One Change That Would Make A Retro Game Perfect

[WerewolfJones]

Recently I’ve started on a little project. I have Nintendo Switch Online and a ton of retro game collections, so I’m going through my backlogs of games on them. Some of them are games I’ve played before, others I haven’t. But I want to give them all a shake because I’m finding more and more how deeply I prefer retro to modern gaming.

Right now I’ve dived back in to the Cadtlevania Anniversary Collection, and I’m playing through the first Castlevamk for the first time in forever. Castlevania has aged like fine wine: great music and graphic for its atmosphere, tough ass difficulty including some truly brutal enemy placement. It’s a near perfect platformer for me. But there’s one thing that really gets me.

I really hate the whip upgrade. It seems superfluous to me, and having to hope you get whip upgrades after you die is obnoxious. I get the basic idea of it, but unlike, say, it really feeling like an integral mechanic like Arthur and his diminishing armor in Ghosts an’ Goblins, it kind of just feels like a cheap way to weaken your primary tool and pad game time by how much of a penalty death is. If your whip was just static, the game would still be difficulty, but at least more fair.

anyone else got any examples of this, where there’s just one little thing that turns a 10/10 to an 8 or 9?

 

[Pinballbuzzbro]

Making it so that when you die in Rendering Ranger R2, your weapon upgrade level doesn't reset back to zero. Either that or increasing the power of your base gun by 5x.

Legit took that game from being an 8/10 to a 5/10 for me, hate to sound cliche but genuinely wtf were they thinking with how slow and pitiful your stock peashooter is. Even something as simple as a DOOR takes almost 10 whole seconds to simply SHOOT DOWN with the thing, so you can imagine how nightmarish fighting basic enemies and obstacles is.

 

[Cardboardtubeknight]

It would seem that in the effort to make games back then more "whole" they made them difficult for the purpose of allowing you to gain pattern recognition, timing, and spatial awareness, and it was a commemorable practice but did some of them really have to make it  one hit? Sure, is that an example of an 8/10 to 5/10? Probably not in the general sense, that would be skill issue territory on my part, but the examples I'm thinking of are Contra or Sunset Riders. The latter I was actually playing earlier. Games like that are bullet hells. They're designed in a meticulous way where dodging is essential, but in my opinion the one hit kill makes what again I find to be a commemorable practice into needless padding.

 

[Burzuru]

maybe not "perfect" but playing Jak 2 would be much more tolerable if half of the npcs roaming around haven city where just removed.
kingdom hearts 358/2 days would have been amazing if the combat was much smoother and less of a slog.
king's field but i could play it with m+kb or at least the analog sticks

 

[RockinACup]

All the classic lego games on ps2 should've had character creation from the beginning with the first lego star wars.

maybe not "perfect" but playing Jak 2 would be much more tolerable if half of the npcs roaming around haven city where just removed.

Holy crap could not agree more. The fact that your hover bike also takes damage from their impact too is also bs. Like GTA 3 npcs were pretty dumb (mostly construction workers telling you their from the YMCA for some reason) but they wouldn't run out in front of you or just be acting unaware of things (sometimes).

Speaking of GTA 3, I know they got rid of general flying in that game due to 9/11 but they should have still added it in when they "remastered" it. Gliding in that dodo is a total pain.

 

[LaserMoose]

Keeping the Sonic Adventure titles (both 1 and 2) more focused on the speed stages would've greatly improved my overall opinion of the two games.

I don't dislike everything about the other gameplay styles, and I understand that SA1 was used more as a tech demo for what the Dreamcast was capable of. That said, the Sonic levels are much more enjoyable for me than the others, and would've loved to see more of those levels over some of the other character campaigns in SA1 or the treasure hunting levels found in both games.

 

[Bakuma1997]

Not Gameplay, But Lorewise

Spoiler: Mostly Zero 1, but of the entire Zero saga in retrospective

Had Megaman Zero Kept uss believing that Copy X was the real deal until his return in Zero 3 would be a better compromise to the axing of the "X became evil due to tiredness of the Maveric Wars", instead, Ciel just randomly spawns in the door to the final mission and drops the fact the Neo Arcadia tyrant is a copy of her making like

"Hey Zero that guy is a bootleg of your friend i made to try to keep humans and Mavericks from killing each other but he ended as a tyrant...whoopsy"