Retro games and emulation - Discuss retro shit in case you're stuck in the past or a hipster

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xbox 360 is in the lair so its fair game to post this here now

tried hooking up my 360 to my crt and it has mad overscan (:_(
tried fiddling with the service menu and the only relevant settings were H and V center and V amplitude, you cant squish the image horizontally :(
thankfully it didnt cut off any ui elements when playing halo 2, but still a bummer imo


also im trying to download a game from minerva and lot of the trackers arent working lol, no seeds either
 
I have not ceased my SSX binge since starting Tricky 2 weeks ago, I'm now almost finished SSX3. These games are masterpieces. Just got a couple of Big Challenges and some collectibles left on peak 3 to find.

The way all the tracks are connected and you can ride through most of them in a single free ride session from the top of the mountain to the bottom is groundbreaking. I often have to stop and remind myself I'm meant to be clearing out the remaining the objectives on that track I exited 15 minutes ago because I was having too much fun shredding my way through the next few areas after it.

EDIT: some characters from the previous games return as cheat characters you can unlock, but they have no voice lines. Playing as mute Eddie just feels sad.
 
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Rango Dango said:
xbox 360 is in the lair so its fair game to post this here now

tried hooking up my 360 to my crt and it has mad overscan (:_(
tried fiddling with the service menu and the only relevant settings were H and V center and V amplitude, you cant squish the image horizontally :(
thankfully it didnt cut off any ui elements when playing halo 2, but still a bummer imo


also im trying to download a game from minerva and lot of the trackers arent working lol, no seeds either
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No you know why games in that era often had screen size settings in the options!

Also, for anyone that wasn’t around at that time, there was a HUGE spectrum of quality for CRTs. Some monitors and TVs back then were absolute trash, and a lot of arcade machines, mainly bootleg cabinets, had AWFUL picture quality, burn-in, poor colour and other issues.
 
TheArtilleryman said:
The way all the tracks are connected and you can ride through most of them in a single free ride session from the top of the mountain to the bottom is groundbreaking. I often have to stop and remind myself I'm meant to be clearing out the remaining the objectives on that track I exited 15 minutes ago because I was having too much fun shredding my way through the next few areas after it.
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That's why SSX3 is the GOAT. The tone of Tricky is probably more entertaining overall, but the presentation of the game and the gameplay in 3 is just unmatched. Has an absolutely god-tier soundtrack too.
 
Two Dollars said:
instead found a patching utility called Secret of Mana Turbo which allows you to apply any combination of curated patches from a list of… probably around 200-300. Everything you can think of, from individual bug fixes to control reworks to balance changes to multiple different relocalizations.
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IDK what it is about this game that attracts rom hacks like flies to a pile of shit. I played it a few times, really liked it, and never thought "I need to change things about this." Even the font I didn't really care, and yeah the plot is threadbare but whatever it's a videogame. Maybe it's an SNES era Squaresoft thing?

Checking apparently most of them are made by some guy named Keithinov:

Just a sample, a hack that "improves" the text box by removing the dither transparency effect:

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I don't think this looks better (I mean it really looks like garbage with the mod) and the dither is one of those things that was intended for a composite or RF connected console since it just looks like proper transparency there.
 
Disguised In Cognito said:
That's why SSX3 is the GOAT. The tone of Tricky is probably more entertaining overall, but the presentation of the game and the gameplay in 3 is just unmatched. Has an absolutely god-tier soundtrack too.
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I love the soundtrack except for maybe 2 songs, though it really could have done with a skip option, or even automatically cycle through tracks for each retry of a heat/challenges. I feel like the frustration of my 30th attempt at a particularly iffy challenge is only exacerbated by hearing the same segment of the same song over and over again alongside it. You have to leave via "transport" and return to get something new.

My custom playlist is just Hypersonic and Bear Witness III. Those 2 unleash something within me, my score or time will automatically be 50% better if they are playing. Its the Tricky Tricky effect.

EDIT:

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Captain Quazar said:
Why do you think Ikaruga is bad?
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imo it's a very unique and cleverly designed game that I don't actually enjoy playing at all. Treasure did a lot of those. The two Sin and Punishment games are, for me, their best.

Pissmaster said:
I don't play many shmups.
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Ikaruga often seems to be a favorite of people who don't play many shmups (including Ikaruga).
 
Captain Quazar said:
The Macintosh one was called Qwirks, right?
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There is a Puyo clone for Mac called Candy Crisis. It was originally Skittles but the developer changed the name due to the trademark issue. It has some nice stolen mod music for the levels and is actually playable still on modern computers despite being made around 1998 or so.
Samuel Fuller said:
No you know why games in that era often had screen size settings in the options!

Also, for anyone that wasn’t around at that time, there was a HUGE spectrum of quality for CRTs. Some monitors and TVs back then were absolute trash, and a lot of arcade machines, mainly bootleg cabinets, had AWFUL picture quality, burn-in, poor colour and other issues.
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My PS3 was unusable for well over a year because the text was too blurry on the CRT. On top of no games and a couple hundred dollars on a console, now you'd need a new HDTV too.
 
I've always preferred Radiant Silvergun to Ikaruga. And I don't like shmups generally, but I feel like Radiant Silvergun does what Ikaruga is praised for a bit better.
 
Captain Quazar said:
Why do you think Ikaruga is bad?
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When it was new a billion years ago, it was overhyped to a breaking point. It was right on the heels of the Dreamcast kicking the bucket and games starting to disappear from store shelves, right as PS2 was taking over and mercilessly dominating the gaming space for years to come. Even by late '02, PS2 had an all-star lineup with every genre in the book realized, and Ikaruga was just one more shmup. That wasn't even novel to Dreamcast, with Mars Matrix releasing over a year before.

I ended up only playing Ikaruga years later on Xbox 360. It was a real "wait, THIS is it?!" experience. Flipping the color of the ship and determining what I'm avoiding based on that just felt stressful and not fun at all. I don't remember anything else that stood out, either. It was very bland, almost as if an AI were asked to write an arcade shmup.

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I don't know what I'm looking at.

So that's why I don't like Ikaruga. A bunch of retards soyfaced about it a million years ago and it's really not even remotely worth that level of admiration. And I'm not even against shmups, they're just not high on my list of favorite genres, and it really takes something special for one to stand out for me.
 
Smaug's Smokey Hole 2 said:
Sir, don't be upset, I'm just doing my rounds and making sure no one is breaking any laws like using fan-fixes on a game they have never played while using a CRT. Sounds silly but that wouldn't be authentic...
View attachment 8790817
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Hell yeah, I love it when some fag I've never met in my life tells me I'm playing my bing bing wahoo games wrong!!!
 
Rango Dango said:
xbox 360 is in the lair so its fair game to post this here now

tried hooking up my 360 to my crt and it has mad overscan (:_(
tried fiddling with the service menu and the only relevant settings were H and V center and V amplitude, you cant squish the image horizontally :(
thankfully it didnt cut off any ui elements when playing halo 2, but still a bummer imo


also im trying to download a game from minerva and lot of the trackers arent working lol, no seeds either
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It's funny, I couldn't read text in Xbox 360 games like Castle Crashers and that's the reason I first bought a 720p TV. Wii and basic cable worked fine on the big ass CRT I had for years. If it wasn't for Xbox 360 being unreadable, it probably would have taken me until the switch to digital cable in the early 2010s to upgrade to a HDTV.
 
I used 360 exclusively on a normal CRT until early 2010. Other than Dead Rising which was notorious for tiny text everything I played looked fine, a bunch of games even had 4:3 modes like Oblivion, Fallout 3, Halo 3, GTA4, Borderlands off the top of my head. Played a ton of games with 16:9 like that too like Assassin's Creed 1&2, Mass Effect, Eternal Sonata, Tales of Vesperia, all the Orange Box games, Gears 1&2, and others.

Mass Effect 2 is the first game I recall intentionally running my 360 through an HDMI->DVI adapter to a monitor to play, and I mostly played like that or PC ports until I got an HDTV in 2011.

I rather think a lot of games looked better scaled down to 480i than they did at raw 720p, especially when they didn't have forced widescreen.
 
There's only one SHUMP I dedicated hours to playing to the very end
Abadox_box_art.jpg
When you die, especially in the later stages, the game basically laughs at you and tells you to give up because you're a weak faggot that will never amount to anything in life. That pea shooter and slow speed will land you getting raped by everything that rams itself into you, especially on the last stage where you have shit like big-as-fuck laser beams and compactors that try to crush you. Even after the final boss the game decides to give you one more "fuck you" by forcing you to go through the "escape" scene which even though there's no enemies, it increases in speed every so often.

Essentially, the items and power-ups in the beginning that you get, you HAVE to keep and protect like your life is literally on the line. Personally I wait until I get the laser weapon in the 2nd stage (each stage has 2 acts) because even though its a straight line, it's the most powerful weapon in the game. After that, the game will only give you shit like giant rings that only do 1 point of damage to the enemy.
 
Baraka Obama said:
I used 360 exclusively on a normal CRT until early 2010. Other than Dead Rising which was notorious for tiny text everything I played looked fine, a bunch of games even had 4:3 modes like Oblivion, Fallout 3, Halo 3, GTA4, Borderlands off the top of my head. Played a ton of games with 16:9 like that too like Assassin's Creed 1&2, Mass Effect, Eternal Sonata, Tales of Vesperia, all the Orange Box games, Gears 1&2, and others.

Mass Effect 2 is the first game I recall intentionally running my 360 through an HDMI->DVI adapter to a monitor to play, and I mostly played like that or PC ports until I got an HDTV in 2011.

I rather think a lot of games looked better scaled down to 480i than they did at raw 720p, especially when they didn't have forced widescreen.
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The two games I was into specifically at the time where text was hard to read was Dead Rising and Castle Crashers. I couldn't figure out what the fuck to do in Dead Rising on a CRT and I was really looking forward to playing it.
 
Calandrino said:
imo it's a very unique and cleverly designed game that I don't actually enjoy playing at all. Treasure did a lot of those. The two Sin and Punishment games are, for me, their best.


Ikaruga often seems to be a favorite of people who don't play many shmups (including Ikaruga).
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I remember picking it up on the GameCube (our frothing demand for this game continues) and while I liked the first couple of levels I found that the gimmick overstayed its welcome and it became a pain in the ass. Like there was one level in particular that was one long stretch of gates closing that just seemed lazy. Plus with other high profile GameCube rarities around that time I wondered why I even bothered.

Like personally I always preferred the Raiden games as shooters, and Dodonpachi as bullet hells and while Ikaruga was fine while shooting I also agree with the weird shit that Treasure often did to the detrimental of a game. Not unlike Idea Factory was doing with RPGs at the time or even Nippon Ichi with their non-Disgaea games. I could say the same for Mishief Maker, Bandai O etc. To me the Ikaruga main gameplay crux maxed out way too early and instead of throwing in some variety they just ran that shit into the ground.
 
Baraka Obama said:
Still prefer just using a real N64 on a CRT. Framerates didn't bother me when I was 10, they don't bother me now.
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Once you get used to 60 fps and above. You cannot go back to those laggy ass performance again. I don't understand the mentality of people who say this. Graphics is understandable given the retro craze and what not but there's no fucking way I'm playing turok or goldeneye at sub 24 fps after experiencing those titles at 60 fps ever again.
 
Dojima's Dragon said:
Once you get used to 60 fps and above. You cannot go back to those laggy ass performance again. I don't understand the mentality of people who say this. Graphics is understandable given the retro craze and what not but there's no fucking way I'm playing turok or goldeneye at sub 24 fps after experiencing those titles at 60 fps ever again.
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The worst thing about playing at high framerates is that you get used to it and have trouble playing on other screens with lower refresh rates.
 
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