Captain Buttbeard's Gaming Corner

Soul Reaver 2 (PlayStation 2) Developer: Crystal Dynamics Publisher: Eidos Interactive Released: 2001 Genre: Action-adventure
Before I started this game I went back and rewatched and reread the story again because it's so complicated with so many characters lol I had to refresh my memory. It starts with the end conversation and battle with Kain in the last game but it's more cinematic here lol they jump all over the place. Then it picks up right where it ended, you are in Moebius's stronghold during his vampire hunting campaign and he offers you a deal to kill Kain. There are a lot of long cutscenes in this game (no subtitles again of course, but you can read the script in the pause menu so that's something I guess) and tons of characters and places return from the first game, in fact they play important parts in the story, like how Kain killing the Nemesis was possible and how it created a paradox that allowed to change history. Near the beginning of the game you find his broken Reaver and it merges with yours and now you can summon it anytime, but it becomes more powerful with every kill as it eats the souls and when it maxes out it starts draining your health, if you just use it to damage enemies the souls you can collect become weaker, so usually I just used it for stronger enemies and I used something else for weaker ones. You don't have to execute enemies anymore and you can just use your claws too if you can't find a weapon and that made combat easier, but it's easier to just avoid combat so that's what I usually did because it's still a bit annoying. The game literally has the same controls lmao but you can use the right stick for camera, and in fact it has the exact same gameplay lol still it was much better to play because the framerate wasn't awful. The world looks really nice in the past when it wasn't a ruined shithole, there is a world map but it's as useless as it was in the first game. The world feels smaller though but because of the time travel they look different and may have more areas in other time periods (like it was cool to see the Pillars corrupt in real time). There are some doors with a guy like Raziel painted on them that can only be opened with the Soul Reaver (I loved how that creepy music from 2001: A Space Odyssey plays when you open them), they are usually forges that are like big puzzles you need to solve and when you activate them they enchance your weapon and increase your health. They all have different powers and open different doors, the Dark Reaver can create a shadow bridge and shoot a projectile to blind sentries above doors, the Light Reaver is like a flashlight lol and you can shoot those pink orbs with it, the Air Reaver can activate these pads you can use to glide up and you can walk through the swamp fast when it's active, and the Fire Reaver which the previous game already had (you don't have the magic powers anymore eh). You can activate these in different fountains and you need to switch between them for puzzles. Some enemies carry key items so you need to defeat those to progress, and the demon enemies sometimes create a barrier you can't pass until you kill them, but they are the hardest in the game and it was better to die and just let them follow you to the spirit world where you can easily regain your health. I don't know what the fuck were they thinking with the save system, there are checkpoints but they don't save the game, you can only do that with the save obelisks and sometimes I had to play for more than an hour until I could save, like the forges can take a long ass time and without a fucking guide I would have been stuck there for hours without saving wtf. The best part of the game was the story, like you find out the Pillars actually belonged to the original vampires and Moebius and whoever he works for created this convoluted time travel plot to get rid of all vampires once and for all, that's why Kain didn't want to sacrifice himself. He wants to use Raziel to fuck them over and change history to restore the pillars for the vampires, so you are going back to the future and then further back to the past to the Sarafan age to meet the last original blue skinned vampire dude called Janos who somehow knows you. Well turns out they just tricked you into going through all this shit and you were part of their plan since the beginning and just used you to change history, like you are there when the original cutscene for the first game happening when Vorador kills most of the guardians and you meet your brothers too as Sarafans and in fact you were the one who killed them and yourself lol. These battles were weird because you pick up the real Reaver and you can't lose health, and at the end you find out why. You were supposed to die and become part of the Reaver turning it to a soul sucking sword from a healing one, but at the last moment Kain saves you and creates a paradox that completely changes history but for the worse. Now I can't wait to see what happens next, but the next game actually takes place in this new timeline with Kain. Anyway you get a code after beating the game and you can unlock all bonus materials, I spent two days just going through them lol, chronology, the intro of Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver in higher quality, the script, tons of concept arts and renders, music from both games, pictures of the developers and voice actors, the voice recordings and outtakes lol, storyboards, trailers, just so much shit I love when a game has these stuff. I think this is my favorite game in this series so far, but only because of the story (as I said the gameplay is exactly the same lol). The next game is on Xbox so finally I can play it there.	2023/11/08
Wings of War (Xbox) Developer: Silver Wish Games Publisher: Gathering Released: 2004 Genre: Combat flight simulator
I've never heard of this game until I saw it on a list I think, I love WW1 and this is literally the only game on Xbox lol so I had to play it. The back of the cover is promising 70 missions and I was like damn how long is this game, and of course it was fucking bullshit lol you have like 12 or something missions and those are just all the objectives in the game. The graphics are alright nothing special really but for some reason everything looked blurry as fuck, I don't know why because it doesn't happen with other games. It's a simple arcade flying game without any story basically, you are just a pilot doing all kinds of tasks throughout the war in Verdun, Somme, Arras (never heard of that place lol) and Ypres, and the only cutscenes are just your plane flying around lol. There is a tutorial and you can check the controls in the options anyway which is great without a manual, but I had to fucking restart on easy because I couldn't complete the training lmao, aiming is terrible when you are in turret and machine guns are useless so I couldn't shoot down some shitty blimps. As I said it's a simple arcade game, there is an option for guns to overheat but it's turned off on deafult, you can't select your plane before missions but sometimes you jump into other ones or steal enemy planes from bases. Maps are huge and it's like a giant open world where you get objectives in a row, or fly to bonus objective that appear on the map, the game autosaves after some of them so you can just go back and continue later. Maps have winter and summer or autumn variants, at some point I thought it has dynamic weather too but I think it just triggers after some objectives, like it starts raining like crazy or you can't see shit because of the fog. My favorite map was Ypres, it had canyons and it was nice to fly through them but I doubt the real place is like that lmao. The objectives can be simple as fuck like shoot down every plane, truck, balloon, zeppelin, train or whatever, or jump into another plane and shoot down enemies in the back turret (it switches to first person view, otherwise you are always in third person), bomb factories and shit (I could never figure out when to drop the bombs from the bombing view), escort bombers or defend a dam (of course next missions you need to destroy it lol). There are some basic shit too like take photos from the plane or drop messages. Sometimes there is a time limit, especially for bonus objectives, which sometimes can be doing a main objective in a different way, like jump into a balloon, truck, train and shoot down enemies, they can be races too but my favorite was taking pictures of UFO crop circles lmao. Besides your machine gun you have rockets and bombs, and you can get more ammo by completing objectives or finding pickups on the map, they have different colors and they can upgrade your engine, give you shield or health, make your machine gun more powerful etc. Some of them are in hard to get places like you need to fly through buildings and shit to get them, or destroy specific buildings or enemies with those flags. I like that they had that giant cannon too and you need to destroy some of them lol, there are also aces that are harder to shoot down and they can come back, the final boss was an ace who kept jumping into another plane when you shot him down lmao had to kill him so many times, of course no cool ending besides your plane flying then the credits eh. At some point it bugged out too, I had to restart because it didn't register that I completed an objective. It has multiplayer with bots, you can select a map, season, weather, plane, camouflage, number of bots, but there is only DM and TDM, but it was actually more intense then any battle in the campaign lol. It's a very simple game with basically no story but it was alright, apparently the PC version had a patch that added Jutland and dreadnoughts to destroy, I wish it was a DLC on Xbox too.	2023/11/03
Soldier of Fortune: Gold Edition (PlayStation 2) Developers: Raven Software, Pipe Dream Interactive Pubisher: Majesco Entertainment Released: 2001 Genre: First-person shooter
I played one of these games on a demo disc in the early 2000s (I'm pretty sure it was Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix and not this one), I remember it was on a skyscraper with a sniper and I thought it was really cool (I thought it's called "Soldier of Fortunate" lmao), then read about these games in a magazine at the same time, about how violent they are and how many bodyparts you can hit. I actually planned to play these on PC for a long time but at this point I would rather put up with any broken dumbed down shitty port than to touch anything on PC ever again, I feel my soul draining out of my body whenever I'm forced to play something there, it's the absolute worst piece of shit soulless experience I can think of. It was actually developed, ported over and published by the same people who did Star Trek: Voyager – Elite Force lol so I thought it will be fine here. I changed the controls again, and I had to stretch the screen out, it was tiny and had black edges for some reason (luckily almost every game supports that on the PlayStation 2). This game supports custom difficulty which was interesting, you can set up enemy damage, inventory space, all kinds of shit, I left everything on standard except the saves which I set to unlimited. The game was named after a real magazine for mercenaries, and you are playing as John Mullins (also based on a real mercenary) who works for some secret organization that operates from a bookshop lol and you are hunting down a terrorist group that stole some nukes from those useless Russkies. You start in the New York subways, then go to find the nukes in Africa on a train (where you need to snipe the pilot out of a helicopter to destroy it, it was literally impossible I don't know how I did it), then in Kosovo where you can kill some fucking Serbs (finally a game that lets you do that lmao) and destroy a big artillery and capture a stealth bomber back with the nuke, after that in Siberia where you can't see shit outside (I'm pretty sure the draw distance was worse than it's supposed to be because enemies who I couldn't see kept shooting at me) and in some chemical plant you destroy the rocket with the nuke, and the last one was in Iraq where Saddam's rogue general wanted to fuck shit up with it. Before some missions you go to the bookstore to select your equipment, you unlock more powerful weapons as the story goes on, I liked that heavy machine gun the most. It was kinda hard to switch weapons and the aiming was pretty bad too even with the auto aim. I love how violently they die lmao they grab their throat, their arms or head falls off lol and the sounds they make were so over the top lmao. You can use stealth and there is a noise meter that attracts more enemies if it's too high I think but honestly there is no reason to use it, you are better off just gun blazing lmao. Sometimes there are civilians or allied soldiers you can save, but they don't fight with you and neither does your partner Hawk, he just shows up in scripted parts eh. Much like Star Trek: Voyager – Elite Force it was a linear game which I liked, you can't get lost so you can focus on the action. Maps seem to be cut to smaller parts so you don't have to replay a lot if you die, but I don't think anything is missing. Around the Siberia missions the game got really hard and I started saving after every corner and I thought maybe I should have lowered the difficulty, and I was scared I'm gonna fuck up the memory card by saving every minute and it fucking happened, it froze during saving and after restarting the memory card said the save is corrupted but somehow it still loaded the game so I just made a separate save just in case. Also why the fuck is it so hard to climb ladders in these shitty PlayStation 2 games, I keep falling off in every one of them. Anyway you go back to New York to hunt down the terrorist leader's white supremacist brother, then to Sudan to some pretty grim slaughterhouse where you can kill cows lol and ride a minecart Indiana Jones style, then you end up in Tokyo fighting ninjas to techno music lmao and these missions had waves of fucking enemies and another helicopter boss but it was easier thanks to an armory, I just popped out and spammed it with rockets lol. You follow the leader back to Iraq to Saddam's hidden fortress where you interrupt Saddam and his general lmao then you fuck up Iraq's nuclear program. The final showdown is in a German castle with hidden bookcase doors and shit, but the final boss fight was fucking insane, first there are tons of fucking enemies then you face the armored boss with insanely OP one-shot kill weapon and if you can't kill him in time the auto cannons activate and destroy you in a second, I had to disable auto aim and just shoot everything I had at his head, then he dies getting cut in half lmao. Mullins gets a chick partner and no vacation lol, and the end is the cover of the magazine with a picture of the real guy posing lol. The multiplayer has bots so I won't delete the game, you can add 7 bots I think and play the usual DM, TDM, CTF modes, some realistic mode which I had no idea what it does, arsenal which seemed like you need to kill an enemy with the weapon the game gives you then get a new one until they run out, conquest mode no idea again, and an assassin mode where you need to kill a specific target. It was so chaotic though lol the bots are dumb as hell and the game slows down like crazy when it adds them to the maps. It was a fun game, I really liked the over the top violence lol it was so ridiculous, I will play the sequel on Xbox some day for sure.	2023/10/26
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3: Black Arrow (Xbox) Developer: Ubisoft Montreal Publisher: Ubisoft Released: 2004 Genre: Tactical shooter
This is basically like what that Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon expansion was, same gameplay with more missions. I thought about playing the PlayStation games but I checked the controls in the manual and noped the fuck out lmao, but then I downloaded it for the PlayStation Portable because it came out officially there and I couldn't imagine how are you supposed to play this on it, well turned out the second control type is just like how first-person shooters work on the PlayStation Portable but not a single reviewer mentioned it they just complained about the controls (are these useless fuckers ever check the options?) so I guess I'm playing those games at some point too. Also it's been almost 3 years since I played Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3, Jesus how it took this long to play through a year worth of Xbox games? I played the training again, it's the same controls but it was good to refresh my memory. You still have 3 saves, same guys, probably same equipment. First missions was in a subway with Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell ads lmao, then some luxury hotel in Cannes (in these two I always ended up being alone in the last part eh), then on the streets after they kidnapped some satellite scientist from the conference and you follow them to the streets of Milan. Btw I kept using the night vision even when it wasn't dark because I noticed enemies faster and easier lol. You find them at some nuclear power plant in Bulgaria then you go back to Milan to some castle where the game gives you 4 saves that's how you know it's getting really difficult lol, the next one is some cool Roman ruins in Tunisia, you only have one squadmate there and it was really fucking hard, not that the next one in a Greek marketplace was easier, it was a fucking timed mission lol. Anyway you find out these scumbag Russkies want to create a new Caucasian country for the oil and that's why they tried kidnapping rocket and nuclear scientists. So you hunt them down on their military base with again just one dude, man this mission had a bunch of ambushes and snipers popping up everywhere, then you need to stop a dude from escaping with a helicopter by taking the pilot out before he flies away lmao. And the last mission is in a rocket facility where you are alone and need to use stealth in the first half (luckily you see them on the radar) and then you have 5 minutes to go through a shitton of enemies to stop a rocket from firing. I think it has new multiplayer modes but I can't test out those so yeah it's just more missions, but I think I liked this more because it was shorter and that's better for these hard games. Btw I thought it has no credits lol but it was under Special Features where it starts automatically, and you can watch the only two cutscenes there lmao and a trailer for Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon 2 which looks cool and I'm really looking forward to play it.	2023/10/26
Galleon (Xbox) Developer: Confounding Factor Publisher: SCi Games Released: 2004 Genre: Action-adventure, platformer
I heard of this game a while ago and it's been on my hard drive for a long time because I like pirate themed games (and pirating games lol) but it seems like such a weird game to be on Xbox. It was made by the creator of Tomb Raider and it was supposed to come out in the late 90s on Dreamcast, and quite frankly I have no idea what the fuck the developers were doing for 5 years because I'm 99% sure the exact same game could have come out there. Like it has the weirdest most ancient controls I've seen on the Xbox, it was clearly developed with the one analog stick Dreamcast controller in mind, the right stick is only used to navigate in the inventory, camera and movement are both on the left stick, like you move where you look lmao. This shit might have worked in the mid to late 90s with simple platforming but it's so fucking detailed here, you can pretty much get anywhere you can see, the dude jumps higher than a fucking Jedi knight, like I couldn't even imagine I was supposed to get to some place because I thought it would be impossible to get there. To make things worse climbing is automatic and the movement is weird as fuck, you can easily fall off from anywhere when you want to walk backwards because it's insanely hard to make small precise movements which is the worst on the small tiny blocks you need to climb up sometimes. It's supposed to work like how hard you push the analog stick forward and backwards, like it takes time for him to start running fast and if you walk very slowly you can't fall off but sometimes he starts doing something completely different when you aren't in an open space, like instead of climbing he crawls under the platform lol or uses it to launch somewhere else from it instead of jumping on it, and that's just fucking awful when you need to redo insanely long parts because the platforming is like that in this game, levels are huge and you need to climb up to insane heights (at least there are some shortcuts). Some walls are climable, but he just runs straight up lol it isn't even climbing, it was hilarious how he runs up on mountains, but jumping when you hang on a wall of course is another hard thing to accomplish. And then later there is wall to wall jumping too which is always the worst shit in every game. The combat was pretty bad too with these controls, I just tried to avoid it as much as possible, it's rythm based though so if you press the attack button the correct time he powers up and becomes stronger and it unlocks moves and attacks you can use during the fight, there are strength potions you can find but I only ever used them later during boss fights, and mushrooms for healing, another potion that makes you faster, in fact these are really well hidden in hard to get places on levels, you can find pistols and secret swords that makes you stronger and hidden treasures, finding these two is supposed to unlock every extra in the ending which I did but I don't think that's true, I think you need to find absolutely everything which I don't think anyone in the entire world has done before lmao (I had to restart the game at some point because I was locked out of a treasure in the first island, guess it was a waste of time after all eh). Still there is something about this game that makes it special, there is an incredible sense of adventure you don't often see in other games, it just oozes with soul. The story is about this guy called Rhama Sabrier who I guess is some famous captain who has been to the Forbidden Sea, and some wizard hires him to help him identify if the ship he found was from there or not. It contained a powerful magical herb that was supposed to be extinct for hundreds of years and he wants to find out where the ship came from, but the wizard's servant Jabez takes the herb, kills the wizard and escapes with the ship so you go after him with the wizard's sexy daughter Faith. She can heal you but you need to help her up to some platforms, meanwhile Mihiko the Asian girl who joins you later will help you out in combat and she can help you up to high platforms and can give you oxygen underwater with a kiss lmao. The characters have an interesting blocky, cartoony look, I guess graphically it wasn't the best but I liked it. Besides the usual platforming sometimes you need to figure out where to go and how, like when you are underwater navigating through rocks in a giant storm avoiding currents, and you need to solve puzzles like activating machines and shit, sometimes you get a list of clues or items to find like when you need to find parts of a golem in the sea, then put it together and pilot it like a mech to beat up a giant hydra and throw it to a lava lmao. Sometimes you need to fight giant enemies like a giant rancor like monster lol but these fights are always the same, you need to climb up on their backs and attack their heads to defeat them. Well at some point you find a hologram maproom on an island which shows you where that island you are looking for is, where you gotta do some insane platforming in a floating castle, then you transform into a tiny guy lmao and find pieces you are looking for in a lab, then you build a golem who fights with you a little bit before you get to the final boss where you need to save one of the girls and the other dies... only to be revived after you defeat Jabez who turned into a giant goat headed monster lmao, but of course this fight was a nightmare thanks to the controls. The girl you save becomes your love of course, the game clearly wants you to save Faith but she is the typical possessive lying bitch who usually cheats on you, while Mihiko is the kind who worships the ground you walk on so I went back to save her too lol but the ending is exactly the same it just switches the girls in the cutscene eh. There is a Surival Arena after you beat the game, it's the usual challenge stages which slowly opens up and it has items too you can find lol. Honestly this game really deserved better, when I couldn't play for months (and found the manual in an unboxing video so I could read it lol) and started again I thought on the first day I could master these controls but nope I could never get used to them. It's a soulful adventure game but with these controls it's simply too frustrating to be a great game, still I just can't help but to like it.	2023/10/17
Extermination (PlayStation 2) Developer: Deep Space Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment Released: 2001 Genre: Survival horror
This is an early PlayStation 2 horror game, clearly inspired by The Thing lol (I played that game too on my Xbox, it wasn't anything special, the trust and infection systems had so much potential but they were really half-assed). Very similar premise, this dude Dennis with some special teams squad goes to Antarctica to investigate what happened at a secret research facility but their plane crashes and when he gets into the base he finds out it's infected with these weird alien monsters, and the girlfriend of his dead friend who still blames him for his death works there to make things complicated. The game is centered around the infection system, if enemies hit you not only your health depletes but the infection rate goes up, and when it gets to 100% you are fucked and you can transform into a monster any minute which is game over. You can lower it by some health items or by the vaccines you find to cure it completely, but you can only use them at health stations and there aren't many of them. You also have a special gun with different parts you can switch, like you can add a scope or attach a shotgun, grenade launcher, flamethrower etc parts for secondary attack, it made the gun look really weird sometimes lol but it's a cool concept. So you are in this huge base (and sometimes outside in a brutal snowstorm where you can barely see anything), you can find files to read to find out more about what happened, find more weapon parts and clips to increase your ammo size or dogtags to collect, and to access parts of the base and to save you need to use your battery, which then you need to recharge (it's always right there next to save points lol) and you need to upgrade it to access later parts of the base. It's similar to Run Like Hell as the base gets more infected and fucked up as you progress, sometimes when you return to previous places it looks completely different. There is no fucking way I would have been able to get anywhere without a guide though, for backtracking I had to follow a video I was so lost. The enemies are really fucking annoying, you have like infected water which can attack you which is really cool, but there are mutant dogs, flying monsters, big monsters sometimes with guns and the worst are these tiny fucking bugs which are so hard to hit with the knife and they can destroy you easily when there are a lot of them. There is lock on for your gun but the aiming is of course inverted, so I just stopped fighting and avoided every enemy I could, which resulted of them being everywhere lol. The controls can be pretty bad too, like you need to align perfectly to make some jumps and shit or you jump down or to the wrong place and you die. But the worst part is the fucking boss fights, there is this fucking tentacle boss with a tiny glowing part you need to hit with the terrible aiming while you are avoiding his tentacles and the tiny fucking bugs that appear and of course it takes fucking forever to kill it, I was stuck there for days before the insane summer heat started, then months later when I could play again too, I can't believe I was able to kill it after a million tries without using any health items. So much about this game being easy, apparently the PAL version is a lot harder and it has different character models with different voice acting and translation (the lip synching was way off on the NTSC version lol but I liked it better, it was goofier). The story has some of the typical Japanese nonsense, like the scientist going crazy and calling the original alien host of the virus his son lol, or a journalist who somehow snuck into the base in fucking Antarctica, yeah right lmao. What I really liked is the music, sometimes it reminded me of Star Wars or Holst's The Planet. Anyway one of the last files confirms what happened, it was all planned to release the bacteria and test it with soldiers, but you manage to escape on a giant hovercraft with Cindy and the goofy black soldier who somehow survives everything lol but a giant alien monster follows you in the water, and that's when the other insane bullshit boss fight happens, you need to shoot it in the water while it's launching spores at you, but then it gets on the hovercraft with tons of bugs then it transforms into a weird copy of you, these parts would have been impossible without the nuke weapon I collected with a guide, and it was still a nightmare with it. At least Dennis didn't cuck his dead friend in the final cutscene, cause the girl clearly wanted him lmao. And what the fuck was that end credits Candy Girl song lmao, it was so weird and out of place. I mean it's ok for an early PlayStation 2 game but honestly I'm just glad I was somehow able to finish it, still it's a better game than The Thing that's for sure.	2023/10/09
Fighting Force (PlayStation) Developer: Core Design Publisher: Eidos Interactive Released: 1997 Genre: Beat 'em up
I've gotten interested in beat 'em ups recently, I put Final Fight CD and the Streets of Rage games on my PlayStation Portable emulators and maybe I will play them one day, but this game was supposed to be the fourth one in the Streets of Rage series and apparently the first real 3D beat 'em up so it seemed like a good introduction to the genre. Plus I still had a week left before the summer heat ends and it seemed like a really short game. I played it on easy though because I had no idea if I would like it or not, plus I'm really not good with combos and fighting and shit. The story is about this evil scientist who thought the end of the world is coming in 2000 (I actually thought the same thing when I was a kid thanks to those fucking retards on TV and in magazines saying the same shit, I was fucking terrified at midnight then of course nothing happened), but it didn't so he decided to bring it himself lmao, someone who is working for him recruits 4 people to stop the dude, two girls, a dude and a giant dude lol, I just went with the dude cause I always play the base character. You wouldn't know this story from the game though, there are some cutscenes but they are just a few seconds long and there is no dialogue whatsoever lmao. I really like the graphical style, it's kind of dominated by orange colors but it's really nice. The gameplay is basically just a bunch of enemies coming at you and you just need to kill them to get to the next section or end the stage, and you have basic moves like kick, punch, back punch and then some extra moves that are different for every character, for the dude it was like a flying kick and sliding and some powerful roundkick attack that reduces you health too. I'm too dumb for this shit though so mostly I just pressed random buttons lol or just picked one attack and spammed it constantly, there is a separate run button but the combat and movement seemed kinda slow. Enemies drop gems and money for higher scores or sandwiches for health and sometimes weapons, which makes everything easier, guns were hard to aim though cause there is no lock on. But you can pick up a lot of shit, you can kick a coke can out of a vending machine and then drink it for more health, destroy shit for bonus and find more weapons or health packs in crates, or in a subway you can kick a coin out of a phone boot and use it to open the door lmao. Stages are grouped together, like the first part was on the streets, then in the parking lot, then the lobby, the elevator, the top floor and finally the room there, all different but short stages and you can only save at the end. There are boss fights and not just at the end of stages, they weren't really hard especially with weapons. And there are different mission paths too like you can go to the airport or the naval base, I guess for replayability but I ain't replaying it lmao. I gets a bit harder here so I'm glad I played on easy, I went to the airport where enemies kept coming from helicopters, then you fight a jetpack boss but I just spammed punch and she couldn't even move or fly away lmao. Then you board some giant plane and crash land on a tiny island with a huge base lol. Usually you fight gangs, security guards or soldiers but here they introduced these mutants with regenerating health but you just need to keep hitting them and after a while they die. You go up on some platforms on a construction site and you face the final boss, which wasn't too hard because there were tons of items you could pick up and I just spammed him with them lol. He gets jailed and that's the end, no dialogue or anything lmao. I mean it's a braindead simple and short game but it wasn't bad at all, I guess it's a good introduction to the genre.	2023/09/25
Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue! (PlayStation) Developer: Traveller's Tales Publisher: Activision Released: 1999 Genre: Platform
I loved these movies when I was a kid and I wished my toys were alive too lol, Toy Story 3 was great too, I'm not watching 4 ever though fuck that shit. This was one of the first PlayStation games on my list when I started looking into what games to play, it has LibCrypt protection though and it came out officially on PlayStation Portable so I just played it there. I didn't know what else to play and it seemed short enough cause it's still hot for two weeks ffs, summer until October so ridiculous. It's a platformer and it follows the plot of Toy Story 2, the cutscenes and the awesome music are from the movie and you are playing as Buzz (he was my favorite and I always wanted his action figure) and you gotta save Woody. When you double jump your wings open lol it was cute, you can kill enemies with your laser or with your spin attack and you can stomp on them when you jump. You can enter first person mode too to aim with your laser (inverted of course eh but at least it has a lock on) and you can see Buzz's reflection on his visor lmao. You select levels on that magnetic drawing board thing which I always wanted when I was a kid (man I still want one), the ones available will get color lol it's cute. Levels are huge and has some of your toy friends you can talk to and get tips from them or do some tasks for them (but it was fucking annoying how you had to listen to them again when you accidentally ran into them). Your goal basically is to collect Pizza Planet tokens to open up new levels, there are 5 of them on each one (except the boss levels), you can get them by collecting 50 coins for that pig, killing a mini boss (who were sometimes harder than proper bosses lmao) solving some puzzle, racing or doing some timed challenge or finding 5 things hidden in the level. You can't complete all of them first, you gotta return later when you unlock a new ability by finding Mr. Potato Head's body parts lol and he gives you a grappling hook, hover boots, energy ball shield, rocket boots or a disk launcher, and there is also a strong green laser pickup you can find on levels. You start at Andy's room, then in the backyard, then fight a toy plane boss (which was easy as fuck I just stood there and shot it a few times lmao), then go to a construction site where you need to climb up to the top which was insane platforming (luckily you can activate shortcuts), and some alley with some insanely frustrating platforming, some annoying as fuck slime boss which you need to spam with lasers, and then a toy store which really nails the aesthethics, everything is much better than in the Army Men games (well no shit, it copied it from these movies lol). The Buzz room level looked so cool with the space themed walls and shit (I always wanted my room to look like that lol) where you need to use a claw machine to get a token lol, these levels had a toy spaceship boss lol. Then another insane platforming level where you need to go up the elevator shaft to Al's house then fight Zurg lol. And finally you are at the airport then the runaway (where I have literally no idea how I solved the helicopter puzzle, I just pressed random buttons lmao), and the final boss fight was so cheap you just had to fight the last three minibosses at the same time eh so lame. The problem is the game was so frustrating I got headaches from playing it, it reminded me of Death Jr. because I couldn't see the sliding ropes in front of me like there is no 3D depth, same shit with coins I could never tell how far they were and it barely ever picked them up the hitboxes were so bad (in combat too), not to mention it barely wanted to register ledge grabs and I barely made jumps like you gotta be millimetre perfect. And of course you get absolutely nothing for collecting all tokens so it's just a waste of time. It's a shame because this was one of the PlayStation games I was really looking forward to play, well at least I didn't waste a disc for it.	2023/09/22
Metal Slug Anthology (PlayStation Portable) Developer: Terminal Reality Publisher: SNK Playmore Released: 2007 Genre: Scrolling shooter, run and gun, arcade
This is a collection of all the mainline Metal Slug games released up to that point. I downloaded it soon after I got my PlayStation Portable to play something for a few minutes when I'm bored and don't have any other game to play. It's a 2D run and gun arcade game so normally I wouldn't fucking touch this shit lmao but it's one of the rare 2D games where I really like the artstyle but it's insanely hard like all typical arcade games (seriously I must be the only one who hated arcades and glad they are gone, you get like 30 seconds of playtime before you die and have to insert another fucking coin to play again, of course for poor kids like me who could barely afford just one coin it was absolute fucking bullshit) however it has an option for unlimited continues and to save your game which was a blessing for me (and rapid fire, but I only realized that later eh). Like seriously this game is insanely difficult, I died at least 20 times trying to get through a level, I don't understand how people can get good at these games at all, I swear there were attacks that were literally unavoidable. Because I didn't want to start another PlayStation Portable game I just decided to finish the remaining ones in this and hope the insane summer heat is gone by the time I'm done (it wasn't). Anyway I picked the blonde dude in every game, I don't remember the story at all and it's only in the manual anyway, you are shooting at these nazi inspired enemies I guess then aliens, mummies and zombies show up later lol. There are prisoners who you can rescue and they give you something extra like new weapons like machine guns, shotguns, rocket launchers, lasers etc and you can drive tanks, walking mechs or planes sometimes lol. Stages have boss fights at the end of course, they were the hardest part lol, I stopped trying after a while and just kept shooting cause I died anyway lmao. The first game Metal Slug was really basic but I think I liked it the most, Metal Slug 2 added some new weapons and shit and the aliens lol and you can become fat by eating too much food pickups lmao, and Metal Slug X is like an upgraded version of it but I didn't like it that much. Metal Slug 3 added different paths you can take and I think this was the longest game too. Metal Slug 4 felt like a step down for most people I'm sure but this was my second favorite because it was short and simple like the first game. I honestly barely remember Metal Slug 5 this was probably my least favorite lol I think it just added new ways to attack or something. Metal Slug 6 felt very different especially because you can't save in this one wtf, I just put the console in sleep mode and continued a few hours later to finish it, it had like a system where the faster you kill enemies the more score you get or something and you could switch weapons. Anyway after beating games you get tokens you can use to unlock bonus stuff, like a bunch of pictures and wallpapers, music, interview with the developers, so it has some nice extras. I mean it was a good time waster but only because of the unlimited continues and saves, otherwise I would have thrown this piece of shit out after two minutes lmao. The final game Metal Slug XX is also on the PlayStation Portable, if it has the same options I will play it otherwise it can fuck off lmao.	2023/09/14
Sidewinder 2 (PlayStation) Developers: Pegasus Japan, Bit Town Publisher: Asmik Ace Entertainment Released: 1997 Genre: Action, simulation
Let's dance in the Sky "edition". This game didn't have a PlayStation Portable eBoot so I had to make my own, it was a nightmare to figure out how to make the background look the same as the ones I download lol but luckily I found a guide. I usually like to wait more between playing sequels but at this point I was just waiting for the summer heat to end so I didn't want to play a long game and this one is fairly short. As I said it only came out in Japan but for some reason it has a full English localisation option, maybe it was supposed to come out in the West? Either way there is absolutely no info of this game online besides the PlayStation DataCenter website, and no reviews either so it's likely the first one in English on the entire internet lmao, I will make sure to mention everything I could. I didn't want to miss anything so I searched the Japanese name of the game and the word they use for guide and I could only find one lmao, so even on the Japanese internet it's relatively unknown. I didn't need it for missions but I found out a few things from that guide, more about them later. The way I found out about this game is another interesting story, I wanted to find old VHS gameplay recordings from the 90s and some channel had a couple of them and one of them was this game, that's when I realized this game is in English lol. Anyway I really like the cover, I mean just look at it, it looks so fucking cool. The intro is a mix of real footage and CGI, planes flying above New York with the Twin Towers, it looked cool. It seemed like it has a proper training mode in the Special missions menu, you learn how to land on a carrier or fly through a canyon only using your machine gun but that was a nightmare with the starting plane that barely turned lol. And finally it has a proper third person view thank god which just made everything better, the graphics look better too especially the water and the cities are more detailed, but it doesn't look nowhere near as good as Ace Combat 2, it was probably made by a small company without the Namco money cause I've never heard of them. You have a lot more planes to choose from (I don't know their names, but there is that famous ground attacking one or that cool looking stealth plane which I loved as a kid lol), you slowly unlock them by completing missions, and there is a nice animation after you select your plane, like you come up from a carrier's hangar. You can also change your weapons but I only ever saw one type of rocket that's good for everything. Mission targets finally have separate red colors like in Ace Combat, and there is a short replay after you complete a mission, basically just shows you the last few seconds but it was nice. Missions are also grouped together, like 3-4 of them and sometimes the next mission begins right after the previous one without a briefing. The story is about these giant corporations merging together to conquer the world, so the UN sends the Sidewinder force to stop them. One of the early missions was another trench run (good job copying it from Ace Combat lol) where you gotta land on an airbase at the end of the canyon, so I could already tell this game will have more complex missions. So after I completed the first mission group I went back to the Special missions because it looks basically like the mission select screen in the first game with a bunch of greyed out ones and I wasn't sure what to make of it. Well apparently it's not just a tutorial but a bunch of challenge stages and they slowly open up as you progress through the game, and you can unlock planes there too. These were somewhat complex too, like liberating a prison camp on a top of a mountain, or chasing two missiles to shoot them down like in Ace Combat 2 lol (this is were I discovered you can use afterburners when you hold the increase speed button lol), you even go to Area 51 to destroy some new plane lmao. But the Campaign missions were really cool, like you need to escort a bomber to destroy a lab, an aerial refueling part which is pretty revolutionary, a crashed bomber causing a fire next to your base and you need to shoot it with fire extinguisher missiles lmao that was some cool clever shit then the next missions starts right after it cause the enemy noticed the fire and attacked your base. Then there is one where you need to destoy some large cannon inside a volcano crater surrounded by missile launchers, you gotta fly up to the sky then go straight down to drop a special missile on it (lol it's like the new Top Gun movie). There are some simple ones too of course like defend a carrier or destroy broadcast towers without damaging other buildings. The Japanese guide mentioned that I should use the points earned from missions and I was like wtf how, then I found out the Custom menu is for upgrading the planes lol, I just fucked the stats of the best plane up to max lmao. Which I'm not even sure was necessary, the first thing I noticed was how easy is to destroy planes when you are facing them and you only need one missile, the entire game is easier on normal than the first one on easy lmao, I wonder if they did the increase the difficulty for the West bullshit for it. I mean there was a mission which was just flying over an enemy base lmao, easiest shit ever. Of course the next one where you need to destroy that base was the hardest in the entire game, I had to destroy a runaway with a bunch of missile launchers around, that's where I figured out I should be just flying as close to the ground as possible to avoid them which isn't easy in such a small space. There was one mission without radar too to make your job harder but it was still easy, some of the Special missions were kinda hard though like the one where you need to destroy some bombers with tons of escorts. But I still had no idea how to get more missile types, first I thought you will get them as you progress but clearly that wasn't the case, so I looked up some YouTube videos and they all changed the Controller Mode to Expert so I did that, and lo and behold, all the different missile types just showed up. But honestly I just changed it back to Novice lmao I didn't want to deal with that bullshit lol. Well torwards the end of the game the enemy allies with an extremist group in Nation R (they called the countries Nation A, B, C etc lmao) which stages a military coup to enter the fight with its powerful military. Then you have a mission where you need to defend the president's plane and the final mission where you attack their capital was surprisingly easy even though the briefing hyped it up as the most dangerous one lol, and with the enemy defeated the Sidewinder force becomes the official terrorist hunting group of the UN. There was no option to save after beating the game eh, and I still had a few Special missions I had no idea how to unlock (I suspect you need to destroy all enemies in Campaign missions) so I just used a cheat to unlock them all, there was one where you need to shoot down balloons lol, destroy planes with just machine guns or destroy a truck that's in a tunnel lol. One last thing to check out was the Editor, which I thought would be a mission editor but it's more like the multiplayer with bots, you can select a map, add your plane somwhere on it, add some squadmates (who weren't in the campaign eh you are always alone), enemy planes or ground forces, change if they are offensive or defensive, so it's pretty cool and the reason why I left the game on my memory card. And that's Sidewinder 2, it's a pretty cool game and a clear improvement over the first game with some nice mission variety but it isn't drastically better like Ace Combat 2 was. The next one in the series is on the PlayStation 2, I expect some big changes there.	2023/09/12
Ghost in the Shell (PlayStation) Developers: Exact, Production I.G Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment Released: 1997 Genre: Action, third-person shooter
I fucking love 80s and 90s cyberpunk, in fact that's the only real cyberpunk, the switch from analog to digital absolutely killed the genre and made it impossible to get the aesthetics right. I knew this movie was a huge deal and I watched it a few years ago, and while it looked cool it was so lame, in fact 99% of the anime I was tricked into watching was juvenile, cookie-cutter bullshit, something is seriously wrong with weebs who think these garbage are some deep, meaningful shit. I heard of this game too, but it looked boring, I didn't care for controlling some shitty tank. But I wanted something short because I thought this insane summer heat is coming to an end (spoiler: it wasn't), and I found it again in a video and it looked cooler this time. It was actually made by the Jumping Flash! developers, and the same studio that made the movie created the cutscenes with the original voice actors which is pretty cool, especially the nice erotic intro lol (no subtitles of course). So you control this little walking tank robot (they talk too in cutscenes lol), and you can tell it was made by the Jumping Flash! developers, but it isn't slow as fuck, you can jump, strafe, boost and walk on walls which is the big feature of this game. Sometimes it was too chaotic for me to control, like I kept walking on walls accidentally, and I hoped the training mode will teach me everything but it was literally just a timed challenge mode eh, I couldn't even complete it lol. At least I got used to the combat, you need to keep pressing the attack button to fire your machine gun and hold it down to lock onto enemies with your missiles, there is also a grenade you can use. I have literally no idea what the story was lmao, it felt like just random cutscenes and missions trying to hunt down some terrorist group or something (I liked that cutscene where the guy complains they use miles instead of km lol, I always change it when the game allows it). There is a nice briefing before missions with that old computer look, and levels are like in a dock, sewer, destroying bombs before they explode, an on-rail sea level, chasing some invisible enemy, a highway on-rail chase, the city at night, an underground city, a reactor, and a tower. Enemies are like just people, mechs, tanks, helicopters etc, and combat is either locking onto enemies from far with your missiles or just strafe boosting around them. They aren't really hard to destroy (they respawn after a bit though), even if it's dark night vision just auto turns on or the camera changes to first person view when it's a tight place so you can always see them. It has the same problem as Jumping Flash! though, some levels are just tight corridors and it's just not suited for this kind of gameplay, you need big open areas for it. There are boss fights at the end of levels and they can be really hard (luckily levels are short), they can be big walking robots, tanks, a ship, a truck, two mechs, reactor lasers or that invisible dude lol. These were more crazy fast paced parts, it was so hard to avoid lasers cause I kept jumping on walls lol or just running into them, my shitty brain and reflexes can't handle this gameplay. The way bosses exploded looked so cool though I loved that orange color lol. Then there is the last level holy fuck, the game just suddenly turns into a bullshit platformer where you have to jump on tiny platforms to progress, it took me days to get through those parts, this game is way to fast for some fucking precision platforming, honestly it ruined the entire game for me, the fucking final boss was easier than getting there lmao. I could only complete the training mode after I beat the game lol, based on how you do you unlock cutscenes, I just used cheats to watch them all lol. It's pretty good for a PlayStation game (except the platforming shit) but it's really short, it's a much better concept than Jumping Flash! that's for sure.	2023/08/31
Death Jr. II: Root of Evil (PlayStation Portable) Developer: Backbone Entertainment Publisher: Konami Released: 2006 Genre: Action adventure
I wasn't looking forward to this game at all lmao but they listened to me lol they changed the camera to the L and R buttons! And man it's so much fucking better to play, movements are the same but it isn't a buggy piece of shit where you need to align perfectly to make jumps. You can also sidestep where you rotate the character with the L and R while the camera is centered behind you, I used this a lot. In this game Death Jr. and Pandora need to find a cocoon for a school project but they accidentally let some evil root lady out lol who then captures DJ's father Death so you gotta save the day. Finally they have proper and funny cutscenes and dialogues and all your friends from the first game are back. You can pick between Death Jr. and Pandora, they play the same but they have different weapons and Pandora has a whip as her main weapon and you can also play co-op which is cool. You collect orbs, green for health and orange for upgrades, you can find more by destroying shit. You can find these upgrade stores on levels and buy new moves and weapons but to upgrade them you need to find specific parts instead of just a generic one, they aren't really hidden though usually you can easily find them, there are some hidden places you can find but they mostly just have big orange orbs. The graphics and the artstyle looks so much better too, and enemies aren't just the same shit anymore, you fight different enemies on different levels, and the best thing is they aren't just retarded waves anymore, the combat is actually fun. The game is linear, so no more hub world like in the first game but it's better this way, levels are fairly long but they have checkpoints. You start in a forest, which has a teddy bear cemetery with dead teddy bear enemies lmao and a giant Monopoly board, this had some basic puzzles where you need to hit robots to rotate blocks to open doors, and the boss here was a giant toy robot, then there is a level where you just find weapon parts for the jar baby. Then there is a secret research facility hidden under a llama farm waffle house lmao wtf with chickens with laser eyes and lab rats, and you teleport to space there which looked cool, then you are in a giant kitchen and finally you face a giant llama boss lol. Well it turns out the jar baby's fart is the toxic weapon to kill the root lady lmao so you go after her in the mall with mannequin and mop bucket enemies lol, and then finally to the underworld. The final level was hard like an average level in the first game lol and I had some flashbacks from that awful wall jumping part and where you need to swing over a lava, but these were the only shitty parts. The boss fights were so much better in this game and for some reason the final boss ended with a QTE finisher lol it felt so out of place. Well after DJ saves his dad he gets grounded lmao and he even says no more PlayStation Portable lmao. There is a funny dialogue during the end credits and you unlock a cutscenes and storyboard viewer. Everything in this game was so much better than in the first game, I don't know why couldn't they just do this the first time. It plays great, it's funny as fuck and it's just a fun game overall. But I don't think anyone cared about it, and maybe it just wasn't enough because Daxter was already out.	2023/08/24
M.A.C.H.: Modified Air Combat Heroes (PlayStation Portable) Developer: Kuju Surrey Publisher: Vivendi Games Released: 2007 Genre: Action, racing
I think I saw this one in a YouTube video, I downloaded it early when I got my PlayStation Portable cause why not. It's a racing and arena like air combat game with a dumb fucking title lmao. The career mode has different tiers you need to beat, rookie, pro, ace whatever, they all have different championships and it gets harder as you progress. You pick a starting plane and you unlock new ones as you progress, and they can be upgraded and customized, you can put on a bunch of logos and flags, I just the flag of my shithole eveywhere lmao. Upgrades have tiers too but it's just easier to buy the best one, except for the last plane where you don't have enough money left and you gotta be smart which ones you pick cause the final unlockable plane was a nightmare to beat. Races have pickups like rockets, stealth and more boost, and you can build up your machpower for turbo by flying close to the ground. The races can change anytime because of the pickups so you are never safe, gotta press the roll button to evade missiles and shit. It took me ages to figure out I should only use turbo when I fly straight and how to take sharp turns, I don't even remember if you could break or not lol. The tracks are very narrow and the locations are like a jungle, some ice place, forest, rainy port etc, there are very few of them actually. Then there is dogfight which is like an arena where the plane with the most kills wins. It has the same pickups and you can use your machine gun which overheats, and when you get a bunch of kills in a row you unlock some laser for a few seconds which instakills everyone. There is also a challenge mode which also has tiers, challenges can be just the dogfighting with the laser weapon, collecting coins before the time expires, going through turbo rings etc and you need a gold star in every one to unlock the next tier. These can be really hard especially that mach speed one where you constantly need to build up your turbo to beat the time limit, it took me forever to beat those. The game is fun at first but then it gets really boring and repetitive because of the lack of new maps, you just get the same ones with a short and long track or in reverse but that's it, and it gets so fucking hard by the final tier it's crazy (which is just races only), I don't even know how long it took me to beat the final plane with the max stats, in fact I can't believe I managed to beat the game and all the challenges too, it was ridiculously frustrating. I think it's the kind of game you should play slowly just every once in a while instead of trying to bruteforce through it cause it's fucking shit like this lmao.	2023/08/13
Fracture (Xbox 360) Developer: Day 1 Studios Publisher: LucasArts Released: 2008 Genre: Third-person shooter
I heard of this game, and I always wanted to play it because it's a LucasArts game, but it had bad reviews and everyone was like how shitty this game is. Even with all the extra DVDs I wasn't sure if I should waste a disc for it or not, but then I just said fuck it, I like the concept and I shouldn't be listening to reviews. The story is about the US splitting into two sides after global warming fucks everything up, the East is focusing on technology to modify the world around them, and the West is more about genetically modifying humans to adapt to the environment or something like that, honestly the story was so utterly forgettable that I had a hard time following it, it's like it's just there in the background and that's it. But it doesn't really matter anyway because the main focus of this game was on modifying the terrain, it's similar to the first Red Faction game but here the entire game is built around it. You can raise and lower the ground with your weapon and use it as cover, and you have grenades too that do the same thing, or one that creates a ramp for you to reach new areas, and a vortex grenade which sucks everyone up then explodes lmao. Sometimes you need to use these stuff to solve puzzles, like creating a ramp by raising the ground under a plank, or like guiding these balls to destroy some machines, or modifying the terrain under some metal to redirect beams, shit like that. They were pretty clever but honestly there were times I couldn't tell what I was supposed to do, and at some point I couldn't progress because a shield got turned back on by a grenade or something on the other side, so this insane terrain modification can softlock you if you are not careful. Some of the weapons are pretty cool too, like there is some torpedo kind of thing that travels underground and you can make it explode when you want, or a freeze gun, some of them were shitty though like the rocket launcher, it was so slow and just barely ever hit the target. You get some upgrades too as you progress, better shield, stronger melee, double jump, and you can jump and press melee attack for a powerful ground attack like it's Star Wars: The Force Unleashed or something lmao. There are three chapters, San Francisco, some desert place with enemy research facility, and Washington, but they all have different areas too like underground bases, city streets and whatever, there is a vehicle section too and it can dig and create ramps too lol and it fires at enemies automatically. There is a big walking machine you need to destroy like in Halo 2 lol, and there are even little Tremors like monsters who travel underground lmao. The game is really hard in general, I died so much already when I was only on the third level, some enemies are brutal like the big armored dudes or the ones who jump all over the place. There are boss fights too, they weren't that hard they just took really long, except the final boss which was fucking brutal lmao I had to use some glitch to defeat him. The collectibles are these hidden data cells, I used a guide to find them all, they unlock more stuff for the weapon testing mode which is like a training area, you can fuck around in a sandbox with weapons and powers an summon enemies, I just used it to get some of the weapon achievements lol it was boring. The ending implies the world split into the two ideologies, the West and Africa is the tech focused and Asia is the genetics, but of course no sequel because everyone hated it lol. I liked it though, especially the music which was fucking awesome like it's from Star Wars, but I guess that's what you should expect from a LucasArts game lol. But I realized why people didn't like these Gears of War "clones" like this one or Army of Two even though they had new and interesting gameplay elements, it's because the setting and the story is so forgettable, but seriously who cares if the gameplay is fine, story is the least important part of games, they can be fun with the dumbest shittiest story too. It can elevate games and turn them into genuine classics like it happened with Gears of War, but they can't make a game worse. But not every game needs to be a classic, they just need to be fun and that's what this game was.	2023/08/11
Raging Skies (PlayStation) Developers: Pegasus Japan, Bit Town Publisher: SCEE Released: 1996 Genre: Action, simulation
Also known as Bogey Dead 6 outside of the civilized world and as Sidewinder in Japan. I wanted to play Lethal Skies Elite Pilot: Team SW on PlayStation 2 but then I found out it is actually part of this series and this is the first game in it, but the next two only came out in Japan so I was like nevermind then, I don't like picking random games without playing through the entire series. I just found out though that the second game had full English localization even though it never came out in the West, and the unreleased English PAL copy of the third game actually leaked online so I can play through these games. From what I understand this series was supposed to be the rival of Ace Combat in Japan but I literally can't find anything about it on the internet, not even those insane Ace Combat fanboys talked about it ever, it's really fascinating to me. The story is basically non-existent, you are part of some elite unit and you need to stop some crime organization who built up a huge military force. There is a training mode, but it's just three missions for score, it doesn't explain anything lol. And it froze on my PlayStation Portable, that's why PopsLoader is great because I could just find an earlier version where it worked. It only has cockpit view though eh, but it's good you could actually see the cockpit and not just a first person view like in the first two Ace Combat games. I had a hard time getting used to the gameplay though and shooting down all the planes in time so I switched to easy and I could finally get to the second training mission where I was supposed to destroy a bridge but I couldn't figure out how. That's when I accidentally discovered you need to switch between missile types to actually target them lol, you have two air-to-air and two air-to-ground missile types, not sure what the difference was. The graphics were really nice, miles better than Air Combat and there is not even a year between these two games (of course it's not as good as Ace Combat 2), I especially loved the orange sky with the sun it looked so pretty. You get a nice briefing on an old monitor before missions, you have six lives as continues if you get destroyed, and you don't have to buy planes you get them as you progress, there is only a few of them though but I always just pick the best one so who cares. Sometimes you can select between two missions, but they are pretty varied, like shooting down a stolen plane, protecting allied planes, destroying ships, factories, oil refineries etc, sometimes you launch from an aircraft carrier which was cool, but landing on it wasn't lmao I crashed but at least it didn't fail the mission lol. Your plane drops chaffs automatically which was pretty cool, I don't think any of the Ace Combat games have that. There are fuel and time limits too but I never ran out of fuel. You never really have any allies though, I think they were only in one mission so that was disappointing. It's a fairly short game, and the last mission was hard so I just flew at maximum speed to the carriers I had to destroy with all the planes chasing me lol. No end credits for playing on easy though, lol fuck you I just watched that on YouTube. I actually liked the game, it's so much fucking better than Air Combat I don't understand why no one knows about these games. I think the second one came out after Ace Combat 2 so let's see if they managed to improve that much too.	2023/08/10
Call of Duty: Roads to Victory (PlayStation Portable) Developer: Amaze Entertainment Publisher: Activision Released: 2007 Genre: First-person shooter
I loved the WW2 Call of Duty games (I didn't really care for the modern ones, I played most of them though), especially Call of Duty 2 which I played on and off for like a decade online on Xfire, which was such a cool program I miss it so much. Call of Duty: Finest Hour was one of the few games I bought back in the 2000s because I wanted to play all the games in the series but it was pretty bad lol, and I played Call of Duty 2: Big Red One after softmodding my Xbox but I didn't really like that either, it was much better though. Call of Duty 3 was one of the first games I've played on my Xbox 360 but I barely remember anything lmao except that it had a Polish campaign which I thought was weird lol. So this game is the last one in this series I could play but hadn't yet, and I read that it's like Call of Duty 3 but on the PlayStation Portable and I thought it's the same game but luckily it isn't at all (it was actually on my PlayStation Portable when I bought it lol). The menu is just like the Call of Duty 2 menu lol and it has three campaigns, USA, Canada and UK. No fucking soviets thank god, just fyi for all the westerners: they were the real bad guys of WW2 and you can see the effects of that today, should have dealt with them the same way as with the nazis. The controls are just like in Coded Arms, but it feels slower. The aim assist helps a lot, and when you aim down sights it moves it to the enemy, not when you are using a sniper though so those parts sucked. When you get close enough to the enemy and press fire it just switches to melee attack so no separate button for that. It feels just like Call of Duty 2 lmao, same kind of missions and sounds and shit. There is no grand storyline, you are just playing as random soldiers fighting somewhere and that's it, most of them seem to take place during Market Garden though. You start in Italy, then go to Normandy, then the Netherlands and then to Germany. It's very linear though, there are no big areas, mostly you just follow the streets or the trenches. It still has that feeling that you are in a grand battle, you see planes flying, waves of enemies or tanks coming at you. And the gameplay isn't just shooting at the enemies with your rifle as you advance, sometimes you need to use turrets, RPGs or even artillery to destroy tanks, so it really is just like any Call of Duty game just on a handheld. There is even a missions where you are in a bomber, hopping from turret to turret and then dropping the bombs at the end. One mission was kinda like D-Day lol except it's on a river with bunkers lmao. The Canadian and British campaigns seemed more complex though, there is one scripted part where you need to run away from the tank in an alleyway, it was weird because it was so different than the rest of the game lmao. And man the MP44 was really OP in this game lol, it was literally a one shot kill weapon which was insane with all those bullets lmao. It wasn't hard though except the last missions, I kept dying but there are checkpoints, you can't restart from the menu though and it fucking bugged out near the end of the final mission, luckily I had grenades to kill myself otherwise I would have had to play the entire mission again eh. The framerate was really bad sometimes though especially during those final missions because there is so much stuff happening. After missions you get a medal based on your accuracy, time, shoots, kills etc, and you can unlock bonuses like database entries and wallpapers, and the end credits had real pics from WW2 which was cool. It was alright and it really feels like a Call of Duty game but it was so short and the multiplayer is online only without bots eh so I get why people were disappointed with it. Well apparently there is still one more Call of Duty game left on the PlayStation 2 which I didn't even know it exists lmao, I will play that in the future for sure.	2023/08/04
Colony Wars (PlayStation) Developer: Psygnosis Publisher: Psygnosis Released: 1997 Genre: Space combat simulator
I heard of this series before, I thought it looked cool as fuck as I love space flying games but I heard it's insanely hard and it's on multiple discs so I played it on my PlayStation Portable. What's cool is that if you fail a mission the game doesn't end, it puts you on a different path and there are a lot of different missions and endings you can get, so being terrible in this game is ok too lmao. They got a narrator who sounds like James Earl Jones which was awesome lmao, the story is about this evil Earth Empire taking all the resources and treating its colonies like shit, and some of them form an alliance called the League of Free Worlds and revolt against the empire. There are a couple different star systems you will go to, it all depends on whether you can complete the missions or not, like you can miss complete star systems and a bunch of missions if you don't fail anything because you go on to attack the Solar System instead of retreating to a different one. You get a really fucking detailed database too narrated by a woman, like the backstory of the star systems and the planets, tons of info about the ships in the game, just all kinds of things, this amount of info was completely unnecessary lmao. There is a tutorial mode with different missions that teaches you everything, and that's where I noticed the controls suck ass lmao, and none of the other presets had any useable controls on a PlayStation Portable, however you can reassign buttons on the PlayStation Portable outside of the game, and I came up with a control scheme that was actually better than anything in the game options lmao, they were all weird like the left and right were the strafe buttons and the shoulder buttons rolled it which I could have never gotten used to. It was still fucking hard to shoot down enemy ships, like you need to press the forward or reverse thrust if you want to move, and I had to put those to X and triangle, and it's hard in general to follow the enemy ships making all kinds of movements and shooting them at the same time. You can't pick between ships and weapons so you gotta use what's given, enemies usually have a shield so there is an anti-shield weapon, then normal laser when the shield is down, some kind of scatter gun that's good for both, an EMP gun that disables the ship so you can safely destroy it (which I realized is a better tactic against large destroyers, cause they have some brutal laser weapon that can fuck you up badly). There is even a grapple gun lmao, I only used it once when the mission was to disable a destroyer and tow it to yours, but I couldn't figure out how it works lmao apparently you need attach it to the cruiser to finish the mission. Man the graphics looked really nice, I loved how the planets looked (except Earth at the end which was yellow for some reason), the suns and the explosions that make you blind for a second, or the wormhole which looked awesome. You have two inside and a third person view, but the last one doesn't have any crosshair for some reason so it's unusable eh. The ship designs were kinda lame though but that's ok, and it was cool how cloaked big battleships just appeared out of nowhere. Missions are really short though, like under 5 minutes but they are grouped together and you need to finish them to save your game. And there are barely any ships around, maybe you have like 4 targets and that's it. I would have loved to have some big space battles like in Project Sylpheed but I get it, it's probably because of the technical limitations. You aren't always alone though, you have allied fighters and big cruisers and they are actually useful for once lmao, like they actually destroy shit before they get blown up lmao. And accidentally killing or targeting friendlies isn't allowed, if you shoot at them it's game over and they send you into the mines lmao. And it was fucking hard man, I had to retry missions so many times because I didn't want to end up on a shitty path, basically I kept retrying for like 45 minutes then just somehow completed all the missions in that chapter in like 10 mintes lmao. The last mission was especially brutal against the tzar's super titan battleship, it took me days to beat it on my last try cause I was about to give up lmao and just accept that ending, and apparently that's the real ending where the next game continues, so maybe you are supposed to fail it lol. It's basically blowing up their portal when you leave to imprison the empire in the Solar System, but the best is a total victory and an alien ship easter egg at the end lol. I think with the best ending you can replay missions and see the other paths too but no thanks I'm done lmao it was fucking exhausting, I just watched all the cutscenes to know what would have happened if I lost a battle. Still I think the custom PlayStation Portable controls actually made it a little bit easier so I'm gonna play the rest of the series here too I think, cause it's a cool game and I want to see what happens next.	2023/08/02
Snoopy vs. the Red Baron (PlayStation Portable) Developer: Smart Bomb Interactive Publisher: Namco Bandai Games Released: 2006 Genre: Flight simulator
I think I watched some of the cartoons when I was a kid, and had Snoopy toys (I remember this particular one from McDonald's lol) but I never really knew about the kids and what their names were besides Charlie Brown. This game came out on PlayStation 2 too and it looks better there with nice clouds but it's a really late game and it would take me years to get there, plus this one has more stuff for multiplayer so I was like let's just play it here, they are essentially the same game anyway. It's a cool WW1 flying game and that's one of the reasons why I wanted to play it, I love that period it's so much cooler than WW2 but there are barely any games sadly and most of them are flying games lol, next one is coming up on Xbox soon and recently I found one for PlayStation 2 so at least it's better than nothing. It has some nice cutscenes, Snoopy is basically sleeping and dreaming about being in WW1 lol but the voices were so weird with all those little kids lmao as they are the other pilots or your officers. There is a nice tutorial in a baseball field in the suburbs, and that's the hub world too where you fly into the upgrade store or buy new secondary weapons, or into billboards when you want to start a mission. Different worlds have different missions, like there is an island, some forest, Verdun lol, some canyon etc, the maps aren't too big but they all have secondary missions too like shooting down everything and there are these balloons and letters you can shoot to unlock new characters too, and coins to collect to buy stuff, and you get a rank based on how you do at the end of missions. There are also these challenge stages at the end of worlds, it's like go through gates in time while collecting coins or just kill waves of enemies. There is always a secondary weapon that's required for a world to pass a mission so you better have enough coins to buy it. The game reminds me of SkyGunner, or more like what that game should have been, it has a really sweet artstyle and it's easy to control. The gameplay is the usual shooting down planes, ships, cannons, tanks etc, sometimes you need fly low to avoid radars (trench run ftw), or navigate through caves, and there are puzzles too but they are braindead easy, like shoot here three times or something like that. Sometimes there are other characters flying with you but I've never noticed them shooting down anything lmao. There are boss fights at the end of worlds, and they are like giant planes or ships, it can be a Woodstock turret section where he is in a tiny plane behind you lmao or it's just an on-rail level chasing the boss. The final boss was a flying fortress then the Red Baron, this was probably the only tough part of the game but it was still easy compared to other ones lol, I mean it's a kids game after all. The end credits was cool because you can fly around with the other characters while the credits roll lmao. I don't know if I did something wrong but I rarely had enough coins despite collecting everything, I never had enough for upgrades, new weapons or the characters which are like ridiculously expensive, so I just replayed challenge stages a bunch of times to get enough for the new weapons. But I think you are supposed to do that, because there are some boxes and shit that can only be destroyed with a certain weapon you unlock later. Multiplayer has bots thank god and it's the usual deathmatch or team deathmatch or a mode where the last survivor wins, but it's so easy I can destroy every bot without dying eh, the only time I lost was when I put every other bot in one team vs me lmao. The new modes that are unique to the PlayStation Portable version are all locked to online though eh. So yeah it's what SkyGunner should have been, it was a really sweet and fun game and I will keep it because of the bots.	2023/07/29
Jumping Flash! (PlayStation) Developers: Exact, Ultra Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment Released: 1995 Genre: Platform
I think I've first seen this game in a YouTube video but I didn't think much of it. It's a very early PlayStation game, and apparently the first 3D platformer ever. What makes it more interesting is that it's a first person game, and you can shoot too so it's kinda like some weird FPS lmao. It was supposed to be very short and easy and it came out on the PlayStation Portable too so I thought maybe I should check it out. You play as a robot rabbit lmao and some dude took some lands out of a planet and your job is to get them back. So there is like 6 worlds and they all have 3 levels, the last one being the boss fight. They are all different, like a normal city, some Egyptian map, a snow world where everything is slippery lol, an underwater place with ships and shit, or like some space construction, they all look pretty cool the game has some nice early 3D visuals. The gimmick here is that you can jump insanely high with triple jump lol and it's slow so you can usually aim where you want to land. The objective is to collect there carrots which opens the portal where you can leave the level, and you can do them in order as they all have the letters of exit, and every world has one bonus stage where you can pop balloons for more score lol. Levels are 10 minutes long but there are pickups like time extend or you can freeze enemies. There are also special weapons you can pick up like bombs and shit, and you can kill enemies by jumping on them too lol, and you can collect coins after they die, but it's all pointless because the score doesn't matter at all. You can only save when you completed a world eh and it sucks when the boss kills you and you need to go through the same shit again. Because this game can be frustrating as hell, there are corridor levels where you can't jump and the gameplay just isn't good for that, and some of the levels like that fucking city in World 5 was a nightmare, took me forever to make those jumps. The boss fights were awful too, the World 5 boss was cool though it reminded me of that boss from Rez who changes forms and starts running, the final boss was brutal too because it different stages and I had no health left when I finally managed to kill him. There were no credits and apparently because you need to play through the game again but it's exactly the same but with less time, yeah no thanks fuck that shit. There is a Time Attack mode too but again fuck that. I mean it's an interesting early 3D game but I didn't like it all, I'm sure it was cool when it came out though.	2023/07/22
Star Wars: Lethal Alliance (PlayStation Portable) Developer: Ubisoft Montreal Publisher: Ubisoft Released: 2006 Genre: Action-adventure game
This is another game like Star Wars Battlefront: Renegade Squadron which I saw in the stores all the time and really wanted to play and now I finally can. Btw I really hate how few manuals you can find online, all the screeching about game preservation and no one made an effort to scan the manuals too? Just fuck off, I always feel like I miss out on something because of that. The story is about stealing the Death Star plans, which is weird because Kyle Katarn already did that (yes, EU is canon and the Disney shits can go fuck themselves) and he is even in the game lmao, but this one is apparently some upgraded one or something, whatever it was confusing as hell. You play as a sexy Twi'lek criminal chick, and I don't think there are many Star Wars game where you play as an alien, although I played a blue Twi'lek chick in Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy because I thought Aayla Secura was really hot lmao. It's a third person action game and the controls were pretty good, L and R are the camera and they change target when you are locked onto an enemy so it's auto aim only when you are shooting but it's fine, and when you get close enough you switch to a laser knife lol, you also execute enemies with it when you get behind them. At some point near the beginning you find a droid who joins you and the game turns into a Ratchet & Clank kinda game lol but a very basic one. He can go through holes in the wall and you take control him to press switches while you are avoiding lasers and shit, sometimes you need to protect him from enemies while he is working on a terminal, and you can use him to jump on walls or slide through rails but you gotta hurry because it drains his energy. He can help you out in combat too, he can disable enemies and you can take them out or later use him as a shield, and when you kill everyone they do a little hip bump to celebrate lmao so cute. He can also disguise you which was the coolest ability, you look like a stormtrooper and you can sneak into closed parts because the guards let you in, you gotta collect energy though or else it runs out and they can tell it's fake if you get close enough. There is this alliance meter which increases when you kill enemies together but I'm not sure what it does, I think it makes the droid's attacks more powerful and he can disable more enemies. You do some very basic acrobatic shit too like jumping and rolling to avoid lasers. There are some on-rail levels too where you fly around holding onto the droid like in Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones avoiding traffic and obstacles lol, I mean there is literally a part like that in Coruscant lmao. Sometimes there are waves of enemies you need to deal with, there are turret segments too and you can assign your droid to cooldown and to repair it, and there are turret levels in your spaceship too where you need to shoot down TIE Fighters. As you go through the game you unlock new moves and weapons, you start on Coruscant with a pistol, then go to Alderaan and the Black Sun shows up (I liked them from the comics) and you get a rifle, and then to Mustafar where the on-rail flying through the lava looked so bad lmao and you get the sniper here (which you can only used zoomed in), then you end up in prison and need to break out lol, and then some forest level where you can see the Death Star in the sky, then you get into the Death Star too, and then finally to some planet called Danuta where the on-rail level looked like when they fly inside the Death Star in the movies lmao it looked so cool. There are some boss fights too, the one with the rancor was tricky lmao, and the final boss was fucking tough, and apparently she was his slave or something, the story wasn't easy to follow lol. It's a good game but there are no collectibles or anything extra, you just play it once and you get everything out of it, but it's a really nice action game with a good Star Wars feel especially with the awesome John Williams music.	2023/07/20
Spyro 2: Gateway to Glimmer (PlayStation) Developer: Insomniac Games Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment Released: 1999 Genre: Platformer
Also known as Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage! outside of the civilized world. As I said I'm gonna play this on the PlayStation Portable, and it felt perfectly fine there, it controlled pretty much the same. In this game Spyro and his dragonfly buddy wants to go on a vacation but as they go through the portal they end up in a different world where a professor modified a portal to summon a dragon, because this evil dude called Ripto took over their world but he is terrified of dragons so they wanted those big ones from the first game to defeat him but all they got is Spyro lmao. No dragons to rescue this time of course, here you need to collect talismans at the end of every level and orbs to power up the portal to the next world. There are three hub worlds, Summer, Autumn and Winter (which only has orbs and no talismans) but they all have different kinds of levels so it's not like every snowy level is in Winter, not sure what was the point then. They don't have any enemies but you can still find orbs and gems there. When you enter and leave a level you get these short funny cutscenes of the locals and enemies lol, the graphics are the same (and the skyboxes are still gorgeous) but the characters look so bad lmao. Levels are more complex now (and you can turn on a minimap which helped a lot) because you need to do quests to get orbs. You always see how difficult they are before you start, some of them are simple like kill certain enemies in time or activate switches, there are some ridiculous ones like playing a hockey game lmao, following a spy or getting an item to find another item to find another one and so on lmao but there are a lot of frustrating ones too like that fucking trolley, or that level with the beanstalks and elephants, or that one with the fauns and stone giants, fuck they were the absolute worst (at least you don't have to chase those little thieves for eggs on every level, just in one), even the bonus flying levels have quests lol. There is this asshole called Moneybag who sometimes wants gems to let you through a part, and he sells you new abilities too like swimming (no oxygen meter thank god), walking up ladders and a headhbash move, and you need them to return to previous levels to complete them. You get powerups too after killing a certain number of enemies, like flying or sprinting (which is still a nightmare to control), and there are other things you can do like picking up rocks and firing it from your mouth lol. There are some fun levels, my favorite was Crystal Glacier where you need to rescue caveman eskimos from ice cubes lmao. There are some other fun parts, like in an underwater level there are sheeps in there in scuba gear lmao, and there is a robot farm level lol, or Metropolis which is like some proto Ratchet & Clank level where you can clearly see they are the same developers. There are boss fights at the end of worlds so it's only three, they were somewhat challenging, the final boss was not as bad as the one in the first game but still it took me a while lol. When you complete the game 100% it unlocks Dragon Shore which is the place you wanted to go originally, it's like a fair lol with roller coaster, bunch of carnival games where you need to hit a target to drop an enemy into the water lol, a fucking love boat ride lmao and you get the mega fire power up if you got all the orbs and gems, the tokens you get on this level unlocks the cutscene viewer but eh who cares. There is another Ratchet & Clank thing you can do which is the skill points, like finish a level in x amount of time and stuff like that, it unlocks the epilogue where you can see stupid shit like what happened to the characters, I just watched it on YouTube lol. It was good but honestly I prefer the simplicity of the first game, it was more soulful and charming and the music was more memorable too, some of the quests were really annoying and frustrating here. There is one more game left and I will try to play it before I get to the next Ratchet & Clank game.	2023/07/17
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (PlayStation Portable) Developer: Griptonite Games Publisher: Buena Vista Games Released: 2006 Genre: Action-adventure
I liked the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie a lot (I read that it was inspired by the Monkey Island games but I think that's bullshit, I don't see it), I have the second one on DVD which was okay but I only saw the third one a few years ago and it was meh (I wouldn't even bother with the other ones). I actually have the first game on PC which barely has anything to do with the movie, it was supposed to be a Sea Dogs game but the publisher renamed it and forced the Black Pearl and the island names in it lol, I liked it but I got stuck at some fortress siege and I could never progress, I might try it again because it's on Xbox. Anyway interestingly this game based on the second movie only came out on handhelds (I only found out later there was another game on PlayStation 2 that takes place between the first two movies, maybe I should have played that first). You are playing as Jack Sparrow (who moves like a moron lmao) and it's just a simple third person action game, you are sword fighting dudes which is simple as fuck they even show which button to press every time lmao, and sometimes you need to solve simple puzzles to progress or move like an exploding barrel to a door to destroy it (which wasn't obvious that you could do that), and there are some platforming too but again it's braindead simple and sometimes buggy as fuck too. For some reason the combat was so fucking hard for me and I couldn't even finish the first level lmao so I had to restart on easy, then it was just really easy without any challenge eh. You can pick up weapons like bottles, throwing knives, guns etc and they are insta kill when you use them, you can also use the environment to kill enemies with like giant rocks. There are also these power moves you can use after you kill enough enemies, they are insta kill too and the stronger ones can kill more enemies. You get these in the treasure arena levels which unlock after you find enough hidden treasure maps, it's just waves of enemies to defeat lol. Who are always the same btw, the only difference is how they look, there is a one sword, a two swords or a giant pirate type and you always need to use the same combos to defeat them, but you can't always see which button to press because of the shitty camera. That three way fight scene from the movie is also here but it's so dumb, you fight one of them, he knocks you down and you follow him to the next room lmao, and at the end you finally fight them both and they were like the regular enemies not bosses. Finishing all arenas unlocks the final level which is the Kraken boss fight, it would have been really hard if I wasn't on easy because I couldn't avoid the shitty tentacles. There was a notoriety meter in the game that gave you better ranks but I had no idea what it really did lmao. Also a weird bug I've never seen before, the game refused to save because the memory card had too much free space, I guess it was made when they were still just like 2GB or less, I had to fill it up with games and videos to fix that. I knew the game had multiplayer but I thought it's online only, but as I was reading a guide it said you can actually play against bots but you need to turn on the wifi to use it, and it's a completely different game, it's naval battles vs 3 other ships with the usual deathmatch, capture the flag, last man standing and time limit modes, you can even board ships but it's like just spam one button lol, there are power ups too like the Kraken you can summon lmao and as I found all the maps it gives you the Black Pearl which was really cool. This was actually fun so I won't delete the game, and it kinda saved it from being a piece of shit simple braindead easy game lmao.	2023/07/11
Rengoku: The Tower of Purgatory (PlayStation Portable) Developer: Neverland Publisher: Konami Released: 2005 Genre: Action-adventure
I saw this game on lists all the time but it had bad reviews and a lot of people complained how boring it was and you just go from room to room. But for some reason I was fascinated by it, and I found a deleted guide that was really detailed (where I learned the EU version is better) so I didn't feel I would be overwhelmed by the mechanics and I decided to give it a go. The story is about these androids created for war and after it ended they were sent to these towers to fight each others for sport to entertain humans. Essentially the goal is to defeat everyone on a floor and move to the next one and eventually reach the top floor to become a champion. However Gram, the android you play gained consciousness and starts questioning why this happens, and he starts fighting his way through the tower to find answers. Basically the only story is before and after boss fights when you talk to them, and it's just conversations. Floors are randomly generated, and in order to get to the next floor you need to clear every room then defeat the floor boss. When you enter a room the first time the door locks until you kill everyone, but if you die you lose the equipment you were wearing and start again at the bottom floor, you need to teleport back through the floors from terminal rooms and try to get it back before it disappears. It was easier to just return to the terminal rooms every once in a while to save lol, you need to come back anyway to manage your inventory and equipment. Becuase when you kill enemies there is a chance they drop stuff and there is also overkill which is an orange bar that shows right after you defeated the enemy, and if you keep damaging him it goes up and the chance of more equipment increases. You can assign weapons and equipment to your head, left and right arms, chest and your legs, and you can use them with the face buttons. There are all kinds of weapons from melee to ranged with different damage types, but it's better to stick to just one because the more you use it the more experience you gain and it makes that weapon type stronger. I just sticked to bullet, used a chain gun on my left arm, some really fast machine gun on my head that sprays bullets everywhere lol, some rocket launcher shit on my right arm, damage reduction armor on my chest and repair and ammo recharge parts on my legs. There are multiple slots so you can use different stuff, some of them even needs more than one slot. The combat is fast paced, you need to keep moving and roll around a lot otherwise you are an easy target. Enemies are randomly generated too but every floor has different equipment, they look so fucking cool though I really like the character design. All the floors and rooms (except the 8th which is white) look the same which kinda sucked, one time I had a swastika shaped one though lmao that was funny. There are boxes everyhwere with health, ammo recharge and cooling elixirs, last one is important because using one weapon, sprinting or rolling too much overheats you and you can't use that weapon until it cools down (there are cooling parts too you can equip). Enemies drop elixirs which you need to use to upgrade your armor, health, weapon slots, cooling etc and you can turn equipment you don't need to elixirs too. You are supposed to grind through floors but I managed to get everything by just clearing all rooms and fighting all the enemies as I was going back to the terminal lol, but as you progress and get better equipment it becomes so easy to farm weapons because you can fill up that orange bar easily. As you go through the floors and speak to the bosses you learn some of them are like you, some just want to fight because that's what they are programmed to do, learn how humanity has been long gone and it's just all for nothing, and when you reach the top floor and defeat the boss the android who controls the tower teleports you back to the bottom and uses you to upgrade all the enemies, so essentially you need to go through the entire game again like in Coded Arms with stronger enemies and better equipment lmao, I know it's just a bullshit way to make the game last longer but here I didn't mind it. When you finally get to the top you are in this weird control room I guess and when you defeat the final boss you leave and go outside to this barren landscape filled with other towers. The only unlockables are concept arts which you get after defeating bosses, they looked cool though. On paper this should be an extremely repetitive boring game where you just do the same thing and all the rooms look the same and everything is just random, and I usually hate these kind of games because I get overwhelmed by the insane amount of customization and I feel lost because I never know what to do, but here everything just clicked and I really enjoyed it. I wish there were more fast paced game like this, I think Armored Core is similar but it's not the same as it has missions and slow mechs. Well at least this game has a sequel which is apparently even better so I'm really looking forward to it.	2023/07/02
Coded Arms (PlayStation Portable) Developer: Konami Publisher: Konami Released: 2005 Genre: First-person shooter
I wanted to play this because it was the first PlayStation Portable FPS and I was really curious to see how they managed to make the controls work. And they are... yeah kinda clumsy, you move with the analog stick and look around with the face buttons, kinda like how it worked on the Dreamcast I suppose, I actually got used to it after a while (first I reversed it but then it felt weirder lol) but it still turned slowly, luckily auto aim helps a lot. The levels are actually randomly generated, I guess it's cool but it also meant sometimes there are elevators that don't go anywhere lmao. There is a story though but it only comes up in the manual lmao, some VR program was created to train soldiers but it was abandoned and a hacker tries to hack into it to sell data and he has to fight through the levels, and there is some kind of virus there that can trap you. There are 3 different kind of maps, city, base and ruins but they just look different the level layout is the same, you go through corridors, which sometimes have enemies, go to a room full of enemies (which sometimes lock down until you kill everyone) and just try to navigate through the maze to find the gate, which sometimes requires you to kill a gatekeeper. Enemies can be bugs, robots, alien soldiers etc and you can always tell there are enemies around because the music changes lmao. Weapons are dropped by enemies and they do different kind of damages, like fire, laser, bullet and you can have different armors too with different defenses. They also drop parts you can use to upgrade your currently selected weapons, they need a certain amount to get to the next level. Sometimes you get infected with a virus which was really annoying. See this was actually one of the first PlayStation Portable games I started playing back in last April, and Sector 01 was only just a few levels per maps, and even though it was kinda boring and dull it was fine. But then you get to Sector 02, which has like 13 levels per map, and I thought ok I will just use the orange gates to get out and save but you can't continue from there, you have to play through the entire thing to pass it, which is more than an hour and that's fucking insane for a handheld game and for me who can't play more than an hour so I just said fuck this, I will get back to it one day. But this year I decided I'm gonna wait until the insane summer heat starts when my consoles would melt by just turning them on and I can't play anything but my PlayStation Portable, and I will just put it to sleep mode and continue later, but this piece of shit game freezes after sleep mode so I had to fucking force myself through this shit and it was fucking awful, especially because it's a lot harder and has boss fights at the end, with the final boss being a nightmare I couldn't beat after a bunch of tries until I switched to the pulse rifle but still I barely did it with 3 health left. But your character gets trapped there and after the credits the Infinity mode unlocks where you can play forever, yeah fuck right off lmao. So this fucking insanely long shit made me hate this fucking game so much, but man I was so happy when I finally beat it and I could delete it from the memory card lmao. There is a sequel which apparently more story focused and without shitty random levels, I'm sure it will be better than this shit.	2023/06/21
Army Men: Sarge's War (Xbox) Developer: Tactical Development Publisher: Global Star Software Released: 2004 Genre: Third-person shooter
I finally got to this shitty game, I've had it on my hard drive since I upgraded it and finally I can delete it lmao. This game was finished by a different company because the original developers went bankrupt thank fucking god lmao (I used to believe they were on par with Electronic Arts or Sega just because they released a console, but I realized they were a terrible shovelware dogshit company without any good games, may they rot in hell forever). They changed the game to be edgy and dark as fuck and they hoped it would restore their former glory (how fucking retarded they were lmao). As usual you start in a bootcamp, I hoped finally they have some modern controls but it's the same shit with lock-ons lmao, but the movement and the camera is so fucking sensitive, at least it's not inverted finally so that's definitely an improvement lol. Zooming on sniper or just first person view was so shit because for some reason they switch the sticks and I could barely get used to it, and the auto aim is still terrible, it just picks some random target sometimes behind you lmao so I had to play on easy again. The story is about the war finally coming to an end, and they are about to sign the peace treaty when a renegade general called Malice (of course he is called that...) destroys the ceremony, killing all the good and evil characters from the previous games wtf, and the hot chick Vikki dies in your arms and Sarge, filled with rage fires two rifles he is holding in his hands while he is screaming in pain for that maximum edge lmao. The previous games had lighthearted cutscenes and story but there are barely any cutscenes here which sucks because they were the best thing about these shitty games, and it's weird but there are subtitles only during the gameplay lmao. And the locations are boring as fuck too, just the same shitty town and sandcastles like multiple times wtf, then a kitchen and the evil guy's stronghold. And the levels are broken up into ridiculously tiny parts separated by checkpoints, I think these developers just sucked ass, no way these consoles couldn't handle an entire level. There are some secret shits to find, flags and warplans but you can always guess where they are hidden lol, it's such a fucking simple game and you only get some shitty medals for finding them all, no extra or anything like that. Of course it's buggy shit too, like one time the enemies didn't move and I could just kill them easily lol. What I really liked was the damage model, you see holes in your body when you are damaged and with health and plastic parts from enemies it regenerates, and then there are burned deformed plastic parts and arms and legs falling off lmao it was actually cool. Also it has the best shotgun I've ever seen lmao, you can kill anyone with one shoot from far away too lol. The final boss had all kinds of weapons but I just kept firing at him until he died lol, then we learn who he was, your commander who wanted revenge for leaving him behind, then we see these tubes in the background with the names of your squadmates and Vikki, maybe they survived or he cloned them? Who the fuck knows, and it doesn't matter because this was the last game and I'm finally free from this nightmare lmao, I'm glad this shitty series is over. Control wise this could have been the best game but the drastic change in tone, the map variety and the lack of cutscenes just kills this game, it's just shit with no personality. The multiplayer could have saved it but of course it has no bots so it's useless. There is actually another Army Men game on Xbox but it's just some random game, I will see if I suffer through that shit too.	2023/06/10

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