We interrupt your regularly scheduled COVID-19 boredom to bring you the May 2020 edition of RF Generation's Site News! In this issue, we announce an awesome June Community Playthrough game for our monthly playthrough group...and our shoot 'em up club??, and of course, thank those members who sent in submissions to our site and registered approvals last month. Thanks for keeping it on Channel 3 and please keep you and your loved ones SAFE!
REMEMBER: If you have any news about upcoming events or topics that you think the site needs to hear about, please PM singlebanana and put "RFG Site News" in the subject line. Who knows, maybe your news will make our front page!
[img width=640 height=360]https://s2.content.video.llnw.net/lovs/images-prod/81d5fd2a308b4f5c981628b17e9fcadd/media/2357df202d554a98bbdc4e54ffaba250/OvA.640x360.jpeg[/img] Insert obvious Nintendon't and Genesisn't joke here
The Switch keeps taking my attention. I play other systems, I really do! Yes, there are other fantastic games not on the Switch to play right now, such as Persona 5 Royal, Final Fantasy VII Remake, and Doom Eternal. Our current situation requires a person to sit inside with a lot of free time, and this is a pretty great gaming season to do so! There are some epic (and incredibly time consuming) titles out right now, but personally I've found myself drawn to the Sega properties on Nintendo's excellent machine. As a gamer who fondly remembers the "console wars" between Nintendo and Sega, I still shake my head at being able to both write that sentence and mean it. It didn't even occur to me until this week that most of what I've played lately on my Switch were originally from Sega, but sure enough here we are:
Posted on May 14th 2020 at 12:00:00 PM by (russlyman) Posted under atari
I take the Toony Terrors figures Micahel Myers (Halloween) and Leather face (Teaxs Chainsaw Massacre) Series 2 Toony Terros by NECA and rePaint them to look more like their Atari 2600 counter parts. Both had games on the Atari system, so with the limited graphics of the system, the color palette will also be limited
Nintendo in 3D! Some games took advantage of the new graphic capabilities, many of which you'll find below. Like all systems, it had its clunkers (hello Superman), but it was interesting to put this list together because it was similar to the Super NES; at the top were some mainstays that received near universal praise.
Speaking of the top, the ranks definitely came into play, which you'll see when we hit the top 2...
Posted on May 10th 2020 at 12:00:00 PM by (Pam) Posted under review, video, ps1
Rayman is an amazingly bright and beautiful platformer than I remember loving as a kid. Re-playing it now, I'm unsure I ever got very far into the game because once you get past the first world, it is incredibly difficult! In this video I take a look at the best and worst parts of the game.
There are times when we, as collectors, have too much choice. Times when, despite curating a highly respectable library of games, our shelves are full to the brim. One might say too full, in fact. In those moments, we can be struck by choice paralysis. We have so many games, it becomes harder to decide what to play. Last month, I wrote an article about "evergreen games" that I can go back to at any time. Those are my "go to" games to play, when I otherwise can't decide. What do you do when you've either exhausted those, or you pop a couple of them in, and you're just not feeling it?
Posted on May 6th 2020 at 05:10:34 PM by (kornnut43) Posted under collection
Six years ago, I had this "grand dream" of building my own YouTube channel.
I had my blog over at http://ControlPadBlues.com where I'd recollect various parts of my childhood as they related to games - like the My Retro Life YouTube channel, but less related to *getting* the games and more related to the other memories tied to them - and I thought "hey, I think people would watch if my blog entries were turned into videos". My wife and I had been having a tough time with trying to have a child, and I needed as many distractions away from that as I could get... so I started recording footage.
Footage from around the yard where my grandparents used to live. Footage from around the neighborhood where I grew up. Footage from stores and restaurants and other places I'd go as a kid that reminded me of my childhood with games. And finally, I recorded gameplay footage.
All I had at the time was an old VHS-to-digital recording device with composite video input, and it worked just fine... until the old desktop PC I was using kicked the bucket.
Not to be deterred, I finally bought a decent laptop and an elgato Game Capture HD for Christmas in 2014. It worked great, and I immediately set out to gather enough footage for a whole "season's" worth of potential videos. I had 10 games recorded... and then the craziest thing happened.
We became parents!
After four and a half years of trying unsuccessfully, and being told it probably wouldn't happen, we got pregnant (well, my wife did) at around the same time we had just accepted that life would be just the two of us. To say that from fall 2015 until summer 2016 was a whirlwind would be an understatement. Games were the last thing on my mind, and I didn't really get back into them until a month or so after our son was born.
I was still recording - life was now 250% more insane and I didn't expect to ever get around to doing the YouTube stuff, but I did enjoy the idea of documenting my progress... besides, maybe if I had footage of it, I'd be less likely to play something I had already played through 20 times.
I mean, I love Super Mario Bros. and Mega Man 3, but my other games need love too, right?
My son would come to love Mario as well, and he'd come see me in my "Mario Room" whenever I was in there doing stuff - that's what he came to call my game room, and he still calls it that now. One day in 2018, as I'm sitting there with him on my lap, both of us admiring my collection, I thought, "there are too many of these that I've only played half-way through, or that I've never played at all. That needs to end."
That was that, but how would I decide what order I'd play them in? One "problem" (if you can call it that) about having a collection this size is that I could never make up my mind as to what I wanted to play next. I'd stand in front of my shelves and be completely overwhelmed with the "responsibility" of choosing my next game. Too much pressure! Decidophobia is apparently a very real thing, and I have it when it comes to choosing what game to play next!
Having kept tabs on my collection here at RF Generation, I was able to export the whole shebang into an Excel file. I then color-coded it by console (because why not), split up the compilation games into individual entries (i.e. the "Orange Box" entry became individual Half-Life 2, Episode 1, Episode 2, and Portal entries) and then tried to ensure that every game I owned was in the Excel file.
I cut out the 32 games I had played since starting the recording process in late 2014, because I already had the footage and it was time to move onto other things.
Then, there were a handful of JRPG's I owned as part of compilations that I removed (or, "set aside"), simply because I'm terrible at those games and have no interest in playing them - although I did keep Final Fantasy I and III, as well as Earthbound on my Classic Consoles as a way to see if I'd end up having fun with them after all. If I enjoyed those, I could always add the Phantasy Stars and whatever else I had later.
Speaking of compilations, I took the older arcade games where the goal is just to gather points, and grouped them as best as I could. For example, Atari Anthology on Xbox is comprised of very simple games where there is no end goal other than gathering points, or quick and dirty sports games. For these, I would tackle *all* of the games on the disc at once. That way, I didn't need to bust out my Xbox for a few minutes of playing Asteroids, then put it away to bring out and hook up whatever console I needed next.
I did the same with similar points-focused games on Capcom, Namco, Midway, and other compilation discs, and gave the games with a more hearty campaign their own spot on my list (i.e. Mortal Kombat II became its own entry, whereas A.P.B., Timber and others went under a single entry under Midway Arcade Classics 2).
If you're still reading through this, I commend you for sitting through how nitpicky and OCD I am.
In the end, my number was around 950. Once I had the number, I could go about spreading all the Mario, Star Wars, Zelda, Grand Theft Auto, and all other series of games evenly throughout the list. My hope in doing that was to not get sick of one genre or the other.
I would also make an effort to not look at the next game on my list. Whenever I would complete a game, it would be a complete surprise as to what I played next. That also meant that I wouldn't have to decide what to play - the somewhat randomized list I threw together did it for me!
So, that was almost two years ago.
I'm now on my 82nd game in the list, which is Assassin's Creed on Xbox 360. I've written the dates of each game's playthrough on the spreadsheet, just for fun. 20 years from now, I'll hopefully be able to look at it and say "I remember playing through Super Mario RPG and Excitebike 64 during the COVID-19 lockdown. Weird times, man."
I've added a few newly acquired titles to the collection, and my grand total is now at 960. I've also taken the liberty of adding new games I really want to play as the next game in my list if I choose to do so - as an example, my Mom got my son Super Mario Maker 2 last summer, and really not wanting to wait to experience it, I plunked it down on my list as game #56 (I was on game #54 at the time).
This project is filling me with a weird sense of pride as I go through and actually beat everything - even the games I've already beaten before, but am simply recording for the first time. Depending on how much fun I have with each one, I'll either decide to speed through it (like I did with Injustice: Gods Among Us) or accomplish/collect everything (like I did with Super Mario Galaxy). I'm quite interested to see how long it takes me to finish everything, and as time progresses, I certainly hope my soon-to-be 4 year old son will start helping me with this endeavor.
Here's the first chunk of games I played through a while back, and what my spreadsheet kinda looks like now...
Like many of us in these crazy times, I've spent a lot of time over the past couple of months trying to make sense of things. Between the constantly stressful/upsetting news, fear of contagion every time I go out, and the push-pull of being thankful I'm able to work from home while also feeling guilty that I'm so busy at work while others are struggling, it's been a really strange experience for me. I'm an extroverted introvert, so while I definitely miss hanging out with friends, eating at restaurants, and small personal niceties with people I used to take for granted, my life hasn't changed too drastically. But while I'm adapting to a new normal, some things have changed, and some things are continuing to change. One of the things that have continued to evolve has been my gaming habits.
In Episode 022, Addicted and MetalFRO cover a shooting game from a company that published several, but only ever developed one. The company was Telenet, the shmup was Gaiares. This well-loved classic has its supporters, and its detractors, but frequently comes into the conversation when discussions about the best shooters from the 16-bit era are had. We pick apart the game, and determine why it's still worth playing today.
When I first started collecting games for older consoles in a serious manner and came to the decision that I'd "get a full set," this was in the early 2000s. My young, optimistically naive self always had it in my mind that I would have that done in the matter of a year or two and then I'd "beat them all" and then simply move onto the SNES and repeat the process. The harsh reality quickly set in that this wasn't a feasible goal, but the idea never left my mind. In 2011, I was still hunting for NES carts to complete my set and had only dabbled in a small chunk of the library, which were both far cries from my original intentions, but that "beat them all" concept was still gnawing at me. So finally in October 2011, I decided to start keeping track of my journey for my personal posterity. I kept a google doc and recorded each game as I completed them. I started off with a 100 NES games in 100 days challenge to get the momentum really amped up. This is a lot easier than it may sound when you have the entire library to choose from. I could knock out games I was immensely familiar with in a single day and do some cursory research or pick games from genres I was comfortable with. I had so much fun with those first 100 games, it was honestly one of the most fun gaming experiences I've ever had.
The Yakuza series has been around for quite some time. The first game dates back to the later years of the Playstation 2, and the 7th main game in the series recently released in Japan and is set to come to the West soon. All the regular releases, plus the spinoffs, prequel, and slowly releasing remakes and upcoming remasters make Yakuza one of the most actively developed video games series to date. [iYakuza 6[/i] was developed by Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio and published by Sega for Sony's Playstation 4. It was originally released in 2016 in Japan. A worldwide release followed two years later in 2018. This long running series has quickly been gaining popularity in the West, which has mostly been propelled by the prequel Yakuza 0. Sega's been spacing out the timing of their Yakuza releases, so the market does not become overwhelmed by constant releases as the West gets caught up with the main story on top of the remakes.
Today, RF Generation turns 16 years old. If you would like to read a little about the site's beginnings, please check out the page here: http://www.rfgeneration.com/PHP/about.php
Speaking personally, I have been in my position as the Technical Director for nearly ten years. I have seen a lot of things around here. Some weren't super great, but I think that we have made a great community even better as time has passed. I'm incredibly pleased to be working with the staff that we have here and, although I don't post a bunch, I'm glad that the conversations continue moving as well on the forum side.
We have gone from sporadic front page posts to new content every other day, 3 podcasts (and another one...), and we are growing our community in many new ways. There are things we have done that I never would have guessed we would do if you would have asked me ten years ago.
16 years, more than 135,000 games in the database, closing in on 10,000 hardware entries. We've made a lot of progress and continue to do so. I know it feels like I've done a bunch of these "Thank you" posts recently, but I truly mean it. I've been very lucky to be able to be in this position and only continue to do it because I care about what we have created as a community.
One of the things I love the most about my retro gaming hobby is feeling the waves of nostalgia rush over me like a surge of whimsical adrenaline when I play a game that I adored from my childhood. Being swept back to a time that was safe, happy and innocent is an addictive pleasure of mine; it is one of my defining characteristics and is my preferred form of escapism. More so than movies or toys from my youth, video games have always potently stimulated that magical feeling in me.
For obvious reasons, a typical child from the 80s didn't have every video game released for his or her favorite console. In fact, most kids would only ever play a small fraction of the hundreds and hundreds of games that may have been produced for a particular system. Admittedly, speaking specifically of the NES, I had a pretty healthy collection and experienced most of the more popular franchises from the 8 bit era. Contra, Zelda, Metroid, Castlevania... yeah, I had all those. And not only did I have them, I beat them. You see, I was the type of gamer who would usually only play one game at a time until I beat it, and then move on to the next. I would cherish the games I beat like trophies, and often revisit them and experience them in different ways or explore new areas. Needless to say, this method of playing my games was, in part, what fueled the intimacy and fondness I have for them today.
After Capcom's highly successful remake of their classic survival-horror hit Resident Evil 2 last year, fans have been asking for a remake of the third entry in the series. With REmake 3 feeling like an inevitability, rumors of the game started circulating around the web, and it was officially announced late last year alongside the multiplayer experience Resident Evil: Resistance. Although both games came bundled together in one package, this review focuses solely on the Resident Evil 3 Remake and not the multiplayer portion.
Released worldwide on April 3, 2020 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC, Resident Evil 3 is an action/survival-horror title. Developed and published by Capcom, it is a remake of their 1999 title Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. It was packaged alongside the online multiplayer game Resident Evil: Resistance. The game has received mostly positive reception and successful sales numbers.
So, I've got this aunt who is super cool, and as long as I have known her she has been a gamer. I credit her not only with truly introducing me to the love of console gaming (while stoking my future love for PC gaming), but especially with helping me out of my "Budget Wall" funk of the early nineties. This is what we are here for today; reliving that special period between 1993 and 1995, when in her amazing generosity, Cool Aunt dumped a generous amount of games and gaming magazines on an otherwise broke teenager. This is the Cool Aunt Chronicles.
We are a community of collectors, gamers and the likes, and some of us enjoy to let the world know what is on our mind. For those members, we have the community blogs, a place where they can publish their thoughts and feelings regarding life, universe, and everything. Some of those members might even choose to write about gaming and collecting! Whatever they write about, you can find it on their blog. You can either see the latest community blog entries in the feed you see to the left, or you can browse for your favorite blog using the menu above. Interested in having your own blog hosted on RF Generation? It's rather simple, first be a registered member, and then click the "My Blog" link that you see in the navigation above. Following those two steps will certainly get you on your way to blogging.
Sit back, relax, and enjoy our entries, rantings, and completely unrelated series of thoughts. We write for you to read, so we certainly hope that you enjoy our material.
