/vr/ - Retro Games

Shadorwun, both SNES and Genesis

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> asks for games
> posts a series

I know I should've read cuckchan's statements on what is and isn't /vr/, but what gives? some retard's hot opinions should at least work as another post to bump the place in the overboard:

> starcraft: brood war (i can concede campaign  and story was shit, but fucking melee AI fucked up with my brain)
> sid meier's alpha centauri
> contra
> black belt
> ultima iii

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 >>/10/
> SMAC
> Contra

Good taste, that man.

Why Ultima III, though? I'm a pleb that never got into the series - why's it better than the rest?

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 >>/10/
> i can concede campaign and story was shit
M8, come the fuck on. The general atmosphere was made like that on purpose, it is a fucking space opera. Or did you expect a story in a video game to be Pulitzer-worthy?
As for campaign gameplay-wise, it is nowhere near shit. The only "problem" with it is that it doesn't make players ready for MP. And I still remember the times this wasn't a flaw of an RTS game.

 >>/13/
> The only "problem" with it is that it doesn't make players ready for MP. And I still remember the times this wasn't a flaw of a game.

Those days were rad.

You got two very different experiences: in one, you got involved in the setting, no matter how poor the writing or AI; and in the other, you hung out with your m8s. 

I'm not going to bullshit and say that every game got that balance right, but a lot of devs publishers seem to have given up on even trying to seek it out.

 >>/14/
Even if something was OP we could always make gentlemen's agreement to not use it. And for UP things you could make it something of a challenge, like "you are limited to X and Y while I can only do Z". We did both in Half-Life MP. The beam-ish weapon was too efficient when wielded by a skilled player.

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 >>/15/
I'm glad you have such fond memories of gentlemanly agreements being formed online.

I seem to remember them only being preserved when in the physical of like-minded companions:

> I swear if you pick Oddjob one more time, your fucking console is going out the window, Craig

 >>/18/
> online
Oh no. I disliked playing MP over the internet precisely because people are unable to stay civil when they are strangers separated by great distances. We played over LAN.

I fucking hate these threads because nobody ever discusses their choices.

Why do you fancy Kirby's Adventure over all the other Kirby games, OP? I'm pretty fucking curious about that one. I don't dislike Adventure, but it's a pretty big call, is all.

 >>/22/
And I never really properly contribute to these kinds of threads as my bestests of best stopped being such over the years. I just can't honestly say I like DOOM more than Quake or Hexen or Heretic or Dark Forces or BLOOD or UT or RtCW. They are all pretty different. Same with other genres.
But at least some react to my replies to their posts and the thread gets bumped.

 >>/23/
Whilst it's never a direct correlation, it's a pretty sure bet that what you've put more hours into across the years is going to be higher on your list, right?

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 >>/24/
Not really. I might absolutely love a game, but only play it once every few years because of some issues with it.
Prime exhibit: Reunion. It's so buggy it is pretty much unplayable, you can never tell with certainty whether something went wrong and thus game data presently in memory is corrupted and thus any saves the game produces will be corrupted, and those saves aren't validated very well so they will be loaded and preserve corrupted state of some variables. I still play it at least every 5 or so years.

 >>/25/
Can you tell us a little about it? Every search for info on it just uncovers unrelated shit thanks to it's super generic name.

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 >>/25/
> Can you tell us a little about it?
Oh boy, you just had to ask, didn't you.
Not very brief summary of the intro because it is important:
 * Things were going exceptionally well for Earth and her inhabitants - world peace, space exploration becomes one of the top priorities again.
 * Two research ships with prototype hyperdrives are constructed and sent somewhere far away from Sol. One sends a distress indicating it is kill, the second returns. Explorer 2 brings data on several habitable planets, including their location.
 * Everyone goes "aww yiss!" and starts refitting Explorer 2 into a colony ship.
 * But Then Suddenly Something Happens™. A violent civil war erupts for absolutely no apparent reason and the UN, which was running the more or less united Earth until this point, fails to stop the rebellion.
 * The last order of the old gubmint is sending Explorer 2 to where one of the potential colonies is located and this is where the PC ends up. Due to hastily preparing the launch, the ship passes through an asteroid field and its warp drive is damaged beyond repair.
 * Nevertheless, Explorer 2 finds itself near a garden-type planet and while not everyone makes it to the surface in escape pods, things are starting to look less then hopeless for a change.
 * The newly established colony is dubbed New Earth and your task is, besides not getting the colony killed, to figure out what the hell happened back on Terra. And take her back.

> Every search for info on it just uncovers unrelated shit thanks to it's super generic name.
Aka "Merit's Galactic Reunion", best searched for with queries like "Reunion 1994 PC" (or "Amiga", if you fancy that instead) in Google search or "Reunion (video game)" for Wikipedia serarch these days. Discovered the "(video game)" thing some time ago and it does save a lot of time.

 >>/31/
> putting vidya gaems in parentheses solves it

Don't mind my clinical retardation.

> dat set up

That's already more interesting than 90% of the main objectives of any other RTS game I can remember playing. Not just building for the sake of SCIENCE, not just to crush the other mooks, but doing both to take back your planet. 

> dat soundtrack

https://youtube.com/watch?v=GMxO9201Km8

Fucking Amiga, man.

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So you are going to manage the colony on this planet (and, later, on other planets and their moons), do research, do limited forms of diplomacy with aliens, but, for the most part, fight with them because most of them are dicks (minor spoilers for those who want a bit of help in this meat grinder of a game: a) Jaanosians are total bros and you can trust them, despite them being LGMs in appearance; b) also after a certain mutually beneficial deal with them keep 15 grands in cash at all times as they'll offer a thing to sell you).

Oh, almost forgot: you're going to manually transfer mined resources from other colonies and mining outposts. A lot. Like 50% of the time if you want to prevent some bugs from happening although you'll eventually forget about it anyway.

Research is everything as the Universe hates you with a passion. But you can't make new shiny toys without money and mined resources. And money can only be generated by taxes, so you have to manage as much colonies as you can. Which is a royal pain because you aren't warned in advance when, for example, there is too little living space - you are only notified after population takes a hit and tax morale gets lower.

There are numerous other issues with the game which I'll let aspiring masochists to discover on their own.

The best thing about the game is atmosphere/setting and, to a bit lesser extent, the story. The art is great too, in my opinion. But all of that might be boring to someone who read a lot of sci-fi during his formative years and get so fed up he can't stomach it any more.

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 >>/33/
> That's already more interesting than 90% of the main objectives of any other RTS game I can remember playing. Not just building for the sake of SCIENCE, not just to crush the other mooks, but doing both to take back your planet.
The prospect of losing our homeworld, the only place in the cold uncaring Universe we can live until the old age and produce viable offspring who can do the same, was utterly terrifying thanks to the rise of fiction back in the middle of the century. Certain things were pretty much ingrained in fans of sci-fi literature.

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMxO9201Km8
> Fucking Amiga, man.
I like the regular SB soundtrack more. Also, if you happen to have GUS emulation set up in DOSbox (or actually have the card), the game not only handles SB atrociously, it also stops playing some environmental sounds when GUS is selected.
Anyway, as that comment on the YT page says, music on PC sounds much grander and disquieting, almost orchestral sometimes, even. But, unfortunately, at the same time it sounds "dirtier" and there are artifacts at some points (resets after credits and intro are the prime examples).

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 >>/35/
> thanks to the rise of fiction back in the middle of the century. Certain things were pretty much ingrained in fans of sci-fi literature.

I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately. We see a lot of terrible fantasy and sci-fi being pushed these days, and a lot of people who are devoid of creativity inserting pop-culture references and meemees into their own artistic works. I wonder to what extent this is due to frames of reference changing. The best fiction authors were invariably well-versed in classic literature; whereas a  lot of folk now seem to only to be capable of drawing on other aspects of pop-culture, so we're getting a steady degradation of quality.

I know, I know: shit writers and shit fiction have always been around. But it's been something that's been playing on my mind lately.

> music on PC sounds much grander and disquieting, almost orchestral sometimes, even. But, unfortunately, at the same time it sounds "dirtier" and there are artifacts at some points (resets after credits and intro are the prime examples).

Amiga stuff almost always sounds dirtier to me, so this is a bit surprising. I'll have to give them a good comparative listen.

 >>/36/
> 
I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately. We see a lot of terrible fantasy and sci-fi being pushed these days, and a lot of people who are devoid of creativity inserting pop-culture references and meemees into their own artistic works. I wonder to what extent this is due to frames of reference changing. The best fiction authors were invariably well-versed in classic literature; whereas a lot of folk now seem to only to be capable of drawing on other aspects of pop-culture, so we're getting a steady degradation of quality.
>  
> I know, I know: shit writers and shit fiction have always been around. But it's been something that's been playing on my mind lately.
Likely. Seems plausible and I can't find any holes in that theory at the moment.

> Amiga stuff almost always sounds dirtier to me, so this is a bit surprising.
No, I meant that in this game's case there are noises that clearly shouldn't be there, glitches or hiccups or how do you even call that stuff. It's like a really bad radio quality on a cheap, old speaker. Maybe not to the same degree, but certainly in the same vein.