Summer is the time for retro gaming in my house. It’s a tradition that’s gone on since before my husband and I were married. Dig up old consoles that still work, hit the local used game stores, and emulate what we can’t find but still want to play. We were old hands at navigating FuncoLands and dim, slightly smelly independent stores whose clientele would stare at interlopers, female or otherwise.
When he and I first got together, I was still running old Commodore 64 emulators to chase the D&D Gold Box nostalgia of my childhood. He, meanwhile, liked to haunt this one sketchy store that would import new Japanese games as well as overprice the hard-to-find old ones. That’s where he found a copy of the Saturn version of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. The one where Maria was also playable. Anyway, that’s us. Summertime, and the hunt is on.
How To Comb Retro Stores And Look Cool Doing It
That’s a lie; there’s no looking cool. You just decide what your goals are and go hunting for them. It’s not as easy as it used to be; digital-only media has a chokehold on today’s gaming industry, and Toys R Us, with its bins of bizarre games on clearance, is long gone. But you can still poke around the corners of a Target or a Wal-Mart, and the indie gaming stores of my experience always have binders of truly weird, often forgettable games for ten bucks or less.
If you’re lucky, you’re not obsessed with popular franchises and can still find some classic entries in your niche for cheap. Early this summer, I managed to find a copy of the original Playstation 2 Monster Hunter for less than thirty bucks. It sits proudly on my bookshelf, sometimes accompanied by a Hunter Nendoroid or whatever Gundam kit I recently finished. It sits because, unfortunately, that was the day we found out our PS2’s drive had gone to the great Gamestop in the sky. Ah, well, at least I could also grab the Monster Hunter Stories rerelease.
But digging (even through emulation, which is beautifully cheap) is how you’ll find some great, fun stuff that’s worth a try. Did you know there was a science fiction Harvest Moon game on PSP? There is! It’s called Innocent Life: A Futuristic Harvest Moon, and while it’s not the best entry, it’s still worth checking out.
The Past Is How We Learn What Works Today
One of the things I like about my annual retro crawl is that it’s a dive into what still works in crafting a new video game and what’s honestly no longer working. For example, this year, I had the opportunity to review Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes. And it was genuinely a delight to experience, but what helped in clicking with that game — and understanding what newer players might have trouble with — was all my experience with the original Suikoden series. I still own my original Playstation copy of the first one, which has terrible cover art. And even there lies the heart of what people wanted from Eiyuden.
Yes, old JRPGs can run sluggishly, and wow, that old-school encounter rate is sometimes the heck. But the best games, the most special ones, figured out how to do the most with the limitations they had. The original Suikoden features some blocky pixels, and it does not look like the fanciest group attacks, but jammed onto that disc is a brisk, heartfelt plot about lives terrified by the natural outcomes of war. We save Gremio in this house. It’s that same drive behind Eiyuden, and it works.
In a different category, one of my best success stories on this retro digs, many years ago, was finding a copy of The Tower SP for GBA. It’s a sim game better known by its PC release, where it’s called SimTower. But this isn’t one of SimCity creator Will Wright’s success stories. It’s an oddball little game from Japanese creator Yoot Saito, who later made the even weirder Dreamcast sim Seaman.
The Tower is streamlined sim joy, as you piece together a high-rise tower from blocks of businesses, janitorial services, and residential levels. Balance it all, and you’ll have a vertical megacity, the likes of which J.G. Ballard couldn’t dream of. Unbalance it and you’ll have a failing capitalist nightmare on your hands… which, actually, is what J.G Ballard dreamed about. But with a lot less weirdness. The only drawback here is a wild learning curve and a lack of useful tutorials, which is a too common problem with sims.
But knowing this game inside and out is a tutorial on why Project Highrise is so clunky. Not only does the glitzy 2016 tower sim feel plain and brutalist in comparison, but eventually, progress is simply a matter of chucking in the most luxurious options and calling it a day. Excessive DLCs improve the situation, but, like Stellaris and other large-scale sims, it quickly becomes too expensive, overwhelming, and frankly, just sort of annoying.
Meanwhile, The Tower has a whole sub-puzzle about elevator management. I realize that this does not sound exciting in the slightest, but it will consume your whole day. Anyway, of these two games, The Tower is still in a GBA mini console in my bedroom. Project Highrise got itself a Steam refund.
Go Play a SNES Game. You Deserve It
My husband’s annual ritual is a play-through of SoulBlazer, a cult SNES action RPG from the same series as Illusion of Gaia and, you lucky Europeans, Terranigma, followed by a trawl through the entire Metroid canon. I have a lot of fond nights falling asleep to chiptune music as a young hero rebuilds a ruined world and takes on a final evil.
I’m lazier about what I’m willing to hook back up to the TV these days, so I usually end up just using the Nintendo Switch’s SNES service to replay my old faves. Like Suikoden, you can’t go wrong learning about JRPGS from Breath of Fire, and I cannot recommend enough that you try out EarthBound on its 30th anniversary this year. Want to learn about platformers? Donkey Kong Country remains a benchmark, and for action fans, the best Zelda game ever awaits you.
In whatever way you choose (and I’ll never tell), I can’t recommend enough the comfortable nostalgia of creating your own link to the past. It’s not that the games of long ago are always better than what’s available today, but in them are ideas that were fresh then, and you get a chance to see how they got their start. It’s a bit like watching the old Universal Monster movies before you go on a horror binge, you know? It’s not necessary, but it’s fun, and you’ll learn something.
Anyway. That’s summer in my house. Grab a controller, and let’s go.
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