Mars 8th:
Some second-hand finds today..
PlayStation 2:
Sprint Car Challenge
DVD:
Open Season 2/Boog & Elliot 2
Rugrats in Paris Movie
The Wild Thornberrys Movie
CD:
Napalm Rave
Books:
Nemi Vol. 1
Nemo Vol. 2
Nemi Vol. 4
Nemi Vol. 10
Other:
Emoji Movie Jailbreak plush toy (McDonalds)
frog lady in bikini figurine
Super Mario Bros. bricks (McDonalds)
..and some movies from a movie store.
DVD:
Mariah Carey's All I Want For Christmas Is You
Milo månvaktaren
Monster High Stora Skalliärrevet
Monster High Tystnad Tagning Vampyraction
Resident Evil Vendetta
Bluray:
Mariah Carey's All I Want For Christmas Is You
The Lego Batman Movie
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Mars 13th:
Some secondhand finds today.
PC:
Gast (Gast The Greatest Little Ghost © 2001 Idol FX)
CD:
La Isla Mix
DVD:
Klara
Rugrats Go Wild
Monster House
Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! Season 2
Once upon a time in Mexico
Bluray:
Superhero Movie
Snow White and the woodsman
Lady Vengeance
Lego:
purple Slizer
yellow Slizer
Other:
broidery painting of lady with tentacles capturing a child, purple colors, very pixelart looking
wooden vase with art of a tribe woman on it
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mars 15th:
Some interesting secondhand finds today; old PC programs!
PC:
eJay Dance 2+
Focus Essential 10000 Photos Vol. 2
Greenstreet Draw 4
GSP Pressworks 2.5
Serif 3DPlus 2
Serif DrawPlus 4
Serif PhotoPlus 6
Serif WebPlus 6
Ulead Cool 360
DVD:
The Kongress
CD:
System Of A Down Toxicity
Other:
König HC-SM10 electric slimming massager
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mars 20th:
Some interesting secondhand finds today, a couple of obscure PC games and some good classic movies!
PC:
Batman Justice Unbalanced
Dr. Brain Action/Reaction
DVD:
Blackie The Pirate
Desperado (Special Edition)
Not Another Not Another Movie
The Darkling
The Lego Movie (still factory sealed)
Walking With Dinosaurs
Other:
a spanish family figure thing, I like the señorita mom
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Mars 20th:
Some nice second-hand finds today.
PC hardware:
Microsoft IntelliMouse TrackBall
DVD:
Disney's Snow White (1937) (Special Edition, 2x DVD)
Galaxy Quest (1999)
Highlander (Collector's Edition)
The Swan Princess a Royal Family Tale (2013)
Tintin Castafiore's Jewels (1991)
War Heroes World War II (3x DVD: The Eagle has Landed (1976), The Heroes of Telemark (1965), The Unknown Soldier (1955))
Books:
Barbie sails to Hawaii (1999)
Other:
a new urn for the remains of my cat that passed away a few years ago
..and some movies from a movie store.
DVD:
Atomic Blonde (2017)
Kill Switch (2016)
Transformers The Last Knights (2017)
Valerian and the City of a thousand Planets (2017)
Bluray:
Wonder Woman (2017)
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Mars 25th:
Ordered some games today, sunday, they should arrive some day during the following week. (they arrived and I went to pick them up on the 28th) I know the Sonic games are all trash but they were having a sale and I've been wanting to get some modern Sonic games to test out and see just how bad exactly for years, and I got the PS2 version of Unleashed just a short while ago so now I have lots of garbage to compare and try out in their full versions, I've already played demos of most of them so I know they're bad, I just don't know to what extent they suck really, it'll be interesting to find out how deep the shit hole that is these games truly goes, also I had to give myself a treat for taking on this arduous task, so I got Lego Batman 3 Beyond Gotham as well so I'll at least get one good game out of all this relentless suffering I'm about to submit myself to.
PlayStation Vita:
Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed
Xbox 360:
Lego Batman 3 Beyond Gotham (Classics)
Sonic Unleashed (Classics)
Sonic Generations (Classics)
Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing with Banjo-Kazooie (Classics)
Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed (Classics)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mars 30th:
Founds some movies in a movie store today.
DVD:
Alien Covenant (2017)
Day of the Dead Bloodline (2017)
Starship Troopers Traitors of Mars (2017)
Wonder Woman (2017)
Thursday, March 8, 2018
Thursday, March 1, 2018
Now Playing - Mars 2018
Cyber Sled (PlayStation)
Aironauts (PlayStation)
A 3D jetpack flying action arcade game, you pick a character, do missions in arena style levels, face off against other characters as bosses and gain points to upgrade your character's stats. It's a good fun game, it plays well, looks good with nice dynamic lighting and has good music.
I played it the first time on a PlayStation Magazine demo disc back in 1999 and liked it, but there were other games I was more interested in so it had to wait, sadly it became somewhat rare and hard to find after that and it wasn't until recently that I finally got hold of a copy, now that I own it I'm glad I got it, it's a good game and I really like it, overall it's a very good game, I think it's a PAL exclusive which probably contribute a lot to the game having little to no coverage on for example YouTube or online game forums.
Roswell Conspiracies Aliens, Myths and Legends (PlayStation)
Finally getting on with playing the PlayStation version I got recently, after having enjoyed the Game Boy Color version last year it's nice to play and compare the two.
It's a good game on PSX as well and similar to the Game Boy Color version it has some good but sometimes very dark visuals, okay controls that can be a bit clunky at times making certain actions harder to pull off than they should be and an overall very high challenge with little to no forgiveness while also having parts that are so easy it's almost silly.
A mixed bag but still good overall.
Gast The Greatest Little Ghost (PC)
A game by Idol FX, the same developer that made IMP. Gast is a point and click adventure horror game meant for a younger audience, it's not great but it's not terrible either, some minor design issues with too much darkness and bad camera angles, I haven't played far enough to say much else.
Dr. Brain Action/Reaction (PC)
A first person physics puzzle action game from 1999 running on the Unreal Engine, it's actually pretty fun, I'm enjoying it so far.
Puyo Puyo 2 (played on 3DS as part of the SEGA 3D Classics Collection)
A rather bland puzzle game with some annoying problems, the biggest being it focuses on Vs. gameplay against the AI, which loves you rape you up thre ass constantly unless you get lucky, not a good formula for a puzzle game, sadly, and this game doesn't even do a good job with it, the Net Yaroze game Super Bub on PSX had the same idea but executed it about an infinite times better.
F1 World Championship (1993) (Mega Drive)
Always good to drive a few laps in a great racing game.
Columns (Mega Drive)
Another rather bland puzzle game, but at least it delivers something good, it's sadly too simplistic and shallow to last very long and the gameplay gets boring pretty quickly due to the lack of depth, it's genuinely fun in short bursts though.
Lego Batman 3 Beyond Gotham (Xbox 360)
Finally get to play the full console version of this. After some time with it I can say it's mostly sadly a let down, it's worse than the original Lego Batman, Lego Batman 2 DC Superheroes and even the 3DS/Vita version of itself; Lego Batman 3 Beyond Gotham, because that version is less convoluted and doesn't have some of the negative aspects of this version.
It's structured similarly to the original Lego Batman, it lacks the free roaming open world gameplay of Lego Batman 2 DC Superheroes, which isn't a negative in itself, but how it does it is worse, instead of having easy to use and navigate hubworlds like the original game did, the hubworlds in Lego Batman 3 Beyond Gotham on Xbox 360 are full of stuff, all the sidequests and tons of environmental objects to destroy and such, so you spend a lot of time just grinding in the hubworlds for studs (the in-game currency of all modern Lego games), which is slower than in the other games because objects don't work in the same way as they did before, they stay longer on screen before they flash and disappear and while on screen they still count as physically there, hindering you from reaching studs that have landed behind and under them, so you have to wait around for pieces of destroyed objects to disappear before you can collect a lot of studs, the stud amount needed in general to reach the True Hero rank in the story missions are also higher, so there's more grinding for studs in the story missions as well, I myself have failed to reach True Hero in some missions both in the 3DS/Vita version and this console version of the game because of this, I've completed the 3DS/Vita version 100% but I could only do so after having unlocked the stud multiplier powerups you can find in the game, before that it was impossible in several missions to reach True Hero, and sadly the same thing seems to apply to this version.
I's glitchy as well, this is nothing new to the series as they all have glitches of some sorts, but you'd think after so many games using the same basic game engine they could've worked out most of the kinks had they just tried, but no, some of the issues the first game had like glitching through objects and the ground, AI wandering off and killing itself walking off edges into bottomless pits etc. is all still here, nothing has been fixed.
It's also not really that good looking, it's better looking that the first Lego Batman for sure, but Lego batman 2 DC Superheroes looks significantly more impressive and better overall with better use of lighting, better textures, better detail textures, better special effects and more custom animations. It's not a bad looking game, it's just a step down from the previous game for some reason.
The story and characters and also not that good this time around compared to the previous two games, it's genuinely become more of a Lego Justice League game than a Lego Batman game at this point and the lack of focus on what it calls itself is unfortunate, I'd love a Lego Justice League game, don't get me wrong, but I'd want it to be it's own thing, not leeching off of Batman and convoluting his game like this.
They've also remixed and added some other things, like there are almost no vehicles anymore, which sucks as I love vehicles in the Lego games, and the citizens you can find and save on the previous games have ALL been replaced with Adam West, which is kind of cool that the real Adam West is in a Lego batman game, but his implementation is just such a waste, and overused at the same time, very sad, they've also shoehorned in a couple of other completely malplaced c-list celebs, Kevin Smith (from Jay and Silent Bob "fame", if anyone still remembers that old obscure comedy movie, he played the role of Silent Bob, a character that never spoke, so yeah, him doing voice acting in this game is just... beyond words, and not in a good way) and one of the countless Letterman wannabe talk show hosts from the 90s, Conan O'Brien, stands around in all the hubworld areas "jokingly" explaining what every area does, except by doing it "jokingly" he provides no usable info, it's just unfunny jokes that completely fail to be entertaining, and I do my best not to trigger them as personally I can't stand his incredibly annoying voice.
So yeah, sadly it's a significantly lesser game than what the series has offered so far in almost every way, a lot worse in some ways, but sadly it has even more things that are problematic than I've listed above, like it doesn't seem to care about what canon it follows, so you have things taken from newer animated series for example, while also having things that happened in older series being the same canon in this game, all at the same time, some things being more troublesome to shoehorn in than others, for sure, like Batman and Wonder Woman, and Superman and Lois Lane are not couples in this anymore, instead Batman is antisocial/asocial toward everyone, no exceptions, and Superman and for some reason Wonder Woman are trying to be a couple except as a running gag it fails all the time, much like in one of the newest spinoff animated series that focused on comedy more than story and character development, so yeah, a total clusterfuck of Batman related things crammed into a Lego game with already questionable quality as it was.
Still, with all this being said, it's not the worst game I've played, it's just far below what it should've been, especially considering had they just left some things out and taken a similar approach that the 3DS/Vita version did it would've at least been a better game by default as at least the visuals are a little bit better than the portable versions thanks to the more powerful hardware in the Xbox 360.
Aironauts (PlayStation)
A 3D jetpack flying action arcade game, you pick a character, do missions in arena style levels, face off against other characters as bosses and gain points to upgrade your character's stats. It's a good fun game, it plays well, looks good with nice dynamic lighting and has good music.
I played it the first time on a PlayStation Magazine demo disc back in 1999 and liked it, but there were other games I was more interested in so it had to wait, sadly it became somewhat rare and hard to find after that and it wasn't until recently that I finally got hold of a copy, now that I own it I'm glad I got it, it's a good game and I really like it, overall it's a very good game, I think it's a PAL exclusive which probably contribute a lot to the game having little to no coverage on for example YouTube or online game forums.
Roswell Conspiracies Aliens, Myths and Legends (PlayStation)
Finally getting on with playing the PlayStation version I got recently, after having enjoyed the Game Boy Color version last year it's nice to play and compare the two.
It's a good game on PSX as well and similar to the Game Boy Color version it has some good but sometimes very dark visuals, okay controls that can be a bit clunky at times making certain actions harder to pull off than they should be and an overall very high challenge with little to no forgiveness while also having parts that are so easy it's almost silly.
A mixed bag but still good overall.
Gast The Greatest Little Ghost (PC)
A game by Idol FX, the same developer that made IMP. Gast is a point and click adventure horror game meant for a younger audience, it's not great but it's not terrible either, some minor design issues with too much darkness and bad camera angles, I haven't played far enough to say much else.
Dr. Brain Action/Reaction (PC)
A first person physics puzzle action game from 1999 running on the Unreal Engine, it's actually pretty fun, I'm enjoying it so far.
Puyo Puyo 2 (played on 3DS as part of the SEGA 3D Classics Collection)
A rather bland puzzle game with some annoying problems, the biggest being it focuses on Vs. gameplay against the AI, which loves you rape you up thre ass constantly unless you get lucky, not a good formula for a puzzle game, sadly, and this game doesn't even do a good job with it, the Net Yaroze game Super Bub on PSX had the same idea but executed it about an infinite times better.
F1 World Championship (1993) (Mega Drive)
Always good to drive a few laps in a great racing game.
Columns (Mega Drive)
Another rather bland puzzle game, but at least it delivers something good, it's sadly too simplistic and shallow to last very long and the gameplay gets boring pretty quickly due to the lack of depth, it's genuinely fun in short bursts though.
Lego Batman 3 Beyond Gotham (Xbox 360)
Finally get to play the full console version of this. After some time with it I can say it's mostly sadly a let down, it's worse than the original Lego Batman, Lego Batman 2 DC Superheroes and even the 3DS/Vita version of itself; Lego Batman 3 Beyond Gotham, because that version is less convoluted and doesn't have some of the negative aspects of this version.
It's structured similarly to the original Lego Batman, it lacks the free roaming open world gameplay of Lego Batman 2 DC Superheroes, which isn't a negative in itself, but how it does it is worse, instead of having easy to use and navigate hubworlds like the original game did, the hubworlds in Lego Batman 3 Beyond Gotham on Xbox 360 are full of stuff, all the sidequests and tons of environmental objects to destroy and such, so you spend a lot of time just grinding in the hubworlds for studs (the in-game currency of all modern Lego games), which is slower than in the other games because objects don't work in the same way as they did before, they stay longer on screen before they flash and disappear and while on screen they still count as physically there, hindering you from reaching studs that have landed behind and under them, so you have to wait around for pieces of destroyed objects to disappear before you can collect a lot of studs, the stud amount needed in general to reach the True Hero rank in the story missions are also higher, so there's more grinding for studs in the story missions as well, I myself have failed to reach True Hero in some missions both in the 3DS/Vita version and this console version of the game because of this, I've completed the 3DS/Vita version 100% but I could only do so after having unlocked the stud multiplier powerups you can find in the game, before that it was impossible in several missions to reach True Hero, and sadly the same thing seems to apply to this version.
I's glitchy as well, this is nothing new to the series as they all have glitches of some sorts, but you'd think after so many games using the same basic game engine they could've worked out most of the kinks had they just tried, but no, some of the issues the first game had like glitching through objects and the ground, AI wandering off and killing itself walking off edges into bottomless pits etc. is all still here, nothing has been fixed.
It's also not really that good looking, it's better looking that the first Lego Batman for sure, but Lego batman 2 DC Superheroes looks significantly more impressive and better overall with better use of lighting, better textures, better detail textures, better special effects and more custom animations. It's not a bad looking game, it's just a step down from the previous game for some reason.
The story and characters and also not that good this time around compared to the previous two games, it's genuinely become more of a Lego Justice League game than a Lego Batman game at this point and the lack of focus on what it calls itself is unfortunate, I'd love a Lego Justice League game, don't get me wrong, but I'd want it to be it's own thing, not leeching off of Batman and convoluting his game like this.
They've also remixed and added some other things, like there are almost no vehicles anymore, which sucks as I love vehicles in the Lego games, and the citizens you can find and save on the previous games have ALL been replaced with Adam West, which is kind of cool that the real Adam West is in a Lego batman game, but his implementation is just such a waste, and overused at the same time, very sad, they've also shoehorned in a couple of other completely malplaced c-list celebs, Kevin Smith (from Jay and Silent Bob "fame", if anyone still remembers that old obscure comedy movie, he played the role of Silent Bob, a character that never spoke, so yeah, him doing voice acting in this game is just... beyond words, and not in a good way) and one of the countless Letterman wannabe talk show hosts from the 90s, Conan O'Brien, stands around in all the hubworld areas "jokingly" explaining what every area does, except by doing it "jokingly" he provides no usable info, it's just unfunny jokes that completely fail to be entertaining, and I do my best not to trigger them as personally I can't stand his incredibly annoying voice.
So yeah, sadly it's a significantly lesser game than what the series has offered so far in almost every way, a lot worse in some ways, but sadly it has even more things that are problematic than I've listed above, like it doesn't seem to care about what canon it follows, so you have things taken from newer animated series for example, while also having things that happened in older series being the same canon in this game, all at the same time, some things being more troublesome to shoehorn in than others, for sure, like Batman and Wonder Woman, and Superman and Lois Lane are not couples in this anymore, instead Batman is antisocial/asocial toward everyone, no exceptions, and Superman and for some reason Wonder Woman are trying to be a couple except as a running gag it fails all the time, much like in one of the newest spinoff animated series that focused on comedy more than story and character development, so yeah, a total clusterfuck of Batman related things crammed into a Lego game with already questionable quality as it was.
Still, with all this being said, it's not the worst game I've played, it's just far below what it should've been, especially considering had they just left some things out and taken a similar approach that the 3DS/Vita version did it would've at least been a better game by default as at least the visuals are a little bit better than the portable versions thanks to the more powerful hardware in the Xbox 360.
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