Captain Buttbeard's Gaming Corner

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon 2 (Xbox) Developer: Red Storm Entertainment Publisher: Ubisoft Released: 2004 Genre: Tactical shooter
	2024/11/06
Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner (PlayStation 2) Developer: Konami Computer Entertainment Japan Publisher: Konami Released: 2003 Genre: Third-person shooter, hack and slash
	2024/10/25
Tron 2.0: Killer App (Xbox) Developers: Monolith Productions, Climax LA Publisher: Buena Vista Interactive Released: 2004 Genre: First-person shooter
	2024/10/25
Folklore (PlayStation 3) Developer: Game Republic Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment Released: 2007 Genre: Action role-playing
	2024/10/24
Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance (PlayStation 2) Developer: Konami Computer Entertainment Japan Publisher: Konami Released: 2003 Genre: Action-adventure, stealth
	2024/10/14
OutRun 2 (Xbox) Developers: Sega AM2, Sumo Digital Publisher: Sega Released: 2004 Genre: Racing game
	2024/10/07
Men of Valor (Xbox) Developer: 2015, Inc. Publisher: Vivendi Universal Games Released: 2004 Genre: First-person shooter
	2024/09/21
Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon 2 (PlayStation 2) Developers: Ubisoft Shanghai, Ubisoft Paris Publisher: Ubisoft Released: 2004 Genre: Tactical shooter
This is not what I was supposed to play next but I realized it's coming up on Xbox so I jumped ahead. So why am I playing it here then? Well because they released two entirely different games under the same name and this version is the prequel that takes place before the Xbox one, pretty cool way to handle it but I know I would have hated it if I didn't have a PlayStation 2 lol. I really liked the first game and I guess the biggest difference is it's in third person now, they clearly went with a SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs inspired direction. It takes place in North Korea in 2007 where they fired a missile at a US ship and they send you in to fuck shit up (the cutscenes were really nice). The graphics are meh but the screen goes kinda grey when firing which was a cool effect (too bad they did the stupid press R1 to fire bullshit and you can't change the controls eh), but the framerate wasn't the best. Everything in so simple now, like you still have squads but it's only 3 other people and you can't give them separate orders, you can't even select who you want or their equipments (there are chicks too now lmao), there is no map anymore where you could select routes for them eh, orders are very simple like advance by just pressing the button, and if you hold it down you can send them to scout ahead, regroup or hold, and to do suppressing fire or grenade attack. There is no subtitles at all and it sucked cause sometimes I couldn't hear anything because of the explosions eh. You can't go prone instantly and you must stand still to do that, and it takes some time while he goes through the motions lol it was so slow. There is a briefing before missions where you can change your equipment but again it's so fucking simple. And there are no big open areas anymore, there is literally only one way to go to progress and everything is very scripted, like enemies are always at the same place. Sometimes you are alone too with this modern rifle and you can use a laser target to call airstrikes. You can't save during missions and there are no checkpoints, but that was rarely an issue because missions feel so short, like sometimes I was done in 15 minutes and I'm slow as fuck lol. You start at an airfield, then go to a village alone to kill a general before he escapes, attack a convoy at night with night vision goggles, destroy a refinery, break into a prison to rescue the only prisoner lol, destroy a crashed helicopter and rescue the pilot, and then you protect him alone eh, save a dam before an insane general destroy it (fuck this was insanely hard, always got killed at the end by that stupid tank). You go back after 3 months because that rogue general wants a military coup and you destroy a radar station, then a ship alone, some missile control with fucking tanks everywhere, a railroad bridge alone in a snowstorm, and the final attack on the general's hideout is in a snowstorm again, he kills himself as he sets the nuclear missile to fire and you gotta destroy the launch pad. Turns out the general was just a pawn for someone else, I guess it sets up the Xbox game. There are quick missions too where you can do all missions alone and with your squad too but who cares lol. You get points as you go through the campaign for like kills, headshots, squadmates survived, and you can use them to unlock concept arts of the end of the final mission, character pics and renders, some army gear promos lol and some futuristic tech under development I guess (well armies don't look like that at all today lol), and the cutscenes. It was ok, clearly a downgrade and very simple and very much like SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs light, and sometimes really hard, but I've heard the Xbox version is supposed to be great so I'm looking forward to that.	2024/09/18
Comix Zone (Mega Drive) Developer: Sega Technical Institute Publisher: Sega Released: 1995 Genre: Beat 'em up
I heard of this somehow a few years ago, I thought it looked cool and I liked the concept, and I found out there is a hack that makes it easier so I decided to play it near the end of the insane summer heat (with Lumines: Puzzle Fusion and some movies because I didn't want to start another game). This comic book artist called Sketch Turner (what a name) gets sucked into his comic after his main villain comes alive. The manual has the actual comic the guy made which was cool so you kinda know what the story is supposed to be, it's some post-apocalyptic world destroyed by an asteroid and some empire rules the world now where this chick general is trying to stop the evil guy. The game has a really good artstyle and music, it actually feels like you are in a comic book as you go from panel to panel (and sometimes you can pick which one you want to go to), all the dialogue is in speech bubbles, and you have a pet rat with you called Roadkill who can find hidden items and shortcuts by ripping the pages, it was so cool. Usually you are just punching and kicking enemies but you can use a knife to throw, grenades, bombs, and there is ice tea for health and some superhero fist for a brutal powerup lol. The evil guy draws up your enemies which was really cool, they are like weird cyborg looking mutants and bugs, or some green goo monster that pours out from containers lol (there are some enemies that can be defeated by your rat because they're scared of him lmao). Sometimes you need to blow up crates or kick open trapdoors to progress, or some basic shit like hit a clock when the pointer is at the right place or use your rat to pull a lever to open up a path for you. There are only a couple levels, you start in a ruined city where you can see the destroyed Statue of Liberty, then you go down to the sewers where their HQ is, to some temple in the Himalayas where their traning facility is and you fight in some kung fu tournament lol, then to a dried up sea with a ship graveyard where there is a weapons factory. Sometimes there are boss fights too but honestly they were way too easy with the hack lmao. At the end of sections he turns into a superhero for some pose and you get stats, there are some funny animations too like when he smells his shoes lmao. The coolest part I think was when the evil guy sets the page on fire and you gotta escape in time, that was awesome. Well at the end he comes back into the comic and traps the chick in a nuke so you gotta defeat him before she drowns or you'll get the bad ending, I used the nuke's rockets to damage him. After you rescue her she comes back with you to the real world and a text shows what happened to them after, your book becomes the best-selling comic ever, girl becomes Chief of Security for the US and the rat gets some cheese lmao. The concept was really cool but it's a ridiculously short game and it was too easy with the hack lol (I still saved all the time hehe).	2024/08/31
Gurumin: A Monstrous Adventure (PlayStation Portable) Developer: Nihon Falcom Publisher: 505 Game Street Released: 2007 Genre: Action role-playing
I have no idea how I heard of this, maybe from a video or a list but I thought it looked cool with a cute cartoony style and it looked simple enough so I decided to play it. You are playing as a girl called Parin who comes to live with her grandpa but it's a mining town and no kids live there lol, but she sees a kid who turns out to be a monster who only children can see and she follows her back through a hole to monster town where these cute little monsters live and she becomes friends with them lol. In the mining town there are shops and people to talk to like this pedo dude with an insane mustache who wants to date her wtf. One of the monsters gets kidnapped by these phantoms and they tell you about this Excalibur kind of weapon that no one call pull out but you do lmao and it's a little drill, and when you save the dude a dark mist covers the map so you can't go anywhere just to a few places, and the phantoms destroy the monster town so you go out to the world and into dungeons. Your drill can be charged up and you can destroy some of the environment for coins, and you have all kinds of attacks like jump attacks that can lift up the enemy and you can combo that by jumping from enemy to enemy which is needed sometimes to get to some areas, you can dash to avoid damage and your drill can fire shots too and you can buy drill upgrades from the pedo dude like a tornado attack where you rotate the analog stick or dash attack and you can upgrade them too. You can find these holes on the floor where you can dig for a drill energy recharge (hitting enemies also recharges it slowly) and there are heal pads too. Sometimes you gotta do stuff like pushing crates to these pads to activate doors but it's all very simple. Armored enemies drop junks when you charge attack them (and you can also find them in bins) and they are needed for upgrades. At the end of dungeons you find furnitures lol an they belong to one of the monsters, and when you give them back some of the mist disappears and you can access new areas, you also get a ranking and a medal based on that. You can use the gold medals to get new headgears from your grandpa and sell the other ones, and you can get platinum medals too by doing weird tasks and they unlock pictures you can view. You can buy headgears in the shop too like goggles, helmets, gas mask, a monkey hat lol and they have different effects like no water damage, no gas damage, more damage, more money, critial hits heal like that vampire hat lol that what I used the most, and you can upgrade them too to improve their effects and add new ones to them. The music was really repetitive though like just the same shit repeating everywhere lmao. Some dungeons are just boss fights (the normal ones don't have them), some of them were so fucking hard lol and max life increases after you defeat them and you usually save a monster there and then the town slowly gets rebuilt. There are some places too that aren't dungeons and you can find these elemental buffs to your drill like fire or ice, they are needed to solve puzzles like lighting a torch, and there are different oils to your drill too that can restore or protect drill energy. Some of these places have other things to do like there is a park with a slide and a monkey bar and if you climb up to the top you get a crown lmao, and you can get items sometimes in dungeons too by doing certain tasks, you can find stupid shit like a joke glass with mustache or an afro wig and give it to a monster and get a picture in return. Half of the dungeons are just the previous ones in backwards eh and they have gatekeepers sometimes who wants something from you before they let you pass like a password wtf or your money must end in 666 wtf how am I supposed to do that lmao, thank god you can just pay them if you want to pass lol. Sometimes you need to do minigames to get help, like destroy more rock than the moles lol or wack moles for the rich dude otherwise he won't pay for rebuilding the village lol, or some fucking soccer game which is impossible unless you play the goalkeeper, and when you get the maid outfit (cost so much money) you can play a minigame selling cakes, you literally just have to type in what they ordered lmao even a toddler could do this. There is also some doc in his lab with a bunch of computers, with a fortune teller and a couple future teller computer lmao, and you get an urn from him you can use to summon one of the monsters to help you out in fights. The locations were like some ruins, forest, cave, those fucking cliffs with some insane jumping, and these weird crystal caves. There is a twist near the end where you find out who the phantom prince really was and who was the previous hero and the monster who defeated the dragon (this was pretty obvious), but the prince broke the dragon free and now you have to stop it. There is an optional boss before the final one in a volcano and you need to walk through these dragon bones to get there while the lava keeps rising it was so hard to do with the clunky controls, and the boss was fucking impossible lmao I couldn't do it. Well the final boss with the dragon Tokaron had two parts, in the first you just gotta avoid his attacks while and monsters and the phantoms fire at him with cannons lol and then comes the actual fight after he sucks everyone up lmao. After the fight everyone is saved, the dragon becomes a puppy, and the monsters and phantoms live together peacefully, but the portal closes because you are getting older and you gotta go back and will never seen them again damn. Lol the credits had some cutscenes about what happened next, the phantoms left and you finally get a kid friend. It unlocks hard mode with new outfits and subquests but eh who cares. It was a really cute, simple and fun game where nothing was complicated, so it's the perfect kind of PlayStation Portable game.	2024/08/28
Bounty Hounds (PlayStation Portable) Developer: XPEC Entertainment Publisher: Namco Released: 2006 Genre: Action role-playing
I found this game when I was going through a list of all PlayStation Portable games, I saw the cover and I thought it looked cool and I've been wanting to play it since last year but I literally couldn't find anything about this game online, like nothing at all other than the fact that it exist. So I went on the Japanese internet and of course it had a lot of info about it and guides too, and like a decade worth of forum posts talking about strategies and shit. The official website was kinda like a manual and the translator did a good job so I understood everything. It's apparently part of Namco's space universe called UGSF with like a bunch of shitty 80s shooters and Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere too huh so I read some timeline on a website to know what happened but it's literally just irrelevant shit lmao. You are part of some mercenary group who are sent to planets to investigate if they can be terraformed, clean up remaining enemies after big battles, find missing ships or people, but the only thing you will do is fight these aliens called ETI. The cutscenes are like comic books but they aren't entirely static, there is no voice acting whatsoever though eh. I really liked the music during the cutscenes, they are like oldschool scifi soundtracks from the 70s, but the ones during gameplay are just generic trash lol. You start on the ship and you can read your fucking contract in your room lmao why, and can read the summary of previous acts you completed thank god because I had no fucking idea what was going on lmao the storytelling is so fucking bad, just random characters showing up and the game doesn't tell you who they are. You can talk to characters to get some tips, buy or sell equipment and modules in the shop, which you can add to your equipment like some enchantment lol, analyze stuff you loot, and in the medical center you can recharge your health and energy for free and upgrade and buy new abilities. You go down to planets through the teleport and you can start doing the only thing you can in this game aka killing aliens lol. You have melee and long range weapons too, and you can switch between them on the go to keep the combo going cause they can't damage you while you're attacking. You can drop a force field which can either buff you or weaken enemies, but I mostly just used the one that recharges your health after each hit. You have a shield too but it can only take 3 hits and then it instead increases the damage you get. The L swaps around the camera but it was still hard to see enemies sometimes, the minimap helps a lot though. You can use the D-pad to replenish your health and energy (and I think ammo?) from your reserves but I only realized this accidentally lol. Sometimes enemies drop loots but you have a small inventory but you can teleport back to your ship and either sell them or store them in your room, and then you can return to the same spot if you haven't quitted the game yet. There are tons of equipment though, and they all look different, I tried to focus on armors that give you health and energy after defeating enemies, and pile bunkers and swords as melee weapons, and big lasers and machine guns as long range weapons. All weapons have a special attack called force charge which can cause a lot of damage but it costs energy, I tried to use it as often as possible though. Also you can take screenshots which is pretty cool, I don't even think there is another game that lets you do that. But this game was really confusing to me, I didn't understand what am I suppose to do, but there are areas you go and sometimes you can just go to the next one without killing anyone, I thought they keep respawning forever but nope, you get a message after killing everyone in an area and they only respawn after you quit the game, but then you have to replay entire parts of a planet which can be 4-5 areas eh so I just tried to get to the next part before saving. There are 4 planets with different enemies, like a desert, a jungle like, a volcanic planet with an underground religious race, and on your ship too when the aliens invade and then these blue futuristic hallways on a space elevator (fuck this was really hard, in the later parts of the game enemies can drop force fields too). There are a couple boss fights too on every planet but they weren't really hard either. But this is one of the most boring and repetitive games I've ever played, I hated every minute of it. And guess what, turns out everything was part of a simulation and you have to replay the entire game again to get the real story Jesus Christ, and it's harder too with so many more enemies but thank god your level, upgrades and equipment remains. Here these Genome hunter guys are after you and that's pretty much the only drastic difference in story and I thought levels will literally be the same but actually no, there was a new area inside some giant alien lol. The later bosses were really hard but the final boss was insane, first you think it's just the alien rulers like in the first playthrough but they were really easy but then you get one of the Genome fuckers with 3 forms and that means 3 boss fights, it took me fucking forever to figure out how to kill him, first I just used normal attacks and evade his attacks, in the second and third forms I just constantly force charged him then recharged my energy otherwise he would have killed me in seconds. This unlocks hard mode with new equipment but no new story so fuck that shit, but I still don't understand what the fuck was going on lmao. No wonder there was nothing about this online, it's just an awful boring and repetitive game, the Rengoku games were really enjoyable but this was just fucking miserable so stay the fuck away from it.	2024/08/23
Tenchu 2: Birth of the Stealth Assassins (PlayStation) Developer: Acquire Publisher: Activision Released: 2000 Genre: Stealth
This is a prequel to the first game with the same characters, they are like students here. Finally they have different missions on the same areas, like one saves his lord and the other his family in a different building so I just kept alternating between them, and there is a third character too but he's only available after beating the game with the other two. The graphics look better, there is a bigger draw distance too. You start with a training mission where you can see some of the new things right away, like you can hide underwater and breath with a little bamboo tube lmao. There are a lot of traps too, spikes, trapdoors, arrows, little bells that alert the enemy if you walk into them, and you can take fire damage too by accidentally walking into a torch lol. You can drag enemy bodies to hide them or lure enemies, but they never noticed them lol maybe because I was playing on easy. Sometimes you are forced to be stealthy because it's instant mission failure when you're detected. The way you get items is different too, you need to find them in hidden boxes on levels or loot them from dead enemies, and you don't get specific items by getting the best rank on certain levels, you need to get a certain number of best ranks to unlock them, which was fucking impossible for me because this game sucked ass. I don't know what the fuck happened but everything just feels so much worse. There are some daytime missions too and levels feel more open, like there are a lot more natural locations and less towns, but the level design was terrible, on some levels I got completely lost. There are some civilians too, like a quarantine village full of sick people, but sometimes I couldn't even tell the difference and got a negative score one time because I kept killing them too lmao, and sometimes there are allies who can kill enemies that was cool at least. Both you and the bosses have new moves, like a bunch of cool executions like cutting the head off lmao or crouch attack which seemed almost undefendable and the bosses can do shit like posion cloud attacks, but with these crappy and simple controls it was impossible to defend or react quickly sometimes, I couldn't even beat the first boss and realized there is no fucking way I could beat this game so I just started cheating and kept refilling my health, I had to do it so many times to kill bosses it was insane. Bosses were cooler here though, like that giant dude with a hammer, a cute girl in white, a blind dude or a midget riding a white tiger lmao (not every mission has bosses though, and sometimes you fight like 3 of them but they were easier). And the cutscenes were so funny sometimes, in fact there was more focus on the story which was so much better than in the first game. It starts with his uncle betraying your lord and you gotta save him, but he gets fucked over by his ninja group called Burning Dawn who wants to rule instead of serving these lords. Then you gotta work on stopping them kidnapping villagers (in demon masks, no supernatural shit here though), and you find out your friend who you thought had died joined them after losing his memories. He attacks the ninja village where you started and kills your master, here you had to kill all enemies to finish the level. And there was a really beautiful night level with cherry trees (and with a fucking ninja dog at the end lmao wtf). Then you go through a cave system to find a giant ship they are building, and as they attack your castle you go from boat to boat trying to reach the ship on a long two part level to kill your traitor friend with the girl and the ninja leader girl with the dude (weird but this was pretty much the only level where I could kill the bosses without cheating lmao, later levels are actually better made too). Beating the two campaigns unlock your traitor friend's missions where you see how he lost his memories and then why he decided to stay after regaining them, he is super fast but only uses his fist unless he does an execution, I only got the best rank on his level lmao where you need to kidnap villagers without being detected (you need to kill everyone in most of his missions though), and there was a boss who was like an old samuari who could barely move lmao like Yoda or something. But his final boss was impossible to beat, I had to cheat like 10 times to win, this gameplay just doesn't work in a limited game like this and the level design was so much fucking worse, it's a shame because the story was so much better. It also has a mission editor which is cool I guess but I would never use shit like that so it's irrelevant to me. I can finally play the third game on Xbox and I really hope it has good gameplay, there is no excuse for technical limitations like this on that system.	2024/08/21
Streets of Rage (Mega Drive) Developer: Sega Publisher: Sega Released: 1991 Genre: Beat 'em up
I only heard of this game recently before playing Fighting Force, it seems like an important part of gaming history so I thought I should check it out. You can choose from 3 different characters, a black dude, a chick and a blonde dude who I picked because he looked the coolest. They are former cops who had enough of criminals and the corrupt police and decided to hunt them down lmao. The 3 buttons are attack, jump and a special attack where a cop car shows up and launches a napalm or rocket strike lol. You can grab and throw enemies and do all kinds of moves even with just one or two buttons, but the gameplay and movement felt so fucking slow eh. You can destroy shit like telephone booths or trashcans for items, like food for health, life, money and weapons like knife, bottle, baseball bat, pipe or a pepper shaker to stun enemies lmao, but I got fucked over a few times because you pick up items with the attack button and he kept picking up them up instead of attacking eh. You can move up and down too not just left and right, levels are like the streets, shitty part of the town, at the beach, a bridge, on a ship, some factory where the assembly line can damage you too so you gotta pay attention when you move, an elevator with no boss fight and finally the enemy HQ. You get the same kind of enemies on every level but sometimes with a weapon, some crazier ones were those chicks with whips lol and those fucking juggling clowns who were the worst. There is a fucking time limit though but it was only a problem with a few bosses, some of them were brutal like that fire breathing fat guy, and sometimes you fight two of them at the same time. Some bosses show up later as normal enemies, and all of them show up in the last mission where you go from right to left this time, and that's where the fucking save got corrupted right before I got to the final boss and had to start the entire fucking game again so fuck this emulation piece of shit, yeah probably because I was saving after literally every fight but I would still be on the first level if I didn't abuse this shit. After suffering through it again I finally got there and he gives you a choice to join him, if you pick yes he just sends you back to the factory level lol. He fires at you with a machine gun and some normal enemies show up too, at this point I just kept spamming attack and let my lives run out and finally won, but I wouldn't have been able to do it without saving all the time and hoarding up all these lives. You see pics of them celebrating with cops and looking at the sunset during the end credits. I could definitely see the similarities with Fighting Force, especially with the locations, but it's way too simple and frustrating to be enjoyable but apparently the sequels are much better, guess I'll see about that one day.	2024/08/20
Rocket Knight Adventures (Mega Drive) Developer: Konami Publisher: Konami Released: 1993 Genre: Platformer, scrolling shooter
I'm not gonna list these shitty 2D games when I'm playing them, I'll just write about them if I can finish them, cause I only play them when I'm done with a game session before an hour and still have a few minutes left cause I can't stand anything more than that. I didn't know anything about this game but I'm sure I've seen it or heard of it before because it looked familiar, I thought it's like a knight dog lol and also he was in Snatcher. The third game I can play on PlayStation 3 so let's see what it's like, I should try to give a chance to these shitty 2D games anyway. I played a little bit but I couldn't even get through the first minute, I couldn't jump up so I found the manual and turns out you need to charge your rocket lol, if I was a kid I would have stuck there forever. And I noticed you can hang on trees so I thought maybe he is a bat lmao but after reading the manual I found out he's an opossum lol. There is a story in the manual that doesn't really show up in the game about some pig king and a knight who betrayed you, and some key to protect some ancient ship and the princess who knows where the key is. Luckily I quickly realized before I really started playing that the Western releases were all insanely hard and can't get the ending unless you play on hard so I just downloaded the Japanese version, it's all in English anyway (the menus at least, there is no text in game lol). Thank god you can save anytime with emulator, I literally just saved after every enemy that's the only way I can attempt playing these games, and with a guide, I have no idea how the fuck people can tolerate these games without saving, even as a kid I hated how I could barely do the first level then die and have to start over again, if it wasn't for 3D games I would have never liked games. Anyway you can attack by slicing and you can charge up your rocket and fly into enemies to damage them or get to higher places by wall jumping, you pick up apples for health, you can pick up extra lives too and these gems for points. There are some flying levels too and boss fights all have patterns and you gotta utilize every move. When you get to the castle that former knight dude kidnaps the princess so you spend most of the game chasing after them. There are some really clever solutions for a 2D game, you can go from front to back in the waterfall level but it was hard to tell because it was all 2D lol, or how you can see your reflection in a lava and that's the only way to know where to jump cause you can't see the platforms on that level. There is an on-rail minecart ride where you need to jump over shit, you get fired up to a ship where the wind could blow you away and gotta hang on, then you arrive to the pig city which looks modern unlike your medieval world lol, at some point you need to outrun invincible soldiers using teleport pads and with walls falling behind you, or control moving platforms by hitting the correct arrow on its side, that was also interesting. Some of these bosses were ridiculous, like that fucking lava fish with fast moving platforms, or when you're running away from a boss which was awful then jump into a giant pig mech lmao and box with him lol, this shit took me forever eh. After you save the princess you go up to space following the pig king, avoiding meteors and enemies, then fighting a giant ship that turns into a mech, and then you arrive to a fucking pig Death Star lmao (the king was so hard to beat eh). You finally kill the traitor knight as you blow a hole in the Death Star, then you face the core which is the pig king himself lol. You escape in a pod after it explodes, and the last level is just avoiding his attacks as you can't attack back from inside the escape pod, and you see how you get closer to Earth and finally the robot pig king burns up in the atmosphere, then you give back the princess to the king and fly away lol. I liked the clever solutions but honestly if it wasn't for saving anytime it would have been insanely frustrating to me and I would still be on the first level, I genuinely can't understand how people played through these games, but at least it was linear so I couldn't get lost cause I can't navigate through these fucking 2D games.	2024/08/06
Rengoku II: The Stairway to H.E.A.V.E.N. (PlayStation Portable) Developer: Neverland Publisher: Konami Released: 2006 Genre: Action-adventure
I was looking forward to this, the first game was suprisingly fun. It's not really a sequel, it's more like a reboot or it could be a prequel too lol, clearly the Japanese don't give a fuck about continuity lol. There are cutscenes of drawings where human scientists talk about data huh, and apparently you were the husband of the female scientist who uses the memory data of soldiers to train AI, and she is desperate to recreate you inside a simulation. The game looks so much better, it's very colorful and you can change your character's color too if you want lol. It has like techno music but with industrial sounds too which was really cool. There is a built in tutorial which is text only and you get it on the first floor and in menus, but there is an ingame manual too. The biggest change is you can switch weapons now without going back to terminals, but only the ones you have equipped. There are 8 floors and you don't have to clear all of them but there are red challenge rooms with minibosses that must be defeated to get to the floor boss. Floors are much bigger and you can find portals in some remote rooms that take you back to the terminal thank god, and there are some doors that can only be entered from one side. The floors all look very different, they have all kinds of shapes and not just squares and not all of them have enemies and I'm pretty sure they aren't random anymore. The 1st floor is basically a sewer, the 2nd some industrial place with outside areas too, the 3rd is like a furnace, the 4th is like some futuristic storage area like it's some cargo spaceship or something with large round rooms and fast moving walkways, the 5th is like a Covenant ship for Halo lol with blocks that raise up, the 6th is like futuristic offices just without any furniture, the 7th is like a castle and the 8th floor is a garden above the clouds on the roof wow with little water ponds and trees and flowers, it was beautiful. You can find these new kind of "crates" that either hold elixirs or the usual cooldown, health or ammo recharge etc potions, and sometimes you can see another room in open areas which you can't access from there. The combat is a little bit different as you can do combos now by pressing the different bodytype buttons and it increases the damage, and not just the damage types improve when you keep using them but the the weapons too, like more ammo, less heat and how likely the new bonus effects occur (like enemy getting stunned or loses an equipment etc), and you can put shields on your arms too and use it as a block when you press the button. You can tell from the light on your back if there is danger, green has no enemy, blue means the enemy is about to spawn and orange means there is an enemy around. You can enter Overdrive mode by finding this shiny silver thing sometimes in crates (or later with an equipment which instantly overheats you and you can only use it once, but if you equip a recharge kit on your legs then switch to a cooler instantly you can use it many times and fight without worrying about overheating lol) where you become indestructible with infinite combos, ammo and no heat generation but only for a short time. The boss rooms and bosses look different and unique, they aren't just simple androids anymore, like one has a rollerblade on his arms lol, one is this giant fat boss that can't move, and obviously they are references to the seven deadly sins. Mostly I just used energy weapons in this game, and one that was like a hybrid between melee and energy, and the usual repair on the legs, but the final boss was insane, I could only kill it but switching the legs to a cooler and equipping some really OP energy weapon and constantly rolling around. You get a wtf ending where the girl shows up and nothing is fucking explained lmao. But at least you don't have to play through the game again, cause it unlocks H.E.A.V.E.N. which is essentially the first game (that's why I said it could be a prequel) with it's music and looks but it's 99 fucking floors lmao wtf, but they are smaller and separated into 3 parts, first is H.E.A.V.E.N. A where all stats beside the slots reset, you start without equipment but you auto equip weapons you find and when ammo runs out they're automatically destroyed, your stats upgrade randomly when you enter a new floor and terminals are only on every 3-4 floors and you can't upgrade or change equipment there. In H.E.A.V.E.N. B all stats reset but your equipment remains and you can upgrade the way you want (and your equipment upgrades too) and I'm pretty sure they are cheaper too, and there are terminals on every floor, this was so much easier lol. And finally H.E.A.V.E.N. C where you keep all your stats and can upgrade anything but you can only use the equipment you find here, this is where the best equipment is as every enemy has the same kind of ones per floor so you always know what you'll get there, floors only have a few rooms and like every second one has a portal back to the terminal, you can only access one at a time and it gets harder by you reach the last room where the best equipment is, if you die here you have to start the entire thing from the first floor (but I always just reloaded the save when I died lol), these can be really tough I got absolutely destroyed a couple times, usually there are 3 enemies per room but near the end it's 7 in two pairs wtf (here I switched to these insanely fast combo swords to survive). Beating all that unlocks the final 100th floor, which is a giant room with waves of fucking enemies but they weren't that hard, and after that you get to the "final boss" but she doesn't do anything just talks to you, killing her is more like unlocking the end credits and getting an engagement ring item lol which doesn't have any stats but I think it instantly revives you if you die. There are a lot of unlockables, the cutscene drawings, Another Story which is like a text retelling from your perspective and you learn about what happened when you were a human and the bosses who were your squadmates, it kind of essential to understand the story but at the end it seemed like it happened before the game where you gained consciousness before and got defeated, and it's pretty long I had to load up the game the next day to finish reading lol, there are also boss renders and concept arts, music, and I think you unlock everything from the first game too after beating H.E.A.V.E.N. lol. There is also a multiplayer which I couldn't try obviously, I think it was arena fights with other players (there is a like a Bomberman map too lol), I also got the DLC which adds more maps and items to the single player. Even though it should be repetitive as fuck the only thing worse here compared to the first game is the story. I think this is the best PlayStation Portable game I've played so far, but to be fair most of the great games on the system are part of some series and I'm not there yet to play them so it's most likely gonna change.	2024/07/29
Kileak: The Blood (PlayStation) Developer: Genki Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment Released: 1995 Genre: First-person shooter
I saw a game called BRAHMA Force in a YouTube video and I thought it looked really cool, and after looking it up I found out it's part of a series and this one was the first game. It was a launch title in the US and I could only find a Japanese manual lol but I could understand pretty much everything with a translator, it has a pretty detailed backstory for such a simple game. Basically some nazi family from Chile has a research base in Antarctica and a secret agent sends a message that the scientist there must be stopped so you go there with your squad but your helicopter gets shot down and only you and some other guy survives who calls you on radio sometimes. It's a simple mech FPS with maze like floors you need to navigate through, basically you're going through tight corridors where you can barely move to arrive to rooms so it's impossible to avoid some enemies but you can backtrack and get out of their range and still kill them if you have the right weapon. You can't see your weapon, and can't really move around the crosshair besides looking up and down, but it auto locks on enemies if you are close enough. Your energy constantly depletes, you can pick up a little from dead enemies but you need to find the energy recharge stations if you want to survive as your armor, energy and ammo carries to the next level. You can find hidden new weapons on some levels, and you need them if you want to complete the game, like the energy weapon that uses energy instead of ammo is really useful, but that means you need to backtrack a lot to recharge it eh. You can find ammo and armor upgrades too, and a bunch of keycards for like the map room (I didn't care just used a guide lol, it was still fucking confusing though) or to some doors and to the lift at the end of levels which takes you to the next floor down. You get an alert when an enemy is nearby and that was really helpful, they are usually monsters or little robots and there are some fucking spike traps too and they were the fucking worst. Sometimes there are boss fights but all you gotta do is keep strafing, but that's pretty much the same for normal enemies. After you go down like 5 floors from the labs to these caves the game gets really brutal, like you gotta aim up or down to hit these stronger enemies and the controls just suck for that, by the 10th floor you get to these futuristic corridors, by that time I just kept firing ahead and hoping I hit something, went back to the recharge station and repeat, it fucking took forever eh. Near the end I found this record card which you can view on a ternimal for a cutscene where the evil scientist talks about something, I realized I skipped those lol so I just watched them on YouTube. The last floor had these flesh covered walls and the final boss which was the scientist turning into a monster, it took like 5 seconds to kill him lmao because I saved up ammo for the best weapon. You get a wtf ending as the base emerges and ascends to space then I have no idea wtf happened lmao. It was a very lame and simple game, hopefully the next one will be better.	2024/07/23
Star Ocean: First Departure (PlayStation Portable) Developers: tri-Ace, Tose Publisher: Square Enix Released: 2008 Genre: Action role-playing
I heard of this series when I was looking for JRPGs to play with real time battles as the fourth one came out on Xbox 360, it sounded cool because it's scifi themed but it has that separate battle windows bullshit and I'm not wasting 3 fucking discs on a shitty game, but after I got my PlayStation 2 I wanted to play the third game, and then with the PlayStation Portable I found out the first two games came out there so I could properly play some of the series, and now with the PlayStation 3 I could finally play all of them because the fourth and the final games also came out there lmao. I found a strategy guide for this one but actually I just used one from GameFAQs because it's easier for my shitty brain to follow a step-by-step guide. The game takes place on a planet called Roak where humans with tails live lol in a medieval world, you are playing as Roddick who is like a village guard, and some virus is spreading through the world turning people into stones. While you are trying to find a cure after your friend gets infected the real humans from Earth teleport down to help because it was their enemy that infected the planet, and you go with them to their spaceship to help find a cure, but turns out the host was a demon who lived 300 years ago so they go to a planet with a time gate and travel back in time to get a sample lol. The graphics would look good but they made the characters these shitty pixelated 2D crap and that looks fucking terrible in a 3D world, but retarded weebs love that shit for some reason, no wonder though cause they have the worst fucking taste in everything. There are some anime cutscenes though and they look good but they are very rare, most of the dialogue takes place ingame but at least they are all voiced and not just text only (some of them can be really fucking long lol). There are these event called Private Actions which you need to activate before entering a city, they are additional interactions with party members where you can gain more affection points and learn about them, or sometimes get skills or items. There is a world map you travel on to reach cities or dungeons (and an arena with tiers like in Kingdom Hearts), and random battles happen quite often. The battles are very simple though, basically just spam X lol but you can assign Special Arts to the L and R buttons and they are like some special attack or spells and apparently the more you use one the more powerful it gets. I didn't understand the skill system at all for a long time and just tried to follow the guide, but you can assign these skill points and level up your stats and learn new talents like cooking or crafting, and sometimes randomly develop some special talent like being good with animals and that allows you send out like a pigeon to buy you items like health potions when you are in a dungeon and can't leave, that was super cool. Things you can do are like composing music which you can play and that gives buffs, or write a book and that can level up specific skills, or appraising which is needed to identify some items with spectacles, alchemy to create metals or customization which can add those metals to weapons and armors to create better ones, or sometimes worst because you can fail them too. There are these super specialities too which you can turn on if other people have the same skills, like you are weaker but you level up more or something like that. To be honest I barely bothered with these stuff because they weren't really needed, I always got enough skill points from battles to level up and barely had any issues, it's an easy game thank god. You can only have 8 characters but only 4 will be in your party, there are more you can recruit from though so you gotta choose who you want to have because apparently the story will be different too, I went with Ashlay because he was an old fighter, the two angels for magic users and Pericci who was some fucking cat girl lol but only because you can get a bunny with her and use it to travel faster on the world maps without battles which is fucking essential cause you need to backtrack a lot and I spent so many fucking days just going from towns to towns to do private actions. Almost half of the game is just trying to find your friends after arriving to the past, meanwhile you go to places like the Purgatorium where you meet the angel dude, see a spaceship that crashes which are the ruins next to your village in the present, and then visit kingdoms and helping them out. To get to the demon world you need this thing called Eye of Truth, and that means returning to all the kingdoms to get their emblems, and then return to the Purgatorium with them to find some modern lab there wtf, and then go to the demon world which is also a futuristic lab (and you get a lightsaber fuck yeah lmao). Turns out everything was meant to happen and you aren't changing the past, you go back to the present and develop a cure and find out who is behind the virus, and it's like yeah that's the end but then the humans return with your friends from the past lol and you go to that planet which is like Mars in Total Recall with a resistance lol. These parts felt really out of place, like they just decided let's not end yet and come up with something, you spent the entire game hiding who you really were from your party members from the past cause they wouldn't understand but now they act like it's nothing eh. Anyway there is a tower here and when you finally end up at the final savepoint you can go back to some insane 30 floor dungeon where I got like 2-3 levels after every battle lol but I didn't even try to complete it, I'm not even sure if you can save there. You gotta fight the final boss twice but I just spammed my special art and it wasn't hard. The ending cutscenes are just small things with the characters you recruited, like what happened to them and an anime cutscene where you say goodbye to the humans (with an epilogue of them ending up getting together finally after all the private actions I did lol). Not much else you can do after beating the game besides viewing the cutscenes and listening to some voice lines of the characters eh. It was ok but nothing groundbreaking, but I wanted to play a cool scifi game and like 10% of the game is that, the rest is just generic fantasy setting eh, but either way I will play the second game in a few years.	2024/07/17
Spyro: Year of the Dragon (PlayStation) Developer: Insomniac Games Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment Released: 2000 Genre: Platform, action-adventure
This is the final Spyro game (yes, the rest doesn't count), hopefully I can get to Ratchet & Clank 2: Locked and Loaded next year. The official release wasn't the 1.1 bugfix version but someone made one anyway so I just used that one lol. It had an ingame anti-piracy protection where some character tells you it's a hacked copy and you can't continue playing the game lmao, well that wasn't an issue on the PlayStation Portable hehe. I found a strategy guide (where the pics were all fucked up) so it made it easier to find everything without looking for ages. In this game the dragons have eggs, while everyone is sleeping some new enemy sends her people to steal them Space Jam style lmao, and only Spyro is small enough to follow them down the hole to the Forgotten Realms. It's similar to the first game with the dragons trapped in crystals as you need to find the eggs and they crack open and some baby dragon comes out and dances or does something stupid lol. It literally looks the same lmao, I don't think there is any difference in graphics but that's fine as the artstyle is still beautiful. Some characters from the second game are back, like that cheetah dude Hunter, that Moneybag asshole, the professor and that faun chick but she only shows up for the ending cutscenes. There are new characters you can buy from that asshole and you need to play them too at certain points to finish some levels (you can only access them after completing their homeworld), Sheila the Kangaroo has an Aussie accent lol and she can double and triple jump really high but it was so hard to do and her attack is kicking (when you kick jars they make a flame sound lol), Sergeant Byrd the Penguin who is like a British soldier who can fly (or more like hover) and you can switch to a top-down view and bomb enemies lol (his homeworld was saving French resistance hummingbirds lmao), Bentley the Yeti with a giant ice club which he can swirl around to fire snowballs back at enemies lol, he is strong but slow and he can push large boxes, and Agent 9 the Monkey who feels like a proto Ratchet, he has a laser gun and he can throw bombs, his movement was different too like he can sidestep and at some point he is in first person mode. There are no little cutscenes anymore before and after levels, you only get them sometimes after returning from a level. Minigames are back, there is fucking skateboarding lmao wtf, you can do tricks and get points and set high scores too lol, but it was so fucking bad like you need to collect stuff then do again with a time limit, or do more tricks than Hunter, just fuck off with this shit. There are warp gates taking you to other parts of levels where usually these minigames are, it confused me at first because I thought it's the exit lol. The fucking egg stealing assholes are back on every level too, but they weren't as bad here. Every world still has speedways, it's the usual time trial bullshit where you need to do every task and the other one is racing but there is no skill involved you just gotta hit the blue speed boosts, and there are Hunter tasks too involving alien sheeps in UFOs wtf lmao. As usual there are boss fights after every world, they weren't as bad as in the previous games. After the boss fights you can return to the previous worlds and do these top-down shoot 'em up levels with Sparx, he can fire and charge too but his moves are different, while you are defeating enemies you need to find keys to open barriers to get to the boss, beating them unlock new abilities for him, like picking up gems farther away (you could do that without any upgrades in the previous games eh), looking at the direction of gems (same), one more additional health point, and breaking jars and containers open and teleporting to any level. Levels feel much longer and bigger, they are like creating a sun for a cloud world (with the ugliest fucking characters I've ever seen lol), a dark swampy spooky place where everyone talks in haikus lol, underwater places (where you swim in a whale's mouth for an egg lol), a ghost fleet level with a treasure hunter where the ghosts are the usual enemies covered with a white sheet lmao (fuck this level though), a level with respawning ninjas and some flying Chinese dragons that regenerate body parts, some ice world where your flame becomes a cooling one that freezes enemies, a level where the fairy princess escapes with a bad guy on a motorbike lol (and you jump on mushrooms and chase 3 waves of witches, fuck these), a desert with giant statue heads and a Tomb Raider reference with a mouse Lara Croft lmao, a mummy level with fucking hovercrafts and riddles (fucking terrible), or a Wild West level with dinos lol and an on-rails FPS shooting segment eh. There were some cool minigames, like when you help a dog navigating back to his owner by throwing his ball on pressure pads to activate platforms lol but most of them were terrible, like protecting some fucking ice skating girl from hockey players, a fucking box match with the yeti, a hockey game again, and just bunch of vehicle segments like boats, submarines, they just weren't fun at all. In the final boss fight you gotta use turrets, tanks and UFOs to beat her lol, and after that you can chase around that Moneybag asshole to get the final egg and your gems back and then you can open the bonus portal where the thieves have gems and more portals that open after you get certain amount of gems where you get more submarine shit, or skateboard race and shooting down UFOs, and after that you get the real final boss fight where you are in a UFO lol (and a stupid fucking ending with burping baby dragons). It was good and better than the second game but just as with Burnout Legends I thought maybe because it's like the first two games combined this will be the best, but I quickly realized that also means the shitty parts of the second game with the frustrating minigames, but either way it's a good trilogy and now I just can't wait to play the next Ratchet & Clank game lol.	2024/07/07
Burnout Legends (PlayStation Portable) Developer: Criterion Games Publisher: Electronic Arts Released: 2005 Genre: Racing
I was excited to play this, it's a very early PlayStation Portable game and I know for a fact that I knew about it before knowing anything about the series because a magazine I bought had a review of it and I just couldn't believe handheld games can look and play like this. This one is literally just Burnout 3: Takedown with more tracks from the first two games mixed together so not much new to write besides listing what's different here. Most noticeably it's back to just 4 car races and there is less traffic too, but that actually made the game easier. The graphics would look good but there is like no anti-aliasing, and sometimes I could barely tell where to turn. The music is different too, I think they're from Burnout Revenge but they weren't as good as in Burnout 3: Takedown. Cars are similar but there are some from the earlier games, but some of them you can only unlock by playing multiplayer huh (my favorite from Burnout 2: Point of Impact was back hurray lol but it doesn't have the green color I used eh), and you can't see the car stats anymore though and that sucked. The race modes are the same, but Pursuit is back from the first two games and you unlock different kind of cop cars, sometimes they were the best ones lol. And it seemed like there is a lot less of that time trial bullshit thank fucking god, and I think because Pursuit replaced a lot of them. The cars handle the same but it didn't feel as good as on the Xbox, thank god though they let you change the controls to use the triggers for gas and brake like on Xbox, driving with buttons is just awful. Crash mode is different, there are no score multipliers and that just made them insanely hard, like sometimes you need to hit every car and medals to just barely pass the gold requirement, I spent so much fucking time on that Paradise Peril map for example, I thought it was fucking impossible, had to watch tons of YouTube videos and tried to just copy them until after a million tries I miraculously got the gold. And it's kinda buggy too, the framerate drops like crazy during crash replays, I fell under the world a few times and I kept crashing into these graphical bugs on walls which was really annoying. The maps from the first two games felt harder too with this gameplay, in fact that Burnout map was completely unusable, even the AI kept crashing at every corner lmao. Thank god the last few GPs didn't have those F1 cars because they would've been impossible here lol, but they were easy with my favorite car. I thought it could be the best in the series because it combined everything from the three games but I quickly realized that included the frustrating parts too, especially the crashes which just made it so fucking frustrating without multipliers. It's still good though, like the third best game in the series so far. The last game that's on Xbox is next but I'm afraid it's gonna take me forever to get there eh.	2024/06/21
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six (PlayStation) Developers: Red Storm Entertainment, Rebellion Developments Publisher: Red Storm Entertainment Released: 1999 Genre: Tactical shooter
As I said after playing Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3: Black Arrow I found out you can actually change the controls in this game to play like PlayStation Portable first-person shooters so it was time to check it out while I suffer through this piece of fucking shit summer heat. While the controls were fine the aiming still sucked as I found out during the training when I had to aim at targets. Luckily there is auto aim and it helped a lot with enemies. You still have 2 other squadmates with you but they don't really do anything and you can't really give them orders like in the Xbox games, they can just follow you or guard the place (at least they shoot on their own) but you can switch between them so you don't have to use the same character. The briefing is more detailed, you can read a lot of info about the organizations and people, you have a bunch of squadmates with different stats you can choose (Chavez is here too lol), and you can change their equipment like different uniforms and armor types which are more useful for different tasks and environments, guns, grenades, things that make it faster to open locked doors or hack computers or defuse bombs, and even a heartbeat monitor to see enemies on the map lol, and you can choose your insertion points too but as I said if you put them to different places they'll be just standing there until you switch to them eh. You only have very few bullets so you can easily run out of ammo if you aren't switching between squadmates, if they get injured you gotta sit them out for a few missions if you want them to recover, and if they die you can't use them again. The graphics weren't really good, the characters looked the worst lol but you can see your gun with a nice effect as smoke is coming out of it after firing, which is impressive when Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon on Xbox only had a shitty crosshair. Most missions are very short, and sometimes they are timed too, and you gotta do the usual shit like disarming bombs, killing terrorist or rescuing hostages, who you can give orders to follow you and you need to lead them out, which wasn't always easy cause the AI was retarded as fuck and got stuck in everything, even your squadmates too, I had to go back for them so many times. At first I thought there is no story just random missions, but there is a connection with this eco-terrorist Phoenix group and you find out they are part of a conspiracy with a big biotech corporation, and a Free Europe terrorist organization shows up too. Missions are like saving an ambassador, rescuing a scientist in Congo, killing terrorists on an oil rig in the North Sea, ambushing a drug lord's villa in the Amazon, a nuclear silo in Kazakhstan, an amusement park in Spain where commies are taking hostages (this looked cool), a dam, some biohazard lab in Idaho where you are wearing a protection suit, then stopping the leaders from escaping with planes, rescuing hostages in an EU celebration, on a ship rescuing a scientist (which was the worst fucking shit because it was like a labyrinth and the fucker got stuck everywhere), a mission where you need to infiltrate a mansion avoiding guards and cameras and you can't be detected (this was the fucking worst, took me forever to complete it), stopping terrorist from releasing a virus in the Olympic village in Sydney, and some ark in Brazil for the final showdown (there wass an actual ending cutscene which was nice). It was actually not bad for a PlayStation game and some things were more detailed here then in the later games which was interesting to see, but I know I would have hated it if I wasn't playing on easy lol.	2024/06/16
Snatcher (Mega CD) Developer: Konami Publisher: Konami Released: 1994 Genre: Graphic adventure, visual novel
I think I read about this a few years ago in one of those old magazines I've been reading, it's one of the first games made by Kojima. I love cyberpunk and this is basically a Blade Runner rip-off lol with apparently a lot of Metal Gear references so I thought I should check it out. Originally it was made for some weird Japanese computer in the 80s but it got an expanded port later with the Mega CD version being the only one in English, and that also meant I could play it on my PlayStation Portable with the emulator. Another reason why I wanted to play this is cause I loved point and click adventure games like the Monkey Island series and Beneath a Steel Sky, I would have never been able to do anything in them without a guide though lol but I still enjoyed the experience. This isn't point and click it's more like a menu navigation where you choose from options but that makes more sense on a console anyway, but that also means you can't control or see your character just give him commands. You are playing as Gillian Seed, an amnesiac who joins this cop unit in Japan called Junkers who are hunting these robots called Snatchers who take the place of humans (yeah totally not Blade Runner lol). The game has a nice manual with lots of info and a comic too, and the good thing about the Mega CD is it has tons of voice acting and proper music and not just shitty bleeping, it makes these shitty 2D game somewhat enjoyable lmao (no subtitles for the voiced segments of course). You can look through and do so much shit, there are so much fucking text for everything, and you can do the same command multiple times and get different results so you gotta use every option at least twice, sometimes a lot more. In your HQ you can access a computer that has an insane database which is like a proto internet, you can look up so much info like the history, organizations, places, even characters, I spent most of my first day playing just reading shit there. And when I wanted to save I realized I couldn't, the fucking emulator refused to do it, and I found out it's because it only works with ISO and mp3 files even though you can play bin and cue files, and figuring out how to convert them was a nightmare, had to hunt down some ancient program to make the converter work, but then I still couldn't figure out how to just convert it to ISO because that stupid program deleted the ISO file after converting it to CSO, so I just used the brute force method and closed the program right when it started converting to CSO to keep the ISO file, copied it then started the conversion again lmao, and holy shit it saved my so much space so I just converted all Mega CD games lol. You get a navigator robot when you first visit the HQ, he is called Metal Gear lmao and he talks, that's where you save the game and he helps out a lot, like with a flashlight in the dark, use the videophone to call people, and he analyzes stuff you find to help your investigation. You can use a car and go to places, it's not always linear like sometimes you can select multiple options, and even in buildings you need to select which room you want to go. The only "real" gameplay is the shooting, you gotta kill these robot bugs and Snatchers (who can only be killed with headshots), it's like 9 blocks you can move the crosshair to so at least they don't make you do precise movements, the crosshair always jumps back to the middle so you gotta keep the D-pad pressed if you want to go down to the bottom left for example. You can practice in the shooting range but it wasn't easy at all, especially at the end when tons of enemies coming at you in two waves, I have no idea if I could've finished it without using the emulator that can save anytime. I like how funny the game was, there are so much dumb shit you can do, the dude was flirting with every chick lmao even though he is married, you can even sniff them lol or look around on a street forever trying to pick up chicks (your dumb robot lies and one of them was a transvestite lmao), you can call like a phone sex and the girl just makes fun of you lmao, or see a girl showering (even though it's censored in this version). And it's very self aware too like Metal Gear Solid, in fact there really are tons of references, the robot I already mentioned but there is a club called Outer Heaven (with Konami characters lol and a sexy redhead yum), Fox Hound, you can look up the developers too in the database and call them on the phone lmao, and the usual stupid shit like when you are trying to listen to some noise and then something loud happens and the robot says you left the volume too high lol, and you can do mundane shit too like go home and shave and use the toilet, so fucking cool. Of course you can't see any of that, it's mostly just images with very limited movement, but still I liked how the world looked. Like the HQ looks straight out of Blade Runner, but the techs were pretty cool too like with the evidence and witnesses (you have to ask them so many questions) you can reconstruct faces (without a guide there is no way I could've have done it), and there are the usual stupid cyberpunk shit too like the animal hospital where you can see modified pets, like a cat that's also a purse at the same time lmao. There are some brutal parts too, like when you find your partner and his head was cut off damn. There are some interesting characters besides him, like the receptionist chick from HQ, your partner's daughter, your wife, this bounty hunter dude who looks like Sting from Dune lol, a Chinese informant who sneezes all the time, Harry the engineer etc, and you can talk to them a lot and have proper conversations. Well as you are trying to find your partner's killers based on the clues he left you eventually find out the Snatchers infiltrated your HQ, and you need to find out if it's your boss or Harry, and when the building gets attacked it becomes obvious it's your boss and Harry dies (and I saw that other twist about him coming since the first time he was introduced, poor Gillian). You find out who you really are (again it was kinda obvious based on all the clues) when you find the Snatcher HQ at a church, and you get a 30+ minutes long cutscene which is absolutely insane for an old game like this wow. Your robot sacrifices himself but still survives at the end in a new body, which is a fucking Mega Drive with a Mega CD lmao. It's kind of a cliffhanger ending as he flies away to the place where Snatchers are made, I wish there was a sequel because it was such a cool game. I'm glad I played it, it's really fucking impressive, there is still one famous early Kojima game called Policenauts but I don't think I'm gonna play it cause I heard it has even less gameplay and there is no English voice acting and I can't fucking stand Japanese voice acting with its constant screeching and incoherent yelling.	2024/06/03
Heavenly Sword (PlayStation 3) Developer: Ninja Theory Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment Released: 2007 Genre: Action-adventure, hack and slash
I heard of this game a while ago, like before I started playing games again, because of Enslaved: Odyssey to the West actually cause it was made by the same developers (who also made that god fucking awful Kung Fu Chaos game ew). It's an early PlayStation 3 exclusive and it's funny how this also has a hot redhead chick and Andy Serkis lmao. The game required a mandatory installation huh which is interesting because it's not like on Xbox 360 where you need to install one disc and play the other. It starts right at the end of the game lol, this sword this girl called Nariko is wielding is draining her life and she dies, and we play through what led to this. Basically your clan is guarding this magical sword sent by the gods, and this evil king called Bohan is after it, and you are trying to save them and stop the dude. It's a fast paced hack and slash game with tons of combos and counters and shit, I just found a few ones I could remember and spammed those most of the time, still I had a hard time figuring out when to exactly press a button for counterattacks. The controls are kinda weird too, like you control the camera with the L2 and R2 buttons and use the right stick for rolling lol, I barely ever used it cause it's hard to just switch there from the face buttons where you are in a middle of a combo. You have 3 different stances, Speed is the normal, Heavy is brutal but slow with R1 pressed, and Range is weak but has really fast long-range attacks with L1, they all have different combos and are good for different situations, like with Range stance you can block arrows, Heavy is good against armored enemies and they can only block specific attacks (Speed is blue, Heavy is orange, and Range is yellow, and the red color you can't block), but switching between stances was a nightmare I'm too slow and dumb for this shit eh. There are also these superstyle moves you can use after you kill enough enemies and they are insta kills, and there are 3 glyphs you can earn if you are good enough and they unlock stuff, usually I could get at least 2 and sometimes all of them and it was enough to unlock almost everything besides some concept arts. Sometimes you gotta throw or launch stuff and time slows down and you can control it (originally with that motion sensor shit lmao thank god you can change it to the analog stick), like launch rockets or bombs from catapults and hit the weak points of these siege towers, or throw a shield that ricochets off a wall to hit a switch to open doors, they were so hard to do. There are parts where you play as your little sister who fires arrows at enemies and you use that slow down here a lot with arrows, some of these segments were really long like she is like a third of the game, and you can do shit like navigate the arrow through fire and blow up explosives, she can't fight in close combat but she can evade enemies like crazy lol. Speaking of crazy, the characters and bosses in this game are batshit insane, like your sister is pretty much retarded, that fox dude was so over the top with this stupid voice lmao, and there is like some snake fish woman hybrid and a giant retarded roach son who rolls around lol, most of the regular enemies were normal though except those orangutan dudes lol. There are a lot of QTEs, mostly during boss fights but they were so fast I had to pause the game and look up what to press eh. I guess they make the game more cinematic, like sometimes there are multiple windows on the screen, the graphics and environments looked nice btw like the castle on those cliffs but her hair moved so weirdly lol it was all over the place. Anyway when you get to the point where the game started you actually come back from the dead like some literal goddess, even walking past to enemies kills them lol, it's a giant fucking battle with hundreds of enemies around you it was pretty crazy. The final chapter is essentially one giant boss battle throughout multiple levels, and beating the game unlocks hell mode, yeah no thanks lmao. With the glyphs you earned you unlock concept arts and promo pics, the cutscenes, 2 animated videos of the origins of the sword (later I found out there were more on YouTube, they looked cool), making of videos where you can see the motion capture too. Nariko looked so much better on the promo pics though, she looked kinda ugly in the game lmao I'm sure it was because of the actress who played her had a completely different face and the mix of these two just made her look weird. Honestly I expected it to be a lame game but it was suprisingly good, it was just way too fucking short eh.	2024/06/01
Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders (Xbox) Developers: Phantagram, Blueside Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios Released: 2004 Genre: Hack and slash, real-time tactics
This is a game I always wanted to play, even before I softmodded my Xbox, even though I didn't really know what kind of game it really is. This isn't the first one in the series, the first game was an RTS and I actually played it a little bit in the early 2000s because it was a free game that came with a PC magazine I bought, but I didn't like it at all, I thought the graphics sucked and I think by that time I was bored of RTS games. As I said I didn't really understand what kind of game it is, I thought it's like Ninety-Nine Nights or the Dynasty Warriors games but you can give your units more orders but actually it's more like an RTS and hack and slash hybrid. I watched the first game on YouTube to but it felt like I'm missing something like it kinda just starts expecting you to know the world but nope, and there is like a book you can read on the loading screen which explains what happened in the first game and between the two. It has multiple campaigns like in Ninety-Nine Nights (made by the same developers), the first human campaign with Gerald is the "easy" one which sort of explains the gameplay, you are just trying to defend your kingdom from the evil ors and dark elves and their leader called Regnier who is looking for the Ancient Heart from the first game. First thing you will notice though is the music which is heavy metal only lmao, it may sounds weird in a fantasy game but it wasn't bad lol. Basically there are two types of controls, when you aren't in combat it's like an RTS where you need to point somewhere and send your armies there and you need to use the minimap for that, and when you get into combat it switches to hack and slash where you control your hero and fuck shit up. You have two commanders and you can get help from them (lightning and meteor attacks were the most OP, but healing was also helpful) as long as you have any SP, which is also needed for your special abilities. The battle can end earlier if you kill the enemy leader, but that means less XP and sometimes it's impossible to tell which one it is lol. In the RTS view you can change formations, tight is slower but it improves defense against arrows and lose which is fast but with terrible defense. You can also use abilities during this view, like send a scout ahead. After missions you return to the castle where you listen to the briefing, go to the pub where you can listen what the soldiers are talking about and you can hire mercenaries there who can lead your armies or replace your commanders if you want to. There is training here too which teaches you about the formations, how to use archers, cavalry, sappers etc. And most importantly you can upgrade your skills, buy new equipment for your heroes and your armies too, and can change the job of your armies if they have the right skill, like create knights or catapults from normal soldiers. But it was so confusing and overwhelming I had no fucking idea what to do, I used a guide but even with that I had no idea what I'm doing. There is so much detail in this game though, like sunlight has a negative effect on archers, forest can block arrows but you can burn them down with fire arrows, only polemen can stop the cavalry, sappers are needed to disable or set traps, paladins can heal you, and there are support units too like giant eagles and zeppelins or dragons, mammoths and giant scorpions for the enemy lol. But even though it's supposed to be the easy campaign it was hard as fuck, especially the last mission and the final boss was like just try to survive for a minute until the cutscene happens lol, I had no idea what the fuck happened and it was clear you need to play all campaigns to understand it. The end credits was the most insane shit I've ever seen with the developers thanking Buddha, Allah, Jesus and their ex girlfriends lmao wtf. The next campaign was with Lucretia the sexy dark elf (they all have revealing clothes and nice asses lol) who swears a lot (yet they censored the word pope for some reason lmao dumb Koreans) in some weird French accent I guess? She is faster but less powerful, and elves can regenerate health when they are in a forest huh that was cool, but of course you have orcs and ogres too you can use and the scorpions have a really OP shockwave attack. These missions were getting harder with waves of enemies but I realized I need to use abilities more, especially lightning attack and heal all the time, her final mission wasn't hard compared to the rest lol. You see the story from different perspective, how the elves are being ruled by vampires and there are rebelling elves too, and that the human Patriarch is after the Ancient Heart too. Completing these two unlocks the other two campaigns with hard difficulty, with Kendal from the religious kindgom, he is like a big dude with a hammer who is slow as fuck, and these were the most brutal missions, but some of them were really short and sometimes you could pick which one you want to do first (and there is barely any dialogue during briefings). There were some cool locations here like a castle built on the ruins of a giant fucking angel statue (btw there is a library you can read in castles in these campaigns, mostly about the characters and kingdoms), and I thought it will be the same story as the previous two but apparently it continues where they left off, you are after the Ancient Heart after the Patriarch's guard stole it, and when you destroy it some giant fucking demon like enemy appears in the sky and sucks everyone up then spawns a bunch of demons. This is where the real nightmare begins, I spent so much time trying to complete these fucking missions, like waves of fucking demons and you need to protect a fucking wall, or when you just need to outrun them (I had like some 1 millimeter left on my health bar when I completed it), and holy fuck the last mission where you need to fly into that demon god and you gotta destroy these pillars that hold his heart, it took me more like an hour and a half to complete it. You learn about what happened after it was defeated, like Gerald became the king, and get a nice CGI fight during the credits, and it also unlocks a minigame called County Carnival where you are an archer and you need to hit orcs or barrels fired at you by catapults lol, there is even a special attack you can do. The last campaign is Regnier (who is actually someone important from the first game), he a giant buff dude with a horned helmet and he is slow too, I couldn't even complete the first mission and I couldn't figure out how to do the combos you see on the loading screen but apparently the games' website is still up lmao and it explained you have to hold down B to activate his fire sword eh. You learn more about how the good and evil guys allied to figh the demons, and you fight some elf rebels too, but the rest of the missions were really easy compared to the first and shorter too, like usually I played one mission per day cause I wouldn't have time to finish two in an hour (that's why it took me almost 2 fucking months to finish this game eh) but here I could do like 2 or 3, and by this point I think I finally got good at this game (took long enough, just shows you how insane it is). Beating this one unlocks the Risky Raiders minigame, basically you are riding a dragon and you need to pick up captured orcs from the enemy camp and bring them back to yours while avoiding eagles and zeppelins lol, so dumb. So by the end it turned out to be good but man it was brutally hard sometimes and 2 months on this game is way too much, but I will play the sequel and I think the Xbox 360 game too.	2024/05/26
Disaster Report (PlayStation 2) Developer: Irem Publisher: Agetec Released: 2003 Genre: Action-adventure
Also known as SOS: The Final Escape in the civilized world. I think I heard of this game from a YouTube video or maybe on a forum, I loved the concept of trying to survive in an abandoned city hit by earthquakes, that's exactly what I was looking for since I played Silent Hill. You are playing as a journalist called Keith who is traveling there for work when the catastrophe happens, and he wakes up later in the train car on a half collapsed bridge, obviously your goal is to get through the city to find a rescue team. Besides your health you also have a thirst meter that constantly depletes (faster when you are running instead of walking), you gotta keep drinking water or else you will start losing health, it was a really cool gameplay mechanic but there are plenty of water bottles and water fountains (that's where you can save the game too) where you can fill it up so it was never a problem. The controls aren't the best, you need to hold L2 to rotate the camera and you jump and grab ledges automatically. When an earthquake hits you gotta hold down the R1 button to brace yourself or you will lose health, and there are a lot of them but the controller vibrates when it happens. You get a bag where you can store things, it has limited slots in different sizes you can fill up which was a cool solution (and the umbrella and crowbar sticks out lmao), you can find all sorts of items, bandages, health packs, orange juice lol, lighter, coat hanger to slide down cables, batteries, a radio where you listen to the news coverage, fire extinguisher etc, and often times they are needed to progress or to combine them to make new items. You can find clothes too you can wear, and they can protect you like a helmet, gloves that help you while you are hanging, a chestguard from a baseball stadium lol, and sunglasses too and it makes everything dark when you switch to first person mode lmao, and there are stupid shit too that have no benefit like hats. The collectibles seem to be these compasses you can find, and some of them are stupid shit like a surfer figure, ballerina, little angel, a turtle, a tire, jewelry lol all kinds of shit. You save a blonde chick near the beginning called Karen and you go on together, you can give her water too and an umbrella when it starts raining which was cute (and according to her she doesn't wear panties, hot lol). You meet other people too, like Greg who is a photo journalist, Kelly who is a hot redhead, and some other random people who you can help or talk to as you go through the ruined city. Which was really fucking impressive for a PlayStation 2 game, the city is huge and you see shit collapsing around you, you navigate through buildings collapsed on their side, often times you have to go through tiny ramps and platforms and shit, and climb up to reach new areas or escape from giant fires. You have a map which has sticky notes to mark important events and places and it helps out a lot. It's a very ambitious game but the console can barely handle it, there are giant fucking slowdowns but it didn't really ruin the experience for me. At some point you have a choice between going to two different places and that adds to the replayability, I stayed with the girl and went to her home to find her dog (lmao he looked so retarded in her backpack) and you have to build a raft from a bench, barrels, tires etc lol and you can paint it with flames or flowers lmao and then ride it through the flood to reach her house, then you ride a bicycle too to escape from all the collapsing buildings. You end up at your newspaper's office where you find out your boss is still there working lmao and he is sending you to an assignment lol because it seems like there is a conspiracy going on and you need to find evidence that this isn't just a natural disaster but actually a man-made one. You get caught too but you escape and then carry you boss on your back lol to a lake (where a fucking hotel falls on a rescue boat lmao). You go through a collapsing stadium too, there are no enemies to fight in the game but at this point you have to escape from a helicopter that's firing missiles at you lmao and you end up in a mall where you are hiding from a rocket launcher and sniper dudes (you hold Karen's hand here, cute), and there is a "boss fight" here where you have a fire hose and you need to use it to drop something on a helicopter to destroy it lol (you can use it on the girl too and she screams lmao). When you finally arrive at the rescue site the last helicopter leaves without you lol but you find out what really caused the earthquakes and you get an absolutely batshit insane shootout cutscene lmao. The game has a bunch of different endings, some of them are similar (basically the same but with different girls, you can also finish the game earlier and leave them behind lol) but to get the "true" endings you need to do specific things (I just used a guide lol), but it's not a happy ending (or at leats it's ambiguous). After beating the game you get a rank (I got C lol) and the special menu opens up where you can view Greg's photos he took lol. I went back to the save I made before you pick a route because the next game is gonna be a big one and won't have time to finish it before the insane summer heat starts, and because this game was cool and I wanted to see the rest lol. You arrive at an amusement park where you find the hot redhead chick Kelly who is looking for her little brother, and you save her and go on a swan boat ride to escape lmao, when you arrive at her house you can look through her drawers and find what I assume was a dildo lmao and she asks you to keep it a secret lol. After that you end up at a hospital then go through a flooded area, and then you arrive at the newspaper office and the rest of the game is the same but with Kelly instead of Karen. It was really fucking cool and really impressive, it's a Mister Mosquito kind of Japanese game it's worth owning a PlayStation 2 for. There is a sequel and I'm really looking forward to play it, and there was a Japanese only third game on the PlayStation Portable that got translated recently so luckily I can play that too.	2024/05/22

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