Party of One: The Jeff Gerstmann Home Game: Zany Golf, Star Control, Fantastic Dizzy, More!

I rarely like seeing any of the games on this series and probably wouldn't want to play them, but as someone who skipped most of this era it makes for an insightful watch ^-^

EDIT - Actually you know what, every so often a pretty cool game is shown off, and Star Control is definitely one of them *w*

Genesis time is the right time to party.

He doesn't get to play as the robot cop. :(

I wonder how often Jeff goes digging into the collection for the genuine article vs just emulating stuff. A private collection the size of his is an amazing resource, but I know I'd emulate damn near everything just to save myself the extra five minutes of sifting through a bin.

Yo you playing star control in this piece i am here for that

Damn did i ever sink some HOURS into Star Control 2

Star control 2 is friggin amazing. Star Control 1 maybe less so - I do not remember the combat seeming that slow. I wonder if that's a genesis thing.

Also now there's two separate star control games in development? And I guess TfB doesn't own the name anymore? What's up with that.

Toys for Bob: https://dogarandkazon.squarespace.com/blog/2017/10/6/launch-fighters

Stardock: http://store.steampowered.com/app/271260/Star_Control_Origins/

The cycling box art make this feature hard to watch. I would be in favor of Jeff extending the time each cover is displayed to a minute or, better yet, only display the box art of the game he is playing.

Old games are such the rage that I'm currently playing Donkey Kong Country on my SNES Classic while I watch this!

I'll never forget going to a local video store as a kid and seeing Dizzy in the Quattro Adventure for NES there. Being young and naive, I thought the game would be so amazing because you were getting 4 games for the price of one. Turns out, all 4 games were complete garbage but Dizzy stood out as the most baffling junker in the bunch. After watching this, my 35 year old brain still doesn't understand what the hell is going on with the Dizzy games.

I bought Tommy Lasorda Baseball like a month ago to resupply the collection I had as a kid. It's one of my favorite baseball titles, but it really is hard as hell as Jeff showed.

Can you guys help me with something? I remember an arcade game like ESWAT but with gorillas in robot suits.. Does anyone know the name of my fever dream video game?

That Mega Anser soundtrack is legit AF

DON'T SWING ON THAT!

Make that burger bounce yo make that ketchup squirt yo

The thing about Dizzy games is that they're not platformers, really. They're adventure games. You solve puzzles by combining inventory items with things in the world. I played a couple of those games on my Amiga and thought they were alright. Only years later I found out that it was a long-running and relatively well-known series (at least in the UK).

There's even a pretty good "tribute" on Steam that controls better and streamlines some of the clunkiness of the original, Spud's Quest.

Edit: Holy shit! George Lucas/Steven Spielberg Dizzy fans confirmed?

@jeff You're not playing badly. You're doing a remarkable job simulating the actual A's this season!

Thank you for playing Star Control, I haven't seen it since that game played since I was a kid. I remember the cartridge was a weird shape, and the UI was near impossible to decipher.

Oh hell yes, Star Control! Probably one of the very first video games I really got into, on my parent's good old Tandy 1000. (That and "Silpheed", which still has one of the best soundtracks of my youth, dammit.)

The only bad thing I can say about StarCon was that you had to rely on the dumb code-wheel copy-protection thing, IIRC. I'm pretty sure my dad and I spend many painstaking hours cutting out additional concentric circles from construction paper, clipping out little "windows", and connecting everything with the little brass pin-thingie so that we could have a backup in case we lost, tore or stained the original.

Glad to see Jeff doing these more frequently, they've become one of my favorite features as of late. Just something relaxing about them while I work.

@fleckle said:

i, for one, think the cycling box art is actually good

That music on the puzzle stage in Dizzy was pretty dope.

The true enemy in the Dizzy games was the inventory system. In Treasure Island Dizzy there was an underwater area that you could only pass by having a snorkel in your inventory - unfortunately there were also coins in the water to collect, which swapped the snorkel out of your inventory, killing you. The only way of collecting the coins was to pick up one, leave the water, drop the snorkel, pick it up again, repeat for each coin in the water. Insane.

I remember a neighbor got a Genesis and I saw Tommy Lasorda Baseball being played on it and I was amazed. He was a dick and wouldn't let me play it because he said it was "for adults only". To me it was like, OK a new generation had arrived. My NES games instantly felt old and crappy looking and Genesis games all looked incredible. In hindsight that seems insane, but 12-year old me was blown away by the Genesis.

A couple years later when I finally did get one (fuck you, neighbor guy), I remember playing the shit out of Tommy Lasorda Baseball.

@jeff I have fond memories of Fantastic Dizzy. Never finished it though... and now I remember why.

It suuuuucks.

Thanks for clearing that up.

The Tommy Lasorda Baseball soundtrack always sounded like Fantasy Star II to me.

Why was Hitler just kinda hanging out in that Dizzy game? (1:14:17)

Personally I like the cycling box-art, but while it would be a lot more work to manage, I think it would be good to see the box art of the currently played game be displayed instead.

Also it's weird they just digitised Rutger Hauer into the Rambo game considering he was never in Rambo, but it's a nice reminder that even Metal Gear back in the day just stole the likenesses of film actors. I wonder what specific film they took his face from.

That's not a hole, that's a hamburger

Disappointed at the lack of Adventure in the Park or Plumbing Contest.

Heh, after my email to the Beastcast last week about the Star Control games, it's cool to see Jeff show off the first one here. The Genesis version definitely wasn't the best, but my friends and I liked it the most because you didn't both have to huddle around the same keyboard to play against each other.

Star Control 2 was the shit, though. I really enjoyed the single player campaign in that one. I played through it in my senior year of high school. I borrowed it from a friend and ended up copying it from him, but the game also had one of those copy protection schemes where you had to consult a piece of paper to enter the correct code word. Star Control 2's version of this was a big ol' star map with a bunch of star systems on it. On startup, the game would give you a set of coordinates, and you'd have to enter the corresponding star system from the map. I spent a chunk of time typing up a list of every star system and their coordinates so I could keep playing when I gave the game back.

I should go back and play the free version.

It took me until adulthood to realize just how lucky I was back then to have both a SNES and a Genesis as a kid. I liked them both for different reasons, but the games on the SNES make it a better system IMO.

Man, I love the Home Game for all of these old retro games. A TurboGrafx/PC Engine-only stream similar to this would be cool, just to see Jeff try a bunch of different stuff that a lot of people might not otherwise have played back in the day.

That, and shmups are cool and good.

I had an Apple IIgs growing up with Zany Golf. The thing about the IIgs is it had a custom sound chip built in (like a soundcard) and audio for games on it was so much better.

So disappointing when you go to a friends house and find they are getting crappy beeps and stuff :).

Look up a video of Zany Golf for IIgs to see what I mean.

One day I will watch Jeff play Mighty Bomb Jack and the world will finally make since again.

I remember it taking months (years?) to get any good at Tommy Lasorda Baseball - even then it was not easy to win with any real consistency. You had to be "on" every single moment to have any hope against the computer.

HOLY SHIT Jeff's face after that Dizzy sliding puzzle. The emotions ran hot and strong in that one. And his face when he encountered the puzzle the second time...

@jutturna: I like the cycling box art. There are some gems in there

For your own good, do tell Rambo you're a secret agent.

Some great music in this one.

I'm sure it's bad now, but I loved that Dizzy game.

Was really fun as a kid.

@muftyriots: This was informative. Thank you!

1:09:26

Have not laughed this hard in a while. Thank you.

Star Control 2 Music... The PC definitely had better music as it used decent quality digital samples as instruments using the MOD music format.

Some fun quotes from SC2

and the best theme in the game IMO

Also more music....

http://star-control.com/fan/music.php

The main page of that site has a lot of good StarCon info if you are curious.

It was one of my favorite games from that time period. The fact that we had that and Masters of Orion was a nice golden age of space games.

Drivin' hard.

Or hardly drivin'?