It is a cool evening dusk in 2001. You find this game in one of the demo disks. A great night is awaiting.
Demo disc? I had (and still have) the whole game. My older sister beat it, but I never got around to it.
The last few years as I’ve gotten into emulation and retro gaming, I find this is a game I go back to more often than most. I have an RGB10MAX- a cheap Chinese handheld that has a 16:9 screen but is too weak to play modern HD systems.
Luckily there were somewhere around 44 PS1 games with widescreen modes. Unfortunately it looks like 27 of those are racing games (and some of those are only slightly different variants of basically the. Same game). 7 more are sports games, including soen annual entries. 4 are just a single Visual Novel series. 2 more are just 2D (Worms and Galaxian), and Bloody Roar is technically 3D but like… It’s a fighting game so it’s not very 3D.
So if you’re looking for a very videogame-ey videogame, that can run in a PS1 emulator, but still upscale nicely to a 16:9 screen, without using fan-made patches… You only have 4 options:
- Codename/Lifeforce Tenka
- Ghost in the Shell
- Mrs. Pac-Man : Maze Madness
- Pac-Man World
Tenka and GitS are both shooters, which aren’t really my thing (especially on the PS1 before analog sticks were ubiquitous). Mrs. Pac-Man is arguably more of a 2.5D game. So Pac-Man World somehow ended up as my go-to for testing out Widescreen on devices. I still go back to it occasionally on my Steam Deck and maybe one of these days I’ll finally finish it off.
That’s very cool. I’m a purist though, only play on a CRT. The way it was intended.
Fair enough. Personally I’m old enough to remember when my parents upgraded the living room TV from a CRT to a flat screen (I think it was a plasma?) and the upgrade so so drastic I’ve never had any urge to go back.
I think part of it is that the only CRT’s left in existence are the ultra-high-end models that retro enthusiasts covet. Models that I never would have seen back in the late 90’s unless I had an ultra wealthy friend or visited a local TV station. The old console-style CRT with only a single coaxial input, with the faded phosphorus and the weird spots where someone got a magnet too close to the screen… I’m fine leaving that in the past lol.
Actually you can get them practically for free nowadays. I got a 20" for 25 euro in 2021. Just don’t ship them. They WILL be destroyed.
I had that demo disk
It was the first one of the millennium
https://powerlineoeupsmfanclub.fandom.com/wiki/Euro_Demo_54_(OUKPSM54)
Everything on it was amazing to me at the time
I played lots of Worms on that one
I played the same platforms in worms for ages, before getting Worms World Party on PC.
Demos were cool and that (ThatNukemGuy and Sean Swanson do brilliant recap vids), but…
…what I really looked forward to were the Net Yaroze games that were published on the discs. Most of them were decent; some of them were utter shit; but some of them were absolute bangers.
That, and putting the discs in the CD player gave you a blind taste of some 90s techno choons - the drop in the Lifeforce Tenka track is top quality.
My favorite was adventure game. I still love Italian Concerto because of this game lol.
Amazing. Somehow they managed to make it look almost as good as a full price title at the time!
Adventure game is the game I most think about when I think about Net Yaroze. It’s so (intentionally) bad it’s good.
The year is 2001. You find this game in a demo disk. Your evening is going to be great.
This, september the 10th, will be a great night. Tomorrow morning however…
I’ve been meaning to get brunch at that penthouse restaurant. Tomorrows the day!
Sept 10th 2001 was the day Advance Wars for GBA went on sale in America. Japan was going to get it later that week. They wouldn’t get it until 2004.
I found a game called Dark Cloud in one of these demo disks. Still today is one of my favorite games. Unfortunately is not very known due to bad marketing.
This is one that’s not on my radar. I guess I’ll need to check it out sometime.
When I went off to college, I basically sold as much of my stuff as I could because even in the ancient times it was expensive as hell for a kid from a poor family. So, that was the end of my gaming days for the better part of a decade, and I honestly didn’t really keep up. My last gaming system was the original Playstation until around 2007 when I decided to spend money I didn’t have to buy a Wii.
Sometimes the full game was on those demo discs and you could use gameshark to bypass the flag to kick you off.
I should get back to that, I only played a little of it but I remember enjoying it.
Sleepy quick scroll. Thought it was Face Ball for the SNES. That game sucked and I was confused. Now I’m better.
Oh man!! Yep found this one in a goodwill tote wayyyyy back. Good game.
Sadly ps1 disc’s didnt age well. Rebuilding my collection in roms. Duckstation ftw!
The full version of this game supported the extremely uncommon namco jogcon
