Red Dead Revolver

Red Dead Revolver was released in 2004 for PS2 and original Xbox. It tells you the story of a gun handler named “Red”. It is actually the first game in the series of Red Dead games that featured also, later, Red Dead Redemption and a sequel Red Dead Redemption 2. Red Dead Revolver was published by Rockstar Games.

The game is formed around 27 stages. The website, “How Long to Beat”, states that it takes seven hours to finish the game. I have played this game for a bit over nine hours already. I have almost finished it. I got stuck to the last stage that has a duel battle against the final boss “Griffon”. The duel, and also other duels in the game, are a bit hard to go through. “Griffon” is the final person that “Red” has to defeat in his journey of a revenge. There is a somewhat deep plot in the game but the action, at least for me, seems to be the driving force for trying to beat the game.

There is a lot of shooting and lots of weapons in this game. You basically select a rifle and a hand gun and also a melee or throwing weapon, like a knife, for you when you start a stage. You achieve some money from taking down the enemies that you can spend to buy better weapons. There exists also some other items that unlock some more content if you are interested in these special features of the game. Toughest parts are duels in which you try to pull your gun and aim it and also trigger the shooting to try to kill your enemy before the enemy kills you. There are some of these parts, maybe three or four, in this game. It can get tricky and you might have to spend a lot of time in trying to get through these parts.

You can buy Red Dead Revolver from Xbox store for fifteen euros. It is also possible to buy the physical copy of this game. It is backwards compatible with Xbox Series X. It isn’t the most expensive game but it can cost even as much as 70 or 80 euros since the prices seem to be rising. There are only a bit over 60 games from original Xbox that are actually backwards compatible with Series X. It might be interesting to try to collect all of them. I just recently got one more game that is backwards compatible in this way. It was “Star Wars – Jedi Knight – Jedi Academy” and it cost only ten euros. I got also some PS1 games with this same purchase. I am hoping to have some time with these games, also. One interesting game that I bought was “V-Rally 2”.

Red Dead Revolver is 22 years old game. It can be considered a retro game. What makes it remarkable is that it is actually the game that inspired the development of Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2. These were released in 2010 and 2018. I will always remember the launch of RDR2. Back then I was working in a game shop as a customer servant. I wrote a blog post of the shop about the release on this game shops own blog. We also sold a lot of RDR2 games and had a launch moment that started at midnight when RDR2 was actually released. I don’t know the actual sales figures of that happening but I can estimate that there were hundreds of games sold back at that moment that lasted maybe three hours.

Red Dead Revolver reminds a bit of Max Payne. It features very similar action in the gameplay. Both of them are shooting games with a slightly detailed plot that does make the game deeper as a video game experience. Plot can be very important in a video game but it never is the driving feature when it comes to how I like to play my video games. I actually even think that Max Payne was a bit more advanced and more realistic although it was released already three years earlier than Red Dead Revolver.

Old School Rally

Old School Rally is something for you if you like games like Colin McRae Rally and Colin McRae Rally 2.0 that were originally published for the first PlayStation. The driving feel is very much like in those classic retro games. You get actually to control your rally car using just your plain original gamepad. This seemed to be the norm way back. The gamers actually didn’t have so many driving wheels and pedals. The graphics weren’t as realsitic but yet these games just had something special in them.

I bought my copy of Old School Rally for Nintendo Switch for a bit over 30 euros. It think the precise price was 32 euros. It is a physical copy. The game is also available for PS5 also as a physical game and also for Steam as, of course, a digital copy of the game. With this same purchase I bought Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection. I tried briefly also this compilation of some earlier Mortal Kombat games. It was fun to play the first MK game like it was meant to be played in an Arcade. I got as far as trying to beat Goro. Then I had to give up for that session. Maybe I’ll try again later.

Old School Rally is really nice to play if you are familiar with CMR PS1 games. There are some differences. The cars aren’t official ones. They are fictive manufacturers and models. You also don’t get to fiddle with car settings actually at all. The damage that the car takes does affect the controllability of the car. If you damage your car greatly the driving becomes more difficult although not impossible. Car has breaking and steering functions although I don’t get to see under the hood so much and I think it isn’t actually required. My notes here are based solely on plaiyng this game. I haven’t seen the source code. This isn’t an open source release after all.

Breaking seems to be the critical fact when it comes to how you can handle your car. It isn’t, in my opinion, as accurate as was with CMR games. You also don’t get to fix how the breaks work. Other abilities of the car are the ability to accelerate and also the highest speed you can reach. Also, there aren’t any other competitors. There isn’t a series to compete in. Instead you get a record time that you have to beat on each stage.

Graphics are a bit fuzzy but I think they work just fine considering the clear comparison to CMR games. Actually, if you think about it, the CMR games are already almost 30 years old. This fact brings for me and also for a lot of other older gamers a huge amount of nostalgia. There is actually a lot to play in Old School Rally. I did spent over ten hours playing the campaign of this rally game. The How Long To Beat website states that it takes eight hours to finish Old School Rally.

I could share some tips for a beginner. Try not to completely wreck your car. Try to break in time with the corners. Don’t break too late or too slightly. Figure out which car to buy or not to buy. If you totally wreck your car during a stage consider retiring from the event and starting over. You can easily end up with a broken car trying to desperately beat the record time. This can be almost impossible. At times I found myself in this loop of repeating a stage. The driving is in Old School Rally more difficult with a broken car.

The Role of SNES In The History of Gaming

There was a time in history of gaming when SNES was the most powerful and the most newest gaming console in the markets. This period of time was followed by many years of dominance from Mega Drive, or Genesis as the system was called in the USA, that in turn was a following of dominance from Nintendo Entertainment System, or for short, NES. What had happened earlier, before Nintendos dominant era, would be known as video game crash. It was a time when video games weren’t selling so well. NES begun the new era when video games started to begin to be popular again.

What makes Super Nintendo, or SNES, so significant is reflected in these games that were released for it. They were beginning to look like something that could be considered a true form of art and not just some entertainment for kids. There were stories that were told through these games. There were some limitations about the amount space available and also some considerations about how to, for example, save a game with this technology. However the progression was fast and SNES had its time when it was actually considered the greatest gaming console of all that were available.

Now, you can debate on which one is better, Mega Drive or SNES but actually the way I see it is something like this. NES was the best during 1983 to 1988. Mega Drive dominated from 1988 to 1991. And SNES was the greatest console between 1991 and 1995. After that it would be the era of PlayStation 1 which would continue all the way to the era of the generation in which PS2 would belong to. Take this as just an idea and not something I could somehow actually prove to be true. This is a sort of a theory.

How were the games that were released for SNES? I would point out that there were games like Street Fighter II and Super Mario World. They were full of action and included graphics that were very impressive at their time. There were also some role-playing games that I think moved gaming very much forward at this time in the history of gaming and playing video games. These games brought us closer to the games that could be later found on PS1. I think that when PS1 came actually as popular as it would show to be we were actually starting to realize the full potential that video games actually had. RPGs on SNES were something like a bridge to more complex and modern gaming.

So, the whole scene of gaming was advancing very fast at this time. Everything I have told you here makes me think how little I have spend playing SNES. I have several RPGs to explore if I choose to go to that path. I am thinking that this system, SNES, has some great games. But the question in my mind seems to be “are they actually worth playing”? I ma thinking this because they are old games. I don’t have so many memories of playing SNES back in the 90s. I have more memories about Mega Drive.

I am still thinking about this. Some good games for SNES include titles like many of Final Fantasy titles, Secret of Mana, Dragon Quest VI and III, Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG. It also had many good games that weren’t actually RPGs. These titles include Super Mario World, Super Mario All-Stars, Donkey Kong Country, Star Fox and F-Zero just to mention some of them.

If you are a retro collector you must have heard how there was a device that would have actually been a Nintendo console that would have had a CD drive of some kind included with it. This was actually something that would have been a collaboration of Sony and Nintendo. We never saw this machine and Sony went on to release its own gaming console. PlayStation, later. This leaves my imagination with many possible outcomes of what we would have had as video gamers if it would have come to reality.

SNES is a huge part of history of video games. As I am more of a Mega Drive and PlayStation 1 fan I have lots of playing to do if I wish to get into SNES a bit more. There is a lot to explore. Some games might not be ones that I will spend tens of hours or even hundreds of hours playing since they are already a bit old as video games. I might play some newer video games instead. However it is great to acknowledge how these games shaped the way we experience gaming today.