Thursday, November 1, 2018

Gaming Purchases - November 2018

November 1st:

Went secondhand shopping today, found some stuff.

PlayStation 2:
MotoGP (Namco)

Xbox:
Star Wars Battlefront (no manual)

Xbox 360:
composite A/V cable with a separate RCA and S-Video to SCART adapter
composite+component combo-A/V cable
Hitman Blood Money
Ringarnas Herre Slaget om Midgård II (Lord of the Rings Battle of Middle-Earth II)

Other:
male USB to male Mini USB cable
male RCA to male 3,5mm cable

Comics:
Fix & Foxi
Korak
Disney's Princess Yule Album
Disney's The Jungle Book 2 (two different versions)
Disney's Jasmine Friends for Life

DVD:
Disney's Brave
Disney's Cinderella 2
Disney's Dumbo
Pelle Svanslös i Amerikatt (Peter No-Tail in Americat)

Toys:
Atco City Series 3023 Airport Set + instructions (two parts missing, the glass for the helicopter canopy and the plug to hold one of the smaller propellers in place)
Atco Space Adventure 8025 Space Ship + instructions

and a new movie from a movie store

DVD:
The Star (2017)

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November 8th:

Some second hand finds today.

Electronics:
composite and S-Video <-> SCART converter

DVD:
LEGO Friends (2013, with original protective paper sleeve still around it, episodes 1-3)
Monty Python and the Holy Graal (2-disc Special Edition)

Bluray:
Cleopatra (2-disc 50th Anniversary Edition)

Books/Magazines/Comics:
Bobo - Svarta feens trolldom! (1984)
Disney's Classics - Sleeping Beauty
Katitzi vol. 1 - Barnhemsflickan
Katitzi vol. 2 - Zigenarflickan
Katitzi vol. 3 - Hjältinnan
LEGO Ninjago - Find the Samuraidroid (Where's Wally?-style look-and-find book with the LEGO Samuraidroid set to build)
Lilla Fruntimret - från livstycke till fuskpäls
Lilla Fruntimret rymmer hemifrån
Nya Fruntimmers Boken
Modern Dansk Humor

Toys:
a bag of toy cars (mostly made in china cheap ones, one Hot Wheels and one Majorette)
another Rubik's Cube (3x3x3, official Rubik's Cube brand)
a Secret Life of Pets McDonald's Rubik's Cube (1x2x3 size)

Other:
a 40-pack of flat green glass blobs
UNO (the card game from Mattel, 2015 edition with new "trade all" and "make your own rule" cards)

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November 12th:

Some new stuff, no secondhand stuff today.

DVD:
Justice League (2017)

Toy Cars:
a red Audi R8 (Majorette)
a gold Lamborghini Gallardo (Majorette)
a silver Lamborghini Reventon (Majorette)
a wine red Renault Alpine A110-50 (Majorette)

Other:
My Little Pony Friendship is Magic chocolate advent calendar (60g)

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November 15th:

More secondhand stuff.

DVD:
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001)
Iron Sky (2012)

Books/Magazines/Comics:
Barbie (#2 1993, #4 1993)
Dennis (#3 1988)

LEGO:
a small bag of blue and grey Technic pieces from an unknown set

Other:
a factory sealed, new and unused deck of playing cards (Black Jaguar label)
six factory sealed, new and unused VHS-C compact videocassettes
a bag of 103 smaller flat green glass blobs
a motorcycle painting in light-shifting colors (Yamaha Genesis)

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November 19th:

Other:
another My Little Pony Friendship is Magic chocolate advent calendar, different design than the other one (75g)

Now Playing - November 2018

Auto Racing (Intellivision)

Sonic 3D Flickies' Island (Mega Drive)

Auto Racing (Intellivision Lives!, PlayStation 2)
It's still not as good as the real thing but it's still good enough to have some fun with.

Bomb Squad (Intellivision Lives!, PlayStation 2)
This one is borderline unplayable, the heavy use of the numeric keypad and bad control emulation ruins a lot of the intuitive nature of the game and like most games on this disc the lack of proper instructions makes it so you have to look up extra stuff online to get a good idea what to even do.
Thankfully I already know how to play most these games properly but for others who want to get into Intellivision are gonna have a very hard time with this collection, sadly. It does not show off the awesomeness of the real games running on original hardware, that's for sure.

Skiing (Intellivision Lives!, PlayStation 2)

Enduro (Intellivision Lives!, PlayStation 2)
This one I am not so familiar with, but I'm trying to get the hang of it, I'm getting better.

Stadium Mud Buggies (Intellivision Lives!, PlayStation 2)

Sonic The Hedgehog (Sonic Mega Collection Plus, PlayStation 2)
Sadly they've just lazily taken the 60hz NTSC roms and slowed them down to play at 50hz for this collection, so the games run and sound slow and weird, far from the real 50hz PAL original versions on original hardware.

Sonic The Hedgehog 2 (Sonic Mega Collection Plus, PlayStation 2)

Sonic 3D Flickies' Island (Sonic Mega Collection Plus, PlayStation 2)

WRC Rally Evolved (PlayStation 2)
A really great rally game with some cool extreme weather effects and stuff, kinda similar to games like Motorstorm Apocalypse or Split/Second.

WRC 4 (PlayStation 2)
A great rally game, it's basically like WRC Rally Evolved but focused on regular rally racing only. Both are great games.

Rally Championship (PlayStation 2)
A fantastic arcade rally game, I love the driving physics, the music is awesome, this may be a new contender for the best [arcade] rally game I've ever played. I can't seem to wipe off the huge dumb grin I get on my face when playing this.

Jet Ion GP (PlayStation 2)
A nostalgic classic for me, I think it was the third or possibly fourth game I got for my PS2 back in the day.

New York Race (PlayStation 2)
I got this game less than a year ago but originally I could've gotten it instead of Jet Ion GP.
Now finally I've been able to compare both side by side and truly see if I made the right choice when I picked Jet Ion GP over New York Race all those years ago.
I have to say yes, I made the right choice, as good as New York Race is, I like Jet Ion GP better. I'm glad to finally have both though.

Sonic CD (Sonic Gems Collection, PlayStation 2)
Beat is with the bad ending but I did probably my personal best run ever, with only having lost one life during the whole playthrough, obtaining 5 of the time stones and getting the good future in I think 8 or 9 stages.

Sonic Unleashed (PlayStation 2)
This game is awful.
It's the same version that is on Wii so I can't even imagine how bad that one must be if it's this game with broken motion controls..
I have the Xbox 360 version, which is different from the PS2/Wii versions, but I haven't played that one yet. I'm guessing it's probably really awful as well, maybe not quite as bad as this one but still really bad, I have no reason to think they made it better in any way that counts, the atrocious Sonic Generations I have on Xbox 360 has made sure I can exclusively assume the very worst of all modern Sonic games.
As a side note, anyone who dares complain about even a single tiny little thing about Sonic 06 needs to play this (and/or Sonic Generations) to see what truly bad Sonic games are like, then they need to beg on their bare knees to Sonic 06 for forgiveness.

Crash of the Titans (PlayStation 2)
I didn't have much hope for this being good but it suprised me, in fact it's one of the better 3D platformers I've played.
Good visuals, good gameplay, good controls, good level design, very good multilingual voice acting.
The combat could've been a bit better in the responsiveness and control, but the ability to take over large enemies and use their abilities adds a nice variety and depth to the combat and gameplay of the entire game, so overall that's all still good too.

Offroad Extreme! (PlayStation 2)
I have this on Wii and played it a few years ago, it was pretty bad with the visuals and framerate but I remember it having really responsive and accurate motion controls, far better than any other Wii game in fact, and now I've tried out the PS2 version and can safely say the framerate, visuals and controls are all much better than in the Wii version, as good as the Wii version's controls are they are to no suprise infinitely better with an analog stick, and the visuals actually look okay in this, still low budget looking but they run silky smooth and the environments and textures don't look weird like they did on Wii.
Simply put, the PS2 version is clearly superior in every way to the newer Wii version, and keep in mind that Wii had a more than twice as powerful CPU than PS2 and twice as much RAM memory.

Armored Core (PlayStation)
Made the Shadow The Hedgehog logo as an emblem. Also began work on a My Little Pony emblem of the old cartoon (My Little Pony Tales) show logo.

Dead Or Alive 2 (PlayStation 2)

LEGO Batman The Videogame (PlayStation 2)

Saint Seiya The Hades (PlayStation 2)
What a disappointment. I enjoyed the anime series back in the day, Hilda De Polaris being my favorite character, but this game is just awful.
Ugly, poor controls, repetitive, limited gameplay and game modes, awful game design with enemies being allowed to revive themselves multiple times before you defeat them but you game over instantly if you lose once, enemies are either super easy and can be defeated by repeating a single attack or they are impossibly hard and spam super moves that can't be dodged that drain 95% of your health in one hit, japanese voices only, retarded dialog options you have to unlock before they are actual options but you still have to pick the only option available as if you had a choice only to waste your time and slow down the already awful excuses for cutscenes.
I really didn't find a single redeemable feature in this game. I didn't even get to see Hilda.

DT Racer (PlayStation 2)
Feels good to play my favorite racing game of all time again.

Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow (PlayStation 2)
Awful gameplay design, atrocious tutorial design, garbage programming and optimization with tons of unnecessary in-level loading times and framerate issues, glitches, artificial limitations on what you can do making a vast majority of the moves you have at your disposal unusable, bad voice acting, extremely poor script with cringe worthy dialogue from everyone, continuity problems severely limiting your freedom of options in the levels.
It's a bad game, plain and simple. Play a good stealth action game instead, there are many of them, even in the same series there are better ones that are older, this one is simply one of the worst, avoid it entirely, you're not missing out on anything good if you never play this, you're just saving yourself from a headache and frustration.

The Italian Job L.A. Heist (PlayStation 2)
One of those potentially fantastic games that was ruined by absolutely retarded progress design. Unless you super master every single little corner of the game with every car and save your progress you'll never see a vast majority of it, not even in multiplayer mode which could've been great and fun had they just had everything unlocked to enjoy. Having to perfect the entire singleplayer experience to have anything fun in multiplayer is at best insult to injury. Such a shame. it plays great otherwise, looks great too. Tight controls and fun stunt moves, it has so many top quality attributes it's nothing short of impressive how they managed to systematically go through all the trouble of locking down the entire game and making it one of the hardest games ever to unlock even a single new thing in. One of the best examples of all time on how not to design a game's difficulty and means of progression.

Cold Winter (PlayStation 2)
An overall mediocre FPS with a great physics engine, tons of interactivity and great dynamic lighting and shadows, too bad none of that is used and it plays more similar to Wolfenstein 3D or Doom than, say, a stealth game or something.

Battle Engine Aquila (PlayStation 2)
Good old cockpit view mech shooter. I wish it would've had a third person view but it's still a good game, some repetitive missions and sadly as always with game like this the developers just had to force in annoying protect and escort missions to ruin the fun.

Star Wars Racer Revenge (PlayStation 2)
I like it, it's fast, looks good, controls good, sounds good and has nice levels with multiple paths. I wish it would've had weapons like WipEout, but you can at least damage your opponents with aggressive playing, so it's not completely limited to just basic racing at least.

Star Wars Jedi Starfighter (PlayStation 2)
An okay free-flight spaceship shooter, nowhere near the level of games like StarLancer, Star Trek Invasion, Colony Wars Red Sun or Blast Radius but not bad either, just okay. Framerate issues, some clunky command controls, clunky enemy selection/targeting controls, repetitive defend, destroy all, protect and escort missions and repetitive gameplay keep it from being great.

The SeeD Warzone (PlayStation 2)
I'm getting a little better at this game. I always wanted to be good at it and play through it properly but I've never had the time to dedicate to learning all the depth this game has to offer.

Super Mario Bros. 3 (Entertainment System)

Super Mario Bros. (Entertainment System)

Sonic The Hedgehog (Mega Drive)

Sonic The Hedgehog 2 (Mega Drive)

Wonder Boy The Dragon's Trap (Game Gear)