Playing Old Games For the First Time - Give a Short Review of Some 10+ Year Old Game You Played For the First Time

I played Golden Eye for the first time in a long while, the controls feel weird playing on a keyboard and the graphics make it difficult for long distance firefights. It was fun.

If you can try Perfect Dark. Its made from the same engine, but has almost all of the wrinkles Goldeneye had all smoothed out and polished.
Everyone loves GE007 but PD almost never gets any love.
 
I'd argue the Tomb Raider remasters are accurate enough that they count as the original: God damn what an IP. I remember a documentary where footballers said "aw yeh dawg I was up with Lara all nite before the match!". It's a really enthralling game, just you in a quiet tomb hunting that next 'aha' moment.

SMT3.. Equally, what a game. You're also stuck alone in dreadfully empty hallways. It does have that Persona jank and having enemies attack you INSIDE SHOPS is fucking nuts, but also one of the few old games I actually played a lot, which is something I've great difficulties with.
 
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the controls feel weird playing on a keyboard
Gonna assume you mean keyboard and mouse because that sounds like a miserable experience otherwise.
but has almost all of the wrinkles Goldeneye had all smoothed out and polished.
The only thing I would add to this is if you thought GoldenEye ran like shit, boy howdy. 20fps is considered the target framerate.
 
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I recently completed half-life 1 and 2 for the first time after hearing for my entire life how perfect those games are. I played the Black Mesa edition for 1 and it was pretty good. I had a 9/10 experience overall and I was excited to play the second game. I played on the hardest difficulty and man that shit was pretty tough. And 2 was also really good. I'm not gonna glaze it to hard but I see why people revere these games now and now I wish there was a 3 because I think the strongest attractor to me is the world in which it takes place in. I wanna kill more combine.
 
you shut your whore mouth
cope and sneed.
fucking radscorpions and hulk hogan turrets blackpilled me against turn based after the 4th playthrough, if it doesn't have ATB it belongs in the trashbin.
turncucks wait your turn before roping.
Is that free?
black mesa is the mod, HL1-2 were given for free during valve anniversary.
 
This is a cool thread, I didn't know it existed.
I played Metal Gear Solid, for the first time, a few months ago. I can totally understand why so many people are obsessed with this series now. The charm in the characters and writing alone are intoxicating, the story itself is decent, but the way it's presented is so captivating, and I'm blown away how a PS1 game has a better presentation than many new releases. I knew most of the plot from internet osmosis, but it was still fun to experience them first hand.
As for the gameplay, I was surprised at how little stealth there actually is in the game, after the halfway mark you don't even do any stealth anymore. And on a counter point, I'm surprised at how many boss fights there are, and how fun they still are to play. It almost feels like a boss rush in some parts.
The worst and most annoying parts of the game are the forced combat set-pieces, the actual combat is mediocre, so those sequences are not fun at all.

Overall I loved the game, I'll definitely play sequels in the future.
 
I got Kingdom Hearts 1.5 for PS3. It can be a fun game but it has a lot of flaws that make gameplay tedious. There's no onscreen map. Something you would expect from a game like this and at this point was already standard. This is a problem in areas like Monstro that require a lot of backtracking through a confusing labyrinth where everything looks basically the same. Atlantica suffers the same problem. The trident marks leading to the palace are helpful. When you need to get to the palace that is.

There's two instances where you need to grab the dorsal fin of a dolphin and speed through currents. You have to track him down and make sure no enemies are currently too close to him. But there are a ton of spawn points. There are too many spawn points in Atlantica overall. It seems every time you turn around you are assaulted by jellyfish. It makes the whole area way too tedious.

Other problems include the fact that simple maneuvers like dodging and blocking and the ability to see enemy HP have to be unlocked and equipped by spending AP when they should be default. At least you get any AP you spent on something back when you unequip the ability. The first few bosses are insane. The Wonderland boss is a huge pain in the ass. The method to defeat Ursula's first form is so obtuse because hitting the cauldron with magic doesn't seem to do anything. It does. But you have to spam it with magic before anything happens. They should have at least added a health bar to the cauldron or make it change colors. Whatever changes occur are barely noticeable. It could at least flash or something.

Jafar was ridiculously easy and Genie attacking you is a total non-concern. Genie form Jafar is even easier. The bosses are just all over the place in terms of difficulty. There's enemy fodder that appears in the second district that can hand you your ass faster than some bosses. Then you get Ursula thrown at you. I feel like this game got rushed or not enough thought was put into the overall balance.

And don't even get me started on how tedious Gummi Ship construction is. The fun of building a ship stripped away by a cumbersome interface all because someone wanted to design it to be cute and quirky. A simple list of gummi blocks with a building grid would have sufficed. You actually miss blocks you do have if you don't know how to view other blocks in the selected category. Something that simple is cockblocked by the horrible interface. :mad:

I like the game itself. But it feels like they outsourced parts of the development to macaques with brain damage.
 
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There's enemy fodder that appears in the second district that can hand you your ass faster than some bosses.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm guessing you're talking about the Sniperwilds.
Sniperwild_KHFM.webp
These aren't fodder enemies. They didn't exist in the original vanilla version of KH1 and are part of a group of enemies that were added to the Final Mix rerelease which the HD port is based on. Basically each world was given a new enemy type that's a recolor of a regular enemy that existed in the base game (the Bouncywilds in this case) that either rarely spawns or has some special spawn condition. Generally they don't appear at all until you finish the main plot in that world. They're all meant to be annoying shits with high stats and gimmicks to them that you're not supposed to fight until late-game, and they all drop rare crafting materials that you're supposed to farm off them if you want to craft everything.
 
Trying to play KOTOR 1 rn and it's IMPOSSIBLE. Keep getting immediate crashes and it refuses to even start on Windows 10. I use a Radeon RX 6750 XT. Tried running it in compatibility mode on for 7, XP and 98/ME with no luck. Is it just the fucking drivers that kicking my ass?
View attachment 7242709
I recently ran it with no issues in Windows 11 + Radeon 6700 XT. It was the GOG version, dunno if that makes any difference. Doom 2016 turns 9 years old this year.
 
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I just finished the original Phantasy Star for the Master System. My main impression is that even compared to its contemporaries in DQ2 and FF1 it felt jank as fuck. I have a long list of complaints and observations, so I'm gonna stick it in a spoiler.
・You start with jack shit and get killed in a couple hits by anything except the weakest random encounter in the game, so you need to spent a couple hours grinding right off the bat before you really doing anything. But once the ball gets rolling, the rest of the game is piss-easy. It doesn't even have a final dungeon difficulty spike like DQ2 or Mother.

・There's literally no reason to do anything in non-boss battles except regular attacks. None of your magic does anything to end fights quicker, so it's more efficient to just use your MP to heal up between fights. Strangely magic is not good for clearing mobs like it is in literally ever other RPG of the era. Magic hits random targets 2 or 3 times, which makes it more useful in boss fights than anything. After a while I was holding down the emulator speed up in every fight because there's literally no reason to think or pay attention to any fight, you just wait for your numbers to beat over the monsters' numbers.

・Even in boss fights, the only useful things to do besides spamming regular attacks and having Lutz use up his one good attack spell, is to have Myau heal sometimes or cast the attack buff late-game. I could never get the attack debuff to work on enemies, and the spell that makes you immune to damage for a few turns just stopped working for me halfway through the game. Anytime I'd try to use it it would immediately wear off when the enemy attacked next. I have no idea what was going on there.

・I didn't even think about it while playing, but the game didn't have any status effects or anything. Literally the only things enemies could do to you are regular physical attacks or rarely using one of the 3 attacks spells in the game. I think a couple bosses healed themselves.

・The party balance is kind of weird, since one of your guys Tyron is some beefy chad and the only party member who doesn't learn any magic, so you would expect him to be the biggest DPS/tank of the party, but he's consistently in the 3rd place in attack, defense, and HP behind both main heroine Alisa and Myau who's literally a cat, and only barely above pure mage Lutz. His attack power did surpass Alisa at the very end, but only after getting his best weapon. He always felt like the character who was taking the most damage and getting close to dying, even more than Lutz.

・I was playing the Japanese version, and the text is only in katakana, making everything annoying to read. Did the Master System cart seriously not have space for both kana sets?

・Enemies don't directly drop money after a fight, they drop a chest that you can choose to open and get money. Sometimes the chest is randomly trapped and you take damage opening it. I can see what they're going for since Wizardry did that, but the thing is Wizardry had the Thief class whose whole point was literally just to remove traps from chests. There's no equivalent in Phantasy Star so the traps end up just being a random HP tax on getting money from random encounters.

・Chests that you find in dungeons are barely ever worth it. Half of them just give irrelevantly small amounts of money, consumables you don't need, or outdated equipment you don't need, and most of the other of chests are empty and trapped. I feel like I took more damage over the course of the game opening chests than from getting hit in battle. Myau eventually learns a spell that untraps chests, so I guess you're blinding casting it on everything or just savescumming since you can save anywhere, which I started doing in the final dungeon. (By the way, earliest JRPG to let you save anywhere, anytime?)

・The game keeps handing you dozens of one-use flashlights that let you see in dungeons, but you get an infinite use light only like 1/4 into the game, so it's just a bunch of junk you don't want taking up inventory space until you throw it away.

・Random encounters themselves are kind of jank since they can happen when you step on a new tile even if something else happened. There were several times I got a random encounters right after opening a chest, a couple times right after running away (because you move backwards when you run from a fight), one time I got an encounter as soon as I stepped in the dungeon (the dungeon BGM played for half a second before getting interruppted by the battle music), and the one time a random encounter activated immediately after killing a boss.

・Also, running from random encounters causing you to move backwards kind of has some weird jank to it. Because pressing back while in a dungeon (which are first-person btw) causes you to walk backwards. Now having you move back when running is supposed to make it so you're losing progress by running so there's some cost to doing it. That's how it works in Wizardry, but you can't move backwards in Wizardry. So in Phantasy Star you can technically moonwalk through the dungeon and if you get into a fight and run away you'll actually move in the direction you want to go.

・And the plot was really sketchy. I'm still not sure who exactly the villain even is and what exactly he was doing that's so evil, other than being vaguely responsible for some places he rules over being in disrepair, and some eltritch entity that serves the final boss was involved somehow. It feels dumb to harp on the plot of the game like this, but I never felt other 8-bit JRPGs were this light on important details.
Nice graphics though. I think this is the first RPG with fully animated enemies? Nice animation too. I'm guessing it took up a lot of console power though and that's why you only ever fight one enemy type at a time.

Okay game overall. Nothing great, not terribles, but since every dungeon's a featureless maze it wore out it's welcome by the time the game was only 2/3 over.
 
I could never get the attack debuff to work on enemies, and the spell that makes you immune to damage for a few turns just stopped working for me halfway through the game. Anytime I'd try to use it it would immediately wear off when the enemy attacked next. I have no idea what was going on there.

For some reason, JRPG makers always thought it was a good idea for debuff spells to be absolutely useless against the only enemies you'd actually want to use them on.
 
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Trying to play KOTOR 1 rn and it's IMPOSSIBLE. Keep getting immediate crashes and it refuses to even start on Windows 10. I use a Radeon RX 6750 XT. Tried running it in compatibility mode on for 7, XP and 98/ME with no luck. Is it just the fucking drivers that kicking my ass?

I remember the Steam version had difficulty with save issues. I remember even in 2012 it was hard to run on modern computers. Maybe check out the PCGamingWiki page?
 
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Played Phantasy Star II. It's not a very long game, but it was rough getting through it. I've read it was rushed and the developers put the game together in only 3 months, and I believe it. It has the biggest "babby's first RPG Maker game" feel of any professional game I've played.

The balancing is horrible. You almost need to spent literal hours grinding at the start of the game before you can get anywhere, every character joins at level 1 no matter far in you are, and half of them have such niche use that you'll probably never use them. Equipment is ridiculously expensive. There's a bajillion spells with no description for what they do and half of them don't need to exist. I beat the game at level 25, but characters keep learning spells into the 30s and even 40s? Multiple stats are broken and do nothing, including the Attack stat. The game only has 3 boss fights, one a bit less than halfway and then two at the very end. And to top it off, one of those final bosses is complete bullshit, it's almost pure luck whether you win.

I have to apologize to Final Fantasy II for thinking it had intentionally annoying dungeons designed by assholes, because Phantasy Star II's dungeons are pure torture designed by madmen or sadists. First off, every dungeon just has shit all over the screen, obstructing your view. Every building has ceiling pipes (?) and the outdoor and temple dungeons have a bunch of opaque fog covering the screen. It's lowkey annoying the entire game just trying to see where you're going. And the dungeons themselves are all a series of warps panels, and everything looks the same, you have no idea where you've been warped to in relation to anything else in the dungeon. And many warps lead to empty dead ends and the dungeons designed in general to waste as much of your time walking around as it can. And that's exasperated by the excruciatingly slow walking speed, the screen not centering on your character so you can't see what's in front of you, and the high random encounter rate. I shamelessly looked at maps the whole time I was playing, because I'm pretty sure if you played the game blind, trying to navigate the dungeons would literally double your playtime.

The presentation is good for a game that came out 1989, except for the shit on the screen in dungeons and the battles not having backgrounds. The story is kind of interesting, but needed more fleshing out. The small handful of major story events make it clear the devs had good ideas and not enough time to execute on them. The ending was at least pretty cool.

Overall, can understand someone who played it when it was new thinking it was interesting enough to make it to the end and then consider it a game they like, but I'm not sure I could really recommend anyone play it now.
 
Other problems include the fact that simple maneuvers like dodging and blocking and the ability to see enemy HP have to be unlocked and equipped by spending AP when they should be default.
And that they come at different times for different starting choices. And how some moves are lower dmg at higher cost to the point you literally don't want these supposed "upgrades" in your rotation.
 
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