So I‘ve been interested in the trend of folks making new games for old hardware for a long time, but until xeno crisis I didn’t think anyone had actually done anything that was worth playing as anything other than a curiosity.
I'm curious if other folks have played and legitimately liked any of the other titles that have come out in recent years.
A short list:
Genesis:
Xeno Crisis (extremely recommended)
Tanzer
Tanglewood
Dreamcast:
All the Hucast games, but they're kind of on everything?
Xeno Crisis is on this also, and there's a heart meter on your VMU
Atari 7800 [Rikki & Vikki ](http://www.penguinet.net/Games/Rikki_Vikki/index.php)(which looks amazing but I will never play it)
NES
there's a bunch but I haven't really looked at them
PC Engine
Insanity (it's okay) [FX Unit Yuki](http://www.fxunityuki.com/) (I own this but haven't played it because... it looks "fine")
So... are any of these, aside from xeno crisis, worth playing? Like xeno crisis is a game I play once per week basically, because it's super smartly designed, controls well, looks great, and has excellent music. Most of the other "new retro" games just feel like somebody wanted to make a game for an old console and that's it. But maybe Tanzer is good? I dunno.
any thoughts!? also I'll add games as folks talk about them
I would say those are the good ones! I don’t know the Mega Man hacks but I assume those are the pick of an infinite litter.
Your mileage may vary on Mr. Splash but it was one of the first games of that kind so it has a better reputation through precedence than it probably deserves today.
Obviously there is also the port of Pac-Man CE which we discussed elsewhere. Prior to Pac-Man, Namco has had the habit to release official romhacks of Famista (available through a download code) as an early buyer promotional item for the new episodes released on 3DS and now Switch. You can see Super Famista Retro 2020 in this PV around 3m10s :
https://youtu.be/DJ6DdvHiKi0
As the name implies, this one takes from the Super Famicom version (Super Famista) but the rosters and teams are from the 2020 season. The 3DS games had similar Famicom versions with contemporary rosters. I cannot guarantee they are true Famicom and Super Famicom games but it sure seems so. I think the FC games have aged poorly but the SFC series fare a bit better so this new one might comply as a successful “new old game”.
Mr. Splash is pretty fun for what it is. On the simple but great side, I actually love Zooming Secretary as an extension of the single screen black box style NES games like Wrecking Crew etc.
Also, since it is on sale today there is the Wii port of Shakedown Hawaii, though I am very curious to see how it actually runs on the Wii. I have enjoyed it on Vita though.
In a similar fashion, the excellent Völgarr the Viking was downported to the Dreamcast in 2015. However, I don’t know if these examples fit what @exodus is looking for.
Pier Solar is okay, but it's very oldschool in some unfortunate ways.
- it came from a forum originally, and has individual forum member references all throughout the story
- there are some "clever" puzzles like while you're on a platform you have to hit an invisible button on the back of a pillar in order to proceed (that's when I stopped playing heh)
on the other hand it looks nice and it's cool that you'll get a CD soundtrack if you put the disc in, and a chip soundtrack if you don't??
members of that team went on to never finish paprium... I still want that game to exist but I think all the haters talking about how long it took to finish have sort of killed any dev interest in finishing it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3CTqTzkgZQ
haven‘t put too much time into it coz it was real tough the time I did play it, but Battle Kid was real good! I should probably fire it up again soon! Haven’t touched the sequel yet tho.
[img]https://i.imgur.com/trlx6wPl.jpg[/img]
I really want that Project Blue game but the Kickstarter is over. I hope there are physical copies available once the game actually comes out.
@exodus#3064 Since the thread got bumped I will say that Pier Solar‘s soundtrack is very good. I totally tricked me into buying the Dreamcast version. Which came relatively on time, so that’s why I order Paprium. I am preparing to commiserate about it here in this thread. But who knows! It's kind of… exciting?
@exodus#3064 this feels like a weird take on what happened considering they had a “launch party” and said the game was done and ready to ship and then dissappeared for two years until this email.
been thinking i may want to pick up a Genesis copy of Xeno Crisis. i‘ve never really gotten into the homebrew scene insofar as actually owning copies, but it seems like there’s some stuff out there that is actually worth it.
There is a really curious subset of these, games for old hardware that are not being released on that hardware.
Namco has really good modern ports of Gaplus and Pac-Man: Championship Edition for NES for some of their game collections. M2 did a Sega Tetris port for Sega Genesis which they put on the Sega Genesis Mini.
I think maybe the Fantasy Zone II: The Tears of Opa-Opa up-port to System 16 released on PS2 might have been the first of these.
GG Aleste 3: Last Messiah for Game Gear released as part of the Aleste Collection and on the included Game Gear Micro in the special edition, is an interesting recent example.
Now that I think about it, I guess all of these so far seem to be coming from M2 and Namco, unless I'm overlooking some.
https://d2skuhm0vrry40.cloudfront.net/2020/articles/2020-06-27-13-53/sh_wii_wiiu_hdr.jpg