It becomes boring once you're no longer in the surface summer stages. 70% of the game is spent in the deep ocean instead of the pelagic zone jumping out of the water and other cool shit.

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>>11280340
Life changing event, in a most non-ironic way.

>>11280349
The Sega CD version added a few levels that are action-focused instead of maze/crystal puzzles and with lots of surface jumping, fwiw.
>>11280340
I played Ecco 2 as a kid, liked the atmosphere and novelty but the limited air, maze levels and difficulty made me drop it.
As an adult I played the original, the aforementiomed Sega CD version. I enjoyed it despite hitbox/collision jank, love the aesthetic and music and overall presentation. I also checked a guide before playing that warned me about getting the sonar weapon in level 2, if you miss that, you get handicapped for the rest of the playthrough. Didn't use a guide beyond that.
I didn't beat the game though, Welcome To The Machine is too much, I reached the alien queen a number of times but died too quickly, didn't get to understand her attack patterns (if there even is any) and having to restart all over again that autoscroll hell just made me give up after a while. I refused to use save states.

>>11280340
Mind blowing, played it when it had just come out and the graphics and music were very high quality to me.
That combined with the gameplay being very different from anything else I had played up till then made for a very memorable experience.

Its not perfect, but in an ocean of platformers and shooters it tried to do something else .

>>11280340
An exercise in extreme patience, at least half of it owing to that excruciating sound effect that plays when you get hit.

>>11280340
Ecco is a great guy. Always gets the job done quickly and efficiently

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>>11280340
When I was 9, I used to visit a small store near me. They were selling clothes and dishware mostly, but there was a small corner selling vidya stuff, think Fami and Sega clones. There were two CRTs working in demo mode on shelf, sometimes store clerk was playing something on one of them. They've displayed Genesis games like Robocop, Rainbow Islands, Sonic 1 and there was Ecco 2, too.

I didn't have any money to buy games then (neither did I have Genesis) so I just visited them from time to time to watch demos. They were so fascinating, like nothing I saw before. I was afraid clerk will shoo me away if i'll just hang around buying nothing, so I pretended like i'm choosing new cartridge, while also peeping at CRTs as long as I could.

That was in 1999, roughly around this time of year, maybe late October or November. That store stopped selling vidya in mid-00s but I still visited them just out of nostalgia, bought a weirdass ceramic chef to put my spoons into. They've closed in 2020 and now there's an alcohol market and a restaurant in their place. I still remember the distinctive smell of cloth and shoe polish inside, dolphins jumping out of water on TV screen, the weird sense of sad but comforting loneliness as I wandered around the cold streets and a grey, autumn sky of 1999.

our sega cd came with it. im not sure i ever made it past maybe the second or third stage. just wasnt that interested.

>>11280449
Bot post

Good Hungarian games. Yes, you may still say they have eurojank controls and design, but the soul, creativity and uniqueness is undisputable.

>>11280340
delightful throughout

>>11280734
If you say so. I just shared a memory related to my history with the game.

>>11280407
And eh doesn't afraid or anything?

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Yeah sure. From my notes:

////////
Ecco the Dolphin - Sega CD, 6/10. 07/10/2024-07/13/2024, rating: Hard

I COULD NEVER BRING MYSELF TO FINISH THIS GAME.... And for very good reason.
I got like six or seven levels in on the 'Ultimate Genesis Collection' version sometime around ~2017, but that was the last I'd touched it before finally deciding to make it my Vacation 2024 clear.

Really though, this is the most obnoxious a game can be while still being technically 'good'; on paper everything about Ecco's solid, and it's a treat both in terms of audio visuals, but good lord is every aspect of its gameplay tedious until you get a grasp on it. From entire swathes of stages wholly barren of either air pockets or health restores, to bizarre block-breaking shells and urchin rings you'll always struggle to control, to completely un-telegraphed upcurrents that erase minutes of progress multiple times a stage - only for you to run into a crystal right after that forces you to backtrack anyway, all while the incessant necessity of ecolocation mapping and agonizing death checkpointing drives you even crazier - this is the sort of game where I can only tip my hat to the retro gramps and grans out there for completing legit, even as I myself shamelessly savestate the obscene final boss runback until it finally starts making sense.

Even things as simple as health and air reserve management's a struggle here, since there seems to be no consistency at all between when different pips of your gague disappear;(...)

>>11282759
(...); your first chunk of health seems almost endless, but get down to the last and even a single pufferfish spells instant doom on contact. It makes for this absurd gameloop where you'll spend ten minutes just inching along through the latest seafloor maze, mapping every foot or so, only to realize there's no airpockets anyhere in sight; this is all as the game presents an urchin ring it wants you to bring all the way BACK, past an octopus that takes half your healthbar in a swing, and with controls never more than a button press away from sending the urchins lurching out of bounds into the level geometry, forcing you to do it all over again. Just multiple layers of impossible, which inevitably results in yet more slowness as you backtrack for gauge restores and try to set up the run what finally gets you that 10% closer to clearing the stage...

Except even weirder than all that is, most of the game's REALLY annoying bits are right at the beginning. And, barring singular difficulty bumps - looking at the obscene four-jump Atlantis sequence, the trial and error Asterite fight, and the crazy stupid final stretch - it actually gets easier as you go along. Not even taking into account the Sega CD's somewhat fixed checkpoint mechanic, things just get way more straightforward across the board, and the near constant appearance of reusable power-up crystals - what provide 15 seconds of invincibility AND restore both air and life - near trivializes what was once a hairpulling slugfest. Have someone tell you about the unadvertised 'mash dash to prevent enemy respawn' mechanic too, and the game becomes even easier; just an overall good example of a decent game designed piss poorly, and while the end result's still playable, I'd almost argue you need someone to sit you down and really explain HOW to approach it before ever trying it yourself.

>>11280340
Save stated the fuck out of it. Still enjoyed it.

The ending? Of 2? Wad fucking weird. Or my rom was fucked up? It was a bunch of garbled letters that weren't quite japanese? And they scrolled pady and then there was even more game. It was more like 3/4 the way through

there are certain games I appreciate primarily for its aesthetic/adventure premise instead of the particulars of the gameplay. sh1 is up there as one my favorite games of all time but the second to second play of it is at best tolerable. see also soul reaver, gex 2.
ecco obviously has an amazing story/aesthetic premise, facing killing machine fish in deep ocean mazes is a great formula for an adventure, unfortunately I found that slogging my way through the actual gameplay too unpleasent to endure for the novelty of the game's premise. when I heard about what the final level would consist of I called it a day in the prehistoric section.

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>>11280340
water level: the game

https://youtu.be/32S2oJuANxo?si=YdIlnJS3EsOPCiBo

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I saw a review of it in Games Magazine which occasionally did video games, it sounded awesome so I rented it then quickly got it. It's been one of my favorite games ever since even though the Asterite filtered me for quite some time. Other than the PC version I've bought every release of it since.

>>11280340
Had it on master system but it seems like the levels are the same. Big levels and the bits of story were cool with parts that are still memorable like swim past 7 legs slowly and talking with the whale to rescue the calf. Later on there was a bit where a pterodactyl carries you over some land, that was cool, loaded that game a few times to watch that and the ice age level was cool. The difficulty was typical but it had passwords so there was really no trouble finishing it. Over all really nice but once we finished it we didn't go back to it like with other games. Seems a lot of games get unfairly criticized because streamers try to finish it during a 4 hour stream. Later got it on Dreamcast and really wondered were normies stupid to not be buying this console.

>>11280740
I always thought of eurojank as up to jump and stiff controls like being on an exact pixel to go up a ladder. Ecco seems smooth to me.

>>11282759
You think thats hard, imagine how hard it would be for a real Dolphin.

really good music and atmosphere and it's mostly pretty fun, but the later levels are just incomprehensible labyrinthine mazes.

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>>11280340
I remember someone drew that Ecco cover on oekaki, I wish I had saved the timelapse file.

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>>11283115
>I always thought of eurojank as up to jump and stiff controls like being on an exact pixel to go up a ladder. Ecco seems smooth to me.

Eurojank is basically any platform game that doesn't control like Mario.

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>>11283193
>git gud

>>11280753
dont mind him, hes just a fag who needs the attention of being an edgelord on 4chan

>>11280340
its an expirience

>>11280340
Insightful. The only other game (and its sequel) that goes as hard as it does is Xenogears
>>11280360
I'll never play the game again because of that decision or save state my way through it next time. Completing it and the final boss without dying once was enough for me. It's a good game until that point. WotM is retardedly frustrating.

the craziest thing was finding out what the inspiration for this game was
>carl sagan raising funds for some guy to live in a flooded house with dolphins
>guy hires some chicks to teach the dolphins to speak english out of their blowholes (!) and give them hand jobs

all of this is real and insane from the 80s when everyone was being told animals could talk (koko the heckin gorilla! another big scam) and within 10 years man and dolphin would be working side by side
truly krazy shit

i didnt finish the story even
>the guy was in the other room getting blasted off of LSD in a isolation chamber talking to the "ecco" space gods
>meanwhile chick is giving hand jobs to dolphins to calm them down enough to learn to talk english out of their blow holes
>carl sagan shows up now and then to swim with the dolphins and keeps telling funders the research is progressing and a breakthrough is imminent and dolphins will speak english

carl sagan was nothing but a con his whole life kek

>>11283940
I d9nt like Carl Sagan and that experiment happened but I don't think it was him

>>11284146
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UziFw-jQSks
carl sagan wasn't a physicist or chemist he was a linguist
his whole thing was "i can send a message to the stars give me 100 million for a golden record"
"my colleague will teach the fish to speak give me 100 million this will happen"
people in the 80s really did get brainwashed we were on the cusp of talking to the animals, dr doolittle style
this was the kind of "i hecking love science" stuff you would see on mainstream tv
koko the gorilla is a much more famous scam. they even suckered in robin williams and mr rogers to promote that one.

if its on TV, people believe it

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>>11280340
It's decent, has a dark atmosphere I appreciate, but it doesn't control too good. I'd rather play a clone of it like Ariel: The Little Mermaid, at least it's easier and shorter despite suffering from so many of the same issues.

It could've been more polished, but it's alright.

>>11283202
>speccy platformer

opinion automatically discarded.

>>11280353
I tried playing it for the first time the other day and I got goosebumps when I had to go out on the open ocean to talk to a whale. I turned the game off in the next level where you had to swim through pitch black caves with sharks. I heard there's a shark boss too so I probably would've never beaten it.

>>11280340
Fleeting with intention to fully embrace, but for now the dolphin embraces the back burner

>>11285961
>I heard there's a shark boss too
There are no bosses in Ecco 1 & 2, even the Vortex Queen is just a simple bump & run event.
Not sure about the Dreamcast game though, I never really played it much but I do recall a cutscene showing you a shark so.. maybe that's what got you confused.

>>11284163
Like I said- it looks like the dolphins was john c lily.

Carl Sagan is a piece of shit-dont getme wrong.

I still don't understand how the save system works in the Sega CD version of the first game.

>>11280340
Painful.

>>11280340
Somehow it's hard and tiring even with invincibility cheats on.

>>11286552
John C Lilly was funded by Carl Sagan
if Carl Sagan didn't vouch for him and fundraise, none of those dolphins would have been tortured to death
nobody ever heard of John C Lilly and his batshit ideas, it was Sagans name that made all that happen

>>11286953
Good to know

>>11280340
Bored. Painful. Unfulfilling.