PS1 essentials

i too hated parasite eve, never even came close to finishing it

Funny, I loved that game. I beat it in one extremely long sitting in first-year uni. Why did I love it so? I remember cool weapons and being dazzled by the recognizable real-life environments, which I don't think I'd seen up till then.

I also loved it; but I did finish it and in another massive two day stretch. I loved the world and the creepy shit and the great cinemas and the odd attach scheme.

"attack"

"ghost in the shell"!!!!!!!!!!!!1111!!!1111!!!11

not "single cell complex" or whatever

one of the top 10 ps1 games ever without a doubt

the scenario: third-person shooter in which you control a mechanical spider that can walk up walls and across ceilings and fall any distance without taking any damage

you can strafe endlessly (even forward and backwards), shoot up to six missiles at once, each of which is capable of locking onto a different enemy

a typical level sees you in a city of skyscrapers, at night, needing to destroy four superguns scattered throughout the nieghborhood, which are protected by helicopters, fighter jets, fixed gun turrets, cyborgs with shoulder rpgs, and other mechanical spiders which can shoot blue lasers at you and also crawl up walls

strangely, the closest thing i can think of to this game is tenchu, which is all about stealth, whereas this is a full-on, guns blazing strafe fest. i think it's because both of them allow you to climb on onto roofs and both allow total freedom of 3-D movement (although ghost in the shell does have two thrilling levels on "rails" -- one at sea and one on a highway, where your little spider is always carried in a certain direction and must dodge things and rotate to deal with other things)

probably the best shoot em up PS1 game ever

another thing: this is one of the few, proud playstation games in which the training level is the most difficult and most satisfying level of all

oh, and the soundtrack is by takkyu ishino!!

I recently found an old stockpile of PS1 RPGs. Give me an honest assessment of which of these games are actually worth revisiting in the year of two thousand ought nine:

Chrono Cross
Persona 1
Vagrant Story
Valkyrie Profile
Xenogears

I haven't played any of them but the ones I remember getting the most positive press were Xenogears and Persona.

chrono cross - disappointing, boring story with a weak battle system. not hard enough. at the time i think it was well-received but i think now the game would same extremely formulaic

persona 1: is this revelation? or the jpn version? this game is kind of a mess and not worth investing time in imo i'd rather play 4.

vagrant story: yes!!! really rad game and i think it would still be extremely challenging. and the look will have dated well. so much to do with this one

Valkyrie Profile - i dont think i ever beat this game fully. it may actually play better now. battle system is the best on this list and i liked the puzzle stuff but there are A LOT of retarded points in this game where yr stuck wandering around and need to just guess at wtf yr supposed to do

xenogears - :D i really loved this game when it came out idk its tied to a specific aesthetic that requires the player to really buy in - i can see how someone trying to play this shit now for the first time would just be O_O at the story and voice-acting and battle system but... i mean i voted for this in that 100 best poll so i would def replay it.

Vagrant Story: definitely
Xenogears: only if you have a way to speed up the text (emulator, or maybe some sort of game genie device?)
Chrono Cross: I never beat this. I hear it gets better towards the end. Dumb battle system and tons of redundant characters.

Haven't played the others.

intelligent cube

don't do xenogears if you just want a pick me up game

seconding twisted metal

Valkyrie Profile-

saw this played but never played it. seemed to have a great deal of neat things going on but I don't think I'd invest that much time in it myself? certainly nothing that fried itself into my brain, unlike

Xenogears

This is best RPG ever made for the PS1. I played through it to the end only once and would probably drop $200+ just for the game if they ever rereleased it.

Most importantly, I'm not ashamed to say so.

There are copies of Xenogears for around fifty bucks on amazon

tombot you'd rank xenogears over suikoden II?

you can grab xenogears on the US PSN now I think?

nah, Suikoden has just been added on there (for $6), not Xenogears.

ah, that's right! sorry

My PS1 essentials (not that I ever had that much for the system) - Symphony of the Night, Parappa or Umjammer. Tony Hawk: 1 and 2 are both great, I probably sank more time into 2 which just adds TONS of stuff, but it does lose a few of the most fun things about the first one, mainly the downhill courses! Definitely need two players to get the most out of either, they are definitive dorm-hallway collective games for me.

I really loved Soul Reaver but I think I might just not have known the genre well enough, all I had to compare it to was Tomb Raider and I think it was slightly more fun than that (although less of a revelation). But there are probably much better games in the 3rd person "leap, shove cubes" genre.

tony hawk 1 was kinda my life at this point

I never played suikoden II! I still need to get around to suikoden V!!

anyone played these

internal section
nanotek warrior
tombi
brave fencer musashi
jumping flash
C12
front mission 3

silent bomber
destrega

?

i played front mission 3 and destrega. the former is pretty good but nowhere near as fun as front mision 1, but better than 4. destrega is a hilarious game to paly when it's 1999 and you're well drunk but as a "serious" fighter it's grossly unbalanced and kinda shit really.

jumping flash: loved the huge jumps when I first played it, but I recently bought it on psn and it's not so good. It's really ugly and it has tank controls.

Jumping flash and Jumping flash 2 are probably my all-time favorite personal cult games! JF2 is way better than the first one.

Some other great games I don't see here yet:
-Ape Escape
-Bust-A-Move (don't know which version we had, prob. '99)
-Resident Evil 3, which has gotten a bad rap, historically, I think. The initial reviews were really positive, and I had more fun playing it than either parts 1 or 2. I especially liked the survival mode that unlocked after you beat it.
-Tenchu 2, which was much better than the first one.

I never actually got to play Vib-Ribbon but I always wanted to.

a giant cube made out of styrofoam filled with dead flies

it really is incredible that you have a hard time getting girls to date you, burt

get it? PS1 the arts center? Hilarious.

according to your posts your the one not getting it

I have an easy time getting girls to date me, I have a hard time not being a righteous fruitcake and screwing it up. I stand by my lame gag, btw.

I FINALLY GOT VIB RIBBON!

it's freaking hard

ooh nice!

I got gitaroo man, it's also freakin hard

haha Brave Fencer Musashi!

I can't remember if I told this story on this board elsewhere before, but when I was in first year university I had a roommate who would play video games in this windowless room with gray-painted walls for hours and hours and hours at a time (36 hours on Ocarina of Time entirely uninterrupted, except, one hopes, by bathroom breaks). He would become just completely demented after awhile. In the middle of one of these binges, I overheard him on the phone, calling Slocki, desperate and deranged, at god knows what time: "HELLO MARK HAVE YOU HEARD ANYTHING ON THE INTERNET ABOUT BRAVE FENCER MUSASHI?"

curious - anyone play Poy Poy? I haven't but heard its a great multiplayer game.

I recently found an old stockpile of PS1 RPGs. Give me an honest assessment of which of these games are actually worth revisiting in the year of two thousand ought nine:

Chrono Cross
Persona 1
Vagrant Story
Valkyrie Profile
Xenogears

― Nhex, Friday, January 9, 2009 11:17 AM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Chrono Cross - I remember liking it when it came out, it tried to do something different and had some things going for it, iirc (great music, an abundance of extraneous characters but a lot of them were actually p. compelling, esp compared with much less fleshed out PCs from games with smaller casts, like ff9, kinda sloppy overall and it admits asmuch by the end, when [i remember j parish pointing this out] [lol] it assembles some toddler versions of the main characters around the portal to the last boss and employs them as expository devices that explain the entire convoluted plot to u) - not really sure i could recommend it, but fool around with it for a couple hours and you'll probably have an idea of how much you'll dig it

Valkyrie Profile - idk

Vagrant Story - top 50 all time, any platform

Xenogears - the worst JRPG ever released in north america (keith olbermann voice)

actually went back and beat xenogears in 07 or 08, as i was cleaning up old games that i'd never beaten and my save before the final dungeon had remained untouched since 99 or 00 - there's a nice element of strategy to the gear fighting, since your attacks all draw from a limited supply of fuel and if you run out you are fucked, but the gears themselves are so powerful that you're really never in any danger. one of the most persistently irritating/infuriating random encounter systems ever, one that would famously interrupt you mid-jump during some of the game's ill-advised platforming sections. you play a guy with a ponytail, who is often naked for no reason you can discern, and whose best bud is another guy with a ponytail. filled with insidious pedophile pandering bullshit (not as bad as xenosaga in this regard). hideous sprite based characters. every smidgen of action is bracketed by hours of goopy bullshit like this:

Krelian:And what if that 'Will' itself was predetermined? What then? Oh what
folly!? Humans
are just primitive life forms that have no such thing as free will... Mankind
has merely been
allowed to live in an imperfect state... "as is", "as will be"... It is for
this very
reason... because humans have this wretched 'will' or whatnot... that humans
must experience
sadness and loss. For someone to gain something means another must lose it...
It is impossible
to make humankind share limited "things" and "affections"... So I came to the
conclusion that
everything must be reverted back to where it all began. To go back to when all
was one...
waves, and nothing else... It is not my -Human's- ego... It is the will of the
'Waves' ...
the will of -god-...

that's some verbatim dialogue, dogg

positives: music, one subplot towards the end of the game references 'soylent green'

brave fencer musashi is a game that is basically made to 'sell' u on the gay lifestyle idk how else to describe it

Thanks for the opinions, guys! I definitely fear Xenogears but want to give it a shot for at least Mitsuda's score. Cool that Vagrant Story seems to really be liked, I was very unsure about that one.

I still haven't really gotten into these yet, since my knowledge is really spotty on PS1 emulation. I have to boot into Windows and use ePSXe or just PSX, and get distracted by the kajillion other games I can play. Anyone know a working PS1 emulator for Mac OS X? I've looked into it but couldn't find one that has been developed since the transition to Intel.

you can get a real one for 18 pounds:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sony-PSone-Console/dp/B00004YWK9

I'll sell you one, or http://pcsx.gpost.dk/

I've tried that one, sadly I haven't gotten it to work.

just played the first couple of tomb raider levels again, PS1 version - such a great game

i tried the TR1 remake (legend, or something?) which looked fantastic but which was RUBBISH

It was anniversary, which I thought was pretty good, one interminable sequence aside.

It was suggested that I bump this over here, hello!

Laugh and Peace - Vib-Ribbon OST