Currently 10 hours into replaying Lunar: Silver Star Story on PlayStation… such a classic.
And that music for Vane magic city sums up the game perfectly… cute, whimsical and light.
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Been checking out older games in arcades while I still have the chance:
-OutRun 2: Played too much of this over other games, but I really wanted to clear all five routes while I could. The drifting is sublime when played with a wheel - so much better than a controller.
-Some game from Mitchell set in the Wild West. I didn’t note down its name.
-Rave Racer: Game blew me away given it was released in 1995.
-Thrill Drive 3. Couldn’t put this down. The series is the obvious inspiration to Criterion’s Burnout series (both mechanically and aesthetically), and Burnout’s different enough that I found Thrill Drive to be pretty unique. For instance, TD3 uses extreme weather conditions as a way to up the difficulty, and it’s possible to fall off the course into water, or out of bounds afte a jump. Cars also take damage that impacts your driving to an extent greater than aesthetics
-The original Wonder Boy. Interesting playing an arcade format game coming from WBIII and the new MB. I liked it a lot, though the infuriating enemy placement combined with the unforgiving collision detection meant I wasn’t willing to put more than 100 yen in.
-TETRIS THE ABSOLUTE GRANDMASTER 2 PLUS: honestly, I only played it because of its long name. Arika’s Tetris games are great though.
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I recently moved and just got though setting up all my consoles a few days ago…
I’m playing Super Runabout: San Francisco Edition on the Dreamcast. I’ve finished all the police force missions and the first of the used car company missions. I remember playing the demo way back in the day on an Official Dreamcast Magazine demo disk and always thought the game was fun. I actually bought this game a couple years back and I’m just now getting around to playing it. Looking up the series on Wikipedia actually got me to buy Super Runabout 3D (Crash City Mayhem in the west) on the 3DS and I finished that game a couple of years ago.
Trying to master and complete Defender of the Crown on the Atari Jaguar , which is a fairly new release, but I bought it right before I moved. It is the superior Atari ST version, with all the extra features and gameplay elements that weren’t in the original Amiga version, but with music from the CD soundtrack. Good times!
Also playing Beyond Oasis on my cell phone and then I’ll tackle Legend of Oasis, which I do own a copy of on the Saturn.
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Where are you playing these?
Castle in the Darkness
Scanlines
No filter
This game looks and sounds great. I can see how the simple progression system works out well, and there’s quite a few nods to old games in it.
Unfortunately, the input lag kills the entire game. Especially a game that requests a decent amount of platforming skill, and throws in the occasional trick to test your reactions.
I’ve looked online and there are several complaints about it. I’ve switched control schemes and gone into windows control settings. Nothing works, and I don’t necessarily like playing around with settings anyway.
I’ve also seen some people defending the lag as “weight.” This is not weight. This is lag, and the game is not designed around it.
So unfortunately I can’t play it anymore. If anyone has had success with it, let me know. I loaded up Bit Trip Runner right after to see if my computer was just acting weird also - it ran fine and responsive.
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Just been checking out arcades whenever I stumble across them in the Kanto region of Japan.
This lot were actually in Tokyo, though, so easily accessible. There’s a couple of boutique arcades called Mikado in Ikebukuro and Shinjuku, with the former having opened earlier this year.
Was a bit disappointed that they no longer have Money Idol Exchanger though, played that last time I went a few years back. Also: The CRT in their deluxe OutRun cabinet seems to have died - it’s been replaced with an LCD which makes the game look really choppy. It’s amazing what good a CRT can do for 30fps in a detailed and fast game.
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Been checking out some of my Virtual Boy games - will post impressions in the other VB thread though!
I suspected as much! Have fun!
RiME - so many feels 
Edit: Oops, wrong thread.
Super Mario Odyssey - Great Game. It’s moving fast and I’m already at Bowser’s Castle. I’ve heard it gets hard after the main story.
Smash - Playing through unlocking characters.
Kirby Star Allies - So far very easy but very fun game.
Pokemon Eevee/Pikachu - I expected this remake to include random battles and so far I haven’t found any. It’s not terrible just not what I was expecting.
Ass Creed Odyssey - After 100+ hours I’m almost finished.
Deathtiny - Great Great game but I’m putting this on hold as it’s messing with my Lightening Force play.
Lightening Force - Trying for 1cc on Normal before I start Zanac in February. We’ll see.
I have Mario Tennis Aces, Undertale and a couple other switch games waiting so I hope to make some room soon.
In trying to keep with my new years resolution (playing less, finishing more), I have been focusing on getting done with Red Dead 2. I am 77 hours in and I am so ready for this thing to be done but I am staying the course. It shouldn’t be much longer (i hope). I am really enjoying the story but I could have used a lot less of it IMO.
Some of my favorite moments in the game have been these optional stranger missions which have had some really interesting pay-offs. Mr. Black & Mr. White, Hamish the civil war vet, & finally Marco Dragic (who seems to be a doctor Frankenstein meets Nikola Tesla) .
Anyway, I have been on a quest to find out what I am playing next, but whatever it is, I hope its not on XBOX. I forget how bad the UI and navigation is until I use it. I was really hoping they would fix it this gen but it looks like it never will and that gives me a bad feeling about another bloated experience next gen too.
I haven’t had time to play much of anything in depth lately. Ugh, stupid real life getting in the way of video games, sheesh smh.
Of the few I have played:
Outrun 2 og Xbox. Sublime, wish I could spend more time with it.
RalliSport Challenge 2: only reason I re-bought an og Xbox, worth every penny.
What I want to play:
More Record of Lodoss War (DC), kind of waiting for RGC DC scart cable, composite is…composite. 
Binary Domain. Played a short bit of this but got busy and never returned, would like to do so
Batman Arkham games, somehow I have three of them but have yet to play them.
Barkley Shut up and Jam Gaiden. F me. Game works on my 15 year old laptop but doesn’t on a two year old laptop with the exact same windows install disk used for each, hangs on sweaty Shaq splash screen, really wanting to play this game, woe is me.
Shadowrun and Thunder Force games on genesis when (if?) my Everdrive ever gets here.
Good man. I really need to play that again. My Xbox died half way through and I lost motivation to get a 2nd Xbox setup even though I bought one straight away.
And I stayed up late to finish Red Dead 2 but now I have an epilogue or two to finish. The journey was better than the end and I will reserve judgement till I finish this post game content. I really would like to move on soon
Red Dead 2 was the game I was thankful was over and burned me out on open world games. The epilogues were my favorite part of the game.
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Ominusha Warlords on Switch. Picked up a boxed copy in Japan and have been playing bits of it over the past two weeks.
Thankfully it’s a solid enough port. There’s a 4:3 mode which preserves the original visual design (16:9 just zooms in the game and adds unnecessary scrolling), and the tank controls are still in if you use the D-Pad. The Switch’s small display also hides the ugly upscaling they’ve done on the 480p backgrounds to make them HD. Can’t imagine how wrong it looks in 4K.
But yeah, while the combat isn’t anything particularly taxing (nice boss fights though) it’s been nice to have some well designed, almost-labyrinth environments to explore and commit to memory. The soundtrack is also rousing at points.
Oh Thank God. I was dreading them. I thought that Rockstar open world’s would always be welcome. The tech in this open world is amazing. Seeing all the awesome weather and various locals is really impressive but the time it takes to navigate from point to point and all the back tracking to previous areas is such a drag. I’ve been burned out of open world games all generation if I was honest. I just don’t need everything to be open and why in the hell is this game this long? I feel like half of the game was spent traveling. I used to think JRPGs were the kings of not respecting your time as a player but this game really makes me think I might want to reconsider that.
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I can totally understand that viewpoint. I get the same way with open world games. 30 hours in you’re still discovering what’s possible, what game mechanics are at your disposal, and what unlockables you can attain.
60 hours in, you’re tired of climbing those fucking towers to open up the map, you start skipping side quests, and you just want the game to end.
Then you Google the time to beat, and it’s a 150 hour game. Shit!
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I quit assassin’s Creed for the most part because the started asking more and more of your time. I never felt a 20-25 hour game felt short but clearly Ubisoft has the numbers to keep people from trading things in. In fact, if it’s a Ubisoft game there is a good chance I’m going to just skip it as Farcry, watch dogs, assassin’s Creed, and even the crew are basically the same game just executed differently.
I need to make better choices on which games I intend on playing. My favorite genre has always been JRPGs and I quit playing them for the most part due to time. If I’m stuck doing a thing for that many hours maybe I should just go back to JRPGs.
You know if I just bought 1st party Nintendo, Sony and Xbox games I still would have enough games and they will all be varied enough to not feel stale.