Divine Force is alright, certainly in comparison to SO4. Feels like a PS2 game in many ways, which is both good and bad depending on your preferences.
Gaming thoughts, bite-size chewables - new orange flavor!
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I've got good memories of taking a fully loaded truck over a snowy mountain and just about making that work.
And eventually it's all zip-line network anyway.
There is a fanmade server for the original Demon's Souls that is easy to connect to from a real PS3 by just changing DNS settings. It also has some handy new features that let you control your world tendency if you can't be arsed to do that the old-fashioned way, it's all explained in the link.
That said, if you want to play the original today and have a reasonably modern PC, I would recommend playing it via RPCS3 instead. It runs very well even on more modest systems, there's a 60fps patch available and load times are less of an issue.
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That's way more than enough to run something like Demon's Souls, you'll be just fine. It's a pretty light PS3 game to emulate.
Canceled my purchase after playing the demo. Which I suppose is exhibit A for why companies generally no longer do demos, in recent times SE are now 4/5 in getting me to not buy a game I was interested in.
Primary reason being technical deficiencies. The performance mode is quite bad. Cutscenes will cap to 30 regardless, but exploration in the small castle section struggles to go much above 40. And in combat they drastically reduce resolution to hit 60, which makes for a very inconsistent experience.
After all their talk about focusing on one platform and substantial delays to make sure the game is the best it can be, I'm not cutting them any slack in that area. And it's not like it's a visual stunner to begin with, cross-gen games like Horizon or God of War are a clear cut above while also performing much better.
There are other issues I have with it, but that's really the big one. It's just not enjoyable to play because of it. If you're fine with the 30fps mode, YMMV.
I think I'm just done with this company, to be honest. It's not the 90s anymore, they've shown again and again they can't deliver. Hard to let go of that nostalgia, though.
It's not UE4. It's also not Luminous, but a custom engine that I would assume to have some roots at least in the FFXIV engine, as that's what the team would have been using already prior to this. Can't blame the poor performance on UE4 this time.
That was sort of the original plan. No GPU per se, but have it all run on a bigger Cell than ultimately shipped. That didn't quite work out that way and in the end they bolted a more or less standard Geforce 7800 GTX on to the system.
If you're curious about these oddball architectures, Rodrigo Copetti has done some fantastic and in-depth analyses of many of them, PS2 and PS3 included.
Worse, the combat system practically requires a party of 3 to function properly. So naturally, they split your party up into groups of 2 for the first 20 hours. It's just a slog.
Racer is easily the best thing to come out of the prequels. There's very few games that can match that sense of speed without it being too finicky to control. I picked up the PS4 port a while back myself and played it through start to finish again. Such a phenomenal racing game still.
- Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons
- Tacoma
- Haven
- Lake
And +1 for LiS, although I personally found the writing in LiS1 a bit rough to go back to these days. True Colors is great, though, and while it does feature a character from LiS: Before the Storm prominently, it doesn't have any other narrative connection and can be played on its own.
As you progress, you can unlock a slew of new upgrades and weapons. But the caveat is, outside of the first time you encounter them, that just means they're available to be picked up on your next runs through item fabricators and drops.
There is a permanent currency, Ether, which will let you buy some upgrades on a new run, but that's not something you can rely on if you die a lot because no actual gear or stats carries over. There are one-time use revival spots you can activate with Ether, too.
Once you beat an area, you will also unlock short cuts that let you skip that area on your next runs. The caveat here being that you also miss out on any upgrades from there, although you will get boosted Proficiency to match the area.
You mentioned dying to lockdowns, those tend to be due to optional encounters. Avoid the golden doors. Do not engage with the corpses of other players. Do not fall down the cracks in the floor that lead to bonus rooms. Those all have the potential to lead to much tougher enemies that can easily wreck you.
Do keep an eye out for statues with glowing yellow eyes. Free extra Silphium.
Certain weapons will also undoubtedly help you. A Tachyomatic Carbine with Leech Rounds is as close to an Easy Mode as is possible in Returnal. While there are much more effective weapons, the healing and ease of use of the weapon helps a lot if you're struggling.
At the end of the day, though, Returnal is a rogue-lite bullet hell shooter. There's no escaping that. However, in my experience, the game does get easier as you progress. So if you can make it past the first area, it's more likely than not that you can finish the game.
As for the story, I think it's quite good and worthwhile, however, it is nothing like Horizon or TLOU. There's a lot of mystery and room for interpretation, and merely beating the game once will not give you all the answers (such as they are).
If that sounds like too steep a hill to climb, it might be best to just watch a summary somewhere to sate your curiosity and move on.
Edit: Co-op might be another possibility. If you're playing on PS5, send me a PM and we can see if we can set something up. Haven't played it in a while, but I'm always up for more Returnal.
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Funnily enough, Pirates: The Legend of Black Kat feels like kind of a proto-modern-AC game. You've got your own upgradeable ship that you can sail around a bunch of islands, engaging in a very similar kind of ship-to-ship combat. Once you've cleared the immediate area of any ships, you can land on and explore the islands on foot, digging up treasure and clearing icons off the map while slashing up some pirates, skeletons and what-have-you.
Feels strikingly familiar to play, just with that good old PS2-era charm/jankiness.
Oh and it's one of the last games Westwood ever made. So there's that, too.
And the framerate doesn't tank completely once battles get a bit more busy, which is very helpful.
I agree with all the rest, too, Leifthrasir greatly improves the original game. I never ended up finishing even just a single character on the PS2 original, but couldn't stop until I got the Platinum trophy on PS4. It's good fun.
You may want to check out Polybius. I believe it's also available on PC now, so don't necessarily need a PSVR1 setup anymore to play it. It's a pretty wild ride in VR.
That's the marketing angle, yes. In practice, it's a really trippy Tempest-like. Aka a Jeff Minter game.
At the same time, if you can get back into that old control scheme, it actually plays pretty well. The grid system and movement mechanics that align with that grid mean it's generally very precise and once you get the hang of it, there's no wondering whether you can make that jump or reach that ledge - you know already, it's the same every time and not adjusted on the fly by the game dependent on whether you're meant to make that jump or not.
It's kinda like the original Prince of Persia in that regard.
That said, close quarters movement is never anything but completely awkward.
I'd be game for that. Legend could definitely use it. It's fairly unstable on PC these days. And Underworld needs a better camera. But otherwise these are still pretty fun games.
Would have me more excited to replay these than Shadow, at any rate. Or anything continuing the modern series, if the trajectory of those stays the same.
+1 for a CRT for retrogaming on CRT-era consoles, but I realize that is not an option for a lot of people.
For a PS1 specifically, my preferred way of playing these games today is to emulate them by way of a PS1 RetroArch core and then output to a CRT using a Radeon 270X (Pitcairn is the most modern GPU that can still output analog video over DVI-I) with a VGA-to-SCART converter. This is best done on a Linux box, but there are modded Windows drivers available that can support the necessary resolutions and timings.
This gets you access to all the handy features like PGXP, perspective-correct textures, save states, digital library and anti-aliasing by way of supersampling while still getting that nice CRT look, at the cost of a bit of added latency.
The other, less insane way you could go would be to use a scaler inbetween. At minimum, something like the Open Source Scan Converter (OSSC) will do okay. A Retrotink 5X or OSSC Pro if you're feeling a little spendier for something higher quality. If money is burning a hole in your pocket, the upcoming Retrotink 4K looks like it will be the single best way to connect old consoles to modern flat-panels.
Connecting old consoles directly to a modern display should be the last resort, it'll never look nice.
Yeah, switching between 240p and 480i was not uncommon for menus or art galleries and such.
The Mister/FPGA emulation in general is definitely something I've been keeping an eye on, but I can't quite see myself using one in its current state, at least not for something like the PS1. The image quality enhancements that are possible for PS1 games are just too tempting.
With the PS2 gen I don't mind sticking to original visuals with real hardware on a CRT since the jump in processing power was so substantial for that generation (and the PS2 in particular has fantastic homebrew support that adds a lot of useful QoL features), but they're beyond the capabilities of Mister anyway.
But PS1, Saturn and N64 are all pretty rough in their own way, and emulation helps to make the games feel more like I remember them to look like, versus what they actually look like.
Might not be a bad idea to get one set up for the SNES, though ...
That's true, of course, but there are a number of ways you might end up in that situation. Some TVs/receivers do still have analog inputs, someone might be tempted to make use of one of those either directly or through a converter. There are numerous cables available that contain an analog-to-digital converter inside them of varying quality. And then there's hardware mods like the PS1Digital that will let it output HDMI, although granted, if you're doing that you probably know what you're doing and why you're doing it anyway.Well most old consoles don't really do HDMI on their own, so...
Hm yeah, save states would definitely be useful. One mitigating factor on the modern emulation side that I forgot to mention is the black magic that is run-ahead. For cores supporting it that can shave off a good bit of latency if you've got it running on a reasonably powerful machine.
Yeah. Just ... bah.
Deck Nine, actually. Dontnod were only responsible for the numbered LiS titles.
Ragnarök is a great, if safe, sequel to 2018. The level of violence is about the same. Still, I wouldn't recommend either God of War or CP2077 for a 7-year-old.
It's a classic for sure, but there's still plenty good music in modern FFs. XIV tends to sail by a lot of people for obvious reasons, but it's got a soundtrack packed with both new versions of old classics as well as plenty of interesting original tracks. Since we are talking boss fights, some of my favorites include Metal: Brute Justice Mode and Beauty's Wicked Wiles.
You'll have a better experience playing HoMM3 using VCMI, a recreation of the engine. Or at least a better experience on a technical level.
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