The Retro Gaming Thread

[talonmalon333]

I have to say, I tend to forget just how good Mega Man 2 is, until I replay it.

[Avaitor]

I figured you guy would like to see this.

[Commode]

Has anyone here actually used R.O.B.?  I've never seen one in action, and I'm kind of curious if its something really worth pursuing.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I found these video reviews of the 2 best wrestling games ever made, the latter of which is easily one of the best N64 games ever made:

Wrestlemania 2000

and

No Mercy

I find it funny that No Mercy, a game made well over a decade ago, is still allows far more freedom and customization than any wrestling game made today. That and the game actually had good controls....

[Spark Of Spirit]

And THQ is about to go out of business, too.

That we will never (at this rate) get a sequel to No Mercy is still one of the worst parts about this company.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Unfortunately, the lackluster wrestling games that they were making up until now have been one of the few things that sell fairly well for them (obviously not enough to save them from going bankrupt, but still much better than what they deserve), so they clearly saw no reason to change it. I find it to be a shame that they went with such an overly complex and frustrating more than fun combat system for most wrestling games since last-gen. The whole wrestling game formula was perfected with Wrestlemania 2000 and refined even further with No Mercy. I always expected future wrestling games to go in that direction, but I guess the developers that took over the franchise after AKI never played either of those games.

Also, the story mode in No Mercy deserves special praise. They went all out and had story-lines for each title/championship, and each one of those had branching paths and were even altered a little bit depending on which character you picked (or if you used your own created character, which I did for all of the stories in that game, myself).

[Spark Of Spirit]

I never understood why they ditched AKI in the first place when their games were million sellers and critical favorites. Smackdown never came close to being as fun or as smooth as AKI's games, and that they've changed very little since the PS1 does little to me when people hype them up.

I was expecting SOMEONE to pick them up and make a proper No Mercy sequel, but that ALSO never happened.

The whole thing is just one huge missed opportunity.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Well, THQ held the monopoly on the WWF/E license ever since the N64/PS1 generation of games, so nobody else ever had a chance to pick up the development of the games except for who THQ allowed to do it. I'm just ticked off that the best wrestling formula was just flat-out forgotten about and abandoned. I actually tried a bit of WWE '13 which one of my friends owns since he's a fan of wrestling, and I personally found it a chore to play. The mechanics seemed needlessly complex (at least to me) compared to the streamlined controls of No Mercy, and the gameplay felt way more limiting and restrictive than that game did. The system for doing reversals is also garbage, as is the system for doing special moves in that game, IMO.

Honestly, the only 2 things I felt were missing from No Mercy were Hell in a Cell matches and Table matches. Other than that, the game literally had everything you could possibly think of that would belong in a wrestling game....and more.

I remember that my older brother as well as my cousin, along with myself, used to play triple threat and tag-team matches in that game for hours upon hours. It may very well be the most time we ever spent together playing a multiplayer game in our childhoods, and we played a lot of games together back then.

[Spark Of Spirit]

Weren't there TLC matches in No Mercy? I know there were ladder matches, but I thought there were also table matches.

But yeah, I agree about how it would be nice to have an up to date game with the same system as No Mercy. No Mercy was a game made for anyone that wrestling fans could also enjoy, and we haven't had a game like it since.

Also, I like that there were no announcers. The music was far more exciting than repetitive sound bites that got old after fifteen minutes of play.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Weren't there TLC matches in No Mercy? I know there were ladder matches, but I thought there were also table matches.

You could slam people through tables (though not the regular kind, but rather only the announce table or the pool table in the bar), but there were no actual table matches.

Also, I like that there were no announcers. The music was far more exciting than repetitive sound bites that got old after fifteen minutes of play.

Well, to be honest there was only one music track that played throughout every match, and that itself got old really quick, however the game was so much fun to actually play that you barely noticed it, anyways. Also, I believe there was an option to turn off the music if you really wanted to, anyways.

The create a character feature in that game also deserves a ton of praise. I was a fan of wrestling back in the Attitude Era, so I remember that I ended up creating pretty decent clones of wrestling characters that I liked that weren't featured in this game's roster thanks to its versatile create a character system (though obviously I couldn't emulate most of their signature movies). I was a little ticked off that this game didn't have a Super Kick, for instance, when Wrestlemania 2000 (the first game) did, but either way it was still the better of the 2 games with all of the improvements it brought to the table. Its definitely the high point of wrestling games, to be sure.

[Spark Of Spirit]

That was one thing WCW/NWO Revenge did better and that was how there were like 6 different themes. The Starcade theme is still my most favorite wrestling theme.

I did enjoy that I could pretty much create ANY character I wanted with the create-a-character feature. It made the roster the best in any wrestling game by far, and all my friends pretty much got into wrestling through these games.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

For me, I got into Wrestlemania 2000 and this game because I used to be a wrestling fan, but its very telling of No Mercy's quality that I still love this game to death even long after my interest in wrestling faded.

[Spark Of Spirit]

Yeah, the best sports games can even hook non-fans of the sport. It's probably why sports games are so lame now, since they only cater to hardcore fans of the sports.

[gunswordfist]

A day or two ago I got past the plane crash level and up to the underwater ship or whatever level in Perfect Dark. After I had to watch an overly long explosion cutscene because I got a special death special I didn't notice the extra tiny timer at the bottom of the screen and even though Elvis was running towards the exit (far too slowly), I had no way of getting there in time just like how I have a hard time finding almost all objectives in Perfect Dark. And yeah, fuck going right back and having to completely start the entire mission over after all of that. I'll probably continue the game again today though.

[Commode]

I just bought a Super Famicom, with a Japanese Super Game Boy, for 30 bucks.  I'm not really sure what I'm going to do with it yet.  It did come with two of the controllers with the pretty multicolor buttons though, and they do fit into my NA SNES.