| Currently playing |
PlayStation
2: .hack//MUTATION Xbox: Phantom Crash; GoldenEye: Rogue Agent Xbox 360: Earth Defense Force 2025; Assassin's Creed III |
| Primal (PlayStation
2) Developer: Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment Released: 2003 Genre: Action-adventure |
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| 2024/12/20 |
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| Forgotten Realms:
Demon Stone (Xbox) Developer: Stormfront Studios Publisher: Atari Released: 2004 Genre: Action role-playing, hack and slash |
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| 2024/12/14 |
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| Tom Clancy's Ghost
Recon 2 (Xbox) Developer: Red Storm Entertainment Publisher: Ubisoft Released: 2004 Genre: Tactical shooter |
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| 2024/11/06 |
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| 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 |
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| 2024/10/25 |
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| Tron 2.0: Killer
App (Xbox) Developers: Monolith Productions, Climax LA Publisher: Buena Vista Interactive Released: 2004 Genre: First-person shooter |
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| 2024/10/25 |
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| Folklore (PlayStation 3) Developer: Game Republic Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment Released: 2007 Genre: Action role-playing |
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| 2024/10/24 |
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| Metal Gear Solid 2:
Substance (PlayStation
2) Developer: Konami Computer Entertainment Japan Publisher: Konami Released: 2003 Genre: Action-adventure, stealth |
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| 2024/10/14 |
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| OutRun 2 (Xbox) Developers: Sega AM2, Sumo Digital Publisher: Sega Released: 2004 Genre: Racing game |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
