April 5th:
Today's second hand finds included a PC game, none other than classic Saturn exclusive Enemy Zero, the second game in WARP's D series (D2 on Dreamcast being the third and final game in the series and final game WARP made before shutting down permanently).
Enemy Zero is a 1996 sci-fi survival horror game with first person shooting, stealth mechanics, a mix between cinematic FMV and real-time 3D exploration gameplay and a unique battle system that uses audio cues rather than visual on-screen cues to locate and take out the alien enemies.
Originally developed as a PlayStation exclusive it was changed to Saturn only after Sony had poorly handled the release of the original D causing the director of Enemy Zero and founder of WARP to port the entire project over to Saturn and make the series and all other future games Sega exclusive from that point onward, the original D was a multiplatform game released on just about every 32-bit disc-based system at the time including the 3DO, PSX and Saturn.
Enemy Zero was one of the very few games for Saturn that came on 4 discs, which was a bit more common on PlayStation with games like Final Fantasy VIII and Fear Effect 2 Retro Helix for example.
Enemy Zero was originally released on December 13th of 1996 for Sega Saturn in Japan, later in 1997 it was released in the other regions worldwide and finally in 1998 it got ported to PC, initially released under the SEGA PC brand.
The version I got hold on is the more recent and much more common here in Europe these days re-release under the popular but nowadays defunct Xplosiv brand by UK-based Empire Interactive Entertainment that also re-released many other SEGA PC classics like Panzer Dragoon, House of the Dead 2, Virtua Fighter, Virtua Fighter 2 (that I also got hold of relatively recently), Sega Rally Championship, Sonic & Knuckles Collection, Sonic 3D Flickies' Island, Sonic R, Virtua Cop 2 etc. etc..
PC:
Enemy Zero (Xplosiv re-release, still factory sealed)
April 26th:
Today's second hand finds included some PC games, some FIFA games for PS3, some PSP UMD movies, some DVDs, some multi CD cases, some W.I.T.C.H. comics, a pocket manga Kajika by Akira Toriyama, a PC video card to component and S-Video converter cable, a small pocket mirror, a magnetic massage thing with rounded spiky balls and a bunch of 5-10 year old videogame magazines.
PSP UMD Movies:
Charlie & The Chocolate Factory
Kill Bill
Kill Bill 2
(2x) Pusher 3
PlayStation 3:
FIFA 11
FIFA 12 (no manual)
FIFA 13
PC:
IMP #005 Hydrael
IMP #007 Kentaurus
IMP #012 Frostmork
IMP #024 Kosmoeus
IMP #025 Megamammon
IMP #027 Ghoulak
IMP #033 Vulkanicus
IMP #046 Buttgod (yes, that's his actual name)
IMP, for those who are not in the know what this game is, was a 1-on-1 arena style fighting game/monster collecting game for PC by the Swedish developer Idol FX and came out for Windows 98/2000 in 2001.
The idea was that you would purchase separate CD-ROMs for each monster you wanted at a lower price than buying a full game on just one disc, needless to say if they had been very cheap and distributed on a larger scale with proper backing and funding by some bigger brand with advertising abilities and all that it might've worked, sadly they were rather expensive for just one monster per disc and on top of that very hard to find as very select few stores ever sold them. I only ever found them in one local store myself. So it didn't last and never became a big thing like Pokemon, Digimon, Monster Rancher, Jade Cocoon and so on.
I don't have all of them but I've managed to get hold of quite a few over the years. I originally bought a bunch when they were new and have since found wayward copies in different second hand shops. I rather liked the monster designs so whenever I see an IMP lost out there in the wild I just gotta catch it.
April 28th:
On April 25th I placed an order for some games that arrived for pickup two days later on April 27th and today, April 28th I went and picked them up.
It's a bigger order that I've had to wait a while to do because the site I ordered it from had some bug in the homepage which didn't allow me to use points I had earned which would've made it more expensive. It was already an expensive order so I had to wait if I wanted to afford to place it at all, during this time several of the games I wanted sadly got sold out and I'll probably not be able to get hold of them again for years if ever, they are simply that rare here, so I'm disappointed that it took well over two months for them to fix their homepage until I got my points. Also now when I got the order two of the games that we supposed to have manuals and be "complete" were missing the manuals. So another disappointment. A third disappointment was that they made some prices higher, and a lot higher at that, for some other games I wanted to the point were even with my points I couldn't afford them and didn't really want to buy them anymore because I don't think they're worth that much, so I had to skip buying them as well.
Simply put I only got about two thirds of the order I originally had planned to buy only two months later than I wanted and it still cost about the same, so not a super great experience overall that I'll not soon forget.
Regardless of the negatives I finally have some 32X games of my very own, I got some nice classics for PlayStation that I've been on the hunt for and my collection for Mega Drive and PlayStation Portable got a little bigger as well.
Mega Drive:
F22 Interceptor (no manual)
LHX Attack Chopper (no manual)
Retro-bit RetroGen 6-button Controller
32X:
DOOM
Metal Head
Virtua Racing Deluxe
PlayStation:
Centipede
Iron Soldier 3
Kirikou
Newman Haas Racing
T'ai Fu Wrath of the Tiger (no manual)
Re-Loaded (no manual)
Star Wars Rebel Assault II The Hidden Empire (no manual)
Viewpoint (no manual)
PlayStation Portable:
Key of Heaven
L.A. Rush
Wednesday, April 6, 2016
Sunday, April 3, 2016
Now Playing - April 2016
What I'm playing right now.
Rally Fusion Race Of Champions (PlayStation 2)
Pretty much my all-time favorite rally game. It has all my favorite rally cars throughout all the ages of rally racing, fantastic visuals, good driving physics, great tracks and a driving feel that makes it enjoyable to just play the game. I recently (middle of December 2015) got hold of the Xbox version but because my Xbox died just a few days later I never got a chance to try it out, so now instead I've dug out my PS2 copy and am playing through it from the beginning. I haven't played it in what feels like forever but it's just as good as I remember it to be and after having played some other rather fun rally games recently on PS2 and GameCube (WRC3 and Pro Rally respectively) you might think this would have a harder time living up to the memory I have of it being the best and all but honestly it's quite the opposite, it easily lived up to my rose-tinted memories and in comparison to the other two it's in a league of it's own, even other types of challenges that in other games are mostly tedious and annoying are fun in this, like cone challenges, I don't know any other racing game where I enjoy them in beside this!
Beyond Oasis (Mega Drive)
A top-down action adventure game with platforming, puzzle and RPG elements, a common type of game on Super Nintendo but not so much on the Mega Drive making this very much a one of a kind.
And what a one of a kind it is! It's easily the best representative of the genre in that generation and puts the Super Nintendo competitors like The Legend of Zelda A Link to the Past and Chrono Trigger in their places.
I completed the game with a time of 6 hours and 33 minutes with 0 deaths but I missed a lot of secrets and stuff so I only got about half of the stuff you can find and none of the secret super weapons. So there's certainly replayability in there as well, which is nice.
The game has a built in save feature for up to four separate files at a time and it saves your end scores so every time you beat it you can compare with how you did in your previous playthroughs. You can aim to get a better time and higher rank and stuff separately too as they have their own scoreboards which is really cool and should be appreciated by anyone who likes to improve their game without having to keep a manual score themselves by writing down stats on paper or on a PC or something, very innovative thinking by the developers to say the least, even more so for a game released in 1995 on a console from 1989.
So it's a great game and a must play for anyone who likes the idea of the genre but haven't felt satisfied with the more common Super Nintendo offerings, this was the type of game I was looking for and I enjoyed it a lot.
Metal Head (32X)
Basically Armored Core on the 32X, it's fantastic.
Star Wars Arcade (32X)
Virtua Racing Deluxe (32X)
Rally Fusion Race Of Champions (PlayStation 2)
Pretty much my all-time favorite rally game. It has all my favorite rally cars throughout all the ages of rally racing, fantastic visuals, good driving physics, great tracks and a driving feel that makes it enjoyable to just play the game. I recently (middle of December 2015) got hold of the Xbox version but because my Xbox died just a few days later I never got a chance to try it out, so now instead I've dug out my PS2 copy and am playing through it from the beginning. I haven't played it in what feels like forever but it's just as good as I remember it to be and after having played some other rather fun rally games recently on PS2 and GameCube (WRC3 and Pro Rally respectively) you might think this would have a harder time living up to the memory I have of it being the best and all but honestly it's quite the opposite, it easily lived up to my rose-tinted memories and in comparison to the other two it's in a league of it's own, even other types of challenges that in other games are mostly tedious and annoying are fun in this, like cone challenges, I don't know any other racing game where I enjoy them in beside this!
Beyond Oasis (Mega Drive)
A top-down action adventure game with platforming, puzzle and RPG elements, a common type of game on Super Nintendo but not so much on the Mega Drive making this very much a one of a kind.
And what a one of a kind it is! It's easily the best representative of the genre in that generation and puts the Super Nintendo competitors like The Legend of Zelda A Link to the Past and Chrono Trigger in their places.
I completed the game with a time of 6 hours and 33 minutes with 0 deaths but I missed a lot of secrets and stuff so I only got about half of the stuff you can find and none of the secret super weapons. So there's certainly replayability in there as well, which is nice.
The game has a built in save feature for up to four separate files at a time and it saves your end scores so every time you beat it you can compare with how you did in your previous playthroughs. You can aim to get a better time and higher rank and stuff separately too as they have their own scoreboards which is really cool and should be appreciated by anyone who likes to improve their game without having to keep a manual score themselves by writing down stats on paper or on a PC or something, very innovative thinking by the developers to say the least, even more so for a game released in 1995 on a console from 1989.
So it's a great game and a must play for anyone who likes the idea of the genre but haven't felt satisfied with the more common Super Nintendo offerings, this was the type of game I was looking for and I enjoyed it a lot.
Metal Head (32X)
Basically Armored Core on the 32X, it's fantastic.
Star Wars Arcade (32X)
Virtua Racing Deluxe (32X)
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