How did you get a hold of that @aaron? Sounds like it's up there with the games I mentioned, if not rarer!

Oct 26, 2022 20:14:49 GMT Emperor said:

How did you get a hold of that Aaron? Sounds like it's up there with the games I mentioned, if not rarer!

I bought it brand new and sealed from an Italian seller in 2008 for £30!

The release was cancelled here due to some completely false controversy - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_Rose#Controversy

Let's bring this thread back to life with a game that came out over 20 years ago!

Syberia 1

Game from 2002 plays and feels like a game from 2002, all I can think about when playing Syberia for the 1st time was "Outdated badly". This game suffers from Quality of Life perspective and I think this game is one of those where if you have nostalgia about this game from back in the day, you might overlook what the game actually is today. Unfortunately for me, this isn't the case. The Syberia series was always one I wanted to get into and play after hearing some good opinions of the 1st 2 games and getting the game very cheap on a sale via the Nintendo Switch, I said why not?

In a nutshell, the plot is basically you play as an American lawyer(Anne Walker) who has to seal the deal of a contract negotiation for her boss by getting the signature of a descendant of a toy factory. However, as you'd imagine, this becomes far more complicated than what was anticipated and your protagonist goes through an entire journey as she tries to secure this deal for fear of losing her job or well-standing with her boss. All along the way, she speaks with her husband or mother or best friend to get updates about life in New York(her hometown) in the meanwhile which leads to some interesting dialogue. It's a point & click game with puzzles which no combat and it's admittedly a very relaxing game due to the lack of it so you sorta have to know what you're getting yourself into. For a while, I always thought this was a Tomb Raider/Uncharted esque linear action-adventure game until recently discovering this is point & click. 

Lets highlight some good about this game:

Puzzles Galore: Game gives you pretty standard and fair puzzles. Basically, you need to click around and/or follow clues or directions that are listed throughout. Not the 1st nor last game to do this, no puzzle really overstayed or was nauseating although it goes back to point 1 that due to the moving back & forth, it got tedious if you messed up to have to go right back to a beginning portion and then having to do re--do it. It's more of a Quality of Life issue since this game is 20+ years old but it's the name of the game.

Reasonable Game Length: Game is a good 7-8 hours long which is seemingly pretty solid for a game of this genre. While part of this game's issue is padding game length due to the traversal going back and forth, it's still a decent enough experience where it isn't overly bloated or feel like it's little meat on the bone.


Now the negative:

Bland As Snow: One of the biggest crimes a point and click game can do is make a game that's void of any personality or creativeness and for much of Syberia, I felt that way. Forget the wooden acting, game came out in 2002 so this game wasn't alone in this regard. I thought some characters were voiced better than others but this is a minor blemish if at all. What isn't minor is the one dimensional, bland characters you embark throughout your journey. It feels so generic and basic which is sort of the theme of this entire game. No characters that really stick with you, the plot lacked any kind of bite or twist that wowed you(Which 20 years later, this game gets overshadowed mightily in comparison to narrative games). This was the biggest takeaway from this game. It's fine to not have anything ridiculous but at the same time, everything just felt so close to the vest plotwise.

Even the stuff that was made out to be a big deal.....really wasn't, in large part because you barely interact or know the side characters excluding one character. Without spoiling, when the big news drops by the end of the game, why is this suddenly a massive deal considering you barely know the main protagonist, Anne Walker's relationship with these characters over the phone outside of "Husband" or "Mother". This sort of thing would work in a 2nd or 3rd installment of a game, not 6 hours into a brand new game.

Overall, I came away pretty unimpressed for Syberia 1, even giving it the benefit of the doubt considering it's a 20+ year old game and all. I can overlook Quality of Life issues but not a bland story and set of characters. Will still give Syberia 2 a shot as it came apart of a dual purchase package but this game came, stood in my Switch for a few days and left as cold as the train ride in Siberia.

Lately I've been doing this weird thing where I go through old magazine covers just to see what was being hyped back in the day. Namely Sony covers because if there was one console that's difficult to nail down a definitive list of games, it's the console with over 3,000 games on it. What I like about it is that for every Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Crash Bandicoot you get a ReLoaded or C-12: Final Resistance which unlocks an old memory. C-12 especially was one of those games that was pushed heavily right when I got my PS1 and at the end of the day it was just a mediocre Syphon Filter knock off.

Of course I had to take it a step further and see what Japan were promoting around that time. I thought going in I'd be able to recognise a lot of the games easily, but even after studying the library for years there's characters I don't recognise at all. In fact I was stumped on the first issue and did a deep dive trying to find what they were promoting around December of '95. This took me hours, I even resorted to typing the katakana out, going on some Japanese blogs and reading really bad translations of them recapping the magazine. As it turns out, they were previewing Princess Maker 3, a popular virtual life sub-genre where you raise a daughter and you get all sorts of different endings - brought to you by the people who made Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Even then, I was suspicious the image was actually from Princess Maker 3 since it didn't look like the princess from the game, so I went through the process of going through all the other katakana. It's always difficult to tell whether the font is different or it's actually a different word so often I just found myself saying close enough. Anyways, I found the other game they were promoting heavily at the time was Fortune Quest.

This is kind of like Puzzle and Dragons, a huge series of games in Japan that Nintendo eventually tried to get over in the west by slapping Mario on it with the DQ characters. I've always heard that it's an amazing board game but seemingly like the rest of the west I just no sold on it. This version of Fortune Quest seems to have an anime/manga tie-in and seems to have the charm of Dragon Quest.

When it comes to the Nintendo 64, I can lay out what each year was like the 60 odd games that were worth buying and how the library evolved from Mario 64 to that Paper Mario/Mario Party 3/Pokemon Stadium era. Hell the GBA Virtual Console reminded me of a small era where the GBA ruled the roost for Nintendo as we waited nearly a year for the release of the GameCube. It's something I'd like to be able to do with Sony, go month by month from 1994-2002 and have that list of 100 (let's round it up) games in sequential order.

Question - What's the one console you're the most passionate about?

BONUS Question - What's one console you'd love to know more about?

Syberia 2

More like Syberia 1.5..........because that's what it felt like. Without going too much into detail, I didn't really care much for Syberia 1 because it lacked any real substance and felt rather bland from start to finish, at least for me. Syberia 2 doesn't really change much of anything, if you liked Syberia 1, it's more of the same. The only real differences that this game has are more CGI effects which again are the equivalent to a mid 2000's game so it hasn't aged well in the least bit but you can at least appreciate the effort put in. 

Story picks up off where Syberia 1 leaves you and it's a story that doesn't really go anywhere but it stays consistent to the tone and pacing that the 1st game had so again one of those "more of the same" type of deals. 

Just an overall giant nothing burger. The game is a bit shorter than the 1st one but it felt more like DLC of the 1st game more than anything rather than a full fledged sequel or anything that changes the game from what the 1st one tries to do. Color me somewhat unimpressed with the 1st 2 Syberia games, I think it's a series that gets outshined by later games of the same ilk and it loses it's bite. Not much else to say since it's a borderline clone to Syberia 1 only with new characters, somewhat of a new plot and better CGI/graphics for it's time. 

Anyone ever find out what the line on certain SNES carts was about?

It's like the little yellow tabs on the EA carts for the Sega, as a kid you just had to take that off of there to see what it was, you couldn't help it but fucking ruin your shit.

So while I waited for RE4 Remake to come in the mail this past Saturday, I ended up playing something on the PS5 in the meanwhile, a PS1 retro game called Jumping Flash which was a launch title for the system(And one I owned but due to being like 7 years old, had not a clue what I was doing in the game). This was made possible via the PS Plus Collection that dropped a little under a year ago so given how little use I got of this subscription, it made sense to play a quick enough game before my long awaited game came.

And yeah when I say quick enough, we're talking maybe the game running you 2 1/2 hours. It's amazing that this was considered one of Sony's "system sellers" when their then brand new attempt at tackling on the video game landscape dropped in the form of the Playstation 1 because man this game was a quick and admittedly, average experience.

The graphics are PS1 style so you either like it/grew up with it or you didn't. The game is certainly colorful and full of zaniness & wackiness by design and the game's different levels show it, which is the biggest takeaway from something like Jumping Flash. Yeah the game isn't really deep gameplay wise nor are the levels long, especially if you know what you're doing but they are just so wacky that it's very reminiscent of gaming in the 90's. Think NIGHTS: Into Dreams sort of wacky. Jumping Flash is one of those games that would never be thought of nor will it ever come out in present day and despite me not loving the game, I do appreciate Sony Japan and their ambition to do something unique, which of course is ancient history to modern day Sony.

The story I admittedly didn't really pay much attention to, it has the typical cheesy voice acting and 1990's choppy cutscenes that one would expect out of a game from this time. The gameplay on the other hand is a game where you control the protagonist named Ribbit who is some sort of robotic frog and you are basically moving via hopping all around while trying to collect carrots in order to progress and move onto the next level. Yeah it's about as zany as how I described it lol. You run into enemies that inhabit these areas and you are able to shoot these enemies or use powerups that range from roman candles to firecrackers to do further damage(Best to save these for the boss fights that are the final act of each world, 6 altogether).

I think the major issue I have with Jumping Flash as a whole isn't the graphics nor is it the simplicity(Which can sometimes actually be a very good thing).....it's just it doesn't really offer up much to do with the worlds themselves. Yes there's a bonus stage every now and then and sure there are collectibles but there's no real incentive towards going all around the levels and sightseeing or trying to engage combat with the enemies scattered throughout each level. In addition, the controls of the game are pretty bad. We're talking your character is inching/moving a bit when you are trying to rotate the camera which caused me to fall to my death on a narrow platform when trying to see what to jump to next. To further the lousy controls is how tough it is to make jumps on moving platforms where it's you either succeed or die. Thank goodness for the updated rewind abilities which I shamefully had to use a few times due to these pretty poor controls. I would chalk this up as to this game being so old that it doesn't have the luxury of seeing 3D platformers control well but for a game that is heavy on making platforms itself, this is the one gaming nuance that could & should have been better. 

If you can look past the tons of outdated gameplay issues and typical early/launch PS1 feel of the game, you can have a nice evening with Jumping Flash altogether. It's a short experience, again the art & design of the game is zany & original and it isn't an overly hard game to get or play. The controls absolutely let the game down when needed most and the worlds despite the colorful art & whimsical themes about them, feel sort of dry from an objective standpoint where you are simply better off just getting the carrots/items to progress and move on. It's a solid attempt from Sony back in the mid 90's upon trying to bring something new to the table of gaming but 25+ years later, Jumping Flash has been left in the dust by father time itself. 

My new crt looks and sounds amazing it has been what was missing from my life. I played a few rounds of Kung Fu for NES and then just hooked up my JVC XEye and just had Final Fight Cd and Ecco Cd soundtracks going as background noise, excellent stuff.

Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus

The late 90s and early 2000s was full of 3D platformers, many of them starring anthromorphic creatures. The most famous examples being Banjo Kazooie, Spyro The Dragon and Crash Bandicoot. A lesser-known example is Sly Cooper, the rowdy robbin' globe-trottin' raccoon.

The first thing I notice about Sly Cooper is the slick comic-book style presentation. It immediately grabs my attention and sets it apart from its contemporaries. The story behind Sly Cooper is somewhat more advanced than the primitive stories of Crash and Spyro, but it doesn't go far enough to get me to really care about anything beyond the gameplay. The villains all have backstories, but they're superficial and all revolve around the villain having a rough childhood so they turn heel and use their special talent to set up a criminal empire and take out their frustrations on the world. For reasons I don't remember these villains stole pages of a legendary tomer of theft called the Thievius Raccoonus, and I think they killed some of Sly's family in the process? It's been months since I saw the prologue and I don't care enough to look it up. Sly's mission is to recover the fragments of this book from each of these baddies. There is a police officer chasing him down, called Carmelita Montoya Fox. This character and her relationship with Sly intrigues me, although I've seen very little of her during the game. She basically shows up to arrest every big bad after Sly KOs them. Talk about a glory hog. I assume she'll play a bigger role at the end of the game. Maybe a final boss? No spoilers please Blindy.

How's the gameplay? Pretty good. I started this right after finishing the ultra-janky Ico, so anything was an upgrade. While this is not Crash or Spyro in terms of smooth controls and camerawork, it's reasonably close. There are some awkward controls, such as having to press Circle to execute certain platforming techniques that would be automatic in other games. I'm talking about landing on tightropes, grabbing ropes to climb and so on. It does become a problem in more fast-paced segments where you're running away from something and you have to remember not only to jump, but to time your Circle presses correctly. It's awkward and counter-intuitive, although that's perhaps only because I'm accustomed to the niceties of far more modern games. The automatic camera movement isn't ideal but the player has control of the camera with the right analog stick so it's fine. Some minor frustrations aside, it's mostly a pretty easy-to-play platformer.

My biggest problem is the combat. The enemies are all run up, hit Square to attack, they're dead. However I sometimes experience some input delay with the attack, and I find it really difficult to judge the hit box, so it's not easy to jollily mow through enemies with correct timing like you can do in Crash or Spyro. Instead I'm constantly pausing, second guessing myself, making sure I'm in range before committing to an attack. This became downright frustrating with some of the enemies in the Voodoo Swamp world where the enemies start using cheeseball tactics to add artificial difficulty. It could be my age setting in, I'm hardly old but 20 years ago I may have had no problem with this game.

The powerup gimmick is also kinda silly, you get a bunch of powerups but you can only have one active at a time, and scrolling through them is slow, and most of them are useless. I usually just stick to the roll or the dive. You acquire and upgrade abilities by finding all the "message in a bottle" collectibles in a level. They did find the right balance by making some collectibles hard to spot without making them too obscure to the point where the player has to explore every single nook and cranny to find the deceptively hidden last bottle. I did this maybe on one level, most of the time I could find them all in one playthrough with enough curiosity and camera-swivelling.

I finished the Voodoo Swamp world today. The regular platformer-combat levels were pretty awful mainly for the combat, and I was starting to get sick of the game, but the level took an upturn with three fun mini-game levels. Two of them were vehicle drive-and-gun deals, and another was a "kill the chickens" minigame, perhaps a homage to Zelda. Each had the right level of difficulty. The boss of this world is an extended Parappa The Rapper rhythm sequence which was well-constructed and a lot of fun. The only other minigame I remember is this car racing level from the Las Vegas Casino world which was pretty awful. Glad the game is picking up on that front.

The music is pretty poor, ranging from inoffensive to annoying. The only good piece of music is the aforementioned boss battle. I also dislike the voice acting. Especially the nerdy turtle. It is just a stereotypical nerd voice. Probably something that wouldn't have bothered me 20 years ago but in 2023 it's so dated.

Still a long way to go but this game has a lot of meat to it, I'm looking forward to my next visit.

I do remember Blindy played these games about a year ago and reviewed them.

May 1, 2023 15:56:00 GMT Blindy said:

Game length is rather short, I got the illustrious platinum and beat the game within 3 sittings. This game probably runs you around 8 hours or so give or take. Each level is consisted of one pseudo open world portion followed by either a short level or minigames. The minigames are hit and miss admittedly with this game. They can be anything from racing to rail shooting to collecting items in a certain amount of time while avoiding hazardous animals, run of the mill stuff you would expect from this type of platformer. 

Rather short :lol: Clearly I'm losing my video game skills. I'm sure I've spent double that time and I've just passed the halfway mark if the completion meter is accurate.

It was short because this was a 2nd playthrough so I knew what to do!

Sly 2 is the best of the bunch though Sly 1 is a very close 2nd. I didn't get to replay Sly 3 or Sly 4, maybe in the future!

The voice acting of the characters gets better from Sly 2 onward. THE MURRAY(The Hippo) gets a personality, Bentley's voice stays the same but he gets more shine and Carmelita is always great despite all of the accents changing all the time. Sly Cooper is always good, he never changes which is a great thing.

So happy you gave these games a try. Sucker Punch really have become an important company to Sony's success between this series, InFamous and their most recent try, Ghost of Tsushima.

Slowly but surely Emperor is burning his way through that PSX/PS2 backlog.

PSX/PS2
Alone In The Dark: New Nightmare
Dino Crisis
Disgaea
Ico
Kingdom Hearts I/II
Obscure
Resident Evil (OK I have the PC remake but I'm including it here because it's my list.)
Resident Evil 2
Resident Evil 3: Nemesis
Resident Evil - Code Veronica X
Samurai Warrior
Second Sight
Shadow Hearts: From The New World
Shadow Of Memories
Silent Hill 1/3/4
Sly Raccoon
Tomb Raider I/II (played I many times but never got past the fourth level)
Vagrant Story
Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria
Vexx
XIII

How many of these have you beaten Emp? Vexx, KH, Ico...?

New life goal, you can put travel and make more money away for a second and finish all these games!

After Sly 2 and Sly 3, go after one of the Shin Megami Tensei games Emperor. SMT: Nocturne would be my choice but either Digital Devil Saga/Devil Tuner(I think that is the EU name?) works too.

Oh man, Sly Cooper was amazing. Just a great series that was so pretty.

Persona 4 Golden I will toss on after being converted by the Steam version if playing PS2 era games. Nocturne is not bad, but the Persona games were the best of the SMT games IMO as the life sim side is always pretty cute and a lot of fun.

Also recommend Disgaea.

May 2, 2023 15:09:21 GMT Blindy said:

After Sly 2 and Sly 3, go after one of the Shin Megami Tensei games Emperor . SMT: Nocturne would be my choice but either Digital Devil Saga/Devil Tuner(I think that is the EU name?) works too.

Don't add more games to the pile!

It's still Digital Devil Saga 1 & 2 in the UK - Nocturne is actually Lucifer's Call.

I could have had it back in the day, but the name change threw me off.

Same with Illusion of Gaia which is Illusion of Time in PAL regions.

May 2, 2023 14:49:44 GMT Big Pete said:

Slowly but surely Emperor is burning his way through that PSX/PS2 backlog.

PSX/PS2
Alone In The Dark: New Nightmare
Dino Crisis
Disgaea
Ico
Kingdom Hearts I/II
Obscure
Resident Evil (OK I have the PC remake but I'm including it here because it's my list.)
Resident Evil 2
Resident Evil 3: Nemesis
Resident Evil - Code Veronica X
Samurai Warrior
Second Sight
Shadow Hearts: From The New World
Shadow Of Memories
Silent Hill 1/3/4
Sly Raccoon
Tomb Raider I/II (played I many times but never got past the fourth level)
Vagrant Story
Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria
Vexx
XIII

How many of these have you beaten Emp? Vexx, KH, Ico...?

New life goal, you can put travel and make more money away for a second and finish all these games!

Sly Raccoon in progress. Vexx I abandoned pretty quickly because it's awful. XIII is great, couldn't beat the final boss but it's off my list. Beat Ico and Kingdom Hearts I. I started Dino Crisis a long time ago but the clunkiness annoyed me. Not sure if I will ever return.

I breezed through the next Sly Raccoon world set in China. Far more pleasant than the Voodoo Swamp. Even the racing minigame wasn't bad. Won the race in 4-5 attempts which is far faster than the previous race minigame. The boss battle was fun too, fairly basic but still enjoyable. Literally fighting against a Kung Fu Panda.

Moving onto Russia which has final world vibes but can't be too sure yet.

Holy hell the nostalgia with the XBOX hooked up to the CRT TV I found at a yard sale last month. I scooped up a few games from one of the shops in town, Virtual Pool, Mega Man Anniversary Collection(1 through 8), Street Fighter Collection, and Blitz: The League.

It's the Mega Man Anniversary Collection that triggered the nostalgia, like 2005 vibes, prime Adult Swim pre-Family Guy revival, watching Pride FC and Ultimate Fighter, Devildriver and Chimaira, not having like any type of internet access at all or a cell phone(and its like not even a big deal). Good times man.

I had a friend that had the Mega Man Collection on XBOX back in the day I always thought it was a cool collection but never bought it for myself through the years because the games just feel wrong to me on any type of controller other than NES rectangle. I noticed this when I bought Mega Man 2 on the PSN for PS3, just can't get into it without that og stick. But playing this was a good time, pretty sweet to have all these on one disc like this and the menu/music is sweet. I think my favorite thing about this whole era of gaming was all the retro compilations on disc becoming a thing, so many good ones.

Virtual Pool was pretty bad. It looked cool on the box so I grabbed it but bad camera and too complicated gameplay, better 16 bit pool games exist.

The Street Fighter collection I used to have but sold it off back in the great purge of 2011(when I sold over half of my retro games collection online for money to buy tools). It's a cool game to have in the collection and I scored it on the cheap, but the only thing about it really is that it has the full length Street Fighter 2 animated movie(can't remember if it's the full uncensored version with naked Chun Li). It also has Street Fighter III and there is like a remix/hybrid version of all the different Street Fighter 2 games but I never was a fan of it it feels like a hacked rom.

Blitz the league I had high hopes for. I thought this was such a cool game when it first came out but never got around to playing it and kinda forgot about it. It has a story mode like Any Given Sunday but when I loaded it up last night I was disappointed with the actual football gameplay, its not good.

Sly Cooper is complete!

The final world was mostly pretty good, with a neat Asteroids style minigame, but an issue I mentioned before really came to the forefront.

May 3, 2023 18:15:57 GMT Emperor said:

There are some awkward controls, such as having to press Circle to execute certain platforming techniques that would be automatic in other games. I'm talking about landing on tightropes, grabbing ropes to climb and so on. It does become a problem in more fast-paced segments where you're running away from something and you have to remember not only to jump, but to time your Circle presses correctly.

This world has two fast-paced segments where you basically can't stop. Not only do you have to press Circle to perform some moves, but some moves require you to hold Circle while others don't. The game does make it clear which is which, but didn't stop it from catching me out a couple of time and in general seems completely unnecessary. Also if I was too far away from the target when I hit Circle I wouldn't land on the platform. Slightly frustrating.

The final boss was quite fun and was appropriately epic, with two jetpack shooting phases and a final sprint platform to wrap up the game in classic Sly Cooper style. Not bad.

There is precisely one vault you can't unlock until beating the final boss. After the credits finished I went back and replayed that level, got the powerup from the vault and...roll credits. That's it. No extra levels. Just a bonus cutscene. I assume the extra powerup is useful for the time trials, which I have absolutely no intention of doing. But wow. What an anticlimax. Make me replay a level for nothing.

I'll be moving swiftly onto Sly 2: Band of Thieves which is apparently the best one.

Sly is good stuff, but I have a weird memory of them being exceedingly short especially the first one. No clue if it's accurate or not.

I was expecting Sly 2 to be better, but it's staggering how much better it actually is. While the first game required some oomph to sit down and play, I could hardly tear myself away from the sequel. Already put a few hours in.

They've ironed out all the kinks. No signs of an overabundance of useless powerups. More fluid controls. One-hit-equals-death replaced with a health bar. Combat and enemies received a serious upgrade. A nice blend of combat and stealth missions. The story is more nuanced.

My favourite change is the level style. The previous game had a Crash-style structure. One central hub leading to different levels. Sly 2 is the same structurally, but the central hub is a big open world, and you complete mini-missions. Each mission is part of a bigger heist which is the end goal of the world. Completing two or three missions unlocks new ones. The two main side characters Bentley and Murray have larger role as playable characters. This add-on fell flat in Spyro but so far Sly 2 is doing a better job. I've not played as Bentley yet but the Murray level was short and very sweet.

Even the little things like smashing objects to get coins is so much more satisfying. I already collected enough cash to buy out all the inventory, I'm probably not expected to do that :lol:

Why would I lie to you Emperor! Sly 2 is damn good. It's a 9.5/10 for me honestly.

You get introduced to one of the BEST characters of the series in Dmitri too!

I've already met Dmitri. Had to follow him on the dingy streets of Paris. Sneaky lizard man. I'm sure we'll cross paths again.

Dude this was a good time to be an action platformer fan. Living the height of Ratchet Jak Sly, Mario doing standard sauce and other c level games rising up. PS2/Cube time was doing their thing and even Xbox had a few.

Just realized this is the retro thread. This is what we've become. The olds.

May 3, 2023 22:42:44 GMT @ness said:

Dude this was a good time to be an action platformer fan. Living the height of Ratchet Jak Sly, Mario doing standard sauce and other c level games rising up. PS2/Cube time was doing their thing and even Xbox had a few.

Just realized this is the retro thread. This is what we've become. The olds.

It's been 23 years since the release of the PS2.

To put it into perspective, Space Invaders was released 22 years before the PS2.

How fortunate were we to appreciate that leap? It really felt like night and day playing a SNES game to an N64 game and while we're still getting awesome titles, I don't think we'll ever see a leap quite like it again.

Yes going from Mario 1 on NES at 5 years old a solid year or so before SNES existed to PS2 by age 15 I think makes you look at the whole thing a little different(plus being a kid when Arcade machines were a huge deal then watching that whole thing die). I played Crimson Skies on XBOX last night and that thing has such a gorgeous picture through S-video on a 2006 CRT TV. As I was playing that last night I couldn't help but wonder did video games really need to get any better looking than this?

I'm past the halfway mark on Sly Cooper 2.

Still absolutely incredible, there's very little to complain about. The difficulty is increasing at a slow but noticeable pace. A couple of the missions in Episode 3 were rather frustrating, and I had to do some internet sleuthing to find the elusive 30th clue. It was very well hidden!

I managed to find all 30 clues in Episode 4 without the internet although the last one took a lot of exploration to find. I had to really start using my stealth more as I can't mow through the enemies. Especially those vulture guards - fighting them head on guarantees you'll take substantial damage.

I've just started Episode 5. The gothic architecture in the previous episode was really nice and made for some great climbing/platforming so I'm glad they repeated it in a slightly different setting. I've barely started the episode and I already found 28 out of the 30 clues. I suspect the final two will remain hidden for a long time. I just finished a neat mission where I had to capture ghosts via photography. Subtle inspiration from Fatal Frame? I doubt it, but it's good to believe.

This is as good as it gets with Sly, I haven't replayed Sly 3 or 4 yet but 1st playthrough of each, Sly 2 was the best thing of the series. Did you do the tango with Camelita at Rijan's palace or what? 

That being said, you're in the Episode with the worst minigame/mission in the game. Won't say what it is but cannot wait to hear your impressions on it.

Const. Nayla is your homegirl Emperor or what?

Back on the Sly Cooper 2. Finished Episode 5 today. Overall the game is still amazing but the tank minigames were very frustrating. Driving a tank should be cool but they made the controls so clunky and counterintuitive that it was just a chore. Fortunately the two tnak missions were short and easy so I didn't spend too long.

The Contessa boss fight was a walk in the park. In the second phase she uses the Clockwerk Eye to try some mind control. I was expecting some Psycho Mantis shit where my controls get manipulated, but nope, it's this beam that's very easy to dodge. I did get hit once though, and all that happens is Sly gets staggered for a bit, but with a pretty neat visual effect. She then hit me off the tall building we were fighting on, which in kayfabe would have allowed her to get away with the artefact. Instead she yanks me back up Spiderman style because she really wanted to lose that fight :suspic:

Jun 9, 2023 3:10:20 GMT Blindy said:

Const. Nayla is your homegirl Emperor or what?

She does have a delightful voice and is far more interesting than that dope Carmelita. I did do the dancing, a rhythm game that was more tedious than the one from the first game.

As much as I praise the game, the writing leaves a lot to be desired. The end of the previous games sees Sly Cooper defeat his nemesis Clockwerk, a giant mechanical owl. Clockwerk is destroyed and broken into several mechanical fragments which are now spread all over the globe in the hands of various villainous characters. Cooper's mission is to recover all the Clockwerk fragments. Apparently they are too dangerous in the possession of villains, but if you bring all the fragments together, then Clockwerk himself has a greater chance of reviving, right? It's inevitably going to end with Cooper vs Clockwerk part two.

Not to mention Carmelita Fox is one of the dumbest and most one-dimensional characters in video game history. Why is Sly Cooper interested in her? I didn't think she could get any dumber than she was in the first game, but Carmelita from Sly 2 makes Carmelita from Sly 1 look like a genius.

The Canada world on Sly Cooper 2 is incredible. Really fun level design and all the missions have been great.

I also had some extracurricular fun. There are some invincible NPCs on the map. Trains, which rip around various tracks on the map. Bears. There are two of them. They hit hard and they're relentless. And Carmelita Fox. She shows up for one mission, but even after you complete it she's prowling on the open world.

While having some fun provoking a bear, I unintentionally got them to run into the path of a train just as it was entering the tunnel. You can't go in the tunnel. It turns out, neither can the bear. The bear just vanished from existence. Train 1 - Bear 0. I spent about 30 minutes trying to pit Carmelita against Bear. They are on opposite sides of the map, and they both kill me in two hits, so it wasn't an easy task. First I tried to get Carmelita to chase me, but in what is either an inspired piece of charcter design or poor AI coding, she's terrible at chasing. You have to stay very close to her to keep the chase going, and then she kills you. That left me the option of literally poking the bear. Fortunately the bear is an extremely effective chaser, whose predictable attack is easier to evade than Carmelita's. The results were interesting.

First, the bear would stop to decimate any of the regular enemies that stood in its way. It then returned to me as its top priority. Getting the bear and Carmelita had...unsurprising results. I was public enemy number one. Both of them ignored each other and went after me. While the bear can be evaded by climbing on an inaccessible surface, Carmelita's weapon is a gun, so I got shot down. In my dying moments I glimpsed Carmelita infinitely shooting the bear, while the bear stood aggressively, but inactively, in front of her. I was unable to recreate this situation while staying alive, but on a couple of occasions I noticed the bear would randomly vanish from the map if they left my POV. This led to an interesting scenario where Carmelita and one of the random grunts engaged in an infinite battle, Carmelita shooting endlessly just like she did to the bear. I was satisfied.

There was also a pretty funny glitch in the Carmelita Fox mission. You're supposed to pickpocket her three times, and she "chases" you after each steal. After my first steal she somehow got glitched in the environment and fell into a pool of water. She didn't respawn. She was stuck under the level. I know this because there's a objective indicator and it was pointing into a place I couldn't access. So I killed myself to restart the mission.

Fun times.