Expanding The Together Retro Game Club
The Together Retro Game Club has passed the four month mark and the growing community has already had some great times enjoying some games many of us just never made the time for previously. However, two of the major challenges with a game club are the different amounts of free time and genre preferences between the members.
First of all, depending on what point you are in your life and what responsibilities you have (school/career/family/etc), you may have only a small portion of your week to actually devote to gaming, or you may have lots of free time that lets you explore all sorts of games. And as an off-shoot of that concept, many people don’t have the time, attention span, or desire to play longer story-driven games like RPGs.
Because of this, we have had a handful of debates about how quick the pace should be for Together Retro and how many RPGs should be included. After these discussions, we have decided to try having to different Together Retro paths. The main one, which is most similar to the way we have been arranging it so far, will consist mostly of shorter games that are easy to play every now and each game will jump around between genres. The second path will focus on longer games such as RPG, and possibly some more involved action/adventure games.
The beauty of this setup is that you don’t necessarily have to choose one or the other. If you have a lot of free time and want to get the most of the club, you can play both the longer games and sprinkle in the shorter games for variety. However, if you are more limited on free time, like myself, you can just stick with the shorter games. And of course, if you a just a lover of story-driven games, you’re free to stick with that path.
I’m hoping this concept works out well and the discussions for each game will still be strong and helpful to those involved. Of course, if you have any suggestions along the way, feel free to start bring something up in the General Together Retro discussion thread.
Anyway, to kick off this story-based path with a good RPG, I want to let everyone vote for the game they would most like to play first. As usual, keep in mind that we are not necessarily voting for which game is the best out of the bunch, but which one you think that most of us haven’t already played recently, but would enjoy diving into.
[poll=6]
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I’ve had Albion on my PC for a while, but haven’t gotten around to playing it yet. I put my vote in for that, but I’m open to all these.
Terranigma! Its almost completely unknown as it never came out in the states but its fantastic. Also English roms are still readily available because it DID come out in Australia.
I voted for Terranigma.
Great game and well worth the effort.
Also an easy one for the first shot hence my pick.
Best !
Terranigma has been on my “must play some day” list for years but I’ve never got around to it. This may be the perfect excuse to finally pick it up!
I chose Xenogears as I just started it recently.
My vote went to Phantasy Star, as I only recently began playing Phantasy Star I for Master System a few days ago – and enjoying it, I might add. Pen and Paper style. 😉
Phantasy Star here.
It’s not only a big series on gaming history, it haves many port to choose from.
I’ve only played and finished three of them, but since I’ve always wanted to play Phantasy Star, I’m voting for it (I just started with the GBA port). Yet I’ve got to play the others some day.
No love for the PC here huh. That’s ok, these are all great games. Really diverse set of consoles too. PSX, SNES, NES, SMS, Genesis, and PC. I picked Albion, because I love PC RPGs, but Xenogears would be great too. Hope it runs ok on the Xbox though.
I voted Valkyrie Profile, but it’s just one of the games on the list that I’ve been meaning to play for a long time. I’d be happy to start with any of these. All of these games are on my list of games I never got around to starting (except Xenogears and Crystalis, which I started but never finished, and Albion, which I actually hadn’t heard of until now, but it sounds pretty good judging from the Wikipedia article).
Racket, do you plan on rotating the story-driven track as often as the main one? I personally don’t have all that much time to devote to games lately, but RPGs usually hold my attention longer. I feel that I’d rather use my spare time to pick at an RPG for, say, 2 months, as opposed to trying to find time in one month for a shorter game. Just thought I’d throw my point of view out there, for what it’s worth. I haven’t been keeping up with the discussions in the actual forums, so I don’t know if that’s come up at all.
Also, I think that your idea of mixing in adventure games is a great idea. I’d love to play Gabriel Knight or Phantasmagoria again, or some of the King’s Quest games I never got around to; any others you had in mind for that genre?
If I have time for the games in this track, I’m definitely in! I thought the club was an awesome idea to begin with, but splitting it up like this is even better; I wonder how far it could go…?
I’m planning on mixing in both RPG and adventure games. I previously had Snatcher and Monkey Island planned previously, so those will get shifted into that branch. And I’ll plan on about 45 day to 2 months for most games on there.