Maj 12th:
Haven't gotten much of anything since last month, still no new games at all.
Magazines:
The Lego Batman Movie + Harley Quinn on rollerskates exclusive polybag figure
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Maj 17th:
Some stuff from a second hand store today, still no new games though.
DVD:
From Dusk till Dawn 3 The Hangman's Daughter
Kung Pow! Enter the Fist!
CD:
Dio
Musikgymnasiet 95
Other:
Boo-Diddley (Super Mario McDonalds figure with tongue that moves)
and a DVD from a movie store
DVD:
Trolls (2016)
and a magazine from a grocery store
Magazines:
Donald Duck + LEGO 30531 Ninjago bike polybag set
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Maj 21th:
Just some movies from a movie store today.
DVD:
Bring It On (2017)
Free Fire (2016)
Shopkins Chef Club (2016)
The Exception (2016)
The Lost City of Z (2017)
The Mummy (2016)
What Happened to Monday (2017)
Bluray:
47 Meters Down (2016)
Bring It On (2017)
The Lost City of Z (2017)
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Maj 24th:
Doesn't look like I'll be getting any new games this month, just another LEGO magazine + polybag set today.
Magazines:
LEGO Jurassic World + LEGO Jurassic World Velociraptor baby and nest limited edition polybag set
Sunday, May 13, 2018
Tuesday, May 1, 2018
Now Playing - Maj 2018
Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed (PlayStation Vita)
V-Rally (PlayStation)
Joyriding.
Super Mario Bros. (Entertainment System)
Just a quick playthrough.
The Valley Rule (PC)
Just a quick playthrough.
Vector TD (PC)
Just a quick playthrough.
Vector TD 2 (PC)
Just a quick playthrough.
Grand Theft Auto (PC)
Just testing it out a little bit.
Grand Theft Auto 2 (PC)
Just testing it out a little bit.
Lego Batman 3 Beyond Gotham (Xbox 360)
Still trying to replicate the glitch with the combining hubworlds, sadly to no success. I have completed some regular challenge in the game in the meantime though.
Senario Vs. Maxx (Plug&Play)
Just playing some of the games for fun, Smart Escape is still the best of the bunch.
Been playing some games at a friend's house, Ice Hockey, Double Dribble and Ice Climber on Entertainment System and some various games on his new Atari Flashback, a fishing game, a cowboy duel game (Outlaw), a tank game (Combat) and some other ones (American Football, Football ("Soccer"), and some top-down racing games).
I've also installed an Intellivision emulator (Bliss 2.04) and am trying out some of the games I own, since I don't own an actual Intellivision console to play them on this is as good as I can do at the moment.
BurgerTime! (Intellivision)
BurgerTime! is a really good arcade game and a lot of fun to play, the Intellivision version is great.
Pac-Man (Intellivision)
One of the top best older versions of Pac-Man for sure.
Frog Bog (Intellivision)
It's a lot more fun when you activate manual controls.
Popeye (Intellivision)
A fun arcade game, not the most impressive version but a good game regardless and still very enjoyable, I prefer it to some of the more technically impressive versions as some of the added animations, music and sound effects etc. in other versions aren't always that good and end up being kind of awkward, so at the end of the day this is still my favorite version.
Skiing (Intellivision)
A simple but enjoyable skiing game, I'd say it's one of the best due to it's simplicity, compared to for example Slalom on Entertainment System this is much better as that game is far too hard and has rather annoying controls in which you have to constantly hold up on the steering cross to go forward, which is absolute murder on your thumb, and when compared to more modern games like Alpine Skiing 2007 on PS2 for example it's also superior as that game is a bit too technical and advanced for it's own good, it looks fantastic for a PS2 game but it's just not very fun to play, Skiing on Intellivision is just a great and simple little game to pick up and play and for us who aren't into the sport of skiing that's really all you need, and it makes for a better experience than all the licenced and complicated stuff other skiing games have to offer, at least in my opinion.
Utopia (Intellivision)
Trying to learn how to play this properly, it's a really cool game once you learn it, like a versus sim game, you control one of two islands with each of the two controllers and you try to manage your island as good as you can for a set amount of turns, the one who has managed their island the best at the end, wins.
Centipede (Intellivision)
A good version, nothing spectacular but it does what it needs to do, if you know Centipede in general then you know the Intellivision version as well, it's just the same good old classic Centipede.
Stadium Mud Buggies (Intellivision)
A great isometric racing game with good control, good visuals, lots of content and great driving physics.
Monster Truck Rally (Entertainment System)
The spiritual successor to Stadium Mud Buggies, basically the same game with even more content and better visuals.
Been playing some more games at a friend's house, now on his Mega Drive Flashback; Golden Axe 1, 2 and 3, Eternal Champions, Bonanza Bros., Flicky and Mortal Kombat 1 and 2.
Auto Racing (Intellivision)
An underrated top-down racer with some really good driving physics making it a blast to powerslide through corners like a pro. Got some nice visuals too with the cars and roadside buildings having shadows and the game shows off some nice multi-directional scrolling for such an old title.
This game commonly gets a bad rep for having bad controls but it all boils down to learning the controls, and they aren't even hard to learn, I'm honestly astonished over how many seem to struggle with them, basically the control disc is like a steering wheel, using the 16-directional input as a means to determine how much you're turning in either direction, only it's even easier as you don't actually have to turn it, you can just press down where you want and the game will do it, it's of course easier to explain in real life with an actual controller or with visual aids but here's an attempt at doing so in text form anyway; for example, pressing up on the disc does nothing as that's where the steering wheel is neutral, pressing up and diagonally will only ever so slightly steer in those direction, which can be good for minor adjustments, pressing straight left or right will give you a moderate amount of turning while still not risking any spin-outs, and pressing the lower part of the disc while turning, as in lower diagonal-left and lower diagonal-right, will result in significantly tighter turning, this can cause spin-outs if you do it too much from left to right in quick succession, but if done correctly you'll powerslide through corners at high speeds and it'll feel like a modern racing game only with a top-down camera angle and retro visuals, and finally you can slide it over to the other side and basically do 180 degree handbrake like turns and even pull off proper 360s if you're good enough, it's a genuine analog control that simply wasn't a thing again at all until the later part of the 90s, so enormous amounts of kudos to this game for implementing such a control scheme this early on and of course an equal amount of Kudos to the Intellivision for having such an awesome controller for making it possible in the first place, most impressive, you also have brakes on the action buttons but they're rarely needed even on the harder tracks, only the two fastest cars truly need the use of braking, it automatically accelerates so you just have to focus on steering for the most part.
There is an older and much more rare version of the game that had another control scheme (the regular one was an option too but you had to input a code to access it) and I can kind of excuse anyone who's played that as it seems to have far harder to manage controls than the regular version, but my guess is that a majority of those who have trouble with the game has it due to them using emulation where they try and map the 16-directional control disc to a 4-directional steering cross on a modern controller or the arrow keys on a keyboard, effectively losing 12 steps of analog sensitivity in the process, it's literally the same thing as mapping a modern console's analog stick to WASD, you'll lose any and all analog sensitivity and some games simply won't play correctly if they require you to use that sensitivity, as is the case of Auto Racing, despite being an older game the system was WAY ahead of it's time and the analog disc circle pad was only one of many things it did that took competitors many years, sometimes close to a couple of decades to catch up to.
Bowling (Intellivision)
What can I say, it's bowling. You line your guy up, aim, throw the ball, give it some aftertouch, hope the physics give you a strike then repeat that until you've bowled a whole game and get the final score. You get to pick some options like ball size, isle slipperiness, right or left handed and how many players will compete, you move the guy left and right on the isle with the left action buttons and aim/shoot with the lower right action button, you can see each player's current score by pressing the corresponding number key during gameplay.
Atlantis (Intellivision)
A Missile Command clone with some cool special features like a shmup ability where you ge to send out a ship to shoot down the incoming enemies but it had an energy limit of 90 second, you need to land and recharge to use it more, it can also be destroyed while in action.
Sonic Generations (Xbox 360)
An awful game with virtually no positive, everything is bad, bad visuals, bad framerate, strange super low screen resolutions at times, tons of super simplistic "3D" models (as in a lot of basic sprite stuff you'd expect to see in old 32-bit generation games) bad, inaccurate and laggy controls, bad, inaccurate and glitchy physics, no camera control, camera glitches, long load times, horrible voice acting, garbage script, wildly unfitting voice actors, characters act inaccordingly to their personalities and feel completely rebooted and out of place, bad level design, bad audio design, almost complete lack of exploration 99% of the time, super excessive use of forced on-rail segments where you have little to no control (you can sometimes use boost to make them go by faster but that drains the boost bar), poor placement of hidden star pickups forcing repeat gameplay in the laziest of ways imaginable (literally in one stage you have three right next to each other directly after a jump you can't control with three ways to jump and no way to return and grab the other two, simply pick one jump one time you play through the level, then the second during a second playthrough and finally the third during a third playthrough, it's as forced and boring as it gets, no skill involved, just rinse and repeat thee times over, it's mindless, boring and repetitive, and it's by far the most commonly used design choice for every single thing in this game), speaking of the boost, you have a button that boosts you forward, killing enemies automatically and stuff, making the already ultra linear and on-rail designed gameplay even more linear and on-rails, it fills up with everything you do, even moving the analog stick during on-ail jumps gives you points that charge your boost meter so you can use it to skip even more gameplay, on top of that you also have lots of upgrades you can buy, from points you get for completing and replaying stages, that make the game even more automatic and easy to breeze through, it's like they went to every extreme to make the game as unplayable and skippable as possible because they weren't going to put anything good in there anyway so why make anyone suffer through it, literally the levels are quite big in size but take only a couple of minutes to get through, they feel a lot longer becuase it's just several minutes of watching sonic "go fast" without much if any interaction, so basically you can watch a playthrough on youtube and get a virtually identical experience, there's so little gameplay here it's almost not even warranted to call it a game, there are a few extra challenges you can play as well, like racing against another charcter to the end of a level with a timer, or collecting rings with a timer, or using invincibility to walk across spikes etc. to reach the end of a level while on a timer, and so on.
Sonic The Hedgehog (Xbox 360, the unlockable Mega Drive version available in Sonic Generations after purchasing the Mega Drive controller in the shop for 7777 points and using it on the Mega Drive console above Green Hill zone)
The one potentially good thing about this game was that it came with the original Mega Drive version of Sonic The Hedgehog, except ofcourse it's not the original version, it's a ported version with some glitches and omissions, first off it runs in a window, so it's not full screen, not even close, the level select code don't seem to work and there are tons of little glitches that the original definitely didn't have, finally the audio has been remade so it sounds different, same musical compositions and the same kind of sound effects but it all sounds different, not sure if I would count that as a negative or a neutral as it technically doesn't sound "worse", it's more a matter of if you want it to sound authentic or not, if you do then it's a clear negative, if you don't care then it's okay, I guess, on a final tiny positive note they did fix the insta-death if you touch spikes while temporarily invincible after having been hit by something and lost your rings, so I guess that's something, still, it's a lesser version of the original and it doesn't even slightly begin to make up for the shitty main Sonic Generations game.
V-Rally (PlayStation)
Joyriding.
Super Mario Bros. (Entertainment System)
Just a quick playthrough.
The Valley Rule (PC)
Just a quick playthrough.
Vector TD (PC)
Just a quick playthrough.
Vector TD 2 (PC)
Just a quick playthrough.
Grand Theft Auto (PC)
Just testing it out a little bit.
Grand Theft Auto 2 (PC)
Just testing it out a little bit.
Lego Batman 3 Beyond Gotham (Xbox 360)
Still trying to replicate the glitch with the combining hubworlds, sadly to no success. I have completed some regular challenge in the game in the meantime though.
Senario Vs. Maxx (Plug&Play)
Just playing some of the games for fun, Smart Escape is still the best of the bunch.
Been playing some games at a friend's house, Ice Hockey, Double Dribble and Ice Climber on Entertainment System and some various games on his new Atari Flashback, a fishing game, a cowboy duel game (Outlaw), a tank game (Combat) and some other ones (American Football, Football ("Soccer"), and some top-down racing games).
I've also installed an Intellivision emulator (Bliss 2.04) and am trying out some of the games I own, since I don't own an actual Intellivision console to play them on this is as good as I can do at the moment.
BurgerTime! (Intellivision)
BurgerTime! is a really good arcade game and a lot of fun to play, the Intellivision version is great.
Pac-Man (Intellivision)
One of the top best older versions of Pac-Man for sure.
Frog Bog (Intellivision)
It's a lot more fun when you activate manual controls.
Popeye (Intellivision)
A fun arcade game, not the most impressive version but a good game regardless and still very enjoyable, I prefer it to some of the more technically impressive versions as some of the added animations, music and sound effects etc. in other versions aren't always that good and end up being kind of awkward, so at the end of the day this is still my favorite version.
Skiing (Intellivision)
A simple but enjoyable skiing game, I'd say it's one of the best due to it's simplicity, compared to for example Slalom on Entertainment System this is much better as that game is far too hard and has rather annoying controls in which you have to constantly hold up on the steering cross to go forward, which is absolute murder on your thumb, and when compared to more modern games like Alpine Skiing 2007 on PS2 for example it's also superior as that game is a bit too technical and advanced for it's own good, it looks fantastic for a PS2 game but it's just not very fun to play, Skiing on Intellivision is just a great and simple little game to pick up and play and for us who aren't into the sport of skiing that's really all you need, and it makes for a better experience than all the licenced and complicated stuff other skiing games have to offer, at least in my opinion.
Utopia (Intellivision)
Trying to learn how to play this properly, it's a really cool game once you learn it, like a versus sim game, you control one of two islands with each of the two controllers and you try to manage your island as good as you can for a set amount of turns, the one who has managed their island the best at the end, wins.
Centipede (Intellivision)
A good version, nothing spectacular but it does what it needs to do, if you know Centipede in general then you know the Intellivision version as well, it's just the same good old classic Centipede.
Stadium Mud Buggies (Intellivision)
A great isometric racing game with good control, good visuals, lots of content and great driving physics.
Monster Truck Rally (Entertainment System)
The spiritual successor to Stadium Mud Buggies, basically the same game with even more content and better visuals.
Been playing some more games at a friend's house, now on his Mega Drive Flashback; Golden Axe 1, 2 and 3, Eternal Champions, Bonanza Bros., Flicky and Mortal Kombat 1 and 2.
Auto Racing (Intellivision)
An underrated top-down racer with some really good driving physics making it a blast to powerslide through corners like a pro. Got some nice visuals too with the cars and roadside buildings having shadows and the game shows off some nice multi-directional scrolling for such an old title.
This game commonly gets a bad rep for having bad controls but it all boils down to learning the controls, and they aren't even hard to learn, I'm honestly astonished over how many seem to struggle with them, basically the control disc is like a steering wheel, using the 16-directional input as a means to determine how much you're turning in either direction, only it's even easier as you don't actually have to turn it, you can just press down where you want and the game will do it, it's of course easier to explain in real life with an actual controller or with visual aids but here's an attempt at doing so in text form anyway; for example, pressing up on the disc does nothing as that's where the steering wheel is neutral, pressing up and diagonally will only ever so slightly steer in those direction, which can be good for minor adjustments, pressing straight left or right will give you a moderate amount of turning while still not risking any spin-outs, and pressing the lower part of the disc while turning, as in lower diagonal-left and lower diagonal-right, will result in significantly tighter turning, this can cause spin-outs if you do it too much from left to right in quick succession, but if done correctly you'll powerslide through corners at high speeds and it'll feel like a modern racing game only with a top-down camera angle and retro visuals, and finally you can slide it over to the other side and basically do 180 degree handbrake like turns and even pull off proper 360s if you're good enough, it's a genuine analog control that simply wasn't a thing again at all until the later part of the 90s, so enormous amounts of kudos to this game for implementing such a control scheme this early on and of course an equal amount of Kudos to the Intellivision for having such an awesome controller for making it possible in the first place, most impressive, you also have brakes on the action buttons but they're rarely needed even on the harder tracks, only the two fastest cars truly need the use of braking, it automatically accelerates so you just have to focus on steering for the most part.
There is an older and much more rare version of the game that had another control scheme (the regular one was an option too but you had to input a code to access it) and I can kind of excuse anyone who's played that as it seems to have far harder to manage controls than the regular version, but my guess is that a majority of those who have trouble with the game has it due to them using emulation where they try and map the 16-directional control disc to a 4-directional steering cross on a modern controller or the arrow keys on a keyboard, effectively losing 12 steps of analog sensitivity in the process, it's literally the same thing as mapping a modern console's analog stick to WASD, you'll lose any and all analog sensitivity and some games simply won't play correctly if they require you to use that sensitivity, as is the case of Auto Racing, despite being an older game the system was WAY ahead of it's time and the analog disc circle pad was only one of many things it did that took competitors many years, sometimes close to a couple of decades to catch up to.
Bowling (Intellivision)
What can I say, it's bowling. You line your guy up, aim, throw the ball, give it some aftertouch, hope the physics give you a strike then repeat that until you've bowled a whole game and get the final score. You get to pick some options like ball size, isle slipperiness, right or left handed and how many players will compete, you move the guy left and right on the isle with the left action buttons and aim/shoot with the lower right action button, you can see each player's current score by pressing the corresponding number key during gameplay.
Atlantis (Intellivision)
A Missile Command clone with some cool special features like a shmup ability where you ge to send out a ship to shoot down the incoming enemies but it had an energy limit of 90 second, you need to land and recharge to use it more, it can also be destroyed while in action.
Sonic Generations (Xbox 360)
An awful game with virtually no positive, everything is bad, bad visuals, bad framerate, strange super low screen resolutions at times, tons of super simplistic "3D" models (as in a lot of basic sprite stuff you'd expect to see in old 32-bit generation games) bad, inaccurate and laggy controls, bad, inaccurate and glitchy physics, no camera control, camera glitches, long load times, horrible voice acting, garbage script, wildly unfitting voice actors, characters act inaccordingly to their personalities and feel completely rebooted and out of place, bad level design, bad audio design, almost complete lack of exploration 99% of the time, super excessive use of forced on-rail segments where you have little to no control (you can sometimes use boost to make them go by faster but that drains the boost bar), poor placement of hidden star pickups forcing repeat gameplay in the laziest of ways imaginable (literally in one stage you have three right next to each other directly after a jump you can't control with three ways to jump and no way to return and grab the other two, simply pick one jump one time you play through the level, then the second during a second playthrough and finally the third during a third playthrough, it's as forced and boring as it gets, no skill involved, just rinse and repeat thee times over, it's mindless, boring and repetitive, and it's by far the most commonly used design choice for every single thing in this game), speaking of the boost, you have a button that boosts you forward, killing enemies automatically and stuff, making the already ultra linear and on-rail designed gameplay even more linear and on-rails, it fills up with everything you do, even moving the analog stick during on-ail jumps gives you points that charge your boost meter so you can use it to skip even more gameplay, on top of that you also have lots of upgrades you can buy, from points you get for completing and replaying stages, that make the game even more automatic and easy to breeze through, it's like they went to every extreme to make the game as unplayable and skippable as possible because they weren't going to put anything good in there anyway so why make anyone suffer through it, literally the levels are quite big in size but take only a couple of minutes to get through, they feel a lot longer becuase it's just several minutes of watching sonic "go fast" without much if any interaction, so basically you can watch a playthrough on youtube and get a virtually identical experience, there's so little gameplay here it's almost not even warranted to call it a game, there are a few extra challenges you can play as well, like racing against another charcter to the end of a level with a timer, or collecting rings with a timer, or using invincibility to walk across spikes etc. to reach the end of a level while on a timer, and so on.
Sonic The Hedgehog (Xbox 360, the unlockable Mega Drive version available in Sonic Generations after purchasing the Mega Drive controller in the shop for 7777 points and using it on the Mega Drive console above Green Hill zone)
The one potentially good thing about this game was that it came with the original Mega Drive version of Sonic The Hedgehog, except ofcourse it's not the original version, it's a ported version with some glitches and omissions, first off it runs in a window, so it's not full screen, not even close, the level select code don't seem to work and there are tons of little glitches that the original definitely didn't have, finally the audio has been remade so it sounds different, same musical compositions and the same kind of sound effects but it all sounds different, not sure if I would count that as a negative or a neutral as it technically doesn't sound "worse", it's more a matter of if you want it to sound authentic or not, if you do then it's a clear negative, if you don't care then it's okay, I guess, on a final tiny positive note they did fix the insta-death if you touch spikes while temporarily invincible after having been hit by something and lost your rings, so I guess that's something, still, it's a lesser version of the original and it doesn't even slightly begin to make up for the shitty main Sonic Generations game.
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