Captain Buttbeard's Gaming Corner

Blood Omen 2 (Xbox) Developers: Crystal Dynamics, Nixxes Software Publisher: Eidos Interactive Released: 2002 Genre: Action-adventure
	2025/02/21
Condemned (Xbox 360) Developer: Monolith Productions Publisher: Sega Released: 2005 Genre: Survival horror, action
	2025/02/20
RTX Red Rock (PlayStation 2) Developer: LucasArts Publisher: LucasArts Released: 2003 Genre: Action-adventure
	2025/02/10
Call of Juarez (Xbox 360) Developer: Techland Publisher: Ubisoft Released: 2007 Genre: First-person shooter
	2025/02/09
MechAssault 2: Lone Wolf (Xbox) Developers: Day 1 Studios, FASA Studio Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios Released: 2004 Genre: Third-person shooter
	2025/01/29
Clive Barker's Jericho (Xbox 360) Developer: MercurySteam Publisher: Codemasters Released: 2007 Genre: First-person shooter
	2025/01/25
.hack//MUTATION (PlayStation 2) Developer: CyberConnect2 Publisher: Bandai Released: 2003 Genre: Action role-playing
	2025/01/23
Prince of Persia: Warrior Within (Xbox) Developer: Ubisoft Montreal Publisher: Ubisoft Released: 2004 Genre: Action-adventure, platform, hack and slash
	2025/01/21
Assassin's Creed III (Xbox 360) Developer: Ubisoft Montreal Publisher: Ubisoft Released: 2012 Genre: Action-adventure, stealth
	2025/01/14
GoldenEye: Rogue Agent (Xbox) Developer: EA Los Angeles Publisher: EA Games Released: 2004 Genre: First-person shooter
I heard of this a while ago as a James Bond game where you play as an evil agent and that sounded cool, and it's an FPS again, thank god I don't have to deal with that lock-on shit. I knew people hated it but I thought they're just those insane Nintendo cultists cause it has the same name as their beloved game lol. It has a strategy guide but it's not needed, but I heard it's hard so I played on easy. It has a bunch of villains from the movies lol like Goldfinger, Dr. No, that Asian dude with a hat, Pussy Galore lmao what a name, some other chicks too and Christopher Lee lol (aren't they from the 60s and 70s, it feels so weird in this modern setting lol). The first mission is with Bond defending Fort Knox, first of all you can use P90 hell yeah which is a very important fact for me lol and you can dual wield a lot of weapons, there are some weird ones like some laser weapon that can fire through covers but it's really slow, I loved the big machine gun that just destroys everyone lol. There is auto aim too but it's just the bullet goes there if turned on instead of moving the crosshair to the target, aiming sucks though and it makes sniping so hard. You can take hostages for human shield after you stun them by beating them with melee attack lol. Enemies sometimes get scared of you and take one of their buddies as hostage to defend themselves lmao. There is regenerating heath and there are armors to pick up from dead enemies, if you damage their body they worth less which was cool. Sometimes you can find these machines that are traps you can activate and kill enemies and you get these Rogue Bonus points for it, you can also get them for headshots, melee kills, hostages, when you push them over rails, using explosive barrels and shit, or for kills when you go down on ropes or lifts. At the end of levels these points determine what you unlock, there are 2 concept art videos and 2 multiplayer maps or skins on every level I think, I was lucky if I could unlock one concept art video lmao, shame there were no cool extras. The character moves slow as shit though and you can't jump eh. Turns out the first mission was just a simulation and you failed and they kick you out, but Goldfinger contacts you and offers you a GoldenEye to replace your lost eye lol that has abilities. Dr. No is basically at war with Goldfinger because he wants to steal his organic matter destruction device or whatever it is, so you get recruited to defend it. The CGI was really nice in the cutscenes (your dude is barely in them and never talks lol) and the graphics look pretty cool too with aesthetics kinda like techno futurism if that's a thing lol. Your GoldenEye has 4 abilities you slowly unlock as you progress through the game and they all cost energy, you start with seeing through covers, hacking from a distance which can make weapons malfunction or activate shit and you take over turrets for your side which was cool, polarity shield which is an energy shield that protects you and you can use it in melee to discharge it and kill enemies (some stronger enemies with names can have this too), and a magnetic field which is the Jedi force basically lol to push and pull enemies. You can't save anytime but missions aren't too long, the levels are incredibly linear, you can only go one way eh. You go to Hong Kong fighting drones on skyscrapers and the triad in bathouses where you can gas them to death in saunas lol, Las Vegas in a casino and underground, the Hoover Dam which was way too long and fuck those tanks Jesus, some underwater base which is like a black market for luxury weapons and that dude with the cat shows up too lol, Dr. No's island where you kill him and get fucked over by Goldfinger of course, and then his base where you get the Omen weapon which can disintegrate enemies even if they're shielded, but that also means insta death for you too eh. There is multiplayer too but it's online only so who cares, it's not a good game anyway, it was so boring and dull and just lame as fuck, it wasn't fun to play at all.	2024/12/31
Primal (PlayStation 2) Developer: Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment Released: 2003 Genre: Action-adventure
I only heard of this game a few years ago when I started reading that console magazine, from what I've read real gamer girls in those days really loved it (along with Beyond Good & Evil). It was made by the MediEvil devs so I thought I should check it out. So this metal chick called Jen and her boyfriend Lewis are at a concert where he sings and sees some weird tall being and he gets scared, later it attacks them in the alleyway and she hits her head and falls into a coma where this gargoyle dude called Scree drags her soul out of her body and takes her into this place called Nexus in this dimension called Oblivion which has 4 worlds, two belong to Order with the goddess Arella and two to Chaos controlled by Abaddon who wants to control everything and he's behind the kidnapping of your boyfriend, so you help the gargoyle dude to restore the balance by visiting those worlds. The first world is Solum where these minotaur beings called the Ferai live, it's like Greek ruins and it's always dark and snowy, the kings in this world need to sacrifice themselves but the current one' son is missing and the world is collapsing because of it so you need to find him and find out what's going on. There are some NPCs but you can't interact with them just in cutscenes, when you find the son he actually helps you fighting lol (later that happens with the Wraith peasant too). You have regenerating health but you don't really use human form, you get other from the worlds and they have their own energies with different colors which Scree can collect from dead enemies, chests, barrels, stones or fountains to recharge his pool, and if you hold down the form's dpad button it recharges it from his energy. The Ferai form makes you jump higher to reach ledges but the combat sucks, you need to use finishing moves on some enemies and can block too and if you do it the right time it counterattacks, you use the shoulder buttons which was wierd, a normal press is a quick attack and holding down is a power attack (there are combos too but I'm too dumb for that). Corpses don't disappear at all which is cool, sometimes there are shielded enemies and they were harder to kill. Scree can't fight at all though, in fact he turns into stone during combat lol. You can find energy gems for Jen and they restore full energy if you run out, it's basically extra lives. Graphics are fine but the camera jumps around and shakes when you go up stairs and shit and it made me dizzy eh. The music is alright but it turns into this metal music when you're in combat lmao. You can switch between the characters with the Select button, there is so much banter between them lmao, the chick's voice actress is that hot blonde goddess from Xena: Warrior Princess yummy. You can ask Scree what to do next but it's vague as fuck so I just followed a guide lol. You gotta work together to progress, sometimes opening big doors or switches together, but you need to be separated sometimes like Jen can walk through small ledges and Scree can walk on walls. Scree can posses statues using 5 lodestones (that's other shit he can collect), it's needed to open doors or wiggle it to knock it down and create a path but actually sometimes he fights using the statue lol. He can carry a torch too to light up dark places which was cool, and he will find a rope in that minotaur world you can drop down so Jen can climb up and down, the animations are so fucking slow though when you climb and shit or when you change forms just waiting for it to finish lol. There is no jump button, you gotta go to the place and press forward on the analog stick and they do what's supposed to happen, but that also means you can't fall off or do the wrong thing. There are rift gates which are like a stargate lol where you can travel to different gates you discovered on the level and that's where you go back to the Nexus too, you have a map where you can see the gates and the objectives too. There are also these little portals called summoning stones where you can drag Scree out from other parts of the level if you get separated. You can save anytime thank god, you don't have to deal with checkpoints. You don't really get visual clues on what to do unless you have multiple things you can choose from, without a guide I would have been completely lost. The collectibles are hidden tarot cards, I think they needed to unlock all extras. It reminds me of Soul Reaver 2 like the big puzzles to solve and how combat works, it's just the story isn't that good lol. You gotta use all the different forms to progress through the levels, the second world is Aquis which is a water world where the water is poisoned and you gotta save the queen and help her restart the water filtering system, the Undine form here makes you breath underwater, the combat fucking sucked though and it was disorienting sometimes. Aetha world is like Transylvanian mountains with fog and rain with Wraiths who are like French vampires lmao, they sacrifice villagers (the decapitated heads can talk lol) and you gotta stop them. The Wraith form has purple whip but the fucking enemies were so hard here Jesus I tried to avoid combat with the monsters, this form's special ability is teleporting around and when you aren't in combat you can slow down time (I loved that part where you dress up as a Wraith and go to dance ball lmao, but that fucking maze was a nightmare). The last world Volca is an Egyptian and Arabian inspired desert kind of place with volcanos and lava and Djinns lol (I loved how flames automatically light up the rooms as you enter like in Aladdin) where the king takes control of Jen and you gotta rescue her by fighting her lol, the Djinn form here is different because you can switch between fast but weak and slow but powerful modes with your flame weapons, you can instakill weaker enemies lol it was brutal. The final boss is your boyfriend who got brainwashed to serve Abaddon and he has the forms too so it's 4 parts where you gotta fight through all of them (I just switched to Djinn form for all of them except water lol), and there is one where you fight with Scree who returned to his original body. After the end credits there was a Ghoshunter promo, I'm really looking forward to that game. The bonus stuff you unlock are a cutscenes viewer, tarot card viewer, behind the scenes video with the voice actors, making of video that was more like a gameplay promo with the devs talking lol, an interview with that metal band, trailer, and a coming soon trailer for some stupid monster fighting game lol. It was actually quite long (would have been almost a month if I didn't have to stop playing), it's sort of like Soul Reaver 2 lite but still a good game.	2024/12/20
Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone (Xbox) Developer: Stormfront Studios Publisher: Atari Released: 2004 Genre: Action role-playing, hack and slash
This game is part of some Dungeons & Dragons universe, honestly I can't decide what to think of those tabletop RPG games, they simultaneously sound like coolest and the cringiest fucking shit ever lol. It's made by The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers devs and yeah I could easily tell cause it's pretty much the same game lol. Some wizard dude trapped these two fighting evil beings from another dimensions in a demon stone a hundred years ago, in the present day some dude stumbles upon some giant battle with orcs and a dragon attacking elves in front of a mine and that's where you take control. There are 3 characters and you can switch between them thank god, a warrior dude with a sword, some half dark elf rogue chick with two daggers who becomes invisible in shadows and can insta kill enemies like that and a sorcerer dude who can do ranged ranged attacks without any mana cost and other spells like a protection shield, stunning enemies, protect friends, the other characters can throw daggers and shit too with limited ammo but I literally never used it (no split screen co-op though which is weird). The graphics would be fine but it has that fucking fixed camera angle shit eh and I could barely see anything sometimes. The story goes on during cutscenes and you learn more about the characters, there are subtitles thank god but I had to turn them on every time I started the game eh. I played on easy cause heard it's really hard, you have combos but usually I just spammed A but you need to use other attacks too to knock down some enemies and then do a finisher attack, and there are secondary unarmed attacks too which I literally never used unless they're part of a combo, and you can block too which is essential if you want to survive. You have a hero meter that fills up slowly, you can launch a powerful attack and can call one teammate to do a team attack, and if all characters have full hero meter you can launch a team super attack that also gives you XP just for using it. There are chests and barrels with money and potions (and you can find them in hidden areas too), there is no inventory but enemies can drop health too. It's not just killing enemies, sometimes you have objectives like protect a place or destroy something and a health meter shows up, and there are boss fights too of course. Between levels you can level up and buy new stuff, it's easier to navigate than in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and thank god for auto buy cause I would have no idea what to get so it made everything easier, and armors and weapons actually change how the characters look like so it's not just stats. It's not a long game, you only get 10 missions and you can't save during levels eh. You start at the battle rescuing prisoner elves when you rescue the dark elf chick and play as her, then stumble upon the sorcerer dude and learn about ranged attacks. You seek refuge from the dragon and orcs inside a mine where you kill the orc king who drops loot lmao and they learn character specific abilities, the dude can break walls and shit, the chick can jump and the sorcerer can put down bombs lol and they are like item loots lmao like the ring makes her jump, so silly. They get tricked into releasing those evil enemies from the stone, so you gotta escape and try to find a way to stop them. They go to that wizard that trapped them and he tells you about another stone, statues and books attack enemies in this mission lol, you control this giant shield statue too for a bit to kill enemies lol. There are some jungle levels too with giant snake and spider like enemies and a raft ride lol, there was a giant demon here they summoned and you gotta stop them from feeding him to deplete his health lol. At some point they arrive to some snowy place with a famous character from this universe, here trolls can only be killed with fire so gotta use fire around you to light up your sword. You actually got to play that dark elf dude here, he fights like the chick but he can't jump. Sometimes there were so many enemies it was fucking insane I could barely move, and of course you gotta kill the dragon too which took me fucking forever, especially because the game just introduces some group kill out of nowhere without telling you what to do and which button to press and never uses it again, it was easier to kill the final boss than this fucking dragon. You get unlockables after beating game (or after beating a mission I'm not sure), like the intro movie, concept arts videos, character background stories with voice acting too huh with a concept pic as background, that's how you find out the evil dude controlled the events from the stone for decades effecting your characters damn. It's literally just The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers but actually better, still I think it was way too short and not really memorable or any good.	2024/12/14
Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon 2 (Xbox) Developer: Red Storm Entertainment Publisher: Ubisoft Released: 2004 Genre: Tactical shooter
A few years later in the Xbox sequel that general launches a coup and this time your army invades too but it doesn't matter I realized this whole connection shit with the PlayStation 2 game is irrelevant too, there is a basic plot but no real story whatsoever lol just missions. Cutscenes are interesting though it's like a documentary where your squad members talk about what the mission was (still no subtitles though). There is no easy mode wtf but you can save absolutely anytime and that made it easier thank god. The equipment is the same as just 4 options however there are weapon classes here and first you select the class then the weapons, you still can't change squad mates or their equipment though eh. The graphics look so much better here lmao it's not even close, you can still switch to FPS view here without seeing the weapon but I just used the third person view because it was clearly designed to be played that way. This version has big open areas, maybe not as big as in the previous ones but the levels are mostly still less corridor like than the PlayStation 2 game. There is a map here at least but you can't give them orders there anymore. It has a better dynamic command system like you look at somewhere and you get context sensitive commands, there are more options too like flank left and right and the white and black buttons are for hold position and follow. You can heal squadmates if someone is down and not dead yet and you can order them to do it too which was really helpful. There are supply crates you can use to get ammo and there are more types of vehicles to destroy here that weren't in the PlayStation 2 game like helicopters, jeeps with machine gun, armored vehicles and tanks too of course. Missions are a lot longer here and you have those ones where you are alone too but the gun camera was different you can move it around while you stay in cover and you can look out of corners and shit, it actually felt like Kill Switch or Gears of War, and you can keep calling airstrikes not just in specific places (these missions were more corridor like). As I said it has big areas and that means a lot more enemies but lots of allies sometimes too who either help you or you gotta protect, for some reason though there were a lot of missions where you just protect an area while waves of enemies just come right at you for such a long time wtf eh. Not gonna list the levels cause I'm too lazy after losing my notes lol but the last mission was supposed to end with the general trying to escape in a helicopter, but I managed to find an angle where I could destroy it while it was still on the ground lmao and still got the cutscene where he crashes lol. This version had a lot more extras, you still get points to unlock them like weapon and vehicle pics, pics and bio of your squad, trailer, those future gear promo pics but also concept videos too which was cool but lmao nothing looks like that at all and they were like this is how armies will look in 2010s no they didn't lol. Technically this is clearly the better game but I expected more and it still feels dumbed down and isn't so much better than the PlayStation 2 game and the plot connection barely exist. It had an Xbox only expansion and that's the last game to play until I can finally get to Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter.	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
Man I played the first game so long ago, but I realized while researching the .hack series that this was a multimedia project too, I knew it was coming up so I started watching like almost a year ago lol first the movie then the series, they were ok but the series was so goofy with that mech AI (nice tits on the daughter though lmao), it was about this failed attempt to attack Earth but there is barely any reference to it in the game besides just one line lmao, then there was some shitty Game Boy Advance game thank god I found a video of the cutscenes only, what a mess that game was with literally zero connection to anything. I rewatched the first game's story too cause I kinda forgot it lol, but you can rewatch a summary in the menu too. I played the PAL Special Edition, I'm not sure what the differences are but it had such a long intro lol with some cool music. It has the same menu sounds as Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance lmao, I started with VR Training to familiarize myself with gameplay again but it's literally the same controls and everything lol, but that also means the camera still sucks. There are some new things though, the most important thing is that you can grab enemies and use them as weapons too to beat other enemies lol and throw them, and you can grab wall panels and shit and use them as weapons or shields, and you can grab allies and heal them. You can also lock on to a lot more enemies and fire so many lasers lol, in fact the first game had just a couple enemies around you here there are so many of them (you can block too but I don't remember if it was in the first game lol). The cutscenes are anime, and the graphics look so good like a with little bit of cell shading especially the explosions. BAHRAM took over Mars and Jehuty was hidden on Jupiter's moon cause the bad guy wanted it to complete the Aumaan project. You play as a miner called Dingo lol and you control his mech first on the ice moon when you notice the Metatron on your monitor and find out it's actually Jehuty hidden there, but the enemy finds it too and attacks, so you fight your way through them with the same gameplay as the first game just cooler. You fight some chick boss called Ken then invade the battleship where that evil chick Viola shows up too but turns out she really died and that's just her AI (even though I clearly remember her being shown in jail in the series lol). Turns out Dingo deserted Nohman's forces, who pilots Anubis and was the final boss in the first game. You fight Anubis (and a couple times later too) but not much you can do and he shots you lol. The chick was an undercover agent all along and saves you by connecting to Jehuty who keeps you alive which means you can't leave it. You have a connection too like you can respond to agree or disagree with her, and she can recommend tactics like sub weapons and she switches to them if you agree, or give you tasks like destroy these enemies in X seconds. Dude is such an asshole though lmao arguing all the time telling everyone to shut up (I loved when he told Ada she's the type who behaves like her man wants to lmao). There are so many new enemy types like small flying mosquito drones or some scorpion like land unit and different mechs, and there are these portals too that keep summoning enemies. There are a lot of different tasks, like in the ship you gotta find some dude hidden in a crate which took me forever cause it was random. When you go down to Mars Leo from first game who is a teenager now is in a Vic Viper lol and you fight him a bit, then you learn Jehuty is supposed to destroy itself inside Aumaan and obviously you don't want that lol. Still you gotta find a Vector Cannon cause that's the only way to get inside Aumaan. It's not like the first game where you travel around a space colony and can go back to areas, here it's linear but it works better. You get the sub weapons slowly too but you don't really have to hunt them down like passcodes and shit, you just get them as you progress (there are some new ones, my favorite was the missile that can lock on to many enemies and instakill them). You don't have to do those civilian protection tasks either, there is one time where you defend buildings and allies but that's it, and later one where the Earth mechs attack and you defend them and you can drop flares and Leo heals damaged allies. Bosses were really simple in the first game but here they require different tactics and look so much cooler, like you fight that AI chick so many times, she even takes over Ken's mech and you gotta grab her to delete the program (then you gotta carry her, and if you flew close to the lava she will wear just a top instead of her uniform in the cutscene, hot). There was this scientist dude too with an awesome mech with an angel statue on its head (and you get there by listening to directions through a minefield lmao it took forever) and you gotta fight him in pitch black. You get an upgrade from him called Zero Shift that's like a brutal attack where you teleport next to the enemies. One really cool moment was when you fight a battleship fleet, first you gotta destroy the cannons and shit then use the Vector Cannon to blow it the fuck up, you gotta land on the ships and charge it up to do that, then you fight some gigantic mech air base lmao so cool. When you're trying to get to Aumaan you pass through some shaft that keeps firing and launching you back to the start, so you gotta grab wall panels to defend yourself and slowly get through it, I thought that was cool too. You fight in a hyperspace window too lol on route to Mars' moon where Aumaan actually is, you are damaged and you are limited to a few subweapons. The final boss fight inside the core was insane I just tried to avoid Anubis as much as possible, the effects are so cool though white then pitch black as the core expands (I like the solution he found to destroy it without blowing up Jehuty). You can find hidden EX-Mission files that unlock Extra Missions, they are the usual challenges like boss fights or fight these enemies with specific subweapons only, I did a few but eh who cares. There is Versus too which is 1 vs 1 battles where you can select the mech and their levels, the stage, and the timer, it was actually cool you can play split screen too. I really liked the gameplay and it's clearly a much better game but I think I prefer the story of the first one, Leo's journey just felt more impactful.	2024/10/25
Tron 2.0: Killer App (Xbox) Developers: Monolith Productions, Climax LA Publisher: Buena Vista Interactive Released: 2004 Genre: First-person shooter
I heard of the movie a long time ago but I only watched it a few years ago, it's an interesting concept but I didn't really care that much about it. I remember this game from a magazine though and I always wanted to play it cause it looked really cool, and it was made by the F.E.A.R. devs and that game was awesome. This is a sequel to the movie, 20 years have passed and you play as Jet, the son of the scientist dude Alan Bradley from the movie who gets sucked into the computer after his father was attacked by a rival company. And yeah the graphical style is insane, it's like Rez with that awesome digital look, but the Xbox port is kinda shitty and has bad screen tearing but even with that it was awesome. The music was cool too but it has lots of audio issues too, the sound was too low sometimes and the music kept cutting off. Everything works in computer terms, like you have health and energy you can recharge but everything you do costs energy, like firing most weapons and opening bins or activating shit. You have the disc of course you can throw and that's the basic weapon and it doesn't cost energy (thank god for auto aim cause it's slow lol). Weapons are called primitives, you get like a rod that can stun enemies, some ball you can throw as grenade, and a rifle that can be a regular machine gun or a sniper, later some claw that gives you the energy of enemies by draining their health, and some black hole weapon lol. They have upgraded versions though that do something different like firing multiple discs, you get them in bins along with emails and subroutines which are like the abilities you can equip. You have a build number lmao and you can upgrade it by finding hidden build notes. You always see how many are there on that level and you can get more health, energy, less weapon energy cost, faster download times or processing power which can defragment or disinfect subroutines cause there are viruses too and they can infect you wow. Subroutines can be shields and weapons but other abilities too like higher jump, quiet walking, block ability to your disc that fires back enemy disc, more damage, disinfect viruses when you loot bins, info about characters and enemies like health, and they all take up blocks in space so it's limited what you can use but they all have 3 tiers and the most upgraded ones only take up 1 block, you can find better versions in bins or use this little bug to get an upgrade point when you find one. Permissions are like keys needed to open doors, access bins or just to activate shit, sometimes enemies drop them or they are in other bins so you have to walk around and backtrack a lot, the gameplay is kinda slow. You have like an AI called MA3A who has your dead mother's voice (it's the actress from the movie) and other programs who help you and the guards are the antivirus that's trying to stop you lol, there are virus enemies too who corrupt the place around them, the security boss of your company who got digitalized and corrupted leads them. Emails are actually important to know what's going on in the background, how a rival company tried to buy your father's company and get the tech for safe digitalization and they paid off the security chief but he got fucked in there, and they kidnapped your father and want the tech for world domination. Your father joins you too, and the evil company sends in data wraiths who are like people they digitalized to fight you lol. I played on easy cause heard it's hard and yeah sometimes I got killed but luckily you can save absolutely anytime which is essential cause I don't think there are checkpoints or autosave, and there are a lot of platforming on boxes that sometimes move too so it helped with those parts a lot. Some of the locations in the system were cool like a library sort of thing or like a train, a ship as a server but you escape to the internet which is like a city lol with bars to find someone to assemble a code, and you go to the old Tron part of the system too and read old emails from the 80s lol. Of course there is that light cycle motorbike game too which sometimes felt forced like they just wanted to use it a lot cause it's like the most well known part of the movie (and watching the making of video later on YouTube pretty much confirmed it that Disney forced them to shoehorn it into more levels), it was hard if you actually wanted to play it but literally all your had to do is drive around and let the AI kill each other or crash lol, sometimes you just gotta go to new area avoiding obstacles and there are pickups too like shield or turbo speed. There are boss fights too, like a big worm lol or the virus chief, but this game was so fucking buggy like a subroutine bugged out but I could find the same one later and replace it, the disc sometimes just didn't return and I had to reload the save eh, one time I thought the level bugged out cause it was different in the PC original in videos but actually I just had to press a bunch of tiny buttons to lower a force field but it didn't have the usual text when you moved the crosshair on them, luckily I found the only video of the Xbox port on YouTube that showed it lol. There is multiplayer and you can play that motorbike game separately and online too but eh who cares. Still it's a really cool game even though it's an awful port lol, it's just a very unique game with insane visuals.	2024/10/25
Folklore (PlayStation 3) Developer: Game Republic Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment Released: 2007 Genre: Action role-playing
I heard of it as some underrated PlayStation 3 game to play and I thought it looked cool and very colorful, and I kinda liked that Irish rural setting, but most importantly I wanted to play some JRPG without that turn based shit. I wasn't sure when to play it though but I decided to follow the release order and just go through it and hope I'll be done in a month and a half max when it gets colder and I could go back to playing on my Xbox 360. I found a strategy guide so I just followed that hehe, you have two characters, a girl called Ellen who gets a letter from her dead mother to meet her in this village called Doolin, and a dude called Keats who works for an occult magazine and gets a phone call from a woman claiming fairies are trying to kill her so he goes there, and they find a woman on a cliff who falls to her death and they start investigating what happened. You play both of them, and have to finish the game with both to get the ending. The artstyle and music are really nice, and normal cutscenes look great but they are rare, mostly it's just comic book styled cutscenes with ingame characters instead of drawings and without any voice acting or that dialogue window thing too where you just talk to someone. When you go to pub at night you find out it's full of these otherworldy creatures, the scarecrow dude tells you that you can go to the Netherworld through the stonehenge near the village on the night of Samhain to meet the dead, and she gets some Sailor Moon transformation into these clothes to cross there lol, and she becomes a messenger and the guy her guardian. You arrive at the Faery world which is very colorful with beautiful flowers and nice forests everywhere (and with laughing stairs that lead to the Faery lord lol), but all worlds are very corridor like without big open areas and they are usually small and separated with loading screens so it kinda feels like just a PlayStation 2 game with better graphics. There are these enemies called Folks, you collect them to fight for you and in order to get them you need to absorb their Id which is like their soul that leaves their body after you beat them up. You can lock onto enemies, there are attack and defense type Folks too and you can assign them to the 4 face buttons. To capture them you need to beat their soul to red and then use the motion control shit by flicking the controller up lol, you can beat up multiple enemies and absorb their Ids the same time for bonus XP. There is karma release which is leveling them up, you need to do certain tasks with Folks like absorb more of them or kill certain types of enemies with them or use certain items you collect etc, and they get more powerful or require less mana or more of them will appear etc. You can find memory stones and some of them need specific elemental Folk like fire, water etc to open them, they have like health, picture book page (which shows you the weakness of specific Folks), karma release item or a different type of cloak you can wear which have different effects. For big enemies you need use different tactics with the motion control shit, like only flick the controller up when it's red, or keep tilting it left to right, or a combination of both, or some fucking balance shit fuck that was so hard, or violently shaking it lmao I thought I fucked it up by doing it Jesus, it's basically a QTE lol. You can play through the entire game with one character but then you need to do the same with the other again so I just alternated between the two, you see the story from the other's perspective and get more answers. They are the same areas though but with different enemies (the bosses are the same though), sometimes the dude seem to have shorter chapters though and unlike Ellen he doesn't summon the Folks to attack for him just strikes using their power and he builds up energy you can use to become invincible with powerful attacks until the meter runs out. Bosses called Folklore, you need to use different Folks to attack and defeating one unlocks a new realm and a dead person you can speak to which unlocks a memory that helps investigating your memories and what happened 17 years ago when a lot of people died. You walk around the village between realms and you can talk to people too but not much options, usually you need an item from them. You can get quests from the barkeepers during the day and night too, and it teleports you to the Netherworld automatically so you can't just have multiple ones eh, they are very simple though usually just killing enemies or escorting someone (these were awful) and you get items, cloaks, book pages, and even Folks as rewards, some quests can be repeated too (there was one where the pub owner pretends to drink but actually he's just terrified of death, he is just like me understanding what it really means, I don't know how people don't go crazy over that thought). You can only travel to the Netherworld at nights and you need a memento from dead people to open portals, the realms are like manifestations of what people fear or thought about aferlife, like the dead are just the memories of dead people and not the real person (kinda how I think what ghosts would be if they were real), and if people don't think about the place it becomes forgotten and disappears forever. Ellen is following the Faery Lord's orders to restore the connection to the Netherworld while Keats listens to this chick called Livane with an invisible man to stop that. Every world has different Folks but you can use the ones from previous worlds too, a lot of them require a specific type of Folk or element type to kill. You have worlds like Warcadia which is like a cool WW1 era battle in town with mechanical enemies or little soldiers and a Dreadnought boss, Undersea City which is obviously an underwater world where you gotta pick a route and the other character will go to the other place (fuck this place especially that boss took fucking forever to kill), Endless Corridor which was created by the belief that there is no afterlife so it's kinda modern creation, and it's a labyrinth where you gotta follow a clock like Folk to pass through it (kinda has Alice In Wonderland vibes), and you gotta beat that Folk within a time limit Jesus (I'm too fucking slow to shake that controller), and HellRealm which is like ancient Greek afterlife sort of hell and not the fiery one with a big elevator and court hearing lol (the cloak here is awesome you can see her tummy and ass yum lmao). Sometimes you can go back to a previous world with a new quest or with a new Folk element that you can use to reach areas you couldn't before. There is a pretty interesting twist (it was obvious who that girl you see really was and why Ellen sees the memories), Livane cut the connection of Netherworld to humanity so they will fear death and start creating and advancing. Chapter 6 only unlocks after you complete all the previous ones with both characters, here you can't select between them and you are in the Netherworld version of the village and it's more like a recollection of what happened (with a Sauron lighthouse lol). In Chapter 7 you go to the Netherworld Core which looks beautiful with forests and fields like in the real world, then a weird purple crystal place, but you can switch characters at the pub and that's when I started playing the DLC quests, most of them are just the same kind as the base ones, but there are like challenges or rules like you can only use the Folk you absorb, and you can find out more about the story from different perspectives like from Ellen's mother, some are greyed out until you get to the last save area, but I just said fuck it they are insanely hard and honestly I had enough and just wanted to finish this already (I watched most of them on YouTube but you can't even find them all on there lol). There are also different DLC skins for your costumes you can only change in the main menu, there are dumb ones too like Christmas themed lol. The final boss took a while to beat, and then you find out who the dude really is (I expected something completely different lol, it's a dumb twist though). It's a cute game with a lot of soul but it's not some great underrated game lol, it really felt like just a PlayStation 2 game with better graphics and it's just too long imo and got boring after a while, but at least I managed to finish it exactly in a month and a half lol.	2024/10/24
Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance (PlayStation 2) Developer: Konami Computer Entertainment Japan Publisher: Konami Released: 2003 Genre: Action-adventure, stealth
This is the game I wanted to play after summer. It's an expanded version of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and it was originally released on Xbox then later on the PlayStation 2 as well, so why am I not playing it there? Well apparently it wasn't a good port and at a specific location there are some bad slowdowns, but it wasn't even that long eh whatever I can only play the rest here so maybe the save will unlock something for the next game. I found a strategy guide again, no way I could play these games without one lol. The only thing I knew is they tricked people into thinking you play as Snake but you only play him in the beginning then you play as this new dude Raiden. I actually watched another game from this series released between this and the previous one called Metal Gear: Ghost Babel, which was on that shitty Nintendo handheld and it's like the second 2D game but with some alternate story. The intro music was cool, they hired some movie composer and it felt like I'm watching some Michael Bay movie lol. I went to the Special menu first and to the Previous Story to read everything to refresh my memory, and you can read about the story of the previous game and it's like a review of a book from a newspaper lol because apparently Natasha who was one of your codec calls wrote a book about it, after you read it you get another one which is like a book based on her book written by some conspiracy lunatic who was kidnapped by aliens lmao and it's batshit crazy about how he got in the base hiding inside a fucking fish lmao wtf but it's like more than a hundred pages wtf and after you read it you get another one which is Natasha's book and it's 300 something pages Jesus I would have spent days just trying to read these shit but luckily someone typed it out and I was able to read everything before the next day, this was interesting because you see the story from her perspective, how her ex husband showed up to ask her help and it kinda ties in to this game and it seemed like this group called the Patriots was behind it all and he was part of it so I would say it's kind of essential. This expanded version has VR missions so I decided to play a little bit like with the first game to familiarize myself with the gameplay again, and it's crazy you can give your nationality and your birthday lmao. You can pick Snake or Raiden (and more later if you unlock them I guess) and I played with both, and they have two main categories VR Missions and Alternative Missions, under VR you have Sneaking, Weapons and First Person Viewing modes so I got a sense for all the new or different stuff here (I only did the first mission for everything). Alternative Missions has shit like proper tiny scenarios like bomb disposal but it was so hard cause I think it expected you to know what to do so I skipped those. The most noticable isn't the new things though but that it's still fucking isometric shit fuck off, I could barely tolerate it on PlayStation, it's completely ridiculous and outdated here. You can switch to FPS mode by holding down a button and aim your weapons like that which was cool but just a normal fucking third person camera would have been better. Items now are grouped and that helps you find them sooner, there is a camera you can use to take photos lol, it's needed for the mission too but I took pics of the chick posters you find in lockers lol where you can hide and find items. You have a stun gun too, I mostly just used that and aiming at the head stuns them for longer. You can use empty ammo magazines to throw and distract guards, or you can do the same by throwing down nudie magazines lmao. If you lose too much health the bar turns orange and you keep bleeding, gotta use bandage to stop it cause they can find the blood and follow you. Some enemies have dog tags you can collect, you gotta pull a gun on them to hold em up and they put their hands up and if you aim at their heads or dicks lmao they start shaking and the dog tag comes out, otherwise it's almost impossible to loot it from their bodies (they don't really do anything it's just pointless collectibles), you can loot other items though by picking up and dropping their bodies lol. You can hang on rails to pass guards, there is a meter that shows how much strength you have left and you can slow it down by doing pullups lol. I played on easy and again it seemed like the best decision. The story is that Revolver Ocelot revealed Metal Gear to the public and now everyone is trying to build one, Snake and Otacon formed an anti Metal Gear organization called Philanthropy and they learn the navy is building a new amphibious type (what do you think submarines are Kojima, they can launch nukes too dumbass lmao) and they transport it through the Hudson river so they decide to infiltrate the tanker and take photos. Dude jumps down from a bridge lol but the ship is also taken over by Russkies at the same time. It's raining like crazy and you can knock enemies over rails into the sea lol, you gotta find your way inside the ship. Everything is so detailed, like you can see magazines and shoot glass bottles, and when you hide in lockers you can peak out but you gotta be careful because you can hit your head and they'll hear it, so cool. Codec calls have animated character faces not just pics now, here Otacon is your only contact so he saves too, he tries to give you those poverbs the Chinese girl did but he has no idea what they mean and just makes shit up lmao. The first boss fight was with a Russkie chick with hairy armpits ew, she uses light to blind you so you gotta shoot at the tarp to cover it up (very clever), here you can see that bosses have 2 bars, health and stun and you gotta use the stun weapon to disable her. As you go deeper down to find the Metal Gear soldiers swarm you and gotta keep firing at them, you can shoot the light off to make it harder for them to aim damn, so it's not just a stealth game there are brutal firefights too you can't skip. Down in the large cargo hold the marines are lined up listening to a speech on a giant projector, you gotta go past them before the colonel finishes speech lol, then take photos of the new Metal Gear from different angles and upload the pics from a terminal. Then the Russkies attack them but Ocelot fucks over the Russkies, he has a new arm that's actually Liquid's lmao wtf and he takes his body over how lmao so insane, then steals the Metal Gear and the ship sinks. Now it's like a new story starts, years passed and Snake is supposed to be dead and this cleanup facility called Big Shell was built where the ship sank to clean up the oil. With the Colonel back on codec this dude is swimming there cause the President was captured there by a former Navy SEAL trainer group called Dead Cell and they'll blow it up if they don't get the money they want and the toxic waste would ruin the ocean. The Colonel calls him Snake but it's clearly not him and he gets a new codename called Raiden. Bugs crawl around where you emerge, if you step on them they can climb up and eat your rations wow I can't believe the details in this game. You have a sensor that vibrates when enemies are nearby because you don't have a radar, you gotta download maps from terminals before you can see it, there is a big map of the entire thing but it's just an overhead view to know which section you are in. The different sections are connected by bridges, sometimes drones flying above to monitor them and there are seagulls outside and you can slip on their shit lol. Your girlfriend called Rose is the one saving your game, they keep talking about relationship stuff lol, dude reminded me of myself though like how he can't open up and shit damn. The terrorists call themselves Sons of Liberty, supposedly lead by Snake huh, they are the bosses in the game, just a bunch of insane characters like some gay vampire dude who can't die lmao he gets shot in the head and still survives multiple boss fights, a chick with a giant energy weapon who is lucky and bullets bend around her wtf, some fat dude in a bomb suit on a roller skate lmao planting bombs. You meet some people there who will help you and you can call on codec, some SEAL soldier who ovbiously is Snake in disguise using the name Iroquois Pliskin lol, some bomb expert dude whose help you need to disarm bombs, you have this sensor that detects the general area then you switch to a cooler in FPS mode and spray it to freeze them. There is a fucking ninja here too lol and you get a phone where you receive texts lol, he tells you to find Ames (the guy from Natasha's story) who is a Secret Service agent among the hostages by getting this special mic to listen to his heartbeat cause he has a pacemaker wow, and you use it to listen to bad guys talking too in the distance by following them through walls and shit, and you dress up disguised as enemy soldier which only works in that specific section with the correct weapon so it's another cool thing. This is where things start to get really weird, apparently they have access to President's nuke briefcase but something different is going on and there is a Metal Gear there too somewhere and it's all just a cover like you get so many twists from him and from enemy conversations, you find out the Patriots are behind everything, and turns out the terrorists' goal was to launch the nukes and not just threaten, they want to liberate Manhattan and create another Outer Heaven. After you escape you gotta disable bombs by shooting at control panels with sniper Jesus, this is where Solidus shows up in like a mech suit lol who was the former President and a Big Boss clone but he is old, and you have a boss fight with a Harrier which gets saved by a Metal Gear. You gotta swim to find a remote controlled missile and save the President by firing it through air vents to disable an electrified floor which is again one of the many similarities with the previous game. More fucking twists here as the President agreed to help terrorists wtf and says he is just a puppet and the Patriots run the country (man I love these oldschool conspiracy stuff, now it's all dumb shit), and Big Shell is a cover for Arsenal Gear which is a giant base with nukes and Metal Gears with an AI system called G.W. designed to control data and information on all networks cause the Patriots are afraid of the digital age. Then you gotta find Emma Emmerich, who is Otacon's sister (he is here too) and designed the system to upload a virus, she is in a flooded area so you gotta swim there and take her back with you lol by holding hands like in Ico, then cover her with sniper fire while she crosses to the other side. A bunch of fucking twists later you get a torture scene inside Arsenal Gear where you learn who you were and what's your connection to Solidus is, and when you escape you run around naked covering your dick lmao. This is where the game becomes absolutely batshit insane, you get insane fucking calls from the "Colonel", he says shit like turn off your video game console lol, tells you an alien abduction story wtf and lines from one of the 2D games. You get your equipment and clothes back from Snake and a samurai sword lmao, Arsenal Gear is a very futuristic place with new type of soldiers and you are just killing them with Snake. Then you gotta fight fucking waves of Metal Gears Jesus fuck, until you get like twists after twists, one minute thinking you know what's happening like why do you have so many similarities to the previous game then it turns out it was something else. Then an even more batshit insane fucking codec call happens, where you find out the Patriots want to control digital information to filter out the junk and lies and made up shit on the internet to protect humanity, cause people would stay in their echochambers and believe what they want instead of the truth (boy did it predict the future my god), and another twist happens and you learn they used you cause the G.W. needed to be completed with someone's data who does everything he is told to and is easy to manipulate (that girlfriend speech though, Raiden is literally me, he does only what he likes for himself alone and couldn't even invite the girl over). The final boss is Solidus and it's a samurai sword battle lol, and when it's done and Raiden has the chance to create his own legacy with his girlfriend and then you find out something crazy about the Patriots (my rank was Flying Squirrel here lol). So another extra of this version is Snake Tales, because of the whiny bitches who complained about no Snake they added these alternate scenarios with him, I thought maybe it will be like what he did while Raiden was doing his shit but nope, there is no voice just text, no radar wtf, no difficulty select so I realized in minutes it's impossible for me lol so I just watched them on YouTube. There is one with Meryl back cause her father was killed and joins this evil Metal Gear crew, there is an insane one with a monster in Big Shell lmao which is a gigantic soldier, in this story VR isn't a simulation but parallel universes and it broke down and people are switching places (kinda like that movie Coherence) and Snake hops from one to another and you gotta solve it inside the VR fighting Solidus, it was so weird lmao. And there is a fucking skateboarding game wtf lmao, I tried it out but it's so fucking dumb why would they even put this in the game lol. The previous game's message was memory and don't let your genes determine who you are, and this one seems to be about legacy and what we pass on (with dumb shit like digital stuff will forever remain yeah what about EMP strikes or when electronics stop working huh dumbass Kojima). I really liked the story and Raiden but the gameplay is ridiculously outdated and Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell absolutely destroyed it a year later. What made the previous game unique is the interactivity with the player and self awareness that it's just a video game, here it's all gone and you just get some fourth wall breaking stuff in codec calls eh. The next game is gonna take a long time to get to but I hope they did something to this gameplay, there is no way I can tolerate it there.	2024/10/14
OutRun 2 (Xbox) Developers: Sega AM2, Sumo Digital Publisher: Sega Released: 2004 Genre: Racing game
I was really looking forward to this game, in my mind this was the other driving game series besides Burnout I wanted to try because it seemed like it had nothing to do with reality just crazy arcade driving without any bullshit. Originally this was an arcade game too that only got ported to Xbox, in the menu you see 3 modes to choose from, OutRun Arcade is what I assume the original arcade game is, OutRun Challenge which is what was added to the Xbox version with 101 missions and cards you can unlock, and OutRun Xbox Live which I didn't check but Insignia supports it and you can race other players and download ghost cars as time trials I think. The other two have 3 menus too, OutRun Challenge has OutRun Mission which is where the missions are, Party Missions for splitscreen I guess and OutRun Race where you can have 8 car races thank fucking god that was really missing from the first game. In the arcade mode you gotta choose from real Ferrari cars, they have 3 stats acceleration, handling and max speed, and they have all kinds of different colors thank god even though I usually picked red lol (you only have a few cars first but you can unlock a lot more, in fact there are codes to unlock everything but I didn't use them). After selecting the car you have 3 menus again, OutRun mode is the same as the first game where you go through a track and select the next one and reach the end within the time limit, Heart Attack mode is the same except the girl next to you is giving you tasks to do like drift here for hearts, go through the right colored section, pass cars, steal hearts from cars, don't crash etc, and the usual Time Attack mode lol fuck that shit. Then you can select music which have the usual tracks with better sound but there are more songs too, honestly here I didn't just use the same song cause they were all good, and you unlock different versions too like Euro remixes lol, instrumental only, prototypes or the original music from the first game too. The tracks are actually very similar and mostly European inspired, you start at some beach city like in the first game, and there are like snowy mountains, castle, forest, tulip gardens with windmills, industrial place etc but there is Paris too lol and Athens, Rome and Egypt with the pyramids lmao, and they have victory screens too lol but the guy always fucks it up like he falls of a cliff when he tries to kiss the girl, tries to give the girl flower but she gives him more, follows the girl around shopping with more and more bags lol, drinks champagne in the desert, takes photo but camera falls over lol. You can change the difficulty but I think it only applies to the arcade mode and it just gives you more time. So why I was so excited for this game is the drifting but it was so hard for me to do lmao I really struggled and I could barely complete the second track and just kept failing even though I kept trying so I thought I should check out the challenges. The way they work is you see like all the paths and they all have 5 tasks you need to complete and then a final race either with a bunch of cars or one-on-one which clears the stage and unlocks the next two paths connected to it. You get ranks based on how you do you and how many hearts you have and you need at least an A to complete it (AAA is the best), you either go through just one area or a couple more but it always shows which ones and sometimes they're in reverse. You gotta do shit like drifting as much as possible, staying inside the correct colored zones, Knockout which is like in Eliminator in Burnout 3: Takedown where you race other cars and the last car that passes the checkpoint gets eliminated, Crazy Convoy where the traffic is trucks and buses only and you can barely go through them and you lose hearts when you crash, one where you gotta knock down blue cones lol while not touching yellow ones because those take away hearts, one that's like the Heart Attack mode where the girl tells you what to do, Max Speed which is the absolute worst you gotta go above a specific speed to earn hearts and to me this was almost impossible because of how bad I am, Time Trial of course lol it's essentially a ghost car you see and his time to beat, one where you gotta drive through hearts to collect them and drop them off by driving through this little red zone, Math Mayhem lmao where you literally see numbers and gotta do additions and subtractions then pick the route where the correct answer is lol, Heart Breaker where you gotta steal hearts from other cars by driving close to them, one where you earn hearts by passing cars, one where you gotta drift at zones and take pictures of hearts at the right moment Jesus, Cone Gate which is literally what it says you gotta pass through them to gain time and hearts without knocking them down, a fucking memory test game where you gotta drive through the correct fruits they show you lmao, Laser Breaker where you gotta break the laser connecting cars in traffic, I think that's all I don't remember more. Some cars are more suited for different tasks, I preferred cars with good acceleration and handling cause I couldn't catch up if I fucked something up cause it's so hard to control the cars in corners. You get cards for completing missions, and they are stupid shit like Ferrari merch lmao but like you can't do anything with them they are just cards to look at lol, like engines, clocks, calendar, toys, bags, clothes etc lmao, and completing a stage unlocks new shit like cars, music, tracks etc. At first I thought this mode is really cool and I enjoyed going through these tasks and I felt like I'm getting better at the game but it got really challenging and by stage 10 it was so insanely hard it took me days to just complete a mission. If you manage to reach the end of a path though you get to race a rival with a specific car and like on all the tracks lmao it was fucking impossible to do. Around stage 12 or 13 I couldn't even complete anything anymore, the amount of raging I felt while trying to beat these fucking missions just couldn't be healthy and I made a decision to stop playing. It was insanely frustrating and I realized this isn't fun for me at all, there is nothing relaxing and satisfying about this, in fact none of these driving games are, so I don't think I'm gonna play any more of them besides trying to finish the Burnout series. I'm sure it would be better if I didn't try to complete everything and just drove on my own pace but I don't think I can do that lol. I think you need to master manual transmission instead of automatic to be good at this game but no way I could do that, I can barely pay attention to the track and traffic, how am I supposed to keep looking at the speed too lol. So OutRun Mission fucking sucked, I wish you could do some of the fun tasks separately like with the races but nope you can only do them in that mode eh. I kind of learned the tracks by doing missions so I went back and managed to finish all the routes in arcade and Heart Attack mode with at least an A rank (it seems like different modes have different girls and drivers too huh), I decided thats what I'm going to call the campaign and the mission mode as challenges which I usually ignore so I can say to myself I beat the game and be done with it. Beating all paths unlocks the original arcade game from the 80s lol which is nice I guess but fuck that 2D shit lmao. These games just aren't for me, it's kinda like Downhill Domination where by the end I could get somewhat good at the arcade game but I'm missing key elements that take away from the experience. Sure on a technical level it's much better than the first game but there is just nothing enjoyable about it, it just made me rage like crazy so I should stop playing games like this to look out for my health more.	2024/10/07
Men of Valor (Xbox) Developer: 2015, Inc. Publisher: Vivendi Universal Games Released: 2004 Genre: First-person shooter
This is the final Vietnam War game on the Xbox and it came out around the same time too just a little bit later. Because of these games I actually got interested in the war and watched a documentary series from like the 80s because I wanted one with a lot of footage and reports from during the war not just some dumb veterans talking, and it made me realize what I knew about the war was wrong (probably because this was a commie shithole too), and they didn't defeat the Americans in fact they bombed these fuckers back to the Stone Age and forced them to negotiate and then just left and of course you can't trust communist scum and the peace only lasted for a year before they invaded the south anyway. This one has a strategy guide but I didn't really need it, it's a pretty straightforward game. You play as a black dude which is interesting to see (I honestly couldn't tell from the cover lol), before and after missions you read his letters he sends back home and recieves from his family. Loading screens have pics with some facts and quotes, one says it's not true that more black people died lol imagine that today. There is the usual training mode and that's when you notice the precise aiming is so weird, instead of looking around like in other games you just move the crosshair on the screen until you get to the edge and that's when you can look around, and you can't move at all while doing that. The health system was also interesting, you start bleeding when you get hit and you need to keep a button pressed to stop it, you can recharge it but if you take many hits or can't react fast enough it permanently takes away from your health bar until you can find some medpacs. The graphics looked the best out of these Vietnam War games, the explosions and napalm striked looked the best with bright orange color lol and with the screen shaking they felt really powerful, there are some other nice effects too like a giant fog where you could barely see anything. You need to use smoke grenades to mark places for strikes but you don't have to aim it goes to the right place automatically lol. It felt like a Call of Duty game to be honest with the music and the scripted scenes and just the general feeling, and the best part is you are almost always with a squad. I played it on easy because I heard it's really hard and I think it was the right choice, you gotta hide a lot behind covers and take them out slowly, rushing into the battle always gets you killed. There are 4 main chapters with different missions, Da Nang, Iron Triangle, Khe Sanh and the Tet Offensive, and missions are actually quite long and the game only saves at the end of them so I just played one mission per day (they are separated by different parts with loading screens though). In the beginning you are in the camp playing American football lmao like actually playing it not just a cutscene which was cool, then it gets attacked and you go out hunting the enemy. Missions are the usual shit, search and destroy, clearing out villages looking for supply crates etc. I could barely see the enemies in the jungle or in tall grass, and they could fire out of tree lines where you can't go and can't damage them, that's where they come out too, so there are a lot of these jungle corridor parts connected to bigger areas. If I remember correctly there were traps too but only like in specific places in some mission and you just gotta press a button to disable it, it wasn't that hardcore as in the other games. It's easy to run out of bullets though so you gotta pick up enemy weapons too. It felt more detailed, like houses have a lot of shit inside, the previous games felt kinda empty in that way. There was a mission where there are reporters with you and the entire village was Viet Cong and those idiots get kidnapped and you gotta rescue them, and when you burn down the village they potray it like you killed innocent villagers lmao fucking scumbags. There are parts when you're shooting from a helicopter (it was hard to aim) or from a ship as you ride through a river, and there was a mission where you had to capture an enemy commander and carry him on your shoulder lmao it makes you really slow. Sometimes there are objectives like suppressing enemies with constant fire so your buddies can move up to a bunker, or setting explosives and triggering them when the enemy patrol gets there, a couple times you gotta defend an area from enemies coming from everywhere, and there is a mission where you go down to those tunnels they used fuck it was confusing I got so lost there lmao. Meanwhile your little brother gets into trouble at home and gets drafted, you gotta find him and help him out too. When the Tet Offensive happens you are at your barracks with one of your squadmate bringing a chick home who he wants to marry lmao and then they get bombed and both die lmao, you gotta defend the base running around there. Then the game gets really challenging, you go through a city protecting a tank and find a mass grave behind a church, then go through the ruined parts of the city (this one was brutal especially at the end when you reach the allied base that still stands). At the end you fly to Khe Sanh because you brother is trapped in there, this one was really cool because I remember this from the documentary how planes flew in this base under siege to bring supplies under enemy fire fuck that must have been so crazy lmao, and of course your plane gets shot down too and you go through the base to find out he is in some outpost and you gotta go through the jungle with barely any cover and destroyed shit lying around everywhere, and of course he gets shot and gotta carry him back lmao it was insane I just kept running because the bombers were coming to destroy everything. It has multiplayer too I might try it on Insignia if someone would host a fucking game there. So yeah it was pretty cool and I would say it's the best Vietnam War game I've played but not by much, but it really felt like a Call of Duty game lol which isn't a bad thing.	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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