How well has Spyro aged, /vr/?
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How well has Spyro aged?
How well has Spyro aged, /vr/?
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It depends what you expect. I loved the game as a kid. When I went back to replay it, I found it incredibly easy and boring. To the point where it wasn't fun to play, for me. It still looks and plays fine though.
If you just want a comfy game to play and turn your brain off it's fine.
This is pretty much exactly how I feel about it. There's really nothing to do in the game because it feels essentially lifeless. There's a few dragons to save but they're all just there in the middle of the level as you run towards the end. There's no real challenging platforming section or enemies and the boss fights are beyond a joke.
It's still a really good game, but the sequel is miles above it. The minigames helped add fun things to do on the side after running through the level or taking a little detour so your entire time wasn't spent holding down square like Spyro 1. It's fun interacting with the various npcs in each level and doing tasks for them because it genuinely feels like you're in a little world.
I've only played through the first world recently and it's really dull and one note. It animates well, looks nice, and the music was fine, but just running into stuff collecting gems wasn't that engaging and I didn't understand the goofy story.
>1
Vanilla but incredibly solid if you're into 100% collectathons in 1-2 evenings. Spyro has only four abilities (jumping / running / gliding / breathing fire) so the game is mostly designed around unique level layouts / gimmicks and rarely around Spyro's abilities (see Tree Tops / Haunted Towers)
>2 and 3
No, all those minigames kill my motivation to 100% the games halfway through. Almost every level in Spyro 2 has "that one minigame I hate doing" and Spyro 3 is filled with bad minigames and sections with sub-characters that usually end up being minigames as well (seriously, the introduction levels of sub-characters are the only parts where I enjoyed playing those characters). It's the bane of 90s / 00s platformers where all devs managed to add in sequels were minigames at the cost of less actual platforming (just check Crash 3 and compare it to Crash 1 for easy example).
I still tend to replay Spyro 1 every one-two years and enjoy it everytime. Spyro 2 and 3? I think the last time I replayed them was in 10s on my old PSP, so it's like 8-10 years since then.
Spyro 1 had a dreamlike aesthetic that colored my imagination as a kid
I just hate the powers in Spyro 2 and how you have to leave levels incomplete till you get the powers then backtrack and redo the levels.
I wasn't bothered bothered by the Banjo-esque design in 2, with a bigger focus on NPC's and the occasional mini-game, but 3 felt like it banked too hard on that, plus different characters that just aren't as fun to play as. Similar issue to Crash 3 focusing too much on gimmicks. And the final boss in 3 is just terrible.
All in all the trilogy is very light and breeze, it plays perfectly fine even for an early 3D game, but 1 is arguably the most consistent while 2 has some bigger ups and downs, depending on how much one gets into its mini-games.
Seconding this anon
Spyro 1 is still amazing with a fun world to explore, a wide variety of enemies and words with different mechanics, and the best soundtrack. 2 and 3 are completely killed by the forced minigames each stage. All the worlds feel shorter and smaller because each one of them is focused on minigames instead of exploration. You can complete Spyro 2 and 3 in like 6 hours because everything is so short and small. And most of these minigames suck ass to play. And the added voice acting to all levels was annoying.
I will make your words mine too, i could even replay Spyro 1 sometime later but i won't replay 2 or 3 because to me they're really a game made to kids or a "first time experience" game, and boring to replay a second time.
The final level in Spyro 2 is kino, all the barbershop quarter gnorcs operating a chill beach theme park. Although having said that the final treasury vault level in Spyro 1 is also pretty cool.
>Minigames: The Level
>0 gems to collect
If anything Dragon Shores is the worst postgame level in original trilogy due to a single fact of developers thinking that making the player do time-wasting trolley minigame not once, not twice but THRICE was a good idea. Spyro 3's Secret Bonus Level is just as bad due to time-wasting submarine minigame and skating race, but at least devs weren't allergic to gems with it.
Both Sorceress fights in Spyro 3 were the weakest parts of the game. The first time there isn't any kind of interesting intro, Agent 9 says one line and the battle just starts and there's not much of an outro for the boss either. The super bonus boss fights has you and Sorceress flying in those ufos and you just shoot her 10 times and it's over. I don't know why but they really just couldn't come up with anything and/or they had to put come up with those fights quickly one week before the release.
sorceress was always a shit villain, sort of fitting that all of her fights end up sucking.
that yeti race fricking blows. really sour up an otherwise decent bonus level. both of the skate races are the lowest points in the game for me. the trick sections were alright, I would've rather just had one more of those.
I think Sorceress had potential and there was the twist that he was willing to kill dragon babies to live longer or get magic etc and Bianca changes sides when she realizes it. It could have been a story choice that Spyro and Sorceress never end up speaking to each other a single time, but just in gameplay terms the bosses are pretty poor and too simple compared even to other Spyro 3 bosses.
>had to put come up with those fights quickly one week before the release.
That's why I thought too, also she didn't even get her own boss fight theme. Fighting Ripto with opera in the background will never be top.
she actually did but the first prints of the game didn't use the music for her fights or some levels for some weird reason. The greatest hits label is the one you wanna download.
I'll echo this sentiment and add that it's a shame because moment to moment level design improved in 2 and 3, and swimming felt like a natural addition to the moveset as an extension of charging.
>mini games are too hard the post
tell me you're bad at the minigames without telling me you're bad at the minigames
Spyro 2 > Spyro 3 >Spyro 1
Not well if you have aged. It's literally, without memeing, a baby game. Slow, easy (bosses are weird difficulty spikes, though), kinda pointless
Spyro 1 has aged like fine wine. Everything is tight and polished. Visuals stand up to this day. Gameplay is sweet and simple, and the level design is interesting.
It just works.
Games don't age. You do.
I can't share Spyro with my nephew because he only knows the Skylanders version of Spyro. If I can't share my childhood with my own blood it might as well be dead.
It's perfect. Pure. Like walking back in time to the 1990's again as a carefree, innocent kid again.
I played it for the first time last year and I felt exactly the same about it
It's okay. Your enjoyment in Spyro depends on how much you enjoy collecting things and how many video games you've played. I've found Crash better even if the level design is linear.
I just tried it recently. It controls and looks surprisingly great for a PS1 game, sometimes even better than SM64. so I was kind of hoping it'd be the SM64 of PS1. But the level design so far is almost polar opposite of it. it's not an obstacle course and not focused on challenge at all; more just roaming freely. Enemies just sprinkled everywhere without much depth to it, and so on. So as usual you get Westoid level design in a Western platformer.
Magic Crafters, Beast Makers, and Dreamweavers are the best worlds in terms of level design. They tend to introduce new gimmicks or have something unique in their level to make it fun to explore.
Artisan's is great as a beginner world, but Peacekeepers comes off as a slightly harder beginner world, its main thing is trying to encourage the player to think more outside the box when exploring (The second half of Ice Caves, the other side of the river in Cliff Town, and that one dragon in Dry Canyon).
>aged
>aged
>aged
can anyone tell me why the FRICK did every platformer made past '97 or so go so hard on shitty minigames? what exact game made all devs say "yes, this is the future"? Crash 3, DK64, Spyro 2-3 too. what were they thinking?
Likely from devs not knowing how else to keep things fresh, it's the eternal problem with sequels, specially in games where story isn't a selling point. I doubt the devs even saw some of these added mechanics as mini-games or distractions, they probably hoped at least one of these new things would be so well received that it could be a new mainstay idea for sequels. Like the monkey was going to be a breakout character and something they could use in the future, which they kind of did since it's basically a proto-Ratchet.
Agent 9 was supposed to be the foundation for an independent game series
Source: a post on this board from years ago I read once and barely remember
Uncharted was already the start of movieshit cinematic-slop.
I don't see forced diversity on Uncharted.
It’s not even the diversity, it’s that Uncharted started the trend of movieshit cinematic heavy “adventure” games for them. Crash was so much better. You’re a bandicoot in the South Pacific and you gotta rescue your big tiddy gf from a mad scientist making mutant animals. You don’t need endless cinematics. Uncharted was the first step to the Last of Us which is essentially one long cutscene with limited interaction at certain intervals.
That was it Ratchet and Clank
Why is it le bad if they try out new things with minigames instead of you just gliding and firing breath at things for the whole game? Ofc it matters if the minigames feel out of place of flow well tho.
Agent 9 was them testing stuff for Ratchet & Clank.
Spyro ran out of things to by the third game because they had to add more characters with different controls into it. Doesn't make the third one a bad game in my opinion but I remember people hating every time they have to control someone other than Spyro.
>Why is it le bad if they try out new things with minigames instead of you just gliding and firing breath at things for the whole game?
The better option is new abilities that integrate into the existing gameplay rather than a separate, walled-in experience.
Yeah true. They figured they could not invent that many abilities in the 2 and 3 so they put minigames and then side characters in. The developers said that Spyro quickly became limited because he didn't have hands to do stuff with.
Unfortunately, it was a common thing for platformers due to several reasons.
First of all, developers usually try to put all of their best ideas into their first game in the series (because there's no guarantee it'll ever end up being a series and won't end at the very first title), so when higher-ups tell them "wow, this game was a huge success, make a sequel to it asap!" developers probably go "uhhhhhhh" inside of their heads. They've already used up their best ideas (or at least most of them - usually there's some cut content that can be implemented in sequels) and now they need to outdo themselves in shorter amount of time (usually the first title has much more pre-production time compared to sequels, or at least it was like that with platformers in 90s).
Second of all, there are only few ways devs can expand on platformer in a sequel:
>Game had only one playable character? Now there are several playable characters (and the amount of NPCs also tends to be higher)!
>Game had minimum amount of text / dialogues? Now there's more of it (and maybe voiceacting as well)!
>Game's protagonist didn't have many abilities to use? Now there's more!
>Game had zero / minimum amount of minigames? Minigame galore from now on!
>Game was in 2D? Maybe it's time to move to 3D or at least 2.5D, it's the hottest thing right now!
And very rarely devs are willing to overhaul everything because it'd take many years to release such platformer sequel.
Making a sequel with minimum changes and just more levels sounds like a plan, but such sequels were considered as "expansion packs" by majority (like Super Mario Bros 2 in Japan being an expansion pack to original SMB while Super Mario Bros 2 in US/Europe being an entirely new game) and wouldn't sell that much because they don't really have a new good feature for marketing to promote (even if the new levels end up being great).
It looks nice, but is incredibily boring and repetitive gameplay wise. I would rate it a 6/10 at most.
Rare did a much better job with BK
Naughty Dog and Insomniac underwent identical evolutions (and devolutions)
>start out making kiddy platformers on 5th gen (Crash, Spyro)
>make edgy platformers on 6th gen (Jak and Daxter, Ratchet and Clank)
>make "serious action games" on 7th gen (Uncharted, Resistance)
>today they make goyslop garbage (Last of Troons, Black personman)
games dont age. insomniac has never made a single great game.
Always consider it such a well made game. I actually think its perfect although I do agree its a very easy game. Its a platformer made for children though so this is understandable. As far as platformers of its era goes I think I would only put it behind SM64 in terms of the fun I had with it. So even though Spyro imo is more well made than SM64, as a game SM64 edges it in fun factor.
>How well has Spyro aged, /vr/?
Extraordinarily well. It's great fun to 100% run this game.
My only criticism is many levels are too sparse and plain, too easy. Levels should be more like Misty Bog or Wizard Peak. The increased enemy density makes the game a lot more engaging
First played through it at 21 years old, and had a good time. Was easy as frick, but it was just fun in a relaxing way
Spyro 1 is ludokino
2 and 3 are ruined by the minigames
After playing lots of 90s collectathons, I love that you can 100% every level in Spyro the first time through. The only obstacle is your dedication and skill, not pointless backtracking.
In general, the controls, environments, and music are all top-notch.
Dont play the remake, they replaced the mystical, dream-like artstyle with cartoony WoW fantasy garbage.
>the mystical, dream-like artstyle
So fricking glad someone else noticed this. Even the original sequels that Insomniac themselves made dropped this.
this plus I liked the sense of being almost completely alone in the world. had a much greater sense of adventure in that it was your mission to defeat a giant enemy army in order to reclaim your world. freeing dragons felt like a real reward in that sense. It annoyed me that the game never explains where they go right after you free them, instead of joining you. although based on how you re-free some of them in Gnasty's World, I guess the assumption is they tried to launch an attack right back at him, but got trapped again.
>It annoyed me that the game never explains where they go right after you free them, instead of joining you.
The dragons do often come across as either lazy or incompetent.
if anything I remember that they made a bunch of them overly senile, like some repeating joke that spyro was the only young dragon.
Thank you for releasing me.
"Dragons are being replaced by gnasty gBlack folk!"
"Okay gramps. Think I'm gonna go toast some sheep and listen to Kendrick"
"By pressing the triangle button at the end of your flame you can-" *vwoosh*
For me, it’s the skyboxes
SOUL
literally one of the most inspired and creative fantasy worlds ever brought to life and for a stupid kids dragon game, landmark in game design and pinnacle of ps1 graphics (and that's saying something) imo.
>Be 12
>Playing spyro 2
>Find the hidden corridor that takes you to the top of the castle
>Stay there looking at the horizon, listening to that ost while the wind blows
best moment of the entire series
Every time I replay Spyro 2 I use the cheat code to enable all abilities so I can do every level in one go
They don't even do progress gates more than a handful of times across the whole game so it's just a nuisance
Sucks there's no such code to early unlock the friends in YotD but at least it's an entire level plus at least one segment of another level, instead of a single headbash chest or a single ladder
It's still the best platformer of all time.
>How well has Spyro aged, /vr/?
Spyro was and is lovely. That is all. Plucky lovable little dragon.
>How well has Spyro aged, /vr/?
Not bad at all. It looks like he grew into a strong, well-built dragon.
Holy shit, Elora won't walk for a month.
I only emulated it recently so I have no nostalgia for it, but it was actually really good. Great atmosphere, fun to explore, a minimum of jank. The only disappointing part was the bosses, which Spyro 2 fixed right up. Though I liked the straightforward levels of 1 a lot more than the minigames and gimmicks in 2.
>The only disappointing part was the bosses
as a kid I didn't even realize that the first boss "Toasty" was even a boss at all. I barely even noticed him, just flamed that b***h instantly.
It's peak DUDE WEED gaming. The PS graphics makes it look like it's on a canvas sort of texture and the music is amazing.
>glide around looking for gems
Why is Spyro so kino but Knuckles gameplay so shit?
Looks the same to me.
What's the secret to capturing that Spyro 1 aesthetic?
1. dreamlike vaporwave skyboxes
2. floaty physics
3. low stakes at-your-own-pace gameplay
4. stewart copeland
Carefully selected color palette and vertex shading
What were they thinking when they made this trash?
>No collectibles
>Less platforming than modern Ratchet & Clank games
>The whole game is a fricking linear corridor
what im even more puzzled about is how they ended up making three of these games. i mean somebody must have been buying them, were they at least more playable than EtD?
yea, etd was rushed out by a 2nd rate dev team after the original devs sold the franchise