Zelda (pick your favourite). Also fuck Nintendo.
Not anymore! Thanks to decompilation projects like Ship of Harkinian, you can play Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask as native PC ports – no emulation involved. I think Twilight Princess just got a decompilation release as well. Having full 4K + widescreen support, thumbstick camera controls, mod menus, etc. is awesome.
The only reason you say you can only play zelda games through emulation is because you also say fuck nintendo.
You can easily play wind waker with a gamecube.
You can easily play breath of the wild on switch.
Great and neither one of those is a PC like the question asked. Also fuck Nintendo.
Bloodborne is THE answer to this question.
Bloodborne
I dont even have a gaming pc and im still so annoyed about this
Anyway :ps5 beep:
Old DOS games.
Unless they get some special treatment from GOG or fans, you generally need something like DOSBox to actually run them. Then again, I don’t know what, if anything, would prevent just installing DOS on your PC (to another partition or drive at least).
Also pretty much every Nintendo game excluding Switch 2 titles. For now.
Don’t all MS-DOS games use DOSBox in GOG releases? Still emulation in that case.
Then again, I don’t know what, if anything, would prevent just installing DOS on your PC (to another partition or drive at least).
Drivers.
Even, maybe especially, during the actual DOS days drivers were something that could take days to weeks, literally, to install. And that’s assuming you got a disk with your device and didn’t buy second hand and just had to call in to the manufacturer and hope they sold the disks separate.
Nowadays nothing you have in your computer has effective DOS drivers. This means outside of the literal command prompt, you aren’t doing much. If it requires sound or direct video access, you’re more likely to directly lay an egg out of every orifice after winning the lottery from a ticket purchased with a golden dollar found on your way to bang a supermodel that recently themselves managed to lay an egg out of all their orifices specifically in front of Abraham Lincoln’s scientifically proven but ironic reincarnation as a black dwarf.
If you have to run literally any software that is not exclusively text based that was meant for dos, just use dosbox.
Mother 3 in English (yes yes they made carts that work in GBA)
I love the old genesis shadowrun. its a bit buggy but way fun. used the actual shadowrun rules at the time.
A lot of arcade games are nearly inaccessible on original hardware, so emulation is more or less the only viable way to play them. Hell there are probably a nonzero amount of games that actually don’t have any authentic surviving cabinets anymore.
Xenogears.
For something in the Nintendo catalog that’s not even available through their services: Pokemon HeartGold/SoulSilver.
Advance wars 2
You can play this on GBA
Not if you want to play it on PC.
Some ROM hacks.
Pokemon Emerald Rogue has been mentioned, but I can’t overstate just how polished it is for being a ROM hack. I think it would get really positive reviews if released as an official product as-is. It even manages to gradually introduce a lot of complicated Pokemon mechanics in ways the main series games never did. Only change I would make for a mass-market release is lowering default difficulty to Easy.
Reverie (Super Mario World) is one of the best Myst-ish puzzle games I’ve played. Doesn’t really require you to be good at platforming, savestates or rewind can help in the worst case without cheapening out on its strengths. One of those games where you end up with a fantastically messy set of notes.
Link to the Past randomizer somehow creates a lot of unique twists before it starts to run out of curveballs to throw your way, especially if you keep cranking up the gimmicks over time. I think a basic beginner run is quite doable and likely interesting for anyone that’s 100%'d base LTTP once in the past year. As long as you don’t touch the glitches setting, you’ll probably complete every run eventually.
Lost Odyssey maybe? I haven’t actually played it yet but it’s next on the docket (probably) and I’ve heard it’s supposed to be a masterpiece.
The original 3D Ninja Gaidens (black and original version of 2) are also trapped on the Xbox ecosystem. But I don’t know to which extent it counts, the Sigma version of the first game is available on PC and is “fine”, even though Black is the better version. There is really no way to play the proper original X360 version of Ninja Gaiden 2 on PC without emulation, though.
Lost Odyssey is good but at least a tier below the greats being named in this thread.
Last I heard, there’s still a guaranteed emulation freeze (that can be bypassed with a cutscene skip) and random freezes that you might have to reload to get through, so be prepared for some frustration.
Hm, good to know. Which version of Xenia did you use, Canary or Edge? Would you say it’s worth it to experience it or should I bump it down the priority list? It’s not like I don’t have other games at the ready in the backlog…
Canary. Played it with some friends a couple years ago, I only got the guaranteed freeze (and some random stuff in side areas very late) but both my friends lost an hour a few times.
I’d say it depends on what you’re looking for. Some of the vignettes are among the best writing you’ll see anywhere in video games, but much of the main story…is not. The gameplay is also on the ponderous side, more like Final Fantasy IX, if you’ve played that. Good voice acting, enjoyable cast, Uematsu is as good as ever (though the soundtrack is small).
Okay. Hm. We’ll see then. I’m very interested in the good parts you described, but I’m not sure I have the appetite for hundreds of hours of JRPG right now.
Thank you for the rundown, it was very helpful!
I’d say it’s pretty FFXy in over world and like a mix of Shadow Hearts and Dragon Quest in its battles, but it’s the vignettes and sound design where it really stands out - not just the voice acting, but having a natural flow to the voices, with people interrupting and speaking over each other rather than saying their lines consecutively.
Yeah, the voice editing really stood out to me when I played it. Very different feel to Final Fantasy X, where–despite good performances–the localization had to shoehorn in some stilted/rushed dialogue.
Damn, okay. You’re pulling me back in…
I’d say it’s unique in a similar way to Clair Obscur, in that it takes a lot of long running and well established mechanics but combines them in a way that feels very modern and original, topped off by the voice acting instead of the graphics. Unfortunately as the other commenter said the story isn’t particularly special and it doesn’t rush at all, so some parts can get a bit grindy. If you find yourself in a long JRPG mood in the future I’d definitely recommend it, but you do have to be in a long JRPG mood to really enjoy it.
Some of the older Ace Combat games. Specifically Ace Combat 04, 5, and Zero.
I wonder, it used to be that PSCX2 would freakout with rendering the old ace combats. How is it now?
Oh, yeah nevermind, it’s better than native nowadays. I’ll be replaying AC4
I’m going to assume you mean no PC port. The Mother/Earthbound games are cool. I’d start with Earthbound if you aren’t familiar. Other SNES games to check out: Gradius III with the speedup mod, with music hack while you’re at it. Goof Troop, made by the creator of Resident Evil. Both Castlevania are good. Plenty of games that never released worldwide that have fan translations. You could go back even further and mess around with some PC88 or MSX games. Neo Geo emulates well and has a ton of games, you can find some on steam but the emulation isn’t as good as you can find elsewhere. I have emulated a lot of things on PC, are you looking for a specific genre or time period?
Neo Geo games. Afaik their official PC versions are all emulated.
Metroid Prime
