The UKFF Retro Gaming Thread

[Scratch]

56 minutes ago, BigJag said:

Are there any system requirements or special set up required?

Not that I’ve noticed, but then I have the latest iPhone. That said, there feels like there’s loads of headroom and so I’d suspect an older model would run it more than fine. It’s free, so nothing to lose.

[Merzbow]

PPSSPP doesn't need a lot of horsepower, especially if you run games at their native resolution but you should easily be able to bump that up pretty highly on any iPhone that runs it.

[BigJag]

Thanks for the responses. I've just downloaded it onto my Android phone. I need to find some game files. Is there a recommended source?

[Merzbow]

57 minutes ago, BigJag said:

Thanks for the responses. I've just downloaded it onto my Android phone. I need to find some game files. Is there a recommended source?

Vimm's Lair, Myrient or one of the many archives on archive.org

I use the latter mostly for any ISOs now, just search "psp archive" in Google.

[FLips]

Had my mate over yesterday and had a good go of a few PS1 games and demos.

We sat and finished Gamera 2000 in one sitting. It's a Panzer Dragoon/Starwing style shoot em up about the big turtle thing off Godzilla who assists you through the levels. My mate recommended I burn a copy of it as he said the cutscenes were shocking and right he was, they were absolutely abysmal. They're exactly like the original Resident Evil cutscenes where it's live actors who seemingly have never acted before. There's a guy in it that's so bad we looked him up and this is his only acting credit and it was so bad they got a Japanese voice actor to dub English over him.
Obviously they couldn't get the real Gamera so he's CGI'd in and ends up being better than the live actors.
The gameplay though is actually really fun. Controls smooth, the gameplay is fast and furious even on the easier mode and there's a good lot of nonsense in it. Giant dragons and turtles firing laser beams out their stomachs, "neo" versions of cities, women in eggs, it's got it all. Worth a go actually.

Had a few matches on Fire Pro G which is exactly what you'd expect if you've ever played Fire Pro before. The roster is decent, with a mix of All Japan/New Japan/WCW/WWF and then random fighters from other feds I recognise. It's hard to know exactly what was going on as sadly it's all Japanese with no translated versions I could find.
I felt the gameplay wasn't as responsive as the Fire Pro X or Fire Pro World, with a few instances of momentum just stopping dead or grapples not responding. It has the same issues they all have where the camera angle means you miss half your strikes because you're not lined up right. Still a lot of fun, but you're better off getting the translated rom of the SNES titles or World on the PS4.

I've been playing a fair bit of Gran Turismo 2 Simulation Mode too. I'm currently saving up my winnings to get a Lotus but it's going to take a while. It really is a fantastic game in terms of letting you just mooch about looking for your perfect car, tuning it up and racing about in it. I'm not a big realistic racing game fan but the amount of content in here is great and I imagine if you knew anything about cars then you'd be in heaven with this.

Played a lot of Demo games including Spyro The Dragon which I found massively interesting. A lot of oddities in the demo including the wrong music, wrong/unused sound effects, some dragons finished and some being walls of text and unique dialogue from the balloonist to say it's a demo version which I always find cool in demos when they code unique dialogue or graphics in.
Some of the enemies behave differently too, and the most interesting change is that the last gem is in the exit portal of every level so you have to go through it to collect the last gem. As someone who speedran the remake at one point, a major mechanic is quitting levels from the menu to save time so it's curious to see a version that could have changed everything for that.

Millenium Soldier was a fun run and gun that played a lot like Loaded x Future Cop LAPD. You can strafe and have multiple weapons with powerups you can pick up and it's just a brainless blaster. Might not be a lot of depth to the game but for this era it's decent and I enjoyed what I played.

Killer Loop was another "unknown" game we had a try of. It's a knockoff Wipeout and nowhere near as good. It's all over the place control wise, we were flying up the walls on it. The AI got so far ahead we didn't even know we were racing against anyone until we crossed the finish line. Rubbish. The futuristic racer is such a niche genre and quite frankly all the good ones I've played are nearly interchangeable; Wipeout, F-Zero, Fast RMX. So when a bad one like this comes along it stands out a bit more because it's such an easy style game to just copy.

I have a load of demos I've won in bids on their way to me including Demo One, a Resident Evil 2 demo, a mix of PS Magazine ones and an Abe's Oddysey/Exoddus combo. I'm skeptical of the latter one though as I won it a couple of weeks ago and it was meant to come between Sat-Tue just gone and never even changed to dispatched on Ebay. When I messaged the guy after it didn't show on Wednesday he responded saying it was packed and ready but he had a death in the family so never got chance to post it. He said it was with 4 other packages he had to ship but I looked on his profile and my daft demo disc was his only sale to date so I'm not sure I believe anything he's telling me.
Still, I was nice about it and he said he would send me out some extra "doubles" to make up for it. I'm really not sure what double demo discs there are on PS1 though so I guess we'll see if anything turns up.

In non-Playstation goings on, me and my wife have been playing through Castlevania III on the NES. She got really into the original one and we're enjoying this but maybe not quite as much. We're on the final stage now and it's took ages as my wife was picking the routes and picked not only the optional clock tower level but also both hardest routes through the game. It really is great though and I'm still buzzing I took a £17 risk on it because I was never ever buying a legit cart.

 

Edited May 23 by FLips

[FLips]

Me again!

Finally got my hands on a copy of Demo One, in my opinion and probably most of yours, the essential demo disc for the PS1. It's the one most people had and remember, to the point that my wife noticed the sleeve on top of the pile when she got in from work yesterday and excitedly sat down to play it and send videos to her sister.

There are seven versions and I have Version 5 which is the one I had as a kid. There are I believe three prints for this version alone, two reds and a purple sleeved copy. The first red has Forumla One 97 listed on the back but it's not on the disc, which is the one I had as a kid. The printed I have now is the second red, non-F1 version with the following playable games:

• Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee
• Disney's Action Game Featuring Hercules
• Lifeforce Tenka
• Porsche Challenge
• Rage Racer
• Rapid Racer
• Kurushi
• Overboard!

It has video previews for Soul Blade and Rosco McQueen, a V-CD player which I think is graphics to play over your music CDs, and importantly the Tech demo for the T-Rex and Manta Ray.

As a side note Version 7 looks really good with playables of Crash 3 Warped, Spyro, Kula World, Tekken 3, Gran Turismo and Medievil to name a few. I've not looked but if that's the one with the underwater seahorse background then my mate had it and it's the first ways I played Medievil and Kula World.

I've not had a proper go of it yet but my wife had a go of everything on there and was loving life. It really is a fantastic disc.

Another Official Playstation Magazine demo arrived today with a playable Resident Evil 2 on it which started you as Leon at the beginning of the game and a ten minute time limit. Again, my wife was the one to play that and she had a blast on it. Nothing out of the ordinary compared to the main game other than a text notification to say saving the game wasn't allowed in the demo and she thinks some herbs and starting items were missing.
I tell you what though it's a great demo that I think would have turned a lot of people onto Resident Evil 2. Ten minutes doesn't seem long but it gives you all you need to see to know if you'd like the game or not.

The same disc has Gex: Enter The Gecko on it which I had a go of. I have a soft spot for the game but the demo is lacking a lot, I'm not sure how early the build is but the HUD symbols are different, you only have two hits, there are glitches with the item counters and most importantly (for better or worse) Gex has no voice lines, which makes the whole thing feel plain. It's a single level demo of one of the haunted castle levels, which wouldn't have been my first choice but it's ok.

After that I played Rascal which I always remember from playing a mate's copy as a kid that it was the worst game I ever played on the console. All these years I thought maybe I was just being harsh on it but no, it really is dreadful.
Developed by Traveller's Tales and Published by Psygnosis, with character models from Jim Henson's Creature Shop, it could and should have been better but according to the developer he was off doing one of the naff 3D Sonic games and left Psygnosis in charge who went out of their way to completely fuck it up. Why they would do that, I don't know, but that's the official story.
People cite it as technologically impressive at least but I wouldn't even go that far as a casual player. Maybe the load times and lighting effects are impressive from a tech standpoint but it's a fast loading and well-lit turd so who cares?
Suffers from maybe the worst platformer controls in any game I've played, repetitive bland music, dull characters and by this time completely dead on arrival euro-platformer mechanics which even in the demo had me circling the same dozen rooms looking for a peice of hourglass and getting game over before I found it. Everyone involved should be ashamed to be honest.

 

[SuperBacon]

11 minutes ago, FLips said:

Kula World

Absolutely fantastic game.

[Statto]

42 minutes ago, FLips said:

 a V-CD player which I think is graphics to play over your music CDs

It is indeed. A significant amount of my music listening in the late 90s was done using this! 

[Scratch]

I appreciate it’s not exactly retro, but it felt more suited here than the general video games thread. How have I never heard of this? I’m utterly stunned by how shit it is, more so given how much it goes for on eBay.

I feel I need experience it for myself.

[FLips]

Get it going on your proper setup. Experience it as it was meant to be.

[Big Bully Busick]

1 hour ago, Scratch said:

I appreciate it’s not exactly retro, but it felt more suited here than the general video games thread. How have I never heard of this? I’m utterly stunned by how shit it is, more so given how much it goes for on eBay.

I feel I need experience it for myself.

I've a friend that was considering buying this only this morning 🤣

[Big Bully Busick]

So today I picked up a Sega Saturn as I had a load of vouchers for CEX

 

I think I'll look in to getting a Saroo to play a ton of games on it as Saturn stuff is very pricey 

[FLips]

A little different to my usual posts in here but there's a couple of games that have been on my mind today. Back before I had a PC in the early 2000s, one of my mates had one and the nights I would hang out and stay over his were spent with pizza, pop from the corner shop and a mix of PS2 games and PC games.

His selection wasn't vast, but it was the early 2000s so it didn't need to be. The internet was in it's relative infancy so hardly any time was spent on it other than looking up cheat codes on CheatCC which I think is still going, downloading music on Kazaa, Ares and Limewire and getting our hands on grot. Our attention spans were a lot better.
He only had five or so games I can remember. Champ Man 00-01 and 01-02, Age of Empires II, one of the Unreal Tournament games and Inca II Wiracocha.

Despite being the worst of the lot, it's the latter game that I always remember so fondly and every now and again it'll pop into my head for the day. It was part point and click puzzle game and part space shooter, set 500 years in the future during a war between Inca and Spain. It's a total mishmash of live action characters and cutscenes, gameplay styles and pan pipe music.
It was developed by Coktel Vision and published by Sierra Online in a one-two combo of 90s-2000s PC gaming names that died a death. It has it's moments and if nothing else a unique concept despite overall not being anything write home about, but I have fond memories of it and the title music from it is actually really good and worth a listen.
Sometimes I think it's a shame games like that this just fade away to history. As far as I know it's not on any current digital platforms, even GOG, but the inferior floppy disk version is playable in-browser.
Some publication ranked it one of the worst games of all time, but that's insane. Other places rated it much higher, so it's certainly an opinion splitter.

Here's the title music and a look at the game itself for those who have never heard of it, or those who have and want to remind themselves.

 

 

[Carbomb]

I had both Inca games. Being obsessed with Meso-America as a kid, I was able to overlook their quality, or lack thereof, as games, because I loved the soundtrack and the imagery.

[Jazzy G]

@FLipsGamera is not from Godzilla. He was created by a rival studio to cash in on the Kaiju boom. They've been trying to do Godzilla Vs Gamera for ages, but I don't think they can agree on who the winner would be, and there'd be a LOT of rights and stuff to negotiate. The only viable option I think would be for some kind of huge threat (probably original, or King Ghidora/MechaGodzilla) to turn up while they are throwing down, and for the hero monsters to realise they have to work together to overcome it.

Still loving the write-ups. I think I played Demo 1 back in the day. Rage Racer was the one that got most of my attention. Have you found the demo disc with Crash Bash on where it's ostensibly the whole game?