Retro Recap #1
Primer: in the last year I've shamefully been peer pressured into, and found myself enjoying, retro achievements. I maintain that this is just a fun mechanism for revisiting old games I haven't thought about in a decade (or decades), and use it as a framing device for replaying old classics or old games that are new to me. These will be rapid fire and off the cuff. Since I'm writing this so late, this first post will be a bit long with me going through a backlog.
Pokémon Yellow: Special Pikachu Edition, Gameboy (1998)
Never got to play this as a kid or as an adult, so it was neat seeing how much it was just gen 1 unchanged, except they give you the three starters early on (plus Pikachu). Had never really used Mewtwo in gen 1 before, idk what I expected but yeah it was as broken as people lead me to believe. Gen 1 Exp Share sucks a lot. There was a fun side challenge for the game via the set: beat the Elite 4 with only pikachu in your party. It turns out Pikachu is very move limited so the only way I found to make it work was with a moveset of Thunderbolt, Body Slam, Seismic Toss, Double Team. Was considering Toxic instead of the double team, but it saved me on a few encounters I think? The other thing I had to do was capture every capturable pokemon, which totals to 129; this wasn’t too bad, but the Safari Zone is pretty miserable in Gen 1. This did require me to do the Mew encounter glitch where you do some fuckery around Nugget Bridge which was pretty interesting - I think that’s the first time I’ve obtained Mew in a pokemon game?
Pokémon Crystal, Gameboy Colour (2000)
Only ever played Gold/Silver before. Differences are way less drastic between these than they were for Yellow to Blue/Red. I think the only real ones are there’s some scripted sequences regarding Suicune now and a Battle Tower? Also for some reason they decided to remove Mareep/Flaffy/Ampharos as obtainables (???). Was interested in this achievement set b/c it had a lot of conditional ones like “Beat Gym 1 with a team of <=lvl 9 and so on I thought might require some strategizing, but it ended up being pretty easy. Catching all the mons was not too bad, but the happiness evolutions can eat a dick. Catching the roaming dogs without using masterballs (another stipulation) was pretty rough, having to catch a Chansey (3% spawn rate) holding a Lucky Egg (2% odds any given Chansey encounter has one) was fuckin miserable; fortunately there’s a bit of Repel manipulation you can do to make encounter rates better, but it was still an hour or two. Overall though it was a nice nostalgic trip, after like 25~ years I still enjoy the core pokemon formula; I just think they’re neat.
My team is Typhlosion, Heracross, Crobat, Umbreon, Lanturn, Piloswine. Heracross and Umbreon have been pretty disappointing, I think it’s b/c I didn’t realize their movesets in Gen 2 were still pretty limited and so they’ve done very little for me. Piloswine (love this guy) and Lanturn (never used or even thought of this line before) have been absolute stars though and going beast mode for me the whole playthrough.
Super Mario Land, Gameboy (1989)
First time playing this, it was pretty basic but I can really respect it for what it does being a Gameboy game released in ‘89. There were frustrations with how weird the mechanics felt at times with things like momentum buildup and the like, but I really can’t complain.
Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, Gameboy (1992)
First time with this as well, and it was wild how much of an upgrade it was over the first, like unreal improvement for a same-console sequel. Basically a jump from the original SMB to SMB3. Again, a very basic and miniature version of the console inspiration, but it was a good time and I’d have loved this game if it was one of the few I grew up owning. The difficulty suddenly goes from like 1 to 100 with the final stage and boss, which I’m not really complaining about, but it was stark as hell.
Donkey Kong Land, Gameboy (1995)
First time with this, horrific game. I don’t know why this was made. Absolute dog shit; it is misery. I might be more sensitive to how goofy the mechanics are than most, but I am very familiar with the DKC games, and even speedran them for a while, and it’s jarring how different and bad it feels to play. Possibly one of the ugliest games I’ve ever played, too. There was a dude who used to speedrun in this community who would shill for this game saying “Respect The Land” and after experiencing it, I don’t think I will, thanks.
Pokemon Snap, Nintendo 64 (1999)
Fantastic and charming game, if too short. It’s a shame it gets a bit too much hate for that and isn’t appreciated for what it is at it’s core, which is a score attack game you’re meant to get a lot of replayability out of. Going through it w/ RetroAchievements was a fun romp, I’m pretty familiar with it and didn’t have much issues, other than there being a “Get a perfect photo of Mew” requirement which was actual misery, but I feel good having gotten it, tbh. The game’s score systems are really finicky and this experience laid that pretty bare, but I still had a good time.
Mortal Kombat II, Super Nintendo (1993)
This one was mainly about mastering a game that made me miserable as a child. It’s fun how the source code has since come out to confirm the AI does genuinely do input-reads and frame-perfect impossible reactions after giving you a free round or two, validating a lot of people’s complaints. In light of that, getting really good at beating the AI requires a lot of cheese and exploits, the best of whom can exploit for me were Baraka, Kitana, and Jax (in order). Jax is an absolute animal with his air grab and the ultimate achievement for this was beating the game on 1 credit, beating it on very hard difficulty, and beating the 3 bonus/cameo opponents (Smoke, Jade, Noob Saibot) who don’t follow the other difficulty rules and are insane opponents. It was super gratifying learning the ins and outs of AI behaviour and how to get comfortable exploiting it. I never got 100% confident/consistent at putting Kintaro away, but Shao Khan is shockingly easy once you learn a few of his quirks and “activation ranges” for his moves.
007: The World Is Not Enough, Nintendo 64 (2000)
This one was brand new to me, and frankly I had never even heard of it. I have a friend who streams a lot and his very cool and interesting mind makes watching him play games is a blast, and so I had been bugging him to play Omori to see how he resonates with it, and he told me he would do it if I mastered this game (get all achievements in hardcore mode (this just means savestates and slowdown functions are disabled) on retroachievements) so I took him up on the offer. Did it in about 5 or 6 days, and at first I hate it, but by the end I was pretty fond of this game. I like how dynamic the missions are and LOVE Rare’s way of adding variety to missions by having it so higher difficulties have more objectives you need to accomplish or keep track of. One trick I found was if you use one of the control schemes, and map your left analog stick to the C-buttons and C-buttons to the analog stick, the game plays like a contemporary twin stick shooter which made it so much more fun. While trying to do all of this was a bit aggravating at times, I really enjoyed it.
GoldenEye 007, Nintendo 64 (1997)
The previous game made me really nostalgic for my memories of this and made me want to take a crack at it, since this is a game I remember as a kid not getting to play often since I didn’t own it, but always getting my ass kicked and wondering “what the fuck do I do??” when I did. This one was a bit harder the TWINE; it way rougher around the edges, the FPS mechanics are less refined, the mission scripts are a lot weirder, and it includes some genuinely very difficult challenges that eclipse anything mastering TWINE asked of me. Beating Aztec was tough as nails, and unlocking all of the cheat codes required pulling off some 00 Agent speedruns of levels I felt were genuinely impressive mechanical accomplishments. I feel good having done this - I conquered a game from childhood that was always daunting and incomprehensible as a kid, got to learn a lot about its quirks, how I’m actually supposed to do missions, how you unlock the secret two stages (Aztec and Egyptian) and the like. Like TWINE you could manipulate emulator control mappings to make it feel like a modern shooter and that made it so much more palatable.
Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, Playstation 2 (2005)
This one is weird. It’s both better and a lot worse than it was in my memory. There’s definitely some novel concepts here (I think?) and I remember at the time being enamoured with the idea of “What if GTA, but more military shooter oriented?.” Which is funny, as I was also playing Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield 2 at the time, both of which put this to shame, but even 20~ years ago I was a sucker for my single player games. There’s a cool game here that definitely could’ve become exceptional with another year of polish, I think. The core is mostly good, there’s just a lot of jank to the scripting dynamics for factional stuff, challenge triggers, etc. and the core gameplay of driving and shooting feels very shallow; I got the distinct impression that’s a very low skill ceiling to getting good with either. Also a game that is not as popular as I thought! The resources online for finding information about this fuckin suck, so I even had to whip up photoshop to make better versions of the collectibles maps since the main ones are awful quality 400x400px gamefaqs MS paint images.
Pikmin, Gamecube (2001)
Fantastic game. Incredibly strong introduction to a new franchise and is the best novel idea Nintendo has had since this came out. Having this sort of lemmings inspired tactical RTS on a console where your troops are just cute little guys in a "Honey I Shrunk The Kids" scale makes for an incredibly charming IP. My only complaints with this are that it's a bit hard to go back to since playing the remastered ports on the Switch which have a lot of QoL functionality built in, but this ages quite well imo. Wonderful entry to a new franchise and I enjoyed my time with it a lot.
Pikmin 2, Gamecube (2004)
A fantastic sequel that follows up on the original and builds on it in every way. The introduction of the white and purple Pikmin does a lot to make the game feel more varied, the introduction of dungeons in tandem with the overworld do well to make the game feel like you can be more strategic instead of rushed like in Pikmin 1 (although I can see some people finding this to be a downgrade). There's a lot of subtle - but important! - QoL added into this title (e.g: if you throw a pikmin at a pellet flower, it will automatically bring the ensuing pellet to The Onion rather than rejoining you) that make doing higher execution play a lot more enjoyable and worth pursuing. This has me wanting to replay 3 and 4, as those are also stellar games which might mean Pikmin is genuinely Nintendo's best IP in terms of batting average for quality titles. The worst is the first, mainly due to limited scope/content, which are all things that can be forgiven for a first entry to an experimental IP, imo.