June 2016 Retro Game purchases.

 So another month over and another months worth of retro game purchasing to talk about. It hasnt been the best of months but there have been a few highlights here and there that have made me quiet happy so rather than prattle on I will get straight in to it.

On Friday June the 3rd after finishing at work I decided to nip into a little local independent store. They had a plastic tub of loose gameboy and gameboy color cartridges on the till So I decided to dive in and have a look, there were prices on some of them ranging from £2 to £5 but no prices on others so I had a look through them and began talking to the person behind the counter. In the end I ended up with 6 cartridges in my hand and haggled managing to get a price of £15 for all of them. I got 2 loose gameboy carts and 4 loose Gameboy Color carts. The Gameboy carts were CastleVania Adventure and Road Rash with the Gameboy Color carts being WWF Betrayal, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Emperors new groove and Tiny Toons Dizzys Candy Quest. I was very happy with this purchase as I have often seen Castlevania go for around this on its own and its something I remember enjoying in the past, although I think when I get around to giving it another bash I will do so by playing it through my SNES using the Super Gameboy adaptor.

On the way home I also popped in to a charity shop and managed to grab Medal of Honour Underground complete for the PS1 for £1 and Armoured Core 2 for playstation 2 for £1

 

On monday the 6th I hit the local charity shops again and picked up a bunch of PS2 stuff. I got Knight Rider 2 The game complete for 50pence, ESPN Konami X games Skateboarding complete for 50pence, ESPN Konami International Track and Field complete for 50 pence, Starsky & Hutch complete for 50pence, Robot Warlords boxed but with no manual for 50pence, Midway Arcade Treasures complete for £1 and Dirge Of Cerberus Final Fantasy VII complete for £1. Mostly its the last two I was excited about, hate to go all nerdy fan boy but I love pretty much everything final fantasy and well there are lots of awesome games on Midway Arcade Treasures.

 

 On the 7th after work I went to my local play time and grabbed Dark Rift for N64 (loose cart), and Top Gear Overdrive for N64 (loose cart) for £8, and although these wernt proberbly the best prices for them it did put me on a bit of a game wanting kick so I travelled half way home and popped into an indy store where I managed to convince them to sell me the following for £14 Global Gladiators for megadrive (loose cart), Chase HQ for gameboy (loose cart), Chase HQ Secret Police for gameboy color (loose cart), The Empire Strikes back for Gameboy (loose Cart), Cooking Mama 3 complete for DS and Professor Layton Pandoras Box complete for DS. The best part of this is proberbly The Empire strikes back as I have seen it frequently sell for this much on its own, but I also have to admit I have a very soft spot for the entire Chase HQ franchise, I seriously wish they would make a modern one (although I guess some of the need for speed games have kind of gone down that kind of route).

 

The following day I went to some local charity shops again and managed to grab a boxed action replay for the N64 for £8, Cold War for the originnal Xbox boxed but with no manual for 50pence

Ghost Recon 2 for the original xbox complete for 50pence and Rayman M for the PS2 complete for 50pence. The action replay is something that could come in useful and checking up on it online people certain ask for a lot more when selling them through ebay and amazon and such.

On the 9th I went tto a charity shop and grabbed The Suffering for the original Xbox complete for £2

and I also spent £2 on a boxed Forza Motorsport pre order only disk, proberbly a stupid purchase as it only contains demo's and stuff but it was something I hadnt seen before and I did try to use my phone to have a look for any info I could find about it online but I couldnt find anything.

The following day I went to a local indy and spent £8 on Clock Tower 3 for the PS2 complete and a copy of  Mickey Mania for the SNES I had orderd a day or two before arrived, it was £3.50 for a loose pal cart including postage so I cant grumble at all, I also nipped in Granger games and got a copy of Moto GP for the psp complete for £1, The next day I saw another Mickey Mania cart for £3.50 and as I figured its a good price I grabbed it which I know proberbly sounds stupid but I just figured why not. I also spent 99pence on a boxed wii speak from Game, yeah its proberbly of no use but it was kind of cool to find one still in its box with all the packaging.

It actually wasnt until the 17th when I next picked something up, I went in a charity shop and got

SmackDown Just bring it (platinum edition) complete for ps2 for 50pence. I dont know who owned this before but sheesh would I like to buy more second hand games theyve owned its like its never been touched which considering its age, where I found it and its price is overall pretty darn good.

It wasnt until the 26th when I would next buy something, I got the following during a trip to my local Playtime, Lord of the Rings the Third age GBA cart only £2, Top Gear Rally GBA cart only £2, Sonic Chaos Game Gear cart only £3 and Major Title SNES cart only £2. II have never played the Third age on the GBA but I adore it on the Gamecube, PS2 and Xbox so im kind of excited to see what a cut down version will be like. One bad piece of news though is that it kind of turns out I got stung on the Top Gear, its actually a counterfit, it works and the whole game appears to be there but still its a little bit sucky, I guess it will remind me to not be quiet so quick to rush and buy something in the future, its not the only counterfit GBA game I have but it is the first I have rushingly purchased believing it to be real.

The following day I went into a indy shop and managed to get some PSP games complete for 75pence each, Crash of the Titans, Daxter, Secret Agent Clank, Rathcet and Clank:Size Matters, Medal Of Honour heroes. 

I finshed the month today by getting Fun n Games on the Snes cart only for £3.

 

The things I am most excited to have gotten this month would be Empire Strikes back and Castlevania adventure for the Gameboy and Clock Tower 3 for the PS2.

 

Having spent  in the region of £90 for the month I cant help but think I spent to much, but still I guess plenty of people just jump straight online and seek out a particular game or two and spend far more just getting those, at least I am spending some of my time looking for things and I enjoy the hunt just as much as the games themselves.

 

 

Why I missed E3 and which PS4 games I fancy from it.

Well some might wonder why I didnt write anything about E3 while it was happening or just after it had happend, well in my defense I am a blog not a news site. I will admit something here though and that is the basic fact that I tottally ignored E3 while it was all going on. Why did I do this? Well there are a couple of reasons, one of them being that as I have previously mentioned have a new girlfriend who I have been spending a fair degree of time with but the other reason is that having also made a new friend who is intrested in retro games has kind of reignited my passion for old games. Plus there has been a crazy amount of things I have wanted to write about to the point that its held me back as I couldnt decide which one to go with, I was almost going to talk about the ''some feminists'' who ruined a Betty Paige murial, or Brexit, or how stoked I was about Dean Ambrose winning the main WWE belt (cause I am super stoked) but in the end I decided a late E3 post was the way to go.

OK to start with I think I should mentuion that I tend to go through phases of being super into modern games and then super into retro games, yeah sure sometimes I will play a little Sonic and then jump on to Fallout 4 but in honesty a lot of the time I seem to have my feet planted firmly on one side of the fence. I have also been back to back watching the whole of Buffy the Vampire Slayer after having picked up a box set of all 7 seasons for £10 in a second hand shop.  This Buffy onslaught will proberbly lead to a post all of its own at some point but lets just say that at the moment I have been more inclined to sink time in to a  long game, so most of my play time recently has been taken up with quick blasts of pick up and play retro goodness, including most of a day spent playing Perfect Dark on the N64 with my above mentioned new friend.given all of this E3 just wasnt a priority for me.

I dont live under a rock though, sure I might not have sat and refreshed various web pages and live streams while E3 was on but I have of course heard about the various announcments and watched clips that relate to titles I like the sound of. So here is just a taste of some of what I am excited about, for now I am going to keep it purly to the upcoming PS4 treats which are on my mind.

Friday the 13th: The Game (PS4)

Ok so I am obviously going to be a big mark for this bearing in mind that I have wrote so much about horror. The Friday the 13th films are something I absolutly adore, I can not get enough Jason, sure at times they might be a little silly but there also gory, atmospheric and awesome

This game doesnt look like a graphical masterpiece or anything but it does look very true to Friday the 13th and by that I mean true to the original films not the so so remake.Is it going to be a buy on release thing? Well I am not sure I guess I will have to see how it looks closer to release. I seldom buy games on the day of release because so many games even good ones are litterally on sale a week or two latter for £10 to £20 cheaper than they launched at, but I will deffinetly be keeping my eyes on this one. A Jason X skin as an unlockable would be pretty cool, although knowning the modern gaming world it would be more likly to be a £3.99 piece of DLC, which would not be cool. (I so need to write a piece about how lame it is that stuff which used to be thrown in to games as little cool unlockable tid bits is now farmed for far more cash than it is really worth).

 

Spiderman (PS4)

 

Ok so what can I say about Spiderman other than Wowzers really a Spiderman game by Insomniac? One which does not have the burden of having its plot tied to a film, hell to the yes. Lets just say that there work on Sunset Overdrive coupled with my love of SpiderMan as a character added to the fact that they have the freedom to just take the character his world, years and years of characters and plots and run with it due to it not being tied to a movie has me just hoping that this can reach the heights of SpiderMan 2 on the GameCube a game I spent a heck of a long time on it, loving every single moment of it. In honesty I have even managed to eek out a fair bit of enjoyment from even some of the lesser SpiderMan titles just through the share love of getting to be SpiderMan for awile. Again I find myself harping on and on about alternative costumes but I really hope that they stuff this game with unlockable costumes from SpiderMan's comics, the Symbiote suit, the Scarlet Spider costume, SpiderMan 2099 ecetera. Again I hope they throw this in to make the game awesome as apposed to charging dollar dollar per suit or making them pre-order bonuses you can only get if you agree to pre-order it from a specific shop, a shop which then knowing how much people will want it can slap on whatever price they see fit knowing some people will need to have it no matter what.

A look at making the most of Xbox One backwards compatability

Since the release of Xbox One Backward Compatibility Xbox One uses have been able to play certain Xbox 360 titles on their Xbox Ones, with more titles being added regularly to the list of available games. Since the update which added backwards compatability all of the Xbox 360 games added to games with gold have been ones which are playable on the Xbox One. There are other games however ones which although compatable havent been offerd for free yet, however if you have already purchased them then you can download them on your Xbox One or you can pay the xbox live asking price or wait for a sale involving said title or you can get creative and make the most of backwards compatability with the least money possible.

Capcoms DarkVoid is £14.99 via Xbox Live, which well a lot of peope would proberbly say is not worth it after all it didnt receive the gretest reviews only scoring a metacritic score of 59, however I actually found it a pretty darn fun game, going so far as to complete it twice. I wont get in to a discusion of whether this old game is worth spending £14.99 on digitally because I want to point out the fact that you can buy a second hand physical copy of this game for so little that you have almost nothing to loose, in fact I picked up a complete copy from my local granger game today for £1 and its not like granger is your only option CEX apparently only charge 80pence for it, Game will deliver a second hand copy for £1.99. With disc-based games that are a part of the Back Compat game catalog, all you have to do is insert the disc and the console will begin downloading the game to your hard drive. After the game has finished downloading, you will still need to keep the game disc in the drive to play. Yeah its not as good as just having it digitally there but it is a very cheap usefull way of trying out the backwards compatability function and enjoying more games without spending much.

A full list of current compatable games can be found here https://majornelson.com/blog/xbox-one-backward-compatibility/ some of them are arcade only download titles but others are available on disc for very little not just Dark Void.Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2 are cracking games which can also be grabbed from CEX, Game or Granger
for pretty much the same price. Gears of War 1, 2 and 3 as well as Mass Effect, border lands and Alan Wake can all be got for pretty much sub £5... At the very least its worth taking a look at the list and keeping your eyes open to take advantage of the awesomeness that is backwars compatability.

Why FootLoose is one of the greatest films ever

OK so I am here once again to talk about how a particular film is one of the greatest things that has ever existed as worthy of praise as almost any book, and you know what this film is? It is the 1980's classic FootLoose staring Kevin Bacon (yes the same Kevin Bacon I raved about in HollowMan).

I attended a religious school where the bible was always being used to try to tell us who to be and how to live, it was being used to try to teach us what we should find to be right and to be wrong. It was in this very school that I would get attacked by sometimes groups of three to six kids who were older than me just for being tubby, then when I would end up in the head teachers office nursing a black eye I would get told off and told the old bible passage about turning the other cheek and how disappointed they were in me for having retaliated with my own punches. I wasn't an idiot though, I knew the bible was a quiet contradictory piece of literature but I would not have dared point this out at least not until my mother showed me FootLoose, this film and its impact was huge on me. It taught me how to face up to authority in the right way, how to stand up and make your point in a manner where by they couldn't help but at least hear you out.

Now when first watching FootLoose some might see it as just a film about dancing but it is so much more than that, its a film about a new kid trying to find his place in society, in school when this particular society has outlawed the one thing he feels he is good at and that is dancing. You see dancing is frowned upon in this town because they link it to drinking and youngsters misbehaving and fornicating. Those in power in the town council have done this because the local priest has persuaded them that if they stop the dancing they will stop all of these other things and he managed to do it because everyone was scared for there childrens lives due to a death which had happend.

Sounds kind of simple right its a case of ''the old foggies'' just dont get our hip new young thing. Well you could see it in that way, but its also a look at how people in general assign a value to particular activities, for example a punk rock concert can be called meaningless drivel where an opera is seen as being sophisticated, this is what sociologists would call Cultural capital. This is not just a film about a guy standing up for dancing, this is a film about someone standing up for what they believe in, standing up for there right to enjoy there own personal hobby, there form of expression.

What this film demenstrates is how to fight back not with violence or screaming but how to stand your ground using logic and reason, how to debate a point in a calm reasonable manner. If something brings you pleasure then fight for it but not with violence or with anger but with calm determination. if everyone learned to use there words and there reasoning as well as recognising that cultures other than there own have value then the world would be a much better place.

Oh and in the spirit of FootLoose here is a biblical quote ''There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens'' To all of those who were stuck up and had an issue with my likes and dislikes the hobbies I have and had well its time for you to fuck off.