Recent Game Pickups

It's been ages since I posted anything, so I thought I'd talk about a few of the games I picked up recently. Well, not about Pikmin 2 or The Munchables. They were pretty sweet deals at €23 and €18 respectively, but I just want to knuckle down and finish Super Mario RPG on the VC before I move on to anything else on the Wii. Just one more star to go!

Frequency:

I was in a local record shop to grab some headphones last week and I went to check out their small game section at the back. Sitting on the shelf was Frequency, Harmonix's first PS2 effort and a pretty damn expensive game to get hold of now, new for €9.99.

I really enjoyed Amplitude. It made you feel like you like you were mucking about on a mixing desk, building songs up from their basic components. I thought was always was interesting to hear what different combinations of those components sounded like. Some of the later songs required crazy amounts of dexterity, but hitting the right combination of buttons at the right time and activating the track you were on was always extremely satisfying.

Frequency seems to pretty much the same as it's sequel, from what I've played. The graphics aren't quite as flashy and the track listing seems a bit more obscure, but I'm sure that I'll enjoy it equally.

Sonic Mega Collection Plus

While Sonic Mega Collection on the Cube is great, there is one major drawback. The lack of save states makes it pretty tough for a lazy game such as myself to beat any the games on it. Screw practising, I prefer to cheat my way to success. Thankfully, you can save away in the PS2/Xbox versions, so after spotting it in GameStop, I decided to double dip.

Just like the Cube version, this includes with all the major Sonic games from the Mega Drive, but you also get a bunch of (fairly ropey) Game Gear efforts. From what I've seen so far, there doesn't seem to be any 60Hz option, which is a big disappointment if true. On the bright side though, you can save anywhere you like by bringing up a menu with the L2 button. The only problem with that is that it takes forever for the game to save or load. A temporary quick save like in the PS2 version of Half-Life would have been a welcome inclusion, but it's better than nothing guess. Maybe I'll finally be able to get past the fucking Labyrinth Zone now. :D

Castlevania & Contra

Another compilation and one I had forgotten about until pretty recently. I already had the original Castlevania on the VC, but I didn't have the rest of the games here and with the cheap price it was going for on eBay, I decided to grab a copy.

What you're getting here are the three NES Castlevanias plus the NES versions of Contra and Super C, complete with customisable controls and save states. I was kind of worried that the game mightn't agree with Windows XP, but it worked fine and the emulation seems pretty good from what I've played.

The only problem I have is that in order to save or load, just like Sonic Mega Collection, you have to go into a menu to do it, there's no way to quick save or load by pressing certain keys. I mean, the time it takes to save or load a game on a PC is minimal and you've been able to do this in PC emulators for ages, so why not include it here? I guess I'll have to soldier on without it, but it would have been nice to have the option to use it for some of the more bastard-hard sections of the games. Medusa heads, I'm looking at you.

Perfect Dark Zero

I'm planning on picking up a 360 soon, so I decided to have a gander around the used section at GameStop to see if I could find anything interesting. Prefect Dark Zero immediately caught my eye. While I know it's not the greatest of games, I sunk a hell of a lot of time into Perfect Dark in the N64 days and I really wanted to check this out. And hey, it comes with a fake DataDyne security card thing. That's got to be worth €13 all on it's own.

Not-so-live Blogging Nintendo's E3 Conference

It's E3 once again and today was Nintendo's turn in the spotlight. I was going to take the massively original step of giving my impressions on Twitter as the inevitable train wreck unfolded. I ended up missing it when it was on live, but luckily for you, I opened up a Notepad window and jotted down my impressions as I watched it two hours later. Will we find out more about Cammie's son, will Ravi Drums return and most importantly, will Nintendo be bringing any smiles to this gamer's face. If you want to follow along, you can watch the conference here.

Let the madness begin...

• 10:03:11AM And we're off. Look at how happy all those fake gamers look.

• 10:03:49 Holy crap, might want to tone down the crazy flashing animations guys. I wouldn't want to have epilepsy right now.

• 10:04:20 "Everyone's Game". Oh goody, lots of casual shovelware to look forward to, I suppose.

• 10:04:28 Cammie! The stage is engulfed in what can only be described as "Gamecube purple". So sick of that colour from back in the day. I wonder if there are more Wiimakes on the way.
  

• 10:05:17 Sales data incoming.

• 10:06:00 Oh! Everyone's game. As in everyone is up for gaming. That's sort of clever.
  

• 10:06:42 "A grin or a shout buried in the middle of a level." What?

• 10:07:07 Mario reveal on the way. A little retrospective of Mario games begins.

• 10:07:29 Super Mario World. Fuck yeah!

• 10:08:04 Mario in the fourth dimension? Mario on PS3 confirmed!

• 10:08:30 New Super Mario Bros. for Wii. Excite!!!

• 10:09:24 So, Mario Four Swords then. I like how the Treehouse guys have shirts to match their characters.

More after the jump.

Feature: Inside the Toy Box

Before Christmas (2008), I came across an old box of toys that me and my brother had when we were kids. After more than ten years, I had half forgotten what was inside, so expecting to finds all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff, I grabbed a camera and got ready to have a good poke around.



Here's the box itself. It's from an an old Sharp microwave that recently expired in a plume of black smoke. I guess 15 years isn't too bad for an electrical appliance. Let's pop this sucker open.

Drum roll, please.



And what did I find inside? A bunch of toy cars of various types and states of decomposition belonging to my auto mobile-obsessed sibling.

Great.

Oh well, I don't know what I was expecting to see anyway. I was far too prone to loosing or breaking any toys I had to still have them in here. Let's press on anyway.



First up is a crappy two-piece present from a mall Santa from about 1993. It's a turntable and a....lift thing (move over, Jeremy Clarkson) for small toy cars. I can't remember what I got from him, but I do remember that we got cardboard reindeer hats though. I guess they got binned.



Ooh, it's something of mine. It's an tattered old pair of gloves that I used to ride my bike with. Not strictly necessary, but I thought they were pretty cool at the time.



Another of my brother's. It's a licensed toy from Gerry Anderson's short-lived 90's show, Space Precinct. I have no idea why he would have wanted this, neither of us were into the show, but he picked this as a Christmas present one year (1995, I think).

By then, Santa had seemingly gotten a bit lazy and decided to forgo the whole letter and workshop thing and let us pick what we wanted ourselves. Apparently he paid for the presents later through some sort arrangement with the shop. I wasn't buying it.



A toy tractor my brother got as a present one year. He was totally thrilled, I mean who wouldn't be? It says "let's get to work!" when you push down the yellow bit on top for crying out loud!



A blue Santa hat that they were giving away with Pepsi around Christmas 1996. If Pepsi got to redesign Santa, he'd wear this and probably have a goatee.

More bad jokes and dodgy camera work after the jump

deviantART Update: Paint Doodles 2

Paint Doodles 2

by JiliK - Apr 27, 2009

Another deviantART update. This time I've put up a collage of odd little doodles I do sometimes in MS Paint - usually when the broadband is out and I'm back to waiting forever for stuff to load with dial-up. I've had these ones stored away for ages, but I finally whipped them into something reasonable looking over the last few weeks. Check it out here.

Gameboy Player

I've wanted one of these things forever and I was given the perfect excuse to pick one up last week when the screen on my GBA died. I was nearing the end of Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, when the picture suddenly faded from the screen. I tried changing the batteries to no avail. It was pretty clear that the old launch model GBA had had it.

The GBP arrived on Friday in great condition, apart from a few scratches. Installing it was very simple, I just needed to take off the cover of the high speed port on the bottom of the Cube, slot the GBP in there and screw it into the console. The two screws are fixed to the GBP so you can't loose them. Of course, the unit itself is no good without the required software, which came on a pretty scratched-up GC disc. I popped it in and booted the Cube, hoping for the best. Thankfully, it all worked fine.

I was really impressed with how well the handheld games translate to TV screen, even old games from the original Gameboy look nice and sharp. The GBP presents the games in the middle of the screen, surrounded by a border in the style of a GBA or you can stretch the picture to fill about 2/3 of the TV screen. The second option leaves you with a smaller border and doesn't really impact on the picture quality of the game too much.

So far, I'm really happy with the GBP and I'm hoping it'll get me to check out some more GB/GBC/GBA games. Even though I've had a GBA for years, I've pretty much ignored it for most of that time. It's only within the last few years I've started to pick a few games for it, but given the fact that I just bought Donkey Kong '94 on eBay, I think the GBP may be working.

GameStop Pickups 24/04/09

I popped into the local GameStop today for another raid on their used PS2 section. It hadn't been turning up too much of late - mostly old football games of various shapes and sizes. But the was plenty of good stuff on offer today - Dark Cloud 2, Destroy All Humans 2, Scarface and even a copy of the somewhat elusive God Hand (at a hefty €29.99 though). I had €24 to spend and decided that it was best put to use thusly:

Everybody's Tennis - €9.99

Looks like a nice, solid tennis game so far. There's more than a whiff of Wii-style inclusiveness in everything from the cute characters, the relaxing music to the menu design. I started off on the training mode, trying to hit panels on the opponent's side of the court, quite fun. The Challenge mode looks to be the where meat of the game is. For my first match I went for a little girl on girl action on the beach (sorry, I'll stop). The AI character put up pretty decent challenge. It's definitely not the lightweight casual game the presentation might suggest.

Second Sight - €6.99

For some reason, I woke up with a question this morning. I don't know what I was dreaming of, but I was trying to think what was the other PS2/Xbox telekinesis game besides Second Sight - Psi-Ops came to me after a while. Anyway, I really liked the TimeSplitters series and I've been meaning to check out Free Radical's other last gen offering for ages. I played the PC version of this on GameTap for a bit last year, but the voices were all screwed up for some reason and I've always found third person games tricky to control with the muse/keyboard combo -no such problems here.

Tony Hawk's Underground 2 - €5.99

It's been forever since I played a Tony Hawk's game and despite the dodgy reputation this one has, I decided to go for it given the budget price. I hear there are a number of ill advised additions that came in with the "Underground" moniker, but so far it seems like business as usual and I was pulling off a string of ludicrous combos in no time. Liking the soundtrack so far too - "That's Life" by Frank Sinatra was a pleasant surprise.

Site Update: Timesplitters 2/Soul Calibur Review...Thing

Today, I've stuck another old college assignment up on my web site. It's a sort of review I did in 2005, comparing two games of different genres in terms of physics, AI and collision detection. I picked TimeSplitters 2 and Soul Calibur II for mine. As well as that, we had to do a walkthrough for the first level of one of the games to prove we'd actually played them first. A move you might think unnecessary in a computing course, but there were a lot more non-gamers among us than I would have ever imagined.

You can check it out, in all its glory here.