The UKFF Retro Gaming Thread

[Onyx2]

After finishing Super Metroid earlier this week I've gone straight back in following a 100% guide. Shit there is miles of the game I never saw. So many Easter eggs, hidden rooms and special items. Plus lots of powers you just don't discover (I imagine they were all in the manual). 

But there are some proper bastard jumps in it. There's one jump where Samus has to leave quicksand (requiring a specific jump motion) and at the apex double tap down to morph ball to squeeze through a gap... And hence decapitating your jump. It's classic era type platforming. And as for the specificity of the wall jump... Needless to say I had to put the console down for a bit. 

[Merzbow]

It's still in beta but this homemade port of Mortal Kombat 2 for the 3DO is *excellent* so far, the sprites might actually look bigger and nicer than the original arcade. Outside of the bugs it seems to have it's own quirks which is interesting, it's not trying to be 100% arcade perfect which I kinda dig as all console versions had their own little things that made them different.

 

[FLips]

Went to the same place I got my last lot of retro games and came away with a few goodies. I've ended up with two tickets to the Leeds Retro Market next weekend as my mate couldn't go, and this place is one of the sellers there. I'm not sure if they do mark up for the trade markets but I know a lot of places do, so getting some stuff today could save me a bit of money over buying it next week.

For the SNES I've had my eyes on Jurrasic Park for a while as it varies to the side scrolling platformer on the Mega Drive and instead opts for a Chaos Engine-style top down shooter. I've heard good things and while I didn't have a proper go today, I'm more than sure it will be worth the £5 I spent on it.
Michael Jordan's Chaos in The Windy City which I'll refer to as MJCITWC (phew) won't make any Top 10 lists soon but I have a bit of a soft spot for it. It's a platformer where you open doors like in Michael Jackson's Moonwalker to rescue fellow players and use different coloured keys to open locks, activate platforms and ziplines and other obstacles. Your weapon is a basketball, naturally, but you can have a load of fun with it as there's a seperate button for slam dunking and trickshots, and there's hoops all over the place. The game encourages you to forego regular freethrow shots to take exciting running dunks on enemies just for the fun of it. It's a silly game but it plays to it's strengths and in an era of dime a dozen mascot platformers, this one doesn't get the recognition it deserves.
Last but not least I picked up Cannon Fodder making it maybe three or four versions of this game I now own, including roms and digital, but my only legit physical copy. Sadly didn't get a SNES Mouse to play it with but the control scheme isn't an issue with a game this simple. You know what Cannon Fodder is so I won't go into it as other than the novelty of hearing it on the SNES soundchip you're getting nothing new here, but are there many more better pick up and play games than this?

A little back in time on the NES I scooped up a copy of California Games which I don't think has much on the Mega Drive version which is one of my favourite games on the console, but I do have a little nostalgia for this version as we used to play it a bunch on the college PCs back in the day when we would skive off lessons. I don't want to say our Sixth Form was lax but the amount of times 6 of us used to sit in this random room with computers in just reading Inside Pulse and NODQ for wrestling scoops and playing illegal emulators on them without ever even seeing another student or teacher is worrying.
Plus the NES version has the exclusive Flying Disc game which isn't in the MD one and it also only cost a fiver, so whatever. I'll get my money's worth out of it.

I also got A Boy and His Blob which is a fun and unique side scroller in the vein of Abe's Oddysee or Another World where you run around with this alien blob and feed it different flavoured jelly beans to make it change form into things like a ladder, umbrella or hole. It's charming, the puzzles are trial and error but fun to solve, and the protagonists are likeable. If you like treasure hunting puzzle games of this era like the Dizzy games, this one might be for you.

The final pickup today was the often well spoken about Batman which is an action platformer similar to Ninja Gaiden in a lot of ways; cool character, difficult levels, wall jumping and swappable special weapons. Of all the games I got today this is the one we spent most the day playing, eventually reaching the final boss but not being able to do it. It's a rock hard game but it has a lot of positives and if you have the patience to practice the levels it's certainly completeable. Stage 5 and the final boss are whoppers though, so get ready for them.

All in all it cost me £50 for the lot, which I was happy with. I had to have some self restraint as I almost came away with Rainbow Island, Fester's Quest, New Zealand Story and Blaster Master on the NES but I'd spent enough and I know fine well I can't complete any of them so gave them a miss.
I did however grab a copy of Goof Troop on the SNES off Ebay later in the day as I was hoping to get it next week but in checking the prices on Ebay saw that it looks to be in the middle of a potential price hike, as there was two copies for £17 and every other copy was priced at £30. I panic bought it at £17 just incase because I've been after it a while and don't want to be caught with my pants down next weekend when every stall has it for the new £30 Ebay price.

In terms of what I'll be keeping my eyes peeled for next week:

• SNES Mouse
• Theme Park (SNES)
• The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II (NES)
• Metroid (NES)
• Ice Climber (NES)
• Kid Icarus (NES)

I'm not going to pick them all up because I'm not made of money, and some of them are expensive. I'm hoping though to get at least one or two of them if the price is right. To be honest I'm just looking forward to an impromptu day out to mooch!

Edited January 26, 2025 by FLips

[CleetusVanDamme]

Dino Crisis 1 and 2 are up for sale on GOG! https://www.gog.com/en/game/dino_crisis_bundle

 

[Fog Dude]

On 1/25/2025 at 9:21 PM, Onyx2 said:

After finishing Super Metroid earlier this week I've gone straight back in following a 100% guide. Shit there is miles of the game I never saw. So many Easter eggs, hidden rooms and special items. Plus lots of powers you just don't discover (I imagine they were all in the manual). 

But there are some proper bastard jumps in it. There's one jump where Samus has to leave quicksand (requiring a specific jump motion) and at the apex double tap down to morph ball to squeeze through a gap... And hence decapitating your jump. It's classic era type platforming. And as for the specificity of the wall jump... Needless to say I had to put the console down for a bit. 

In the veterinary sense?

[FLips]

A friend gave us a couple of tickets to the Leeds Retro Gaming Market as he couldn't make it so we popped along today. I would describe it as a mixed bag to be honest.

We had "early bird" tickets meaning we could enter from 10.30am instead of 12pm general admission, which sounds decent on paper but the tickets were only £8 and I don't think they were limited so we turned up at 10.34am to a queue easily 200 people long snaking out the doorway. Not really much point in getting the early bird because unless you're front of that queue and know exactly what to look for and where to look for it, you may as well have wandered in at any old time.

We spotted a couple of Youtubers there, and both of them to varying degrees annoyed us. One started filming when we were stood next to them so we'll likely end up in one of their videos unless we're lucky enough to be edited out. The other asked a stall permission to film and then when they got the Yes, sarcastically commented "yeah it's mad isn't it, can I please have permission to advertise your business?". It was likely tongue in cheek but still.
Would have much preferred to go enjoy the day without the constant feeling of being filmed by strangers.

This one I'd really like to give the benefit of the doubt but a lot of stalls had no rhyme or reason to seperating their imports, especially in the NES/SNES stuff where it's not obvious you have to check the region codes. I'd like to hope it was a genuine mistake their Australian, French and USA games were all mixed in with the identical looking (in the NES case anyway) PAL cartridges, but so many of them did it you would think that not that many sellers couldn't tell the difference.
Fair play to some stalls though, especially the ones who dealt mostly with imported stuff because their setup was way more professional and correct. You could tell the quality apart stall to stall from people who do this for a proper living and care about the products and those who see it as a way to make money but don't really care.

On a more positive note there was a really decent variety of sellers. Oddly a lot of "shove it in a box on the ground" car boot style sellers but for the most part the stalls were nicely set up and it was interesting to see things like boxed and complete PC Engines, a sea of boxed imported stuff and coverage for everything from floppy disks and tapes to modern games.

Another positive and one I don't particularly like to do but felt I had to in two cases was the stalls are open to haggling. I assume this is partly the market environment but also partly the additional markups they make for events like this. The pricing was all over the place stall to stall. I saw the same games for £30 and £45, £5 and £8, and so on.

In the end I came away with 4 items, picking up a 5th on the way home.

I got Zelda II: the Adventure of Link and Chip & Dale Rescue Rangers on the NES for £40 and £10 respectively. Zelda I've overpayed on even after haggling them down a fiver due to it being scuffed and having a literal cobweb in it. Ebay currently has it for £27.80 however this is one seller, the rest all have it at the £40+ that I've payed so I don't feel too scammed. There was only two copies there and the other was one of the previously mentioned FRA copies tucked in with the PAL UKV stuff, so when I did find a UKV copy my brain has just went BUY BUY BUY. Silly.
Chip & Dale is £10 on Ebay so I payed a regular price for that. Both decent games so happy with them regardless. Will be keen to play the original Zeldas in their proper format. I got a decent chunk through Zelda II on the Switch a few years back so more than happy to commit to playing it on this.

On the SNES I picked up Operation Starfi5h and ActRaiser for £20 and £35 respectively. Starfi5h is a port of James Pond 3 but I believe made partially from the ground up. Not only does it handle slightly better, but a lot of the levels are redesigned and made to be a little friendlier. I genuinely didn't think it was a real game because I struggled recently to even find the rom for it after playing it years ago. It's a PAL exclusive with only a EUR region and no UKV but for the sake of this one I took the chance and it runs perfectly. My favourite Pond and for someone used to the Mega Drive version it's fun to see and hear it presented on the competitor.
ActRaiser has confused the life out of me because I felt £35 (haggled from £38 because it had yellowing) was a fair price for a game you rarely see. Looking online though the cheapest currently is shy of £60 and then it shoots over £100 for copies after that. PriceCharting has it at £39.94 but that's skewed massively by a random one that sold for £9.30 because most the other copies are £45-50 so I genuinely have no idea what it's worth but I know it made up for the deficit I caused with Zelda II.
Glad to get my hands on both of these as they were both games that I was so unlikely to find they never even entered my mind to look for them. ActRaiser especially is a unique civilization sim x hack and slash that works better than it sounds.

All in all £105 spent at market but I got two high value items, Zelda II being one I had on my hit list. I did see a few copies of Theme Park but I nabbed that off Ebay for a fiver the other day so didn't need to pick it up today. A few games I spotted that I decided against were Mega Man for £70 and Kid Icarus for I think about £38-45 which is the general range a PAL A (GBR region not UKV but they're the same) goes for, but this was a USA region one anyway. Mega Man for £70 can get in the bin, though it did remind me to pop into my nearby store on the way home and grab Mega Man 3 on the NES for £40 which is the general price of it on Ebay give or take a couple of quid. I'd rather spend an extra few bob here though than get it from a random stall in Leeds. They did also have Metroid but that was a FRA region code so I gave it a miss.

All in all a successful day but the heaving market in a gym atmosphere isn't for me. Doubt I'd go to another one of these any time soon.

 

 

 

[Jazzy G]

On 1/26/2025 at 9:49 PM, FLips said:

A little back in time on the NES I scooped up a copy of California Games which I don't think has much on the Mega Drive version which is one of my favourite games on the console, but I do have a little nostalgia for this version as we used to play it a bunch on the college PCs back in the day when we would skive off lessons. I don't want to say our Sixth Form was lax but the amount of times 6 of us used to sit in this random room with computers in just reading Inside Pulse and NODQ for wrestling scoops and playing illegal emulators on them without ever even seeing another student or teacher is worrying.
Plus the NES version has the exclusive Flying Disc game which isn't in the MD one and it also only cost a fiver, so whatever. I'll get my money's worth out of it.

I remember a friend had the Lynx version of California Games, which was a cracking version.

I'm trying to figure out how to get ROMs onto Vicky's Anbernic as she wants to play some PS1 game called Creatures: Raised in Outer Space. It looks pretty dreadful from what I've seen of it, but she has fond memories of it. It would be handy to figure it out as it'd hopefully mean I could stick some Tetris games on mine.

[Scratch]

In the context of Donkey Kong being so significant in gaming, especially in the world of setting high scores, this feels like a big deal.

The guy does a good job of explaining the limitations of 8-bit and why the kill screen occurs in the first place. But given the glitch was well-known, I’m surprised this has only been figured out now. It’s also sadly another blow to everyone’s favourite gaming baddie, Billy Mitchell.

[FLips]

9 hours ago, Jazzy G said:

I remember a friend had the Lynx version of California Games, which was a cracking version.

I'm trying to figure out how to get ROMs onto Vicky's Anbernic as she wants to play some PS1 game called Creatures: Raised in Outer Space. It looks pretty dreadful from what I've seen of it, but she has fond memories of it. It would be handy to figure it out as it'd hopefully mean I could stick some Tetris games on mine.

Oddly enough when it came to PS1 stuff my wife also buzzed about Creatures. That and Monster Rancher where you put CDs into the PS1 to spawn new monsters. 

[Merzbow]

Gonna find myself a Phat PS2 again, it's pretty awful on the Slim though.

 

[DavidB6937]

Pretty much me with my kids.

 

 

[SuperBacon]

Thought this article would be of interest to some of you 

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2025/feb/15/theres-no-stress-gamers-go-offline-in-retro-console-revival

[FLips]

After watching the brilliant "U Can Beat Videogames" on Youtube, which is a fantastic channel for detailed guides on retro games, I managed to beat Batman on the NES.

It's a brilliant little game with responsive controls, tough but fair gameplay similar to a Ninja Gaiden at a slower pace, and importantly with enough practice something you can beat in under an hour. The music isn't all-time great but there's some choice cuts in there for sure.
If you're looking for a NES era fast-paced platformer then you can't really go wrong with it.

Also on the NES I've put a lot of pick up and play time into Paperboy, finally after a lot of attempts making it past Monday and also getting the #1 hi-score on my cartridge (not in the world obviously). In terms of distance, Wednesday is my furthest. The tornados and skateboarders can get in the bin.

Elsewhere I've been sinking time into Theme Park on the SNES which I just couldn't do at all. It's a tough port that struggles with pacing due to hardware limitations. Research for example is done in a locked sequence so you can't prioritise rides and shops, meaning there's a really tough section where all you unlock is trees. The value and interest in your park dwindles year on year so unless you find that sweet spot to balance buying new rides and shops at the right time, but not leaving it too late that you run out of money is crucial. If you sink too far the game is basically lost.
There's no save feature either, with passwords given only upon the successful auction of your park at the end of the level. After moaning I couldn't do it after several attempts, my wife asked to play and having never played Theme Park in her life, sat for 3 hours straight and finished the first park in one go and now she won't shut up about it.
I begrudgingly used similar tactics to her but it took me over 4 hours and sold for less at auction so that just gave her more ammunition.

I also got around to Blade Runner on the PC. It looks pretty blurry and rough around the edges even for the time, and the gameplay is a bit of a snooze even for a point and click. I've only done the first chapter so maybe it picks up but it's not doing anything for me currently. Soundtrack is nice though and the voice acting has a lot of effort going into it.
Also on the PC I picked up Populous: The Beginning which is another game a friend had when I was younger and quite enjoyed. It's not your usual Populous game, more based around map exploration for new magic spells and protecting your Shaman. It seems like it would be a blast in a 1v1 setting back in the day.

My next "project" is to get Sonic Mania running on my CRT just for a laugh. From what I understand there are a couple of bits that are made for the 16:9 format such as the spider boss, but from what I've seen it's "90% fully playable in 4:3" so we'll see. Won't take long to do and it'll be interesting more than anything else.

[hallicks]

1 hour ago, FLips said:

After watching the brilliant "U Can Beat Videogames" on Youtube, which is a fantastic channel for detailed guides on retro games, I managed to beat Batman on the NES.

It's a brilliant little game with responsive controls, tough but fair gameplay similar to a Ninja Gaiden at a slower pace, and importantly with enough practice something you can beat in under an hour. The music isn't all-time great but there's some choice cuts in there for sure.
If you're looking for a NES era fast-paced platformer then you can't really go wrong with it.

Also on the NES I've put a lot of pick up and play time into Paperboy, finally after a lot of attempts making it past Monday and also getting the #1 hi-score on my cartridge (not in the world obviously). In terms of distance, Wednesday is my furthest. The tornados and skateboarders can get in the bin.

Elsewhere I've been sinking time into Theme Park on the SNES which I just couldn't do at all. It's a tough port that struggles with pacing due to hardware limitations. Research for example is done in a locked sequence so you can't prioritise rides and shops, meaning there's a really tough section where all you unlock is trees. The value and interest in your park dwindles year on year so unless you find that sweet spot to balance buying new rides and shops at the right time, but not leaving it too late that you run out of money is crucial. If you sink too far the game is basically lost.
There's no save feature either, with passwords given only upon the successful auction of your park at the end of the level. After moaning I couldn't do it after several attempts, my wife asked to play and having never played Theme Park in her life, sat for 3 hours straight and finished the first park in one go and now she won't shut up about it.
I begrudgingly used similar tactics to her but it took me over 4 hours and sold for less at auction so that just gave her more ammunition.

I also got around to Blade Runner on the PC. It looks pretty blurry and rough around the edges even for the time, and the gameplay is a bit of a snooze even for a point and click. I've only done the first chapter so maybe it picks up but it's not doing anything for me currently. Soundtrack is nice though and the voice acting has a lot of effort going into it.
Also on the PC I picked up Populous: The Beginning which is another game a friend had when I was younger and quite enjoyed. It's not your usual Populous game, more based around map exploration for new magic spells and protecting your Shaman. It seems like it would be a blast in a 1v1 setting back in the day.

My next "project" is to get Sonic Mania running on my CRT just for a laugh. From what I understand there are a couple of bits that are made for the 16:9 format such as the spider boss, but from what I've seen it's "90% fully playable in 4:3" so we'll see. Won't take long to do and it'll be interesting more than anything else.

I borrowed Blade Runner off my mate many years ago. I don't think I ever got to the end. At the time, I thought the cut-scene graphics were brilliant.

I only remember playing Theme Park at another mate's house on PC. I don't remember the research bit at all. In fact I only remember two things, both about the go-karts. One, if you change the guest/rider's name to a then-current F1 driver, it made them whizz round. And two, my mate deleting a section of the track with someone about to drive on it, causing them to crash and go off crying.

I could be thinking about a completely different game of course, but it was like 27 years ago. Actually I do remember something else. Is that the game where you can pick up the mechanic and drop them off near the broken ride? What the hell am I thinking about if it's not this game!

[FLips]

2 minutes ago, hallicks said:

I borrowed Blade Runner off my mate many years ago. I don't think I ever got to the end. At the time, I thought the cut-scene graphics were brilliant.

I only remember playing Theme Park at another mate's house on PC. I don't remember the research bit at all. In fact I only remember two things, both about the go-karts. One, if you change the guest/rider's name to a then-current F1 driver, it made them whizz round. And two, my mate deleting a section of the track with someone about to drive on it, causing them to crash and go off crying.

I could be thinking about a completely different game of course, but it was like 27 years ago. Actually I do remember something else. Is that the game where you can pick up the mechanic and drop them off near the broken ride? What the hell am I thinking about if it's not this game!

Yeah that's Theme Park, or judging by the ability to name the guest possibly Theme Park World which was the sequel.