New feature – 5 Word Impressions

First thing’s first: Yes, I’m still alive! I just haven’t had anything to post in a long time…

Okay, anyway, I’ve been to a retro gaming cafe known as “Megabytes”, which is a great place, everyone should visit if they’re ever in Glasgow.

So I decided to do this thing where you get to try out and play consoles for £1 an hour, so I decided to try out a bunch of N64 racers I’ve been dying to try out, from Cruisin’ USA to F-zero X!

So I’ve decided to try out this new feature I wanted to do called “5 word impressions”, where, as the title says, I give my impression of a game in exactly 5 words! In the end, I’ll give a rating of my experience out of 10, which won’t count towards the word count.
I might end up changing the name later, though, since I don’t like the title as it is, so it’s a placeholder.
The idea was inspired by a radio station I used to listen to (that sadly isn’t around anymore) called “Rock Radio”, where they gave the weather forecast in 5 words, called “5 Word Weather”. (See what I mean? That’s a better title!)

Anyway, without further delay, let’s start on the games I tried out! Bear in mind, though, I only got to try these for 5-10 minutes each, so I didn’t get time to try them out in full.

---

 

Cruisin’ USA!

(Credit: arcade-museum.com)

Max Payne 3 [PC] – Glitches and Stuff

While I was playing through Max Payne 3, I managed to capture a few glitches, so i thought I’d throw them together, and upload it, enjoy!

I might more of these, I’ve already captured some Walking Dead videos.

By the way, I installed a Classic Max Payne mod, which gives the game a HD version of the original Max Payne, it looks stupid at times, but it’s awesome!
You can download the mod here!

"Retro" Arrivals: Left 4 Dead: game of the Year Edition [PC]

I realised something, most of my “pick up” articles, aren’t actually about things I’ve pick up, but rather just arrived in the post.

I decided for those types of situations, I’ll just call them “‘Retro’ Arrivals”, a little more fitting, isn’t it?

Anyway, my copy of Left 4 Dead: Game of the Year Edition arrived in the post today, I still haven’t opened it up yet because I’m writing this stupi-I mean “Retro” blog.

Anyway, I’ll just cut to the chase, I got this because I’ve been wanting it so badly, so I ordered the Game of the Year edition off of Amazon.

Here are the photos:

Horse of the Week – Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater [N-Gage]

My cousin, Steven, wasn’t at our grans last Sunday due to a shift at Asda. However today, we got to meet up at our grans for lunch, so I brought along my N-Gage with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, so we could do the Horse of the Week.

This is a new feature I’m making for my blog, we were always playing Horse in a Tony Hawk’s console, I have a Tony Hawk game for every console and handheld newer than the Saturn, so we are always playing a game of Horse in them, so I decided to make this a feature for my blog, where we keep score of our wins, and plus, we always have a random word for horse, because you can change the name to whatever you want in the games.

So as you’ve probably guessed, the game used this week is Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater for the N-Gage, unlike the other versions, you can actually change the name to anything you want, whereas in the other versions, you have to stick with “Horse”, also, a nice feature is that for horse, you don’t need another N-Gage, you can just pass it around to the second player.

This week, the horse of the week insult is: PJPJKJ5JJL!

Currently, the score is 3-1 to me.

After this week, I’m going to keep track of the scores to make this longer, but since I haven’t this week, I’ll go straight to the result.

The Winner was…

Me!

Steven is a PJPJKJ5JJL!

The score is now 4-1 to me!

Retro Diary – 28/11/11 – "Are you ready to press a button? Then let’s go!!"

Dear Diary,

Sorry I was late, I didn’t have any time to write this weeks entry yesterday, I had to get up early the next day, personal reason, I’d rather not mention.

I had a fairly busy week this week, but I need to write notes down from now on, because I forgot the order these events happened.

Throughout the week, I have been revisiting old games that I had in my ‘collection’ which I completed ages ago, but was tempted to do again, Timesplitters 2, the Tony Hawk’s Underground, Tony Hawk’s Underground 2 and Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland.

I’ve still to play the latter of the list as I’m in the middle of Underground 2, I and if you must know, I’m playing the Gamecube version, I’ve never played that one, I completed the first Underground on PS2, and after playing the Xbox version before… wow, I have to say, the PS2 version looks kind of rubbish, as for the Gamecube version, I’ve never played that, so I can’t comment on it.

I was playing Timesplitters 2 on PS2, but while I was on that, I went to my cousins house, and we played through the Xbox version it there, so I didn’t see the point in completing it on PS2 if I’ve more-a-less seen everything. Alright, I lie, we only went through a couple of levels, but you get the idea.

---

While I was at my cousin’s house, we played some games, mostly on N64.

I brought a few games with me in case we got bored, just as well we did I guess, but we had a problem with the N64, it wasn’t able to save or load data from cartridges, so when I put in Ridge Racer 64, it said the memory had gone corrupt, and the data in Perfect Dark was gone too, but when I went back home, and tried them on my N64, the data was still there.

Anyway, that didn’t stop us from playing a race or two on Ridge Racer 64, although I was moody the whole way through.

First, we played Tony Hawks Skateboarding on N64, my cousin told me he never played the original Tony Hawk game, I was surprised, he loves Pro Skater 3 and Underground, but never played the first game!? Alright, fair enough, I was like that at first, but eventually I got the whole collection up to Tony Hawks Proving Ground on PS2.

Anyway, we played a few games on Graffiti, and I more-a-less annihilated him, with scored like 12-4!

Then, we had a few games on Hockey on Monster Truck Madness 64, and he got me back, he kept beating me with scores like 6-0! I think I an safely say, I’ve lost my touch…

Then we had a game of Ridge Racer 64 and tried to play Perfect Dark, but like I said before, the N64 had problems reading the data.

Then we played Timesplitters 2, and like I said, we played through a couple of levels until I had to leave to go back home.

Here are the games I think we played, in the order I think we played them:
• Tony Hawk’s Skateboarding [N64]
• Monster Truck Madness 64 [N64]
• Ridge Racer 64 [N64]
• Perfect Dark* [N64]
• Timesplitters 2 [Xbox]

---

Speaking of Perfect Dark, I was also playing games I haven’t completed before throughout the week, such as Matrix: Path of Neo [Xbox], Driver 2 [PS1], Burnout [PS2] and Perfect Dark [N64].

Perfect Dark was the only games out of those games I actually completed, I’ll go back to the others and complete them eventually, but man did Perfect Dark feel rewarding for one reason, I was given a bonus mission that’s mostly about shooting anything that moves! That was alot of fun!

---

On Sunday, at grans, it was Sega Saturn week, we restarted due a confusion, I’d rather not mention why.

I played a match with my little brothers on Fighters Megamix, of course with a handicap for balance, and they were having an absolute blast, they kept bugging me to play more.

Eventually, I convinced them to try out Sega Rally, they didn’t like that too much, racing games, as I’ve discovered, aren’t my little brothers’ strong points.

Then they wanted to play the Sonic games I had on the Saturn, so we had a game of Sonic 2 on Sonic Jam, and then we had a couple of races in Sonic R. I actually convinced my uncle to play a game of Sonic Jam with me at Sonic 2, we had fun, although we didn’t get far.

Then my cousin arrived, and we had a game of Virtua Fighter 2, then he wanted to watch the Fifth Element, which was coming up on Channel 5. I wanted to play him in a couple of fights every time an ad break starts for 3 reasons:

1. I wanted some time spent towards playing the Saturn, we didn’t spend much time playing for it.
2. To make the ad breaks seam shorter.
3. To give the Saturn rests, to keep the Disc Tray and Cartridge slot working, so then we could load my Virtua Fighter 2 data from the Backup Cart, so we can play Virtua Fighter 2.1!

Believe or not, this did all 3 jobs perfectly, it made the ad breaks seam much shorter, we had a blast every time, and the Saturn for the most part, kept working perfectly.

We even gave ourselves a name by the last ad breaks, we called ourselves the “Rapid Virtua Fighter Response Unit”, or the RVFRU, because the second the ad breaks came on, we literally rushed to the TV, turned the Saturn on, switched the channel and played a few games! I think we were overall equal in the record, I won alot of the matched, but he won alot as well.

As for the film itself, It was brilliant! I had no interest to watch it before and never pictured myself actually liking it that much, but wow, were my expectations blown out of the water, (get it?) it had a little of everything I wanted, it had alot of funny moments, it had an all star cast, I loved the environments, it had a great atmosphere to it, and the story, although it seamed a bit ridiculous in my opinion, was very good and kept you watching until the end. I’ll definitely be getting myself the DVD soon…

During the film, We recognised the actor that played as Ruby Rhod, or at least he was familiar, but we couldn’t figure out where we seen him, then I said “He looks and sounds just like that guy from Rush Hour.”, then my cousin looked it up on his smartphone (or ‘daft-phone’ as I like to call it.), and it turns out I was right, he was played by Chris Tucker, who played James Carter in the Rush Hour Films, so that was where we’d seen him!

In a nutshell, Here’s what we played:

In the Order I think we Played Them
• Fighters Megamix
• Sega Rally
• Sonic Jam
• Sonic R
• Virtua Fighter 2/2.1

---

Afterwards, I went to my other cousin’s house… again, and we were playing FIFA 11 on the Xbox 360.
My brother was playing with my cousin in a match, I forgot the result of that.
Then we had a match, I lost.
Then he a match with my brother again, and my brother lost, with a 8-1 score no less!
After that, we left, we didn’t stay very long.

---

The following day, we were at my old flat, literally, everyone in the family were there, even close friends and old neighbours were there, again, I don’t want to mention why.

Good thing I started to keep notes, there are thing here I never would’ve remembered!

Me, my brother and my cousins got kind of bored eventually, so I decided to go to my house and bring a console, but by the time I went there and back by bus, as I have no driving license, they would’ve gone, so my uncle said he’d drive me there and back, I always feel bad when I get other to do stuff for me like this, but he said he didn’t mind, so we agreed that I’d do that.

I asked my cousins what console I should bring, at first, they said “Whatever you want.” like they didn’t care, then I said, or at least I practically said, “I meant should I bring the Saturn, so we can play Virtua Fighter 2.1 again, or bring the Playstation, as that’s next on the list.”, then they said, “Bring the Dreamcast!”, of course, I happily obliged, I brought the Dreamcast.

When I did, one of my older cousins was intrigued by the fact that I bought the Dreamcast, he lived through that era, (Lucky b*stard, I was too young back then!) and remembers it, and so we played a few 4-player games.

Before that, though, we were talking about games in general, and because I was a retro gamer (Who knew?), we were talking mostly about old games, and I found out that my Mega Drive that I have now, I bought from my cousin: Giancarlo, it was actually his Mega Drive originally (The older cousin, not the one who sold me it.), and he gave it to him before selling it to me, however, he apparently had the Mega CD attachment for it, but I didn’t find out what happened to it, I would’ve loved to have that though!

We were talking about a game on the Mega CD called “Night Trap”, which was meant to be a cult classic, but is supposed to be one of those games that’s so bad, it’s good. After that, we were making fun of how enthusiastic the old FMV videos were, they were over the top, saying that they said stuff like we were going on adventures, when in reality, we were just pressing buttons in a sequence, I made fun of them by saying “Are you ready to press buttons? Then let’s go!”!

We have this partial in-joke, I say partial, because I’m p*ssed off at the reason that I made it, basically, when someone mentions the Xbox, I, for a joke, assume that they mean the original Xbox,
let’s say for argument someone says, “I’m getting Modern Warfare 3 for the Xbox!”,
I say “There’s an Xbox version!?”,
The conversation would probably go on like:
“Yeah, it’s on Xbox and PS3.”
“Isn’t there also an Xbox 360 version?”
“Yeah, that was what I meant.”
“Then why did you say you were getting it for the Xbox?”
“Shut Up! You knew what I meant!”

It does p*ss me off how people just call the Xbox 360, just the Xbox, because I have an original Xbox and still play it today, and I’m probably the only one, but nevertheless it still really annoyed me, so I created the in-joke.

Why am I telling you this Dear Diary? Well, because the cousin who lived through the Dreamcast era. (I need to give these guy nicknames, I don’t want to give away their real names.) was talking about something for the Xbox 360, I forgot what it was, but he referred the Xbox 360 as just the Xbox, so I done that In-joke on him, he was confused at first, but then my other cousin explained the in-joke, and then for a joke, he called me a “Retro pedant!”.

We played a couple of games of Ready 2 Rumble boxing, a Dreamcast night just isn’t a Dreamcast night without that! I was facing Giancarlo at first, I won, then I faced my older cousin (nickname pending), and he won, but he was button bashing, even my youngest brother gave him advice by telling him to keep pressing the Y button, and it worked…

Then we played Chu Chu Rocket, 4-player! It was madness, just as I expected!

Then we played WWF Royal Rumble, just to try it, I didn’t expect much out of it, but surprisingly, we had an absolute blast playing it, we played a good few matches of that!

---

Then me and Steve (Nickname from 007 Nightfire a few weeks back) had a game of Tony Hawks Skateboarding, he said he’d be better than me in the Dreamcast version, I didn’t believe him, but then he actually beat me in a game of graffiti, I beat him the next game, then we tied, so it was neck and neck, next time we play will be a decider. I have a feeling though he used an N64 emulator to practice the N64 version… Then we played a game of horse, unfortunetly, you couldn’t change the name, so we were stuck with ‘horse’. So we played a game, and I lost… wow.

Then we played Tony Hawks Pro Skater 2, we played a game of Graffiti, that I won, then we had a game of horse, but this time, we could change the name, so what did we do, we both moved the d-pad in random directions and kept tapping A, and then came the final result:

I’ll be introducing a new feature, perhaps outside the Retro diary as I think it deserves it’s own articles, we call it, the “Insult of the Week”.

So, without further adieu, we present to you, the Insult of the week is… DCCJJIBCSS!

Hopefully, I’ll document the highlights of the matches we will have and make it a new full feature of the Blog, but the score will be backdated.

So the match winner was… Me! That’s 3-0 to me! Steve is the DCCJJIBCSS!

---

Afterwards we played WWF Royal Rumble again, but this time, we did a Royal Rumble Match match, it never seamed to end! It turns out that we needed to eliminate the computer opponents, (Because this game supported up to 9 wrestlers at the screen at one, which is very impressive considering that the newer Smackdown vs. Raw games can only handle 6! So we did that, and all we had to do, was eliminate each other, but once you were eliminated, you can go right back in by pressing start after you’ve been eliminated, so theoretically, in a 4-player game, it can be never ending! Just as well it didn’t but it take half an hour of our lives!

We then had a game of ECW Hardcore Revolution, because it was so much fun to play, because it’s so bad, so yeah, we played 3 matched, we had a good laugh out of it.

After that, I had to go, and then wrote the blog entry.

---

Note to Self: Take notes from now on.

Cobra!

The PS2’s Final Moments: WWE All Stars Review

I’m going to start doing reviews on this site, I’ve been doing reviews for several sites, and since my readers think I’m good at reviewing, I though make some here, particularly this series I like to call “The PS2’s final moments.”, where I review the PS2’s last games.
When did they come out? The more appropriate question is, when WILL they come out?
That’s right! Believe it our not, they’re still games being made for the PS2, usually a port of a game, although there’s no mention on the advertisements for the games, or reviews of them, that’s when I come along, I’m going to buy every individual game that comes out on the PS2 from 2011 onwards.

I also want to know, if there’s any game I’ve missed that’s coming to PS2, tell me about it, like I said I want to experience the PS2’s last moments, I want to be with it, on it’s deathbed, sitting beside it, holding it’s controller, until it finally rests it’s laser and is discontinued.

The first game in this series is WWE All Stars, yes, believe it or not, there’s a PS2 version, don’t believe me? Check on Amazon, it does exist, however, THQ themselves have never mentioned a PS2 port, why not?

As a PC gamer, at least when it comes to modern games, and a fan or Wrestling games, I am annoyed that THQ never release the WWE games on the PC, and have to resort to getting them on PS2, and recently, we were given a very good port of Smackdown vs. Raw 2011, the graphics were actually comparable to the other versions,and the game ran fast and the controls were very functional, in fact the only complaint I have with it is that the commentating wasn’t very good, sometimes they repeat lines a couple of times or just say something totally out of context to what’s going on, and the load times were awful, it can take up to 5 minutes to load up a match, apart from those, it was a great port and probably the best PS2 game in years, and being it was released when it was, I thought it would be the last, ending the PS2’s life with a bang.

The best thing was, unlike every other game from 2008 to present, they didn’t just grab the Wii version and port it without a care in the world. The graphics were better on the PS2 overall, for instance, the ropes were 3D and the names on the wrestlers, telling you who you’re facing, didn’t have a black box behind them unlike the Wii version, the framerate was much more reliable too, in fact if I can recall right, it never slowed down on me, not even with 6 wrestlers in a TLC match, it’s just things like that that proved that THQ put real effort into the PS2 version!

On the back of the instruction manual it has an ad for the then upcoming WWE All Stars, and having done a little research, I found that it was coming to the PS2. The game was going to be an unofficial sequel of sorts to WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade game, it’ll be cartoony and not the slightest bit realistic, I loved that game, so I was looking forward to this, and after playing the PS3 version at HMV, and enjoyed it, I didn’t expect a perfect port, but I still expected a great port nonetheless, like what we got for Smackdown vs. Raw 2011.

Before I started playing, I heard they grabbed the Wii version, and put it on the PS2, I thought that was kind of lazy, but I’ll give it a chance.

The game as you imagine, doesn’t have much of a story, just win matches and become the champion, you can choose from 3 champions, I’ll get more into that later.

I started the game up, and played a quick match, and wow, was I disappointed, the arena looked pretty nice, the textures were actually really good, the best I’ve seen from the PS2 in fact, but the characters look awful, the texture quality is awful, the colours look all washed out, sometimes the clothes look as though they were just part of the wrestlers skin. The worst part is, the game doesn’t even run a good framerate despite this, The gameplay suffers big time from this, I’ll get to that later.

The music is… well, there’s no music, instead we have JR and Jerry “King” Lawler commentating the match, if you wanted a fast paced, fun game, put in some upbeat music, or at least something that give you the impression that it’s fast. I’m sick and tired of hearing JR and King’s annoying American accents, to give them credit, at least this time around they got it right, they don’t repeat the same lines constantly and everything they say relates to what’s going on in the match.

The sound effects are awful, they honestly sound like they recorded the sound effects using a microphone to a speaker and then compressed it. It just sounds awful.

The gameplay is terrible. the controls lag, what I mean by this is that the buttons only work half the time and sometimes you have to press a button multiple times for it to do something, the AI are annoying as well, sometimes, they just won’t give you any chance to attack, they’ll punch you when you’re down getting back up, this can get very frustrating.

There are a few game modes to keep you occupied, you have the fantasy warfare game types, where they have matches where they get a WWE legend and their modern equivalent, for example, Andre the Giant vs Big show, both of them are big and heavy, or Sgt. Slaughter vs. Jack Swagger, both of them being obsessed with their country, the USA.
You also have a Path of Champions mode, which a mentioned earlier, you can choose from 3 champions to chase, the classic WWE championship (Undertaker and Paul Bearer), the modern WWE championship (Randy Orton) and the WWE tag team championship (D-Generation X), they’re all the same thing, you play 10 matches, the championship one included, so there really isn’t much to say about that.

The presentation is average, well, it would be had it not of been for the awful muffled sound effects, and the terrible load times, they aren’t as bad as Smackdown vs. Raw 2011, but they’re still awful.

To end on a high note, if you’re playing with a friend for the sake of laughing at the game for it’s many flaws, there’s actually some fun to be had with the game, because of the low gravity moves and, lack of music and bad sound effects give off the impression that they’re on the moon, you have a great laugh out of that.

Overall, it’s is an awful port, they put no effort into it whatsoever, they just grabbed the Wii version and dumped it on a PS2 disc. On multiplayer, however, it’s so bad, it’s good. Unless you can find it very cheap, like say 50p, and want to buy it for the multiplayer, don’t bother.

Graphics: 3/10 – They would be considered bad even if it was a launch title, and it can’t even run a good framerate, not even the great textures can save it.

Gameplay: 5/10 – Again, unless your playing it on multi-player to laugh at it, it’s just boring, the controls are delayed and sometimes don’t work.

Music: 1/10 – There’s no music in the game, and again, the commentators will really get on your nerves, The sound effects are Awful, absolutely awful, I give it 1 point for at least getting the commentary right.

Overall: 3/10 – Overall, A terrible port of a great game, I do not recommend you get this version. It wasn’t like you were going to get the PS2 version anyway, I’m just saying, don’t!

Was this any good? Give me your honest opinion, I want to know.

Gamestation Rant

I’m not doing this to view whore, or anything like that, I’m really am p*ssed off at these guys!

In my early days as a Retro Gamer, being laughed at and all, and no store were selling them, that was until I discovered Gamestation, and they had a whole wall dedicated to Retro Games, and was so exited, I practically ran over and went to my knees, and slid over and looked at all of them, seeing if any caught my interest, for a year or so it was all good, the games were at a reasonable price and they worked fine.

… that was until recently, I’ll give you the whole story, I once bought both Enter the Matrix and Matrix: Path of Neo for Xbox out of Gamestation, Enter the Matrix worked just fine, but Path of Neo was f*cked up, the audio was delayed in FMVs, some sound didn’t play at all, it loads way longer than it should, even when the police officer shouts “FREEZE!” in the training mode, it took 5 minutes to load that, and the game couldn’t load beyond the first level where you’re trying to escape from the Agents at Neo’s workplace, I bought another copy off EBay, a promotional one no less, and it didn’t have these problems, so it wasn’t the game itself.

I took it back, they got the disc cleaned, and guess what, it still didn’t work, so I took it back again, and traded it for Halo: Combat Evolved having to pay an extra £4, due to the price being higher, and you’ll never believe this, it didn’t even have the disc inside the case! I spent a total of £6 for an empty case, I wasn’t having it, so I took it back, and got Fable: The Lost Chapters, luckily, that worked just fine, so that was settled, I forgave Gamestation for that.

but then afterwards I took it back, I bought faulty game, after faulty game, after faulty game, and I kept falling for it every time, so I decided to give them one last chance today, and bought Sega Worldwide Soccer 97 on the Sega Saturn, I was surprised they even took Saturn Games on trade in, so I bought it, and guess what… it didn’t work!

That’s the last time I buy ANYTHING from those arseholes! They don’t even have the decency to check if the discs are inside the cases, let alone if they work!

In fact, they don’t even check if the case itself is in good condition, as in can it keep the game inside, I once saw a copy of GTA2 on PS1, and the case was the worst I’ve ever seen, but that was the only game that caught my eye at that point, so I picked it up, and the disc fell out the bottom!

If you were to snap a disc and sell them the smaller or most hazardous half, whichever is worse, with no case, scratched to f*ck, I wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised if they’d still sell it!

With that said, you’re probably hoping that trading in games aren’t so bad, I mean, if they’d accept anything, you can make money easily… right?

Sorry, no, they aren’t much better in that department, my brother offered to trade in 6 games to save up for football boots, most of them fairly new at the time, and they only offered him just £5 for the lot, he declined, and I don’t blame him. Worse even, I remember being in Gamestation once, and I overheard some guy trying to sell some retro games, and they shooed him away, saying they didn’t take Retro games, despite having a whole WALL full of them!

Also, they’re a bunch of stupid f*cks, I once bought WWF Warzone and WWF Attitude for Nintendo 64, for only £2 I might add, the labels say they were SNES games…

Ok, first of all, neither game was released for that console,
Second, the cartridge size difference is MASSIVE,
and third, it had the N64 logo ON the cartridge, how could they’ve missed that!?

When I went to the checkout, the guy there said “Sorry, I can’t find a price on these SNES games.”, I think this a good time a que a facepalm, don’t you think?

Frankly, it’s the worst store I ever visited, they’re a prime example of a company that cares nothing about user satisfaction, but only for money, honestly, you’d be better off going to car boot sales, at least the games you buy there HAVE the games in the cases and, for the most part, WORK!

Oh how I wish for a proper store that sells retro games, one that actually checks if there’s a disc/cartridge inside the case, if there is one, and if it works, if there’s a store like that in Glasgow, could you PLEASE tell me about it?

Retro Pick-Ups: Nintendo Game Boy Color + Super Mario Bros. Deluxe

This is a new feature I’m going to do, it’s where I post whatever it is I pick-up, as long as it’s retro-related (or in rare cases, something modern), with pictures and the story of how I got it, if it’s interesting.

My family were going to the beach today, but they didn’t have enough room in the car for all of us, one of us had to stay, so I decided to stay, I didn’t want to go anyway.

So since I’d be on my own, I thought I’d go to my cousin’s house for the day, and we were playing the Xbox (Original) and N64 all day. We were going to play the Gamecube, but he lost one of the controllers, so we went searching for it, and I found a Game Boy Color, suddenly, memories came rushing back, I wanted it so bad, so I asked him if I could have it, along with the game inside it, which was Super Mario Bros. Deluxe, and he said I could, saying that I would give it a better home than he would.

Here they are (Warning: Pictures are rather blurry, sorry about that):

I’m very pleased to own one of these again, I’ve had so many memories with it, and I’m looking forward to reliving them…

Cobra!

Retro Diary – 31/7/11 – "Dreamcast Week"

I will now be doing a new weekly feature named “Retro Diary” (I know, not very original), where I tell youse what’s been happening retro-gaming related in my life. (No stuff, Sherlock!)

Every Sunday, me and my cousins meet up at my grans, usually with one of us bringing a console, we take turns every week.

So it was my turn this week, usually I’d bring the N64, or the PS1, but this time I thought I’d so something different this week, and brought the Dreamcast, and we had an absolute blast, more than usual, with the N64 and the PS1, you get maybe 1 or 2 out of 10 games that when playing multiplayer, you don’t care whether or not you win or lose, you’re just having too much fun to care. Well, every Dreamcast game we played were all like that.

The games we played:

• Ready 2 Rumble Boxing
• Mortal Kombat Gold
• Chu-Chu Rocket
• Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2
• Sonic Adventure 2 (Kart Racing Mini-Game)

I brought a whole lot more than that, but we didn’t get to play any of them, ah well, we still had a great time.

We agreed that next week would be “Gamecube week”, where we will bring the Gamecube, and then we decided that afterwards, we’d do it chronologically, as in, start with the Jaguar, then the next week, bring the console we have that was released next, the Sega Saturn, then the PS1, then the N64, and so on, and when we reach the end (Xbox 360 or Wii, it depends), we’d go back to the beginning, and do it all over again.

I think this is a very good idea, this way, we can still play the old retro game consoles, but also give some week to the modern consoles, when we get a little bored of retro games.

So yeah, it should be alot of fun, I’m really exited for it.

---

I ordered a Dreamcast Modem off eBay, because my Dreamcast didn’t come with one, and I’ve been hearing that not only can you still go online with it using DreamKey 3.0, but also create a server between the Dreamcast and your PC to give it a broadband connection, so I tried it.

No luck though, I couldn’t get it to connect, that totally sucks, but I don’t think I’ll be giving up just yet, I went this far to get the modem and a cable, I’ll probably try another tutorial.

---

I’ve finally completed Ratchet and Clank! I managed to scrape up enough bolts for a R.Y.N.O. (Alright, I cheated, but can you blame me, it costs 150,000 bolts!) and finally defeated Chairmen Drek, who beforehand was totally solid, now he was a walk in the park.

It gave me the option to start a new game with all the weapons, bolts, and “nanotech capacity”, if that’s what you call it, that I have, I did that, so now I’m playing a second time, this time being that I have a R.Y.N.O., it’s ALOT easier.

---

…and that’s it for this weeks Retro Diary, I’ll see youse here next week.

Cobra!

I’m now doing a blog about retro(ish) stuff

I’m now doing a blog about retro(ish) stuff.

What I’ll be posting here are reviews, first impressions, pick-ups, or even just me giving an opinion of a subject.

It won’t be just games and consoles, it may be DVDs, VHSes, and even in rare occasions, books.

This blog probably won’t be of interest to anyone, and I know that practically no one will be reading this blog, but it does get me away from the stress of working on Gamerstorm stuff.