Summer Games Challenge 2025 - GET EQUIPPED

[prfsnl_gmr]

Great to hear your takes on Phantasy Star and 8-bit RPGs in general, SB. Glad to hear you enjoyed Phantasy Star as well.

As someone who hasn't jumped into the Dragon Quest series, are there any major QOL upgrades on the GBC ports? Also, has anyone played the SNES versions of DQ 1-3? If so, any opinions on those versions?

The GBC version adds a quick save, which is really great. It also adds some content and collectibles, if I recall correctly. (Also, it rules.)

……

I’m so, so close to the end of F-Zero X. I’ve claimed the Jack, Queen, and King cups on all difficulty levels, and I’ve completed the Joker cup on beginner and intermediate. That leaves only the Joker cup on expert

The game is so, so good, but the way. It’s fast and exciting, and its blocky graphics have actually aged really well. Better yet, it has incredibly deep mechanics, and my GameFAQs “research” into how to complete this incredibly challenging game revealed people writing detailed guides and discovering new racing techniques almost twenty years after the game’s release.

I hope to beat it soon! Also…Octoman forever!!!!

[BoneSnapDeez]

Clash is done.

Overall, I thought it was okay. Kinda surprised by how highly this game is rated. Lots of grinding, shrill music, incoherent navigation... I really have no idea what was going on with the bomb diffusion at the end. The radical 1990 style plot was the best aspect of the game, but not enough to elevate it.

Cocoron is next, but I dunno when I'll start!

1. Alex Kidd in Miracle World
2. Clash at Demonhead
3. Cocoron
4. Conquest of the Crystal Palace
5. The Goonies
6. Journey to Silius
7. Little Nemo: The Dream Master
8. Rygar
9. StarTropics
10. Wrath of the Black Manta

[MrPopo]

The GBC ports also adjust the difficulty; I know for 1 & 2 they significantly boost exp and gold rewards so they aren't as grindy. I think 3 doesn't need to, as the game was reasonably well balanced, but it does have the thief class originally from the SFC port.

[marurun]

I have decided that whatever I play this summer is my Summer Games Challenge. And I lead it off with Ys Origin on Switch, which was much less frustrating (but still periodically frustrating) than when I first played it on PC. It's a pretty neat top-down action-RPG that has multiple playable characters and a few annoying flaws to go with the good stuff. It is typical Falcom in that you need to grind AND get the various not so much hidden as obtuse upgrades. I beat the game with Yunica. If I go back to it again it will be to beat it with Hugo. My understanding is there's another character and a "True" ending after that.

The top-down view isn't really isometric at all, but it is down and from the side just a hair, and because all the 3D terrain is not lit or well-indicated for depth there are some frustrating jumps where you're kind of guessing. There were some very frustrating moments where I just could not get a series of jumps to stick, including on bosses, because the game world has flat lighting and no shading to indicate relative position. There's also a bit of elemental switching you have to do that's not really an issue until a particular point in the game when suddenly it becomes a critical skill. There's never really a good explanation for it, so you just have to kind of figure it out. I did have to read on-line to beat a couple bosses.

And now I'm going into No Man's Sky with the Switch 2 upgrade pack. It's super impressive so far. This is exactly the kind of game I can totally get absorbed in, and that's dangerous. I remember reading just how convoluted and difficult it was early on to get antimatter and a hyperdrive, but apparently they've smoothed that out a lot because I didn't have any issues at all. Boy is limited inventory going to become a thing, though. Also, the game likes to crash after waking the Switch 2 from sleep or switching to the home menu and popping back into the game.