First game on the list is Cadash, an arcade title from 1991
Cadash was frankly a bad idea by the fine people at Taito. It seems like it was intended to be a game for the NES or SNES or some other home console, but someone in charge said "fuck it, we want more quarters!!!" The game is an RPG platformer. It's similar to a lot of action adventure games in the arcade, but you also level up as you play and earn money to buy new weapons and armor. It's also hard as hell so you'll be dying a lot while you try to earn money and experience. There's also a time limit in the game that ensures the player will drop a lot of quarters even if the person playing the game is some idiot savant who can be immediately great at a difficult video game or possibly Dvader.
Originally I played this game while I was on vacation in the early 90's and while I only played it a couple times I was really amazed by it. At face value it really hits all my likes. A fantasy game where you can choose your character class, I'm sold. At the time though I didn't get very far, and didn't realize that you'd probably have to take out a small loan to finish it. Anyway it's been one of those games I've always wanted to go back to and finally I can say I have. Not that I'd brag about it mind you. It had a few cool ideas, but it's hard to look at this as anything but an old game that aged like a bad boob job. Its playable, but nothing you're going to want to remember. Still, nice to cross a game like this off my bucket list.
robio said:First game on the list is Cadash, an arcade title from 1991
Cadash was frankly a bad idea by the fine people at Taito. It seems like it was intended to be a game for the NES or SNES or some other home console, but someone in charge said "fuck it, we want more quarters!!!" The game is an RPG platformer. It's similar to a lot of action adventure games in the arcade, but you also level up as you play and earn money to buy new weapons and armor. It's also hard as hell so you'll be dying a lot while you try to earn money and experience. There's also a time limit in the game that ensures the player will drop a lot of quarters even if the person playing the game is some idiot savant who can be immediately great at a difficult video game or possibly Dvader.
Originally I played this game while I was on vacation in the early 90's and while I only played it a couple times I was really amazed by it. At face value it really hits all my likes. A fantasy game where you can choose your character class, I'm sold. At the time though I didn't get very far, and didn't realize that you'd probably have to take out a small loan to finish it. Anyway it's been one of those games I've always wanted to go back to and finally I can say I have. Not that I'd brag about it mind you. It had a few cool ideas, but it's hard to look at this as anything but an old game that aged like a bad boob job. Its playable, but nothing you're going to want to remember. Still, nice to cross a game like this off my bucket list.
I remember that one.
aspro said:I remember that one.
I have since learned that this genre was extremely popular in Japanese arcades at the time. And that makes complete sense knowing what masochistic bastards those people are.
Mmmmmmm. Pie.
How about posting a photo of your pie Robio?
Yeah I want to do one for me.
Next up Kid Niki - arcade version!
Ahhhh good ole Kid Niki. A game that came out right at the height of ninja culture in the US. Despite being a founding member and leader of the Kid Niki Force I never played much of the original arcade version of the game. As a kid there was a rollerskating rink near my house had it, but it always seemed to be broken. The NES version was okay, but there's nothing like the real deal, and now I have access to it.
And you know what? It's still a really good game. It definitely gets difficult at times, and the boss battles can get nasty. There's no way you're going to beat them without dying several times. But its not an unfairly difficult game on the whole and that's not something that can be said for many games of the era. The graphics are pretty sharp too. They're not particularly detailed, but they're big, colorful, and you can pretty easily tell what everything is. Really, my only complaint is the repetitive music that never seems to change. This one is still a winner. Almost makes me want to break out the official Kid Kiki Force theme song.
Oh and here is the picture of my pie, with a PS3 controller for scale. Also please note the decapitated Superman flash drive is plugged in. That part doesn't actually need to be plugged in, but the damn this is too easy to lose if I don't leave it in.
As you can see though the whole thing is pretty small. It's about the size of a folded up GBA SP. And sorry that the image quality is shit. Please remember, I can't hold a camera steady unless I've been drinking and I took this at around 11 AM this morning. Little too early for respectable people like myself to drink.
I loves me some Kid Nikki. Amazing game.
One more arcade to mention before I start to spotlight some games on other systems I'm playing. Mr. Do!
I've always had a penchant for classic arcade titles, but Mr. Do! is a game I never spent a lot of time with. As a kid I remember watching some older guy play it in an arcade game, and eventually he gave me a quarter to play something else so I'd leave him alone. I've played it a few times in other arcades throughout the years, but it was never really a favorite of mine, up until now. I've probably spent more time playing Mr. Do! than just about anything else this past week.
The game's concept really is something that only could have come out of the early 80's arcade boom. It's a clown that throws a ball red reptile looking things while he digs through dirt and collects cherries. Oh and if you find a piece of food in the middle of the screen all the red dinosaur things freeze and some purple blobs start chasing you instead. So yeah... that's it. Anyway it's fun as hell. Glad I gave this one a shot. Now if I just make it past the 9th level I'd feel a lot better about myself.
So do you download games to this thing? Pretty neat, same concept as the Retron basically. I need to start picking up more Genesis and Snes games to play on my Retron.
edgecrusher said:So do you download games to this thing? Pretty neat, same concept as the Retron basically. I need to start picking up more Genesis and Snes games to play on my Retron.
Kind of. Since this is technically a microcomputer you can do a lot of different things with it. Emulators are just one option. But you can use this to watch movies, play music, or actual computer type things. You could in theory install a webcam on this and use it for home security. In fact some people do. There is a whole community health care of people doing different things with Raspberry Pi. I just choose to use the emulator software since it's packaged so nicely in the retropie set.
Retro con probably does a better job of actual emulation for a few systems. Most are fine, but the NES is surprisingly spotty. At least in regards to some of the more obscure games. Contra and Tetris are perfect, but weirder shit like Dino Riki and Chubby Cherub have bizarre graphic glitches.
I made a nice rediscovery with my Pi this weekend. Anyone who grew up with the NES probably played The Goonies II, as it was a game based on every kid's favorite movie, but it left us with the inevitable question "what happened to the Goonies I?" There were always a barrage of theories, but the truth was the game did exist, just not on the NES. At least not in America anyway. It was on the Famicom, and I think there was a port of it on the Atari 7800, but really the only way for most of us to play it was if you could find one of those Player Choice 10 arcade games. Occasionally you'd find it on that, but it always had a time limit, and it wasn't an easy game. It was kind of a game that required the kind of repeated plays that you can really only get on a console. So remembering that the game existed after a conversation about it this weekend, I finally got a hold of it and here it is.
It turns out the game is surprisingly decent and good interpretation of the movie. It doesn't really get the plot right, but it does nail a lot of movie's settings and the Fratelli brothers and ghost pirates are among the monsters you have to battle with. Each level is a labyrinth that you have to explore in order to find one of the other kidnapped Goonies as well as three keys in order to progress to the next level. There's also hidden equipment that will make the gameplay easier, though its a matter of jumping in the right empty space to find it, and god knows if you don't find it by accident, you won't find it at all. That's a gameplay trope I'm really glad that I'm happy to have seen disappear. The gameplay itself is pretty decent. Really the only genuine issue is that there's no save or continue in it. So the whole thing is trial and error till you die, then start over and hope you make a little more progress the next time. Fortunately the game isn't particularly hard so you can probably finish it in an afternoon, even without a guide. I recommend it.
A few days ago when Punk added Strider to his top 100 games, it got me thinking about the game and I started to do some research on it. While looking over some information about its development, I learned about a game called Osman. It was an arcade only release made by several of the Strider developers after they left Capcom, and it was considered a spiritual sequel. I'd never even heard of this game, but the screenshots looked really impressive, and 1-Up put it on the 100 Games to Play Before You Die list so I decided to give it a whirl.
Anyway the game is about as batshit crazy as any I've played. It's very similar to the Strider arcade game, but this time its set in a neo-Arabian setting (Dubai becomes neo-Toykyo from Akira), and it's all been turned up to 11. There's some sort of story here, but honestly it barely makes sense. There's pieces of cut scenes at the start of each level and a little narrative before some of the boss fights. The translation is completely god awful though, so it barely makes sense. Even if was translated well, there's such tremendous jumps from one part to the next, that I'm pretty sure it still wouldn't help. The action is also so crazy that I'm not sure if it's any good enough. It's an action platformer and they have you jumping all over the place. As you power up you create shadow clones of yourself that keep attacking even after you moved, so that seems to be the key to mastering the game. I can't honestly say it's great combat.
So is it any good? Well that's tough to say. I can say it's absolutely insane. They have you bouncing from some cities to the desert to the middle of the ocean to Prague (Prague? that's odd), a dream level, and maybe outerspace?? I don't know....All throughout it you're just kicking ass and looking cool. I'll just say that's its a pretty cool experience.
That looks pretty neat. Looks like something I would have been into in the Snes days.
That Osman game looks very cool indeed.
I just turned on the ole RetroPie again, and started up Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain. Man, I forgot how dark this game is. And by "dark" I literally mean dark. When the day cycle switches to night or you go into a dungeon the game is fucking impossible to see. Anyway it's definitely dated, but the core of it is still a strong experience. Kain is such a great character. It's a god damn shamed this series was tossed to the curb.
So I meant to make this post a few weeks ago. For Christmas, the one child of mine that actually seems to give a damn about things I like got me an excellent gift, a Raspberry Pi 3. Not familiar with what the hell that is? Well it's basically a micro computer. It costs all of $35 and with a few accessories like micro SD cards and flash sticks, some tutorials on Youtube, an HDMI cable, and a little time and patience you too can have the ultimate emulation machine that play your games on an HDTV. At least that's what how it was pitched. Most of it was true. Except for the "little bit of time and patience." The Youtube videos and descriptions said 20 minutes. Maybe 30. How about 3 days? But it was all worth it. Not only was it oddly satisifying to put that much work into setting up a game console, I got to use this!!!
In fairness it didn't really take 3 days. It was functional after a couple hours, but it did take me a few days of tweaks and refining to really get it where I liked it. That probably doesn't interest you. What should interest you is RetroPie itself. It's a program that basically houses a bunch of emulators and it one of the most intuitive menus you've ever come across. Seriously, the way you select systems and games is remarkbly easy. It's kind of shameful that the console makers have nothing on this. It's more smart phone than console in that way.
So what's available to play? Pretty much every console through N64 and Playstation. N64 games are hit or miss. Harvest Moon 64 (a game lost to even its own developers) runs well. Castlevania 64 is a little spotty, but playable. Crusin' World sadly barely runs. Still there's plenty of games that do seem to work. And the Playstation ones all seem to be great. And of course all the earlier systems work as well. Atari, NES, Genesis, etc. Some PSP games even work, with little loss of performance though I haven't tried them firsthand yet. Really I doubt I will. The main reason I'm using this is to get my hands on old arcade games and Japanese games with fan translations that never made it to the West before.
Anyway, I'll be posting some of what I'm playing here. Showing off a lot of forgotten games, or shit no one has even heard of. Should be an interesting walk down memory lane as the alleys that shoot off of it that are full of homeless people, prostitutes, junkies, and the things that make life fun.