Saturday, December 28, 2019

Eric Vs. 365 - Day 181 - LSD Dream Emulator

I love emulation. And cable internet. These things allow me to play goofy weird random games I would never have a chance to play otherwise either due to simple availability or excessive aftermarket cost. I also love how pretty much everyone besides Nintendo just shrugs and says "Whatever" with regard to emulation because they aren't making any money off old stuff so why be a jerk about it. What's the deal with Nintendo, though? Anyway, today's game is the Japanese PS1 exclusive LSD: Dream Emulator. Read on for more and to watch gameplay.

Released in Japan in 1998, LSD is one of the first walking simulators ever made. The game has you walking around weird dream worlds in first person and basically the whole objective is just to see crazy stuff. Like you're tripping on LSD, you see. You make progress by touching whatever weird thing you see - some graffiti on the wall, a strange creature, a pointy bush, statues, animals, etc. - and that whisks you away to some new weird thing. It's really incredible how much stuff there is in this game to the point that everyone that plays it will probably see a totally different collection of crazy crap. That's cool.

It isn't so cool that the game controls like absolute crap, which makes it hard to actually navigate the worlds. If you get stuck on a wall or object or something the game thinks that is what you're trying to touch, but since it's a generic random nothing object you go to a generic nothing world instead of progressing to somewhere cool, so you spend a lot of wasted time re-visiting bland worlds you've already seen. 


When you take your time and make sure you aren't getting stuck on the geometry, however, LSD is really freaking cool. The visuals are trippy and fantastic and the music is awesome. I'd highly recommend checking it out if you can.

We're joined by Andrew for today's video since I thought LSD Dream Emulator was something we needed to experience together. That was a good call, me. My cat Mughi is present during the whole recording - he distracted Andrew a lot - and there was a momentary technical difficulty when the cat stunk up the house. Yeah, now that's on the Internet for eternity.