May Together Retro: Sega Dreamcast & Ports

[dsheinem]

6 Game Dreamcast Collection on PC for like $4: https://www.fanatical.com/en/game/dream ... d=13212017

[o.pwuaioc]

6 Game Dreamcast Collection on PC for like $4: https://www.fanatical.com/en/game/dream ... d=13212017

Um... "NiGHTS Into Dreams" When did this come out for the Dreamcast?

[Ack]

6 Game Dreamcast Collection on PC for like $4: https://www.fanatical.com/en/game/dream ... d=13212017

Um... "NiGHTS Into Dreams" When did this come out for the Dreamcast?

...Thursday?

[Note]

I'm still playing through Skies of Arcadia. Didn't make too much progress the past week, as I've felt burned out in the evenings after work but I'm hoping to put in a significant amount of time into the game this evening and throughout the holiday weekend.

I'm about 26 hours into the game, and up to the part where ...

The party gets split up and Vyse meets Gilder. Both of the split parties find a map to Duccat's Treasure and are on the way to the island.

[Markies]

I am just a few hours ahead of you, so you have almost caught up with me.

The game again opens up after the dungeon and the subsequent plot point.

It was during those two dungeons and the aftermath that reminded me how much I love the game. The character interactions on top of such an addicting battle system makes it such a breeze to go through.

I hope you enjoy it this weekend.

[PartridgeSenpai]

I put another good few hours into Maken X today. My opinion on that game has changed very little, but I'm nearing the end of it (one or two more missions). It's kinda cool how it's got so many different playable characters, the character design is Atlus as fuck (particularly the "mafia don" character ), and the several different endings are also neat. None of that changes the fact that the game just plays badly though. Having only one joystick does not a good first-person action game make. While the controls could certainly be BETTER, I have serious doubts they could ever be as good as just two joysticks would allow for (at least without making the game play significantly differently).

Although a friend of mine pointed out to me that there actually IS an improved port of Maken X! Apparently, only in Japan and Europe, Maken X got an improved port to the PS2 in the early 2000's, and it adds, among other things, a third person perspective and the ability to control the camera with the second joystick. I'm really gonna have to hunt that down (as it's also quite cheap, albeit uncommon), as it looks FAR more playable than this version and genuinely a fairly good game (or at least far above the "barely a good game" status the DC version has). While I'm kinda excited to play through the PS2 port eventually, I've also made it my mission to eventually beat the DC version. I haven't come this far to give up now

[Nemoide]

Okay, I'm finally getting around to this month's TR with Evil Dead: Hail to the King on the Dreamcast. This game was also released on PS1 and PC - TBH, it looks like a PS1 game. It doesn't have native support for the Dreamcast's VGA but it seems it can be patched; I'm not sure how one goes about ripping a DC game so I tracked down a disc image online, changed a line using a hex editor and burned that to a disc. It works fine on VGA! Why was this not officially supported!??

Anyway, as a fan of the Evil Dead movies, this game sounded really good when I first learned of it. A direct sequel to Army of Darkness featuring Bruce Campbell reprising his role as Ash (there's even a button for one liners!), it's a combat-heavy survival horror game that lets you slice and dice with your chainsaw-hand!
Sadly, this game is a mess. Really the idea of making a "combat-heavy survival horror" seems misguided at best. Enemies seem to spawn infinitely, though they thankfully drop healing items most of the time, so it's not really a dangerous thing. But the enemy AI is some of the worst I've seen, they just kind of move around, sometimes running away right TOWARDS you and cowering, other times attacking and disappearing. Standard enemies aren't much of a threat, but they do get annoying. This game attempting to be a survival horror means your ammo (bullets and gas for your chainsaw) and healing items are limited to what you can carry, but since you just find more TOTALLY RANDOMLY, it seems like it mostly comes down to luck. This is not a well-crafted experience like Resident Evil. It also has a similar control scheme and fixed-camera system as RE, though it feels like it's been implemented much worse due to the randomly-appearing nature of most of the enemies.
I was looking forward to playing this game and when I picked it up in high school, I remember being DEEPLY disappointed by the bad graphics, extremely awkward gameplay, and just the lack of fun. I barely played it and put it back on the shelf. Years later I'd play Resident Evil: Regeneration on original Xbox and have a better time (not that it's an amazing game itself) but I could never bring myself to really make a serious attempt at Hail to the King.

BUT I'M GOING FOR IT. I'm using a walkthrough from GameFAQs and will see if I can beat this game this week! It certainly looks like a short game, though the PS1 version was 2 discs, so maybe I'm wrong...
Either way, I'd love to cross this off my backlog.

[Note]

I am just a few hours ahead of you, so you have almost caught up with me.

The game again opens up after the dungeon and the subsequent plot point.

It was during those two dungeons and the aftermath that reminded me how much I love the game. The character interactions on top of such an addicting battle system makes it such a breeze to go through.

I hope you enjoy it this weekend.

Thanks! I definitely enjoyed the time I put into the game over the three day weekend. I ended up playing about a total of fourteen hours, and even had a rare late night game session on Friday night, staying up til about 2 AM playing. I feel I got through a big chunk of the game and made a lot of progress, but I know I have a lot more to go, as I'm still on Disc 1.

Over the weekend, these are the areas I completed ...

I found Daccat's Treasure, escaped from the Grand Fortress in Valua for a second time (this was an awesome part of the game), acquired the Delphinus ship, raised the 100,000 coins to upgrade the ship and build the headquarters, beat Gregorio and the Armada in the series of ship battles at Esperanza, and navigated through the Dark Rift (this dungeon has a really creepy atmosphere, and I needed the help of a guide without a map).

At the first ship battle in Yafutoma, I had to redo it because I wasn't prepared with torpedos, I didn't use them much earlier in the game, but luckily I had a decent one on-hand to equip for this battle. I've just finished up the Mt. Kazai dungeon and acquired the blue moon crystal.

Hopefully I can play some more throughout this week, but it depends on how I'm feeling after work. Looks like this game will continue to be my main focus going into June! But I'm not complaining.

[PartridgeSenpai]

I finally beat Maken X tonight! I'll write up a more detailed review tomorrow when I'm less sleepy, but my final thoughts are that this is less "barely good" so much as it is "bad, but just barely". So glad to beat a game for the TR after not quite managing to beat one for last month's~

In other good news, I also found a copy of the PS2 version of Maken X today for only 500 yennies, and trying it out it's already WAY better than the Dreamcast version. I didn't just get the internal satisfaction of beating a not so great game (with an ending I was happy with, to boot~) out of this month's TR, I also found a much improved version of that game that existed all along to enjoy

[Nemoide]

I beat Evil Dead: Hail to the King!

No two ways about it: this game is bad. But as a fan of both Evil Dead and Sega, I'm glad that I can say that I finished the game. This game is very awkward and very poorly designed. The worst aspect are the infinitely spawning enemies and for some reason this happens the most right at the beginning of the game, making the end of the game much easier than the beginning, which feels weird. Boss designs seem pretty bland, they're all fairly predictable and simple. Ammo management is really weird because enemies only drop ammo when you're running low, so I'm really not sure if they want the player to actually waste ammo against weak enemies or conserve. I used the axe and chainsaw combo for most of the game and didn't have much trouble. There's also a really weird upgrade system in that SOMETIMES you'll find a box that upgrades a weapon and you have to combine it with a weapon of your choice in the inventory screen, other times you'll fight a boss and all of a sudden you get a message that says something like "you upgraded your chainsaw and now it holds more gas" apparently completely out of the blue. Thankfully, using a walkthrough makes the game pretty simple and short. Not using a walkthrough means you have to explore more, which means LOTS MORE COMBAT, which would turn the game into an even more painful slog than it already is.

Bruce Campbell is good though and his voice acting helps make the game more tolerable. Some of the one-liners feel really out of place though, I assume the developers were just "hey, Ash said this in Army of Darkness, let's just make him say the same line here without context and it'll be good enough."