I’ve been working through all the games my parents never let me play as a kid using emulators. The idea for this post was inspired by blitz: the league. A dark and gritty American football arcade style game. It features steroids, corruption, and to the modern audience disgusting emphasis on dirty hits and injury. The injuries are emphasized through rewarding the player and mortal kombat style xrays.
It is not without humor (sending sex workers to the away team’s hotel before a game is a feature in the sequel iirc). The gameplay is fun enough and it’s really funny how mad the nfl got because despite the deep flaws it correctly pointed out the corruption.
Final score: “hey dude sniff this milk”/10.
Every game with random battles. When I was a kid it was fine, who cares, you're playing all afternoon anyway - but god damn trying to go back to classic RPGs as an adult is so annoying because 90% of the gameplay is just meaningless filler. Boss fights can be interesting because they often do stuff with the game mechanics that you have to figure out, but mook fights are never interesting in any game, and leveling up feels like a fake game mechanic. "We could design a game where you have to get better at it to progress, but instead we're gonna raise your numbers so that it remains easy throughout" what the fuck man.
Emulators with 4x speed and self imposed challenges like staying at a super low level and beating bosses with speedrunner strats are basically the only way to make these games hold up.
It's a bummer how true this is. The first two Pokémon gens (Pokémon Blue being my first ever non-edutainment game) captured my imagination in an incredible way, but when I've tried to revisit them they've been a complete slog. 4x speed reduces that aspect of it, but it also completely takes me out of the game which defeats the purpose of replaying them--I might as well be doing data entry at that point.
I wish there were a story-driven version of Pokémon Crystal where I could really soak in the setting and music of the games without the grinding and one-dimensional battles.
My two favorite recent Pokemon releases (not including spinoffs) are Let's Go Eevee and Pikachu and Legends Arcaeus precisely because both of them let you dodge random encounters if you want and change the way you catch the 'mon and what you do with them in interesting ways.
I played through a bit of Arceus on Ryujinx, but I didn't actually make it through the full tutorial (and to think some of us complained about the old man in Viridian City teaching us to catch a Weedle!). Maybe I'll pick it back up or check out Let's Go Pikachu for the nostalgia factor. Wonder if there's a mod to replace the new OST with the OG Game Boy OST, or how hard it would be to do myself...I just love those 8-bit bleeps and bloops.
Also, happy cakeday, Super Saiya-jin Marx! Hard to believe it's been over two years since we got booted from :reddit-logo:.
Earthbound was really good about this because it auto-resolved trivial fights. I'd say it was years ahead of it's time, but games still don't do that :shrug-outta-hecks: