These are not retro styled new games, but games you played this year in the retro category. Could be games you discovered this year or games you revisited. In terms of defining retro, use your own definitions, we don’t have to be super strict. It’s all in good fun.
For me it was Treasure’s excellent Guardian Heroes. I played this via XBLA. It’s also playable on the XB1 The emulation is rather excellent and price is right for having a legal option of playing this classic. Saturn games are just insane right now.
I liked the original for the PSX a lot but I didn’t know there was a sequel until recently. It has more of the “attitude” style that “EA Big” games had at the time. They basically took the original and turned it into “Sled SSX” (quite literally, Zoe Payne is in it).
It’s not a game that will blow anyone’s mind for originality, but gets the job done quite nicely.
Layer Section is one of the best shooters of its generation. Such a fantastic game with an awesome soundtrack. I’ve been playing it since the Japanese day of release and still love it. Best of all its cheap. Saturn owners must play the Arcade mode as the Saturn mode is missing many of the scrolling effects due to the resolution difference.
It took me forever to finally get around to playing this game, and I wonder why it took me so long! I’m still not quite done, but I’ve been chipping away at it without a guide: drawing maps and making notes the whole time.
Despite seeming very overwhelming at first, the game is actually really accessible. Getting to a new area and seeing new enemies with their amazing sprite work, the way the plot unfolds through the use of diaries and messages you find, cutscenes with tension… the game feels way ahead of its time, and is still a blast to play.
Me and a friend played it coop with the OSSC on my newly acquired Japanese Saturn. Flipped the whole LCD 43" TV over and all. Wonderful evening. Amazing game and the Saturn d-pad is just incredible for this kind of game.
I played through Metroid Zero Mission and Fusion for the first time in 2017 and I really love them both. If I had to decide I would say Zero Mission edges out Fusion by a hair
Final fantasy 6 would be my runner up! I played it with my wife on the Snes classic and it was our first time playing through. It lived up to the hype!
Oh man, that’s awesome. I’m actually planning on playing Zero Mission for the first time this year, looking forward to it; I’ve only ever beat the original Metroid, not the remake. Fusion is amazing though, I remember getting both it and Metroid Prime on release day, and as good as Metroid Prime is, I still think I like Fusion more: It was so exciting to see what happened to Samus AFTER Super Metroid, and the whole SA-X enemy sequences were so intense.
FF6 is crazy stupid good. It’s so easy to break if you use the right characters, making the game a bit too easy in my opinion, but that would be its only flaw. The graphics, music, storyline, even the uality of the original translation, all make the game really special. It was also the first REALLY long RPG I ever played. I remember renting it with my dad back in the day for a week, then extended the rental by a few days, then finally calling the guy at the game store and asking how far we were in it. He said “Oh, you’re almost halfway”. I didn’t see the World of Ruin until probably a decade later, haha!
Zero Mission was my first Metroid experience. I bought it the day it came out and loved it so much. It may just be my favorite game in the GBA library.
I still need to play Zero Mission. I loved Fusion back in the day, played a bit of it this past year as well. I understand the flack it gets for guiding the player through much more than the original and Super but it’s still good.
I just started Zero Mission for the first time last night, THANKS GUYS
Enjoying it so far. I wish you could turn off the guidance system that tells you where to go next, but it’s still really enjoyable. I love the original Metroid so much, so it’s fun to see the same areas revisited. And the music is KILLER so far.
Looking back I didn’t play as many games as I wanted to this year. So I’m going to go with Rondo of Blood, which, for the first time, I played on real hardware.
