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The PS1 Nostalgia Thread


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Victory Boxing was my game of choice, a very Japanese-y title which I think had some inspiration from Hajime no Ippo. It looks so very old now, even compared to most other PS1 games of the time but I remember loving it and making a beast that would just hammer the shit out of everyones stomach till the went down. The gameplay music slaps, too.

 

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On 8/14/2022 at 2:01 PM, Jesse said:

I'm turning 35 this week and since we're going away I unwrapped my present from my wife today because she didn't want to wait until we're back. She got me a chunky silver PS2, so now I can live all my backwards compatibility dreams and play my PS1 games on hardware instead of emulating them on PC!

Wonderful! I bought an original PS2 a few years back (think it was £30ish with about 50 discs) and the kids love playing it when they come round. I also have an XBOX 360, but the PS2 gets played much more. We're currently playing Crazy Taxi, Simpsons Hit and Run and also THUG, which is the kids favourite.

The only issue I have is that it doesn't play some PS1 and 2 games, mainly the ones with the black back of the disc, but for the price I paid, it's not a massive deal and it is around 20 years old now, so I suppose it's to be expected. 

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Sorry for digging up an old thread but in recent weeks I've been on somewhat of a PS1 binge again, but this time I've went all out to do it properly.

As some of you saw in the Retro Gaming thread I bagged a pretty sweet 14" Ferguson CRT TV from a car booty for a fiver and after I got my SNES fix on it, I dug out the old PS1 and was really blown away by how good some of it looked.
Well give me 14" and I'll take a mile because I ended up buying a chipped console off Ebay for £25 (a SCPH-7502 model which according to Reddit is one of the best ones for hardware improvements) and then proceeded to go absolutely off the deep end and I downloaded and burnt over a hundred games to CD-R discs. I even got one of those CD wallets!

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Getting the games was time consuming but fruitful. Only 4 games never worked in the end; Abe's Exodus, Demo 1 and Toy Story 2 (twice). I think 4 fails out of about 110 isn't bad.
Eventually I'm going to get round to buying a GunCon for Time Crisis and Point Blank when I see one for a good price, and I also need extra memory cards because I ran out of space immediately and found myself in shit yesterday when after an hour of original Diablo I got told it needed 10 blocks of space. Madness.

I've already played through a few favourites including Mega Man 8 which still holds up as one of the best main series games (voice acting excluded) and at my wife's recommendation the both of us and our mate played through Mary Kate and Ashley's Crush Course yesterday which is as bad as it sounds, but she enjoyed it.
On top of that I've been playing games I missed out on, and with a week off ahead of me while I change jobs I'm going to do a few small little reviews and stuff.

That startup sound is still the best.

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Edited by FelatioLips
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17 minutes ago, DavidB6937 said:

Damn I miss home light gun games.

I did have a light gun round my Dad's when I was a kid but used it more to play Point Blank's weird desert island story mode than anything else. I remember playing Time Crisis with the controller more than the gun, strangely.

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12 hours ago, FelatioLips said:

As some of you saw in the Retro Gaming thread I bagged a pretty sweet 14" Ferguson CRT TV from a car booty for a fiver and after I got my SNES fix on it

One of my biggest gaming regrets was not picking up a CRT TV being sold at a retro games fair that I went to in Dundee. Taking it home seemed a pain in the arse given that I was parked far away, and by the time I decided I wanted it anyway, someone else had snapped it up. I’ve tried all sorts to get older consoles looking good on modern televisions, but there’s just no way of doing that - at least, not to the extent where there’s not some level of noticeable blur. 

11 hours ago, DavidB6937 said:

Damn I miss home light gun games.

You know, I don’t think I’ve ever played a light gun game using a light gun. I’m not sure how that one passed me by. I just used the control pad, which was still fun, but clearly not the same.

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Vib Ribbon

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What is it?

Vib Ribbon is a unique rhythm cult hit from the brains behind PaRappa The Rapper which has you walk a straight line to the beat of the music, pressing prompts to dodge obstacles. The game comes with it's own Easy, Medium and Hard levels but also astonishingly allows you to enter your own CDs and play levels based off the music on them; something I think only Monster Rancher let you do.

How is it?

It's actually fantastic and I can see why it's a cult hit. It came to the Playstation in 2000, well into the life cycle and just as the PS2 was hitting shelves. The console wasn't dead by any means with huge PS1 titans like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, Final Fantasy IX and Spyro The Dragon 3 coming out, and in fact it was still the best selling console that year but it was the swansong for the PS1 as 2001 saw the PS2 completely dominate the console market.

So you'd be forgiven for not having played or heard of this game, but like me, you've missed out on an incredibly unique experience. The whole presentation is a joy with everything made up of black background and white vector lines and that's it. The protagonist Vibri is wonderful and animated too as she dances and skips through the stages to some thumpingly strange beats. You press 4 buttons to dodge specific obstacles, cleverly shaped the same as the button you have to press. A loop is R, a block is L, a pit is Down and waves ^^^ are X. In harder stages they combine shapes so you have to press two buttons to get through, e.g a block with waves on would be L1 and X, a loop with a pit would be R1 and Down.
As you combo obstacles you gain little pellets that eventually transform you into some sort of ballerina that increases your score, and if you take too many hits the screen will distort and you'll transform into a frog, then a worm and then game over.

There is no story, just difficulty modes, High Score boards and endless potential for levels based on your music taste. It is the ultimate expression of less is more and it's truly a shame it came out so late or it would be considered a defining moment of the console.

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Mega Man 8

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What is it?

The 8th main entry into the Mega Man series and the first produced by who some consider the main driving force behind Mega Man; Keiji Inafune. Mega Man 8 broke a lot of new ground for the series but came too late to be truly appreciated. The concept had been done to death, the gameplay was slow even compared to it's own spinoff series Mega Man X and 3D platformers were entering the fray with Tomb Raider, Crash Bandicoot and Super Mario 64 all out the same year.
That being said if you wanted a classic Mega Man game it's very underappreciated. Full animated cutscenes and beautiful pixel work, creative and varied level design, and the first game to allow you to combine weapon usage.

How is it?

Personally I love it. It's my favourite Mega Man aside from Mega Man 2 on the NES. Rose-tinted glasses for sure, but I feel I could make a good argument for it. That being said it persistently places near the bottom of ranking lists due to an over-reliance on gimmicks and bad voice acting (I'll concede on that last point).

Mega Man 8 plays as well as they all did; precise platforming mixed with button bashing run and gun mechanics. The graphics are gorgeous and the music is some of the best in the series. There is some repetition that holds it back, such as the awful snowboarding gimmick from Frost Man's stage returning in Dr Wily's Castle, which is bad in of itself but the prompts to JUMP, JUMP, SLIDE, JUMP, SLIDE rattle your brain. I do really like the shoot-em-up autoscroller they do for Tengu Man's stage though, and the looping labyrinth of Astro Man's stage.
The 8 Robot stages encourage replaying them to go back with new weapons and find hidden bolts which you can spend on upgrades in Roll's shop. It's not essential but it can make the game very different with options for auto-fire, faster sliding and weapon modifications.

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I have good and bad memories of this game. Putting the disc into a CD player and laying on the sofa bed listening to it, our bedroom freshly painted with that glow in the dark paint making stars on the ceiling is one of the few good memories I have of being round my Dad's house. The bad being not looking after the disc and eventually binning it (it was a genuine copy) and now it's worth hundreds. Bummer.

There's not an awful lot to say about it. It's Mega Man and the 8th one at that. You know what you're getting and it's one of the better versions of it. The voice acting is truly some of the worst in video games though with the voice actor for Dr Light absolutely shitting the bed the entire time. Needs to be seen to be believed.

 

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Vib Ribbon is one of the games that made me pursue a career in videogame sound.  The idea of the game reacting to the music, is nuts and almost unique in videogames, and made me start thinking about sound and music in games and how it was done/who might be doing it.

Years later I worked on a beatmatching game called Zubo for the DS

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I was chuffed that I got the gameplay to adapt to the music, so the systems worked off the tempo of the music tracks rather than vice versa.  Not as cool as Vib Ribbon but something.

It's also one of those games I direct students at to look at how gameplay and music can interact; as you say @FelatioLips nobody's ever heard of it.

Putting your own CDs into the Playstation was one of its amazing hidden features that almost nobody used and is long dead (alongside the Xbox ability to replace game music with your own).  The PSOne demo CD it shipped with had a cool 3D video display thing that created an insane light display for any CD that you put in.

(sadly terrible choice of music, it works much better with beat music).

And of course early games had their music soundtracks just as CD tracks, so you could rip the music straight off a CD player.

 

 

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I loved Vib Ribbon - used to play my own CDs on it a lot, but some of them could get really difficult unexpectedly. I am surprised that very few games have tried to emulate it since.

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I bloody love Vib Ribbon.

A real gem of that era that really feels ahead of its time, like a kind of precursor to Bit.Trip Runner. The sort of thing that, with a wacky story mode attached to it, I could see being a cult indie hit now and still feeling fresh and unique.

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8 minutes ago, Loki said:

Years later I worked on a beatmatching game called Zubo for the DS

Not only did I buy this game when it first came out, but I still own it! I was looking for a Pokemon clone, and picked this up. It wasn't quite what I expected, but it was the first game that I played that took the idea of monster-catching and did something different with it. I've not played it for year, but I remember really enjoying it. 

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16 minutes ago, RedRooster said:

Not only did I buy this game when it first came out, but I still own it! I was looking for a Pokemon clone, and picked this up. It wasn't quite what I expected, but it was the first game that I played that took the idea of monster-catching and did something different with it. I've not played it for year, but I remember really enjoying it. 

You're the one person who bought it. ;)  It was a classic EA move where by the time we finished it, there'd been a change of execs at the top of the studio who didn't want to make casual titles so they buried the game, no marketing push on release really.  Which was a pity as it was a superior Pokemon-style game that pushed the DS to its absolute limits.  You could battle you mates too - I got copies for my three nephews/nieces and they all played it a lot.

The music was great as originally it was going to be Wii as well and so the music was all professionally composed to a high standard and then cut into samples to fit onto DS. Each complete music track was 250k data and samples 😎 

There was also going to be a cartoon series off the back of it as originally EA wanted it to be a long-running kids IP and so even after the game flopped the cartoon series pre-production wobbled on for another 2-3 years!

Very cute characters, we had plushies made and all that.  It could have been huge, I could be STILL working on a Switch 2 version today!


Edit: the GLORY of that music, for the DS that's as good as it gets.

Edited by Loki
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44 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

I loved Vib Ribbon - used to play my own CDs on it a lot, but some of them could get really difficult unexpectedly. I am surprised that very few games have tried to emulate it since.

The closest I can think if AudioSurf which can use music off your PC. Loved playing it on Steam years ago. It was more like Beatsaber than Vib Ribbon though.

 

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