Tenchu

I played a demo of this game about 15 years ago. I'm getting a PSP soon so I can play PS1 games and am thinking about giving this a go.

Has it aged well? From what I can remember its some kind of blend of dark souls, zelda, metal gear solid, thief and ninja gaiden. Not sure how accurate that is.

I dunno if it aged well in particular but it's still fun to play, the second game too

It's a comfy game of find the target on the map and kill him. The main reason you should play it is the soundtrack. You shouldn't really compare the game with anything else.

Do you like cheesy bad voice acting and great soundtracks? You should really play The House of the Dead 2 Tenchu

Games don't age dipshit.

Controls feel stiff at first, take time getting use to but the game is great. It's biggest problem, due to technical limitations (which is what I'm guessing you call "aging"), is fog keeping you from seeing much very far ahead of you.

Play wrath of heaven and burn everything else. Tenchu is dead.

Well somehow I lost my Wrath of Heaven shirt I got when I preordered it back in the day. FUCK

Aged like ass

And yet, in the next sentence you concede that hardware limitations of the time cause fogging, which is part of what I and most other people with a working brain would call ageing.

It might amaze you to know that words can have multiple meanings. Ageing when talking about games just means that the mechanics or pacing are dated (generally in a negative way) by today's standards.

This is different from games that get more watered down/simplified like morrowind to skyrim. This isn't ageing, because the earlier game was better. This is casualising.

Devs need to focus on quality of life improvements that keep the core experience rather than making the games have paper thin depth.

Trying to fit in ?

Echigoya, where are you hidden?

As much as I love Tenchu 1, it did not age well. The game isn't bad by any means, but it's very dated and sometimes feels more like playing a period piece than a game. The game itself is pretty simple, but the game doesn't explain anything about how it works, save for some extremely unhelpful advice before a mission starts.

Playing it for the first time will give you a pretty bad learning curve because you need to learn how to deal with slow tank controls, an awkward control scheme and shit draw distance all at the same time. That being said, you do have a staggering amount of movement options, as well as a zoom function to help circumvent the draw distance problem, but you're not told about these things and you're just supposed to figure it out on your own. I could go into an autistic level of detail about the various systems, but for now, I'll just say that learning how to use the zoom button and grappling hook are crucial to doing well.

I still think Tenchu 1 is worth playing because there simply isn't anything else like it. It's jank as fuck but extremely comfy once you get used to it. Early Tenchu games don't get a lot of love because the series was immediately overshadowed by MGS and Thief, but I still think the first 3 games are worth playing today.


Your greed sickens me. I hope your death, is a lesson to others.

You've been a bad boy, Its payback time!

Even if a games mechanics are old it doesn't mean it's dated. Dated are what journos pushed so their shit game skills were hidden. For example, voice acting. Todays voice acting is just as bad as it ever was. Nothing got better. But for an actual mechanic would be bosses at this point. This mechanuc is also one that journos try throwing under the bus to prevent people from seeing how incompetent they are.

RICKIMARUUUUUUUUUU

I remember having fun fucking around with the level maker in Tenchu 2

at the time nobody complained about heavy fog in PSX games because holy shit this is in 3d. You just expected it in any game that wasn't a racer (even there you had pretty fucking short draw distances to be honest)

It's not short draw distance, it's just advanced darkness technology.

It's not about mechanics, it's about not wanting to slash your eyeballs with razorblades.
Most 2D except the very primitive and very poorly done holds up, the higher quality stuff looks amazing. And most 3d from PS2 on is fine as well. And text remains text of course.

But holy fucking shit, early 3d is an abomination. We didn't know any better, and it's all pretty terrible to the point of detracting from gameplay when you've lost the ability to decode what those 2 dozen triangles are trying to depict.

YOO SHUD DAI BAI MAI EHWWOWS

That's not game mechanics. That's just visuals, but even than good devs made that shit look good. Which is a main point of mine. Shit games will always be shit while good to great games will always be that. Hell, I just recently played psone Resident Evil 1. It was okay, nothing amazing. Part 2 though? That game went above and beyond part 1. And yes I played the originals on the psone console, flat screen and all. You know what happened? I had fun and replayed re2 3 times but hell if I can reach that 2 hours and 40 minute mark for the weapons. I had fun user and still enjoyed the scenes even when the visuals were not that good.
Also Soul Reaver 1 is still a well designed and great looking and greatly written/voiced game.

Emulating PS1 has been a thing for ages, you know?

2:40 is a lot of time for a RE2 run.
A couple years ago I went on a full marathon to get Tofu (need to beat the game six times with A ranks, less than 2:30 each. Also you can only save 12 times total supposedly).
I did that in a weekend and had a blast with it.
You should learn your scenarios and plan accordingly when moving around, especially in the police station since it's quite big and you need to constantly move between wings.

Speedruns manage to go under 1:30 so you have plenty of time. If you want some bonus help you can use the inf.ammo trick (R1+squarex10 in keyconfig).

Might need to. Though that code is cheating, but memorizing scenarios? Fuck that'll take quite a few tries. Last time I did it was about 5 hours.
Also Monster Rancher 2 looks terrible to todays graphics but god damn I sunk months into that game and didn't get bored. It's all about the game itself on how well it's made, the lost passion. It'll shine through regardless of age. Also a few other examples.
It's really easy to forget from all the shit devs these days put us through that great games of the past will always be great. I personally nearly forgot vidya was fun. Plan to get dreamcast and N64 when my family moves in a couple of years.

Yes, I know that's not mechanics, I said it wasn't about mechanics.
Visuals can interfere with gameplay when it's hard to parse the action or scene and gives you a headache to look at.

If you can stand the garbage that the psx pumps out, more power to you. But even the absolute best visually is simply trash, when compared to anything before or after.

5 hours is quite expansive. Unless you're taking your time to explore everything, 3~3.5 hours should be a 'nominal' time.
You should learn your scenarios by remembering the puzzles and minimizing item box trips as much as possible. For example, when in the sewers always keep that damn valve handle with you - it sucks when you find out it is needed and you don't have it, necessitating a trip to the item box in order to grab it.
Make use of the internal pause feature, too. If you need to pause hit Start for the 'PAUSED' message - since time halts here. If you stay on the map or the status screen you're going to add time to your run.

You need L2 and R2 for Tenchu so you'll have to assign them to the analog "stick".

Otherwise it's fantastic unless you were born after 91 like muh graphics autist here.

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