May 5th:
Went to a Retro Game Convention in Gothenburg with some friends and bought some neat stuff. I bought one cartridge of Space Battle for Intellivision, but then later found a cheaper one with the overlays and manual laying in a big box of random stuff, so I bought that copy too! There were no refunds, so yeah, simple as that. (all items are pre-owned unless otherwise noted)
IntelliVision:
Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Treasure of Tarmin (cartridge only)
Tron Deadly Discs (cartridge only)
Space Battle (cartridge only)
Space Battle (cartridge, two controller overlays and manual)
Star Strike (cartridge only)
Mega Drive:
Abrams Battle Tank (cartridge only)
MIG-29 Fighter Pilot (cartridge only)
32X:
Cosmic Carnage (cartridge only)
DS:
Asphalt Urban GT (no instruction manual)
Collectibles:
Princess Daisy - Super Mario Super Size Figure Collection (version with keyring hanger, new and sealed)
Princess Daisy - Super Mario Super Size Figure Collection (version without keyring hanger, new and sealed)
Steel Battalion - Lycoming Defense Systems Vitzh 1st-Generation - Capcom Figure Collection (new and sealed)
Steel Battalion - Lycoming Defense Systems Quasar 3rd-Generation - Capcom Figure Collection (new and sealed)
Other:
Virtua Racing (Mega Drive) rental case
Tomb Raider (Saturn) instruction manual
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May 12th:
One of my friends who was with me to the Retro Game Convention a week ago had bought a game he didn't like, so he gave it to me.
Mega Drive:
688 Attack Sub (cartridge only)
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May 14th:
A trip to the local GameStop resulted in some nice finds today. (all items are pre-owned unless otherwise noted)
Hardware:
AtGames SEGA Mega Drive Plug N Play with 81 built-in games, cartridge slot, power adapter, stereo composite AV-cables and two 6-button controllers (new and complete in box)
PlayStation 3:
Battleship
BlazBlue Continuum Shift Extend
Dead Rising 2
EyeCreate
Far Cry 3
God of War Ascension
Valkyria Chronicles
PlayStation Vita:
Dynasty Warriors Next (no instruction manual)
Xbox 360:
BlazBlue Continuum Shift - Limited Edition (no instruction manual)
Dead Island Riptide - Special Edition
F.E.A.R. 2 Project Origin
Grand Theft Auto V Five (no instruction manual)
Mass Effect
Mass Effect 2
Prey
Smackdown Vs. Raw 2008
Star Wars The Clone Wars Republic Heroes
Collectibles:
Disney Infinity 3.0 - Cars 2 - Holley Shiftwell (figure only)
Disney Infinity 3.0 - Star Wars - Ahsoka Tano (figure only)
Skylanders Imaginators - Golden Queen (figure only)
Skylanders Superchargers - Hot Streak (vehicle only)
Skylanders Superchargers - Jet Stream (vehicle only)
Skylanders Swap Force - Ninja Stealth Elf (figure only)
Totaku WipEout Feisar FX350 (new and sealed)
Totaku WipEout AG-SYS (new and sealed)
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May 17th:
Took a long walk today and bought some stuff along the way.
Collectibles:
3x Marvel Avengers Black Widow Hasbro action figure (2016, new and sealed)
DVD:
Dumb and Dumber Unrated (1994, new and sealed)
Bluray:
Monster High Clawesome Double Feature (2014, Monster High Fright On! (2011), Monster High Escape from Skull Shores (2012), new and sealed)
Penguins of Madagascar (2014, new and sealed)
Robocop (2013, new and sealed)
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May 22nd:
Ordered some games online during a 20th anniversary sale that Discshop.se was having. Got every game for only 20kr each, all new and sealed.
UPDATE: the order arrived and I went and picked it up the next day, May 23rd
PlayStation 3:
Battlefield 4
Borderlands 2 - The Premiere Club Edition
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3
Duke Nukem Forever - Duke's Kick Ass Edition
Medal of Honor Warfighter - Limited Edition
Prototype 2 - Limited! Radnet Edition
Rage - Anarchy Edition
XCOM Enemy Unknown - Elite Soldier Pack Edition
Xbox 360:
Battlefield 4
Duke Nukem Forever - Duke's Kick Ass Edition
Medal of Honor Warfighter - Limited Edition
Prototype 2 - Limited! Radnet Edition
XCOM Enemy Unknown - Elite Soldier Pack Edition
Showing posts with label 32x. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 32x. Show all posts
Sunday, May 5, 2019
Thursday, June 22, 2017
TV Broken
Welp, my old SDTV broke yesterday, it makes this weird noise and blinks red with the power indicator. It may be fixable, I dunno. And this just a few days after my 32X was having issues with the sound. Until I get my TV fixed or replaced I'm going to have to resort to alternative ways to see my games, I have my PSP and Vita for remote play on PS3 but that's far from ideal, my best bet is probably to use my USB video grabbers with composite or S-video cables, it may come with a bit of lag and loss of quality in the conversion process but it's better than nothing, at least for now. I also have a couple of smaller older TVs but they are 50hz only and lack most of the cable connections, I think they either have RF only or possibly RF and mono composite on one of them.
Thursday, June 1, 2017
Now Playing - Juni 2017
Staring off this month with an old classic puzzle game called Swing for PlayStation, Ferrari Challenge Trofeo Pirelli on PS2 and the PS2 version of Shadow The Hedgehog.
Smart As... (PlayStation Vita)
Getting a bit tired of this now, my longest record of playing the daily challenge was 45 days in a row. I noticed early on that the game has issues with controls and stuff and it's been that way without change this entire time, it's a deeply flawed game but it has minor moments when it can be very enjoyable, so it's not all bad, it's just far too flawed to be anything special, sadly.
Swing (PlayStation)
Essentially my third top favorite puzzle game of all time after Mercury and Mercury Meltdown on PSP and the ports Mercury Meltdown Remix on PS2 and Mercury Meltdown Revolution on Wii. It's a relatively unknown game for most, so here's what you do, you place numbered orbs on scales, line up three in a row to create chains removing any connected orbs, the numbers work both as weight on the scales and as points and if you stack 5 orbs on each other they collapse into one orb with the combined number value/wight. There are special orbs with other abilities such as bombs that clear every orb they are close to, color switching orbs that do various different things, star orbs that can transform when in contact with other special orbs and so on.
You die when a stack of orbs reaches the top where the orbs are grabbed. You have a manual orb grabber and a row of refilling orbs at the top of the screen.
There's also the aspect of the scales to keep in mind as if you let a heavy orb fall down on a scale when there's a light orb on the other side it will throw the light orb up and depending on the weight difference it will travel so many steps to the side opposite of where it was in regard to the heavy orb on the scale, if the weight it enough it will push the light orb off screen and it will then turn into a star orb and come out the other side or if heavy enough it can pass over and become a bomb the second time, this can go on for as big as the weight difference was, so a super heavy orb with a high number, say 67, the lighter orb will fly over the screen multiple times swifting back and forth between bomb and star orb before landing. It's a very complex game with many things to keep in mind and it's tons of fun.
Ferrari Challenge Trofeo Pirelli (PlayStation 2)
It's been almost exactly a year since I bought and played this game last, so I thought why not play it again, and because I saw no reason not to, I did.
Shadow The Hedgehog (PlayStation 2)
Haven't played the PS2 version in about two years now, I think. I got the GameCube and Xbox versions about a year and a half ago and while they both play a lot better than this with rock solid smooth 60fps framerates and with high color palettes, this version remains the only one that's never frozen on me, even after being my most played version because I owned it since the game was new I've still never had it freeze on me one, and I've played it a lot over the years so it's by far the most stable one to play even if the framerate is choppy as times and the color depth is a bit low, on GameCube it freezes a lot, you can barely make it through a single mission sometimes, on Xbox it can freeze every now and then but you can usually play a few missions at least, on PS2 I can play for hours and complete several playthroughs of the story mode and play through a whole bunch of manually selected levels and still nt see it freeze once, that makes the PS2 version the ultimate winner of the three in my book, the slight graphical and performance advantage the other two have mean very little when you can't enjoy them due to freezing issues, especially on the GameCube. Great game though, I always loved it, it's not perfect but it's great game with tons of content and fun varied gameplay. One of the last great games Sega ever made, together with Sonic Riders, Sonic Riders Zero Gravity and Sonic 06, before they exclusively started making atrocious shit only.
Total Drivin (PlayStation)
An okay racing game with some variety in the form of different types of racing, like sports car street racing, dune buggy racing and rally racing among a few others. It's kind of basic by home console game standards but not as bad as arcade games.
Battle Arena Toshinden (PlayStation)
An early and somewhat basic 3D fighting game, along with games like Virtua Fighter this was the beginning of modern fighting games.
Battle Arena Toshinden 2 (PlayStation)
An excellent sequel that made for a much more involved game than the original, a personal nostalgic classic for me as well as it was the very first 3D fighting game I ever played.
Cardinal Syn (PlayStation)
Another early 3D fighting game, not a great one sadly, it has very simple and unpolished gameplay.
Criticom (PlayStation)
Almost the same game as Cardinal Syn actually, same gameplay style of 3D fighting with same problems, but with far fewer options overall it's even worse.
Motorhead (PlayStation)
A buttery smooth racing game with some nice solid visuals and cool futuristic design, a great game and personal classic, though I only ever had a demo of the PlayStation version, I had the PC version instead, but they're virtually the same.
Psychic Force (PlayStation)
I love the Dreamcast game Psychic Force 2012 but without a functional Dreamcast I'm left to testing the older PlayStation game instead. It's not as good as the excellent Dreamcast game, naturally, but it's still good for what it is. No Regina kills it for me personally as she's one of my top all time favorite characters in all of gaming.
Deathtrap Dungeon (PlayStation)
A dungeon crawler hack-n-slash with traps, it's cool.
Ghen War (Saturn)
A Saturn exclusive first person mech game in similar style of Krazy Ivan.
Sudoku (portable LCD game)
Changed to new batteries in my portable LCD Sudoku game so I can solve some Sudokus again without having to draw lines and write shit down on paper like a filthy animal.
Intellivision Lives! (PlayStation 2)
I completely forgot I had this. I got it back in 2012 while GameStop was selling out their PS2 games cheap alongside a whole bunch of other games but for some reason this one completely slipped my mind and I had actually recently been looking to buy it as I've been curious about Intellivision lately.
It's actually kind of cool, it emulates the old games very well in most cases, some visual glitches are present but nothing major, for this kind of compilation at least it's fairly good.
I've tried most of them and some of the games are definitely better than others, but it's fun being able to play all these old games and see what they're like even if they're not exactly like how they are on the original hardware, like the analog controls aren't emulated properly, the original Intellivision has a 16 way pseudo-analog circle-pad, yet using the analog sticks on PS2 only emulates 8 direction in total, giving far less control in some games than they originally had back in the day, which is a bummer as that was one of the really cool things it did so early in gaming history, at least in my opinion, at least it has an okay way to emulate the 12-button keypad on screen with accurate overlays for each game making it much easier than trying to remember corresponding button combinations, so kudos for that at least.
It's actually got some really cool games on it and I've found quite a lot of favorites already. It's safe to say Intellivision is my oldest favorite console now, I love it.
UPDATE:
I've been enjoying Night Stalker and Tower of Doom the most, those are two really great games and I really like them. So much in fact that I recorded some gameplay footage of them and made some fanart of Night Stalker in Windows Journal!
V-Rally 3 (PlayStation 2)
After having played so much V-Rally and V-Rally 2 recently, and the GBA version of V-Rally 3 in the past, I feel it's time to give V-Rally 3 on PS2 a proper go, I tested it earlier this year when I got it but I didn't continue playing, it was just to test that it worked and to get some first impressions. Now I want to put myself into a bit more and see what it can do, we'll see if I stick with it or not, it all depends on how good it is, I guess, I've been rather spoiled by the other V-Rally games so this has a lot to live up to. So it sucks when you instantly notice the framerate issues, screen tearing and visuals glitches everywhere, like how the entire bodywork of the car just disappears randomly, this happens very often during replays, and how the handling is very low on grip and very high on bouncing all over the fucking place including launching the entire car into the air while driving on normal flat road surfaces. It's not great, it does not surpass V-Rally or V-Rally 2 overall, it adds some new things like detailed vehicle damage and more polygonal detail, but when it's so much glitchier, less optimized and worse to play it's a clear step down in quality. It's still good enough, I've played many worse rally games than this, it's just a disappointment for the series and a lesser game in the genre than what the contemporary competition had to offer, Sega Rally 2 on Dreamcast and PC for example blows this game away in every conceivable way and all the Colin McRae games of the time also do a better job than this in every way, but when even the older V-Rally, Colin McRae and Sega Rally games are better than this overall it was already clear this game wasn't competing for first place anymore and it's understandable the series ended with this title, sad, but makes sense if this was the best they could do.
Pro Rally 2002 (GameCube)
Couldn't resist firing up the only original GameCube rally game I own after having played so many rally games lately. It's a good one, more in line with arcade rally games like Sega Rally 2 than the more simulation based games. I like it, I'd like to get hold of the PS2 version some day as well. It has some really tight handling for the cars, the normal brake can stop just about anything at any speed and the handbrake is exclusively useful for powersliding as it offers little to no braking ability. It's got a mixed bag of visuals though, while the cars and special effects on the cars, like the real-time reflections and shadows look great, the environments look almost a generation behind, especially by comparison with the great looking cars. There's no damage modeling but it has dirt and snow accumulating on the cars as they drive, much like V-Rally 2 had several years earlier on PlayStation, so it's kind of average by contemporary standards of the time. It's got a nice selection of cars, very nice actually, with modern cars and some classics like the Audi Quattro, which I appreciate a lot.
WRC Arcade (PlayStation)
Giving this another go as well, I briefly tested it last month when I got it but I was testing so many new games I only got to dive deeper into a handful of them. As for this one, it's growing on me, it has a very unique feeling to it, it's very slip and slide slippery in the handling, as the name suggests it's not aiming to be a rally simulator so offering something non-standard is fine. It doesn't have damage modeling but it has dynamic dirt on the car, so if you drive in some mud, it gets really dark dirty brown, then if you drive on dry dirt the dust sticks to the car instead so it becomes brighter, and if you drive through water it cleans the car off entirely, it's a nice effect and it makes up for the lack of damage at least a little a bit. V-Rally 2 on PlayStation also had dirt on the car so this isn't the only game of that generation that had effects like this, but it's a nice effect regardless. Overall the game looks great and runs smoothly, it came out in 2002 so it's roughly the same age as V-Rally 3 and Pro Rally 2002 on the next gen consoles, kind of, Pro Rally 2002 was originally released on PC in 2000 or 2001, I forget which year exactly, and was originally called Pro Rally 2001, so it's a little older than the slightly newer PlayStation 2 and GameCube console ports, but regardless, WRC Arcade is good so far and I like it, it's a competent and well made arcade style rally game and it easily competes with the next gen offerings because of this.
I'm glad they showed the original PlayStation some love so late into it's lifespan, it deserved to go out with some stellar titles like this and F1 Arcade, even if F1 Arcade was a bit too choppy framerate wise in my opinion, they should've been able to optimize that game better for a proper solid 25fps at least if you ask me. Oh well, at least this game runs silky smooth, which puts it a relatively clear step above V-Rally 3 on PlayStation 2, with all the minor but constant framerate drops, slowdown and screen tearing issues that game sadly has alongside a whole bunch of glitches.
V-Rally 2 (PlayStation)
Bubsy 3D (PlayStation)
I have two complaints about this game. 1) You turn too slowly. 2) You keep up the running when you stop pressing forward if you're still holding left or right, you need to let go of all directions to stop otherwise he'll keep running, this is an awkward control design choice. Honestly I'm really liking everything else, I love low poly flat shaded 3D graphics and I think this game looks fantastic, I love the cheesy 90s cartoony humor, it's silly, it's colorful, the rest of the controls are fine, I actually really like the jumping as it reminds me of the excellent Jumping Flash! games becuase you get kind of strafing controls with a downward camera angle when you jump to make platform jumping a lot easier, this is something I usually don't like in 3D platformers but here it's some of the best I've ever played. The hate and underrating of this game is wildly incorrect as far as I can tell and most likely nothing more than the typical internet follow-the-leader retardation.
Doom (32X)
Just found out there're give all and god mode cheats for this version, UMAC and UMXZ, finally a way to acquire the BFG9000! It disables entry to the secret level and the final level so you can't get the true ending but that's fine, the BFG makes it well worth it. On a sadder note the sound doesn't seem to play properly, the sound effects are all really low volume during gameplay, it's not suppose to be like that. I hope nothing is wrong with my 32X, I know it's old tech but I only got it about one and a half years ago, I haven't enjoyed it enough for it to break already.
Kawasaki Superbikes (Mega Drive)
Metal Head (32X)
Virtua Racing Deluxe (32X)
Just testing out my other 32X games a few more Mega Drive games to see if they have sound issues too. There's definitely something not right with the 32X sound, certain channels are weird, I guess, as some noises are normal others are really muted and barely make a noise at all, the Sega logo in Virtua Racing uses the 32X sound chip for an engine noise and it sounds really weird, not at all like it should. This really sucks.
Eternal Champions (Mega Drive)
Captured some footage of Trident's stage overkill.
Steel Talons (Mega Drive)
LHX Attack Chopper (Mega Drive)
Night Stalker (PC)
Found a very good homebrew port of the Intellivision classic Night Stalker but it didn't support USB controllers by default, so I also found a program called JoytoKey which let me assign custom keyboard and mouse functions to USB controllers. It works great and is fun to play now.
Star Wars Lethal Alliance (DS, playing on 3DS)
A third person action game with puzzle elements as you control Rianna Saren, a female twi'lek, and her droid companion, it's better in every way on PSP but this is an okay version of the game, easily one of the best games on DS at least.
C.O.P. The Recruit (DS, playing on 3DS)
It's like the GTA Liberty City Stories of DS, a third person open city game, only not as good in any way, it's not bad though, another one of the best games on DS.
G.I. Joe The Rise of Cobra (DS, playing on 3DS)
It's like Loaded or ReLoaded with a G.I. Joe movie license, it's pretty good, yet another one of the best games on DS.
Project Rub (DS, playing on 3DS)
A minigame style game with lots of weird stuff, I don't know what to even think of it yet, it's very different.
The Rub Rabbits! (DS, playing on 3DS)
The virtually identical sequel to Project Rub. I still don't get it, if anything I'm more confused.
Grand Theft Auto Chinatown Wars (DS, playing on 3DS)
It's more visually interesting than the PSP port thanks to the cartoony celshaded style, but it plays worse due to the poor controls and all the touch screen shit you're forced to deal with, at least on PSP it was just QTE button stuff and as bad as that is I can at least live with it if it's short and not too frequent, but with motion controls such as poor touch screen controls I have a lot less patience and it really hurts the game, which is a shame as this is a good game otherwise.
Soleil (Mega Drive)
A clone of The Legend of Zelda A Link to the Past.
Marvel Nemesis Rise of the Imperfects (DS, playing on 3DS)
A broken free-moving fighting game with some entertainment value. The AI is some of the worst I've ever seen but because of how extremely unbalanced the game is combined with how poorly it controls I'd say the AI being downright broken is what makes the game playable at all, if the opponent you were fighting had been smarter the game would've been unplayable with most characters as brute force very easily wins. On the flipside, playing as a character like Venom who is one of the most dangerous characters in the game, you can just wail on until you win against anyone you're up against, even technically more powerful opponents are easy to defeat because Venom isn't just overpowered, he also has very effective attacks that are easy and fast to pull off. So you can have a rather good time plowing through a few matches as Venom if you've had a bad day.
Visually it looks like a mid 90s PlayStation or Saturn budget title, the only good thing is that it allows the game to run smoothly and have rather big levels to fight on with some destructible scenery.
The character roster is quite good, with a nice and even mix of male and female characters, sadly it's a mixed bag of characters with only some being recognizable to anyone but the most avid Marvel fans. Personally I don't care much for Marvel, I like Scarlet Spider, Venom and Scream from the 90s Spider-Man comics as part of the clone saga, or whatever it's been called, I think I read that somewhere, and some of the characters in X-Men Evolution, that's it, so for me most of these characters are either completely unknown to me or characters I don't like or care for to begin with.
Sadly the clone saga and X-Men Evolution are not what this game is based on so none of the versions of those characters are in this, at best there are some versions of characters like Venom from Spider-Man and Storm from X-Men in this but they're just the basic-franchise-in-general versions of themselves, not from any specific series, at least as far as I can tell as someone who isn't a Marvel fan, it seems like it's closer to stuff like Pocket Fighter or Marvel Vs. Capcom or something, it's just a bunch of franchises thrown together to make a game with no deeper thought or plan to it.
Smart As... (PlayStation Vita)
Getting a bit tired of this now, my longest record of playing the daily challenge was 45 days in a row. I noticed early on that the game has issues with controls and stuff and it's been that way without change this entire time, it's a deeply flawed game but it has minor moments when it can be very enjoyable, so it's not all bad, it's just far too flawed to be anything special, sadly.
Swing (PlayStation)
Essentially my third top favorite puzzle game of all time after Mercury and Mercury Meltdown on PSP and the ports Mercury Meltdown Remix on PS2 and Mercury Meltdown Revolution on Wii. It's a relatively unknown game for most, so here's what you do, you place numbered orbs on scales, line up three in a row to create chains removing any connected orbs, the numbers work both as weight on the scales and as points and if you stack 5 orbs on each other they collapse into one orb with the combined number value/wight. There are special orbs with other abilities such as bombs that clear every orb they are close to, color switching orbs that do various different things, star orbs that can transform when in contact with other special orbs and so on.
You die when a stack of orbs reaches the top where the orbs are grabbed. You have a manual orb grabber and a row of refilling orbs at the top of the screen.
There's also the aspect of the scales to keep in mind as if you let a heavy orb fall down on a scale when there's a light orb on the other side it will throw the light orb up and depending on the weight difference it will travel so many steps to the side opposite of where it was in regard to the heavy orb on the scale, if the weight it enough it will push the light orb off screen and it will then turn into a star orb and come out the other side or if heavy enough it can pass over and become a bomb the second time, this can go on for as big as the weight difference was, so a super heavy orb with a high number, say 67, the lighter orb will fly over the screen multiple times swifting back and forth between bomb and star orb before landing. It's a very complex game with many things to keep in mind and it's tons of fun.
Ferrari Challenge Trofeo Pirelli (PlayStation 2)
It's been almost exactly a year since I bought and played this game last, so I thought why not play it again, and because I saw no reason not to, I did.
Shadow The Hedgehog (PlayStation 2)
Haven't played the PS2 version in about two years now, I think. I got the GameCube and Xbox versions about a year and a half ago and while they both play a lot better than this with rock solid smooth 60fps framerates and with high color palettes, this version remains the only one that's never frozen on me, even after being my most played version because I owned it since the game was new I've still never had it freeze on me one, and I've played it a lot over the years so it's by far the most stable one to play even if the framerate is choppy as times and the color depth is a bit low, on GameCube it freezes a lot, you can barely make it through a single mission sometimes, on Xbox it can freeze every now and then but you can usually play a few missions at least, on PS2 I can play for hours and complete several playthroughs of the story mode and play through a whole bunch of manually selected levels and still nt see it freeze once, that makes the PS2 version the ultimate winner of the three in my book, the slight graphical and performance advantage the other two have mean very little when you can't enjoy them due to freezing issues, especially on the GameCube. Great game though, I always loved it, it's not perfect but it's great game with tons of content and fun varied gameplay. One of the last great games Sega ever made, together with Sonic Riders, Sonic Riders Zero Gravity and Sonic 06, before they exclusively started making atrocious shit only.
Total Drivin (PlayStation)
An okay racing game with some variety in the form of different types of racing, like sports car street racing, dune buggy racing and rally racing among a few others. It's kind of basic by home console game standards but not as bad as arcade games.
Battle Arena Toshinden (PlayStation)
An early and somewhat basic 3D fighting game, along with games like Virtua Fighter this was the beginning of modern fighting games.
Battle Arena Toshinden 2 (PlayStation)
An excellent sequel that made for a much more involved game than the original, a personal nostalgic classic for me as well as it was the very first 3D fighting game I ever played.
Cardinal Syn (PlayStation)
Another early 3D fighting game, not a great one sadly, it has very simple and unpolished gameplay.
Criticom (PlayStation)
Almost the same game as Cardinal Syn actually, same gameplay style of 3D fighting with same problems, but with far fewer options overall it's even worse.
Motorhead (PlayStation)
A buttery smooth racing game with some nice solid visuals and cool futuristic design, a great game and personal classic, though I only ever had a demo of the PlayStation version, I had the PC version instead, but they're virtually the same.
Psychic Force (PlayStation)
I love the Dreamcast game Psychic Force 2012 but without a functional Dreamcast I'm left to testing the older PlayStation game instead. It's not as good as the excellent Dreamcast game, naturally, but it's still good for what it is. No Regina kills it for me personally as she's one of my top all time favorite characters in all of gaming.
Deathtrap Dungeon (PlayStation)
A dungeon crawler hack-n-slash with traps, it's cool.
Ghen War (Saturn)
A Saturn exclusive first person mech game in similar style of Krazy Ivan.
Sudoku (portable LCD game)
Changed to new batteries in my portable LCD Sudoku game so I can solve some Sudokus again without having to draw lines and write shit down on paper like a filthy animal.
Intellivision Lives! (PlayStation 2)
I completely forgot I had this. I got it back in 2012 while GameStop was selling out their PS2 games cheap alongside a whole bunch of other games but for some reason this one completely slipped my mind and I had actually recently been looking to buy it as I've been curious about Intellivision lately.
It's actually kind of cool, it emulates the old games very well in most cases, some visual glitches are present but nothing major, for this kind of compilation at least it's fairly good.
I've tried most of them and some of the games are definitely better than others, but it's fun being able to play all these old games and see what they're like even if they're not exactly like how they are on the original hardware, like the analog controls aren't emulated properly, the original Intellivision has a 16 way pseudo-analog circle-pad, yet using the analog sticks on PS2 only emulates 8 direction in total, giving far less control in some games than they originally had back in the day, which is a bummer as that was one of the really cool things it did so early in gaming history, at least in my opinion, at least it has an okay way to emulate the 12-button keypad on screen with accurate overlays for each game making it much easier than trying to remember corresponding button combinations, so kudos for that at least.
It's actually got some really cool games on it and I've found quite a lot of favorites already. It's safe to say Intellivision is my oldest favorite console now, I love it.
UPDATE:
I've been enjoying Night Stalker and Tower of Doom the most, those are two really great games and I really like them. So much in fact that I recorded some gameplay footage of them and made some fanart of Night Stalker in Windows Journal!
V-Rally 3 (PlayStation 2)
After having played so much V-Rally and V-Rally 2 recently, and the GBA version of V-Rally 3 in the past, I feel it's time to give V-Rally 3 on PS2 a proper go, I tested it earlier this year when I got it but I didn't continue playing, it was just to test that it worked and to get some first impressions. Now I want to put myself into a bit more and see what it can do, we'll see if I stick with it or not, it all depends on how good it is, I guess, I've been rather spoiled by the other V-Rally games so this has a lot to live up to. So it sucks when you instantly notice the framerate issues, screen tearing and visuals glitches everywhere, like how the entire bodywork of the car just disappears randomly, this happens very often during replays, and how the handling is very low on grip and very high on bouncing all over the fucking place including launching the entire car into the air while driving on normal flat road surfaces. It's not great, it does not surpass V-Rally or V-Rally 2 overall, it adds some new things like detailed vehicle damage and more polygonal detail, but when it's so much glitchier, less optimized and worse to play it's a clear step down in quality. It's still good enough, I've played many worse rally games than this, it's just a disappointment for the series and a lesser game in the genre than what the contemporary competition had to offer, Sega Rally 2 on Dreamcast and PC for example blows this game away in every conceivable way and all the Colin McRae games of the time also do a better job than this in every way, but when even the older V-Rally, Colin McRae and Sega Rally games are better than this overall it was already clear this game wasn't competing for first place anymore and it's understandable the series ended with this title, sad, but makes sense if this was the best they could do.
Pro Rally 2002 (GameCube)
Couldn't resist firing up the only original GameCube rally game I own after having played so many rally games lately. It's a good one, more in line with arcade rally games like Sega Rally 2 than the more simulation based games. I like it, I'd like to get hold of the PS2 version some day as well. It has some really tight handling for the cars, the normal brake can stop just about anything at any speed and the handbrake is exclusively useful for powersliding as it offers little to no braking ability. It's got a mixed bag of visuals though, while the cars and special effects on the cars, like the real-time reflections and shadows look great, the environments look almost a generation behind, especially by comparison with the great looking cars. There's no damage modeling but it has dirt and snow accumulating on the cars as they drive, much like V-Rally 2 had several years earlier on PlayStation, so it's kind of average by contemporary standards of the time. It's got a nice selection of cars, very nice actually, with modern cars and some classics like the Audi Quattro, which I appreciate a lot.
WRC Arcade (PlayStation)
Giving this another go as well, I briefly tested it last month when I got it but I was testing so many new games I only got to dive deeper into a handful of them. As for this one, it's growing on me, it has a very unique feeling to it, it's very slip and slide slippery in the handling, as the name suggests it's not aiming to be a rally simulator so offering something non-standard is fine. It doesn't have damage modeling but it has dynamic dirt on the car, so if you drive in some mud, it gets really dark dirty brown, then if you drive on dry dirt the dust sticks to the car instead so it becomes brighter, and if you drive through water it cleans the car off entirely, it's a nice effect and it makes up for the lack of damage at least a little a bit. V-Rally 2 on PlayStation also had dirt on the car so this isn't the only game of that generation that had effects like this, but it's a nice effect regardless. Overall the game looks great and runs smoothly, it came out in 2002 so it's roughly the same age as V-Rally 3 and Pro Rally 2002 on the next gen consoles, kind of, Pro Rally 2002 was originally released on PC in 2000 or 2001, I forget which year exactly, and was originally called Pro Rally 2001, so it's a little older than the slightly newer PlayStation 2 and GameCube console ports, but regardless, WRC Arcade is good so far and I like it, it's a competent and well made arcade style rally game and it easily competes with the next gen offerings because of this.
I'm glad they showed the original PlayStation some love so late into it's lifespan, it deserved to go out with some stellar titles like this and F1 Arcade, even if F1 Arcade was a bit too choppy framerate wise in my opinion, they should've been able to optimize that game better for a proper solid 25fps at least if you ask me. Oh well, at least this game runs silky smooth, which puts it a relatively clear step above V-Rally 3 on PlayStation 2, with all the minor but constant framerate drops, slowdown and screen tearing issues that game sadly has alongside a whole bunch of glitches.
V-Rally 2 (PlayStation)
Bubsy 3D (PlayStation)
I have two complaints about this game. 1) You turn too slowly. 2) You keep up the running when you stop pressing forward if you're still holding left or right, you need to let go of all directions to stop otherwise he'll keep running, this is an awkward control design choice. Honestly I'm really liking everything else, I love low poly flat shaded 3D graphics and I think this game looks fantastic, I love the cheesy 90s cartoony humor, it's silly, it's colorful, the rest of the controls are fine, I actually really like the jumping as it reminds me of the excellent Jumping Flash! games becuase you get kind of strafing controls with a downward camera angle when you jump to make platform jumping a lot easier, this is something I usually don't like in 3D platformers but here it's some of the best I've ever played. The hate and underrating of this game is wildly incorrect as far as I can tell and most likely nothing more than the typical internet follow-the-leader retardation.
Doom (32X)
Just found out there're give all and god mode cheats for this version, UMAC and UMXZ, finally a way to acquire the BFG9000! It disables entry to the secret level and the final level so you can't get the true ending but that's fine, the BFG makes it well worth it. On a sadder note the sound doesn't seem to play properly, the sound effects are all really low volume during gameplay, it's not suppose to be like that. I hope nothing is wrong with my 32X, I know it's old tech but I only got it about one and a half years ago, I haven't enjoyed it enough for it to break already.
Kawasaki Superbikes (Mega Drive)
Metal Head (32X)
Virtua Racing Deluxe (32X)
Just testing out my other 32X games a few more Mega Drive games to see if they have sound issues too. There's definitely something not right with the 32X sound, certain channels are weird, I guess, as some noises are normal others are really muted and barely make a noise at all, the Sega logo in Virtua Racing uses the 32X sound chip for an engine noise and it sounds really weird, not at all like it should. This really sucks.
Eternal Champions (Mega Drive)
Captured some footage of Trident's stage overkill.
Steel Talons (Mega Drive)
LHX Attack Chopper (Mega Drive)
Night Stalker (PC)
Found a very good homebrew port of the Intellivision classic Night Stalker but it didn't support USB controllers by default, so I also found a program called JoytoKey which let me assign custom keyboard and mouse functions to USB controllers. It works great and is fun to play now.
Star Wars Lethal Alliance (DS, playing on 3DS)
A third person action game with puzzle elements as you control Rianna Saren, a female twi'lek, and her droid companion, it's better in every way on PSP but this is an okay version of the game, easily one of the best games on DS at least.
C.O.P. The Recruit (DS, playing on 3DS)
It's like the GTA Liberty City Stories of DS, a third person open city game, only not as good in any way, it's not bad though, another one of the best games on DS.
G.I. Joe The Rise of Cobra (DS, playing on 3DS)
It's like Loaded or ReLoaded with a G.I. Joe movie license, it's pretty good, yet another one of the best games on DS.
Project Rub (DS, playing on 3DS)
A minigame style game with lots of weird stuff, I don't know what to even think of it yet, it's very different.
The Rub Rabbits! (DS, playing on 3DS)
The virtually identical sequel to Project Rub. I still don't get it, if anything I'm more confused.
Grand Theft Auto Chinatown Wars (DS, playing on 3DS)
It's more visually interesting than the PSP port thanks to the cartoony celshaded style, but it plays worse due to the poor controls and all the touch screen shit you're forced to deal with, at least on PSP it was just QTE button stuff and as bad as that is I can at least live with it if it's short and not too frequent, but with motion controls such as poor touch screen controls I have a lot less patience and it really hurts the game, which is a shame as this is a good game otherwise.
Soleil (Mega Drive)
A clone of The Legend of Zelda A Link to the Past.
Marvel Nemesis Rise of the Imperfects (DS, playing on 3DS)
A broken free-moving fighting game with some entertainment value. The AI is some of the worst I've ever seen but because of how extremely unbalanced the game is combined with how poorly it controls I'd say the AI being downright broken is what makes the game playable at all, if the opponent you were fighting had been smarter the game would've been unplayable with most characters as brute force very easily wins. On the flipside, playing as a character like Venom who is one of the most dangerous characters in the game, you can just wail on until you win against anyone you're up against, even technically more powerful opponents are easy to defeat because Venom isn't just overpowered, he also has very effective attacks that are easy and fast to pull off. So you can have a rather good time plowing through a few matches as Venom if you've had a bad day.
Visually it looks like a mid 90s PlayStation or Saturn budget title, the only good thing is that it allows the game to run smoothly and have rather big levels to fight on with some destructible scenery.
The character roster is quite good, with a nice and even mix of male and female characters, sadly it's a mixed bag of characters with only some being recognizable to anyone but the most avid Marvel fans. Personally I don't care much for Marvel, I like Scarlet Spider, Venom and Scream from the 90s Spider-Man comics as part of the clone saga, or whatever it's been called, I think I read that somewhere, and some of the characters in X-Men Evolution, that's it, so for me most of these characters are either completely unknown to me or characters I don't like or care for to begin with.
Sadly the clone saga and X-Men Evolution are not what this game is based on so none of the versions of those characters are in this, at best there are some versions of characters like Venom from Spider-Man and Storm from X-Men in this but they're just the basic-franchise-in-general versions of themselves, not from any specific series, at least as far as I can tell as someone who isn't a Marvel fan, it seems like it's closer to stuff like Pocket Fighter or Marvel Vs. Capcom or something, it's just a bunch of franchises thrown together to make a game with no deeper thought or plan to it.
Tuesday, October 18, 2016
Now Playing - Oktober 2016
Haven't played much this month, just sporadic short bursts of gameplay in random games, some new, some old.
SoulCalibur IV (Xbox 360)
Finally decided to get this game. Have to say I'm thoroughly disappointed. It lacks pretty much every single thing that made the previous games so great. There's an almost complete lack of story more and locked away fundamental content you have to pay extra for that for example the vastly superior SoulCalibur III on PS2 had in it are a couple of top reasons why this was so awful, also the controls are a lot more sluggish and unresponsive and the animations more jerky and don't transition anywhere near as well as they did in previous instalments, and it's technically ugly too, every SoulCalibur before this looked more visually impressive, I'd say even Soul Blade on PlayStation was better looking, at least from a design point of view and how well it managed to push the hardware it was on because it still holds up well today and it a lot more fun than this game is, also Yoda fucking sucks and the whole Star Wars thing in this game is a fucking joke that should never have been told, this is worse than SoulCalibur II's stupid bonus characters bullshit with the more shallow than a cardboard cutout lack-of-character Link from The Legend of Zelda for the GameCube version, the painfully unfitting and forced inclusion of one of Tekken's worst characters Heihachi Mishima for the PS2 version and a very lacking rendition of a less than optimal version of the otherwise badass comic book character Spawn for the Xbox version, no really, there's a medieval Spawn they could've used that would've fit the game perfectly and been a fucking blast to play as, such a waste, still it was a better game in all respects than this disappointing turd.
The Adventure of Willy Beamish (Mega CD/MS-DOS)
Trying out this old game for the first time. It's not bad, it's not good, it's a mixed bag. It's got one of the best intro songs I've ever heard though and I like some of the humor and characters. The Mega CD version has awful voice acting, slow loading times and choppy animations so overall the MS-DOS version is far superior with silent text based dialog, shorter loading times and smoother animations, also the MS-DOS version has far more colors and therefor better details. I like how there are a lot of funny death animations, it makes up for the fact that the game is overly cryptic with retarded logic for puzzle solving a lot of the time causing you to die without having a clue what to do to avoid it. An unbalanced game to play but still an interesting experience.
Steel Talons (Mega Drive)
Eternal Champions (Mega Drive)
Virtua Racing Deluxe (32X)
Race Drivin' (Mega Drive)
CastleVania Symphony of The Night (PlayStation)
UniRally (Super Nintendo)
SoulCalibur IV (Xbox 360)
Finally decided to get this game. Have to say I'm thoroughly disappointed. It lacks pretty much every single thing that made the previous games so great. There's an almost complete lack of story more and locked away fundamental content you have to pay extra for that for example the vastly superior SoulCalibur III on PS2 had in it are a couple of top reasons why this was so awful, also the controls are a lot more sluggish and unresponsive and the animations more jerky and don't transition anywhere near as well as they did in previous instalments, and it's technically ugly too, every SoulCalibur before this looked more visually impressive, I'd say even Soul Blade on PlayStation was better looking, at least from a design point of view and how well it managed to push the hardware it was on because it still holds up well today and it a lot more fun than this game is, also Yoda fucking sucks and the whole Star Wars thing in this game is a fucking joke that should never have been told, this is worse than SoulCalibur II's stupid bonus characters bullshit with the more shallow than a cardboard cutout lack-of-character Link from The Legend of Zelda for the GameCube version, the painfully unfitting and forced inclusion of one of Tekken's worst characters Heihachi Mishima for the PS2 version and a very lacking rendition of a less than optimal version of the otherwise badass comic book character Spawn for the Xbox version, no really, there's a medieval Spawn they could've used that would've fit the game perfectly and been a fucking blast to play as, such a waste, still it was a better game in all respects than this disappointing turd.
The Adventure of Willy Beamish (Mega CD/MS-DOS)
Trying out this old game for the first time. It's not bad, it's not good, it's a mixed bag. It's got one of the best intro songs I've ever heard though and I like some of the humor and characters. The Mega CD version has awful voice acting, slow loading times and choppy animations so overall the MS-DOS version is far superior with silent text based dialog, shorter loading times and smoother animations, also the MS-DOS version has far more colors and therefor better details. I like how there are a lot of funny death animations, it makes up for the fact that the game is overly cryptic with retarded logic for puzzle solving a lot of the time causing you to die without having a clue what to do to avoid it. An unbalanced game to play but still an interesting experience.
Steel Talons (Mega Drive)
Eternal Champions (Mega Drive)
Virtua Racing Deluxe (32X)
Race Drivin' (Mega Drive)
CastleVania Symphony of The Night (PlayStation)
UniRally (Super Nintendo)
Friday, July 1, 2016
Now Playing - Juli 2016
Playing some of the stuff I was playing at the end of Juni but also some of the new games I ordered.
Doom (32X)
The Ultimate Doom (the Doom 3 Resurrection of Evil version for Xbox played on Xbox 360)
Doom 3 Resurrection of Evil (Xbox, played on Xbox 360)
Quake 2 (Quake 4 Bonus Disc version for Xbox 360)
Quake 3 Revolution (PlayStation 2)
Quake 4 (Xbox 360)
I wanted to give this game a chance but damn it sucks, the framerate is atrocious, some of the worst I've seen on Xbox 360, the visuals are low res and look worse in many cases than Doom 3 and Doom 3 Resurrection of Evil do on Xbox, the gameplay is constantly interrupted by stuff having to do with the "story" and other marines that are with you, it freezes every now and then forcing me to reboot and the enemies disappear after they die so fast that I barely ever get too see what it was I was even fighting because the darkness is even worse than Doom 3 was making it hard to see anything at the best of times! Sure, some of the guns have built in flashlights but they're small and ineffective so most of the game is just fumbling around in the pitch black darkness not knowing what to do because the objectives are vague as shit and you have no map and most doors are locked making it an extremely linear experience where you mostly just run around in circles until you find the one door that can be opened now, they all the same with no indication they've been unlocked or anything either so it's really just about trial and error until you come across the right way to go. Also the turret sections are plenty and they all fucking suck. I doubt I'll be able to endure through to the end of this game, it's just wearing on me so much every minute feels like an hour. If only there was more action it could've at least kept my interest up a bit but enemies are far too few and generic, at least this early in the game, to be interesting to fight. A custom soundtrack with good music is a must, the game does not provide that for you so you have to bring your own tunes, that's fine, I have plenty on my Xbox 360 harddrive, but after how Quake 2 did everything so perfect and right it's very hard to cope with all these downgrades that Quake 4 brings to the table. Quake 2 is still one of the best games ever made and I love it to bits, this sadly is one of the worst games ever made and a terrible sequel in every sense and I wish they would've just left it in development hell for a few more years until they at least had a game that worked on fundamental levels unlike the fucking failfest this sadly turned out to be.
Ferrari Challenge Trofeo Pirelli (PS2)
Red Zone (Mega Drive)
This game is awesome, a top-down helicopter game with some on-foot missions. It's very impressive and does some really cool things to get 3D effects and such. The biggest flaw this game has remains the insane difficulty, much like Battletoads on Entertainment System it's a technical marvel and a pleasure to behold and play but you won't be able to breeze through it anytime soon. Thankfully this game, unlike Battletoads, has a password system with some nice codes for level select and stuff so it's far more lenient in that regard.
Mega Games 6 Vol. 2 (Mega Drive)
A nice collection of games containing Alien Storm, Super Thunder Blade, Super Monaco GP, Super Hang-On, Columns and World Cup Italia.
I'm mostly playing Alien Storm and Super Thunder Blade as I already have Super Monaco GP on separate cartridge and for the rest I only really like Super Hang-On and even then not that much, haven't tried World Cup Italia yet, I don't care for sports games, especially football and ice hockey they're just the worst, and I have many versions of Columns so I don't need to bother with that at all, I know exactly what it is and have played it plenty.
Alien Storm is awesome and it was worth getting this collection cartridge for that game alone, the rest are a nice and welcome bonus though.
Super Thunder Blade is a game I have other versions of as well so nothing new, I've played it plenty, but this is the first time I've played the Mega Drive original, closest I had before this was the version in Mega Drive Collection for PS2.
Jimmy White's Whirlwind Snooker (Mega Drive)
I don't care much for sports games in general, and pool, snooker, billiards and the like are no exceptions, but this is a 3D polygonal game on Mega Drive and it's made by the same guy who made the excellent Mercury games on PSP, Archer Maclean.
The Story of Thor (Mega Drive)
Beyond Oasis is a better name for it but the content remains the same. I recently played through this but now I have my very own copy and that's awesome! Didn't come cheap though, it remains one of the most expensive games on Mega Drive you can buy. I got it at a somewhat reasonable price compared to what I've seen on ebay and such places.
Top Gear Rally (Game Boy Advance)
Another good rally game for GBA alongside the excellent V-Rally 3. The graphics in this are similar to the original Need For Speed and 32-bit versions of Road Rash with scrolling 2D backgrounds at angles that make them appear as if they are 3D with textures, very nice looking. It plays well but the difficulty is up there, it's one of the harder rally games I've played. Between this, V-Rally 3 and Colin McRae Rally 2.0 and some other okay ones like GT Advance 2 Rally Racing it really makes me wonder why Sega Rally Championship turned out so bad, GBA can absolutely do good rally games and the older Sega Rally games were great so how they fucked up the GBA game so royally is beyond me at this point. Thankfully I don't ever have to play it again, I have several better racing and rally games for GBA to enjoy now so fuck you Sega Rally Championship on GBA, you suck and it was an absolute displeasure ever trying to play you. Hooray for good GBA rally games like Top Gear Rally!
Wing Commander Prophecy (Game Boy Advance)
A 3D space action flight-sim with good visuals and all. Another good game that helps prove that the GBA had a lot more to offer than just ports of old Super Nintendo games.
MTV Sports Snowboarding (PlayStation)
One of the very select few sports games I enjoy. It holds up very well. I always felt there were two good snowboarding games of that generation, this and Coolboarders 2, and of the two this is the better one by far, Coolboarders 2 is a bit more playful fun and has a nostalgic value to me more than anything, while this is an objectively superior and much more solid game.
Fade To Black (PlayStation)
This is the sequel to the classic platformer Flashback. It's not a perfect game but it's enjoyable and interesting. I succeeds with making me want to play on to see what happens next.
Stranglehold (Xbox 360)
A great third person shooter action game I go back to every now and then for a guaranteed good time. Also a good game to relieve some aggression in. It still looks fantastic, they really did a fantastic job on the technical side, it's a visual treat that set a high standard for other games to follow, maybe a little too high as not many has lived up to the same level, it's a very impressive game and with good gameplay to back up the technical and visual quality. I recommend this to all action fans out there, especially John Woo film fans and anyone who liked his movie Hard Boiled as this game is the official sequel to that movie.
Final Fantasy VII (PlayStation)
Disc 1, at Gold Saucer, got Yuffie.
Probotector (Game Boy)
Hard but awesome classic.
Super Mario Land (Game Boy)
Always fun to play through.
Bomb Jack (Game Boy)
A fun time waster.
Impact Racing (PlayStation)
Why is there no behind the car views in my game? When I look on youtube literally every video I see has at least two behind the car views to pick from beside the default bumper cam, one video had a guy even mention that you change views with the square button, but in my game there's no mention of being able to switch views in the manual for square, it just says square is the brake, which isn't correct either as square has no effect in game and braking is done by pressing down on the steering cross!
The screenshots on the back of the packaging of my game are only taken from bumper cam and no button or combination of buttons work in game to switch views.
I'm beginning to think the PAL release skipped including the behind the car views entirely. If that's the case this game will not get much play from me as it isn't particularly enjoyable to play in that view at all, which is why every video on youtube understandable has the person playing switching to a better view!
It's still somewhat playable as it is but I HATE driving in bumper cam and this game clearly wasn't made to be played that way. I can tolerate bumper cam only in some games, but this clearly has a behind the car view in every example i can find but my own copy, so why can't I just get it to work!? Ahh! Infuriating!
It still has awesome music though.
FlatOut 2 (PlayStation 2)
It was as I expected from having played the upgraded versions Ultimate Carnage on Xbox 360 and Head On on PSP. Beautiful to look at with lots of detailed destruction but virtually impossible to win a single race in due to skilled opponent AI and a driving physics engine that doesn't like you very much.
The ragdoll-launching minigames are still what I enjoy the most; driving a rocket-powered car down a ramp only to launch the driver out the front window of the car into some absurd oversized game arena like bowling or basketball just never gets old.
Raceway Drag & Stock Racing (PlayStation 2)
I couldn't test much as most stuff needs to be unlocked by playing through the championship mode, but the few races I could partake in were okay, the framerate was a bit choppy when all 16 cars were on screen at once during stock car races, but as they scattered a bit over the track after a lap or two it ran smoothly for the most part until the race was over. It reminded me of early Dreamcast games visually more so than any PS2 games from 2006.
R:Racing (PlayStation 2)
It's every bit as good as it was on Xbox last time I played it. Now I'd like to get hold of the GameCube version some day too for a complete set.
Turok Evolution (PlayStation 2)
Wow was this a mixed experience. It's kinda ugly for the most part, even for a 2002 release these are horribly dated visuals, in all honesty the older N64 Turok games look better than this.
It's pretty bland in gameplay as well, at least so far. I liked the idea of the flying sections that were a bit like Panzer Dragoon but sadly they had one hit kills whenever you touched anything, including the randomly spawning invisible walls!!
It became a test of patience as the frustration of having to reload the same sections again and again as I would just randomly die in mid air while far away from any visible objects, enemies or other dangers that could've killed me, and only sometimes I'd die in the same place, mostly it changed at random, but after countless tries and three hours later trying to get through a part of the game that otherwise would've taken less than half an hour I got past it and was back doing the normal FPS stuff again. However, later segments of the game become very long and because this game has no in-game checkpoints it's back to the beginning of the entire level every time you die, which can also happen at random for no apparent reason now just like in the flying missions which were super short and took over three hours due to this bullshit!! I'm not doing that with levels that are already long as they are without having to restart them at random intervals.
Sky Odyssey (PlayStation 2)
An adventure game in flight simulation form. It's hard and requires precise flying from the start. I've managed to get past the first level but that's it.
I love that it allows you to customize your place a bit. I'd love more options to do so but a paint job and emblem editor are nice and I appreciate it even if the emblem editor is the weakest I've ever encountered in a game and nowhere near what you can do in Rage Racer, R4 Ridge Racer Type 4 or the Armored Core series.
I'm impressed by how detailed the flying physics are, they simulate airflow in a way no other game I know does.
An interesting thing to note with this game is that while it's a very early release for the PS2 it still has a 60hz option, making this the earliest and oldest PS2 game with a 60hz option that I'm aware of.
Britney's Dance Beat (PlayStation 2)
I've always wondered what this game was like. Now I know. It's a very basic rhythm game with a Britney Spears theme. Not much more to say. I am terrible at rhythm games in general and this was one of the hardest and least forgiving ones I've ever played, which is weird as you'd think a game for Britney Spears fans would be more lenient to non-gamers, beginners and people like me with no sense of rhythm, so I couldn't get anywhere in the main Audition mode and I can safely say I'll never ever be able to unlock Britney. Yeah, the Britney pat of the game feels very tucked away as anything to do with her and fanservice of her is locked away and needs to be unlocked before you can see or use it. You'd think she and the fanservice stuff like music videos etc. would be the stuff you had unlocked by default and other characters and stuff would come later seeing as this is a product for fans of her first and a dance and rhythm game second, but it feels like the opposite is true.
Road Rage 3 (PlayStation 2)
An excellent drift racing game, easily the best in that genre that I've played. Sure, there are other racing games I love even more that has similar things in it like DT Racer, but as a game focused on this type of racing it does an excellent job at what it does and is a lot of fun to play, and successfully pulling off long consecutive drifts both up and down tight and technically challenging mountain roads feels endlessly satisfying.
It runs silky smooth and looks fairly nice too, nothing overly impressive to look at but at least it has no issues with the framerate. I just wish they could've had some proper reflections on the cars.
A fun fact to note is that this game, while originally developed and published by Atlus in Japan it was published by the infamous Phoenix Games here in Europe. As far as I know that makes for the only good game they've ever published.
The Getaway Black Monday (PlayStation 2)
Well this was a disappointment. It's uglier than the original Getaway, it has a much worse framerate, it controls worse with much worse vehicle crash physics, there's lots of glitches and I even saw hug chunks of the graphics pop in and out of existence while I was standing still so you can't blame it on loading new geometry, it was just glitchy, and some parts were just not there, you could see through the ground and nothing I did changed that, going away and coming back so the game loaded the area again changed nothing, it's just poorly made it seems.
That being said it's still an okay free roaming game with a nice big chunk of London realistically recreated in virtual form and there is still some fun to be had, the first game just did it much better is all.
Starsky & Hutch (GameCube)
A good version of the game but I prefer the GBA version a lot more. If anything this makes me appreciate the GBA version even more as it manages to do almost everything this version does but on infinitely less powerful hardware and more streamlined, this takes forever to do anything and feels drawn out and convoluted by comparison. Still, it's nice to have another GameCube game as that part of my collection is crippled by default due to GameCube not having a lot of games I want, so any game that can help fill it out a bit is most welcome.
Metro 2033 (Xbox 360)
This is literally unplayable. The forced auto walking ruins it. I've already died multiple times simply because I can't stop the character from walking over edged falling to his death and I've just started playing, it's a whole project trying to line him up to press a button because he just walks past everything! It's broken by design. I don't understand how anyone can play this. By far the worst controls in any game I've ever played spanning the last 30 years. At first I thought it may just be some really obscure glitch but i found nothing online about it and it's there with all controllers I have, no settings change this, I've tried rebooting, I've tried installing the disc, I've tried deleting all the game data and nothing i do changes it so as bad as it is I guess they wanted it that way. It's unbelievably bad yet I've read or heard nothing about this as a complaint anywhere? I don't get it. How does anyone cope with this?
He just auto walked through a wall so I skipped a whole part of the level and ended up in some completely other scene I haven't seen before. This is the glitchiest game I've played in a long time.
For "fun" (as in desperation) I went to my storage and dug out one of my old original Xbox 360 controllers, I have two and they're both broken in different ways so I got the one that at least sporadically works, and plugged it in via my old half working charge & play cable and battery pack because I thought to myself this is the only thing I haven't tried yet and it's not going to work but at least it'll be more fun trying to see how little this thing works than actually trying to play this crap with a working controller.. turns out it's the only controller I own that doesn't have the auto walking problem so I've been trying to use it to play the game for a while and I can't say I wanna change my score at all, this game even with working controls is awful with constant in-game cutscenes (if they only wanted to make a horror b-movie why did they make a game in the first place?), quick time events, glitches out the fracking wazoo (now IA characters and enemies glitch through walls as well, so it wasn't just my own character earlier who can do it, it's a feature everyone can enjoy!!), lackluster weapons, dark and unevenly detailed visuals (doom 3 on original Xbox feels like it's played out outdoors on a bright sunny day compared to this), the one thing I've liked so far was a hot prostitute looking character that walked past as I was contextually forced to sit at a table and drink alcohol while listening to some dialog I cared nothing about as she disappeared as quickly as she popped up outta nowhere. I hate how there's no good display of information, everything is hidden away so you're getting little to no tactical feedback and then there are all the little things, for example like how you can't have the pointer "compass" on screen without having everything else tucked away, you can't even run with it because the character keeps flailing his arms madly if you do so you can't look at the damn thing telling you where to go to trigger the next drawn out uninteresting in-game cutscene you're forced to sit through until the next uneventful and glitchy context sensitive event happens, or how the AI is mentally retarded and just sits in corners not doing jack shit letting you kill whole rooms of enemies on your own until you've reached the next context sensitive point where the AI finally understands that it's time to do something, like open a door because our hero is too fucking incapable of doing such demanding tasks apparently.
This game has very rapidly become a strong top contender for worst game of the previous generation + all time for me.
Metro Last Light (Xbox 360)
I couldn't take anymore of 2033 so I decided to give Last Light a go in hopes that after years making a sequel they'd at least learn to program walking or realise how awful the constant interruption of gameplay with context cutscenes were or some kind of improvements or problems fixed. But no. They did not. All the same problems are here even the auto walking makes a return making it equally as unplayable as 2033. I am gobsmacked by this developer's ineptitude.
So I've been trying to try out Last Light some more to see if a single thing has been fixed or improved over 2033 at all (spoiler: nothing has been fixed or improved, in fact some things seem even worse, more incomplete and glitchier than in the first game) I stumbled across this funny little thing.
While allowing the game to auto walk, as they both love to do against my will except with my broken controller I can't use anyway, turns out even the game itself seems to realize it's not suppose to be doing that shit as the fucking idle animations started playing while he was still walking! While walking forward he starts checking his gun and counting his bullets and stuff.
It's beyond words at this point so I'm just gonna pretend I never played either of these and never had the money I bought them with and never bought them and they don't exist at all, at least then maybe I'll be able to sleep at night after this.
I am now officially done with this shit, no more Metro for me ever.
Doom (32X)
The Ultimate Doom (the Doom 3 Resurrection of Evil version for Xbox played on Xbox 360)
Doom 3 Resurrection of Evil (Xbox, played on Xbox 360)
Quake 2 (Quake 4 Bonus Disc version for Xbox 360)
Quake 3 Revolution (PlayStation 2)
Quake 4 (Xbox 360)
I wanted to give this game a chance but damn it sucks, the framerate is atrocious, some of the worst I've seen on Xbox 360, the visuals are low res and look worse in many cases than Doom 3 and Doom 3 Resurrection of Evil do on Xbox, the gameplay is constantly interrupted by stuff having to do with the "story" and other marines that are with you, it freezes every now and then forcing me to reboot and the enemies disappear after they die so fast that I barely ever get too see what it was I was even fighting because the darkness is even worse than Doom 3 was making it hard to see anything at the best of times! Sure, some of the guns have built in flashlights but they're small and ineffective so most of the game is just fumbling around in the pitch black darkness not knowing what to do because the objectives are vague as shit and you have no map and most doors are locked making it an extremely linear experience where you mostly just run around in circles until you find the one door that can be opened now, they all the same with no indication they've been unlocked or anything either so it's really just about trial and error until you come across the right way to go. Also the turret sections are plenty and they all fucking suck. I doubt I'll be able to endure through to the end of this game, it's just wearing on me so much every minute feels like an hour. If only there was more action it could've at least kept my interest up a bit but enemies are far too few and generic, at least this early in the game, to be interesting to fight. A custom soundtrack with good music is a must, the game does not provide that for you so you have to bring your own tunes, that's fine, I have plenty on my Xbox 360 harddrive, but after how Quake 2 did everything so perfect and right it's very hard to cope with all these downgrades that Quake 4 brings to the table. Quake 2 is still one of the best games ever made and I love it to bits, this sadly is one of the worst games ever made and a terrible sequel in every sense and I wish they would've just left it in development hell for a few more years until they at least had a game that worked on fundamental levels unlike the fucking failfest this sadly turned out to be.
Ferrari Challenge Trofeo Pirelli (PS2)
Red Zone (Mega Drive)
This game is awesome, a top-down helicopter game with some on-foot missions. It's very impressive and does some really cool things to get 3D effects and such. The biggest flaw this game has remains the insane difficulty, much like Battletoads on Entertainment System it's a technical marvel and a pleasure to behold and play but you won't be able to breeze through it anytime soon. Thankfully this game, unlike Battletoads, has a password system with some nice codes for level select and stuff so it's far more lenient in that regard.
Mega Games 6 Vol. 2 (Mega Drive)
A nice collection of games containing Alien Storm, Super Thunder Blade, Super Monaco GP, Super Hang-On, Columns and World Cup Italia.
I'm mostly playing Alien Storm and Super Thunder Blade as I already have Super Monaco GP on separate cartridge and for the rest I only really like Super Hang-On and even then not that much, haven't tried World Cup Italia yet, I don't care for sports games, especially football and ice hockey they're just the worst, and I have many versions of Columns so I don't need to bother with that at all, I know exactly what it is and have played it plenty.
Alien Storm is awesome and it was worth getting this collection cartridge for that game alone, the rest are a nice and welcome bonus though.
Super Thunder Blade is a game I have other versions of as well so nothing new, I've played it plenty, but this is the first time I've played the Mega Drive original, closest I had before this was the version in Mega Drive Collection for PS2.
Jimmy White's Whirlwind Snooker (Mega Drive)
I don't care much for sports games in general, and pool, snooker, billiards and the like are no exceptions, but this is a 3D polygonal game on Mega Drive and it's made by the same guy who made the excellent Mercury games on PSP, Archer Maclean.
The Story of Thor (Mega Drive)
Beyond Oasis is a better name for it but the content remains the same. I recently played through this but now I have my very own copy and that's awesome! Didn't come cheap though, it remains one of the most expensive games on Mega Drive you can buy. I got it at a somewhat reasonable price compared to what I've seen on ebay and such places.
Top Gear Rally (Game Boy Advance)
Another good rally game for GBA alongside the excellent V-Rally 3. The graphics in this are similar to the original Need For Speed and 32-bit versions of Road Rash with scrolling 2D backgrounds at angles that make them appear as if they are 3D with textures, very nice looking. It plays well but the difficulty is up there, it's one of the harder rally games I've played. Between this, V-Rally 3 and Colin McRae Rally 2.0 and some other okay ones like GT Advance 2 Rally Racing it really makes me wonder why Sega Rally Championship turned out so bad, GBA can absolutely do good rally games and the older Sega Rally games were great so how they fucked up the GBA game so royally is beyond me at this point. Thankfully I don't ever have to play it again, I have several better racing and rally games for GBA to enjoy now so fuck you Sega Rally Championship on GBA, you suck and it was an absolute displeasure ever trying to play you. Hooray for good GBA rally games like Top Gear Rally!
Wing Commander Prophecy (Game Boy Advance)
A 3D space action flight-sim with good visuals and all. Another good game that helps prove that the GBA had a lot more to offer than just ports of old Super Nintendo games.
MTV Sports Snowboarding (PlayStation)
One of the very select few sports games I enjoy. It holds up very well. I always felt there were two good snowboarding games of that generation, this and Coolboarders 2, and of the two this is the better one by far, Coolboarders 2 is a bit more playful fun and has a nostalgic value to me more than anything, while this is an objectively superior and much more solid game.
Fade To Black (PlayStation)
This is the sequel to the classic platformer Flashback. It's not a perfect game but it's enjoyable and interesting. I succeeds with making me want to play on to see what happens next.
Stranglehold (Xbox 360)
A great third person shooter action game I go back to every now and then for a guaranteed good time. Also a good game to relieve some aggression in. It still looks fantastic, they really did a fantastic job on the technical side, it's a visual treat that set a high standard for other games to follow, maybe a little too high as not many has lived up to the same level, it's a very impressive game and with good gameplay to back up the technical and visual quality. I recommend this to all action fans out there, especially John Woo film fans and anyone who liked his movie Hard Boiled as this game is the official sequel to that movie.
Final Fantasy VII (PlayStation)
Disc 1, at Gold Saucer, got Yuffie.
Probotector (Game Boy)
Hard but awesome classic.
Super Mario Land (Game Boy)
Always fun to play through.
Bomb Jack (Game Boy)
A fun time waster.
Impact Racing (PlayStation)
Why is there no behind the car views in my game? When I look on youtube literally every video I see has at least two behind the car views to pick from beside the default bumper cam, one video had a guy even mention that you change views with the square button, but in my game there's no mention of being able to switch views in the manual for square, it just says square is the brake, which isn't correct either as square has no effect in game and braking is done by pressing down on the steering cross!
The screenshots on the back of the packaging of my game are only taken from bumper cam and no button or combination of buttons work in game to switch views.
I'm beginning to think the PAL release skipped including the behind the car views entirely. If that's the case this game will not get much play from me as it isn't particularly enjoyable to play in that view at all, which is why every video on youtube understandable has the person playing switching to a better view!
It's still somewhat playable as it is but I HATE driving in bumper cam and this game clearly wasn't made to be played that way. I can tolerate bumper cam only in some games, but this clearly has a behind the car view in every example i can find but my own copy, so why can't I just get it to work!? Ahh! Infuriating!
It still has awesome music though.
FlatOut 2 (PlayStation 2)
It was as I expected from having played the upgraded versions Ultimate Carnage on Xbox 360 and Head On on PSP. Beautiful to look at with lots of detailed destruction but virtually impossible to win a single race in due to skilled opponent AI and a driving physics engine that doesn't like you very much.
The ragdoll-launching minigames are still what I enjoy the most; driving a rocket-powered car down a ramp only to launch the driver out the front window of the car into some absurd oversized game arena like bowling or basketball just never gets old.
Raceway Drag & Stock Racing (PlayStation 2)
I couldn't test much as most stuff needs to be unlocked by playing through the championship mode, but the few races I could partake in were okay, the framerate was a bit choppy when all 16 cars were on screen at once during stock car races, but as they scattered a bit over the track after a lap or two it ran smoothly for the most part until the race was over. It reminded me of early Dreamcast games visually more so than any PS2 games from 2006.
R:Racing (PlayStation 2)
It's every bit as good as it was on Xbox last time I played it. Now I'd like to get hold of the GameCube version some day too for a complete set.
Turok Evolution (PlayStation 2)
Wow was this a mixed experience. It's kinda ugly for the most part, even for a 2002 release these are horribly dated visuals, in all honesty the older N64 Turok games look better than this.
It's pretty bland in gameplay as well, at least so far. I liked the idea of the flying sections that were a bit like Panzer Dragoon but sadly they had one hit kills whenever you touched anything, including the randomly spawning invisible walls!!
It became a test of patience as the frustration of having to reload the same sections again and again as I would just randomly die in mid air while far away from any visible objects, enemies or other dangers that could've killed me, and only sometimes I'd die in the same place, mostly it changed at random, but after countless tries and three hours later trying to get through a part of the game that otherwise would've taken less than half an hour I got past it and was back doing the normal FPS stuff again. However, later segments of the game become very long and because this game has no in-game checkpoints it's back to the beginning of the entire level every time you die, which can also happen at random for no apparent reason now just like in the flying missions which were super short and took over three hours due to this bullshit!! I'm not doing that with levels that are already long as they are without having to restart them at random intervals.
Sky Odyssey (PlayStation 2)
An adventure game in flight simulation form. It's hard and requires precise flying from the start. I've managed to get past the first level but that's it.
I love that it allows you to customize your place a bit. I'd love more options to do so but a paint job and emblem editor are nice and I appreciate it even if the emblem editor is the weakest I've ever encountered in a game and nowhere near what you can do in Rage Racer, R4 Ridge Racer Type 4 or the Armored Core series.
I'm impressed by how detailed the flying physics are, they simulate airflow in a way no other game I know does.
An interesting thing to note with this game is that while it's a very early release for the PS2 it still has a 60hz option, making this the earliest and oldest PS2 game with a 60hz option that I'm aware of.
Britney's Dance Beat (PlayStation 2)
I've always wondered what this game was like. Now I know. It's a very basic rhythm game with a Britney Spears theme. Not much more to say. I am terrible at rhythm games in general and this was one of the hardest and least forgiving ones I've ever played, which is weird as you'd think a game for Britney Spears fans would be more lenient to non-gamers, beginners and people like me with no sense of rhythm, so I couldn't get anywhere in the main Audition mode and I can safely say I'll never ever be able to unlock Britney. Yeah, the Britney pat of the game feels very tucked away as anything to do with her and fanservice of her is locked away and needs to be unlocked before you can see or use it. You'd think she and the fanservice stuff like music videos etc. would be the stuff you had unlocked by default and other characters and stuff would come later seeing as this is a product for fans of her first and a dance and rhythm game second, but it feels like the opposite is true.
Road Rage 3 (PlayStation 2)
An excellent drift racing game, easily the best in that genre that I've played. Sure, there are other racing games I love even more that has similar things in it like DT Racer, but as a game focused on this type of racing it does an excellent job at what it does and is a lot of fun to play, and successfully pulling off long consecutive drifts both up and down tight and technically challenging mountain roads feels endlessly satisfying.
It runs silky smooth and looks fairly nice too, nothing overly impressive to look at but at least it has no issues with the framerate. I just wish they could've had some proper reflections on the cars.
A fun fact to note is that this game, while originally developed and published by Atlus in Japan it was published by the infamous Phoenix Games here in Europe. As far as I know that makes for the only good game they've ever published.
The Getaway Black Monday (PlayStation 2)
Well this was a disappointment. It's uglier than the original Getaway, it has a much worse framerate, it controls worse with much worse vehicle crash physics, there's lots of glitches and I even saw hug chunks of the graphics pop in and out of existence while I was standing still so you can't blame it on loading new geometry, it was just glitchy, and some parts were just not there, you could see through the ground and nothing I did changed that, going away and coming back so the game loaded the area again changed nothing, it's just poorly made it seems.
That being said it's still an okay free roaming game with a nice big chunk of London realistically recreated in virtual form and there is still some fun to be had, the first game just did it much better is all.
Starsky & Hutch (GameCube)
A good version of the game but I prefer the GBA version a lot more. If anything this makes me appreciate the GBA version even more as it manages to do almost everything this version does but on infinitely less powerful hardware and more streamlined, this takes forever to do anything and feels drawn out and convoluted by comparison. Still, it's nice to have another GameCube game as that part of my collection is crippled by default due to GameCube not having a lot of games I want, so any game that can help fill it out a bit is most welcome.
Metro 2033 (Xbox 360)
This is literally unplayable. The forced auto walking ruins it. I've already died multiple times simply because I can't stop the character from walking over edged falling to his death and I've just started playing, it's a whole project trying to line him up to press a button because he just walks past everything! It's broken by design. I don't understand how anyone can play this. By far the worst controls in any game I've ever played spanning the last 30 years. At first I thought it may just be some really obscure glitch but i found nothing online about it and it's there with all controllers I have, no settings change this, I've tried rebooting, I've tried installing the disc, I've tried deleting all the game data and nothing i do changes it so as bad as it is I guess they wanted it that way. It's unbelievably bad yet I've read or heard nothing about this as a complaint anywhere? I don't get it. How does anyone cope with this?
He just auto walked through a wall so I skipped a whole part of the level and ended up in some completely other scene I haven't seen before. This is the glitchiest game I've played in a long time.
For "fun" (as in desperation) I went to my storage and dug out one of my old original Xbox 360 controllers, I have two and they're both broken in different ways so I got the one that at least sporadically works, and plugged it in via my old half working charge & play cable and battery pack because I thought to myself this is the only thing I haven't tried yet and it's not going to work but at least it'll be more fun trying to see how little this thing works than actually trying to play this crap with a working controller.. turns out it's the only controller I own that doesn't have the auto walking problem so I've been trying to use it to play the game for a while and I can't say I wanna change my score at all, this game even with working controls is awful with constant in-game cutscenes (if they only wanted to make a horror b-movie why did they make a game in the first place?), quick time events, glitches out the fracking wazoo (now IA characters and enemies glitch through walls as well, so it wasn't just my own character earlier who can do it, it's a feature everyone can enjoy!!), lackluster weapons, dark and unevenly detailed visuals (doom 3 on original Xbox feels like it's played out outdoors on a bright sunny day compared to this), the one thing I've liked so far was a hot prostitute looking character that walked past as I was contextually forced to sit at a table and drink alcohol while listening to some dialog I cared nothing about as she disappeared as quickly as she popped up outta nowhere. I hate how there's no good display of information, everything is hidden away so you're getting little to no tactical feedback and then there are all the little things, for example like how you can't have the pointer "compass" on screen without having everything else tucked away, you can't even run with it because the character keeps flailing his arms madly if you do so you can't look at the damn thing telling you where to go to trigger the next drawn out uninteresting in-game cutscene you're forced to sit through until the next uneventful and glitchy context sensitive event happens, or how the AI is mentally retarded and just sits in corners not doing jack shit letting you kill whole rooms of enemies on your own until you've reached the next context sensitive point where the AI finally understands that it's time to do something, like open a door because our hero is too fucking incapable of doing such demanding tasks apparently.
This game has very rapidly become a strong top contender for worst game of the previous generation + all time for me.
Metro Last Light (Xbox 360)
I couldn't take anymore of 2033 so I decided to give Last Light a go in hopes that after years making a sequel they'd at least learn to program walking or realise how awful the constant interruption of gameplay with context cutscenes were or some kind of improvements or problems fixed. But no. They did not. All the same problems are here even the auto walking makes a return making it equally as unplayable as 2033. I am gobsmacked by this developer's ineptitude.
So I've been trying to try out Last Light some more to see if a single thing has been fixed or improved over 2033 at all (spoiler: nothing has been fixed or improved, in fact some things seem even worse, more incomplete and glitchier than in the first game) I stumbled across this funny little thing.
While allowing the game to auto walk, as they both love to do against my will except with my broken controller I can't use anyway, turns out even the game itself seems to realize it's not suppose to be doing that shit as the fucking idle animations started playing while he was still walking! While walking forward he starts checking his gun and counting his bullets and stuff.
It's beyond words at this point so I'm just gonna pretend I never played either of these and never had the money I bought them with and never bought them and they don't exist at all, at least then maybe I'll be able to sleep at night after this.
I am now officially done with this shit, no more Metro for me ever.
Thursday, June 9, 2016
Now Playing - Juni 2016
Mostly been playing the games I got recently, it feels great to finally own copies of my own for some of these games and the newcomers have been welcome additions to my library as well.
Doom (32X)
Ferrari Challenge Trofeo Pirelli (PS2)
A newly purchased game I'm trying out. It's fairly average overall with some highlights and some low points. It's a bit glitchy and the main menu has frozen on my multiple times when in the Options menu, forcing me to reset my PS2.
The visuals are a mixed bag, it runs at 25fps (in the PAL version I have, I'm assuming the NTSC version runs at 30) and it's a bit grainy and pixelated, not a lot of antialiasing going on, if any, maybe some but I think it's just the light bloom effect making it seem like it's smoother than it really is. On the bright side it does have some very nice details on the cars and environment, with some nice dynamic shadows and light bloom effect that makes it all look at bit less flat and boring, there are real-time reflections on the cars with a fairly high framerate on them, not buttery smooth but it's a lot better than games like Forza on Xbox where the game ran 30fps but the reflections were rendered in single digits.
One thing I noticed was that there was only ever one type of car model on the track at any given time, you always race against the same type of car you're driving, this means you can't pick a better car and win and vice versa for the opponents, they all have different paint jobs though so it's not too visually repetitive.
You have a few different camera angles to pick from, three behind the car where two are far away and one so close it's impractical, a hood cam and a bumper cam, sadly no driver cam like the game claims in the manual because that part is copied directly from the PS3 and Wii versions' manuals, simple laziness from the developers not making a dedicated manual and information for the PS2 version, also, some claim that a racing wheel that supposedly should work doesn't, but I don't have one of those so it's not something I can test or verify myself.
There's damage modeling on the cars, which is nice, and while nothing fancy, just some superficial twisted metal, it's still better than the likes of Gran Turismo or Enthusia where there was no damage at all to be found.
The driving physics are fairly good, it's an arcade-sim hybrid so it's a bit exaggerated by real life standards but still maintain a lot of the real world dynamics you would expect, it does powersliding very well, so drifting is fairly easy to do, it's not too unlike DT Racer in that regard, which is great as DT Racer is my all time favorite racing game.
There are some odd parts to this game, like they have their own Achievements/Trophy system where you win cards with Ferrari cars on them by completing set "Card Challenges" in the game's many modes, like beat your own time in Time Trial, win a race first place and other such common goals, and the information about the cars on the cards, like the year it was introduced, how fast the top speed is and the brake horse power etc., act like points in this odd card game you can play that doesn't seem to do anything whether you win or lose.
There are a few different modes to play in the game, relatively basic stuff but it's at least all there, all except multiplayer that is, it's a singleplayer game only, so if you wanted to race against your friends you're all out of luck.
You unlock cars before you get to buy them, you earn credits from racing in general, even time trial gets you a few measly points. You can also customize your cars to an extent, with custom paintjobs a-la-Need for Speed Underground with paints such as metallic, pearlescent, glossy and matte. You can also add custom vinyls and stuff, nothing too advanced but it's better than nothing, no extreme custom mods like new spoilers or body kits or anything of that sort though, but you do get to customize things like ride height and other more technical stuff i have little to no interest in, just the usual basic performance tweaking.
There are more things I could talk about like how you can set the challenge mode time so you can end up having to race 45 minutes before the race can end and other odd little things like that but I haven't explored the game enough to go into more detail at the moment.
As a final word I'll say the AI is okay, they're not glued to an invisible race line like in the Gran Turismo games, so if there's contact they don't automatically get the upper hand screwing you over by default.
Mega Drive Collection (PS2)
Sonic, Sonic 2 and Shinobi III.
The Ultimate Doom (the Doom 3 Resurrection of Evil version for Xbox played on Xbox 360)
It's easily one of the most accurate console ports of the original PC version of Doom there is, maybe even more so than the newer ones and maybe even the most so period, and while I still prefer the 32X and PlayStation versions for their changes and upgrades that fit my personal taste better, it's nice to be able to enjoy the original in it's original form now and then as well.
Doom 3 Resurrection of Evil (Xbox, played on Xbox 360)
I prefer Doom 3 on Xbox over the PC original and RoE is a great follow up that improves on the original in just about every technical way. I may not care as much for the story and setting in RoE as I do for Doom 3, but it's still good and I enjoy it. I've always felt RoE is underappreciated and when playing it now again after not having played it for years I can say I still feel the same way, it is underappreciated.
Quake 2 (Quake 4 Bonus Disc version for Xbox 360)
I love Quake 2, it's one of my all time favorites regardless of the version, sure the N64 version is the marginally weakest due to the choppiness and bad controls but it's still great, so even at it's worst Quake 2 holds up and is a joy to play. This version for Xbox 360 that comes on the initial release of Quake 4's Bonus Disc is a direct and virtually perfect port of the PC original. Sadly the newer re-release of Quake 4 on Xbox 360 lacked the Bonus Disc making it much harder to get hold of, I had to buy Quake 4 twice to get it myself as the first was the correct release but the disc was missing when I got it, after that I found a complete copy at GameStop that I bought immediately.
I may prefer the PlayStation port as my favorite of them all due to the upgrades and added content but I love the PC original and it's nice that there was finally a proper console port with no changes or downgrades.
Quake 3 Revolution (PlayStation 2)
Not as good as the Dreamcast port over all, sure it has twice as high framerate and the pickups are 3D models instead of 2D icons but the controls are much worse, the load times are extremely long and the visuals are much duller in color, and if I'm not mistaken some special effects are completely missing like shiny surfaces on some walls and stuff, and to be honest I prefer the 2D icons the Dreamcast version has as they were much easier to detect.
Still, as my Dreamcast remains dead the PS2 version is all I got, short of the PC original, but I don't wanna play on PC when I have a proper console version.
Quake 4 (Xbox 360)
I'm not a fan of this game and the Xbox 360 versions makes it hard to even endure with a really bad framerate to constantly remind you that there is no fun allowed.
I've tried Quake 4 once before when I bought it but I thought it pretty much sucked and because I only really bought it for the Bonus Disc containing Quake 2 I never bothered giving Quake 4 much of a chance at the time, so I figured I'd give it one now. It doesn't start good but I'll keep at it and see if it gets any better.
Doom (32X)
Ferrari Challenge Trofeo Pirelli (PS2)
A newly purchased game I'm trying out. It's fairly average overall with some highlights and some low points. It's a bit glitchy and the main menu has frozen on my multiple times when in the Options menu, forcing me to reset my PS2.
The visuals are a mixed bag, it runs at 25fps (in the PAL version I have, I'm assuming the NTSC version runs at 30) and it's a bit grainy and pixelated, not a lot of antialiasing going on, if any, maybe some but I think it's just the light bloom effect making it seem like it's smoother than it really is. On the bright side it does have some very nice details on the cars and environment, with some nice dynamic shadows and light bloom effect that makes it all look at bit less flat and boring, there are real-time reflections on the cars with a fairly high framerate on them, not buttery smooth but it's a lot better than games like Forza on Xbox where the game ran 30fps but the reflections were rendered in single digits.
One thing I noticed was that there was only ever one type of car model on the track at any given time, you always race against the same type of car you're driving, this means you can't pick a better car and win and vice versa for the opponents, they all have different paint jobs though so it's not too visually repetitive.
You have a few different camera angles to pick from, three behind the car where two are far away and one so close it's impractical, a hood cam and a bumper cam, sadly no driver cam like the game claims in the manual because that part is copied directly from the PS3 and Wii versions' manuals, simple laziness from the developers not making a dedicated manual and information for the PS2 version, also, some claim that a racing wheel that supposedly should work doesn't, but I don't have one of those so it's not something I can test or verify myself.
There's damage modeling on the cars, which is nice, and while nothing fancy, just some superficial twisted metal, it's still better than the likes of Gran Turismo or Enthusia where there was no damage at all to be found.
The driving physics are fairly good, it's an arcade-sim hybrid so it's a bit exaggerated by real life standards but still maintain a lot of the real world dynamics you would expect, it does powersliding very well, so drifting is fairly easy to do, it's not too unlike DT Racer in that regard, which is great as DT Racer is my all time favorite racing game.
There are some odd parts to this game, like they have their own Achievements/Trophy system where you win cards with Ferrari cars on them by completing set "Card Challenges" in the game's many modes, like beat your own time in Time Trial, win a race first place and other such common goals, and the information about the cars on the cards, like the year it was introduced, how fast the top speed is and the brake horse power etc., act like points in this odd card game you can play that doesn't seem to do anything whether you win or lose.
There are a few different modes to play in the game, relatively basic stuff but it's at least all there, all except multiplayer that is, it's a singleplayer game only, so if you wanted to race against your friends you're all out of luck.
You unlock cars before you get to buy them, you earn credits from racing in general, even time trial gets you a few measly points. You can also customize your cars to an extent, with custom paintjobs a-la-Need for Speed Underground with paints such as metallic, pearlescent, glossy and matte. You can also add custom vinyls and stuff, nothing too advanced but it's better than nothing, no extreme custom mods like new spoilers or body kits or anything of that sort though, but you do get to customize things like ride height and other more technical stuff i have little to no interest in, just the usual basic performance tweaking.
There are more things I could talk about like how you can set the challenge mode time so you can end up having to race 45 minutes before the race can end and other odd little things like that but I haven't explored the game enough to go into more detail at the moment.
As a final word I'll say the AI is okay, they're not glued to an invisible race line like in the Gran Turismo games, so if there's contact they don't automatically get the upper hand screwing you over by default.
Mega Drive Collection (PS2)
Sonic, Sonic 2 and Shinobi III.
The Ultimate Doom (the Doom 3 Resurrection of Evil version for Xbox played on Xbox 360)
It's easily one of the most accurate console ports of the original PC version of Doom there is, maybe even more so than the newer ones and maybe even the most so period, and while I still prefer the 32X and PlayStation versions for their changes and upgrades that fit my personal taste better, it's nice to be able to enjoy the original in it's original form now and then as well.
Doom 3 Resurrection of Evil (Xbox, played on Xbox 360)
I prefer Doom 3 on Xbox over the PC original and RoE is a great follow up that improves on the original in just about every technical way. I may not care as much for the story and setting in RoE as I do for Doom 3, but it's still good and I enjoy it. I've always felt RoE is underappreciated and when playing it now again after not having played it for years I can say I still feel the same way, it is underappreciated.
Quake 2 (Quake 4 Bonus Disc version for Xbox 360)
I love Quake 2, it's one of my all time favorites regardless of the version, sure the N64 version is the marginally weakest due to the choppiness and bad controls but it's still great, so even at it's worst Quake 2 holds up and is a joy to play. This version for Xbox 360 that comes on the initial release of Quake 4's Bonus Disc is a direct and virtually perfect port of the PC original. Sadly the newer re-release of Quake 4 on Xbox 360 lacked the Bonus Disc making it much harder to get hold of, I had to buy Quake 4 twice to get it myself as the first was the correct release but the disc was missing when I got it, after that I found a complete copy at GameStop that I bought immediately.
I may prefer the PlayStation port as my favorite of them all due to the upgrades and added content but I love the PC original and it's nice that there was finally a proper console port with no changes or downgrades.
Quake 3 Revolution (PlayStation 2)
Not as good as the Dreamcast port over all, sure it has twice as high framerate and the pickups are 3D models instead of 2D icons but the controls are much worse, the load times are extremely long and the visuals are much duller in color, and if I'm not mistaken some special effects are completely missing like shiny surfaces on some walls and stuff, and to be honest I prefer the 2D icons the Dreamcast version has as they were much easier to detect.
Still, as my Dreamcast remains dead the PS2 version is all I got, short of the PC original, but I don't wanna play on PC when I have a proper console version.
Quake 4 (Xbox 360)
I'm not a fan of this game and the Xbox 360 versions makes it hard to even endure with a really bad framerate to constantly remind you that there is no fun allowed.
I've tried Quake 4 once before when I bought it but I thought it pretty much sucked and because I only really bought it for the Bonus Disc containing Quake 2 I never bothered giving Quake 4 much of a chance at the time, so I figured I'd give it one now. It doesn't start good but I'll keep at it and see if it gets any better.
Wednesday, May 4, 2016
Now Playing - Maj 2016
Mostly been playing the games I got recently, it feels great to finally own copies of my own for some of these games and the newcomers have been welcome additions to my library as well.
Eternal Champions (Mega Drive)
F22 Interceptor (Mega Drive)
I'm usually not a huge fan of flight sim games but a flat-shaded polygonal 3D flight sim on the Mega Drive that plays well and is fun is easily something I can make an exception for and thoroughly enjoy.
LHX Attack Chopper (Mega Drive)
I do however love helicopter games and this alongside the more arcade oriented Steel Talons, also on the Mega Drive, is one of my oldest favorites in that genre.
Steel Talons (Mega Drive)
Winter Challenge (Mega Drive)
Doom (32X)
My favorite version of Doom alongside the PSX port.
Metal Head (32X)
Essentially Armored Core on 32X, naturally a given favorite.
Virtua Racing Deluxe (32X)
While not my top favorite version of Virtua Racing, that honor goes to the SVP powered Mega Drive port, it's still one of my favorite games ever on one of my favorite systems ever.
Centipede (PSX)
While not quite on par with the next gen Dreamcast port this is still a fantastic version and due to how much easier it is to play a PlayStation game than a Dreamcast game it certainly has an edge of it's own, and when played on PS2 with texture filtering turned on there's even less of a difference between the two.
Also I don't think the Dreamcast version ever got released here in Europe so the PSX version was the only one available for me anyway. Great game though, even comes with the original arcade game so it's two games in one and I love that.
Iron Soldier 3 (PSX)
Not exactly an Armored Core killer but still a great mech game nonetheless. It retains what made the Jaguar 64 and Jaguar 64 CD games so good and improves the formula even further with the help of the superior power of the PlayStation. It may lack the flat-shaded polygonal charm of the Jaguar games but it makes up for it with technically superior visuals overall.
It's a tough game though, not one you just jump straight into and have a quick brawl guns a blazin', you have to be tactical and take your time, aim carefully and think and plan things out before you make your moves, your mech is big and heavy and controls like it, in that way it's very different from mech games in general from that era as most, at least on consoles, were more fast paced and action oriented.
I'd love to get hold of a Jaguar 64 and the original Iron Soldier games some day, I've tried the first one in the past and I loved it, which is why I was extra happy to get hold of this great sequel finally.
Kirikou (PSX)
A 2001 release exclusive to Europe, based on the first movie in the Kirikou series about an African boy who is very special indeed. It's a 2.5D platformer similar to some of Disney's greatest 2.5D platformers of the time like Hercules and Tarzan or other great 2.5D PSX classics like Klonoa and Tombi/Tomba, where you take on levels with multiple paths and lots of hidden secrets and all that good stuff. It re-enacts the events from the first film as you play as Kirikou literally from birth to coming face to face with the evil sorceress Karaba, on the way you must face her evil robots (called "fetishes") and make your way through the levels collecting water (essentially this game's equivalent to coins in Mario or rings in Sonic) and learning new abilities from the wise elder such as double jumping and other common game things.
It's easily one of the best 2.5D platformers I've played and I'm glad to own it. I didn't know about the game back when it was new but a few years ago when I found the movie on DVD and thought it looked interesting I got more into it and found out there were games released, multiple games actually, and sequels to the movie as well, so while I still haven't found much I now at least have the first game on PlayStation to go with the first movie on DVD, now I just need to find the PS2 game, the Game Boy Color game and the movie sequels!
Newman Haas Racing (PSX)
A 1998 release by Psygnosis and Bizarre Creations. It saddens me that I missed out on this one back when it was new but I'm glad to have discovered it now and I'm enjoying it very much, it's one of the best F1 style racing games I've ever played.
Re-Loaded (PSX)
A classic I played on PSX and MS-DOS back in the day but sadly never had myself and it's been over 15 years since I played it last. It lived up to my nostalgic memories and I've had a blast from the past with this one, a fantastic top-down action shooter and while I don't think it's better than the original Loaded I also don't think it's worse, they're equals but for different reasons, Loaded was a simpler, more straight forwards and notably more hectic shooter and thus a slightly better two-player experience this expands the missions and gameplay and makes for a better singleplayer experience, I'd say they compliment eachother perfectly and now I need to get hold of a copy the original Loaded so I can relive those nostalgic memories as well, we'll just have to wait and see how many more years that'll take to happen..
T'ai Fu Wrath of the Tiger (PSX)
A 1999 release by Dreamworks and the spiritual predecessor of Kung Fu Panda, a 3D platformer with lots of fighting and a great game I've played through numerous times in the past.
Viewpoint (PSX)
Not much to say about this one, it's a fantastic looking version of Viewpoint, identical to the other versions in gameplay and design but with a complete overhaul of the visuals and music. There's no competition for me, this is the superior way to play this already great game.
WinX Club (PC)
The old Konami developed WinX game that was also released on PS2 that's based on season 1 of the cartoon. I like this game and after having found a no-CD crack for it that worked so I don't have to get the disc out even though the game's been installed I finally got into the game. I really hate when PC games try to limit how I use them even after I've bought them, which is why I don't do PC gaming in general and don't acknowledge digital online gaming at all, if a game has only been released on Steam or something (Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, Nintendo eShop etc.) I don't consider it to have ever been released at all.
Brahma Force (PSX)
An FPS mech sim action game with similarities to Armored Core, GunGriffon and Krazy Ivan among many more, I like it but it's not exactly killing the competition, I prefer pretty much all those other games over this, still it's pretty good and has some good stuff in it, it's not bad by any means but it does come with a lot of minor and medium sized problems. Forever and literally constant respawning of enemies are the cause to most of the issues I have.
KKND 2 Krossfire (PC)
I've only ever played this on PlayStation before so it's interesting to see how different it is, it's basically two different games in almost every way, the good thing about that is you can't directly compare the two and thus neither ends up being the "bad" one. I love when they do this rather than just make direct ports because this gives incentive to those who own and enjoy one to get the other as well. It's just as hard as I remember the PlayStation version to be, only for slightly different reasons. I haven't really played either enough to say much more at this point.
KKND Krossfire (PSX)
I remember having troubles with this game back in the day and now when I'm revisiting it and it's PC original I fully understand why as my memories of getting absolutely crushed by the enemy AI comes rushing back as a nightmare that I thought was long gone. This is a hard as fuck game regardless if it's played on PC or PSX, "easy" mode doesn't mean much in this game, the harder difficulties I can't even imagine what they're like. It's good though, not impossible, just very hard and unforgiving. You need to get good at this game to enjoy it, it asks of you to invest time to get something of equal or greater value back and honestly that's not a bad thing, some of the best games ever do this. It just would've been even better still if the game had eased you into it step by step a bit because you'll be losing big time for a while just to learn the basic controls and what any of all the stuff you can do actually does. Having some easier levels to begin with letting you get used to said basics before having the enemy rape your base's every orifice with death and defeat would've been greatly appreciated. These games really didn't need to ask that much of the player so early on, especially in a strategy game where missions can get rather lengthy. A hard platformer in comparison is usually hard but has short levels that are over in just a couple of minutes so getting back to the place you were and trying a different strategy to get better and win is less of a setback.
SEGA Arcade Gallery (Game Boy Advance)
V-Rally 3 (Game Boy Advance)
Eternal Champions (Mega Drive)
F22 Interceptor (Mega Drive)
I'm usually not a huge fan of flight sim games but a flat-shaded polygonal 3D flight sim on the Mega Drive that plays well and is fun is easily something I can make an exception for and thoroughly enjoy.
LHX Attack Chopper (Mega Drive)
I do however love helicopter games and this alongside the more arcade oriented Steel Talons, also on the Mega Drive, is one of my oldest favorites in that genre.
Steel Talons (Mega Drive)
Winter Challenge (Mega Drive)
Doom (32X)
My favorite version of Doom alongside the PSX port.
Metal Head (32X)
Essentially Armored Core on 32X, naturally a given favorite.
Virtua Racing Deluxe (32X)
While not my top favorite version of Virtua Racing, that honor goes to the SVP powered Mega Drive port, it's still one of my favorite games ever on one of my favorite systems ever.
Centipede (PSX)
While not quite on par with the next gen Dreamcast port this is still a fantastic version and due to how much easier it is to play a PlayStation game than a Dreamcast game it certainly has an edge of it's own, and when played on PS2 with texture filtering turned on there's even less of a difference between the two.
Also I don't think the Dreamcast version ever got released here in Europe so the PSX version was the only one available for me anyway. Great game though, even comes with the original arcade game so it's two games in one and I love that.
Iron Soldier 3 (PSX)
Not exactly an Armored Core killer but still a great mech game nonetheless. It retains what made the Jaguar 64 and Jaguar 64 CD games so good and improves the formula even further with the help of the superior power of the PlayStation. It may lack the flat-shaded polygonal charm of the Jaguar games but it makes up for it with technically superior visuals overall.
It's a tough game though, not one you just jump straight into and have a quick brawl guns a blazin', you have to be tactical and take your time, aim carefully and think and plan things out before you make your moves, your mech is big and heavy and controls like it, in that way it's very different from mech games in general from that era as most, at least on consoles, were more fast paced and action oriented.
I'd love to get hold of a Jaguar 64 and the original Iron Soldier games some day, I've tried the first one in the past and I loved it, which is why I was extra happy to get hold of this great sequel finally.
Kirikou (PSX)
A 2001 release exclusive to Europe, based on the first movie in the Kirikou series about an African boy who is very special indeed. It's a 2.5D platformer similar to some of Disney's greatest 2.5D platformers of the time like Hercules and Tarzan or other great 2.5D PSX classics like Klonoa and Tombi/Tomba, where you take on levels with multiple paths and lots of hidden secrets and all that good stuff. It re-enacts the events from the first film as you play as Kirikou literally from birth to coming face to face with the evil sorceress Karaba, on the way you must face her evil robots (called "fetishes") and make your way through the levels collecting water (essentially this game's equivalent to coins in Mario or rings in Sonic) and learning new abilities from the wise elder such as double jumping and other common game things.
It's easily one of the best 2.5D platformers I've played and I'm glad to own it. I didn't know about the game back when it was new but a few years ago when I found the movie on DVD and thought it looked interesting I got more into it and found out there were games released, multiple games actually, and sequels to the movie as well, so while I still haven't found much I now at least have the first game on PlayStation to go with the first movie on DVD, now I just need to find the PS2 game, the Game Boy Color game and the movie sequels!
Newman Haas Racing (PSX)
A 1998 release by Psygnosis and Bizarre Creations. It saddens me that I missed out on this one back when it was new but I'm glad to have discovered it now and I'm enjoying it very much, it's one of the best F1 style racing games I've ever played.
Re-Loaded (PSX)
A classic I played on PSX and MS-DOS back in the day but sadly never had myself and it's been over 15 years since I played it last. It lived up to my nostalgic memories and I've had a blast from the past with this one, a fantastic top-down action shooter and while I don't think it's better than the original Loaded I also don't think it's worse, they're equals but for different reasons, Loaded was a simpler, more straight forwards and notably more hectic shooter and thus a slightly better two-player experience this expands the missions and gameplay and makes for a better singleplayer experience, I'd say they compliment eachother perfectly and now I need to get hold of a copy the original Loaded so I can relive those nostalgic memories as well, we'll just have to wait and see how many more years that'll take to happen..
T'ai Fu Wrath of the Tiger (PSX)
A 1999 release by Dreamworks and the spiritual predecessor of Kung Fu Panda, a 3D platformer with lots of fighting and a great game I've played through numerous times in the past.
Viewpoint (PSX)
Not much to say about this one, it's a fantastic looking version of Viewpoint, identical to the other versions in gameplay and design but with a complete overhaul of the visuals and music. There's no competition for me, this is the superior way to play this already great game.
WinX Club (PC)
The old Konami developed WinX game that was also released on PS2 that's based on season 1 of the cartoon. I like this game and after having found a no-CD crack for it that worked so I don't have to get the disc out even though the game's been installed I finally got into the game. I really hate when PC games try to limit how I use them even after I've bought them, which is why I don't do PC gaming in general and don't acknowledge digital online gaming at all, if a game has only been released on Steam or something (Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, Nintendo eShop etc.) I don't consider it to have ever been released at all.
Brahma Force (PSX)
An FPS mech sim action game with similarities to Armored Core, GunGriffon and Krazy Ivan among many more, I like it but it's not exactly killing the competition, I prefer pretty much all those other games over this, still it's pretty good and has some good stuff in it, it's not bad by any means but it does come with a lot of minor and medium sized problems. Forever and literally constant respawning of enemies are the cause to most of the issues I have.
KKND 2 Krossfire (PC)
I've only ever played this on PlayStation before so it's interesting to see how different it is, it's basically two different games in almost every way, the good thing about that is you can't directly compare the two and thus neither ends up being the "bad" one. I love when they do this rather than just make direct ports because this gives incentive to those who own and enjoy one to get the other as well. It's just as hard as I remember the PlayStation version to be, only for slightly different reasons. I haven't really played either enough to say much more at this point.
KKND Krossfire (PSX)
I remember having troubles with this game back in the day and now when I'm revisiting it and it's PC original I fully understand why as my memories of getting absolutely crushed by the enemy AI comes rushing back as a nightmare that I thought was long gone. This is a hard as fuck game regardless if it's played on PC or PSX, "easy" mode doesn't mean much in this game, the harder difficulties I can't even imagine what they're like. It's good though, not impossible, just very hard and unforgiving. You need to get good at this game to enjoy it, it asks of you to invest time to get something of equal or greater value back and honestly that's not a bad thing, some of the best games ever do this. It just would've been even better still if the game had eased you into it step by step a bit because you'll be losing big time for a while just to learn the basic controls and what any of all the stuff you can do actually does. Having some easier levels to begin with letting you get used to said basics before having the enemy rape your base's every orifice with death and defeat would've been greatly appreciated. These games really didn't need to ask that much of the player so early on, especially in a strategy game where missions can get rather lengthy. A hard platformer in comparison is usually hard but has short levels that are over in just a couple of minutes so getting back to the place you were and trying a different strategy to get better and win is less of a setback.
SEGA Arcade Gallery (Game Boy Advance)
V-Rally 3 (Game Boy Advance)
Wednesday, April 6, 2016
Gaming Purchases - April 2016
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
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
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)
Sunday, August 9, 2015
Now Playing
World of Outlaws Sprint Cars (Xbox 360)
Got it a couple days ago.
A simulation racing game where you drive around muddy Nascar-like oval tracks with small buggy cars with huge sideways spoilers on top.
It's alright, way too hard for my taste, not the kind of challenge I enjoy.
It's a bit choppy too with an unstable framerate and questionable physics, you can randomly flip and bounce around even though there was nothing visually on screen to collide with, the controls are also a bit wonky, you always have to double correct because the game does this weird extra move whenever you turn, I have not gotten used to that yet.
It was cheap so it's not that bad, I do like some of it, I hope it gets better as I get more used to it.
CastleVania Lords of Shadow 2 (Xbox 360)
Got it a couple days ago.
I've only played the demo from Xbox Live so far and it seemed pretty good.
I liked the first game quite a lot, it had problems that made me lose interest and never complete it but I still got enough fun out of it that I felt I could try this one instead as the demo suggested this is a more polished game than the first. I know from videos on youtube that you get to transform into and play as a rat later in the game, I must at least give that a try before putting this game to the side.
The demo did have some really awful parts though, I hope there aren't too many in the game overall, I'm talking about climbing and QTEs combined, very annoying, didn't even finish the demo because it annoyed me so much. I'll give it a more proper try in the actual full game though as it didn't feel worth retrying it over and over just to play through a demo when I was getting the full game soon anyway.
Damnation (Xbox 360)
Got it recently.
Really enjoying this game so far, love the intuitive way to move around. The jumping, shooting and climbing is all fun to do and the levels are huge and vertical, just as the game promised on the back of the cover calling itself a "vertical shooter". I like the steampunk western design. The vehicles are specially awesome, I absolutely love the jet engine motorcycles that can be driven so fast they cling to walls, finally a game that lets me perform the cool looking wall driving Lara did with her bike in the cutscene in the original Tomb Raider.
I like the characters and story as well, I will absolutely play through this to the end.
Halo 4 (Xbox 360)
Got it very recently.
Suprisingly awesome. I hate the Halo series, Bungie had no idea what makes a good first person shooter so I'm glad to see another developer give it a go and actually get it right. It feels like a complete overhaul but when you look at the old games and Halo 4 side by side the changes are suprisingly minor a lot of the time, depending on what you look at that is, the visuals are much improved and so are the sound effects but the gameplay is almost completely the same, except it's totally different, tweaked everywhere it needed to be, it feels more responsive, you now have basic abilities that the other games lacked, like sprinting, as standard while you also still have just about all the things you had before like additional armor abilities, vehicles and the weapon loadout, except a lot of new weapons have been introduced thanks to a whole new type of enemies with some really cool high tech stuff on offer, and the storytelling is vastly improved as well, I actually kind of cared about things this time, I mean Master Chief is still the most unoriginal Doom Marine ripoff of all time but at least in this game they gave him a personality, and his A.I. companion Cortana (the most unoriginal Sally from Aquanox ripoff of all time) was also given a personality that actually was interesting and relevant to the story. They're no Doomguy or Sally but at least I didn't hate them this time, that's a HUGE improvement over the previous games in the series.
The problems I had with this game as I played through it were the parts that were still based on the older games, like only being able to carry two weapons at a time, the vehicle controls and the story/characters/universe of the game. I would've loved this game even more had they given you the ability to carry all the weapons you find like in many better series, had better vehicle controls where you more directly control the vehicles and made it an original game with new cast of characters, set in a whole new universe with a whole different story.
In short, I liked all the additions and changes they made but had this not been a Halo game at all it would've been even better.
Duke Nukem Forever (Xbox 360 and PS3)
Got it relatively recently on PS3 but I've had it on 360 for quite a long time.
The PS3 version is the weaker version so I'm mainly playing this on 360 from now on.
I like this game, I don't really get the hate for it as it's easily the best in the series to date.
The visuals are varied from basic and somewhat dated (it's a game that's been in the works for a while so no suprise there, some things were bound to look dated) to some of the most impressive I've seen this generation.
I like the humor and have gotten many laughs out of it already, the characters and story are entertaining as well.
It controls well for the most part but the aiming can feel a bit off at times lacking the precision needed. I like the vehicle sections a lot, the vehicles so far have controlled very well.
I haven't encountered any bugs or glitches yet, at worst only some ugly dated and low quality visuals like extremely low quality dynamic shadows that update like a slideshow while the game still plays at 50/60fps (50hz on PS3 as PS3 doesn't support PAL60 on SDTVs like 360 does).
Unreal Tournament III (Xbox 360 and PS3)
Got it relatively recently.
Not as good as UT2003 and Unreal Championship 1 and 2 were but still a great game. I really miss the adrenaline abilities from the previous games, the new armor system with individual parts is not a valid replacement, not even close, and vehicles are not very good either, just like they weren't in UT2004.
Not much else to say, I usually just play short bursts of a few rounds of CTF and normal Deathmatch and that's about it. I might give the singleplayer story mode another try some day but I don't really care that much to be honest, it wasn't bad but UT isn't a series where I want to play through a story even if it's there, I just wanna play some good classic CTF and Deathmatch with awesome weapons in well designed levels.
Aliens Colonial Marines (Xbox 360)
Got it a pretty long time ago but haven't played it until now.
I was very pleasantly suprised by this game, I thought it was going to be terrible or at the very least bad but turns out it's one of the best games I've ever played.
The atmosphere is perfect, like Alien Trilogy in HD, the motion tracker makes a return and makes me panic like never before, every noise from it fills my head with thoughts of all types of aliens crawling around where I can't see them until it's too late and they've swarmed me and I have to blast my way through barely making it out alive.
I love how you get to revisit places from the classic Aliens movie and see familiar places and find stuff like the unique weapons they had in the movie and stuff like that, as a fan of the franchise and the movie things like that are very much appreciated.
Just before playing this I gave Aliens Isolation a try, also on 360, and it was absolutely fucking atrocious with beyond broken and dysfunctional A.I., glitchy visuals with tons of screen tearing, framerate drops and slowdown, clunky and unintuitive controls, overuse of QTEs, archaic gameplay design that would've felt horribly outdated in the late 80s, very boring, sterile and non interactive environments, tons of humans and evil low tech andirods, literally no isolation and the aliens were a chapter of fail all on their own with a whole new type of bad A.I., predictable scripted events, visual and technical glitches etc. etc., it was just one of the very worst games I've ever played in my life and a HUGE disappointment after having heard things like "it makes up for how bad Colonial Marines was", "the game Alien fans have been waiting for" and "one of the best horror games ever made"... BULL FUCKING SHIT. It was a travesty, at best..
Haven't even mentioned how it had a mandatory install disc of 5gigs and then a mandatory patch download that was almost a gig as well, and because it's a horror game you'll naturally want to install the game disc that takes another 5gigs to install so you don't have the 360s loud humming from spinning the disc during gameplay as the sound in horror games is important, ending with a whooping 11gig installation for a glitchy broken mess of a game!
You'd think all that install bullshit would've fixed at least something, but no, apparently it only made the game "playable" in the first place, if you can count something that broken as playable at all, fuck knows what that 1gig patch did, I can't imagine the game being even more broken than it was as the only steps left to take down the ladder is an error message and not running at all, which in hindsight would've been preferable as the game was honestly that bad.
Also it was clearly meant to only be played on a full 1080p HDTV as on an SDTV the text was so tiny it was almost completely unreadable. I've seen this in quite a few games over the last few years but Alien Isolation was by far the worst, the subtitles for the piss poor voice acting was rendered completely useless because of this.
Anyway, Colonial Marines was better in all ways and it's a really great game so far. I'll be sure to play through it to the end as this is a game I really want to play more of.
This ended up being more about the shitty Isolation game but that's how it is sometime, can't be helped.
FUEL (PS3)
Got it recently.
A huge open world racing game, like Test Drive Unlimited on steroids.
I haven't been able to play it as much as I wanted because it freezes a lot.
I want to play more but the freezing seems to be a common issue with this game according to internet forums, I've seen quite a lot of threads talking about this and it puts me off playing the game to be honest.
Burnout 3 Takedown (Xbox)
Got it recently.
I've never been a fan of the stop and go gameplay this series has but I've decided to give this game a try anyway, I've played the main mode a bit and unlocked a few new cars and stuff and so far it's not that bad, I turned off the crash cam so it only does it when I crash, that helped keep the flow of the game up a lot.
There's a lot of random luck elements to the gameplay that I don't like and feel really holds the game back, it gets really boring really fast when the challenge is super high and needs pin point exact and flawless driving to complete something when there's random traffic coming out of nowhere in less that a split tenth of a second that forces you to restart a race over and over dussins of times in a row.
It controls nicely and runs smoothly an looks great otherwise so it's a shame the bad parts hold it back as much as they do.
Easily one of the most overrated games of all time as I've encountered numerous claims of this being not only the best in the series but also the best arcade racing game on PS2 and [one of] the best arcade racing games of all time.
It's mediocre among other games of the genre and I have to say it's the worst in the series as it's the first after they rebooted it with new developers and the sequels were all better and I personally like the two original games more with the second game being my favorite in the entire series.
DOOM (32X)
Link to my failed playthrough on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmEvY0MeyjPaMKLkwByxAw1KPOsbi6edI
Pretty much my favorite version of the classic Doom. I also love the PSX version and the version on Xbox that comes as a bonus together with Doom 2 and the Master Levels for Doom 2 in Doom 3 Resurrection of Evil is also great.
I love the music in this version, the Mega Drive sound chip has a unique sound I really love and it makes the classic Doom songs justice and then some.
The sound effects are taken directly from the PC version and sound as good as ever, the 32X handles them with respect and deliver perfectly where for example the Super Nintendo version fails miserably.
It lacks a save feature so instead you have free pickings of any level in the game sans the bonus and final level directly from the main menu, making it instantly accessible at all times.
It lacks several levels from the full set the PC original has but that also makes it a lot more approachable as you can play through it much faster, that makes for example a great evening of Doom without having to go on long into the night, past morning and well into next day before reaching the end.
The enemies lack sprites for turning so they end up always facing you, this gives the feeling that they're always focused on you, I like this change a lot, also adding to the feeling of being the center of enemy attention is the lack of the A.I. script that made enemies attack eachother in many other versions, this also adds to the challenge as you have to be the one to take out the enemies, they won't do the job for you in this version.
With the 6 button controller you have some of the best controls of the time, with the map being especially functional in this version, you can also pick between the weapons in your aquired arsenal freely by holding Mode and pressing other buttons for respective weapons, pressing Mode+Start twice being the most important as it's the only way to switch back to your fists after having aquired the chainsaw.
It lacks the BFG as well but that's okay as I never used it except for the biggest bosses anyway and because they're also not in this version it's not a loss that matters very much.
It's on a cartridge so the load times are as short as on a fast PC, unlike many later versions that were on CD and thus had noticeably longer loading times.
It runs relatively smooth and is relatively high res as well, it's not as good as the PSX version but it's still a lot better than many versions of Doom including the Saturn, Super Nintendo and 3DO versions, it's even slightly better performing than the commonly praised Jaguar 64 version.
This is the version of Doom I return to the most and it's a great additional version regardless of what other versions of Doom you might already own.
It might seem as if it's a bad version seeing as it lacks so much but in my opinion the changes created a unique and in many ways better take on the Doom formula, and combine that with how well it plays and you have nothing left but a winner.
Tempo (32X)
One of my favorite platform games of all time. I love the design, the music, the levels, the controls and long list of moves you can pull off, the gameplay, the characters and enemies, the minigames, the upgrades, simply put I love just about everything about this game and I never get tired of playing it, a true classic.
Bomberman Act Zero (Xbox 360)
Got it recently.
I never liked the older Bomberman games, I hate the design and the gameplay lacked certain elements needed to be good. This game fixes everything that was wrong with only one drawback, the multiplayer. The one thing Bomberman games did right was multiplayer, I mean it's one of the oldest games I know that had support for four players.
Sadly this game is singleplayer only, at most it has an online mode but because most Bomberman fans didn't like it for reasons I will never understand the online mode is dead, so it's singleplayer only.
A shame because this is the first Bomberman game I've ever liked and I would've loved to have friends over and play this in multiplayer, just my luck the one game in the series I want to play with friends won't let me.
Regardless it's a great game and I'm having a good time with it even if I have to play it on my own.
I love the new design, it reminds me of a game I have on PC but I forget the name, and the new camera angle, life bar and powerups you pick up are all great too.
A criminally underrated and underappreciated game to say the least and a prime example of a game where haters ruined a good thing.
Got it a couple days ago.
A simulation racing game where you drive around muddy Nascar-like oval tracks with small buggy cars with huge sideways spoilers on top.
It's alright, way too hard for my taste, not the kind of challenge I enjoy.
It's a bit choppy too with an unstable framerate and questionable physics, you can randomly flip and bounce around even though there was nothing visually on screen to collide with, the controls are also a bit wonky, you always have to double correct because the game does this weird extra move whenever you turn, I have not gotten used to that yet.
It was cheap so it's not that bad, I do like some of it, I hope it gets better as I get more used to it.
CastleVania Lords of Shadow 2 (Xbox 360)
Got it a couple days ago.
I've only played the demo from Xbox Live so far and it seemed pretty good.
I liked the first game quite a lot, it had problems that made me lose interest and never complete it but I still got enough fun out of it that I felt I could try this one instead as the demo suggested this is a more polished game than the first. I know from videos on youtube that you get to transform into and play as a rat later in the game, I must at least give that a try before putting this game to the side.
The demo did have some really awful parts though, I hope there aren't too many in the game overall, I'm talking about climbing and QTEs combined, very annoying, didn't even finish the demo because it annoyed me so much. I'll give it a more proper try in the actual full game though as it didn't feel worth retrying it over and over just to play through a demo when I was getting the full game soon anyway.
Damnation (Xbox 360)
Got it recently.
Really enjoying this game so far, love the intuitive way to move around. The jumping, shooting and climbing is all fun to do and the levels are huge and vertical, just as the game promised on the back of the cover calling itself a "vertical shooter". I like the steampunk western design. The vehicles are specially awesome, I absolutely love the jet engine motorcycles that can be driven so fast they cling to walls, finally a game that lets me perform the cool looking wall driving Lara did with her bike in the cutscene in the original Tomb Raider.
I like the characters and story as well, I will absolutely play through this to the end.
Halo 4 (Xbox 360)
Got it very recently.
Suprisingly awesome. I hate the Halo series, Bungie had no idea what makes a good first person shooter so I'm glad to see another developer give it a go and actually get it right. It feels like a complete overhaul but when you look at the old games and Halo 4 side by side the changes are suprisingly minor a lot of the time, depending on what you look at that is, the visuals are much improved and so are the sound effects but the gameplay is almost completely the same, except it's totally different, tweaked everywhere it needed to be, it feels more responsive, you now have basic abilities that the other games lacked, like sprinting, as standard while you also still have just about all the things you had before like additional armor abilities, vehicles and the weapon loadout, except a lot of new weapons have been introduced thanks to a whole new type of enemies with some really cool high tech stuff on offer, and the storytelling is vastly improved as well, I actually kind of cared about things this time, I mean Master Chief is still the most unoriginal Doom Marine ripoff of all time but at least in this game they gave him a personality, and his A.I. companion Cortana (the most unoriginal Sally from Aquanox ripoff of all time) was also given a personality that actually was interesting and relevant to the story. They're no Doomguy or Sally but at least I didn't hate them this time, that's a HUGE improvement over the previous games in the series.
The problems I had with this game as I played through it were the parts that were still based on the older games, like only being able to carry two weapons at a time, the vehicle controls and the story/characters/universe of the game. I would've loved this game even more had they given you the ability to carry all the weapons you find like in many better series, had better vehicle controls where you more directly control the vehicles and made it an original game with new cast of characters, set in a whole new universe with a whole different story.
In short, I liked all the additions and changes they made but had this not been a Halo game at all it would've been even better.
Duke Nukem Forever (Xbox 360 and PS3)
Got it relatively recently on PS3 but I've had it on 360 for quite a long time.
The PS3 version is the weaker version so I'm mainly playing this on 360 from now on.
I like this game, I don't really get the hate for it as it's easily the best in the series to date.
The visuals are varied from basic and somewhat dated (it's a game that's been in the works for a while so no suprise there, some things were bound to look dated) to some of the most impressive I've seen this generation.
I like the humor and have gotten many laughs out of it already, the characters and story are entertaining as well.
It controls well for the most part but the aiming can feel a bit off at times lacking the precision needed. I like the vehicle sections a lot, the vehicles so far have controlled very well.
I haven't encountered any bugs or glitches yet, at worst only some ugly dated and low quality visuals like extremely low quality dynamic shadows that update like a slideshow while the game still plays at 50/60fps (50hz on PS3 as PS3 doesn't support PAL60 on SDTVs like 360 does).
Unreal Tournament III (Xbox 360 and PS3)
Got it relatively recently.
Not as good as UT2003 and Unreal Championship 1 and 2 were but still a great game. I really miss the adrenaline abilities from the previous games, the new armor system with individual parts is not a valid replacement, not even close, and vehicles are not very good either, just like they weren't in UT2004.
Not much else to say, I usually just play short bursts of a few rounds of CTF and normal Deathmatch and that's about it. I might give the singleplayer story mode another try some day but I don't really care that much to be honest, it wasn't bad but UT isn't a series where I want to play through a story even if it's there, I just wanna play some good classic CTF and Deathmatch with awesome weapons in well designed levels.
Aliens Colonial Marines (Xbox 360)
Got it a pretty long time ago but haven't played it until now.
I was very pleasantly suprised by this game, I thought it was going to be terrible or at the very least bad but turns out it's one of the best games I've ever played.
The atmosphere is perfect, like Alien Trilogy in HD, the motion tracker makes a return and makes me panic like never before, every noise from it fills my head with thoughts of all types of aliens crawling around where I can't see them until it's too late and they've swarmed me and I have to blast my way through barely making it out alive.
I love how you get to revisit places from the classic Aliens movie and see familiar places and find stuff like the unique weapons they had in the movie and stuff like that, as a fan of the franchise and the movie things like that are very much appreciated.
Just before playing this I gave Aliens Isolation a try, also on 360, and it was absolutely fucking atrocious with beyond broken and dysfunctional A.I., glitchy visuals with tons of screen tearing, framerate drops and slowdown, clunky and unintuitive controls, overuse of QTEs, archaic gameplay design that would've felt horribly outdated in the late 80s, very boring, sterile and non interactive environments, tons of humans and evil low tech andirods, literally no isolation and the aliens were a chapter of fail all on their own with a whole new type of bad A.I., predictable scripted events, visual and technical glitches etc. etc., it was just one of the very worst games I've ever played in my life and a HUGE disappointment after having heard things like "it makes up for how bad Colonial Marines was", "the game Alien fans have been waiting for" and "one of the best horror games ever made"... BULL FUCKING SHIT. It was a travesty, at best..
Haven't even mentioned how it had a mandatory install disc of 5gigs and then a mandatory patch download that was almost a gig as well, and because it's a horror game you'll naturally want to install the game disc that takes another 5gigs to install so you don't have the 360s loud humming from spinning the disc during gameplay as the sound in horror games is important, ending with a whooping 11gig installation for a glitchy broken mess of a game!
You'd think all that install bullshit would've fixed at least something, but no, apparently it only made the game "playable" in the first place, if you can count something that broken as playable at all, fuck knows what that 1gig patch did, I can't imagine the game being even more broken than it was as the only steps left to take down the ladder is an error message and not running at all, which in hindsight would've been preferable as the game was honestly that bad.
Also it was clearly meant to only be played on a full 1080p HDTV as on an SDTV the text was so tiny it was almost completely unreadable. I've seen this in quite a few games over the last few years but Alien Isolation was by far the worst, the subtitles for the piss poor voice acting was rendered completely useless because of this.
Anyway, Colonial Marines was better in all ways and it's a really great game so far. I'll be sure to play through it to the end as this is a game I really want to play more of.
This ended up being more about the shitty Isolation game but that's how it is sometime, can't be helped.
FUEL (PS3)
Got it recently.
A huge open world racing game, like Test Drive Unlimited on steroids.
I haven't been able to play it as much as I wanted because it freezes a lot.
I want to play more but the freezing seems to be a common issue with this game according to internet forums, I've seen quite a lot of threads talking about this and it puts me off playing the game to be honest.
Burnout 3 Takedown (Xbox)
Got it recently.
I've never been a fan of the stop and go gameplay this series has but I've decided to give this game a try anyway, I've played the main mode a bit and unlocked a few new cars and stuff and so far it's not that bad, I turned off the crash cam so it only does it when I crash, that helped keep the flow of the game up a lot.
There's a lot of random luck elements to the gameplay that I don't like and feel really holds the game back, it gets really boring really fast when the challenge is super high and needs pin point exact and flawless driving to complete something when there's random traffic coming out of nowhere in less that a split tenth of a second that forces you to restart a race over and over dussins of times in a row.
It controls nicely and runs smoothly an looks great otherwise so it's a shame the bad parts hold it back as much as they do.
Easily one of the most overrated games of all time as I've encountered numerous claims of this being not only the best in the series but also the best arcade racing game on PS2 and [one of] the best arcade racing games of all time.
It's mediocre among other games of the genre and I have to say it's the worst in the series as it's the first after they rebooted it with new developers and the sequels were all better and I personally like the two original games more with the second game being my favorite in the entire series.
DOOM (32X)
Link to my failed playthrough on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmEvY0MeyjPaMKLkwByxAw1KPOsbi6edI
Pretty much my favorite version of the classic Doom. I also love the PSX version and the version on Xbox that comes as a bonus together with Doom 2 and the Master Levels for Doom 2 in Doom 3 Resurrection of Evil is also great.
I love the music in this version, the Mega Drive sound chip has a unique sound I really love and it makes the classic Doom songs justice and then some.
The sound effects are taken directly from the PC version and sound as good as ever, the 32X handles them with respect and deliver perfectly where for example the Super Nintendo version fails miserably.
It lacks a save feature so instead you have free pickings of any level in the game sans the bonus and final level directly from the main menu, making it instantly accessible at all times.
It lacks several levels from the full set the PC original has but that also makes it a lot more approachable as you can play through it much faster, that makes for example a great evening of Doom without having to go on long into the night, past morning and well into next day before reaching the end.
The enemies lack sprites for turning so they end up always facing you, this gives the feeling that they're always focused on you, I like this change a lot, also adding to the feeling of being the center of enemy attention is the lack of the A.I. script that made enemies attack eachother in many other versions, this also adds to the challenge as you have to be the one to take out the enemies, they won't do the job for you in this version.
With the 6 button controller you have some of the best controls of the time, with the map being especially functional in this version, you can also pick between the weapons in your aquired arsenal freely by holding Mode and pressing other buttons for respective weapons, pressing Mode+Start twice being the most important as it's the only way to switch back to your fists after having aquired the chainsaw.
It lacks the BFG as well but that's okay as I never used it except for the biggest bosses anyway and because they're also not in this version it's not a loss that matters very much.
It's on a cartridge so the load times are as short as on a fast PC, unlike many later versions that were on CD and thus had noticeably longer loading times.
It runs relatively smooth and is relatively high res as well, it's not as good as the PSX version but it's still a lot better than many versions of Doom including the Saturn, Super Nintendo and 3DO versions, it's even slightly better performing than the commonly praised Jaguar 64 version.
This is the version of Doom I return to the most and it's a great additional version regardless of what other versions of Doom you might already own.
It might seem as if it's a bad version seeing as it lacks so much but in my opinion the changes created a unique and in many ways better take on the Doom formula, and combine that with how well it plays and you have nothing left but a winner.
Tempo (32X)
One of my favorite platform games of all time. I love the design, the music, the levels, the controls and long list of moves you can pull off, the gameplay, the characters and enemies, the minigames, the upgrades, simply put I love just about everything about this game and I never get tired of playing it, a true classic.
Bomberman Act Zero (Xbox 360)
Got it recently.
I never liked the older Bomberman games, I hate the design and the gameplay lacked certain elements needed to be good. This game fixes everything that was wrong with only one drawback, the multiplayer. The one thing Bomberman games did right was multiplayer, I mean it's one of the oldest games I know that had support for four players.
Sadly this game is singleplayer only, at most it has an online mode but because most Bomberman fans didn't like it for reasons I will never understand the online mode is dead, so it's singleplayer only.
A shame because this is the first Bomberman game I've ever liked and I would've loved to have friends over and play this in multiplayer, just my luck the one game in the series I want to play with friends won't let me.
Regardless it's a great game and I'm having a good time with it even if I have to play it on my own.
I love the new design, it reminds me of a game I have on PC but I forget the name, and the new camera angle, life bar and powerups you pick up are all great too.
A criminally underrated and underappreciated game to say the least and a prime example of a game where haters ruined a good thing.
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