I’ve been enjoying emulating games recently - mostly NES, ps1 and gba - and I’m looking to branch out from my limited familiarity as I mostly play games I’ve played in the past (and then it was mostly rentals- so very limited exposure lol).
What games would you recommend checking out? Basically across any ps1-equivalent generation system or earlier. I’m interested in the FF series but have no idea where to start either 🤷♂️
My rotation atm:
PS1: Medal of Honor, ssx,
GBA: Pokémon firered, wario
NES: castlevania, ninja gaiden
I grew up on N64, IMO Star Fox 64 and F Zero X are among the greatest games ever made.
FF6 and 7 are both fine starting points, SNES and PS1 respectively. FF Tactics is also a great game from the PS1 era, but best thought of as its own thing because aside from some visual designs it doesn’t share much in common with the other FF games.
Also you should give Dreamcast a try! It’s technically a generation later but emulation for it is really mature so it can run better than PS1 on some computers. Space Channel 5, Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Power Stone, Samba de Amigo, Skies of Arcadia, Resident Evil Code Veronica, uhhhh Rez and Ikaruga and I guess Shenmue is cool too
Star Fox 64 is a perfect time capsule, nothing like it will ever be made again. Nice 40 minute play-through time, but with tons of branching paths and achievements to reach for. This is the best time to play it, since you can experience it without the slowdowns of the OG hardware.
There’s a recompilation of it called Starship, so you can run it natively on PC at widescreen resolutions and a frame rate up to 360 FPS.
Small correction: it’s not a recompilation. Just like the Harbour Masters’ work on Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, and Mario Kart 64, Starship is a source port based off of the matching decompilation of Star Fox 64.
Anyway, thank you for posting about it because somehow I hadn’t heard about it! It looks like it was released not that long after 2Ship2Harkinian, so maybe it got overshadowed.
Haha, yeah, I definitely know the difference between those things
I was in the process of writing a reply explaining the difference…and then my computer crashed
Rather than rewrite it, I’ll just say simply that decompilation requires a lot more labor compared to static recompilation, but it reveals more about the inner workings of the game, which can be useful for modding as well as just understanding why the game behaves in certain ways. They both have their places, and recompilation is especially great for games that don’t have a large dedicated community that’s up to the task of doing a decompilation, since decomp projects can take years and thousands upon thousands of person-hours.
Starfox 64 with one-hand key setup is a fun time