Hello gamers, I hope you are doing well.
Welcome to a new gaming series on Hive, Retro Roam. In this series, I will be sharing my experience of playing old games starting from the late 1970s up to the 2000s. I was fortunate enough to play a few of them here and there but there are so many good old games and entire series that I missed. It will be a nostalgic series for a lot of us.
In the last post of this series, I talked about some old Arcade games that started it all. The Atari 2600 or Atari Video Computer System (VCS) was a game changer and you can read more about that in this post.
Atari was a physical console that you could touch and see, and if things went south for you in a Pac-Man game, could be punched and broken. But not all consoles can be punched. I mean not all have physical hardware. These consoles are called Fantasy Consoles. And today we will talk about the most famous fantasy video game console, PICO-8.
It is quite limited in its capabilities as well. Only 128x128 pixels with just 16 colors, make the game developer challenge and come out with interesting and creative ideas for games. I will talk about arguably the most popular game on Pico-8, Celeste.
It is a great entryway for people trying to learn the flow of game development and have something tangible in quick time. You can just run it in the browser or upload it to a website so everyone can play and test it.
You can find more info about this console on Lexaloffle website. You can also play Pico-8 games on the website.
Celeste Original
If you play games, you must know about the popular Celeste game, a precision platformer on the Steam store with overwhelmingly positive reviews. This was the original game made in 2015 for Pico-8. You can play the classic game from the browser as well.
There are many updates and spin-offs made on Pico-8 because of the popularity of this game.
I used an emulation front-end, Retro Arch to play it. It took me some time to get these games and set up everything. But it was worth the effort!
Here is the gameplay of the game if you are interested.
Did you know this game was made by two friends in just 4 days during a Game Jam event? How cool! Now it is a worldwide phenomenon and so many people have played the subsequent games and enjoyed it.
I loved the game! It gives the retro feel of the 80s with improved and smooth controls, great music, a sense of progression and increasingly difficult levels which forces you to land that perfect jump.
The levels become harder and harder as you progress and climb the icy mountains. The ballons grant you another jump and they make the levels even more challenging. I hate the spikes too. But you can retry as many times as you want, you would get infinite lives.
I completed 20 levels in about 25 minutes, not bad at all. There are no save states in Pico-8 so it won't have too many levels. I would play it more and try to finish it the next time I play it.
There are thousands of games made for this console, and not all are as good as this but still I want to play a lot more games and share them with all of you. So many good games to choose from... I might take more time scrolling through the games than playing them...lol.
Thanks for reading...
Note:
- All the content is mine unless otherwise stated.
- Hive gaming text divider from Raizel posted in Hivegaming Discord Server.