Skies of Arcadia: a difficult start

I bought Skies of Arcadia for the Dreamcast (for £5 when HMV was clearing its stock).  I bought Skies of Arcadia Legends for the Gamecube (for about the same when Game was clearing its stock).  I have never played either.

But now, with the release of ReDream, a clean and simple Dreamcast emulator, and a few spare hours with my laptop in a Taiwan hotel, I have at least started it.  There are a few graphical effects on the screen which wouldn't be there if I were playing on my Dreamcast, but at the same time I wouldn't have such a clean picture ... and in fact I wouldn't be playing it at all.

The game isn't exactly the quickest to start, with cutscene after cutscene introducing the cast and situation.  The characters are well designed, if not immediately likeable, and there's a good world that feels ready to be explored.

But when the game starts properly, it's just all a bit slow.  You have to traverse long distances (across admittedly beautiful scenery) to find the next checkpoint, and it feels very linear and scripted.  I'm sure that the game will eventually open out, but after an hour I had only just landed the ship, after a few easy battles, and had managed to get stuck in a cupboard.

This is a problem I have with most JRPGs, to be fair, and as I get older and I have less free time it becomes ever more noticeable.  While this is a game I'd like to play more of, I suspect that realistically I can expect to forget about it now and have to replay the first part again in the future.

Gaming Moments: J

Jaguar XJ220 (Mega CD)

It wasn't as good as Lotus Turbo Challenge on the Mega Drive.  Sure, it looked better, but I still remember the first time I tried to control it.  I couldn't.

Jet Set Radio (Dreamcast)
Jet Set Radio HD (Xbox 360)

I spent hours just trying to get off the tutorial, doing an endless grind around the central bus station.  Made all the worse since I did it twice, once on each console - but there was an achievement for the 360 version so I felt I had to do it again.

Journey (PS3)

A game filled with moments, but I think my pick comes early in the game, at the bridge.  The structures tower above you, and it took me (and my companion) a while to work out that our path wasn't just across the base but we had to somehow get up there.  Learning the floating mechanic in that way together was amazing.

Then there's the snow, but I can't put the words together to describe that.

Jungle Strike (Mega Drive)

Mainly played via the PSP, to be honest, since that added save states.  The last level is set at the White House.  Just as you think you've completed the game, tanks roll in and you have to protect the president's helicopter as he escapes.

Gaming moments: H

Half-Life (PC)

The very first time I played this, I remember sitting watching the opening sequence and being amazed by the detail in the surroundings.  I accidentally nudged my desk and the view changed - and suddenly I realised that I could control my character already.

Headhunter (Dreamcast)

Travelling by motorbike, I somehow managed to get myself lodged in some scenery, and span on the spot.  Funny until I realised that I'd lose progress since the last save. The accelerator controls on the game were really sensitive, and it was tricky to steer.

Hexic HD (Xbox 360)

I shouted with joy when I finally got a black pearl. It's so tense working up to it, as one mistaken move can lead to everything collapsing. 

Gaming moments: F

Floigan Brothers: Episode One (Dreamcast)

I recall being stumped for ages that I needed to get to somewhere distant, but couldn't jump that far.  By accident I managed to annoy the big fat brother, who picked me up and chucked me over to the platform.

Feel the Magic XX-XY (DS)

I had the US version.  One of the first games in the game (if not the very first) sees you trying to get goldfish out of a man's stomach.  The first time I played this I was mashing the d-pad trying to control the goldfish, completely forgetting about the touch screen.  to be fair, it was a new control scheme at the time ...

Forza Horizon (Xbox 360)

Driving around in the early evening, I was worried that my console was dying, with odd spots appearing in the sky.  It turns out they were Chinese lanterns, floating upwards.

Field Commander (PSP)

I tried to play this multiplayer, not realising it would mean staying on the console until we finished the game.  You'd think that a turn-based game would work using a send-turns mechanic, but no - it worked through a continuous connection.  What's worse is that me and my opponent were closely matched, so I eventually got to bed at around 2am.

Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles (Gamecube)

We played through this at regular games evenings and days.  Kieron played a short bloke with a bucket on his head.  At the end of every day, we watched them all dance around the campfire and made sexist remarks about the woman with big boobs. 

Gaming moments: C

Civilisation Revolution (Xbox 360)

I had expanded across the map, and suddenly I was attacked on three
sides by the Aztecs and two other nations. In one turn they halved my
forces, and during my turn I could do little to bring it back - I rushed
production of units on all my cities but my forces were still depleted.
Defeat seemed likely. But then the Aztecs spent their next turn
attacking one of my tank units with everything they had, all weakened
from the previous battles, and my tank held on to defeat them all. The
other two nations started to attack each other. In my next turn I was
able to push through and capture the Aztec capital and further defend,
leading to an eventual victory. Magic tank.

Crackdown (Xbox 360) 

I had almost completed the game before I realised you could get cars
delivered to the garage. I managed to drive the SUV up the side of the
boss tower and then jump it off - rather amazing.

Chu Chu Rocket (Dreamcast)
My first ever online game, and I won the first match. It was tricky to
adapt to the one-second delay on inputs, but it was that which led to victory in the end - I had placed a tile to my rocket which my opponent simultaneously directed the mice to.

Castle of Illusion (Mega Drive)

I remember Colin bringing his new MD to my house, and being in awe at
this game.  We played it for hours and got pretty far - and then he had
to go home.  He called me the next day to tell me he'd completed the game.

Conker's Bad Fur Day (Nintendo 64)

I am the great mighty poo and I'm going to throw my shit at you!

Crazy Taxi (Dreamcast)

That huge hill at the start of the game, after you'd picked up a woman
at the tram stop.  Crazy boosting all the way down, ready to drift to a
stop at the bottom, slightly to the left, where you were dropping your
passenger off.  That's not my memory though - my memory is of the time
when my drift was too little, and my taxi ended up stuck in the wall
within the drop-off area, racking up huge bonuses as the game continued
my drift for a good two minutes.  The ungrateful woman told me I was
late - but she could have got out at any time.

Conflict: Desert Storm (Gamecube)

I played through this and its sequel with John and Kieron during
multiple gaming days.  The followup, Conflict Vietnam, suddenly removed
the southpaw options from the game, which meant two of us couldn't
control it.  Idiots. 

Game memories: F

Feel the Magic XX-XY (DS)

Project Rub in the UK, but I got this with my imported US DS ahead of the European launch.  In many ways it was an ideal game to launch the DS with, showing many varied ideas on how the touchscreen could be used.  It didn't hang together that well, but I remember the black, white and orange colour scheme vividly.

F1 '97 (PS)

Murray Walker shouting "He's on the green stuff" over and over again; tracks being messes of pixels a little way down the road.  A great game.

F1 2010 (Xbox 360)

Far too many options and menus to wade through.  Completing a single race in the career mode took ages, since you had to go through practice sessions, qualifying and the race itself.  Ideal for people who love F1, but for me it was just a bit painful.

F1 2011 (3DS)

As with F1 2010 above, but with a third of the framerate.

F355 Challenge Passione Rossa (Dreamcast)

At the time this felt like a massive technical achievement and tales of the arcade machine using three monitors underlined the game's credentials.  I played it for about fifteen minutes before being totally overwhelmed by the options and realistic gameplay - in other words, I kept spinning off the track, couldn't work out how to switch to a behind-car view, and had better things to play instead.

Field Commander (PSP)
Like Advance Wars but with little charm, little challenge, and a rubbish online mode.

Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles (Gamecube)
I've never completed a proper Final Fantasy game; I've never even passed the first hour of one.  This, however, was played loads at virtually every games night we held.  Kieron had a bucket on his head, I was a Selkie.  John was accomplished at ranged combat, we all could heal each other but often didn't.

Fire Emblem (GBA)
I never completed this.  I remember it getting very stressful due to the fact that if a character died in a mission, they remained dead.  I restarted missions again and again to protect my favourite characters, and as a result it grew stale and too difficult.

Floigan Brothers: Episode One (Dreamcast)
It's a shame there was no episode two - this was an amusing game which was unlike anything else, as with a lot of Sega's Dreamcast output.  It was far too short and there was a bit too much collection required as far as I recall.  I got this in Singapore and worked out pretty quickly that it was a pirate version, but bought the proper version on my return from HMV for a fiver.

Ford Racing 3 (Xbox)

I was convinced to buy this by people on RLLMUK praising the second game, the fact it was online (when there were few other online games around), and it was £10 brand new.  I think I played it online three times and offline twice, before being tempted away by other games that were just more fun to play.

F-Zero (SNES, Wii, Wii U)

F-Zero GX (Gamecube)

F-Zero X (N64)

F-Zero: Maximum Velocity (GBA, 3DS)
GX is the best.  The Mode 7 games are a bit pants now, but at the time they seemed great, particularly on the GBA where the handling was much more refined.  Replaying them now, they are just too floaty and the career mode is a bit lightweight with daft difficulty spikes.

Future Tactics: the Uprising (Gamecube)

I bought this in the US and as a result, the hassle needed to load the game meant that I played it little.  A shame, as when I did I remember it being a clever game melding a strategy turn-based game with something that felt more action-based.  I'm now able to play US games on my modded Wii; I may try this again when I find it.

Fighting Vipers (Saturn, Xbox 360)

I continue to be hopeless at fighting games that are more complicated that Street Fighter II, but Fighting Vipers has a pleasing lack of combo, super and extra EX WTF meters.  The fighting feels solid and the idea of being able to knock off armour works well.  I get the feeling that if I played this a bit more I could get quite good at it.  That's unlikely to happen.

Daytona USA: a time machine on four wheels

I've been waiting forever for a good conversion of Daytona.  The Saturn game was disappointing.  The second Saturn game fixed all that was bad about the first, and ruined all that was good.  The Dreamcast game was great, but it was too tricky and involved.

The Xbox 360 game is amazing.

Yes, there are a few added modes on top of the pure arcade game, with challenges and time trials and endurance races, but that doesn't take away from the fact that this is Daytona, down to the octagonal wheels and fuzzy roads.  The only thing that's different from the arcade game - other than the wheel of course - is that this is playing on a better quality TV and is in higher definition than I ever saw before.

I'm inspired to get out the old copies just to see if they are as disappointing as I remember.  Particularly the first Saturn game, with digital steering and all.

Space Channel 5: chu chu chu!

I'm still not sure if they say "chu" or "shoot".

Back in 2006, Owen posted about Space Channel 5. He wanted to try again five years later, to see if he could get past the first level. Unfortunately, he never got the chance to.

In his memory, today a number of people from ugvm and RLLMUK have played Space Channel 5 - the idea being to at least finish the first level. Owen said he got kicked out because his view rating wasn't high enough, so I presume that's after the robot battle. I ended the level on 21%, well above the 15% cut-off.

The graphics have aged quite badly in places - walking on the spaceport roof, for example, the pre-rendered background looks like it's at a different angle to the characters. And background characters seem to have rectangular heads. The rhythm of the music is difficult sometimes, but after calibrating the TV to 'game mode' it worked OK.

I played the first section a few times, though, since my Dreamcast kept coming up with disc read errors to start with. I hope it's not on the way out. I would normally just get a new one but I recall PSO characters are tied to the console.

Anyway. Space Channel 5. Sorry Owen, it's not that hard to get past the first level. But I did it for you, so you can say you've done it now.

Game memories: E

Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future (Dreamcast)
The original Mega Drive games were pretty, and at the time were examples of great pacing and exploration. They’ve aged badly, though, and are far too difficult and imprecise to be fun. The same with this, in fact, with the momentum behind Ecco making any fight a random punching at buttons and hoping to flee. And while the Mega Drive games still look great, in a sprite-based way, this is starting to look a little ropey. Especially when you compare it to ...

Endless Ocean (Wii)
A lovely, relaxing, dive game with little to panic or scare you. Exploring the intricate environments is great.

Evil Twin (Dreamcast)
Mediocre action adventure type game which was far better on the Dreamcast than the PS2, but sold only 12 copies.

Exit (PSP)
I really enjoyed this for a while – working out how to save everyone and get to the exit in time was a good logistical puzzle. But it all moved so slowly, and the animation playing out over and over again made it an exercise in frustration in the end.

Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem (Gamecube)
I’ve only even played half an hour of this, because I’m a wuss.

Essential Sudoku DS (DS)
Not for the Sudoku, but for the 1000 colour picross puzzles included. The interface used to complete the puzzles was superb, and while the front-end looks like it was put together by a five-year old with a set of crayons, you can look past that to the excellent implementation. I completed this. All one thousand puzzles.

Elite Beat Agents (DS)
It’s fun, but not amazing. Maybe just because I’m not very good at it.

Excite Truck (Wii)
It’s a racing game, but completely different to every other racing game I own. I love it, but it’s quite a light experience with me feeling very often that progress is down to luck more than anything else.

Earth Defence Force 2017 (Xbox 360)
EDF! EDF!

Game memories: C

Crackdown (Xbox 360)
A sublime game, where the only fault is a limit on 2-player cooperative play. After years, I recently managed to find my last agility orb, and I'm pretending that the hidden ones don't exist any more. The achievements in the game were great as well, with an appropriate balance of progress, difficulty, and silliness. Harpooning 5 people onto a car was good fun.

Crackdown 2 (Xbox 360)
Not as good as the first, but still great, with the bonus that both John and Kieron can join me to shoot people from rooftops. The radar ability means that orbs are a more realistic prospect as well.

Castle of Illusion (Mega Drive)
Possibly the first 16-bit game that made me go 'wow'. I'd been playing on the CPC for a few years beforehand, and everything about Castle of Illusion was a step up from what I was used to. Not only the graphics, but the tightness of control, scale of the world, and variety of gaming. It's the game that sold me the Mega Drive.

Castle of Illusion (Master System)
A few weeks after I saw Colin's Mega Drive for the first time, I went to visit a friend of the family, who I was told had Castle of Illusion. I was looking forward to playing it. Unfortunately it was the Master System game, which was slow and far too difficult to control accurately.

Card Fighter's Clash (NGPC)
I have played this only once, many years ago. I can't remember anything about it.

Colour Cross (DS)
Bargainous colour picross game, which, despite its awful presentation and the need to guess on two of the puzzles, kept me going for four months of playtime.

Cooking Mama (DS)
I don't see the appeal. It's like a minigame collection with a theme, but minigames are done so much better elsewhere.

Chu Chu Rocket (Dreamcast)
Giving away a free game was typical of the Sega of the early noughties. Not just any free game, but an excellent puzzler which caused many fights amongst my friends. The online mode was amazing, although the second-long lag they introduced to compensate for the Dreamcast's 33.6k modem was tricky to deal with.

Civilization Revolution (DS, iPhone)
Civilization is possibly a bit too complex for me. I like my strategy simple - Populous: the Beginning, say - and this does it really well. For a few games. After that you start to try the higher difficulty levels, and there's just a huge wall to overcome.

Contact (DS)
I found this dull and insipid. I was enticed by the prospect of videogame humour and self-referencing, but gave up after I realised that the script was barely English.

Carnival: Funfair Games (Wii)
Actually pretty good. It's well structured, with a decent system of unlocking new games and items. Possibly the best thing is the coin-pushing machine, which I can play for hours (but not as long as my mum, who has racked up 60 hours on the game, of which 40 is on the coin-pushing machine, and 15 is on the horse racing game earning money for the coin-pushing machine).

Cel Damage (Gamecube)
It's only been played twice, both at multiplayer meets, but it's fun.

Samba de Amigo: go to the next stage

Well, when you've just set up your new high-definition LCD TV, what better way to celebrate than plug the Dreamcast in and shake maracas?

I wasn't great at it, though. I didn't manage to get a single entry on the high score table, and even got a B ranking on one turn. Hang my head in shame. Still, now that I've been reminded how great it is, I have every incentive to play more to get better!

Wetrix+

I played a bit of this when I first got it, but only in single player, and it seemed just a little too complicated so I soon got disinterested.

To start with, multiplayer seemed a little tame. We were just building up our own sides, basically playing the single player game simultaneously. Matt had played the game before, and explained some of the nuances - the number of pools, the use of the bombs and rain and so on. Some of these things didn't matter in multiplayer, however.

But then it all changed. I pressed the Y button by accident, and sent across an 'ice attack'. Matt sent back an 'earthquake attack'. We realised that the meter along the bottom of the playing field built up over time, and allowed you to influence your opponent's playing field.

And it really unbalances the game. While you can send over water, ice and earthquake attacks, the best thing to do is just to continue to build it up until you can send over a bomb attack - which drops a few bombs on the playing field, opening massive holes and draining most of the water out. And your opponent probably loses instantly.

I'm sure that if we were more skilled, we'd be able to prevent losing immediately after such an attack, but as it was it pretty much killed the game. Shame.

Matt played single-player while I did some lunch, and got ten pools at one point, and lots of rainbows. He considered himself to 'rock'.

Charge 'n' Blast

Another Dreamcast game which I'd never played in multiplayer - in fact, I'd only ever played this once, and gave up after five minutes after it was just a bit too hard.

However, in multiplayer it shines. This is a out-and-out arcade game, with your movements limited to a single plane, and you having to concentrate more on where you're shooting than where you're standing. You can't just shoot everything though - you must first select which weapon to charge up (using X, Y or B on the joypad), then fire it with A. You can fire immediately, but it's best to wait for the charge meter to build up to the maximum.

The reason it works so well in multiplayer is that you can arrange to use different weapons at the same time, allowing some experimentation rather than having to sit with the boring ordinary single rocket over and over again. And you can work well as a team, with one member concentrating on where the vulnerable points of enemies are, while the other watches out for incoming attacks and shouts for both to move.

Pretty shallow, then, but good fun.

But the absolute best part of the game lies in the options screen: You can choose to turn 'viblation' on or off. Viblation. Hahaha.

Pod 2

During the day, my friend Matt visited my flat while his girlfriend went shopping with my wife. I think we got a better deal. We decided to play some games which either I'd never played before, or which I'd played very little and not in multiplayer.

First up, we played Pod 2 on the Dreamcast. What fun we had, seeing how the options screen allowed you to limit the online communications to 28.8k. And then we started to play.

There were some downers, indeed. The track was horribly foggy so that it was difficult to see where you were supposed to be going. Some of the cars handled like ... well, a ton of concrete. It was difficult to work out how weapons worked and how they could be used. It was difficult to stay on the track, without going really slowly ... and then you never made any of the jumps. And there were no other opponents.

Yet in multiplayer it was pretty fun. Once we'd got the hang of which pickup did what, and how to use mines and not crash, the game became a lot more strategic. And once we'd found cars which did actually turn when you pushed a direction, it got even better.

I got this for £1.99, I suspect long after the online servers had closed down. But it was pretty fun to play, and I think we got my money's worth in the half an hour we played for.