The Okay Old Days

Some of my friends are dead-serious about their retro gaming. They're buying all the consoles from ages past, all the original cartridges and controllers and what have you, even though you could just run all that stuff on a PC with much nicer graphics, thanks to modern filters and stuff. And personally, I just prefer an Xbox controller over the old SNES gamepad. And while they're purists, insisting that this old stuff doesn't feel right unless you play it on the original hardware, I actually kinda like emulating all this old stuff. And not just on PC - my PSP is a portable emulator for countless old 8/16 bit games and even some other stuff like Diablo or Final Fantasy VII.

Besides, ROMs don't just bring back the original games. Sometimes, they make an old game even better. Without the ROMhack of Seiken Densetsu 3 I never would have been able to finish the sequel to Secret of Mana, because I'm just not that great at Japanese. And then there is this thing:

I've never been a huge fan of the very first Sonic game. It wasn't a bad game by any stretch of the imagination, but I always felt that the ludicrous speed of the main character combined with levels full of traps, pits and the occasional leap of faith were somewhat counter-intuitive. I mean, either I run around trying to get to the end of the level as quickly as I can or I inch forward, trying to dodge all the nasty shit that will kill me if I don't pay attention. These two features didn't seem to match very well, at least as far as the first game is concerned.

So now I've tried the "Classic Heroes" ROMhack for the first Sonic the Hedgehog and I'm enjoying it a lot more than the real thing. Unlike the original, Classic Heroes doesn't only include Sonic, but there's also Tails and Nipples the Enchilada and you can play all three of them and switch between characters whenever you want, which is a pretty neat feature. You can also play some characters from Chaotix, but fuck those guys. Except Espio, because he's a chameleon.

Some of the levels were touched up a bit here and there, as the character have all their moves and abilities from Sonic 2 and 3. The original level design doesn't always work too well with that. The changes are okay for the most part, though the annoying water levels suffer even more annoying slowdowns than before, because they've overdone it a bit with the changes. Still, it's great to to steal all the air bubbles as Knuckles or Tails and watch that narcissistic blue son of a bitch drown. They could release that as its own seperate game and I'd play it for hours.

The franchise probably would have died eons ago if it wasn't for all the creepy fan-made porn.

You can also play all of Sonic 2 that way, you get bonus goodies like elemental shields and what have you and all in all it's one of the cooler ROMhacks I've seen.

Meanwhile on Everquest 2:

I'm so badass, just looking at me caused this elf's hair to fall out.

I'm about to reach level 85, meaning flying mounts - and picking one I like. Flying elemental discs, dragons, birds, pegasi - there's a ton of stuff to choose from and I find it difficult to make up my mind. I'm also getting closer and closer to the level cap. I'm hoping to team up with Claire and temporarily lower my level via the mentoring system to experience some fun old content with her. And I'll want to level up some other characters. Gonna be interesting to see how long this game can keep me interested as a non-raider once I get to the maximum level.

Anyway, I have a mount to buy, so if you'll excuse me...

-Cat