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Post by chibby on Jan 3, 2019 7:46:43 GMT -5
I wanna be the very best, like no one ever was. To catch them is my real quest, to train them is my cause. I will travel across the land, searching far and wide: each pokemon, to understand the power that's inside. Every challenge across the way, with courage I must face, I will battle every day, to claim my rightful place. Come with me, the time is right, there's no better team. Arm in arm, we'll win the fight, it's always been our dream. It's you and me, I know it's my destiny. Your my best friend, in a world we must defend. My heart's so true, our courage will pull us through. You teach me and I'll teach you. Gotta catch 'em all, POKEMON!
I'm not going to bother googling the actual lyrics to see how close I am here.
All jokes aside, I don't do a lot of handheld gaming (save for these days on my cursed smartphone) but I seem to remember having a good time with the Golden Sun series (I played at least the first one, maybe the second). Ironically, I played those games on a desktop emulator, so even then it wasn't a handheld experience.
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Post by Ex on Jan 3, 2019 14:38:46 GMT -5
I'd have never expected those assets to hold up so well under such intense scrutiny. Yes the DS has rather decent polygonal/texture tech, it's like a Super N64, only hobbled by its low resolution, which the emulator can overcome by artificially enhancing the resolution. (ePSXe can also do this for PS1 games.) Furthermore, said emulator can also be setup to run DS games in widescreen, while keeping the proper aspect ratio for the polygonal vertices. That said, I still prefer to play DS games on my actual DS. Purely for the comfort factor. I usually play my handhelds in a recliner, with lots of pillow propping and a heated vibrating back massager. And I figure the mouse is easily used as the stylus which is probably awesome. Yes the mouse serves as the stylus, and you can use a PC controller in tandem. There are also impressive DS emulators for smartphones, like DraStic. GB - Link's Awakening is my second favorite Zelda so far. This game really is outstanding. When I played it (1998), I was poor as hell and couldn't afford a real Game Boy and the cartridge, or even a decent computer. I ended up emulating Link's Awakening on an old 486 33mhz using NO$GB on DOS. I had no sound and keyboard only controls. It was still amazing. I really need to play through the DX version someday, not only for the colors and extra dungeon, but to actually get to hear the music this time. For the longest time I refused to even entertain the notion of playing a Pokemon game. I guess I felt like the series was beneath me, or would perhaps challenge my manhood. I've slowly come around over the years, and have considered giving HeartGold a try, or one of the Pokemon Mystery Dungeons. I've tried two or three times to get into this one. I've read / heard many times that the GS games are outstanding. However, I've not yet been able to get the first game to stick for me. The pacing is just glacial due to bloated conversations and I get burnt out waiting on the extremely long cutscenes to end. I have to imagine the actual gameplay itself must be really special though, to garner the review scores these games achieved (the GBA entries anyway). |
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Post by Sarge on Jan 3, 2019 16:06:23 GMT -5
I'd played Link's Awakening on the ol' green screen, but also set folks up after I discovered emulation. My choice then was VGB-DOS, which ran beautifully on pretty much all the machines I put it on, ranging from a 486 DX4 at 75 MHz to a Pentium 60 MHz. I'm pretty sure I tried it on an old 33 MHz 486 I had laying around, too.
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Post by Xeogred on Jan 3, 2019 17:01:57 GMT -5
Link's Awakening's OST is a 10/10 Ex, drop everything you're doing now and replay it asap. Every dungeon has its own theme, which became a bit more standard later in the franchise but it's crazy LA did that like a decade prior. The Tal Tal Heights theme is my favorite though. I still can't fathom how this game exists on the GB, it's so dense. And always I've always liked Link to the Past as my top favorite game of all time next to Super Metroid, I LOVE the Feather in LA. Being able to jump in that one adds an onslaught of cool and different puzzle ideas. I've played the DX version once and really enjoyed it, but I'm actually more partial to the original since I played that version way more haha. Seeing Zelda dominate this kind of thread still weirds me out a lot. Sorry I'm always going to be that guy... but hey I love talking about Link's Awakening. And the two Oracle games are amazing too. I've dabbled into Golden Sun a bit myself but also don't remember it ever pulling me in. |
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Post by toei on Jan 3, 2019 17:21:04 GMT -5
Golden Sun's writing is famously terrible, with conversations that go in circles forever as characters repeat the same information over and over while pretending they didn't already know it. It's just baffling. It actually gets worse in the sequels, too. The gameplay is pretty good, though - like Lufia 2, it mixes ARPG-style puzzles with turn-based RPG. I liked Dark Dawn on DS the most for its fun dungeons, but the story was unbelievably bad.
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Post by Ex on Jan 3, 2019 17:52:48 GMT -5
Link's Awakening's OST is a 10/10 Ex, drop everything you're doing now and replay it asap. I've got the DX version on my 3DS XL, actually bought it off the 3DS eShop. So it's gonna happen eventually. I still need to beat Seasons as well (also have that one on my 3DS XL). I have beaten Ages, which I greatly enjoyed. Golden Sun's writing is famously terrible, with conversations that go in circles forever as characters repeat the same information over and over / the story was unbelievably bad. I wonder if all three games have the same writer. I'll have to look into it when I have more time. Dark Dawn looks like it has really high production values for a DS JRPG though. |
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Post by Xeogred on Jan 3, 2019 17:58:10 GMT -5
I went into Oracle of Ages thinking I'd like that one more, assuming it would be similar to Link to the Past. Well turns out it was very different than LTTP and that's not a bad thing, however I actually walked away liking Seasons the most out of the two! They are both amazing and great to play back to back though, the difficulty is also higher than Link's Awakening, which is quite easy when you go back to it honestly. Not a bad thing though. I'm sad that Capcom originally wanted to make a trilogy but we only got two games. I know toei loves Minish Cap and I need to give that one a replay someday, but I just haven't cared for handheld Zelda that much after LA and the Oracle duology.
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Post by toei on Jan 3, 2019 18:11:32 GMT -5
Minish Cap was also Capcom, though, and I'd say it's closest to the Oracles games. I like them too, but I played them back to back and I always forget which is which. I know I had a clear preference for one of them, I'll have to check. Ex Yeah, the three Golden Sun games credit the same guy for the scenario, Hiroyuki Takahashi, who's old-school Climax. He also wrote Shining Force 3, which was already showing signs of wordiness but still much better overall, and was involved with Shining in the Darkness and Shining Force 1, which didn't have that problem. I see a few possibilities: 1. Space restrictions forced him to be more concise in the 16 and 32-bit days, thus greatly improving his writing. 2. His old co-writers kept him in check, or his new sub-writers are awful (none are credited for Golden Sun, but it's very rare that one guy will write an RPG's entire script, so he might still have some). 3. The localization is just really bad. |
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Post by Sarge on Jan 3, 2019 18:41:33 GMT -5
Yeah, I don't play Golden Sun for the scintillating plot, it's more for the Lufia II-style vibes and spiffy, super-quick Dragon Quest-style combat. And the cool Djinn class combos. (Seriously, play around with them!)
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Post by chibby on Jan 3, 2019 23:02:56 GMT -5
My younger brother and I both started Nuzlocke runs of Emerald, and I think that challenge was exactly what my pokemon experience needed to not feel stale or beneath me. I feel like the makers of Pokemon really should implement the option to set the game to "hard" and just make hard those rules. It's like I'm playing an entirely different game. In fact, I because I am very seriously role playing that "fainted" pokemon are in fact dead pokemon, I was made visibly upset, according to my partner, when some punk-ass trainer made his Koffing use the move Self-Destruct to killing both itself and one of my favorites. All in all, I kind of feel like I'm playing some sort of bizarre, fantasy-world, dog-fighting simulator, a sentence which, having read it back to myself, fills me with dread. |
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