Welcome to STAG
> Games you missed at the time, but want to revisit

Yes, no other RPG I can think of has you fighting poo snakes straight from the off.  It really is quite a charming little game, and deserves more of my time than it got.


It's not bad.  It's not great either.  You can get it for around £5 these days, and it's a decent enough generic third person shooter.  The main reason to play it is the silly humour - the idea is that Matt is a failed video game character and he knows he's in a game, which allows for some wonderfully silly moments as the Soak 'Em commandos are armed with SuperSoakers, complete with pump action reload, for example.


I played the demo of it when it came out, and was so throughly nervous I was jumping all the time.  I bought the full game not long after, but my parents completed it before I did and I HATE it when people do that.  It's a personal pet peeve.  I've since lost my save in the Great Hard Drive Crash, but I really would like to go back.  My parents bought Condemned 2 as well, so I could play the not-as-well-regarded sequel after.


As I've said before, many times, if they'd called this something other than Burnout, more people would have liked it.  I've spent countless hours online shooting the breeze with friends and mucking about with challenges.  Offline play is a bit guff, admittedly, and the other Burnouts trump it on that score.  But I still own those, for that.


I can see why you'd say that.  I didn't get all that far before I put it down either.  I don't really know why.

I was actually making a guess. It was years ago and my memory of the event in question is rather fuzzy. Maybe it's rose-tinted nostalgia, but I remember the Amiga being a fantastic system. It would make my day if its games started appearing on Xbox Live Arcade or the Wii Shop Channel, if they haven't already.

The Amiga was great.  "Count 'em!" was an Amiga Power reference   I guess the main reason you don't see those games about is the licence issues.  Who owns what as far as Amiga is concerned is a right mess.  And most of the companies that made those games don't even exist any more (in those forms, at least).

I'm content with my Amiga emulator and folder full of disk images.  It even makes the drive clunk noise for me.

This emulator of the Amiga intrigues me. Is it one of those that requires a Workbench ROM?
Because (and this is a true story), about five years ago I bought a A1200 off Ebay specifically to get my hands on one of those. When it arrived, I had Gunship 2000 (minus the manual, and hence the copy protection), Frontier (the patched version which didn't allow me to do the 'selling an inhabited crew pod' cheat-gutted), Cadaver (also minus the manual, so I had no idea what I was supposed to do), and a bunch of other games - but NO WORKBENCH ROM.

Disappointment, thy name is Weirdi.

The ROM is in the computer...

I sent you a massive set of Workbench ROM images in 2006. Tch.

Yes you did - but that computer sadly met it's end not too long after.

Co-incidence?

I actually have a full set of legal Amiga ROMs, Workbench disks and Kickstarts due to owning not only my Amiga but also a few copies of Amiga Forever.

They're easily findable at [a reputable highstreet retailer - Ed].

Yeah, I have Amiga Forever too, and actually have two Amigas knocking about, an unexpanded A1200 and one that has a 040 expansion card fitted.  I tried it once to make sure it worked, and then never turned it on again :S  I then bought a CD32 slightly later, which is far more useful really, but which again, I've hardly used.  Gnggh.

I think part of why is that if I play stuff in an emulator, I can 'save' my game and come back to it later.  I just don't have the time and patience to play through stuff in one go without dying once when it takes hours to do so, any more.

Sheepeh, are you going to make me list all of the games I have started but still have yet to get around to finishing?  Basically folks, imagine the library of games available for the Xbox 360.  Now subtract 30 or so for being crap, and another 30 or so that I've completed.  Whatever number you have left is your answer.

The one series of games I have always wanted to play through is the Mother/Earthbound series.  I've often thought that would be the one JRPG that would appeal to me.  Has anyone here played any of those games at all?  I'm incredibly lazy for getting around to this kind of thing.

I shall find an Amiga emulator and give it a try. Hooray for retro gaming!

I've played Earthbound on a SNES emulator, as it happens. I didn't get very far but I could see why its appeal has endured. I'd suggest giving it a try.

As for save states, regenerating health and all of that balderdash, it wasn't like that in my day! I remember when...(rants for approximately half an hour about the virtues of attempting to complete ridiculously difficult retro games).

I've got three words for you.  Treasure.  Island.  Dizzy.

Once upon a time I had MAME and a bajillion platformers and racing games for it. I don't think I completed any, though arcade games were mostly designed to stop you winning. I remember a friend completing Wardner in the arcade though.

They may be designed just to get you to piss off so that the next dosser can start spending money, but any good arcade game is still totally doable on a single credit with a bit of practice. It seems that even people who practically grew up in the arcades have largely started to loathe the idea practicing, though, and not just because they have jobs to go to now. Go on any UK-based console gaming forum and you'll see endless threads of people fuming about some boss that's managed to kill them more than once, or an 'impossible' section that just requires a wee bit of memorisation. It's depressing. It's weird that although most people will concede that most videogame storylines are artistically bankrupt and useless, they'll still spew a load of bile when they can't see the next cutscene quickly enough, and see anything that stands in the way of this as being backward-looking and unprogressive.

The only arcade game I've ever finished, is Michael Jackson's Moonwalker.  I loved that.  My cousin and I completed it while on holiday in a Butlin's.

I've never managed to complete any arcade games.  I lack the patience and the will to persevere.  Klats, what you said there makes me worry about just who expects to ever get past any bosses or similar, in games.  If you can complete it the first time, there's no challenge.  If every moment of the game was like that, it'd be rather tedious, but a boss should be a difficult, slippery bastard.  That's why they're called a 'boss'.  If you can even *reach* the boss, I think you should feel pleased with your achievement, and when you inevitably die and have to try again, you'll be able to learn from your mistakes to this time kill your bastard boss in the face.

An ideal for living, right there.

Sadly, boss hatred is a big deal for an awful lot of people on RLLMUK and the like. Lots of people strongly believe games shouldn't have them any more, because they're a "cheap" and "outdated" way of hindering your progress. I tend to think that a good boss can be the ultimate expression of a game's core design, so boo sucks to them.

As long as they're not hatefully designed, they're fine.  It's when they take 2,000 hits and use a possible 3,000 patterns, and if you die go have to watch an unskippable cutscene and redo the level from the start, that they start getting bullshitty.  The main problem tghese days is that the bosses simply aren't designed well enough.  They're just godlike beings capable of halting your progress and effectively ending the game right there for you.

Virtually every platformer or FPS I've not completed has been because I've hit a stupidly tough boss and eventually thought "Well fuck that then".

So I'm in the no camp generally, especially when they're cheap bosses that are almost invincible until you work out the "trick". If it's just a tougher enemy I can cope. (i.e - Borderlands ones all good except for the last one, which was stupid).

Klat hit the nail on the head.  Gaming has progressed to a level where everything is pretty much about piss-poor 'stories', and players expecting the entire experience handed to them on a plate, to a point where anything that might challenge or hold up progress seems to be hailed as an example of 'unfair'.  I'd say there were two strains of coin-op though, those that could be completed on one credit, and those that were obviously designed as money makers.  I think the scrolling beat-em up was the prime example of that - Golden Axe and Final Fight are undeniably fun, but anyone insisting that they are well-balanced as a set of mechanics can fuck right off.  I've been playing Resi 4 again, and I think it's really brave how stubborn Capcom were with it - at the time of release, things were heading into the pretentious, cut-scene heaven that we've arrived at, and to play a game that's so doggedly 8-bit in its sensibilities is quite shocking now.  Here's a set-piece, we're going to kill you first time around, so remember for next time OK?  Oh, and here's a fucking big boss, that's going to kill you too.  Ha.

It really came home to me when my brother visited a week or two ago.  He's several years younger than me at 27 to my 32, but I got him into gaming and music etc so he's got a good knowledge of gaming from C64 onwards.  He noticed the rotated TV and asked what it was for, so I demonstrated DonDonPachi DJO for him.  He pronounced it fucking impossible and asked why I still played stuff like that when we have the stuff that's about now.  Sigh.  I can't understand, honestly, why someone would take more gratification from generic FPS III, with a boss that looks exactly like a normal baddie but with ten times more health and a rocket launcher, to a shmup boss, where most patterns are plainly visible on your first attempt, and all you have to do is GET GOOD.

I think it's all about age and time myself.  I started with the Intellivision, so classic gaming will always be dear to my heart.  At the same time, I've never ignored current gaming at its expense.  Life for me has simply gotten too busy, to a point where even starting a new Final Fantasy game would be utterly futile, unless I was prepared to play nothing else for a year.  I tried to play Bayonetta, but after cut scene, load, cut scene, load, cut scene, load... fuck it.  To even take control of the game, I ould have beaten the first level of an arcade game.  That's why I still love them.  They allow me to try, fail, try fail, get better and improve within the time constraints I now have.

I'll cease rambling now.  I feel like an old man on this board sometimes.

Time constraints are another reason people don't seem to like bosses, too. I struggle to comprehend how somebody who thinks "Fuck this, I haven't got time to learn a bunch of attack patterns" will happily sit through 30 minutes of Hideo Kojima spraffing a load of philosophically illiterate jizz down their gob before allowing them to finally pick up the controller for a quick-time event.