Sharing this one because it made me laugh, loudly.
It’s kind of like a trifecta of humorous lunacy.
Games
MGS Delta: Snake Eater
At last, the date is announced!
Pretty much, if they can pull off Not Screwing Up, I’m likely to be happy. MGS 3: Snake Eater was one of the most influential games of my teenaged years, and much of its aging owes to the dated controls and limited video output modes of a PlayStation 2. Knowing about Delta, is the main reason I haven’t been playing the recent PC release of the original, that and wanting to dig into the first MGS.
Please, Konami, don’t screw this up š
Dino Crisis
One of those cases of “Remember to check that out” is the news that Dino Crisis and its first sequel are on GOG. As a kid, I was never really that great at Resident Evil. It didn’t really help that the initial U.S. release kinda had borked aiming until the director’s cut and dual shock versions. I was also more of a dinosaurs kid than a zombie fan.
Needless to say, Dino Crisis was probably my next big take on the then-young survival horror genre. One that I actually played quite a bit of and would revisit as a teenager. Compared to the original Resident Evil trilogy, I found Dino Crisis much less stressful and unnerving, and far more curious and mysterious.
Part of me wonders if the plot and setting have held up, or if I’ll just be disappointed. Part of me also wonders if this time, maybe I’ll finish the darn game. :^o
WiBArM
There was a game that I played as a child on our old Tandy 1000 that I’ve wanted to look up for about the last 20 years or so. A relative had sent us a copy, but no one really could read it since the instructions were in Japanese. The 5 1/4″ diskette however, worked just fine.
One of those problems with being a kid, even if I can remember things from way back in more details than I probably should, is that memory is more visual than auditory for me. My best recollection of the name was something like ‘Wib barn,” but hey I was like 5 when I played the game! It’s not like I could spell yet! Literally, I was using MS-DOS before I could read…lol.
Needless to say, trying to find the game on this side of the floppy diskette era has been largely fruitless whenever I’ve tried.
Well, last night I was watching a video on 80s game development, and noticed that the clip of Thexder was Really, Really similar to what I remember but definitely not the same game. Sadly, doing some research into the game also showed that its sequel wasn’t it. Also, I’m pretty sure that I never encountered the Firehawk games personally.
Attempting to find similar games led me to the similar games tab on Giant Bomb, which began as mostly another exercise in futility. I’ve tried to look up the game in the past, always without success. Like seriously, how many late 80s side scrollers were there where you can transform between a robot, and a jet, and a car while exploring pseudo 3D dungeons reminiscent of the Windows 95 Maze? Yeah, you’d think that’s easy, but a lot of old stuff on old video games never made a big impact on the Internet. There were more than a few such ‘robot’ games, but I don’t think any that combined all three modes.
Then in scrolling through the list, I come across one word and it’s like “Holy shit, I remembered the name right,” and lo’ and behold: their page on Wibarm even matches my childhood memory to a tee on the screenshots. It’s without a doubt the same game, and it checks all the boxes: the three modes, the side scroll and 3D like dungeon, and the almost RPG like battles when you encounter the mobs.
So now, after many years, I finally know what that game was, and that my childhood memories are even more accurate than I expected.
I can’t help but giggle snort, and also wonder how many times a piece of 3D accelerator could be defined as fundamentally broken until they redesign something.
For some reason, I’m picturing the evidence as akin to Klaatu taking a chalk to Professor Barnhardt’s blackboard….gah, I’m getting old, aren’t I? š
The Cleric’s Spiritual Weapon
Random things that amuse me
Ahh, it looks like a channel full of cackle worthy nods to Dungeons & Dragons….
Visiting the original mansion again for the first time in this millennium, itās an interesting exercise in how much Iāve forgotten, how much Iāve remembered, and how much comes back to me when Iām there.
On one hand, after do many years itās kind of hard to remember which door leads to zombie ridden stairways and which leads to almost becoming a Jill Sandwich in the name of acquiring a shotgun. Honestly, I donāt remember that horrible joke at all even though I still remember the distinction of Jill gets rescued from becoming a human pancake by Barry, while Chris has to bugger about looking for a broken shotgun in order to win.
Access to guides that have been around for years, and I canāt even remember the name of it, but thereās a wiki somewhere that goes into posting the maps and details (Iāve probably written about that here, regarding the RE2 remake); certainly make for a good augment to the old āwhat order should I?ā problem but not so much the minute directions.
The mansion has always been a hard place to navigate because of its size. Itās pretty easy to remember the general flow, especially easily reached locations like the hallway you meet Cerberus or the balcony where you acquire the grenade launcher. But smaller details like which door in the upstairs east hallway leads to the knights puzzle or whatās at the end of the ground floor dining room hallway, is a bit harder to remember.
This is kinda nice. Like one how itās easy to remember thereās little point to grabbing the wooden emblem, but hard to remember when itās time to bring it to the piano room. Couldnāt remember where the knight puzzle was but on the flip side once finding it, I did remember to avoid the poison gas on the first go, lol.
Some parts are a lot harder to remember than others. For example, I have pretty much no real recollection of the layout of the guard house. Just old mental images of things like pool tables and giant spiders.
But unlike the āHuh, what the frell is this?ā feeling the GameCube remake always gave me, the GOGāified PC edition is more like an old stomping ground. If one filled with zombies and horrors that want to decapitate you, lol.
A real original RE at last
Over the years, I’ve generally considered GOG a good thing but haven’t cared terribly much given my focus elsewhere. But much to my pleasure, it turns out they have a real nice treat that I never expected to find: Resident Evil.
While I appreciated the HD version of the remake, I also didn’t enjoy my childhood memories being made useless by the fact that it was built from the GameCube remake rather than one of the original PlayStation releases. Meanwhile, the version recently released on GOG looks like it’s a fairly vanilla build of the PC release of Resident Evil rolled up for modern machines without extra hackwittery.
I haven’t really played the original since the 1990s and the original PlayStation. Within moments of launching the game, I felt like a proper trip backdown memory lane — in just about every way, it’s how I remember it from almost 30 years ago.
Metal Gear Solid Delta Trailer
I’m going to take this as a good sign that the remake of MGS3 will actually be released closer to ‘soon’ than ‘later’, as in we may actually get to see it this year.
The original Snake Eater was one of the more personally significant / formative video games that I played as a teenager, and remains my favorite in the series. Literally, if they throw modern controls in the sense of MGS5 at it and remain largely faithful, I’m likely to be happy. When I originally learned of Delta, my first words were probably in the vein of ‘Shut and take my money!’, so it’s likely I’ll be buying it and finding out š.
Playing Snake Eater in the 2020s has generally been a somewhat grainy problem. My Play Station 2 can only output 480i, which looks pretty damn grainy on a modern 2160p screens compared to ’90s era tube televisions. That’s sort of alleviated by the ‘HD’ release for modern consoles where we get progressive output, but there’s really no fixing the control scheme with that. It’s ingrained in the design, just like it was in its predecessors.
I love Metal Gear Solid 3 very much. But even at the time it came out, the choice to retain the control scheme (and I assume engine) from Sons of Liberty made the Snake Eater experience less than ideal for the jungles. The mechanics and such worked really well in the first two metal gear and virtual reality training missions, where the majority of your environments are close quarters or high octane. Creeping through the jungle would have been better served by an already then contemporary shooter control scheme, like that seen in SOCOM and many others. The controls never were the good part of MGS3, but yet the game was freaking brilliant and the story poignant. Everything else about the game was superb, and perhaps was Metal Gear Solid at its finest.
Here’s hoping for a solid remake, and that we don’t end up crying tears of blood.
The Insane Engineering of the Gameboy
Nice video giving an overview of the classic handheld’s architecture. The opening may be a little bit harsh IMHO, but also not unwarranted. At least, the way that I look at it the hardware is closer to what a microcomputer could have passed for just over a decade prior, and devices like the Apple II or TRS-80 were hardly portable and battery friendly devices.
That’s a trend that I think largely tends to continue with really portable devices. I remember looking at data about the first Raspberry Pi, and decided it would likely be on par with a ten year old PC — except closer in size to a credit card than a microwave oven, and pretty darn cheap. Likewise, while I find the Steam Deck’s graphics very unimpressive, I find it amazing that someone crammed an Xbox One level of horse power into such a portable package.
It’s pretty darn cool how that sort of evolution plays out, even if my wrist watch literally has an order of magnitude more computing power than my first Personal Computer….