Dust off your DOS, reinstall those ROMs, and party like it's 1999.
  • audaxdreik@pawb.socialEnglish
    17·
    2 days ago

    My Christmas present to myself was a 2TB NVMe to pop into the system JUST for retro gaming.

    RetroArch backend with ES-DE frontend (until Launchbox relents and focuses on a Linux release …)

    All that space to hoard the bulkier PS2/GC ISOs and already at 100GB+ of metadata scraped in put into ES.

    I’m old enough to be nostalgic for it, but even if you’re not, there’s something truly magical about the earlier gens, especially the later handhelds like PSP and 3DS. Game design had come a long way and was sufficiently modern without some of the harsher edges of older retro stuff, but still hadn’t given in to excessively evil design patterns. The graphics are clean, if still a little bit crunchy, which I find charming. They’re compact experiences that understood (in the time) the need to be put down at any moment because you could be doing something else or running out of battery. Place that in stark contrast to the modern mobile gacha nightmares that hammer your attention constantly trying to get at your purse strings. Did you remember to do your dailies? Has your party returned from the deployment?! ARE YOU WASTING TIME BY NOT REDEPLOYING THEM! Better check in with the game!

    EDIT: Curren recs,

    • Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey Redux (3DS): I’ve always been a lowkey SMT fan but missed this back in the day. The graphics are bright and colorful while the story is tense and claustrophobic. Fuse, fuse, fuse those demons like evil pokemon. There’s something viscerally engaging to me about the old school first person dungeon crawling
    • Black Rock Shooter The Game (PSP): I missed this one back in the day but it’s peak late-00’s. Extremely dumb, but with a straightforward narrative to work through and an interesting action RPG combat system. I thought it would be more straight shooter but there’s some interesting mechanics here. Great to just turn your brain off and enjoy the ride.

    EDIT EDIT: I found an absolutely FANTASTIC repository for ROMs, too. Won’t post it here for fear of drawing too much attention, but DM me and I’ll give you the link when I get around to it.

    • BlueSquid0741English
      3·
      1 day ago

      Played a lot of Strange Journey on DS. It was a really cool game. I didn’t know there was a remake.

    • Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      Strange Journey was one of those games that really got under my skin. It hit the right notes of dread, isolation, despair, and horror like a wonderful mesh of The Thing, Event Horizon, and At the Mountains of Madness. The music too helped pull off the vibe and it makes me wish they had an actual live recording instead of digitally generated tracks. The fact it could pull off such a vibe on a tiny DS/3DS screen just begs for this to be remade in a full PC/console experience.