Comments 184

Re: Going Back In Time - Do You Play Retro Games To Reconnect With Your Past?

Andee

I'm a little column A/B

Videogames have been a constant ever since I was about 4, so like with any song/book/movie there are gonna be unavoidable emotional connections to a period of my life, but I can chart that feeling to as recently as last year.

With consoles I definitely have a fondness for games that were designed around their inherent limitations and have always found it fascinating. For actual nostalgia though I'd say I lean more into arcade games, as that's something I simply don't do as often as I used to.

Re: Here's Why The Designers Republic Stopped Working On WipEout

Andee

I really felt that the series hit a massive peak with Wip3out — Fusion felt (rather like Angel of Darkness, as mentioned above), that they were basically starting from scratch with a whole new engine that not everyone was familiar or comfortable working with, and it really suffered from that. The Omega collection felt like a fine return to form, but Fusion really dinged my love for the series for a good long while, especially after how sublime I felt 3 was.

Re: Best PS1 RPGs Of All Time

Andee

We definitely got shafted in the UK for RPGs until the PS1 era — and even then many of the games in this list never made it to this side of the pond.

Re: This Windjammers Port For Sega Mega Drive Looks Ridiculously Good

Andee

@samuelvictor Fascinating and thorough — nice one!

I'm not sure where I read this, but when the Mega Drive was first conceived, weren't Sega originally going to essentially use the same tech as the arcade boards that were being used at the time for games like Afterburner, Golden Axe and Out Run, thus creating an arcade perfect, super-scaler console? But apparently the manufacturing costs would have had each console coming out at something like £300 a pop, so they chose to strip them down in order to save money? We got a near-perfect arcade experience, but ever so slightly out of reach...

I'm not saying I would have been able to convince my parents to shell out three big ones on a console at the time, but it would have been quite impressive!

Re: This Windjammers Port For Sega Mega Drive Looks Ridiculously Good

Andee

@samuelvictor I was always curious about scaling on the Mega Drive — I was under the impression that the SNES could handle sprite scaling, but it wasn't until relatively recently that I realised that it was only the background layer (hence why the boss screens on Super Mario World had a black background).

Would developers essentially have to manually draw a new, unique frame for each layer of zoom? Despite its slightly choppy frame rate, I remember Road Rash having some incredibly smooth scaling (on top of the undulating road), which I found very impressive for the time.

Re: PixelFX Working On HDMI Mod For PlayStation 2

Andee

@UK_Kev I've got a little pigeonhole-style shelf unit with all my retro consoles and a 32-inch TV on top — which I feel is a good size, and not so big as to make pre-HD era games look like poop. Also it's got a component-out, which makes Wii/GC games look super crisp

Re: Anniversary: Sega's Altered Beast Celebrates Its 35th Anniversary Today

Andee

I've always had a soft spot for this one — even the notoriously sluggish port for the CPC back in the day had a really decent 8-bit rendition of the soundtrack, although the game ran like an absolute shaggy dog and had no business being on such an underpowered machine. Going from that to the Mega Drive version was a mind-blowing experience at the time.