My Retro Purchases in November 2018

On the 6th of November I started my months retro purchases by visiting a bunch of charity shops where for the grand total of £7.50 I got 5 complete switch games (Mario Kart Wii, Super Mario Galaxy, Mini Ninjas, Sonic and the secret rings, and Lego StarWars the complete saga) 2 original Playstation games (This is football and F1 World Grand prix) and Tetris 2 for GameBoy, not a bad start to the month at all.

Then on the 12th of the month I grabbed 4 psp games at £1 each from a local charity shop while taking a stroll to get milk, I got medal of honor heroes, medal of honor heroes 2, Socom Tactical strike and Ace Combat X skies of deception, there was another 2 game cases there but some absolute dick had stolen the games they were not anything earth shattering but its just so annoying that people will steal stuff that is being sold for next to sod all and therefore rob charities of cash.

On the 19th I grabbed Time Splitters 2 For Xbox complete for 50pence and Medal of Honor frontline (platinum) for GameCube complete for 50pence from a charity shop. Time Splitters 2 is a game I hold very fond memories of, I got it originally on the GameCube pretty darn soon after its release and its just one of those games that is so much fun particularly if a bunch of you play it together.

On the 28th I spent £3.50 on a cartridge only copy of Rad Gravity for the NES, which I was very happy with because to be honest pretty much anytime you can get a none sports NES title for under £5 is a good time.

On the 29th I  went to a charity shop and got a nice little haul for £2.50. I got Hardcore 4x4 for PlayStation complete, Tomb Raider 2 disc and manual in a CD case with its real cover cut to fit in this, Tekken Tag Tournament (Platinum version) complete for ps2, StarWars Starfighter complete for ps2 and Taito Legends complete for PS2.

So in total this month I spent £18.50 which makes this a pretty small month expense wise, but I am glad with what I have got and that I haven't spent that much on it. I don't think that there is any stand out item that I got but I think in general I got some darn cool stuff and I am very happy with what I spent on it.

A RockStar Ate My Hamster My YouTube Review

My oppinion on Intelligent Cube and Jumping Flash being on the PlayStation Classic

OK so back to the PlayStation classic and my opinion on the games on it. For a start lets take a look at Intelligent Qube. Well you might have seen this game on the list of PlayStation games on the classic and shaken your head and gone ''what the heck is that'' well if your in Europe like I am then that might be because when the game was originally released here on the PlayStation it was released under the title Kurushi. Now I could lie and pretend that I had owned this game or that I had some story about how it was important to me to try and make this a good post but in total honesty the closest I ever got to this game was sampling it in a PlayStation Demo disc, it was a disc I remember also containing one of the Abe oddworld games but in all honesty all I ever did was have a few little go's on it and its not something that has really stuck with me. I can see why they would put it on the Classic, it was originally published by Sony and apparently it was very very popular in Japan. I guess with the fact that Sony published it would make it easy to get onto the system and well if your going by the idea that you want a full shooter a few RPG's a couple of puzzlers then this would definitely help you reach that kind of quota. I can hardly remember how the game worked so I am not very excited about it at all and I would personally have liked to have seen the space being used by a different title. 

One game I do have fond memories of though which has made it to the PlayStation classic is Jumping Flash, a game in which you play a metal high jumping rabbit in a 3D world. One of the things which makes this game interesting is that it was a very early PlayStation game coming out just after the machines release and has been described as an ancestor of as well as an early showcase for 3D graphics in console gaming. For me this game kind of represents a certain kind of game in a certain state at a certain point in time and this is kind of what I think these Mini Classic consoles are supposed to do, there supposed to capture and represent a particular point in video game history and the feel of a particular machine. It was generally well received by critics when it was released, it was praised for both its graphics as well as its unique 3D platforming game-play. This is a game that I am actually quiet happily surprised to see on the machine, but I can see why some people would argue for something else to take its place, something which has kind of been remembered by more people. There are plenty of games which are not on the machine which I would happily trade Jumping Flash for like Silent Hill and Symphony of the Night but there is certainly a lot of games I would throw off the machine before Jumping Flash.

I think my opinion on these two games probably showcases the real problem with these classic consoles, someone will probably read my opinion and go urgh why does he hold Jumping Flash in high regard and thinks it belongs while trying to get rid of Intelligent Qube, does this man not realize how great Intelligent Qube is and how much it represents the machine while others probably wonder what the heck either of these games are and thinks of Tekken and Ridge Racer when thinking about the PlayStation.

A bit about the PlayStation things I have been doing recently and if I am actually going to get a Playstation Classic?

So I guess with the PlayStation Classic being just around the corner I have been thinking about PlayStations an awful lot recently. For one I found myself setting up a PlayStation 2 so that I could play PlayStation 1 and 2 games but also because I had some equipment I wanted to mess with. I had a second hand PS2 I had grabbed from a charity shop ages OK with all its leads for like £10, and then I had a network/hard drive adapter I had spent like £3 on.  To be honest I had purchased this adapter not realizing I was supposed to have a official disc to set it up. I had an old Hard-drive a 40gig model I had grabbed cheap for, £2 and then I had this memory card with software on it which was supposed to help you use programs on your PS2 so you could burn games to the hard drive and play them. In the end I got it up and running and despite being disappointed that I couldn't burn PS1 games to it I did start going through my PS2 games and putting a few on the Hard drive and showing my daughter a few I didn't think she had played before.

Then last night I hit the PSN store and spent around £12 on there and got a load of PS1 games for the vita/ps3/ Vita TV I have. I got Crash Bandicoot 1,2 and 3, Spyro 1,2 and 3, Metal Gear solid, Silent Hill, and Crash Team Racing. Add these to the thirty PS1 download games my PS3 informs me I have on its hard-drive and I guess I now own nearly 40 of these games digitally and that's if I don't want to trouble myself by getting my disc collection out. Now one of the reasons I mention this is because I have been pondering if I should get the PS Classic or not, but when I put all of the above down in writing it doesn't really seem like the best of deals to be honest. If the machine ends up hack-able then this might alter things, or if I was to see some kind of deal on one, heck I might even get excited on the morning of release and run out and get one or decide as an amateur games journalist I just have to have it for reviewing so I guess I wont be overly confident in saying I am not going to be getting one.

My next PlayStation Classic post will be another one looking at a few of the games but for now I just wanted to talk about if I was going to get one or not and what I had been doing recently with one of my PlayStation 2's (Yes I have more than one, because I am a bit of a sad collector who always worries stuff will break one day).

My oppinion on Grand Theft Auto being on the PlayStation Classic and why Id prefer to have parisite eve like the Japanese.

So once again I am going to take a title that has been announced for the PlayStation Classic and seem if it deserves its place on the unit or not, and if it doesn't then what should be put in its place.

OK so I can definitely see why they have put the original Grand Theft Auto on to the PlayStation Classic, after all the 5th entry in the series has literally been a license to print money and has thrust the series in to a position where it is essentially one of the highest earning media products ever. The thing is the GTA brand is now so huge that I can totally see why they want to have it on the system but in reality for me at least GTA is not a PlayStation game, yes yes I know it came out on the PlayStation and that therefore it can be argued makes it a PlayStation game but it doesn't make me think PlayStation in the way that a title like Ridge Racer does. The game is a fun game and I certainly think that lots of people will have fun with it if they pick up the unit but in my opinion when the unit is limited to 20 titles this title is kind of filling a slot which I think something else could better fill.

For an example of a title which I think would fill the slot better I will turn to the Japanese PlayStation Classic list and pick out Parasite Eve and argue that despite the game probably having less name recognition over here that I think it would in fact be a better fit. OK for those who don't know about Parasite Eve it was a game which came out in 1998 it was an action role-playing video game which was developed and published by Square. Strangely it was actually a sequel to a novel which probably helps explain why in my opinion it has a pretty great story. Parasite Eve was to the best of my knowledge actually SquareSoft's first M-rated game,as well as being the first major American and Japanese game development collaboration for the company. So when you think about all of this it actually makes it a pretty darn interesting game historically and Square was very much one of the most important 3rd party companies for the original PlayStation so I don't think it can really be over represented. The story has you following a police officer who is attempting to stop a woman who plans to destroy the whole human race, you explore levels set in New York while using a real-time combat system and several role playing game elements, it game out to a lot of praise. I wouldn't say the game is greatly re-playable once you have finished it, but i certainly think most people would get more fun and time out of going through this once than just occasionally messing around on GTA, after all I have never managed to get the urge to complete either of the first grand Theft Auto's as far as I can remember all I have gotten out of them is 30 or 40 minutes of randomly blowing stuff up and then fighting the police etc.

My oppinion on Destruction Derby and Final Fantasy VII being on the PlayStation Classic , and the issue with diffrent regions Roms being used on the system.

OK so more information seems to have come out about the Sony PlayStation Classic now that a few sites online have had test units, and apparently Some games are the SCEA versions, and some are the SCEE ones, this in itself seems a little bit weird but to start with lets talk about what I mean by SCEA and SCEE. SCEA are the American versions and SCEE are the European versions, the American Versions usually ran at 60hz while the European versions ran at 50hz this usually meant that American and Japanese games were around 20% faster than there European counterparts. Games were often programmed at 60hz and then essentially forced into 50hz for Europe sometimes with optimization but usually without, this means that basically most of the time the 60hz version is really how the developer intended the game to be, and so in most cases gamers in the know tend to prefer to play the 60hz version of games if they can.As the games on the PlayStation classic are essential just disc/rom files it arguably should have been easy for Sony to just slap the 60hz American versions on every English Language regions machines but it doesn't appear like they have done this, heck you'd think that if they really wanted they could have doubled up the machines memory and put the SCEE and SCEA versions of every game on so that people could have fun looking for differences. So why do some people see this as a big issue? Well basically because people kind of want the best product that they can get for there money, and if you know that you very easily could have been given a better version of a game with it incurring the company providing the units no additional costs then it kind of seems crazy for you to be given an inferior version, does this ruin or damage the credibility and usefulness of the PlayStation classic? Well I guess that depends strongly on what is making you consider buying the unit and your own preferences and annoyances.

With that new information touched upon why don't we look at a few more of the games?

Now one of the games on the PlayStation classic that I am very happy to hear is on the system is Destruction Derby. Now I got that game very early in the machines life and I played it to absolute death, I not only loved the racing but I couldn't stop playing the Bowl where all you do is start in a big circular bowl with lots of other cars and try to smash the crud out of them without your car getting so damaged that it can no longer move. I not only spent a great deal of time playing this on at my own but I also pulled it out at plenty of party's and sleepovers and one of the funniest things was that my mother who wasn't even that keen on driving games managed to set a time that none of my friends could beat and it drove a particular friend of mine absolutely  mad to the point that he tried for 3 hours straight and couldn't even approach her score. I love this game because it gave me a whole lot of fun but even more than that it gave me a memory which I will carry with me forever a memory which is very much


OK now with Final Fantasy VII some people will argue that this or that Final Fantasy would be better, personally I would if I had to pick one and one only Final Fantasy game would have gone for Final Fantasy Tactics just because I love that kind of game but I can defiantly see why this game was picked for the PlayStation classic it is a long multi disc good Japanese RPG and after all RPG's were a very strong part of the PlayStation and this one does tend to hold a very special place in a lot of peoples hearts so I think this is an excellent addition to the PlayStation Classic and is probably one of the games which will make the people who purchase this machine decide to purchase it.

More about the PlayStation Classic full title list including the diffrences between the Western and Japanese Version. Including my oppinion on Three of the Japanese exclusives

In my previous post I posted the full list of games on the Western PlayStation classic and then went on to talk about two of the games and what I thought about them being on the machine. Something I didn't mention was the difference between the Western and Japanese versions. Well 12 of the games are the same on both regions systems however our Japanese gaming friends will not be getting Cool Boarders 2, Destruction Derby, Grand Theft Auto, Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee, Rayman, Syphon Filter, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six or Twisted Metal. I guess there will be good reasons for this maybe these games were not very popular over there or are not as well remembered by them. The Japanese however do have the following games on there version of the PlayStation Classic.

Japanese PlayStation Classic Exclusives:
Arc the Lad
Arc the Lad 2
Armored Core
G Darius
Gradius Gaiden
SaGa Frontier
Parasite Eve
XI [sái] (Devil Dice)

I already discussed Cool Borders 2 and whether it really deserved a place on the PlayStation Classic or  not but I instantly have to admit that there are a lot of games on the above Japanese Exclusive list that I would very happily swap Cool Borders 2 for.

The Arc the Lad games are basically games which consist of tactical battles and basic RPG elements, as far as I know they didn't ever come out over here but I do remember one of my best friends having a Japanese import of the first game, and the games have certainly been downloadable in English on the PSN store. I actually quiet like these games and I would have enjoyed seeing one of them on the Western PlayStation Classic and to the best of my knowledge they both actually reviewed quiet well. It is also interesting to note that the inclusion of the first two Arc the Lad games on the Japanese system means that the Japanese version actually has two games in the same series something the Western version cant brag.

Armored Core is a third-person shooter mecha video game developed by FromSoftware who are probably best known now for being the developers of the Dark Souls games. and released in 1997. The game is the first in the Armored Core series a series which not only made a name for itself but has also gone on to include around 20 games. Given how much love Dark Souls gets I think it would have been cool to have this game feature on the Western version of the PlayStation Classic

I don't want to get into the other games right now I will save those for a latter post but personally I think I would have possibly preferred if we had gotten the same titles as the Japanese but I guess a lot of that is down purely to my own possible preferences.