Sometime around Christmas time I bought a Game Boy Advance and a few games at a retro shop that I really like. There is a chain of stores here in the south called Game Xchange they sell movies and used games and systems old and new. Two very cool guys that I got to know that worked at the one nearest me since I shopped there since 2003. Sometime around 2008 these 2 guys pooled their income tax checks and savings together to start their own retro shop across town. It took off and did really well, it was a much better game shop than Game Xchange or the half dozen Game Stops in town, I loved it because they had the best selection of Sega stuff. I always thought it was so cool that these two guys went from being workers making minimum wage to competing against the national chain stores like Game X-Change and Game Stop in town.

They broke off and opened 3 other stores over the last couple of years. One of them was in a town that was a little closer to me(I live in the middle of nowhere 30 minutes away from nearest grocery store, love it). So around Christmas I picked up a sweet Game Boy Advance here, the screen is brighter and better looking that I remember any GBA screen(did they make a different model or something?). Also scored Tecmo Bowl for Game Boy, it's better than I remembered, definitely GOAT portable football game ever.

But Friday on my way home from work I went back hoping to pick up a few more GBA games and the store was closed up and emptied out. Apparently they went out of business at the first of the year. I was fucking gutted thinking I was about to shop for some games only to pull up and see store emptied out and doors chained shut.

Jan 13, 2019 15:25:33 GMT shinobimusashi said:

Sometime around Christmas time I bought a Game Boy Advance and a few games at a retro shop that I really like. There is a chain of stores here in the south called Game Xchange they sell movies and used games and systems old and new. Two very cool guys that I got to know that worked at the one nearest me since I shopped there since 2003. Sometime around 2008 these 2 guys pooled their income tax checks and savings together to start their own retro shop across town. It took off and did really well, it was a much better game shop than Game Xchange or the half dozen Game Stops in town, I loved it because they had the best selection of Sega stuff. I always thought it was so cool that these two guys went from being workers making minimum wage to competing against the national chain stores like Game X-Change and Game Stop in town.

They broke off and opened 3 other stores over the last couple of years. One of them was in a town that was a little closer to me(I live in the middle of nowhere 30 minutes away from nearest grocery store, love it). So around Christmas I picked up a sweet Game Boy Advance here, the screen is brighter and better looking that I remember any GBA screen(did they make a different model or something?). Also scored Tecmo Bowl for Game Boy, it's better than I remembered, definitely GOAT portable football game ever.

But Friday on my way home from work I went back hoping to pick up a few more GBA games and the store was closed up and emptied out. Apparently they went out of business at the first of the year. I was fucking gutted thinking I was about to shop for some games only to pull up and see store emptied out and doors chained shut.

Those retro gaming stores are becoming scarcer and scarcer. Nowadays, it just seems easier to run that business from home where you don't have to worry about expenses and can offer consumers better prices. I'm apart of the problem, if I see one, I love to take a look, but I rarely buy anything because it's always marked up. We've lost a fair few places down here over the years. GameTraders circa mid to late 2000s used to be my go-to. They were actually really good when it came to my needs since they'd import DS games which I was collecting for at the time. They were also the only local store that still stocked retro stuff, so they turned me onto games like Terranigma for the Super Nintendo and I was able to get TMNT: Tournament Fighters from them. I think they fell victim to the gaming crash where a bunch of stores all tried to have their piece of the pie, yet in the end only EB Games and JB Hi Fi remained. We also had GAME from the UK try and come in but they always seemed like a bootleg EB Games with mostly modern stuff at mediocre prices.

My other store was a Mr Toys in the city. It was it's own seperate store and it was all dedicated to gaming. It was one of those stores where you walk in and you're just surrounded by shelves and glass displays of games - if I was running a store, I'd want that look. The store had the best range, good prices and they usually sold me on games I hadn't even heard of before going in. Then rent in the CBD went crazy and all the unique stores were shut down.

The GBA is awesome tech. Do you have the original design, or the SP? I found once you go SP (or even DS) there's no going back. Lately I've been playing through Minish Cap and I've been impressed with how it runs. The way enemies die in a cloud of smoke, being able to roll in 3D Zeldas, the way NPCs behave when you talk to them - it's that evolution of 16-bit goodness we saw in games like DKC and Yoshi's Island come to life. I've actually been eyeing off an Everdrive for the system since it'd be convenient to play it all on the go but $150 seems steep, especially after I just bought the N64 Everdrive which was every Christmas and Birthday all at once. Still, I want to play those Castlevanias, Mega Man Zeros, Advance Wars, Astro Boy etc. on the go.

Its the SP flip open version, super impressed with the screen, I've had one of these before a while back but don't remember the screen being this bright and vivid I wonder if it's been modded or something. Game Boy color games look great on it, the only GBA games I have for it is the Sega arcade comp with Outrun/Hang On/Space Harrier/Afterburner, Namco Museum, and the NES Legand Of Zelda. Need to pick up some games for my niece to play with this thing, I'm eyeing the ports of SNES games like Mario and Donkey Kong Country.

Not bad at all. Super Mario Advance 2 was my favourite iteration of Super Mario World - they made the Dragon Coins worth collecting and they changed Luigi up so he handles like he did in Super Mario Bros 2. I haven't played the DKC games, but presume they're on par with the SNES offerings. I did play the Game Boy equivalents and thought they were fun platformers in their own right, albeit short.

Up until a few years ago, I kind of underestimated the GBA. Around the time of it's release, it seemed like Nintendo were a good 2-3 years behind where they ought to be with their handhelds. The Game Boy Colour came out in 98, when it should have been out at least by 95. Then the GBA comes out in 2001 and Nintendo's best idea was to make Super Mario Bros 2 the launch title. It took me years to get over that awful first impression and more time to realise the system was more than just SNES ports.

If you get the chance, I'd recommend any of the Castlevanias or even Astro Boy.

Big Pete play all 3 DKC games and finish them..now!
You don’t know what you’re missing!

Jan 18, 2019 5:31:25 GMT System said:

Big Pete play all 3 DKC games and finish them..now!
You don’t know what you’re missing!

Are they any different to the SNES games?

I grew up on the Super Nintendo versions, and played them to death.

Jan 18, 2019 9:07:36 GMT Big Pete said:

Jan 18, 2019 5:31:25 GMT System said:

Big Pete play all 3 DKC games and finish them..now!
You don’t know what you’re missing!

Are they any different to the SNES games?

I grew up on the Super Nintendo versions, and played them to death.

Oh I misread, my mistake. You mean the Retro (company) ones?
(So did I, seems like an Australian thing 😂)

Returns is fantastic, I enjoyed Tropical Freeze but it’s by far the hardest..which is saying something. the K levels are complete BS, and I enjoy hard games.

:lol: who's on first?

No, I'm talking about these games:

Supposedly, their ports of the SNES games, but I'm not sure if they made any changes to the source material.

I've got Returns and Tropical Freeze, I've just never got around to playing them. With Returns, I want to mod it so I don't have to wiggle the Wiimote when I play. I played a bit of Tropical Freeze with a mate, but they sucked so it got too frustrating.

Sorry Big Pete I’m an idiot 😂.

I doubt there’s much difference can’t mess with masterpieces!

Kiddy Kong is still a dumb mark no matter the console.

Ugh I hated Kiddy Kong back in the day, I really need to give Donkey Kong Country 3, another play through though... as it's been years since I've last played it, but always found it to be the weakest of the SNES DKC games.

I'd rank them as DKC 2: Diddy's Kong Quest > Donkey Kong Country > DKC 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble!.

That's the popular choice Lony. I enjoy all the games based on their own merits. DKC is the roughest around the edges and suffers the most from arcade game design, and yet has the best atmosphere of all the games. I like how it starts off and it's all cheery because you're in DK's neck of the woods but the further you go, the more solemn the game becomes. It took me back to shows like Captain Planet or movies like Fern Gully where the evil mastermind is messing with the environment and you're getting closer and closer to the source. The game felt paced better as well, it starts off relatively easy and only throws some of the tougher levels in later. In saying that, the bonus missions are a throwback to arcade games of past where lives were considered a precious commodity and almost feel like a waste in this game.

DKC2 fixes this problem by making more side-content which unlocks more content for the player. It strikes a good balance between the two, retaining the same composer of DKC1 while featuring more creative level design. For decades I considered it hands down the best game of the series, with one of the greatest platforming characters ever (Dixie Kong), but I don't find it as enjoyable to revisit. DKC1 I can boot up a save and can find myself in World 4 without feeling bored. DKC2 on the other hand has a lot of slower levels, and I'm not a big fan of it's obsession of vertical based levels. They just seem slower pace to me, and mixed with the 'behind enemy lines' feel to the game, it isn't as inviting as DKC.

DKC3 is the ugly duckling of the trilogy. They decided to move the series away into this new area featuring bears and derpy looking enemies and at times it feels like somebody else developed this game other than Rare. From what I understand, they put their B-team in charge of this so it makes sense. Anyways, DKC3 has even more gimmicks than DKC2 and levels vary from enjoyable to pretty tedious. There were some good ideas at play here, but then you get these MegaMan esque levels with the disappearing platforms with the confusing hit detection that makes the game a drag to play through. Then there's others with low gravity that are actually pretty enjoyable. Kiddy was a curious choice, but I enjoyed the contrast between the two and liked how they'd team up. I thought DKC3 really tried to push the hardware with it's explorable overworld and some of the boss battles. Also, because the N64 was delayed here, I'd usually leave the game on in the background just to hear Peach's Castle in the background. I thought that was such a cool easter egg, and felt like the perfect branch between the two systems. Anyways, I essentially see DKC3 as the most creative, but also the least polished of the series. I much prefer the OST of the first two over it, as well as the enemy designs.

It always felt like DKC3 gets a bad rap since it came out after the N64, so it didn't have that hype to go with it. Still think it's a good game, but obviously it's gonna seem inferior to a GOAT candidate.

After 21 years of memories, my N64 can no longer power on. Hopefully it's just the power adaptor, I just ordered a new one, so I'll find out sometime next week.

Thinking back on it, I should have known something was up when the console randomly reset itself. My best guess is that power board just got old and the recent sessions with the Everdrive sucked whatever juice it had left. Perhaps having it plugged into the Max/High Performance slot on the Powerboard wasn't the best idea either.

Worst case, I'm going to be buying a new N64 off of Ebay.

Feb 2, 2019 4:43:35 GMT Big Pete said:

After 21 years of memories, my N64 can no longer power on. Hopefully it's just the power adaptor, I just ordered a new one, so I'll find out sometime next week.

Thinking back on it, I should have known something was up when the console randomly reset itself. My best guess is that power board just got old and the recent sessions with the Everdrive sucked whatever juice it had left. Perhaps having it plugged into the Max/High Performance slot on the Powerboard wasn't the best idea either.

Worst case, I'm going to be buying a new N64 off of Ebay.

The new power adaptor did the trick.

Kalamari Desert, here I come.

Feb 19, 2018 17:40:13 GMT shinobimusashi said:

Went to wal mart on my lunch break to shop for something for my neices birthday this weekend and found an SNES mini!!! Scored it for like $80, too bad it was the last one i would have bought one for myself.

That's awesome.

There are some great games on there, including my all-time favorite game in Super Mario World, main reason I picked one up was so I could once again play it with a SNES controller. Having said that, there are still a lot of great games on there in Donkey Kong Country, Super Metroid, FF III, and Secret of Mana.

Super Mario Kart, while I enjoyed the hell out of it as a kid, I find to be hard to play from a visual stand point these days, when compared to the newer games.

I've been playing a shit ton of Wrestlemania 2000 lately.



I'm really going deep into this game, checking out everybody's move-set, figuring out the meta of the game and just really breaking the game down so if certain guys were included, how they would have been programmed. I've even gone about getting an English Patch of Virtual Pro Wrestling 2 and doing the same thing there, learning more about Giant Baba, Mitsharu Misawa, Kenta Kobashi etc. along the way.

One of my early take-aways is how OP The Blue Meanie was. It emerged in one of the WCW Books that some of the guys in THQ were huge Raven marks, so Da Blue Guy got special treatment. In the WWF, he would have been lucky to have one move, but here they've given him the Tornado DDT, Manihostral Cradle and the Evenflow DDT as a shout out to his ECW days. It left an impression on me as a kid as I seriously thought Meanie was a borderline WWF Intercontinental Championship level guy, instead of being a glorified manager.

Another guy with a surprisingly good move-set was Meat. They've basically made him into a Cruiserweight, so he has moves like the Frankensteiner, The Yakuza Kick, Hurricarana, A Jumping Swinging DDT and a Frog Splash.

Looks like Sega did the right thing and ditched At Games for the new Genesis Mini, they are going all out on the thing now, it's supposed to come out in September. All of the At Games Genesis clones are complete fucking garbage, was so disappointed when they announced that they were going to make the Gen Mini. I'm super excited about it now. One of the games announced for it is Castlevania Bloodlines, which will be the first time the game has ever been re-released in any way. I'll be buying this thing day 1 so I can play some HDMI Genesis on my 4K curve!

Speaking of Bloodlines, I seen on Price Charting website that the game has gradually increased in value over the past few years, it's selling around the $70 mark loose now(used to sell for $10-$12). Glad I kept mine back when I sold off most of my games back in 2011. Definitely my 3rd favorite Castlevania game behind the NES original and Belmont's Revenge on Game Boy. IV and SOTN can suck it!

Apr 18, 2019 9:18:58 GMT shinobimusashi said:

Looks like Sega did the right thing and ditched At Games for the new Genesis Mini, they are going all out on the thing now, it's supposed to come out in September. All of the At Games Genesis clones are complete fucking garbage, was so disappointed when they announced that they were going to make the Gen Mini. I'm super excited about it now. One of the games announced for it is Castlevania Bloodlines, which will be the first time the game has ever been re-released in any way. I'll be buying this thing day 1 so I can play some HDMI Genesis on my 4K curve!

Speaking of Bloodlines, I seen on Price Charting website that the game has gradually increased in value over the past few years, it's selling around the $70 mark loose now(used to sell for $10-$12). Glad I kept mine back when I sold off most of my games back in 2011. Definitely my 3rd favorite Castlevania game behind the NES original and Belmont's Revenge on Game Boy. IV and SOTN can suck it!

Konami are releasing the Castlevania Anniversary Collection on May 16. It comes with Castlevania I-IV, Bloodlines, Kid Dracula, and Castlevania I and II for Game Boy.

The Belmonts are back!

Holy shit, Contra Hard Corp, Mickey Mouse Castle Of Illusion AND World Of Illusion, Thunderforce III, and EARTHWORM JIM confirmed for Genesis Mini! That's NUTS!

Edit: also LANDSTALKER!

With 10 more games(edit: 20!) to be announced I'm pretty stoked, this is already better lineup of games than SNES Mini. I wonder what's next? Alladin? Musha? Crusader of Centy?
Splatterhouse? Road Rash? Surely they will put the full Sonic 3/Sonic & Knuckles combo/lock on game. I want this right now

Went to town yesterday and treated myself at one of the retro game shops. I picked up Castlevania II: Belmonts Revenge and Donkey Kong '94 for the original Game Boy. Also found Outrun 2019 for the Genesis and I'm in the mood to drag out the 64 so I picked up South Park and NFL Quarterback Club 99 because they were cheap.

It's been a few years since I played Castlevania II for Game Boy, oh my god it is so fucking good. Easily my favorite Game Boy game of any kind and probably one of my favorite games period. Love the music and they did so much with the level designs for such limitations that the old Game Boy has, game has such a great visual atmosphere.

Played DK '94 for the first time and was really impressed. Always heard it was very good and it really is. It starts out with the original 4 levels of the DK arcade game but Mario has some new moves that are really sweet. The game has some really excellent tight controls that feel really good for a Game Boy game. Once you get past the original arcade levels it you get into a really fantastic platformer/puzzle style game where it's like a modern update on the old classic gameplay/level designs, I'm really digging it so far.

Outrun 2019 is fucking excellent too. I'm just tickled pink that this game's title is Outrun 2019 and now it is 2019 and somehow nothing in real life is as futuristic as people imagined back when this game came out. :lol: This is easily one of the best racing/driving games on the Genesis. You can tell they were aiming for like a Genesis version of F-Zero with it, it's not nearly as flashy with the graphics but I'd say it has way more charm than F-Zero, which to me always felt really lifeless and got boring fast.

I got Quarterback Club 99 to have a football game to tinker around with on my day off today because I'm a dork nerd like that.

South Park is purely a nostalgia purchase. I bought this game for $60 brand new back in the day when I was working with my dad and uncles building houses in the Summer of 99. I ended up needing more money to buy school supplies so I tried to take it back and get my money back from the Wal Mart I bought it from but they wouldn't give me a refund. So me and my mom came up with a scheme where she would go up there with me and scream at the manager about selling this dirty foul mouthed obscene game to her 14 year old son(when in reality she couldn't really care less about games/movies and shit we watched, I just wanted my money back because the game kinda sucked). It was embarrassing as fuck but it worked. :lol: Good times.

DK94 is one of my favorite games ever. Think I had it as top 3 in that Gameboy countdown I did.

Fuck, now I wanna make a lets play series of it like I did a few years back. Boy oh boy do I miss the cringe.

May 12, 2019 11:45:38 GMT @ness said:

DK94 is one of my favorite games ever. Think I had it as top 3 in that Gameboy countdown I did.

Fuck, now I wanna make a lets play series of it like I did a few years back. Boy oh boy do I miss the cringe.

Man I wonder if we could dig up a link to that countdown on the wayback

This has been my new addiction of late. I love panel de pon but never mastered them to the point I can pull off skill chains. I'm slowly but surely getting there now and Puzzle League is by far the best version of panel de pon.

When the game originally came out, I wasn't impressed at all. It was like Nintendo threw Pokemon and Panel de Pon into the teleportation machine from the fly and this was the horrible ass-end mutation. A Panel De Pon game with obnoxious voice clips that almost make a Jar Jar Binks spin-off seem enticing. The game looked hastily thrown together like it was supposed to come free with Nintendo Power and it was right at the tail end of the first generation when everyone was ready for Gold & Silver. The only aspect of the game that impressed me was that the game had FMV on a console that wasn't supposed to achieve that.

However, I now realise it's the best version of panel de pon with more modes and better AI. The sound-clips while obnoxious don't bother me and the anime music remixes are nostalgic as anything. I can't get 'Road to Viridian City' or 'What Kind Of Pokemon Are You' out of my head and they take me back to 1999 when I'm using dial-up internet to check out the latest results from WCW Thunder.

Recently cleared Hard Move after 60+ continues. I want to try and widdle that down, so usually around this time every night I'm listening to podcasts while going through the game. I find nothing as comfortable as that.

My other go to when I feel like doing something different. It's one of those games where one bad move can ruin your entire run and the game is constantly giving you junk pieces to test your mettle. Recently this game literally sucked three hours out of me and I have no memory of it whatsoever. I turned the game on, played what felt like three games and came to find myself awake at 4am, that was a rough day.

There's nothing comfier than playing the hoverglide sections with some Chris Van Vliet interviews in the background. It's not the most exciting games and it can be extremely frustrating to play through the same slow four minute levels only to mess up the landing, but once you master it, there's a satisfaction few games have. My only bug bear were the Pokemon Snap levels where you have to take specific photos and you're graded on the quality of the photos. I still can't get the hang of this and it seems like the scoring is just completely random. Otherwise the jet-pack stages where you have to bounce a ball towards a specific location ended up being my favourite. It took me an entire Brian Pillman Starrcast panel to get the hang of it, but once I did I was banging out Perfect scores like nobody's business.

Just completed hard mode and starting to gain a good grasp on the game. This is one of those games that's always been pleasing to the eye and fun to play but I've never really delved beyond easy mode. Having played around with the custom mode, I'm amazed at how well this game controls and some of the track design, including a lot of the short-cuts and risk/rewards.

Just had a quick run through and what amazes me is how this game sucks you in. It has that Doom run and gun style of play where you're constantly collecting new weapons and taking down bigger and more skillful enemies until the screen is just crawling with them. When it starts to feel like too much, you get transported to a brand new area and you start over. Everything feels smooth and outside of some awkward first-person platforming it holds up remarkably well.

Pilotwings 64 was one of the biggest disappointments for me. The SNES game is an all time favorite for me, I was so hyped for the 64 version I thought it would be next level but I just do not like it for some reason, the art direction of the graphics, the gameplay I don't know it just doesn't feel or look like what I thought a next level Pilotwings would.

Waverace is my favorite 64 game bar none. It's so damn pretty and so damn smooth and fun to play. I got down on it some last weekend and it just never gets old to me. I tried the Gamecube sequel and it's trash.

I used to love Turok back in the day but haven't gone back to it. I need to pick up the first 2 they usually go pretty cheap around here.

I hooked up my 64 last weekend to play a few games I had picked up a while back but never had time to play. I played South Park and it was good for some nostalgia for 5 minutes, my god that game sucked. It's a shame they didn't just make a 2D game of some kind to stay true to the art style of the actual show, probably could have pulled off something really nice in 2D or a 2.5D type game either RPG or platformer or something, this is a pretty lame FPS.

Then I played NFL Quarterback Club 99 for about 30 seconds, ugh, these 32/64 bit era football games were fucking garbage looking back now.

Also tried Blast Corp but couldn't figure it out and gave up on it pretty quick. I spent most of my time just playing Waverace, so satisfying.

Was that the one where you throw snowballs? Yeah, very disappointing. I love everything about the N64. Well except that you can't display the carts and know what they are since the labels are on the face side rather than the outside like a normal set of cases. Other than colored themes like No Mercy (black) and DK64 (piss yellow).

South Park on the N64 was a product of it's time. Matt and Trey had no idea that South Park would last twenty seasons and wanted to make the most of their success, so they signed off on every piece of merchandising they could. That included video games and Acclaim, who were right up there with Midway as the biggest video game publishers in America, were happy to oblige. It was pretty simple, South Park is a satirical show, so let's make a satirical version of Turok. Turok had murderous dinosaurs, so the closest thing to that is Turkeys. It was like they had the most basic ideas for what a South Park should entail and just tried to apply it to their own experience. What you end up with is largely a big empty game that feels like a bad Turok rip-off than a satisfying South Park game.

Still, I consider it a large part of the N64 experience. That 1998/99 period was dominated by ads for South Park and it was one of the most popular releases of it's time. The game was usually hard to get a hold of at rental stores and media coverage was extensive. There is a lot of revisionist history surrounding the N64 and South Park deserves to be remembered as a relic of it's time.

Shin, it sounds like you're describing Stick of Truth & Fractured But Whole. I've only played through half of Stick of Truth, and as a long-time South Park fan, I think it's genuinely worth checking out. There's references through out and the game does a good job of satirising the video game medium.

There were a few disappointments in the N64 Library that Rare always seemed to make a point of rectifying. South Park may have been a largely middling FPS, but Conker's Bad Fur Day was the Matt Stone/Trey Parker style game that fans were after. Forget about mini-game compilations or experimental kart racers, the South Park game that would have worked best in that era would have been a Bad Fur Day style romp with an original story by Parker and Stone.

As an aside, all the hype and excitement I had for Buck Bumble was salvaged by Jet Force Gemini, a space opera game with a lot of great ideas.

I've been playing a lot of N64 lately to wind down. The other night I busted out one of my favourite kart games for the N64, Snowboard Kids. There were some games in this era that were just perfect video shop games, and I'd consider this right up there. It wasn't as polished as Mario Kart 64 or Diddy Kong Racing, but for an original game, it had a decent personality and covered all the stereotypes. Back in the day, everyone made a point of picking on the fat kid, Tommy, since he was typically the fastest character.

The game comprises of six tracks to start off with, with 3 more tracks unlocking upon completion. I was able to win 5/6, but the last level, a theme park style course got the better of me. I'm not sure how kids were supposed to win without hours upon hours of practice because some of the turns you've got to make are enough to make your head in. Unfortunately the game takes up an entire memory card to save, so I'll have to start over if I want to complete the game.

In mean time, here's one of the best tracks on the N64.

In 2017, I played through 00 Agent for the first time, which was something I could never dream of doing when I first got the game. The one level that caused me the most amount of grief was Control. For those unfamiliar, Control is one of the longest levels in the game and requires you to play meticulously through out. After slowly and surely taking out each sentry and guard out one at a time, the level comes down to this two minute mission where you have to protect Natalya from guards who are swarning from four (or if you're like me) six different areas. Ammo is tight and the game will constantly send two guards from either side, ensuring you'll either get hit from behind or worse, somebody will sneak up on Natayla and end the mission. Even after she's done disabling Goldeneye, you still need to make sure she gets to her escape area safe and sound and destroy one last server before making your own escape. This makes for an exhillerating final dash because you're typically drained on resources and have to weigh up the risk and reward of getting more health in a heavily guarded room and firing your way out. Or making a beeline towards the final target, quickly destroying it and making a mad dash to the exit with guards firing from all directions. I typically go with Option A because I usually have more autonamy.

It's one of those levels where I envision it by modern standards. If this was remade, there would be a checkpoint right before the protection mission and the whole thing would be completed within a single play session. On one hand, it'd make the game feel less frustrating, but on the other it wouldn't evoke the same intensity.

When I beat Control in 2017, it was like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders. It took over a week to complete that one segment with Natalya. I was able to get the extra piece of health and had to pause the game because I'd become a barrel of nerves. It was so weird, but I think 20 years of build up had taken it's toll and I really didn't want to go through that portion again. I clutched it and felt like I was on cloud nine. Two years later, I wanted to see how long it would take me to beat it again to prove it wasn't a fluke. I actually had an amazing run first go, but got ridiculously careless after the careless and allowed the guards to take to me like Bonnie and Clyde. From near over-health to dead in one bad move.

I found a few optimizations that made the level easier to get through. I didn't realise you could switch the inverse controls around, which made aiming 100% easier. I was able to find all the blind spots for the sentries, making that opening a piece of cake and devised a strategy for the next portion. There's a room where six guards are waiting for you and will shoot you upon sight. The trick was to lure two guards away from the area, giving you the room to find each guard's blind spot saving a bunch of health and ammo. The final save was one of the server rooms where there is four sentries. By simply taking out the guards and two sentries, you can ignore the other two sentries by just running past them since there is an entrance way that protects you from their fire.

This gave me more ammo, allowing me to be a little more reckless with my ammo to take guards out quicker. From there, it just became about concentration and trying to divy the time up ASAP. I nearly choked on the last server mission, but had enough health to recover and blast my way through the guards to finish.

Still, one of the most levels in FPS history. For my generation, it's right up there with the underwater level from TMNT. Not unbelievably hard, but certainly a challenge that demands a level of skill.