@SpaceRunaway: I actually picked up ESPN Extreme a week ago and will be playing it soon. Seemed pretty cool even if it looked a little outdated.

Oh man oh man oh man, I had so much fun with that game. I think I remember that Japanese narrator that told some story at the end of the game the most.

Fo is the best. I didn't have any experience with the first, but I loved the second when it came out. I sought out a copy a couple years back and realized that a) it didn't play as great as I remembered, and b) I had completely blocked out the live action opening FMV sequence.

I still have pretty fond memories of it, along with ESPN Extreme Games and Kileak: The D.N.A. Imperative. If anyone's curious, I haven't revisited Extreme Games, but Kileak definitely doesn't hold up, and I'm not sure if it ever did.

I had a friend once who would brag all the time about how he whipped everyone's ass in Toshinden. I don't think anyone had the heart to tell him that no one cared about his shitty game.

It's really cool to hear everyone's own personal experience with the game. When I started blogging about the retro games I am playing through, I just wanted to add more meaning to playing old games. This is better than I expected lol

I remember it like it was yesterday. Going to a friend's house (whom I was forbidden to see at the time), who got the PSX on launch day - and had nothing but the demo disc to play. God damn did Battle Arena Toshinden blow my flippin' mind. And Wipeout even more so.

Wonder what'll be the next mind-blowing technical leap for videogames. The jump from pixels to polygons was insane.

What made Battle Arena Toshinden amazing, way back when, is lost in time.

Eight traveling fighters, brought together by a common destiny, now meet at the Battle Arena Toshinden...

I was fucking unstoppable at Toshinden 1-3. Vermillion in 2 is still one of the coolest characters in any game, ever.

Most of my memories of the first game were that it used to hurt the hell out of my thumb. I hated doing the moves on the original Playstation controller

All I can say about the game is that I saw a brief video of it once and thought, "Wow. This is horrible." (I'd link to the video, but it's not exactly the video I can post to the fourms.)

The 2nd game in my retro game playing quest was Battle Arena Toshinden. Like the Ace Combat Series, I had never played one of these before. With me playing so much Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat on the SNES, I was really interested to see how the first fighting game on the PS1 played. I have to say after playing for the first 15 mins, I almost put the game back in the case and moved on. After playing a lot of DOA 4 when it came out, I see that the 3-D fighting genre has come a long way. I didn't give up on Toshinden though as I wanted to experience all of the characters and see what the game had to offer. Something weird happened and the game actually grew on me! I can't say it was the actual gameplay, but it was everything else. Something about the characters and the different weapons they each had kept me going until I had beaten the game with everyone. It may not have been the funnest game to play but I've certainly played worse. Whoopin on someone with Rungo's big ass club made it a bit more enjoyable as well. Seeing your foe ring out after smashing them in the face with a big bat is fun no matter how old a game is. I had planned on playing the games in some kind of release date order until I recently got all 3 Syphon Filters for less than $20 bucks with SF3 being sealed! This was one of my favorite series back in the day and can't wait to see if these games old up. Until next time...