I’ve been playing some retro games recently (PS1 and prior) and I’ve been discovering a lot of games that I never thought I would enjoy. Particularly 90s arcade shmups and arcade style sports games.
What are some of your favorite retro games that you always find yourself coming back to?
I just started my nostalgia hunt lately, and firstly it’s Digimon World after watching some content about it. It’s still hold up quite well tbh, even though it does show its age with its system.
I replay it every other year. It was one of my first games ever, started playing it when I was 5 or so and kept grinding on the same save file for more than 10 years.
For those interested, the Maeson patch fixes all the bugs that afflicted the game on release and adds a lot of QoL improvements, including persistent music across screens (in the original game, the music resets every time you change screen), diversified evolution lines, and rebalanced progression.
I replayed it last summer with the Maeson patch and it was very enjoyable while still keeping the “core” experience intact.
Nice, that’s an interesting patch. Can it be done with existing save file?
Also does it patch the monochromon notorious item shop minigame 🙈
I don’t know about the existing save file. It should be compatible, though. It’s worth a try.
As for Monochromon, yes! It’s a lot less frustrating now.
Great! Gotta try it after work
Damn, I’ll have to give that a try. I’ve tried to get back into DW via emulation and man, the game is ruthless! The enemies you fight on the first screen (after beating Agumon) will wipe you if don’t bother training at least one entire day first.
My Leomon lose to a caterpillar haha
I think the dev intended you to avoid most fight, but it’s kinda lame since a lot of time enemy will just place right beside you when you enter the area and then rush toward you, and since fighting is not rewarding it’s kinda pointless.
It may be surprising, but most of the difficulty of the game comes from it being very cryptic. Once you understand the underlying mechanics, the game is not hard. You are thrown into a completely foreign world and are asked to just figure it out; and most people go in expecting Pokémon mechanics, which doesn’t help at all.
What it’s worth remembering when playing it, is that the game encourages you to fail and try again. Your Digimon dies of old age and reverts to an egg every few in-game days anyways, and while it’s technically possible to complete the game with your starter Digimon, new players will probably repeat the cycle a few times at minimum.
It can be off putting at first, but it does provide the advantage that it doesn’t matter how many mistakes you make, you can just retry next time, and you actually have it easier each time, because you keep all your items and progression, some of the Digimon’s stats, and of course the knowledge you’ve gathered up to that point.
The Maeson patch doesn’t fundamentally change any of that, but it does remove some of the bloat. Just a few of my favourite changes:
And required for certain evolutions. Not fun times heh
Back in my PSX days, I would “save up” the poop so that my 'mon would evolve straight from a baby into Sukamon on the first missed potty. Since that evolution halved all stats, and a baby’s stats were super low, it was easily a net positive as training a champion had much larger gains than a baby.
So now it’s possible to actually hit all marks? Because I couldn’t get it with fucking save states.
As long as you don’t do it for the first few generations! All training stations get silently upgraded if you train a Baby I or Baby II digimon there a few times each.
Yeah. In the original game, the slots are rigged so that you have a set chance to either hit three symbols in a row (40%) or three jackpots (10%), and if the guaranteed chance doesn’t trigger, you automatically fail.
With the Maeson patch, you still have the rigged chances to win, but you can also attempt to win the minigame manually if the rigged chance doesn’t trigger. Imo it’s a bit too good (I liked it better the way the Randomizer handled it, by removing the rigged chances altogether and only allowing the player to win the minigame manually), but it’s still an improvement on the original.
When I was a kid I didn’t have my own memory card so I just played the first 2 hours of Digimon World every few days or so LOL. Good game.
Definitely worth trying it now with emulator, savestate and speeding up helps with a lot of tedious stuff and risk-taking, i emulate it with my phone and it sure helps that i don’t have to stick to the front of my pc to play it. I love the mystery the world bring, and it encourage you to explore. Difficulty is wonky though.