Captain Buttbeard's Gaming Corner

Project Sylpheed (Xbox 360) Developers: Game Arts, SETA Corporation Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios Released: 2007 Genre: Space combat simulator
I only heard of this game a couple years ago in a YouTube video, but it looked cool as hell like Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation in space. For years I was thinking about playing it but I was never really in the mood for it until now. Also I've never seen a game before with adjustable white and black level and gamma settings huh, it was weird. Apparently it's part of a rail shooter series but it plays nothing like that thank good. There is a nice tutorial that teaches you everything although it took some time to get used to the controls. The story takes place in the future where a few colonies form an alliance called ADAN and rebel against Earth and launch an invasion because apparently the government forces destroyed their terraforming units and that made the planet inhabitable (it's weird, by that logic they should be the good guys but they are evil as fuck lmao). You are playing as Katana (what a name) a young pilot for Earth, just doing training exercises with your squad when ADAN forces attack you and your retard squadmate gets killed immediately lmao. You have a wingman Ellen (who you will fall in love with of course) and your squadleader who looks like Mike Tyson lmao he even has that shitty face tattoo. Man the graphics look really amazing, I love the stars and planets and just in general looks fucking incredible, the cutscenes have this 3D anime style and they aren't as good but it's fine. The music is more forgettable synth music, nowhere near as good as the one in the Red Faction games. It really is like Ace Combat, you have your briefing, weapons you can select, new ones you can buy but you can only use your spaceship. And you have your wingman and later two other squadmates who you can order separately, but you need to give them order here because otherwise they won't do anything just fly around lmao. There is also radio chatter which I could barely hear and it was impossible to pay attention because this game is even more chaotic than Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation. There is just so much fucking shit happening, fighters and rockets flying everywhere, battleships firing at you, it's fucking insane lmao I'm glad I decided to play it on easy (and apparently you should on your first playthrough, because it's almost impossible on normal with the starting weapons). Weapons are cool, like you can have 3 different ones, rockets that can lock onto multiple enemies or the same enemy multiple times, battleship killing missiles and laser cannons lol, but you are gonna run out of ammo a lot so you need to return to your mothership to reload and for repairs too. Missions are fairly long but at least there are chekpoints between some parts. There are secret subobjectives like shooting down all enemies and stuff like that, I usually got at least one lol but most of them are impossible. There is a time limit, usually not that bad but there was a mission where you need to shoot down everything while your mothership is being repaired and I literally had one enemy left when the time expired lol. There are some special moves you can use, like targeting everything in front of you and firing all your weapons simultaneously lmao, going insanely fast to a target or slowing down time. This game has aces too, they are really fast and hard as fuck to shoot down, one of them was your friend before he joined the bad guys because his planet was the one that got destroyed and you fight him a bunch of times. And of course there are the usual insane enemy types Ace Combat style lol, massive fucking battleships you need to destroy and a fucking Death Star like superweapon that can destroy planets lmao, and the last mission is inside the core of that thing lol but by that time I unlocked such an insane weapon that I took down the final boss and the core with one hit lmao. But no fucking trench run wtf, I wanted to get inside that thing but it's only a cutscene where your friend literally gets fucking destroyed while he is trying to protect your ship lmao, and the only reason you get out is because his ghost takes over your ship lmao. The after credits scene shows there is life on the destroyed planet so it was all for nothing bad guys lmao. It's not as good as Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation but it's a really fun game, and I wouldn't mind playing it again with the more powerful weapons I unlocked.	2023/02/22
Red Dead Revolver (Xbox) Developer: Rockstar San Diego Publisher: Rockstar Games Released: 2004 Genre: Action-adventure
First time I heard of this game was when Red Dead Redemption came out, but I didn't know anything about it except it's not an open world game and it was very different. For some reason I thought it's the same character in both games and this is a prequel where you see his family die. Apparently the two games aren't even connected but still I guess I should play this first before finishing Red Dead Redemption. Here you are playing as Red Harlow, who in the first mission is just a kid and your father returns after he found gold, but then bandits show up and kill your father and your Native American mother. Then he grows up and becomes a bounty hunter to find the people who killed his family. You have a dog with you and could have been a cool mechanic but bandits shoot him in the first mission eh. The characters look a bit cartoony but the game has a nice old Western movie look although sometimes I couldn't see shit because of the colors, and having a fucking letterbox didn't help it, and of course there is the usual Western soundtrack. It's a very arcadey game, missions are usually short and you just need to shoot down guys, sometimes you need to protect or escort someone, ride a horse, or have an on-rail stagecoah level lmao. You get the usual Western locations, bar fights, fortresses, mines, cemetery, ghost towns etc. Sometimes there are duels too lol (there is even a mission which is like battle royale dueling lmao) where you need to draw your weapon with the analog stick and kill the guy before he kills you, I sucked at this but it wasn't too hard. And there is Dead Eye which is also in Red Dead Redemption where time slows down and you can target the enemies on multiple parts of their bodies and then you fire a bunch of shots lol. You can get either a good or excellent rank after missions based on how long it took to finish it, how accurate were you etc and you can unlock new characters or maps for multiplayer or weapons. Between some missions you can walk around the town which is the only open world aspect of this game, there isn't much you can do except repairing and buying weapons or a bunch of shit which unlocks journal pages and more characters and maps for multiplayer. The journal is insanely long, like hundreds of pages, you can read about characters, backstories, weapons, places, all kind of stuff, it's really impressive to have this in the game (I unlocked like 80 something percent of it). Sometimes you play as other characters and they have different playstyles (they all have cute intros lol), like your Native cousin who has a bow and you even play as the bad guy in a flashback. The game is not that hard but some bosses can be brutal, but apparently I got lucky because the worst one with the dynamite bugged out lmao. The worst mission is when you are breaking into a mansion and the guy is picking the lock for minutes and waves of fucking enemies and bosses swarm you, it took me forever to beat that shit. Anyway you find everyone responsible for the death of your family and have your revenge (that's right, eye for an eye motherfucker) and you refuse the bounty and just walk away like a badass lol. After you beat the game you can play through it again in Bounty Hunter mode where you need to complete them with certain conditions (like headshots only and shit like that) to unlock cheats and more stuff for multiplayer, which has bots and that's always a good thing to find. One mode is a 4 way duel lmao and I have no idea what's the difference between the other two modes but you can have separate teams if you want so it's not just deathmatch. It's an alright game but nothing really extraordinary, just a nice arcade game (dear Dead Man's Hand, this is what an arcade Western game looks like). So I guess it's time to finally finish Red Dead Redemption, I think I will play it either this winter or next year.	2023/02/17
Miami Vice: The Game (PlayStation Portable) Developer: Rebellion Developments Publisher: Vivendi Universal Games Released: 2006 Genre: Third-person shooter
I watched Miami Vice on TV when I was a kid lol and I watched the "new" movie this games was based on a couple years ago, it was ok I guess. I first read about this game in the only issue of a console magazine I bought lol because Gears of War was on the cover (same magazine I read now in pdf). I think this is a prequel to the new movie but I don't remember the characters from it, not that it matters because the story is basic as fuck, you are trying to find some drug lord that's it. Basically you are just going from room to room, hiding behind cover and shooting guys or sometimes destroying stuff, it's basic as fuck lol. You have the usual locations like warehouses, drug labs, trailer parks, mansion and on your map you can see the drugs you can find, health pickups, camera you can deactivate, a RAM you can find for the hacking minigame, but you need to buy these informations before missions from a guy. After missions you can sell the drugs you found or buy more from dealers (no reason to do this, what you can find is more than enough) and use the money to upgrade guns or buy and upgrade clothes lol. And there is a hacking minigame which is like some 80s arcade game lol with three stages, you need to blow up these squares and avoid their fire, it was hard sometimes. Completing them unlocks new upgrades and drug baron locations, which is another minigame where you can sell drugs and you can make it harder to get more reputation (I have zero idea what reputation is good for lmao). Some missions are boat rides lol but they very easy, in fact the entire game is easy as fuck except maybe the last mission which has tons of enemies. After you beat the game you can select all the missions on the map and buy cheat clothes lol they cost a lot of money though. It's nothing special really, a very basic game that does nothing great but it's a good time waster I guess.	2023/02/15
Silent Hill 2 (PlayStation 2) Developer: Team Silent Publisher: Konami Released: 2001 Genre: Survival horror
The first thing you might ask is why didn't I play this on Xbox when it came out there, well apparently having Silent Hill 2 save adds some extra things to Silent Hill 3 which only came out on PlayStation 2, and Konami didn't do a good job with the port and this has more fog which looks incredible. I think this is the only Silent Hill game where I forgot what the story and the ending was so it was nice to play through it spoiler free. Although my experience wasn't the best because the screen of the ancient notebook I used for SMB stopped working and I had to use another one which I assume has a dying hard drive because it froze for a few seconds sometimes (luckily I found a VGA cable so I'm back using the other one). There is a nice CGI intro in the menu before you start the game and man it looks awesome, it looks so real, much better than the soulless modern crap we have today. The story is about this guy James who receives a letter from his dead wife to meet her in Silent Hill. Even though you don't need the fog anymore to mask the draw distance it's still an awesome eerie effect especially with the noise filter. But everything looks great even to this day, I would say this is where graphics peaked, the enviroments, the characters, just everything is so detailed with an incredible style, I can't believe there is only 2 years between the two games (compare that to the modern trash where there has been zero fucking innovations for a decade). Finally there is a better control scheme you can select lol even though it's kinda gimped because you can't walk backwards but it wasn't a problem, it's much easier to avoid enemies in this game (seems like they used the enemies from this game for the movie like the Pyramid Head dude lol). There is a separate action and riddle difficulty which is an interesting solution, although I regret picking easy on the action, the first game was challenging to me even on easy but here it's so ridiculously easy, and even the puzzles too (and I picked normal there) like I could solve most of them alone (I still used a nice strategy guide because I didn't want to miss anything). On your journey through the town you meet other people too who aren't locals, they seem to be attracted to the town like you. There is a woman though who is from the town and she looks like a slutty version of your dead wife, even her name Maria is similar to your wife's name. She will be with you for a while so you need to escort and protect her. Another new thing is how you can combine items to solve puzzles. The combat music here is scarier lol but it's still not really a scary game (although there are some scary moments like hearing those fucking whispers in a room). The nightmare parts are different too, in the first game it was all rusty and bloody with tortured and brutally murdered people hanging everywhere, here it's just empty, gray and abandoned, but it's supposed to represent the inner feelings of the character so that makes perfect sense. There are some weird moments here like a fucking quiz show when you are in an elevator lmao, and later you are going down holes and end up in different parts of the town, then finally you take a rowboat through the lake to the hotel. There is this video tape they keep referencing, and I thought it's gonna be a sextape lmao, but when you watch it you find out what really happened (and now is the time to stop reading because I'm gonna spoil everything). You find out you killed your wife when she was sick and you confront Maria who now looks completely like your wife, and after you defeat her you finally get to see the full letter your wife sent you and it was really sad and heartbreaking. I got the In Water ending, which I guess is the intended one because every other ending requires you to purposely not to read, listen or do certain things. Now the Greatest Hits or Director's Cut version includes a bonus scenario where you play as Maria right before the start of the main story, it's less than an hour long where she is thinking about killing herself but then she helps a dude in a mansion and you kinda find out the town manifested her and the dude was a ghost. To be honest I'm not sure if I like this more than the first game, it was short and even though I didn't feel like it's a great game I started thinking about the story more and more after finishing the game, just what everything meant and I kept reading about it online too to understand it more, just about how the town manifests the nightmares of these troubled people, a woman who was molested, a fat guy who was a killer, and James of course who probably drove to Silent Hill with his dead wife to kill himself and whose guilt and delusions manifested Maria and the Pyramid Head and how he was able to face them at the end. Very few games have this effect on me and it actually helped me face my own personal delusions.	2023/02/12
Knights of the Temple: Infernal Crusade (Xbox) Developer: Starbreeze Studios Publisher: TDK Mediactive Europe Released: 2004 Genre: Action-adventure, hack and slash
I wanted to play this because it's one of the very few PAL only Xbox games and I like the setting. It's about a girl with magical powers who is kidnapped by this evil bishop, and you are a Templar knight who goes after him to rescue her. Most cutscenes are shitty drawings eh and there are no subtitles. You go from Belmont to Acre, Jerusalem, Petra, then to hell lmao then back to Belmont at the end so your trip was all for nothing lol. It's just a hack and slash game with a few puzzles and keys to find. But the gameplay sucks, the camera is awful and sometimes I can't see shit, I got stuck in everything, even in enemies when they just block the door and you can't move lol and they can hit you through the wall eh. The combat is hard because it doesn't make sense, I couldn't figure out how the fuck to do combos it's like they just happened randomly sometimes when I pressed the correct buttons, it doesn't help that your special powers and moves (healing, shield, swiping attacks, shit like that) literally have wrong combinations listed on the combos menu lmao what a cheaply made piece of shit game, the funniest thing is how enemies just wait for you to finish your execution moves and don't attack you while you are doing it lmao. You have a couple different weapons and a bow, and you can find better ones which replace the previous weapon, I just used the last one I picked up because it doesn't tell what the difference is. There are health ornaments you can find and boxes that give you some kind of power, but it doesn't explain what those fucking powers are lmao I assumed it buffs your magic. Most puzzles are simple except that fucking door align one which took me ages to solve, but there are barely any puzzles. The game wasn't really difficulty but when you go back to Belmont it becomes insanely hard out of nowhere, and then the fucking final boss took me days to beat, the fucking last two demons always destroyed me. There is a making of video during the end credits full of shit that's not in the game wtf, they must have cut tons of shit and that explains why it feels barebones and unfinished. There is a survival mode with DLC maps too but it's just endless waves of enemies and it sucked ass as usual. It's just a boring shitty game and a waste of time, now I understand why it was never released in America.	2023/02/08
Battlestations: Midway (Xbox 360) Developer: Eidos Hungary Publisher: Eidos Interactive Released: 2007 Genre: Action, real-time tactics
I always wanted to play this game because I love naval ships, I remember following the development but for some reason I never played it. I thought about playing it on my Xbox 360 but I was worried it might be too complicated to manage these grand battles with planes and ships and I had other game priorities, but now I have more discs so I don't have to worry about that lol. It has a really detailed and long tutorial, it took me two days to complete it lmao. There is a story but it's not important, you are some guy who is a torpedo boat captain and as you progress and get promoted you will control a destroyer, a cruiser and at last an aircraft carrier (and there are parts where you are playing as the guy's friend who is a pilot). The first mission is Pearl Harbor, and it was really cool to see it happening just like in Medal of Honor: Rising Sun, but unfortunately I immediately realized how overwhelming this game is, there is just way too much shit happening and I can't focus on shooting and controlling the ship at the same time, I was getting destroyed like crazy. Then there was the plane section of that mission, and fucking hell the controls sucked ass, I could never get used to it. It got worse when you control a destroyer, I had to lower the difficulty just to be able to finish missions, it makes it worse that there are no checkpoints so you have to start from the beginning if you die. But the game redeemed itself in the second half of the campaign when you get promoted and you can control more units. Micromanaging units from a map is much easier when you don't have to do everything on your own, I liked just sitting on an aircraft carrier (I hate them in real life though, I want epic battleship duels not some shitty planes destroying ships eh), launching planes with different tasks, giving orders to ships, launching bombers from airfields or boats from shipyard, and letting them do everything and taking them over the last second to drop bombs or torpedos, switching to the repair screen of ships to make sure they stay alive. The last two missions were the Battle of Midway and it was cool to fight through that too, but the campaign is ridiculously short with missions no longer than 30 minutes (even with the secondary and hidden objectives), but there are separate challenge missions where you can play with the Japanese too. They have 3 different categories, planes, ships and submarines, but you can't change the difficulty so they were extremely hard, like defending an island from waves of planes and ships with only an airfield, attacking a convoy fleet with submarines etc. Somehow I managed to beat the plane and submarine challenges after many tries but I couldn't get through the second ship mission so I just gave up. There is a nice epilogue hidden after the end credits (which you need to view separately), a letter from the guy talking about his memories as he was a real admiral. So even though I enjoyed the strategy aspect of this game I don't think it's worth to waste a disc for just looking at a shitty map, I wanted epic naval battles, or at least some instant action kind of thing but it only has online multiplayer eh. The sequel has that though, and a lot of improvements (and kamikaze attacks lmao) so I might play it later.	2023/02/06
Metal Gear Solid (PlayStation) Developer: Konami Computer Entertainment Japan Publisher: Konami Released: 1998 Genre: Action-adventure, stealth
This is one of those games that's so famous you will hear about it one way or another. However I never wanted to play it, and I never understood what's the big deal about it, from everything I've heard it lead to the interactive movie shit games becoming the mainstream which absolutely destroyed gaming. But because it's literally the most famous PlayStation game I felt like it's a must play and I can't avoid it. But first I watched the 2D games on YouTube, because this one is actually the third in the series. And man the second one is so complex for a shitty 2D game, but it's the perfect example why I hate 2D games, I would have been lost all the time because I can't navigate through samey looking non 3D areas, and you are backtracking all the time, and it's full of cryptic shit so no thanks, fuck that. I found a really nice strategy guide for this game, it's full of character backstories but later I realized it spoils a lot of shit from the game lol. This is also the game where I figured out how to play NTSC games because I didn't want shitty letterbox, but I will make a blog post about that later. The first day I just watched the detailed briefing videos, read the Previous Mission logs and played the VR Training to get familiar with the gameplay lol, they were so long. You are Solid Snake, a former special forces guy who lives in Alaska, when your former colonel finds you (and gets your dogs killed, fuck you) and drags you back into action. Members of your former team took over a nuclear disposal facility and threaten to launch nukes if their demands are not met. They want the remains of your former leader and antagonist of the first two games, Big Boss. They also hold hostage the DARPA chief and the president of a weapon manufacturing company, and your colonel's niece lol, so your task is to stop them and rescue the hostages if possible. It really is kinda like a movie, it even starts with the credits lol. At first I struggled with the gameplay, like I couldn't choke out guards because they always noticed me, so it was a good idea to play on Easy (which is the intended difficulty, but as usual those dumbass Japanese increased the difficulty for the West), but I got used to it after a while. You can only have one weapon and item equipped, luckily the game pauses when you switch between them, that's especially helpful when you are in a gas filled room and you need to switch between your gas mask and card to open a door. The stealth itself is pretty basic, but guards can hear you when you walk on some surfaces and can follow your footprints in the snow which was pretty cool. I think the worst thing about this game is the isometric view, you can look around in first-person and switch to a proper third-person view when you are behind cover, but mostly you will just look at your radar to avoid guards and shit. You have a codec which you are gonna use a lot, your Colonel and other people will call you, and you can call them too like the Chinese girl to save your game. You can flirt with her too lol and get info and tips from animal expert, weapon expert, or just general tips on what to do and how to defeat a boss, or just talk to them and learn about them (or get some famous quote from the girl lol). And man, no wonder this game was popular, the level of story, cutscenes, voice acting and details are insane for a PlayStation game. I really like the graphical style, you have the usual samey military halls but rooms or offices have their own personalities, and you can find shit like a little PlayStation or anime and game posters lol. Then you have different colored walls where you need to tap to hear if it sounds different so you can blow a hole in it, or cards that change shape in cold or hot which was really clever. The story itself isn't better than any random B tier action movie (which I like), but the way it's presented is incredible for such an early game. Like you have shit like the girl hiding the key in her pussy so the guards wouldn't find it lmao. I guess the most unique things are the boss fights and how the game is self aware, it doesn't try to be like a walking simulator movie game and it takes the interactivity to real life. Boss fights are somewhat challenging, the first try I usually got destroyed lol then I figured out what to do, like for the sniper you need to take pills to not to shake (fuck all the backtracking for the sniper rifle though). And there is the infamous Psycho Mantis boss fight, I'm pretty sure that's how I heard of the game first in the early 2000s (and I actually thought he is a woman lmao but he is just a really skinny guy), where he tries to read your memory card and comments on a game if you have that save, or asks you to put the controller down and he will "move it" when it vibrates, then he makes the video disappear lol, and to defeat him you need to connect the controller to the other port which is insane, I have no idea how I was supposed to figure that out on my own. The other infamous part is the torture scene, where you need to press the O button really fast to survive (or you can give up to get the bad ending) but I had to look up how to do it because I kept dying, the trick was to keep sliding a pen over the button lmao. And after the torture the doctor on your codec will give you a "massage" by telling you to put the controller on your arm and she vibrates it, now these are the things that separate it from the shitty movie games, an actual interactivity with the player. There are also some deep thoughts about memories and how you can save in a game but in real life you gotta keep them in your heart, and I guess the overall message of the game is don't let your genes determine who you are and how you live which was nice (as much as I enjoyed the story I still don't know why people treat it like the greatest thing ever, the premise is especially retarded, like yeah Kojima a slow as fuck giant walking mech is gonna revolutionize nuclear warfare lmao). At the end you get to fight the Metal Gear then Liquid Snake with hand-to-hand combat lol (also what the fuck are these names, Solid Snake, Liquid Snake, Revolver Ocelot, Psycho Mantis lmao it was so hard to take them seriously). And then you have a Warthog run at the very end lmao, I guess that's where Bungie took the idea from lol. There is an interesting wtf post credits scene, and you get a rank with statistics after you finished the game, I got Mongoose, probably one of the worst ones lol. Btw it's a two discs game, and that normally wouldn't be a problem but you can't save between switching discs here so I had to play in that emulator a bit and I literally fell under the stairs near a box, so yeah no regrets burning two discs for this game lol. I would say this is the best and my favorite PlayStation game I've played so far, and I finally get why this game was popular and revolutionary, it treats itself like a game and that's what all those interactive movies failed to do, and I hope the sequels didn't make the same mistake.	2023/01/30
Manhunt (Xbox) Developer: Rockstar North Publisher: Rockstar Games Released: 2004 Genre: Stealth, psychological horror
This is another game I've always wanted to play, I remember how controversial it was and that it was banned in some countries because of the insane violence. I remember watching one of our neighbors playing this game and choking enemies to death with a plastic bag, and I was like wow holy shit I can't believe they made a game like this. The story is about a guy on death row who thinks he is getting executed, but instead a snuff film director takes him and he's gotta kill his way through this absolute crime ridden shithole city (which is by far the best one I've seen, better than Grand Theft Auto III or Max Payne, I just love this aesthetic) for the director's films. It has a really nice noise filter which just makes the whole shithole look even better, and cutscenes have VHS effects to make them feel like you are watching a real snuff film. I think most of the sound effects are from Grand Theft Auto III lol, I guess it was just easier to reuse them. The default controls are absolute ass though, I feel bad for those poor fuckers who only had the PlayStation 2 version where you can't change it, thank god you can use another control scheme here. So you are going through parts of the city, abandoned streets, zoo, factory, junk yard, insane asylum etc, which are all controlled by gangs like white supremacists, gun obsessed retards or just insane psychos and at the end of a gang's territory the director's security unit captures you and takes you to the next location. Basically your job is to get to the next level by killing your way to the end, preferably by stealth and brutal kills (you can just attack enemies with your weapons or your hand but you are weak and multiple enemies can easily kill you). You can use all kinds of weapons, plastic bags, glasses, crowbars, guns, and can pick up bricks or even severed heads and throw them to cause distraction lol. Basically you are gonna wait in shadows, making noise so the enemies will come and investigate, and when they turn around you can hold down the attack button and charge up your kill for more brutal executions, which is essential if you want to get a good rating, 3 stars unlock concept arts, and 4 stars give you one half of a cheat. Sometimes you are required to use a specific weapon and execution style, or a big ass crane to kill enemies lol (that part sucked). And then there are some escort missions too, like escorting a hobo lmao and telling him to hide in shadows while you do the killing. It's honestly a bit repetitive but man this game is absolutely nerve-wracking, just waiting in the shadows and trying to figure out how to kill an enemy without the others seeing it and just hoping you can make it to the next save point, I was sweating like crazy playing this game. Near the end you manage to escape from the director and team up with the reporter chick to bring him down, so it's another escort mission but now you are in the better parts of the city killing cops and his security units, but it basically turns into a third-person shooter because you are mostly just using your guns. It's not that this part is easier at all, you still need to use stealth because it's just waves of enemies with guns coming at you. And then you break into his mansion, where there is this chained insane guy in a pig suit called Piggsy lmao, he is like the final boss before you reach the director and slice him up with a chainsaw lol. You can unlock some bonus challenge stages, I unlocked two where you fight all gangs (and they fight each other too) and another one where you are trying to survive with a nail gun (apparently there is one where you shoot monkeys in the zoo lmao). It was a really fucked up game with an awesome aesthetic but those things don't really make a game great when the stealth is very basic and gameplay is repetitive, but that doesn't mean it's a bad game either. I will play the sequel later for sure.	2023/01/26
Death Jr. (PlayStation Portable) Developer: Backbone Entertainment Publisher: Konami Released: 2005 Genre: Action, hack and slash
I think this was the first PlayStation Portable game they ever showed, and I always thought it looks cute (and has that Tim Burton-esque style) but when I watched some reviews they said it's really hard so I wasn't sure if I should play it, but I want to play the early games first so I just said eh fuck it. But it is in fact hard, but entirely because of the absolutely terrible controls and camera. You are playing as the Grim Reaper's son Death Jr., who is friends with Pandora, some freak baby in a jar, Siamese twins, a fucking dead fish lmao and they go to the museum with their class. They find a box there which Pandora really wants to open and to impress her Death Jr. opens it but it sucks all his friends souls in, so you gotta go through levels to find parts of their souls to restore them. They are like your neighborhood, the school, a meat factory, insane asylum etc, and they are filled with demons and shit. You have your scythe for melee attack (and for platforming too) and a bunch of guns you can unlock and upgrade. You have like 3 levels per souls, one is either a boss fight or waves of enemies, and I couldn't pass them until later when I unlocked enough weapons and found enough weapon and health upgrades (and you gotta collect them all if you want to have a chance to finish the game), but at least it's not linear so you can just go through other levels and come back later. But then again the god awful camera just makes everything worse, you keep falling off shit or dying because you can't see anything, and then the enemy AI is terrible too, but sometimes that can be a good thing when they just walk right into the lava and die lmao. And it's a buggy mess too, like your hits don't always register or a boss clips into the wall and it takes him ages to move back to place and shit like that. This just has to be the worst PlayStation Portable game I've played so far, there is nothing good about it besides the artstyle and the weird characters. Still I will play the sequel one day, hoping they realized they should have just used the L and R for adjusting the camera.	2023/01/22
Darksiders (Xbox 360) Developer: Vigil Games Publisher: THQ Released: 2010 Genre: Hack and Slash, action-adventure
I was really excited for this game back in 2009-2010 because I was really into mythology and stuff, and this Christian mythology thing with angels sounded cool as fuck so I followed the development. It actually came with my Xbox 360 so I played it but I felt kind of lost after the first level, I didn't know what to do or where to go so I just stopped playing. So the first level is the Apocalypse happening, angels and demons swarm the world and one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, War shows up. It turns out the Seventh Seal was not broken and the Apocalypse was falsely triggered by someone. Your council gives you another chance to redeem yourself by sending you back to Earth to find out what really happened. But a hundred years have passed and there are no humans left, just angels, demons, monsters and zombies who roam the Earth. First you are helping some demon dude who becomes the vendor in the game lol, you can buy new weapons, moves, Wrath abilities (barely ever used these) etc, and later you can use him for quick travel between locations. Then you free another demon guy called Samael, who sends you to different locations to hunt down bosses for him who guard the tower of the Destroyer. The story is really interesting, but I could tell from the beginning who will be the Destroyer but I had no idea how they're gonna do it, it was a pretty good twist. Some of the locations are smaller but there are huge ones later on, and there are also tunnels which connect two locations, but both of these have a lot of hidden chests you can find, most of the time you can find almost everything you first time there but as you unlock new abilities and gadgets you can come back and use them to reach new areas. This reminded me of Batman: Arkham Asylum, so no way I could have played this game without a guide. There are a lot of puzzle rooms too, most of them can be figured out but that one where you need to switch walls was crazy, and then later on you get a portal gun which was awesome btw, but the puzzles are really insane here, especially because it takes it to the next level when you need to fire a portal through the portal, now that was some fucking crazy shit. Btw some of these items and abilities you can use are pretty cool, like the grappling hook or your horse later (which makes sword attacks more powerful) but there are some useless ones, like I don't think I needed to use the pistol at all. You have your sword to attack, and later a scythe and this epic glove (and you can use your throwing blade which is also needed for puzzles), X is for sword attack and Y is for the other weapons, and you have some pretty cool combos and B for finishing moves at the end. You get blue souls which are the currency you need to buy new stuff which you find in chests too (and green and yellow too, for health and Wrath abilities). Weapons level up and you can add enchantment to them lol. There are some different parts to make the game more interesting, like an on-rail shooting section, using a big gun to shoot down angels lol, or competing with a guy to see who can kill more enemies (I wish there were NPCs to interact with, like angel and demon towns, because the world felt empty this way). Sometimes you will be transported to the Shadow Realm where you need to complete a set of challenges to progress. And then there is the Chaos Form, which turns you into a big flaming demon guy if you kill enough enemies, and it makes you insanely powerful and you can kill anyone with a few hits. At the end you will need to go back to previous locations to collect parts of a new weapon you need to kill the Destroyer, that's when you should go back to collect everything (including a better armor, but it doesn't look better than the base one lol). I collected every single upgrade so the final boss wasn't hard at all lol, the ending was really cool with the Seventh Seal being finally broken and you see the rest of the Horsemen coming. So yeah it was a good game, it has some framerate issues though even with the title update and the world felt kinda empty, but I will play the sequel for sure.	2023/01/18
Kingdom Hearts (PlayStation 2) Developer: Square Publisher: Square Released: 2002 Genre: Action role-playing
Of course I heard of this, I'm not sure when exactly but it always sounded so weird to me, Disney characters mixed with Japanese RPG characters lol. But unlike most JRPGs it doesn't have turn-based combat (more like turd-based combat, am I right lmao) which I absolutely fucking hate so that's why I wanted to try it out (and because it's one of the most famous games on the PlayStation 2), even if I find the concept retarded as fuck (there are some other early action RPGs that looked interesting to me but the more I looked into them the more they looked like I would hate them). There is a really nice piano music in the menu before you start the game, the music is fine in general but most of them are from Disney movies lol. You are playing as Sora, who lives near a beach with his friends, and when the Heartless attack they destroy his world and he finds himself in Traverse Town where he meets Goofy and Donald Duck lmao. You want to find your friends and they want to find their king Mickey Mouse lmao, who instructed them to protect the person who wields the Keyblade, which you get when you arrive in Traverse Town. So they are your party members, Goofy is more like the tank with a shield and Donald is the magic user. And you travel to different worlds, which are basically Disney movies, like Alice in Wonderland, Hercules (this one is an arena with waves of enemies and bosses), Tarzan, Aladdin (which was my favorite when I was a kid), Pinocchio, The Little Mermaid, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh (this one is a book, you find pages and you can play minigames with them inside the book), and some other places made for the game. In some places you look different, like in The Little Mermaid world you are a mermaid lol, and sometimes other characters can join your party if you are in their world. You can also summon a character who replaces all your party members but the only one I used was Tinkerbell because she heals you and your party stays with her. Basically you relive those Disney movies but of course different things happen with the Heartless attacking and trying to destroy the world. The combat is in real time thank god, but it doesn't pause when you try to use items and switch between spells so that was kinda hard, and battles can be really chaotic, you can't move the camera with the right stick, you have to use the L2 R2 buttons, luckily I got used to that from playing PlayStation games (at least it's not inverted). You travel between worlds with a gummy spaceship but this is the worst part of the game, it's like a simple rail shooter and you can change your ship but the editor is a nightmare to use, I just kept going with the stock one until late game when I built a new one from a blueprint. Luckily you can go to worlds you have visited through a wormhole so you don't have to go through that fucking shit all the time. Cause you are gonna travel between worlds a lot, Traverse Town is a hub world where you can buy new stuff but when you learn new abilities you can get to more chests (like the 99 dalmatian puppies lol) or using those colored marks to get items. But there is so much grinding to do and I hate that shit but you need to be like around level 60 to beat the game so I was just killing enemies for a few days eh. It's not a hard game but some bosses near the end were a nightmare, especially because you can't skip cutscenes and you have to watch them over and over again. Ironically the final bosses were the easiest lol, and there are some secret bosses too but you need to be like level 80 for them and fuck that shit, going through the Hades cup with 50 waves of enemies and bosses was hard enough to do (at least you can continue after every 10 if you die). There is a nice end credits reunion, the world is saved and everyone can go home, but you stay with Goofy and Donald to find Mickey lol. I did all the stuff needed for the post credits scene and damn it looked so cool, I had no idea what it was I thought maybe it's something Final Fantasy related but apparently it's like a concept video for the sequel eh. So yeah it's an OK game, the message is similar to Infinite Undiscovery like friendship is the most important thing and darkness can never reach your heart when you have friends you can count on or something like that lol, I mean these games were clearly made for kids and I can't really appreciate it as an adult so I don't understand why this series has so many obsessed fanboys (maybe because they are cringey weeb manchildren). Btw I played the original game, it was re-released in Japan with more content and they changed some stuff too, it has a translation but it doesn't work in OPL and I hate when they change something about the game later.	2023/01/14
Breakdown (Xbox) Developer: Namco Publisher: Namco Released: 2004 Genre: Action-adventure
I heard of this as a famous Japanese Xbox game, I don't think it was a big deal though and I think people thought it's a first-person shooter and that's why they didn't really like it, but it's more of a first-person brawler with some shooting mechanics (which happens with lock-on). And it's one of those games where for some retarded reason the Japanese thought people in the West want to play hard games so they increased the difficulty for no reason, so you are supposed to play on easy to get the intended difficulty setting. But I read it's still hard that way so I was trying to find some tips and some forum from the mid 2000s said use the sliding uppercut combo and they were right lol it made everything easier so I just spammed it constantly lmao. The story is fucking awesome, you are playing as Derrick who wakes up in a research facility and you have no idea what's happening because you have amnesia. You see everything in first person, there are no cutscenes or loading screens between levels, you just walk to the next area and see everything from Derrick's perspective. They tried to make the game very immersive, but I think they went a bit too far, like the way you pick up items is like press X to raise your hand, press it again to grab the item, then press it again to take it or use it, but I just spammed X so it was fine lmao. It starts with a nice tutorial where you learn the basics, and then a girl named Alex saves you from soldiers (that's when you experience first-person vomiting lmao). At first you are only fighting soldiers and going through grey corridors (which is fine, it's a research facility), it's very linear but sometimes there are cool shits like avoiding moving lasers like in the Resident Evil movie lmao. Then the T'lan warriors show up, and they are these fucked up soldiers from underground who glow, and you can't kill them with bullets you need to beat them to death lol (or use the anti T'lan laser later in the game). They have different types, like stealth, laser firing ones, big giant ones etc, and they leave red and blue energies behind to recharge your health and energy (drinks and energy bars do the same thing). You slowly learn about what's going on (and you can get more info from notepads and tapes, and you have to turn the pages with the X too lol), some people might hate how they don't know what's happening but I really liked how they slowly reveal everything, you can make up your own theories which is cool. Especially with all the fucked up hallucinations you experience, like you see a cat sometimes, or your body turns into flesh and bones, or going through a door and you end up in a deserted area with ruins everywhere, or seeing yourself and the scene you just played earlier from another person's perspective, they were so fucking cool. And you can try to put the pieces together when you meet the scientist woman or when you walk past the Beta Project, but even though you can get a general idea of what's going on the twist will blow your mind. Basically in the first part of the game you are trying to get to the lead scientist who is in deep undeground, and he explains to you what you already figured out by that point, that you are the only one who survived the experiment of creating supersoldiers with T'lan abilities. You get another injection and you get more powers you can use, stuff like blocking bullets, throwing energy balls, shockwaves. Then you go through a portal to the T'lan world, which is like a huge underground place with a sun and oceans like wow what the fuck, and you fight your way to the tower (you can get a car thankfully cause it's huge lol, this part reminded me of Halo). The tower is where things get really fucking repetitive, basically you are climbing up and down the same silos over and over again for like an hour lmao, then you finally have your fight with the T'lan leader Solus, thinking it's the last boss fight but then the twist happens and I can't talk about the rest of the game without spoiling everything but it's the coolest fucking shit ever. Anyway later you need to get through some previous locations again but you get another injection that gives you super jump and you can slow time down so that made everything so much easier. There is a part where waves of enemies come at you and I think that's where a lot of people got filtered for good lol but with sliding uppercut it was manageable, and then the end was another fucked up insane thing. There are two endings though, I picked the good one but it pissed me off because it ended with a cliffhanger and they never made a sequel. You unlock bonus pics and music (the Japanese sure love putting the music as an extra in their games huh) as you go through the game, and there are some funny easter eggs like an Xbox on a desk lol. I know this game has a lot of problems, it tries to be too immersive which doesn't really work in video games and I know a lot of people wouldn't like it but I don't care, it's one of the coolest fucking games I've ever played.	2023/01/10
Mafia (Xbox) Developer: Illusion Softworks Publisher: Gathering Released: 2004 Genre: Action-adventure
This was the next game coming up but I heard the console ports are terrible lol and I didn't want to play it on PC. But I watched a video and it wasn't that bad as they say, I mean as long as it isn't unplayable with cut content I don't care cause fuck PC. But graphically it's really bad lmao, the draw distance and lighting is terrible, like when it's sunset and you look at the sun it just makes the screen all red lmao. It all makes up for it with the driving which isn't complete fucking dogshit here and the speed limit is 60 instead of 40. The gunplay is awful too, but it's not really the console port's fault because the combat in general is bad, like you need to pop out of covers when the game doesn't have any cover mechanics otherwise they will kill you in a second. There is no auto aim but you can move the crosshair to the enemy with the black button but that means you need to keep pressing it lmao, it's helpful when the target is too far away though but it's so shit to use. They also added arrows to some places to help you where you need to go, and I think there was no minimap in the PC version but I'm not sure, because I only played a little bit of it back in the day before I got filtered by the driving and how boring it was. Anyway the game starts with a really nice intro where you see the city then Tommy walks into a bar to talk to a detective about his involvement in the Salieri crime family in exchange for witness protection. Of course, no fucking subtitles and that's just fantastic in a game where all the story is in cutscenes, luckily I could understand everything. And yeah there is little to none dialogue during gameplay, just driving with some people in total silence most of the time, at least they changed that in Mafia II. And missions are insanely long because the driving takes fucking forever, at least you can continue from checkpoints here unlike in the PC version. And to make them longer sometimes at the end of missions you can go to a guy who teaches you how to steal luxury cars, these are the only side missions in the game but it just adds another 30 minutes to them. It also has mundane shitty tasks like driving a taxi and picking up crates but it's so much worse here lmao. There is of course the infamous racing mission, I don't know if they changed this for the console version but you can lower the difficulty and turn off damage before it starts lmao I laughed so hard when I saw this, it really filtered people huh. I knew the ending from Mafia II but the leadup to it was really sudden, like everything just happened in the last two missions and you were just doing normal mob stuff before that (lol at that end credits song). Still the story is better but the gameplay is so much worse than in Mafia II, but I guess they even out. There is a Free Ride mode like in Driver where you can drive around the city but at least you can drive a taxi here lol (and you can select a bunch of insane Wacky Races looking cars too lmao), and Grand Prix which is a racing mode with an actual championship but I can't imagine anyone wanting to play this shit after that fucking mission. I was trying to understand the appeal of this game and based on the reactions of the people I knew when it came out it's the realism, how the 30s cars handle like shit as they should be, that you have to obey the traffic laws, or that bullets left in the clip disappear after you reload, but I don't see how these things are good, and ultimately this obsession with trying to make games realistic is what killed gaming.	2022/12/20
Overlord (Xbox 360) Developer: Triumph Studios Publisher: Codemasters Released: 2007 Genre: Action role-playing
I think this game had the same effect on me as MediEvil: Resurrection, I saw the cover in stores and I thought it looked so cool, plus you play as an evil guy and control your little army lol so I always wanted to play it. But when I was looking up reviews I thought maybe I wouldn't like the controls so it wasn't a priority. But now with all those new discs I have no excuse not to play it. You are some evil demon guy with a big tower who looks like Sauron lol and you got killed by a group of heroes, but your minions resurrect you and your job is to kill the heroes, get your tower objects they stole from you back (because they give you power) and conquer the world lol. And you are accomplishing all that with your hordes of minions lol, you are kind of useless alone in the beginning and you control your minions, not only they will pillage and kill enemies and pick up armor and weapons to become stronger (sometimes they pick up dumb shit like a pumpkinhead for helmet lmao) but you also need them to move and pick up stuff and your tower objects to carry them back home. The more enemies you kill the more life force you will collect, that's what you need to summon more minions, there is a maximum limit though but you can increase it by finding more tower objects. You have 4 types of minions, the browns are the general fighting ones I guess, reds can throw fire and walk through it, greens are like stealth units and can get rid of poison gas, and blues resurrect dead minions and can walk through water but they are terrible in combat. They all need different kind of life force to summon so if you run out of them you need to go back somewhere to farm it. The game isn't that linear, you can't do everything at one location, you will need to go back after you unlock a new type of minion to access more areas and complete quests. Controlling the minions is a bit complicated especially when you have all four types of them, you can switch to overhead view which helps a bit, but it was overwhelming when you need to switch between them quickly in the heat of the battle (this was especially bad during the final boss fight, took me forever to beat him). Your spells can help a lot, you can throw freballs, have a shield, slow the enemies down (and turn them to your side later) or buff your minions lol. These are all upgradable just like your armor and weapons too, and you can buff your stats with minion sacrifices lmao (you can also sacrifices them to get back your health and mana). To be honest this game is a lot like Fable, from the style to the humor to the world, but you can only play the evil path lol. But even that has two paths, you can be just a guy who wants to conquer the world and rule your objects or an insane mass murderer lmao, and your corruption level determines which endings you get (of course I had 0% corruption, I can't even play like a bad guy in evil games). You get a wife here too, and you can customize your tower, and if you buy everything she likes you can fuck her lmao. I liked how the heroes all succumbed to the seven deadly sins, and there is a nice twist at the end where you learn why and who you really are. There were some bugs like the minions liked getting stuck in walls and some parts were a bit tedious (like the fucking sandworms from Dune) but overall it was a fun game, I liked it. Now there is an expansion called Raising Hell but I can only play it on PC and I'm not sure if I would want to do that lol so I might just watch it on YouTube before I play Overlord II.	2022/12/14
Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain (PlayStation) Developer: Silicon Knights Publisher: Crystal Dynamics Released: 1996 Genre: Action-adventure
I always wanted to play this series, especially Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver (and I'm pretty sure I played one of the games a little bit on PC, I think Blood Omen 2 maybe but I don't remember anything), but it started with this game, which is like a shitty isometric game and I hate those, so I thought I will just watch it on YouTube. But then I realized it can be played on a PlayStation Portable and it came out there officially too, and a game like this is fine for a handheld I guess. The game starts with a cutscene that made no sense to me, like who are these people and what is happening, then you get to control your character Kain who gets killed immediately and then someone from the underworld turns him into a vampire and sends him back. He wants revenge but he is sent to the Pillars of Nosgoth, which supposed to represent the world, and they got corrupted by their guardians so your job is to hunt them down to cleanse the pillars. To be honest I had to read the plot and watch YouTube videos to understand what the fuck was going on after I finished the game, it does such a terrible job at telling this story. And the gameplay is fucking awful too, like you can zoom in and you won't see shit or zoom out and can barely see anything, but you go through the world fighting enemies and exploring dungeons or cities, but hell even with a guide I was totally lost all the time (especially when you need to go back to previous areas to find new items and spells), it's such a confusing mess. You can find new weapons, armors and spells (and forms too that can help you walk through water or fast travel, those were cool) that do different things but the combat is the worst fucking shit I've ever seen in a game, I've never seen hitboxes so bad I could barely hit anything, then there are those fucking spell throwing demon assholes who can kill you by spamming that shit and you can't even do anything because it cancels your movement or combat, I just had fucking enough at some point and started cheating to get through this piece of fucking garbage game as soon as possible (and of course there are only two cheats, refilling your health and mana so I had to use those all the time). Just to say some positive things, I liked how sucking blood refills your health lol, the voice acting was pretty good (no subtitles of course) and the story was so cool, but of course I had no idea about that until I finished the game, it's a shame that such an awesome story is lost in a shitty game like this. At least as a reward for my suffering I can finally play Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver (and it better be good after this shit).	2022/12/05
SWAT: Global Strike Team (Xbox) Developer: Argonaut Games Publisher: Vivendi Universal Games Released: 2003 Genre: Tactical shooter
This is actually part of the PC SWAT series, and that's the reason why I went back to play it after I found out about it. I played the demo of SWAT 3: Close Quarters Battle in the early 2000s, it was that level with the Arab store and it was after 2001 so it was fun to kill some dirty terrorists lmao. I didn't really have any idea what to do though but I still had fun with it fucking around with my teammates lol. This is very different though, it's like a very dumbed down arcade game for consoles. The story was hard to follow, most of the plot is in the loading screen and I learned more about it from the manual lmao: it's centered around two rival gangs and a new drug they want to distribute. Sometimes you are rescuing hostages (like the daughter of a mayor called Tom Brady lmao), defusing bombs or just attacking the enemy stronghold. The game is basically Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3 lite, like it's very simple with barely any depth to it. You can choose weapons before missions but there is no point, just go with the default assault rifle and you can upgrade it with points you earn for completing objectives (and those are always the same, arrest a number of enemies, no civilian casualties, arrest certain enemies), and you get grades after missions but they are weird because I always got an A even if I had to use all my continues (which are 5 instead of 3 saves). You have 2 squadmates, a guy with a shotgun and a girl with a sniper, they can be useful to take down enemies but sometimes I had to push them into elevators to continue eh. You can order them with the D-pad and sometimes you take over the girl who is in a different place to snipe some enemies. Combat is really easy, you have unlimited ammo lol you just need to reload, and I don't think there is any stealth you just yell at enemies to suprise them and they will surrender instantly, otherwise you need to shoot them a few times while spamming the yelling button lmao to handcuff them (and you need to handcuff everyone, civilians too, too bad they all disappear a few seconds after that eh). What I really liked is the graphics and the lighting, I don't know what this style is called but it looked very detailed (reminded me of Prey) but when you get close to walls it's just flat textures (btw it's a fun little detail that you take your weapon down when you bump into walls lol). The only ulockables are 3 short shitty action movies where you see an enemy trying to avoid your characters eh. I'm just not sure who this game is for, like tactical shooter fans wouldn't like an arcade game like this, and I don't think arcade fans would play a game like this at all.	2022/12/04
The Suffering (Xbox) Developer: Surreal Software Publisher: Midway Games Released: 2004 Genre: First-person shooter, third-person shooter, survival horror
I heard of this game but didn't know much about it, other than how you can transform into a monster and that it's pretty insane lol. This is the game where I learned about manual ACL patching with DVD2Xbox, because it didn't want to work and I couldn't find a patch online (it took me a while to figure out you can only patch games from its file explorer). The first thing I did was to watch that bonus documentary of that real haunted prison they used as an inspiration, it's so cool to have an extra like this in the game, it was really creepy and set the mood perfectly. You are playing as Torque who is on death row for killing his family, but he doesn't remember anything and thinks he is innocent. He is sent to this fucked up prison called Abbot State Penitentiary on Carnate Island, which has a history of fucked up things happening outside of the prison too, and when he arrives these monsters attack the place and start killing everyone, so you are basically trying to survive and escape the island somehow. I was a bit afraid it's gonna be scary but it's more like an action game and that's exactly what I want from horror games lol. It can be scary though sometimes when enemies just jump at you or when a random scary image pops up for a second with a screeching violin sound lol, and there are a lot of fucked up things happening like hallucinations, seeing a lot of monsters trying to kill your children or visions from the past of people getting killed, or just looking at the security camera monitor and seeing yourself with someone walking towards you but when you turn around there is no one there, it's so cool. Some of the characters are fucked up too, like child murderers, an insane doctor, little girls who got people burned for claiming they are witches, and enemies are like manifestations of how people got killed, like by blades, firing squad, gas, lethal injections, hanging, and you learn about them and the places you go through like the asylum (which is such a confusing place, I got lost all the time), caves, pirate ship, nazi plane crash site by archives you unlock. It's really cool that you can switch between third-person and first-person views, but I just used third-person because it was clearly designed to be played with that view and you can see Torque covered with blood after he massacres enemies lol. You have an insanity meter and when it gets full after killing enough enemies you can transform into this monster and just rip everyone apart lol, I barely used it because if you use it too much you can't get the best ending. But the morality system is more important, throughout the game you meet people who you can help and they will join you for a while, or you can decide to just kill them, and you hear your wife and some demon in your ear telling you what to do, obviously the good choice is listening to your wife. Boss fights can be tough, like that gas boss was the fucking worst, and the final boss is Torque's "hatred", a gigantic monster you need to kill, it was so hard to aim at it. With the good ending you remember who killed your family, you escape on a boat and you get a retrial. I watched the other endings too and the bad one was really fucked up, obviously you killed them in that one. So it's an awesome fucked up game but it was really buggy for some reason, like on that level with the raft guy it bugged the hell out, I had to restart it so many times until he finally started going, the music bugged out one time and sometimes I couldn't hear phone calls, and the inventory was a bit hard to use because the game doesn't pause. After you beat the game you can start a new game and you will get a bonus first level, and you can hear the director's voice explaining why it was cut and you wear a cowboy hat lmao. There is a bonus making of video (I always like these) and a trailer for Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy, which is another game I'm looking forward to play lol.	2022/11/21
Disney's Treasure Planet (PlayStation 2) Developer: Bizarre Creations Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment Released: 2002 Genre: Action-adventure, Platformer
I wanted to play this game for a long time, I liked the movie but it's more like I loved the concept of it, mixing the old colonial period with sci-fi and going through space in a fucking sailing ship, how cool is that? Previously my only option was that shitty strategy game on PC but no thanks lol, there is also a PlayStation game that's a totally different from this one, I might play that one day. For some reason the game didn't want to start and that's when I realized I need some years old OPL version to make it work because those fuckers keep breaking games with every update they release by adding useless shit instead of working on compatibility which is the ONLY thing that should matter. One thing I quickly realized as I was playing it that this game is exactly like Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, and I mean literally an exact clone of it, the same shitty inverted camera, the same moveset, the beacons which pop up like the orbs, the hoverboard levels, the green energy which is the same thing as the flies, Morph who is like your Daxter etc. But it's like eveything is worse here, the combat isn't that fluid, the platforming fucking sucks, I keep falling off shit and can't find stuff because the camera is so fucking terrible and the level design is confusing with samey looking enviroments. But it's not open world here, you are going through portals to reach new levels and that's why you need more beacons to open them (which doesn't really make sense if you know the movie, and especially after you already made it to Treasure Planet lol). There are two types of them, the on-foot levels and the hoverboard ones. Instead of the energies here there are Morph powers you can pick up and he transforms into a jetpack, an arm to pull levers, boots to make you faster, or a hammer to break things, all for a small amount of time so you gotta do it fast. The worst part is the stealth segments where you need to sneak past cops and if they see you they kick you back to the beginning, fuck it was so bad. And then there are the hoverboard levels, good lord... You gotta pass through rings in time, do timed races, tricks, chasing something, all by avoiding obstacles, it was so fucking bad holy shit. At some point I just stopped trying, one level I just skipped entirely because I couldn't accomplish any of the tasks. There are only a few boss fights but the final boss was especially painful because of the shitty camera and platforming, and then you get the final level which is a hoverboard one of course lol, you gotta reach the portal in time to escape, it took me forever to get through it. If you collect everything you get a shitty video with all the character and enemies, so I'm glad I didn't try to do that lol. This game wouldn't even been that bad if they just had a good camera, seriously fuck every single developer who forced inverted cameras in their games.	2022/11/12
Dead Man's Hand (Xbox) Developer: Human Head Studios Publisher: Atari Released: 2004 Genre: First-person shooter
The only thing I knew about this game was the cover which I saw in stores a lot, but for some reason I thought it's a shitty poker game because it was so cheap lmao. It's the first of the upcoming Wild West games, it looked like it could be fun so I decided to play it. It has a really nice manual, it looks like an old book from that era. You are some Mexican dude who was part of this gang but you didn't like that they killed women and kids so they betrayed and shot you, and some Mexican general captured you and put you in prison. You escape after a prison riot breaks out and you go on a journey through the West to hunt down the 9 leaders of this gang to have your revenge. It's like a very simple arcade shooter, you score points for shooting at hats, glasses, windows, barrels, causing explosions, or using the environment to kill enemies by shooting at big rocks or something. The score builds up your trick shot meter which you can use for secondary attacks. Before missions you can choose which pistol, rifle and shotgun you wanna use but honestly the starting ones are the best lol. Before levels you can play poker to get bonus health and ammo but I have no idea how to play poker, I never understood the rules so I just tried to pick the bigger numbers and sometimes got lucky lol. There are usually two levels per leaders, the first one is where you are killing his goons and trying to get to him, and the next one is the boss fight, but it's usually the same boring shit every time (fuck that boss fight with the dynamites though). Sometimes there are bonus levels too which can be different, like defending a fort or going through a mansion destroying shit to cause enough damage lol. I found some interesting easter eggs, like a purple rune which must be a reference to the previous game of the developers, Rune (which I played and liked it, but it was the Rune Classic version which is like a gimped version of it eh - oh and apparently they made Prey too, pretty cool) and one time I shot a watermelon and it said "Watermelon shot 1/3" but I kept destroying them on levels and I never saw it again and couldn't find anything about it on the internet, which isn't suprising because it's such a shitty game lol. The aiming is terrible and the framerate too when you are looking around. It's just so simple in a bad way, it feels like absolutely nothing, that's what this game is. Ironically the the on-rails horse riding levels are the only thing I enjoyed lol, it should have been a shitty rail shooter instead. At least it was short.	2022/11/06
Half-Life (PlayStation 2) Developers: Valve, Gearbox Software Publisher: Sierra Studios Released: 2001 Genre: First-person shooter
Obviously I heard of this game, I knew it was a huge deal because everyone was raving about it in magazines and you could still find it in stores in the mid 2000s and people were insanely hyped for Half-Life 2, but I just couldn't care less about this game and I never had any interest in playing it until now when I found out the PlayStation 2 version is actually a good port lol (because I'm not gonna play it on PC that's for sure). You are playing as Gordon Freeman, a scientist who works at a secret underground research facility, working on portals and teleportation to other dimensions I guess when your experiment goes wrong and suddenly aliens invade the facility through portals. So now you are trying to escape and find a way to close the portals, and after the beginning the government sends soldiers to kill aliens and everyone else to make sure no one finds out what happened so you have to deal with them too. What made this game revolutionary is the interactivity and the scripted sequences and all the extra details that happening in the background with NPCs and shit and you will notice them right at the beginning where you go through your daily routine to get ready for the experiment (and I guess the portals too, maybe Prey wasn't that revolutionary as I thought lol). Sometimes you can ask NPCs to follow you too and guards will help you kill enemies and scientists open doors to help you advance. Unfortunetly I have a lot of problems with this game, and I know some of it is unfair, like all I could think off that this is like Red Faction lol, and I know that's supposed to be the Half-Life clone but that's the one I played first. There are no subtitles which is especially bad here because the sound quality is so fucking terrible for some reason. The movement sucks ass, the character moves way too fucking fast it makes platforming really frustrating because I keep falling off from ladders and shit. At least I could change the aiming sensitivity and there is a lock-on button so the shooting isn't that bad, but the game can be hard sometimes and just turns into constant quick saving and reloading. And I guess it's the fault of the PlayStation 2 but sometimes it has bad framerate issues, can't believe this fucking console has trouble handling a PC game from 1998 lmao. Even though the scripted stuffs are impressive the game can softlock you if you miss something or don't jump on a lift in time which I didn't appreciate. And fucking hell it can be a buggy mess, and apparently the PC version has this one too (why couldn't they just fix it here?), like I couldn't kill that fucking Gonarch boss near the end but you can blow up the floor under it if you have enough explosives and then jump down to the portal, I don't even know how many days i wasted on this shit to finally get to the next level (and I saw it in the next level in the sky still trying to shoot at me lmao). I think the worst thing is how it just drags on forever, it felt really tedious to play just like Red Faction, and I would get lost all the time without a strategy guide. The final boss was also a pain in the ass to beat thanks to the shitty movement and platforming, but we get a really interesting ending with that guy in the suit who you see throughout the game, it kinda made me interested in playing Half-Life 2, now there is an Xbox version but it also came out on the Xbox 360 with all the expansions as part of The Orange Box collection with some other games so I might get that one. This one had 3 expansions, Half-Life: Decay came with this version but it's a co-op campaign so I didn't try it (I might watch it on YouTube), but Half-Life: Blue Shift, where you play as a security guy trying to escape with some scientists, was ported to the PlayStation 2 by some fan which is pretty cool so I played that one. And you know what, I think I had a better time with it, it's short and on point and doesn't drag on forever like the main game, I liked it. In Half-Life: Opposing Force you play as one of the soldiers, and this is being ported to the PlayStation 2 by the same guy but he is a Russkie and I think he got sent to the frontlines to die lmao, if not then I will play it too and maybe update this one later. I know I mostly just complained but it isn't really that bad, I'm just 20 years too late to experience this game unfortunately, I think you had to be there to truly appreciate it. And I still think Halo is the gold standard of that era's FPS games lol.	2022/10/30
Vanquish (Xbox 360) Developer: PlatinumGames Publisher: Sega Released: 2010 Genre: Action, third-person shooter
I found this game on a list, it's supposed to be a crazy fast-paced third-person shooter that's really short so that's why I thought maybe I shouldn't burn a disc and it would be a bit overwhelming, but then I said eh fuck it, it looks cool lol. In the future some evil Russkies capture a space station and use it as a weapon to destroy San Francisco and you gotta stop them before they destroy New York too. The space station is huge but it's kinda just the same grey color everywhere which is fine, the graphics are nice but kinda blurry and I checked it online just in case but it's blurry in videos too lol. You are Sam Gideon a DARPA agent who comes with the army in a badass armor suite lol to find a missing scientist, and you have a sexy blonde in short skirt to assist you from your ship. This fucking cool armored suite is what makes the game epic and unique, you have these tiny rockets on your leg so you can slide anywhere at high speed lmao but you can slow down time too, it's really a fast-paced game, you are supposed to play it by sliding everywhere and just destroying everything lol and recharging behind covers, I tried to do that but still it was kinda overwhelmnig to me (and I had to play on Casual difficulty because I knew my shitty brain wouldn't be able to handle this game). As you go through the space station you destroy robots in all kind of sizes, from tiny little ones to giant fucking walking fortresses lmao. You basically have one weapon that transforms into 3 other ones you pick (and then have two kinds of grenades), and you can upgrade weapons by picking up the same one when your ammo is full. What makes it really cool is the insane shits you can do, like lighting up a cigarette and throwing it away to distract enemies, slowing down time when you throw a grenade and shooting it for extra damage or shooting down incoming missiles like that, and the epic QTEs like beating the shit out of a robot's head lmao or that awesome sword fight lol (or just dumb shit like those dancing robots lmao). And the game rewards you with achievements by killing enemies in a cool way or accomplishing things in a certain way. There are these tiny statues as collectibles but I could barely find any, but you get detailed statistics after every mission like how many allies you saved or how much time you spent under cover. There is a nice twist at the end (lmao at what the president did) and you get a cliffhanger ending which is a shame because we never got a sequel. And lol at that end credits, it's basically a rail shooter where you need to destroy meteors which are the developers, it's really clever and probably the best end credits I've seen. There is no multiplayer but apparently there is a challenge mode but you need to beat it at least on Normal so I couldn't try it out. Shame it's such a short game and that there is no sequel because I had a lot of fun playing it.	2022/10/29
James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing (Xbox) Developer: EA Redwood Shores Publisher: Electronic Arts Released: 2004 Genre: Third-person shooter
One of the first games I played on my Xbox after I softmodded it were James Bond 007: Agent Under Fire and James Bond 007: Nightfire, I don't even know why because I never cared about the movies lol. The second game is technically better in every possible way but still I enjoyed the first one more. Those were first-person shooters but in this game they switched to third-person, I guess to show off Pierce Brosnan who finally voiced the character lol. I usually play PAL versions because I genuinely can't tell the difference (and I don't think there is any difference in speed in games after 2000) but this game doesn't work from the HDD without a patch and only the NTSC version had one (later I realized I could just patch everything manually with DVD2Xbox lol). But the game launched right into the first mission and I couldn't see cutscenes or the menu, that's when I realized I'm supposed to switch to NTSC video mode to play NTSC games... I never had any problem like this before because I have PAL-60 enabled and it just switches to that if the game supports 60 Hz (and I thought it works like the PlayStation 2 where it switches automatically), either way changing the video mode fixed it and I could play the game. Besides the regular actors from the movies we have some famous chicks too and Willem Dafoe who plays a Russian guy who wants to take over the world with nanobots, so you are trying to find out what's happening and chase him all over the world. It sucked that there is no aiming and you need to lock onto enemies, I wanted a normal fucking third-person shooter. And it's hard (especially that part where you are falling down from a cliff, it took me forever), but missions are kinda short and sometimes have checkpoints. You can earn Bond moments by doing cool shit like taking down enemies with the environment lol. You have a bunch of gadgets you can use, my favorite was the grappling gun which you can use to climb up and down from buildings lol. But I like the gadgets in the other games, some of them doesn't make any sense like I couldn't figure out how to use that network tap gun or some grenades, they just randomly worked sometimes. There are a lot of vehicle missions, like almost half of the game, and they control like shit like it's from Need for Speed: Underground (I actually tried playing that game but dropped it because the cars controlled like dogshit and I hate that tuning bullshit), but at least the cars look really nice with the reflections. The last missions was fucking nervewrecking with the hordes of enemies you have to fight your way through, the final boss was easy as fuck compared to it lol. You get a nice bonus video after the credits with the voice actors, and there are things you can unlock based on your mission scores, like concept arts, behind the scene pics, upgrades, new sexy outfits for the ladies lol, or a new bonus mission too. And two new game modes, VR challenge rounds and survival modes, but they suck lol. It actually has a different co-op campaign for multiplayer which is pretty cool but I couldn't try it out alone, along with the normal multiplayer because it doesn't have bots. But I realized the other two games have bots which I didn't know so I downloaded James Bond 007: Agent Under Fire again first and a save that unlock everything and I'm having a lot of fun with it, especially with low gravity setting and jetpacks enabled lol.	2022/10/28
Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood (Xbox 360) Developer: Ubisoft Montreal Publisher: Ubisoft Released: 2010 Genre: Action-adventure, stealth
Man it's finally here, I can't believe I waited two years to play the next mainline Assassin's Creed game after that insane ending, I was so excited to see where the story goes next. And it continues right where the second game ended like literally, you are in that chamber wondering what the fuck just happened when your uncle shows up and you escape, and it seemed like I had the same equipment lol I guess it checked my save which is pretty cool. The first memory is basically the tutorial, the Borgias attacked your villa when you arrived home, killed your uncle and took the Apple of Eden. So you go to Rome to take it back and have your revenge for real this time. To be honest pretty much everything is the same in this game lol, but instead of a couple big cities you have one huge one with its countryside. Rome is so cool though especially how you can go to the Pantheon or to the Colosseum, the city looks beautiful and the graphics are noticably better too. Because it's a huge city you can ride horses anywhere and there are tunnels you can use for fast travel. You can leave the Animus anytime too, in fact you have to because some memories take place in real life which is another cool thing. And you can hang out in the city and look for artifacts, talk to your team members and check emails. There is virtual training you can do which I guess are like challenge stages, I only did a few of them. I finally figured out the combat in Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines but of course they changed it here lmao, you can't just use counterattack, most enemies have a specific way of defeating them, and there are executions which are basically combo finishers where you get insta kills with all the enemies around you if you press at the right time. Some of those eagle towers are controlled by enemy soldiers and you have to liberate them by killing the captain there and then burning down the tower which liberates the district and you can open shops, tunnels, famous buildings or repair viaducts there. They are also related to the biggest addition which is the Brotherhood system. You can recruit assassins (the more towers you liberate the more you can hire) and send them on missions all over Europe to level them up, and use them in battles to assassinate people or use their arrow attacks to kill everyone lol. There are a lot of secondary missions in this one too, you will do missions for different guilds (and they also have challenges which reward you with good weapons if you complete them all), destroy war machines (you can actually use them too in those missions, like a tank, a ship, a machine gun and a plane lol), replay some memories with that girl from Firenze who Ezio loved, catacombs where you find treasures and get the Armor of Brutus if you complete them all (which doesn't look as good as Altaïr's nice black armor) and find those hidden glyphs with the puzzles like that video from Assassin's Creed II, but here you actually go inside the glitch and play through it to unlock the message, it wasn't as cool as the previous one but it's still interesting, a nice mystery. There are also collectibles, Borgia flags, treasure chests (which give you items too you can sell or use them for those shop quests to unlock new stuff) and just a few feathers, I felt compelled to collect everything here too but it definitely felt more tedious this time. It was so cool that you could use the Apple of Eden near the end of the game, you can charge it up and kill most people instantly or turn them against each other, it was fucking awesome lmao. There is a big epic boss battle at the end, then you go back to present day to find the Apple, and you get another wtf ending, it doesn't hit as hard as Assassin's Creed II's insane ending, it's more like wow ok that just happened. It also had multiplayer but I couldn't try it. I really enjoyed it and it's great but it doesn't feel as insanely better as Assassin's Creed II was to Assassin's Creed, it's more like just an improved Assassin's Creed II. I really like the story in these games but I need to make sure it won't take me another two years to play the next game lmao.	2022/10/11
Beyond Good & Evil (Xbox) Developer: Ubisoft Pictures Publisher: Ubisoft Released: 2003 Genre: Action-adventure, stealth game
Beyond Good & Evil means a lot to me. I was so excited for this game after reading about it in magazines, it sounded like a game I would really love and actually it's one of the few games I bought for PC. I played it for a while but then I had to reinstall Windows, I wanted to continue playing it so I saved the save files (I still have them!) but later I realized I forgot a file and I couldn't use them. But to be fair it fucking sucked on PC, the controls were terrible and you could clearly tell it was designed to be played with a controller and I could immediately tell that again when I started playing it on Xbox. It was one of my top priorities to play this game after I softmodded my Xbox and it's weird it took me this long, even now when I got there in the release order I was still looking for excuses to not to play it, I guess it's so important to me that I wasn't ready for it and I didn't want to get disappointed. First thing I noticed was the fucking letterbox which you can't turn off, like you are forced to play in 16:9 which sucks, I can't even imagine playing this on a small TV lol. But as I was playing it again on the first day all the memories came rushing back, the lighthouse and the characters who I loved so much (the place is so comfy it made me want to live in a lighthouse), the beautiful sky, the animals, the dog who reminded me of my dog, it was so magical to experience them again. I remembered everything like it was yesterday, the hovercraft, the big flying monster who attacks you on the sea, Mammago Garage, the city, the minigame at the bar with the shark, that Propaganda song lol, the races, the island where you need to take a picture of the DayZ monster, all the way up to part where you are in the factory and trying to find Double H, I think that's where I stopped playing. The story is one of the reasons why this game caught my eyes, you are playing as a cute girl named Jade who lives in a lighthouse with her humanoid pig "uncle" Pey'j and a bunch of orphans when the aliens called DomZ attack and after you defeat them the Alpha Section, who are a military unit that fights the DomZ, shows up. To pay the bills and get the shield back up to prevent another attack on the lighthouse she finds a job to photograph creatures for a museum, and then gets a job offer from some mysterious guy to take a photo of some creatures in an abandoned mine. This turns out to be a test by the underground resistance group called IRIS Network. They suspect the Alpha Section and the DomZ work together and they are behind the kidnappings, and they want you to find proof so they can launch a revolt. So you go from one location to another, sneaking around and trying to find proof and take a photo of it. Combat is alright, you fight with a stick and can do range attacks with gyrodisks, and your companion can help out too with special attacks, which can be used to solve puzzles too. The camera was kinda weird, sometimes I couldn't really see shit, and the jumping and climbing being automatic was weird too. I think the worst part of the game is the stealth when you are trying to avoid Alpha Section soldiers, they can fuck you up easily and it was so hard when you had to pass through a bunch of them. You make money by taking photos of creatures and after every roll film you get a pearl. Pearls are used to purchase upgrades for your hovercraft, you can get them by looking around the city trying to find doors you can unlock with keycards you find during missions, winning races, chasing looters in a cavern, winning them in minigames or by killing certain flying enemies or bosses. Collecting them all gives you a pearl game disc you can play lol, and there is also a save code you can use online to unlock another disc in game for that shark minigame. It was so awesome when you get a flying ship near the end and you can fly above the islands, it's such a cute world. And then you go to space which was just wow, it looked incredible. Another hard part was the final boss where the controls change lol I could barely adjust to it. I'm happy to say that I wasn't disappointed at all, it's such a cute game and I love it so much, it really is a heartwarming experience. It sort of ends with a cliffhanger but unfortunately we never got a sequel. I remember a leaked footage and a trailer from the late 2000s and I was so excited but of course it never came out. There was another modern shitty game in development a few years ago but it lacked all the charm and looks like that one is dead too thankfully.	2022/10/07
Downhill Domination (PlayStation 2) Developer: Incognito Entertainment Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment Released: 2003 Genre: Racing
One night I was watching a video from the 2003 E3 and it had a short clip of this game where bikes go down on an insane mountain slope crazy fast and you can kick and throw bottles at other bikers lol. I never really cared about extreme sports games and the only one I played was SSX 3 on my friend's Xbox back in like 2005, I wanted to like it but I'm way too fucking dumb to remember those complicated combos. But man this game looked so much fun, it reminded me of Burnout with its insane speed so I ignored my early PlayStation 2 games first rule to play it next (and then tried to find similar games on the Xbox). I really wanted to like this too but man it's so hard for me, I can't train my brain to focus on tricks and not hitting something at the same time when I'm going crazy fast. I switched to easy after a few races so that definitely helped, but still I forgot the tricks and the controller sucks ass, I can barely press the shoulder buttons on this tiny piece of shit, especially 4 of them at the same time. But to be honest it's still fun to just race like crazy and press random buttons here and there when I'm in the air lol. There are so much crazy shit on the map lol, like rams and deers and monks, Russkie soldiers, tourists to evade, or lava, thunders and shit, insane jumps, mines, a city to go through, it has really fun locations, and sometimes trails marked by black diamonds which are harder to navigate through but you can get more points. There are some pickups too, the green one gives you more energy so you can keep sprinting, the red gives you an insane speed bonus for a few seconds, the yellow is combat upgrade, the more you pick up the better weapons you have, and purple for more points and orange to get up immediately after you crash. And there are a lot of game modes (even though they are kinda the same), Super Career is the big one, you go through every map with 3 different modes (the last 4 races were hard, luckily you don't have to finish first, you get points for like the top 4 places and you can progress after a couple of retries), Freeride (I guess that's the normal race), Mountain Cross (short motocross race more focused in tricks and jumps) and Technical Downhill (similar to the first one but harder and more shit to avoid), and then there is Specialized Career which is all three separately (you can also make your own under Custom Tournament). Freestyle is basically a trick objective based mode, you don't race anyone just gotta complete the specific set of tricks to complete a course. To my suprise I was able to complete the first one somehow lol but of course I was stuck on the next one and I hate this trick shit anyway so no thank you, that was enough. There is an Arcade mode too but again it's like the same thing as the other career modes, the only difference is you can only use stock bikes, in other modes you can upgrade them and unlock pro bikes which have better stats (and sponsor shirts too like eBay, Amazon, Mountain Dew lmao). You earn money from races and that's how you unlock those, but actually you need to unlock a lot of shit, like music, racers and cheats too, and two game modes: in Moshbowl you basically just fight in a small arena lmao, I only played it once but it was fine, and Super Jump where you go down on an insane ramp from the skies for a gigantic jump lol, you are supposed to land to pass it and you can land on multipliers but I couldn't figure out how and just kept crashing lmao. Oh and of course the usual time trial which I'm not gonna touch lol, I'm sure there are more for multiplayer but I can't test those. It's pretty much the only PlayStation 2 game I won't delete because it can be played for fun anytime. Still though I was hoping to enjoy it more, but I'm just too dumb for games like this.	2022/09/30

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