Today, RF Generation turns 16 years old. If you would like to read a little about the site's beginnings, please check out the page here: http://www.rfgeneration.com/PHP/about.php
Speaking personally, I have been in my position as the Technical Director for nearly ten years. I have seen a lot of things around here. Some weren't super great, but I think that we have made a great community even better as time has passed. I'm incredibly pleased to be working with the staff that we have here and, although I don't post a bunch, I'm glad that the conversations continue moving as well on the forum side.
We have gone from sporadic front page posts to new content every other day, 3 podcasts (and another one...), and we are growing our community in many new ways. There are things we have done that I never would have guessed we would do if you would have asked me ten years ago.
16 years, more than 135,000 games in the database, closing in on 10,000 hardware entries. We've made a lot of progress and continue to do so. I know it feels like I've done a bunch of these "Thank you" posts recently, but I truly mean it. I've been very lucky to be able to be in this position and only continue to do it because I care about what we have created as a community.
One of the things I love the most about my retro gaming hobby is feeling the waves of nostalgia rush over me like a surge of whimsical adrenaline when I play a game that I adored from my childhood. Being swept back to a time that was safe, happy and innocent is an addictive pleasure of mine; it is one of my defining characteristics and is my preferred form of escapism. More so than movies or toys from my youth, video games have always potently stimulated that magical feeling in me.
For obvious reasons, a typical child from the 80s didn't have every video game released for his or her favorite console. In fact, most kids would only ever play a small fraction of the hundreds and hundreds of games that may have been produced for a particular system. Admittedly, speaking specifically of the NES, I had a pretty healthy collection and experienced most of the more popular franchises from the 8 bit era. Contra, Zelda, Metroid, Castlevania... yeah, I had all those. And not only did I have them, I beat them. You see, I was the type of gamer who would usually only play one game at a time until I beat it, and then move on to the next. I would cherish the games I beat like trophies, and often revisit them and experience them in different ways or explore new areas. Needless to say, this method of playing my games was, in part, what fueled the intimacy and fondness I have for them today.
After Capcom's highly successful remake of their classic survival-horror hit Resident Evil 2 last year, fans have been asking for a remake of the third entry in the series. With REmake 3 feeling like an inevitability, rumors of the game started circulating around the web, and it was officially announced late last year alongside the multiplayer experience Resident Evil: Resistance. Although both games came bundled together in one package, this review focuses solely on the Resident Evil 3 Remake and not the multiplayer portion.
Released worldwide on April 3, 2020 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC, Resident Evil 3 is an action/survival-horror title. Developed and published by Capcom, it is a remake of their 1999 title Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. It was packaged alongside the online multiplayer game Resident Evil: Resistance. The game has received mostly positive reception and successful sales numbers.
So, I've got this aunt who is super cool, and as long as I have known her she has been a gamer. I credit her not only with truly introducing me to the love of console gaming (while stoking my future love for PC gaming), but especially with helping me out of my "Budget Wall" funk of the early nineties. This is what we are here for today; reliving that special period between 1993 and 1995, when in her amazing generosity, Cool Aunt dumped a generous amount of games and gaming magazines on an otherwise broke teenager. This is the Cool Aunt Chronicles.
Have you ever wished you could relive moments from your past with the knowledge and wisdom you have now? I think everyone has fantasized about this to a certain extent. It could be as minor as wishing you'd made a better comeback in a argument to making different decisions at major forks in the road of your life. I think about this a lot, to be quite honest. I'm very happy with where my life is now, but I can't help but be tempted by the thought of going back in time to take different courses of action, be they simple or major. In the 1987 novel Replay, author Ken Grimwood explores what would happen to a person who was forced to relive a large chunk of his life, in his younger body and with all of his memories and consciousness intact. I'd seen the novel mentioned in a handful of 'best sci-fi novels' lists on YouTube and was so intigued by the premise that Replay jumped right to the top of my 'to be read' queue. I'm not a fast reader, but I cruised through this one in just a few days. So is this time-jumping tale worth your valuable time? Continue reading to find out.
[img width=550 height=677]http://www.rfgeneration.com/images/games/U-005/gs/U-005-S-04655-A.jpg[/img] Should have suspected survival in the future requires extensive use of Imperial Shuttles.
By now you have probably read quite a few gaming articles (including on here) about how folks are doing during these tough times. In light of this moment, there were a handful of topics I tossed about when considering what to expand into a full write-up, and ultimately it seemed best just to take a few ideas and breathe them out a bit. While this may read more like a journal entry, or really a series of rambling and disjointed thoughts instead of a concentrated article, it is my hope that constructively sharing thoughts right now may be more useful and connecting than one of my gaming lists or reviews. Well, more helpful to me at least.
The social isolation of the recent month has made me want to partake in some gaming comfort food -- old favorites from my childhood and teenage years. I decided to play one of the most memorable adventure games, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. It's a slightly more mature take on the adventure genre that looks at a series of voodoo murders. It has a fantastic setting and voice cast, but also some aspects that I needed to take a more critical look at. Enjoy!
In this month's episode of the Playcast, Rich (singlebanana) and Shawn (GrayGhost81) address these strange times as they travel to the fantastical world of Albion, the setting of Lionhead Studio's Fable II. The guys discuss the ins-and-outs of the game's story, battle mechanics, gameplay, graphics, sounds, and the game's one-of-a-kind morality system. Speaking of morality....the fellas get a bit cheeky as they discuss the current state of our world and government. It goes without saying, but we will, that the opinions herein are those of the hosts and in no way reflect the views of RF Generation. So welcome to this special episode of the Playcast; we hope you enjoy the listen as you practice your social distancing. Stay home if you can and do your best to keep your families and communities safe.
As always, we are happy to hear your thoughts on the games we play on our discussion page (linked below). We will respond to your comments and are always happy to discuss these games more. Please be sure to rate and write a review of the show on iTunes and/or Podbean to help us increase our listenership. Thanks for the listen, we hope you enjoy the show!
We interrupt your regularly scheduled program...but seriously what are you doing beside watching FetNicks or pulling your fighting kids apart?....to bring you the April 2020 edition of RF Generation's Site News! In this issue, we announce a VERY special May Community Playthrough game, unveil the next game for our site shoot 'em up club, congratulate the winners of our site raffle drawing, and of course, thank those members who sent in submissions to our site and registered approvals last month. Thanks for keeping it on Channel 3 and please STAY SAFE!
REMEMBER: If you have any news about upcoming events or topics that you think the site needs to hear about, please PM singlebanana and put "RFG Site News" in the subject line. Who knows, maybe your news will make our front page!
As collectors, we can sometimes fall into the dreaded hole, known as choice paralysis. Whether we collect strictly for the sake of it, or try and curate a small collection of things we want to play, it's bound to happen. Sometimes, you'll walk to a shelf full of games, and no particular mood strikes you, but you have free time, and know you want to play a game. In those situations, you can either try to pick something new, and see if it clicks with you. Other times, you return to an old favorite; an evergreen game, if you will.
Over the years, while I haven't quite built a long list of them, I have identified a few games I can always go back to, no matter what. These are games that I don't tire of. Some of them are very pick up and play, and some of them are not. However, these titles are the kinds of things I can return to, over and over, and immediately get that feeling again, reminding me why I like them so much, and always have a good time. Here are a small handful of my evergreen games.
Some people have had issue with their joy cons drifting, or maybe they got tired of the look of them. There are plenty of ways you can modify them. I custom painted my whole switch to look like the new turquoise Switch Lite, only thing, I still had black thumbsticks. I ordered a set of white ones to make the look compete and I show you how I installed them. Enjoy
Four years ago, id Software resurrected the Doom franchise from development hell. Under the creative direction of Hugo Martin and Marty Stratton, Doom 2016 retained just enough of the original games' DNA to make it feel old-school, while at the same time bringing the series into the 21st century with intelligent upgrades, combat that rewarded you for playing aggressively, and a demonic fire-and-brimstone soundtrack that was perfect for the ridiculous and irreverent tone of the whole thing. It was my favorite game of that year, and in August of 2018, singlebanana, GrayGhost81, and I took to the RF Generation Playcast to heap praise upon it for the community playthrough that month. At long last, the direct follow-up to 2016's game is here. Its predecessor set such a high bar that it's hard to see how this new title could improve things. So join me as I give my thoughts after the first half dozen hours.
This year has been a good year for me in regards to making progress on beating my NES library. In January and February, I was able to pump out some serious completion numbers. For the first couple weeks of March, I was able to tackle a few games from my sublist of games that I anticipated to be the hardest ones for me to complete. Before all this COVID-19 stuff, I planned to continue putting time into these challenging titles specifically. Things are stressful enough at the moment, so I decided to change my tactics and go with some comfort food instead. My stress reducer of choice was the original Final Fantasy. Now I've beaten this game before, but not before I started keeping records and recording my plays.
