Hi All
I've decided to replay some of the most iconic, influential or simply nostalgic games of my past and ask the simple question, are they actually any good, do they stand up to modern scrutiny?
I've decided to start with the 1995 platformer, Rayman.
video link: https://youtu.be/ZRX8UOzvdJY
Complete script for those who can't watch the video:
Rayman was developed for the atari jaguar and released on playstation 1, sega saturn and ms-dos. The version i'll be playing in this video is the playstation 1 version.
Quick fact before we begin, rayman is the highest selling playstation 1 game in the united kingdom, beating greats like final fantasy 7, metal gear solid, and gran turismo. So we're dealing with a world recording holding game, let's replay it and ask the question, rayman 1, was it actually any good?
1 – overview
Rayman is a 2d side scrolling platformer where you control the titular rayman and run, jump and punch your way through various colorful landscapes. The basic plot is the evil mr.dark and destroyed the great protoon, the being who keeps order in the universe, and the resulting explosion has scattered the smaller 'electoons' all across the world, you'll find them in levels trapped in small metal cages, you punch them to free them, and if you free all of them you can face the final boss.
Levels are all pretty linear, start here, get to here, but some of the more complex ones do have several different paths to the end, which you'll need to go back and do if you want to find every caged electoon.
The level select screen is a map, levels are represented by these gold coins and whenever you free a caged electoon within a level, a small purple dot is added to that golden coin, there are 6 electoons in each level, finding them all turns the gold coin into a smilee face.
Right, that's the basics, but before we move onto gameplay, I need to make something very clear about this game.
It lies to you.
Not through words, but through assumptions, look, here's what I mean, this is the first level:
pretty simple right, walk, jump, jump, win. So, if this is the first level, you;d assume te rest of the game is going to be kind of similar, cute, fun, simple?
Wrong, all kinds of wrong, this is one of the most punishing games ever made, after replaying it, i'm going to go ahead and say without a doubt that rayman 1 is the hardest playstation 1 game ever made, and i'm going to explain why.
To be real with you all I wanted to make this series as an excuse to spend all day playing old video games and class it as work, but after forcing myself through rayman i'm really not feeling it any more, but the show must go on, so here we go.
2 – gameplay
Right, gameplay. 2D sidescrolling, rayman is seriously fun to control, movement is tight, and your move set is slowly expanded as the game goes on, level 1 you can walk, crawl and jump, and as you progress you'll be able to throw your disembodies hands out and punch, spin your hair to fly, swing from purple handing, things, grab onto the edges of ledges, and run. Some levels also have you riding a giant mosquito, because of, I don't know, video games in the 90's made less sense.
Each level has a start point and an end point, but reaching the end point doesn't mean you've finished the entire level, as some levels are split into multiple stages, the longer stages do have checkpoints through them, in the form of this little photographer dude, who takes your picture in front of one of those old style beach bodies wooden cutouts, I like this, it's silly. If you die you'll re-spawn here instead of starting from the beginning again, and believe me, you will die.
Ok let's talk about the difficulty, now, this is one of my videos and we're duscissing a difficult game so of course I';m going to make the comparison to dark souls somehow, but acually, no, rayman is harder than dark sould, by far. See dark souls never lies to you, it never pretends to be cute or fun, it just kills you straight away and tells you to deal with it and use your unlimited lives to git gud.
Rayman does something much worse. It starts absolutely stupidly easy, and then the learning curve becomes a sheer cliff face in the second area, band land.
Here's how lives work. Rayman has energy, shown by these yellow circles in the top left, you usually start with 3 but can find a power up to increase this temporaraly to 5, every time you touch an enemy, or get hit by a projectile or touch a dangerous bit of scenery, you'll lose a point of energy, lose all of them and you'll die, lose a life and respawn either at the start, or at the last photographer checkpoint.
Oh also if you fall off the level edge, it's an instant death. And since some of the surfaces, like the slick metalic surface of bandland or the slippy inky surface of the aritstic levels cause you to lose traction and slide everywhere, you WILL fall off the map at some point.
If you manage to lose all your lives, you'll be offered the chance to continue, you start the game with 5 continues, and 3 lives per continue, for anyone keeping up at home that's 15 total lives.
During the game you may find extra lives represented by these little 1 up trophies of rayman, collecting 100 of the shiny ball things called 'tings', or by completing a bonus level, unlocked through hidden merchants who take some of the things and let you try ones.
But here's the problem, once you run out of lives and continues, you are done, you cannot try again on that save file.
So let's imagine, through the game you're likely to earn around 15 bonus lives, add to the 15 you have from the beginning, that's 30.
30 chances to finish a game harder than dark souls.
Rayman is brutally unforgiving in some levels, and enemies can spawn in when you get close, some jumps are blind leaps of faith into the unknown, some levels have water moving up at a constand rate and you have to race it, one the final level you have to outsmart your own shadow, a perfect clone of you that follows you a few seconds behind and if you touch it, you die, instantly. These levels, the auto scrollers, are some of the most terrifying levels in any video game, forget outlast, forget amnesia, you want to know horror, try the rising auto movement levels in rayman.
At least dark souls lets you try as often as you like, rayman is all, nope, you're dead, nice try, begin the game from the start, again.
If you're skilled enough to fight your way through each of the 6 worlds, you'll fight the boss of that world, and maybe you're thinking, hey if the platforming is hard maybe the bosses are pretty simple, nope, wrong again, it pulls the same bait and switch, the first boss is each, the rest are all crazy difficult. You know cuphead, that retro inspired sidescroller with hard as nails bosses, rayman is cupheads older brother, fewer bosses, much harder.
3 – graphics
So we've discussed the gameplay, now let's talk about the graphics, and even if this art stlye isn't your thing you have to admit it, it's beautiful. It's rich, it's stylistic, it's unforgettable, each area has such a beautiful distinctive look and the game designers and artists cleverly found ways to include elements of each worlds art style as a gameplay mechanic, the flowers of the swamp bend to allow you to pass over them, you can punch a fruit off a tree and ride it over water, the musical notes are sharp and deadly in band land, the artistic land has rippling, deadly sharp pencils stabbing you. It's not just a game that looks different in each world, it's actually managed to make each world have unique and interesting dangers, this isn't a palette swap between levels, it's entire mechanics just for one place.
I'm a big fan of stylistic choices, because I think they age better than photo realism, and rayman himself is iconic, a head, torso, hands and feet, no need for connecting limbs, and the wind up and throw of the punch is just super memorable and very fun.
The game uses a system known as parallax scrolling, that's where you have a foreground object, mid ground actual level and background graphic, all moving at slightly different speeds to give the illusion of depth, and it works so damn well, each level is a delight. Visually, not gameplay wise, gameplay wise they're screaming caverns of hell, but visually, they're pretty.
All writing is chunky and ballooned up, keeping the consistent 'kid friendly' aesthetic throughout, it's such a viscous juxtaposition, this friendly, happy, childlike world of wonder housing one of the most brutally unforgiving platform games of all time, you'd never expect it, and I admire that.
4 – sound
Sound, good god sound, rayman for all the hatred i'll give you for gameplay being tough as nails, i'll never, ever fault your sound. To explain how good the sound in this game is i'll have to explain some quick sound concepts, there's 2 main types of sound, diagetic, which means sounds that make sense within the context of the scene and make sense to be there, and non-diagetic, sounds that would not realistically be there. To make this clearer, watching footage of someone walk down a corridor and hearing footsteps, that's diagetic, and if you hear an orchestral soundtrack in the background, that's non-diagetic.
Why am I explaining this, well, the first level of rayman only has diagetic sound. The clump of his footsteps, the creak of the flower stem bending, it's a completely silent world devoid of all noises except the ones you create, but then, in the next few stages, enemies spawn, and as they spawn, a small xylophone sound plays, it stands out as stark and different because, well you didn't make that sound, so who did? It's the very first example of the game taking power away from you, and is a lovely signal for things to come, as you play more, and more enemies spawn, we get this tribal drum beat in the background, and suddenly the very easy first level is replaced by a much more challenging jungle of bad guys, it's such a smooth transition into it, you might not even notice it, but it's the games way of saying, right, you've had your 1 fun level where you're in control, now you're in our world.
Once music has been introduced, every single track is brilliant, you can actually take your playstation 1 rayman disc, put it into a cd player, and it'll play the game music, one of the only games to ever do that, to illustrate the point, here's some of the music.
5 – legacy
part 5, legacy. What I mean by legacy is, beyond the nostalgia we may have for this game, what did it do to the gaming landscape, how has rayman 1 affected us as gamers today, well.
Rayman 1, rayman rhythm games, rayman 2, the great escape, remade as revolution in 2000, rayman arena, rayman rush, rayman 3, hoodlum havok, rayman ds, raving rabbids, tv party, 3d, origins, jungle run, legends, and adventures, 16 sequels spanning android, iphone, pc, xbox 360, gamecube ps1, ps2, playstation vita, ps3, ps4, xboxone, ds, 3ds, wii and wiiu. Rayman, has become a cultural phenomenon, it's had a lasting, and still continuing legacy to this day, and it all started, with a hard as nail cute platformer, back in 1995.
So, was rayman 1 actually good?
Yes. It's good, in fact it's great. It's stylistic, it's hard as nail, it's memorable and it's beautiful. If you're looking for an old school challenge that doesn't even pretend to be fair, give rayman a shot, but remember, you might need to use the 99 lives codes just to finish it, which is one the screen now.
Don't feel bad about using this, I did.
Submitted August 24, 2019 at 09:09AM by cstrife16 https://ift.tt/2U09m0h
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