Alexlotl

A) That’s FFIV, not PS2 B) In the original PS2, you can’t even get the Visiphone until you have Shir and get her to L10. They give it to you from the start in most ports.

Thank goodness. Last boss was quite fun, although the fact that he was a 20 minute walk from the last save point was slightly anxiety inducing. The ending sequence just kind of reinforced the fact that the cast are pretty dull and uninspiring, but it was always about the mechanics not the plot, anyway. Some unexpected nice Mode 7 stuff at the end, including a sort of Star Wars crawl. There’s that one off the list, anyway. Might stick to Arcadey stuff on the Mega SG for a while and play a bit more guitar, rather than starting another RPG

I don’t think I’ve ever seen the box to one of those, even back in the day. Wonderful devices.

Still trudging through the last dungeon of FFIV. Unclear if I’ll defeat the final boss or the sunk cost fallacy first. My party are now borderline invincible and keep levelling up, but the enemies still take so damn long to kill. The B. Dragon enemies are the absolute worst - they have about a billion HP, can’t be run from, have high defence and represent zero threat whatsoever. Each time I get one (or worse, a pair!) in a random battle, I know that’s five minutes of my scant gaming time gone. On the plus side, the bosses guarding the ultimate weapons can be fun little puzzles - trying to kill Plague in 10 seconds by throwing everything at it, and working out how to batter Wyvern with reflected versions of Flare and Holy. The game is very decent about putting save points immediately before them, too. Nearly there, though. I will beat this thing, so I never have any temptation to play it again.

“Story of Thor” is the stupidest name ever for an Arabian Nights themed game, so I approve of this forced rebranding. You wouldn’t call a Viking game “The Adventures of Aladdin”. I don’t remember it being janky, but haven’t tried it in years. Regarding PS2, for the later dungeons I found I had to print maps, then solve them with a pencil like conventional puzzle, then actually play the game. Worth noting the game shipped with a book of maps in all territories, even Japan, so either they planned them to be solved with a map from the start, or they realised they’d screwed up. I’m glad I finished PS2, but I’ll never go back to it, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone other than hardcore Phantasy Star fans who have already played 1 and 4.

I've got Dunk in, as to get one step ahead of the cosmic joke. Both of them are just as capable of scoring own goals/getting red cards as netting, so there's no way I'm putting the armband anywhere near them.

It's a kind of infuriating game, so I find one-run-per-session is about right. Nice and fast too, particularly if you mash the buttons to skip all the interstitials.

I think Analogue moved up the release date at short notice, so they all had to rush their videos out based on pre-prod firmware. Joe from Gamesack has been quite vocally pissed off about the whole thing on Twitter.

Got to Death Bringer with all credits intact. Died. Absolute fucker. I guess finishing both MD Outrun and Golden Axe for the first time in one night was asking too much.

Achievement unlocked! First time I’ve ever finished any version of Outrun! First time I’ve actually made it into stage 5, come to think of it. Feels good! I have a nice routine going where I play three rounds - one to each of the arcade tunes (Step On Beat can do one). It takes about 15 minutes, and is easy to squeeze into the evening. I think I’ll keep it up and see if I can collect the other endings.

The music In Earthworm Jim plays at the wrong speed on a YM2612, and I think there are a few others too - that’s the “busy behaviour” thing. The question of whether people designed for the different sound (no ladder noise) of the MD2 is harder to answer. We can reasonably say games made prior to the MD2 being released were designed for the MD1, but not vice versa.

PS2 is sadly a bit broken. Very grind heavy, difficulty all over the shop, and there are massive inconsistencies and bugs throughout the whole game which just smell of it needing more time in the oven. The dungeon mazes are pretty awful, too, particuarly near the end - they're bloody hard and frustrating even *with* maps. I played a ROMhacked version on MD which had a vast amount of bugfix patches applied, and it was still a bit messy. Posted updates as I went on this thread (spoilers, obv). PS1 and PS4 are the best ones, by a long chalk.

Which original? Basically every model of Mega Drive sounded a bit different. You can match each of them with the right settings. The default setup has the busy-behaviour of a YM2612, but the lack of ladder noise of a YM3438, no low-pass filter and 14-bit output (rather than 9-bit on real consoles), which matches precisely zero real Mega Drives out there. Note that some games were designed for YM2612 ladder noise/busy behaviour and sound wrong on YM3438, and vice versa. So there is no one best setup for all games. I believe FirebrandX (of scaler profile fame) and Ace (of Mega Amp fame) are working on a bunch of settings that will match a Model 1 VA3, which seems to be the de facto standard for "good" Mega Drive audio. The tweak to PSG volume in the latest firmware update was due to their feedback, so their other changes will also probably get rolled back in as defaults.

Was the Amiga the lead platform for this, then? I’d moved onto PC by then, and always think of it as a PC game.

Relevant to the discussion above: ”The Mega SG jailbreaker”. Let’s call him… Bevtris.