The Never Late Gamer here, it was my birthday recently, so here's what I managed to scoop up for my collection
Very off the cuff thoughts on each of them:
Illusion of Gaia is a game I've been meaning to grab for such a long time; a widely celebrated SNES RPG that was also relatively cheap ($35 after taxes and shipping?) seemed like a no brainer but I kept putting off buying it. The game is effectively a more Action RPG-ish take on Link to the Past, which is great for me because I fucking hated the Adventure elements of that game, as anyone in GP will tell you. I've only played the first hour or so of Illusion of Gaia, but the movement and combat is soooo fluid and satisfying, and the story is...so fucking stilted right from the start and apparently it's only going to get more fantastical and bizarre, so I'll probably end up enjoying it. Game is also fairly short (about 15 hours) and it's such a comfy game to play on a weekend night ... very much looking forward to this one, hoping it scratches the same itch as Final Fantasy VI and Phantasy Star IV (this does remind me I need to get back to playing Grandia 2, but that game is much longer so it'll probably be more of a slow burn)
I'd been itching to get more stuff I can play on my Genesis and after playing a good amount of it in emulators I figured
Shinobi III was a good bet in terms of both quality and pricing. And man...I do still really like the first 5 Stages of the game with its focus on fluid movement and fighting enemies, which is what I had played before getting this copy. But Stages 6 and 7 focus on super annoying hazards and precision platforming with very few enemies; pretty antithetical to what came before it honestly. The final boss is nigh impossible so who knows when I'll beat this game. Soundtrack is pretty good though, best song (and most famous song) by far is of course
Whirlwind.
Now, I would have purchased Shinobi 3 on Ebay, but it was actually kinda hard to find a copy for a reasonable price on there. I know my local retro store had a copy for $30, but it was in rough shape from what I remember. However, by some miracle, someone on r/gamesale was selling off their Genesis collection and they not only had Shinobi III, but also
Castlevania Bloodlines. Bloodlines is a game I've already beaten on Normal a few times, but it's hands-down my favorite Genesis game, my favorite Castlevania, and one of my favorite games of the 90s in general, so you'd bet I wanna own a copy. Super Castlevania IV is a celebration of everything that makes the SNES great, having a focus on atmosphere, boundary-pushing impressive setpieces thanks to Mode 7 (i.e. rotating rooms), controls that are a bit stiff but grant the player tons of options, and being a pretty meaty campaign. Bloodlines is its mirror image and celebrates everything great about the Genesis, your options are a bit more limited but your movement is far more fluid to compensate. It doesn't have as deep of an atmosphere, but it makes up for it with incredibly flashy visual effects and a wide variety of setpieces and backdrops for each level. The game's about half as long as Super, but hey, that makes it easier to blast through in one sitting, which you're encouraged to due to the game's limited continues. And the game forgoes Super's more gothic classical soundtrack for a more hype melodic soundtrack by the now legendary Michiru Yamane.
Reincarnated Soul and
Iron Blue Intention are pretty iconic tracks in the series, though my favorite song is
Calling From Heaven.
Bloodlines is a bit pricey by Genesis standards, a cartridge in this condition on Ebay would probably run you somewhere in $80-100 range after taxes and shipping, hence why I haven't gone out of my way to get a copy. The seller had it listed for $60 so it was a no-brainer purchase for me. Top that with $30 for Shinobi III and fees, and I now the happy owner of this bad boy. Gotta make time to play through it on Expert and/or with John Morris...or maybe I'll just play more Normal Mode Eric for funsies, god damn I love this game :)
Speaking of Shinobi, I also picked up
Shinobi for PS2. My brother recently got a PS2 USB loader, so I tried out Shinobi on it and enjoyed it. It still has some of the jank and clunk you'd expect from a 2002 3D action game, but it still plays nicely enough with fast and varied movement options. The camera sucks though and I've heard it only gets more frustrating to deal with as the game goes on. I have enough games I wanna play and, if I want an early-6th Gen 3D Action game, I'll probably get back to Maken X first, but I'll give this a more serious go at some point down the line.
I was already considering buying Shinobi, but the main reason I bought it was because a seller on Ebay would let me get a discount if I got it alongside the copy of
Ridge Racer V I was eyeing. I've been giving some Ridge Racer games a shot on USB loaders and hot damn, I think I have officially been Ridge Racer-pilled. The controls in V are very weighty, which apparently a lot of people complain about, but I don't know, I've been able to get it to work surprisingly well. The game looks absolutely incredible for a PS2 launch title, and it runs at a smooth 60 fps to boot. It's a shame this game is 240p 4:3 only, because it would pass as a 7th Gen game if it could output in 1080p. While R4 is a celebration of the late 90s sense of style, RRV is definitely trying to look forward and embrace the upcoming Y2K style; lots of Black, White, and Blue, a mix of large impact titles and details in incredibly small fonts, and a soundtrack that's more intense techno industrial with some IDM, compared to R4's jazzy acid house. Highlights include the main theme
Fogbound,
Euphoria, and
Samurai Rocket, though my favorite track is the
Junx remix. On an aside, the disc I had gotten was in pretty rough shape so the music kept stuttering whenever I played the game. Thankfully, a nice wiping of the disc got it working perfectly again.
For a longer aside, when I got my PS2 as a kid, the only game we had for it was Gran Turismo 3, and I could not for the life of me understand it which pretty much killed any interest I had in being a Sony Kid. 20 years later, Ridge Racer inspired me to give Gran Turismo 3 another shot and...it's still dogshit LOL. Controls are really finnicky (I don't give a shit about realism I want the game to be fun to play), the arcade mode feels even more rudimentary than RRV's, the style is a lot more sauceless, and holy shit I do not care about the sim mode. The last thing I wanna do when I start up a racing game is to go to the store, buy a car with limited funds, and complete a bunch of license exams. I guess I just have to wonder how differently my life would have gone if my dad opted to get Ridge Racer instead. But I digress.
The previous five games were all purchased online and I didn't feel the urge to buy anything else online; I figured I'd go hit up my local stores and see if they had anything I wanted to grab. I haven't gotten the chance to visit some stores in Boston proper, so I may end up updating this post later. However, it turns out a retro store actually recently opened one town away for me, so I decided to check it out. It was pretty small and had a very limited selection, but they still had a couple items that caught my eye (including some rare Dreamcast stuff, I don't think I've ever seen D2 in the wild). And one such item was
Ridge Racer Type 4, a game I could not find for the life of me when I went hunting for it in-person over the past several months. It was missing the manual, but it had everything else, including the bonus disc, for a pretty reasonable $40. I had no intention on getting this game before, I already had Ridge Racer V (which was much cheaper). When I had sampled both of those games a few months ago, despite how celebrated R4 was and its incredible sense of style, I couldn't really get a feel for the controls like I could with V. But god damnit, I like shopping at and supporting local stores, so I decided to just grab the copy on a whim and bring it home with me.
And...holy shit. The controls clicked this time. Ridge Racer Type 4 is so fucking good. I can't really put my full thoughts on this game into just one paragraph and I am still actively playing it. You'll have to wait for its own post to get my full thoughts, although I'm hoping to enter my Youtuber Era and do a video essay on it.
Also, for the zero of you wondering, yes, the
Smog Tour video is heavily influenced by the How-To-Play videos in the Ridge Racer games (
here's the one for Type 4)
