.

You know there's a DS3 thread, yeah? Not telling you to fuck off or anything but you'd probably have a wider audience there and easier time finding your own post later.

Bastion is cool so far but me being me I'm of course obsessed with getting the first prize on these weapon challenge levels.

Bought the Phoenix Wright trilogy off the eShop some time ago. Already beat the first game, Ace Attorney and now am in the 3rd episode/case of Justice For All.

Usually I'm not a big fan of the "whoddunit" detective crime stories like you see in many best-selling books nowadays, but this series is quite fun. Sure, it's linear, but I find solving the mysteries fun and also the chemistry and the dialogue between the characters. It has some funny moments. It's kinda like I'm playing a story instead of a videogame per se, even though it does have some challenge to it. I always get a wrong objection or two in most cases. And then I realize I missed something obvious or presented the right evidence at a wrong time.

The idea of blending a defense lawyer's job with a detective's seems like a simple thing, but one that requires some thinking. My hats off to Capcom for pulling it well enough. And like any Capcom game, there's quite some memorable music in it. How can you not feel well rewarded when you object and the music stops, meaning you got it right? And then a different piece plays, making you feel oh so smart and powerful. And the way the witnesses and the prosecutor start freaking out is quite satisfying.

Before I talk about Bug's Life, I wanna digress towards that much missed relic, the demo disc. Man, those were really neat. I had Official U.S. Playstation Magazine October 1998, the bundled Interactive Sampler Disc Volume 8 as well as 9, and then another OUSPM that had Star Wars Demolition and Emperor's New Groove, as well as a Playstation Underground disc that I can't find an image of. I remember being kicked out of the room when my cousin wanted to watch the Silent Hill demo video.

Some other games on the aforementioned discs: Ninja: Shadow of Darkness by Core Design, Tomb Raider III (featuring High Security Compound and Area 51), the crazed animal running race game Running Wild, Brave Fencer Musashi, Cool Boarders 3, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, Test Drive 5. Does anyone remember the title of a game where you, in 3D, traversed and battled across the earth as aliens would attack and abduct humans?

Some PS1 games I totally forgot about: Treasures of the Deep (underwater TR), T'ai Fu: Wrath of the Tiger, Wild 9 (those of you watching G4's Judgement Day in the early 2000's will recognize who did the score here).

Every handful of years I think to myself, "Man, it's about time you beat Tomba!" but then I play it and am disappointed.

Back to Bug's Life: I only had the demo; it was fun as a seven year old, but it's not something I ever want to revisit. As far as Disney games go, there are a few that stand out to me. Capcom made a couple doozies for SNES: Goof Troop and Aladdin. I'll write a post on them later. Back in the day, I enjoyed Mickey's Magical Quest, but it is way too slow (last time I played was in the early 2000's on the GBA port), and occasionally difficult. Some cool design choices though. Speaking of Mickey games, the best is easily Mickey's Ultimate Challenge. Otherwise, they really disappointed. Virgin put out a number of them; Jungle Book, Lion King, Aladdin for Genesis. I hated the controls, art, direction-just about everything from those releases. Not fun games. I didn't like Pinocchio, nor Mickey Mania. I've never played any of the NES games.

No, I never played Tenchu. The only stealth game I played was MGS2: Substance, and a demo of Splinter Cell.

Edit: The alien game I talked of earlier is Invasion From Beyond

More games I forgot about: Spiderman games, Rival Schools, B.L.U.E. Legend of Water, and Monkey Hero

Bug's Life reminded me of demos too. My most nostalgic demo disk game would be Tombi (Tomba elsewhere), and I remember being disappointed years later to find it goes for stupid prices on ebay. I've also heard it's not as great as I remember it from other folk.

Syphon Filter, I played the shit out of that demo. You could use a tazer on enemies until they combust and flail about indefinitely. And how could I forget my first time playing Metal Gear Solid, via the demo? I remember being so excited by getting spotted by the enemy, when the music comes on and they all chase after you, I ran over to my friend's house next door and told him he had to come see it. I was just blown away by the demo alone.

I had a huge stack of those demos, used to collect the magazine as a kid. Anyone remember Net Yaroze? Mostly terrible, but getting nostalgic thinking about them.

PS1 games, hmmm. I remember Spice World......and Gubble. I didn't have many PS1 games

I didn't. I should've realized it would have its own topic. Sorry for intruding on this one.

3D Lemmings.

Is Lemmings too easy for you? Try 3D Lemmings! Now you not only get to juggle hundreds of the suicidal little buggers, you get to piss around with annoying as fuck camera controls! Buy it today!

More seriously, had a glimpse at a list and there seems to be quite a few decent games there. Discworld series, Amerzone, Allied General, Oddworld, Fade to Black, Riven. Front Mission 1-3. Populous 3. Return Fire - used to love playing that on 2 player mode. Bloody hell there's even Zork I there - how does that work with a controller?

No need to apologize. There are no rules about it, plus, it's probably full of spoilers you don't want. (Spoiler-tagged but still)

Guess you can still post your video there though.

Final Fantasy Tactics and Breath of Fire 3/4!

Are we still recommending PS1 games? 'cause...





Here's my list of favourite PS1 games if anyone cares:

Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain
Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver
Final Fantasy Tactics
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
Silent Hill
Wild ARMs
Suikoden I and II
Breath of Fire III (and probably IV but I haven't gotten very far in it... lost my save and had to start over )
Alundra
Metal Gear Solid
Xenogears
Resident Evil: Director's Cut, RE2, and RE3 (though REMake is probably better than all of those today, RE2 might still be worth playing I guess)
Crash Bandicoot 1, 2 and 3
Klonoa: Door to Phantomile
Vandal Hearts
Skullmonkeys
Final Fantasy VII
Soul Blade
Rayman
Powerslave/Exhumed

So Breath of Fire IV and... Vagrant Story (which I picked up for like $2 on PSN) are still on my backlog. Also, Tactics Ogre is great but the PSX version is kind of crap, unfortunately.

An older post of mine has additional commentary on those games if anyone cares about why I'm listing them.
And here is my NeoGAF post during the "Best games of gen 5" voting thread, which includes my Top 10 with detailed explanations, but there are Saturn games too of course.

I should bookmark these just so I don't have to dig 'em up every time a "recommend PS1 games" post comes up.


Eh, it's been 17 years so I don't quite remember specifically, but I vaguely remember it having poor controls (and maybe camera? it was a common problem back then though) and the character and dialogue was really stupid and annoying. I rented it mostly for the FF8 demo, LOL... in the end both games were trash and it was really the beginning of the end of Squaresoft.

Well, this is a thing...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/st ... escription

Funded in 3 min, currently at almost 4x its original goal as of this posting. Damn.

Way expensive though. Not sure if want...

Oh man Klonoa was around on PS1? I had a demo disc for PS2 that had whatever Klonoa game was new at the time and I found myself playing through it a lot. It was a lot of fun. I'll have to keep my eye on that.

Right now basically every game I'm currently playing is a million hour long RPG so it'll be a while before I really try anything new. BoFIV was good from what I played but I got pretty tired of just how pointless everything was becoming. I've had the same goal for the 6/7 hours I've played but I feel like I haven't gotten any closer because I'm constantly bombarded with stupid time stalling minigames that do nothing but impede my progress. I know this is a staple of the genre, you can't just go from point A to point B with no interference, the story will always take you elsewhere and make you do other things on the way, but BoFIV does a terrible job of masking it. After spending thirty minutes playing hide and seek with all of the kids in the orphanage (immediately after a race/chase minigame with one of the kids) just so I can hear "The person you're looking for went thataway, but before you can go there you need to clear this arbitrary dungeon in town because that little shit of a kid who keeps wasting your time got lost and is probably being eaten by a grue right now." Good, fuck that kid.

So I took a break, I plan on going back to it because the parts that aren't so blatantly obviously designed to be nothing but timewasters are really good. Like I mentioned before, I started FFT but haven't had a chance to get any further, and I still want to get around to restarting Chrono Cross and I still have Xenogears in the backlog, and when I know I'll only have an hour or so to play I pick up a platformer like Spyro or Crash. So yeah, it'll be a long time until I play anything else.

I still need to play RA3. It's probably disappointing but yeah RA2 is my favourite game of all time and probably the only game I can say that I'm genuinely good at. It was the goofiness that helped make it so fun, so I can see the armed bears being in the spirit of the whole thing.

C&C3 was a major disappointment, but perhaps it's because I rate Tiberium Sun so highly. It was such a rich, gloomy, atmospheric game, so seeing it become a generic RTS was beyond disappointing. Thanks EA! Haven't played the 4th and likely never will.

Continuing the worms love here- a crazy amount of fun. The 3d thing sounded retarded. Worms World Party was great too! Aw man, playing that hotspot was just the best fun. Once every year or two me and a few friends will install it again and give it another run through. I'd say it's one of the best multiplayer games of all time, definitely.

I believe caspian just did the classic "accidentally responded to page 1 of the thread." Don't worry bro, I did it about 200 pages ago myself.

Anyway yeah as I said before, RA3 is clearly not as good as RA2 or Generals, but it's still a fun game with enough differences that it's worth playing, at least for the story. The balance is kind of iffy to begin with and goes completely out the window in the expansion, but it's still fun to play. Not like C&C3.

Haha! Yeah ah well. Worms and the Red Alert are certainly games worth talking about. I might buy RA3 on my break and bring it up north with me, if it has that same fun vibe as the second then it's definitely worth playing.

What's so bad about Tiberium Wars? Tiberium Twilight was indeed complete dogshit but I still fire up Tiberium Wars now and again.

I just found the whole game quite clunky, not particularly fun, and it didn't deliver the same atmosphere that Tiberium Sun did. I know all those things are pretty subjective; I might install it again and have a look at some point. Been 6-ish years since I've last played it?

The Scrin were super lame as well. They made sense from a lore perspective but the design of them, the gameplay, everything was just super lame. I get that they were supposed to be completely different-looking from the other sides as they were aliens, but they just weren't interesting, and looked pretty generic. Clearly a result of the talent behind Westwood having left.

Compare it to Universe at War: Earth Assault, a game made by the same guys after leaving. It's far from perfect, and suffers in my opinion from micromanage overload, but each faction is immediately recognizable, unique, and cool to boot.

I dunno. With funding like that, they could probably sell it at a loss and still smoke weed wrapped in Benjamins.

Fair enough. Speaking of Petroglyph (former Westwood, for those not in the know), any of you guys played Grey Goo? Might be next to Infinite Undiscovery and Divine Divinity as highest worst-title-to-good-game ratio, but make no mistake, it is a good game (at least from what I can tell by looking over my roommate's shoulder XD). There is no shortage of imagination for unit design there, Jesus Christ.

Is it an RTS? Count me as super interested, although yeah, that's an awful title.

Also speaking of Westwood, anyone here play Nox? The company's blatant Diablo II clone but with real-time combat and movement (seriously, playing this first effectively put me off any isometric action-rpg with hotkeyed combat for a long time) and an almost Monty Python-esque sense of humor. Still holds up pretty well to this day, especially if you fire up the MP Nox Quest over a VPN connection with some friends.

Yup. Sadly, the best video review I can find is from IGN, but at least it's better than they usually are:

Yesterday was Metal Slug's 20th anniversary. 20 years of vacuuming quarters out of my pockets.

I thought the whole concept of updating a console generation was satire at first, but this is really going on right now.

I hope the nintendo NX will be a typical couch console where Nintendo forces every 3rd party company to have at least 4 player split screen support for every game and updates/dlc for games are only allowed half a year after the game is out in order to force quality control.

I miss when consoles used to be a thing.

I just got to the Village of Dali in FFIX. My ring finger has been firmly planted on the speed up emulation key.

I'm also replaying India and South Pacific from TRIII. Temple of Xian from TRII deserves another run through as well.