It’s interesting because everyone has their definitive version of Tetris.

For me, it was the arcade coin-op made by Atari Games.

I have a friend, though, who swears by Tetris Plus for the original PlayStation. That was the first Tetris she ever played.

Here, this exhaustively explains wall kicks and how they affect basic play in Tetris:

https://tetris.wiki/Wall_kick

This is my original work, but here’s some further links if you’re curious:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_(Spectrum_HoloByte)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/1630/tetris

https://www.livescience.com/56481-strange-history-of-tetris.html

https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/stories/tetris-fun-cold-war

https://youtu.be/K8omJvkHag4

Nope, they are abandonware. You either buy the physical disks or sail the seven seas.

Both Thexder and Sorcerian were distributed by Sierra.

Thexder, in particular, was quite popular—got a Western-only sequel called Thexder 95 that was a showcase for Windows 95:

https://youtu.be/iI_qGdgybmU

It’s still playable on modern Windows.

As for Japanese games, they’re largely hit or miss on DOS. If it’s a Capcom or Konami game—it’s probably terrible. SEGA is good.

I think the game that really humiliated Capcom was the DOS port of Street Fighter II. In the early 90s, a bunch of Koreans made their own unofficial port and it shamed the official port.

This might explain why Super Street Fighter II for DOS was so much better.

I’ve played many games from the era. There were quite a few DOS games that had much smoother scrolling even if there wasn’t specialized hardware for it. Thexder, made in 1988, is a good example of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwHKg2aUB0I

The truth is, a good many Japanese games that were converted to DOS just weren’t very good.

There were exceptions, though. SEGA games tended to be excellent. And I have to say that anything by Nihon Falcom was amazing – to this day, Sorcerian is a standout on DOS.

That happened to me more than once—though not with this game.

Yeah, that’s the one.

I’m playing the PC version. Haven’t tried on Steam Deck yet but this is mostly mouse-driven.

It’s all right, but have you played Goonies for the MSX? It’s quite different from the NES version.

PSP was released in 2004.

If it were a person, it would be able to vote.

I know, but I have so much hardware at my house. I really don’t want to hoard stuff. I have two old PCs I have to get rid of, and a bunch of GPUs too.

I don’t mind it. But I also paid C$1.29 for it on GOG.

And I’m not so much judging it against the greats but also everything else I’ve ever played.

I’ve played FPSes—even modern ones—where the maps are unnavigable, the AI is beyond stupid, and jank is constant. With such games, I can only stand them for a matter of minutes before I shut them off.

Meanwhile, with Fire Warrior, it’s managed to keep my attention for hours—which is no small feat.

Back in the day, the reviews were not so much negative so much as they were average. And I agree with them. Fire Warrior is as average as average as can be.

But I also feel its low poly aesthetic is delightful. And as average as it is, I think there’s a specific kind of gamer who would enjoy this over the likes of Quake or Unreal simply because it’s super easy to play.

As an FPS, this is as close as it gets to “cosy”.

Yeah, those prices are ridiculous. No question about that.

But again, this is why I’ve chosen to devote my attention to retro PC games instead of console games.

Yeah, I’m quite different from you.

I grew up with an Atari 2600. Then I went Commodore, SEGA, PC, Mac, and PlayStation.

I never owned a Nintendo home console till the GameCube.

When I think “16-bit”, I think Genesis. I guess PC also counts, though EGA/VGA has a vastly different aesthetic.

A lot of people did play this, though. It’s a pretty major arcade game—I remember it being everywhere.

To me, the oddness isn’t just that the only home ports were for computer systems but that it was published by Konami.

It’s not unreasonable that a few arcade games would be computer-only, but it’s wild that the releases were computer-only on Western computer systems. Specifically for the North American market, not European.

The ports were not farmed off to a Western developer but developed and published by Konami—which was atypical for them. The DOS and C64 ports of Castlevania, for example, were not made by Konami.

Keep in mind the arcade game was released in Japan, so there could have been a port for PC-98 or Sharp X68000.

No, a super corporate title would be “Analyzing the Platform Disparity: The Unconventional Release Trajectory of The Simpsons Arcade Game Across Home and Console Systems”

Which you’d probably find less clickbait but would be absolutely perfect for aligning synergies.

If your critique is that I tried to write an interesting title, guilty as charged. But who doesn’t try to be interesting?

Thing is, this being Lemmy, there’s no incentive to click. Clickbait literally implies a reason to click. The pertinent thing worth seeing is already in your feed.

True, but the C64 version definitely wasn’t authentic. 😅

Okay, so I think this impacted by the platforms I owned, which was:

1. Commodore 64
2. Game Boy
3. SEGA Master System
4. SEGA Genesis
5. A bunch of DOS/Windows PCs
6. iMac

If I were to consider my favourite games across all these systems, they would be:

• Lode Runner
• Great Giana Sisters
• OutRun
• Super Mario Land
• Tetris
• Sonic 2
• Road Rash
• Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
• NHL 94
• Earthworm Jim
• MDK
• SimCity
• Civilization
• Heretic
• Marathon
• Escape Velocity
• GeneForge
• Tomb Raider
• Earth 2140

Oh, they’re successful and sold a boat load of copies. I already mentioned that.

But there’s no retrospectives. Go on YouTube, there’s nothing about how groundbreaking this title was. No articles written about it in the same way as something like Cuphead or Shovel Knight.

Popular, yes. Very much so. But also culturally forgotten.