One of the very first games I played on my Sega Genesis was Streets of Rage. I was obssessed with this game. It tore me away from my NES, and made me an instant Sega converter (until I got my SNES that is). I played Sonic a bit too, but nowhere near the amount of investment I had for Streets of Rage. I knew every level like the back of my hand. I could get from the first stage to the end boss and beat the game without losing a life. Yeah it was on easy, but I was five, so I would call that impressive. At the time it was the best game I ever played, and would probably make it into my top 20 if I ever sat down and made a list.
Flash forward to 2007, and games from the 8-bit, 16-bit, even 32-bit are making their appearance on the Wii, Xbox 360, and PS3. At first I wasn't drawn into the "play old games on new consoles" rage (get it!?!) until my personal favorites started showing up. I was surprised how quickly Streets of Rage made an appearance on the Wii's Virtual Console, and downloaded it instantly. I always thought of it as a cult classic. You don't hear about this game as much as Double Dragon or Final Fight. I think being launched right next to Sonic took the light off this excellent game. There have been two sequels after the original, but all on the Genesis. There was never a true remake or sequel on later consoles (and Fighting Force does not count!), so I felt that if you never had the opportunity to play it during the Genesis era, you missed out on a great set of games.
I always wondered if people downloaded any of the Streets of Rage games without ever playing them. Anyway a few months later, part two came out on Xbox live arcade, and you know what that means: achievements! Downloaded that too when I got some money and time to play it. My history with part two isn't as decorated, as I never owned it, only borrowed it from friends and renting it from blockbuster a couple of times. So I looked forward to spending some time with it finally after all these years. I remember beating it when I was younger and thought since I was such an expert in the first one, I would get the achievements in no time.
I was wrong. I made a good start: within the first two weeks I had most of the achievements, but the coveted one was High Score (score 800,000 points with Game Settings set to Hardcore.)
Only recently, about the time I got my original Xbox, have I been playing games on a harder difficulty. I'm not going to lie, when I was younger I usually started games on easy, and played normal games usually with cheats activated. Around the sixth grade I stopped using cheats, and began playing games on normal first time through. But rarely, mostly never, did I play a game on a higher difficulty. I believe beating Halo on Legendary was the first time I trumped a game on it's hardest setting.
Playing Streets of Rage on hardcore was intimidating, to say the least. I couldn't make it pass the second stage. It was frustrating, because I enjoyed so much of these games as a kid, only it was on a lower setting. Now, when I feel like I'm an expert gamer, I'm getting my butt kicked by some game made in 1991! Arrgghhh! Time to rage quit this game for two years!!!
And that's what I did. In April of 2008, was the last time I played my Xbox Arcade version of Streets of Rage 2. I didn't even bother downloading part three on the Wii VC. I never touched the original on my VC either; frustrated and ashamed that I knew the game was better than me. It had my number. Indeed those rage filled Streets were tougher than I remembered, and I didn't dare walk upon them.
I listed the achievement as one of my six impossible achievements in a previous blog post (Xbox 360 Achievements: The Bane of My Existence.) After besting two out of those six, the time was coming before I once again dared to walk the streets of rage. And rage I did. It has taken me about three weeks to do, what I thought, was impossible...
Add another point to my confidence rating. This has been the toughest so far in conquering my impossible achievements. All it took was a lot of patience and trial and error. I did it with Axel, which surprised me because I thought I could do it with Max, but after three failures with him I made the switch.
Returning to my backlog, and only playing the games I currently own this year, has kept me greatly entertained. I thought it would be hard, hearing about the Final Fantasy/God of War/Mass Effect/Pokemon/Heavy Rain/Bioshock games, but honestly I've been thouroghly satisfied in completing my "old" games. I feel like not only am I finishing the games, but finishing things I started long ago. It's giving me a chance to connect to my gaming past, and rediscover why I love playing video games. Streets of Rage was frustrating, but dammit they don't make beat'em ups like this anymore, and for me, it stil holds up. Which brings me to my Question of the blog:
What games have you downloaded (from Xbox Arcade, Virtual Console, etc.) from your gaming past that you still love playing today?
Half of my impossible achievements are ko'd. Let's see if I can do away with the rest, without getting too distracted from The Orange Box. More on that game(s), in another blog...
Kneelift? Flipping suplex? Or a flip into a slam? You decide!!!