"Must Finish" Games You Missed the First Time

[+wongojack]

On SMS phantasy star 1 is a must play... One of the best 8 bit games ever made. I just learned about a re-translation of the game (from the Japanese version). It's claimed that it's a much deeper story and a MUST play. You will need to play it via a emulator or a Everdrive.

 

I am getting a system setup so I can play it on my large 4K tv...looking forward... Oh, Red Dead 2 or Phantasy Star Re-translation...hmmm lol

 

http://www.smspower.org/Translations/PhantasyStar-SMS-EN

 

In case you want to know more...

 

What a great tip - thank you!

[+thegoldenband]

Warning - long post alert:

This has been, and is, one of my main motivators for gaming: going back and playing the games I never got to try, never got into, or was never able to complete.

In a way I've been doing this -- looking backwards, I guess -- for decades, since I spent a fair bit of the mid-1990s beating games I didn't quite finish when they were current. I think the first time I consciously beat a game on a discontinued system was Dungeons of Daggorath on the Tandy CoCo, sometime around 1993. Over the next few years, I took some tough NES games we'd owned for a while and cleared them for the first time, like Batman, Friday the 13th, Adventure Island, and Legacy of the Wizard.

Then came emulation, starting (for me) in 1999 -- a chance to play tons of games I'd only read about, and savestate my way through some childhood nemeses. But using savestates left me unsatisfied in the long term, and as a Mac user I was often dealing with subpar emulators.

I didn't get back into real hardware until 2008 or so, but the first game I ever bought on Ebay -- and, for about a decade, the only one -- was way back in 1999: Captain Comic for the NES. No good ROM dump was available, and it stuck in my craw that I'd come so close to beating it back in the early 1990s on a rental, so I bought it, feeling a bit silly to pay $5 for a NES game (!). I ended up having to deactivate the lockout chip on my aging NES to get it to work, but I finally managed to beat it, though with the help of a FAQ.

For the last 10 years I've been working my way back through my list, replaying games I only beat with savestates, or picking back up the games I never quite beat. I don't know how many of the 400+ games I've beaten in the last decade were old nemeses; a lot of them have been.

One funny one was Swordquest: Earthworld, which had my heart pounding with excitement when I finally got the last clue. I was using a walkthrough, so the actual challenge was zero, but it was still an uncanny feeling to finally complete it.

Getting a perfect score in Pitfall after 30+ years of trying also had my heart pounding, though I beat it on Intellivision -- still haven't done the Atari 2600 version. More recently I completed Chuck Norris Superkicks on the VCS, which felt great to do.

Of all the games I've cleared from my list, one of the ones that meant the most to me was probably Lord of the Rings Vol. 1 for SNES. Yes, yes, I know it's "objectively" (as if that means anything) a poor game -- but the haunting music and Tolkien theme made it stick with me for decades. I rented it around 1993 and didn't make it too far, and then got lost when I tried to beat it with savestates around 2001. Finally my wife and I successfully played through it a few years ago and, even with all the flaws and bugs, somehow it just gave me a really nice feeling of closure and nostalgia. (Beating Journey to Rivendell on the VCS also felt pretty good.)

I don't have a formal list of games I "should" play, though I've got a list for games "in progress" (played in the last 10 years, didn't finish), and another for "unfinished business" games (played as a kid and want to get back to it, or beat with savestates and want to replay legitimately).

So -- to actually answer the question -- what do I want to play, or finish? What's my unfinished business?

Some are on wongojack's list. I've never really gotten into Adventure or Haunted House, and only beat Pitfall II with savestates. I'd love to actually beat Starmaster on the highest difficulty setting; don't remember how far I got as a kid.

On the Intellivision, Treasure of Tarmin is the only AD&D game I haven't thoroughly beaten. I'd also like to complete the (really nice) homebrew Stonix.

The most famous "big" NES game I haven't beaten is Castlevania III, but I'm more bothered that I haven't properly cleared Destination Earthstar or The Goonies II. I also want to play through a full season of Bases Loaded someday; how far did I get as a kid -- 10, 12 games in? Maybe I still have the passwords somewhere. And since I've beaten Dragon Warrior I & II legit, I'd like to replay III and actually play IV for the first time.

On the Genesis, the big one is Ecco the Dolphin. Played it in emulation, was captivated for an hour or two, but haven't touched it since, even though I now own it. On the SNES, I've got a pile of games I didn't finish as a kid: the Super Star Wars trilogy, F-Zero on high difficulties, Contra III, StarFox on the hardest path.

As for computer games, I never did clear Downland (on the CoCo) legitimately. Otherwise, it's all about text adventures and RPGs. The only Infocom game I've actually beaten is Wishbringer, and I never got far in Hitchhiker's or Leather Goddesses of Phobos. I'd love to play those with my wife, along with Zork, Planetfall, and all the others I haven't tried.

But the biggest one is Synapse Software's Mindwheel, a text adventure that sounded amazing when I read about it in Computer Entertainment as a kid. I know it'll be disappointing and confusing -- I played around with it 15 years ago, and didn't get much of anywhere -- but beating it would still feel like writing the long-awaited end to a story I started long ago.

[+wongojack]

I am happy to report that I finished Metal Gear Solid. I had played the 2 MSX Metal Gear games in recent years and I liked their sneak and run gameplay very much. The updates in MGS really make it like a cinematic experience, but DEAR LORD THE TERRIBLE WRITING!! This thing comes close to a schizophrenic manifesto. A sample of the rando plot elements (almost all of which are completely unnecessary) include things like:

• Can you fall in love on the battlefield?
• Gene programming determining your destiny
• Nuclear disarmament
• More weird family stuff than a Mexican soap
• Rampant ridiculous sexism

It would be one thing if you could tell they were laughing at their own creation and expecting the player to laugh along with them, but the game takes itself sooo f'ing seriously. I think it would be interesting if someone were to eliminate the voice acting and attempt to hack the game by re-writing all of the text dialog to not sound like it was written by some guy who bunked with Charles Manson in prison. Simply replacing the text with entries from the dictionary might be an improvement.

However, I was really impressed with how many ways the game yelled "Snake" when you died - LOL

As I mentioned above, I like the gameplay well enough. Sneaking and getting stealth kills is alive and well in games today, and the early Metal Gear games all did that very well. My biggest complaint about actually playing the game is the somewhat unreasonable difficulty of the battle with the Metal Gear robot itself. Wow that took me a LONG time. What really got me hot during that fight was having to switch so quickly between weapons. The inventory switching is kind of a PITA, but it doesn't really bother you during the more slowly paced action in the rest of the game. However when fighting the robot mecha thing, I was constantly picking the wrong item and ending up with the sniper rifle or some other sh!+. It was tense in my house as I was yelling obscenities at the game for not doing what I wanted it to do.

Anyone have suggestions about which Metal Gear game to play next? If you were going to play only one MG game (besides the first 3 which I've already played) which would it be?

[Ramses]

I am happy to report that I finished Metal Gear Solid. I had played the 2 MSX Metal Gear games in recent years and I liked their sneak and run gameplay very much. The updates in MGS really make it like a cinematic experience, but DEAR LORD THE TERRIBLE WRITING!! This thing comes close to a schizophrenic manifesto. A sample of the rando plot elements (almost all of which are completely unnecessary) include things like:

• Can you fall in love on the battlefield?
• Gene programming determining your destiny
• Nuclear disarmament
• More weird family stuff than a Mexican soap
• Rampant ridiculous sexism

It would be one thing if you could tell they were laughing at their own creation and expecting the player to laugh along with them, but the game takes itself sooo f'ing seriously. I think it would be interesting if someone were to eliminate the voice acting and attempt to hack the game by re-writing all of the text dialog to not sound like it was written by some guy who bunked with Charles Manson in prison. Simply replacing the text with entries from the dictionary might be an improvement.

However, I was really impressed with how many ways the game yelled "Snake" when you died - LOL

As I mentioned above, I like the gameplay well enough. Sneaking and getting stealth kills is alive and well in games today, and the early Metal Gear games all did that very well. My biggest complaint about actually playing the game is the somewhat unreasonable difficulty of the battle with the Metal Gear robot itself. Wow that took me a LONG time. What really got me hot during that fight was having to switch so quickly between weapons. The inventory switching is kind of a PITA, but it doesn't really bother you during the more slowly paced action in the rest of the game. However when fighting the robot mecha thing, I was constantly picking the wrong item and ending up with the sniper rifle or some other sh!+. It was tense in my house as I was yelling obscenities at the game for not doing what I wanted it to do.

Anyone have suggestions about which Metal Gear game to play next? If you were going to play only one MG game (besides the first 3 which I've already played) which would it be?

 

 

I felt the same way with Metal Gear Solid. Hideo Kojima is on some really potent stuff. It gets worse in MGS2. Of the first 4, MGS3 is my favorite. It's a little more toned down compared to MGS2 and MGS4. That said there's still quite a bit of ridiculous stuff in it. MGS5 is also toned down, though it's partly due to there being not as much story due to it being more open world.

[+wongojack]

I finished Link to the Past! I don't really have that much to say about it. I did have to check a few things toward the end (where's that cloak?), but I didn't reference a walkthrough to guide me totally through a dungeon or anything. Overall, I had fun discovering the game and solving the puzzles in the dungeons. While I was fighting Gannon, I took a break and explored around again. You get pushed out of the fight and have the ability to go run around and heal up and stuff, so I ended up finding the way to reduce my magic usage just through exploration and trial and error - wasn't expecting that. Anyway, it really is a fantastic game.

[Razzie.P]

I've been meaning to create list similar to this, but kept putting it off. Maybe it's time. I did, however, decide that it's finally time to work my way though the Y's series this year. I finished 1 and 2 on the TurboDuo as a teen, but never kept up with the series. Since then, each time I'd see a new Ys game, I had that I feeling that I really wanna check it out, but need to play the others first, so that's been a bit of a focus lately. Next up is part V. I'm hoping there's an English Translation out there somewhere, or I'll have to skip it and move on to VI.

[+wongojack]

Well, I finished 2 more games recently.  Interestingly I don't think either of them appeared on my list in the first post.

 

Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

I played this via the original Xbox disk on my Xbox One.  I guess I could say A LOT of things about this game, but mostly I was impressed with the story.  It is longer and feels even more connected to the world they created than the other Bethesda RPGs I've played.  Some of the changes they've made over the years have been good and almost all of them have made games like Skyrim more fun for the player, but Morrowind's quirks certainly have their fans.   Here are some thoughts I had while playing the game:

 

• Major and Minor skills made sense for the genre in 2003 but didn't make playing your character more fun
• Not being able to hit something right in front of you is kinda lame and makes leveling up "Marksmanship" a tough thing to do as a miscellaneous skill
• The main story is more interesting that the equivalent in Skyrim, Oblivion or Fallout 3
• I like the way that the story deliberately takes you around the island. You get to see practically the whole thing
• Failing at casting spells, enchanting items, and creating potions kinda sucks
• It's hard to go backwards and accept the very short view distance in the world.

 

I love the story, but my main complaint from a story perspective is that you weren't able to ask Dagoth Ur for his version of what happened on Red Mountain all those years ago.  I'm not sure why they left that out when they gave you tons of other info about that specific event through the course of the game.

 

I think I'd rank the story of all the Bethesda RPG's that I've played like this:

1) Morrowind

2) Fallout 3

3) Skyrim

4) Oblivion

 

 

AND

 

After all these years, I finally stopped Elvin Atombender and completed the Impossible Mission.  I played it on the C64mini and didn't use any save states or trainers.  Knowing what I know now, I never even got close as a kid.  I had to print out a grid the same size and shape of the music puzzle to get it done.  Even then, I still failed a few times. 

 

 

One thing to note, this is a pretty long game for 1983, and the gametime of an individual game gets much LONGER as you improve.  I was playing almost 3 hour games before I finally won.  Overall it is a fun game, and each of the 3 main elements (music room, platform rooms, jigsaw puzzle) are well done, but all of them get tedious and feel LESS rewarding as you make progress.  The music puzzle is a child's memory game that quickly becomes too difficult for an adult.  At least it mercifully doesn't get any harder once you get to the 12th level.  After that time, solving the puzzle requires putting 14 musical notes in order, and it always rewards the player with a "snooze" if you complete it.  The platform rooms are nice in that they can usually be solved in numerous ways.  However, some of the furniture is very hard to reach and because the robot functions are random, you can occasionally be required to spend multiple snoozes on the same room.  Finally, it is nice that the jigsaw puzzles are difficult, but the fact that you can sometimes assemble 2 or even 3 pieces (out of 4) incorrectly can really send the player down the wrong path in a frustrating way.  My advice is to simply clear ALL of the furniture before really spending much time trying to solve the jigsaw puzzles.  Then start with the pieces that have the highest percentage of color or design on them and just do one set of 4 pieces at a time.

[Tanooki]

This wasn't anytime really recent, and maybe a bit of a cheat kind of, but Symphony of the Night I have not had the honor of ever finishing back when it was fresh on the PS1.  It wasn't until years later I ended up with a copy of the game sometime in the mid 00s.  I had previously owned a Saturn and had imported what I felt was the superior Nocturne in the Moonlight, so I had only played the more complete map Japanese release so I couldn't follow the story or much else.

 

Another one some called a must finish because it was so strangely unique and also turning out to end up being one of those annoyingly expensive SNES titles was EVO.  I got this and only finished it within the last 7 years.  There was a point when I could get a really nice deal on it when the price first started to go up around/over old retail and bagged it as I was curious due to the evolution aspect.  I don't know if people were all must have because of the money aspect or the uniqueness, I'd hope the uniqueness, because quite honestly there's nothing like it and I was quite impressed.  As much as I was though the way it played though, it came off to me like one of those games that's one and done, maybe come back to it if ever 10-20 years later as it just does it all.  I really enjoyed the stages through time and the mixing and matching of parts.

[+wongojack]

3 hours ago, Tanooki said:

This wasn't anytime really recent, and maybe a bit of a cheat kind of, but Symphony of the Night I have not had the honor of ever finishing back when it was fresh on the PS1.  It wasn't until years later I ended up with a copy of the game sometime in the mid 00s.  I had previously owned a Saturn and had imported what I felt was the superior Nocturne in the Moonlight, so I had only played the more complete map Japanese release so I couldn't follow the story or much else.

 

Another one some called a must finish because it was so strangely unique and also turning out to end up being one of those annoyingly expensive SNES titles was EVO.  I got this and only finished it within the last 7 years.  There was a point when I could get a really nice deal on it when the price first started to go up around/over old retail and bagged it as I was curious due to the evolution aspect.  I don't know if people were all must have because of the money aspect or the uniqueness, I'd hope the uniqueness, because quite honestly there's nothing like it and I was quite impressed.  As much as I was though the way it played though, it came off to me like one of those games that's one and done, maybe come back to it if ever 10-20 years later as it just does it all.  I really enjoyed the stages through time and the mixing and matching of parts.

I have also never finished Symphony of the Night.  I very much want to though.

 

As for EVO, I don't think I've ever heard of it.  I may have to look it up in emulation.

[Tanooki]

29 minutes ago, wongojack said:

I have also never finished Symphony of the Night.  I very much want to though.

 

As for EVO, I don't think I've ever heard of it.  I may have to look it up in emulation.

Ahh wow, well EVO is a unique one.  It jumps through time, you basically run through different epochs in what I guess could be called an action RPG side scroller.  It is in a little way like Cubivore on the Gamecube where you kill stuff, consume the parts get points, evolve bits you wish to or not to get the power needed to kill the bad creature thing at the end of each period causing problems before the jump to the next evolved level.  And the game can end in various ways of a final evolution, not just human but other creatures.