Retro gaming thread

[Mr Jt (Gog is king)]

So next month i check out some retro gaming stores so which consoles you think are worth to get?Ps2 can play one games and there are also ps3 models which can play ps2 games.Sega mega drive,gamecube,nintendo wii/wiiu,n64 and snes.Which one or more would be worth getting in your opinion

[Gitgud]

Definetly ps2 it had the best games compared to the other ones i think wii would be a better choice over the wiiu

[WarBucks]

I recently bought one of the Super Nt Fpga based Super nintendo clones and its awesome. If you want to hunt for cartridge deals the Super NT is probably the best way to play them. (they can also play roms but its got some limitations)

A few years ago I also bought and soldered in a HiDef NES mod for my NES. Playing scaled up from digital 240p is pretty great and I blew threw most of the beatable games I own. Every year I try solar jetman and realise its basically impossible

[Ⓥenom Ⓢnake 🐍]

The backwards compatible PS2 is a must. Just watch out, as they dropped that feature in later models. The PSX gets covered so you get access to a massive game catalogue.

The SNES and Genesis are a given, as there are so many very good games.

GameCube is another solid platform, especially great if you like playing on a couch with friends.

The Wii was really limited on selection to me. All I really played a lot were Wii Sports and Links Crossbow training.

Never got a Wii U. Nothing really appealed to me, and by then I wasn't doing group gaming parties.

If you can find them cheap, the 3do had a small but very good selection, and the Saturn, which had some outstanding side-scroller and RPGs. I loved Dragon Force, which was a tactical army strat game. Almost worth the price of admission by itself

[Eseman]

Get a NeoGeo.

[Birds]

PS3's tend develop drive ejection issues over time, something ps2 slims are immune to. Many older PS1 titles are also nearly unplayable with a wireless controller. PS3 controllers are expensive in general, and cords long enough to comfortably plug one in can be expensive as well.

Cartridges can be tricky, particularly for the NES and SNES as the saves are dependent on batteries in the cartridge which go bad over time. You can open the cartridge up and replace the battery, but your saves will be gone either way. A new battery often lasts a good 5 years.

N64's only have a few games with battery problems and there's a fairly robust third party controller market. No idea about game prices. The same is true of a Gamecube, which sometimes have their SRAM chips removed and thus can't save system settings. Which is a minor annoyance but something to consider.

I'm not really sure about the Mega Drive market, but I believe all of their cartridges use battery-free storage and many games had disc-based media.

Discs tend to be pricy and many rare games can get quite expensive for the GC, PS1/2, and presumably the megadrive. But plenty of good, popular, and niche games wound up with a lot of spare copies around so they aren't all that expensive if you're into variety, which is definitely their strength. Discs tend to retain their value fairly well, but a great deal of it winds up tied up in the jewel casings. They're also fragile.

Wii's are fairly robust machines that play GC games well enough, but I kind of just got it for Smash and never really got hooked on anything it had to offer. Some people feel it was really the all-around winner of its generation for a reason. Its value is unlikely to depreciate much, and if nostalgia trends are any indication it may even go up in the next decade or so.

Finally, the NES, SNES, and Genesis have had a few different modern re-releases which come with many of the most popular games built in, often for as little as $20 per unit including controllers. So unless you're doing it for the sheer joy of blowing on cartridges it might be better to skip them.

[Electric Cupcake]

PS2 and 3? Retro?

Are you serious? The SNES was the last Retro console.

[blackedz26]

Opprinnelig skrevet av Crosseyed Mie:

PS2 and 3? Retro?

Are you serious? The SNES was the last Retro console.

Awww it's cute that your old and don't know what retro means

[WarBucks]

A few of my games I have opened up and replaced the battery with a battery socket. Its a fun quick project really.

[ʙᴜɴ.ᴇ]

I got lots of retro consoles.

if you wanna go really retro though try and grab one of those cassette consoles. Like Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum.

So funny taking like 40 mins to load a single 16kb game

[bad_fur_day1]

I think a PS2 is invaluable to have around for the library of fantastic games available on it.

[Devsman]

Opprinnelig skrevet av Jt:

and there are also ps3 models which can play ps2 games.

Not really.

A couple of models did, in theory, but they were very prone to YLOD so I dunno how many are still around, and there was a pretty extensive list of games it didn't work on anyway. And the official lists aren't even as comprehensive as they should be (eg, Tales of the Abyss has a glitch on BC PS3 that makes progress past roughly 7 hours impossible, but since it actually boots, they didn't count it).

It's better not to count on this.

[Devsman]

Opprinnelig skrevet av Crosseyed Mie:

PS2 and 3? Retro?

Are you serious? The SNES was the last Retro console.

In terms of time and console generations both, the PS2 is now older than the SNES was when the PS2 launched. Did you consider SNES retro then?

[Haruspex]

Opprinnelig skrevet av Devsman:

Opprinnelig skrevet av Crosseyed Mie:

PS2 and 3? Retro?

Are you serious? The SNES was the last Retro console.

In terms of time and console generations both, the PS2 is now older than the SNES was when the PS2 launched. Did you consider SNES retro then?

This is an interesting point of view, but I think it's a bit more than just age. For example, compare how games looked/played in 1990 compared to 2000. Now compare how they looked/played in 2010 compared to 2020. I think anyone could tell the difference between the former, but with the latter someone would need to know what they're looking for.

Gaming was changing so fast from it's inception in the 70s through into the early 00s, but then it slowed way, way down.

How different will games look 20 years from now, compared to today? We're in a state of diminishing returns when it comes to game graphics.

I think what is considered "retro gaming" is a relatively brief period of time in the grand scheme of things. It's the time from gaming's inception up to, but not necessarily including the PS2, Gamecube, Dreamcast, and Xbox era. I think that generation can be marked as the beginning of modern gaming. The point where gaming left it's adolescence and entered adulthood. I think 50 years from now this will still hold true.

[Masque]

8bitbeard

I would call PS2 retro, as it has no installation drive and no internet (besides one or two games).

As someone who lived through pong, Intellivision, Colecovision and Atari 2600, I do understand your perspective, too. But at this point I do consider PS2 to be retro for the two reasons I stated.

To me, installation on HDD and a persistent internet connection are the watershed.

[🍋 Lemonfed 🍋]

cartridges games are overpriced unless you get loose copies but outside of the batteries that might need changing the cartridges themselves are much more durable then CD or DVD.

sometime the battery in them last for much longer then 5 years , I've had snes and genesis games for more then 10 years and the save still worked ...
they're probably all CR 2032 batteries which are very common and can be brought in large packs too.

so in that sense you have less chance to have a broken copy that can't be fixed then disc based games.

only the more recent Gameboy advance games actually had battery less saves because by that time they started using writable EEprom chips , the early games still have battery. I know I've open some of my gba games before because I was curious why some game had those long pause when saving.