This may be the fifth time that I’ve gotten all 120 stars in this game, although it could be more. My brother bought this at release in the US as we happened to be there on holiday at the time. It was just unbelievable at the time, such a leap forward in video games. I really doubt we’ll ever see anything like it again. The last game I played Jumping Flash! only came out the year before and the difference in controls and depth is incredible.
Stuff about Games I've Completed
I got the original PlayStation at launch in the UK by going halves with my brother. We got a memory card and Ridge Racer, which I finished the same day. It also came with a demo disk that had an interactive T-Rex, and a demo for Loaded among other games. I think there was a video for WipeOut maybe too.
This is a game where you play as a border guard in 1982 for a fictional Soviet style country. Sat in your station, you call people in one by one and check all of their documents. The rules and requirements of these change quite regularly. You get paid for the amount of people you process, and get fined for mistakes.
This is another game that I played at release but didn’t finish. This time I played the remastered version by Nightdive Studios, which is pretty faithful. It feels like they did a great job cleaning it up but not changing the game in any real way.
I bought this at release, but never finished it. This time I played the remastered version that was released recently. In the original version I think I got kept getting lost, and the new version adds a feature that draws markers in the world to show you were you need to go next. I think that’s a great feature that should get added into lots of old shooters.
I played along with the Retrograde Amnesia podcast, this is the game for series 5. This game was never released in the UK, though I was aware of it at the time. I’d played Xenogears through an emulator and absolutely loved it. I didn’t have a way to play import PS2 games though. Strangely they released Episode 2 here, but it can’t have sold well since they then didn’t release 3.
I think this might be my favourite Dragon Quest game now, I loved it the whole way through. Usually Dragon Quest games have a fairly thin overarching story, but a great collection of little stories in each town you visit. I think this one still has the second, but they all tie in to a much stronger narrative. The game also has such a wonderful cast of characters, but Sylvando is a standout. He is just a constant source of joy throughout.
I never got around to finishing the original Resident Evil 3, I think I got really quite far though. I remember the clock tower. From memory I think they’ve changed quite a lot in this remake.
Killer 7 was originally a GameCube game released by Capcom in 2005. I played it at the time, but got stuck in the theme park level. It’s since been ported to Windows, and plays brilliantly on the Steam Deck. At the time of original release it was unlike anything else, and although it is still an unusual game it stylistically fits in well with a lot of modern indie games.
Fatal Labyrinth is a roguelike RPG for the Mega Drive by Sega released in 1991. It’s a very early example of the genre for consoles. There are thirty randomly generated floors of a dungeon to explore, then you need to kill a dragon and collect a goblet. I found it quite easy, which is surprising since these games are normally extremely hard. When you die you don’t start completely from scratch but can restart from a checkpoint in an earlier floor.
This is written by the guy that wrote The Stanley Parable, which I absolutely love. You are presented with a series of tiny games that are supposedly created by a friend of his, while he narrates his thoughts about what they mean and what it tells us about the creator of the games.
I just finished Yakuza 0 on the Steam Deck. You play as Kazama Kiryu who gets accused of a murder he didn’t commit, and Goro Majima who is being forced to run a cabaret club and is not allowed to leave his city. The game is really long, both characters stories could be a standalone game. They end up tying together in a really interesting way I didn’t see coming though.
I hadn’t played this in a very long time. I remembered feeling a bit let down after Sonic 2, and I think that probably still stands. It’s a great game, but the levels are too long and the ending is a bit anti-climactic. I managed to get all the chaos emeralds tough, the bonus levels get very hard!
I got Arcade Paradise from a Humble Bundle this year, and just got around to playing it. I had never heard of the game before and had no idea what it was like. The game is a first person business simulation where you’re running a laundromat that happens to have some arcade machines in the back room. At first you’re just trying to keep up with emptying coin machines and the loads of laundry coming in, but as you get more money you can invest in more arcade machines.
I played Chants of Sennaar on Steam Deck after buying it on a whim. It’s a wonderful adventure game about communication. There are multiple groups of people in the world each of which speak a different language, you can’t understand any of them and none of the groups can speak to each other.