CreepShow Horror House Review

I have written about Creepshow before as its a film which is very dear to me, both of the main guys responsible for it Stephen King and George Romero are absolute horror legends but I figured not everyone feels like reading great big walls of text so it was about time that I made a Video Review of it, one that you can watch here.

The start of how I learned to live with my PTSD and carry on with my life

I wrote this its very long and a bit like an essay but I do eventually intend to turn it into a video but I need the time and energy to read all of this out so if you dont fancy reading this much then a video will be coming at some point.

I have previously talked about how I got PTSD and I have maybe touched a little bit on how I got it under control and managed to carry on with my life, but that's a subject that I want to go into further depth with. I want to make clear that although I have a degree in Social Sciences which includes both Sociology and Psychology I am not a therapist what I am giving here is the personal story and the opinion of someone who although not a lay person is also in no way a qualified councillor. My recovery started with a breakdown which probably sounds strange but I guess a lot of the time you don't get help until you reach the end of your teether.

For those who haven't seen my previous video or read about my experience before I will give a very brief version, essentially I was beaten around the head with iron bars and then held hostage during a robbery at the place I used to work. After this experience I was only off long enough for my physical wounds to heal and I returned to work quiet quickly, the breakdown did not come until around 8 years later. The breakdown was not totally down to the PTSD I was suffering, I was experiencing both visual and audio flashback, I would sometimes see scenes from the robbery playing out in my head like a bad video I just couldn't stop playing, sometimes I would simply hear the sounds of the iron bars hitting my head and at other times I would have the most realistic nightmares, nightmares which at the time would feel so real it was truly like I was relieving the event. This was something I was managing though, I was pushing through and continuing to work and continuing to look after my young daughter. I was progressing at work, managing to climb up the ranks even though sometimes when my stress would get too much I would purposely fail exams in order to slow down my progress as I didn't feel capable of taking on more responsibilities. I had a very unsupportive partner who was doing very little towards raising our daughter leaving the majority of it up to me with help from my parents. I didn't have my breakdown until I was the deputy manager at my place of work, my manager kept taking a lot of time off and leaving everything up to me, and two people below me started a sort of work based war, they hated each other and they were at each others throats and I was having to deal with this. Add on to this the fact that at this period in time I kept having to throw violent drunks out of the business, usually after they had attacked me and the pressure just mounted and mounted.

The final straw which broke the camels back was that we got a new area manager and my boss kind of went crying to him claiming no one underneath her was carrying there weight. The robbery incident had happened on a Sunday night after the business had closed and when I had become a manager I had basically negotiated with the area manager at the time that I would work any shift at all except a Sunday night as the times I had worked a Sunday night after the incident had led to me having extreme anxiety and panic attacks. My boss got the new area manager to tell me that he didn't care about my issues or problems if I wanted to continue working in the business I would have to work whatever I had to work and that was it. When the new rota's were put up there I was put down to work long shifts on Sundays closing the pub and this was what plunged me into a very dark place. I carried on going to work but as my first Sunday in a long time approached I simply found myself loosing it. I made a Doctors appointment one for which I had to get cover and go to during the middle of a shift, and with the way this appointment went I ended up being signed off and going home instead of returning.

In the Doctors office I explained everything I could to the best of my ability, I cant remember everything that I said but I remember one thing and that was I said something on the lines of ''I just cant do it, I cant work till close on a Sunday, If I have to do that then I am just going to throw myself down the stairs leg first, so that I can break my leg and not have to go to work'' It was this comment that got me the help I needed, the Doctor contacted what is called Crisis Team they are a group of mental health professionals who will visit people in there homes to assess them and to try to get them the help that they need. I remember the first thing they asked me after introducing themselves was why had I told a Doctor that I was going to try to kill myself, I explained that I hadn't said that and that what I had said was that I was essentially contemplating trying to break my leg so that I didn't have to go to work, I had no desire at any time to kill myself, I love my daughter far to much for that, and I love my folks far to much and I had things I enjoyed and looked forward to, I just couldn't deal with the idea of working those Sunday nights because something inside me told me that If I worked a Sunday there was a strong possibility that a robbery would happen again and that I would have to live through that experience again or that I might even end up being violently killed. I knew statistically that the chance of a robbery happening was no different on a Sunday than any other day of the week in the rational part of my mind but there was this irrational part which felt certain that working a Sunday would lead to horrible consequences.

This led to me getting sent to a few therapists, in the first couple of cases I would have one very short appointment where the therapist would learn that my issues were related to trauma they would then inform me that although they were a therapist they were not a trauma therapist and therefore did not feel that they were qualified to help me and that I would need to see a trauma therapist. Eventually I began to see a woman who was a Trauma Therapist, my Dad was amazing he would drive me to the appointments and he would help try and keep my spirits as high as possible. During my fight to get better there was another fight going on one that my Dad was also deeply involved in. I was handing in sick notes but my work kept contacting me, they wanted to be kept up to date on my mental health progress, they also did all kinds of things to try and squeeze me to either return or to quit, they messed around with my pay, one month I literally got about £10 for the month as they told me on my payday that I had run out of sick pay allowance, they also tried to deny that the robbery ever happened, I had to contact the police and get the crime report to prove that it actually happened and that I was present. It was awful and there meddling actually was affecting my healing... Eventually they fired me for being off sick for too long, I didn't complain though as they paid me holiday pay and a final pay check at the end and I had already enrolled myself on to a course which came with its bursary and would help me train for a new type of employment.

My therapy lasted around a year. As well as just talking about stuff the therapist used what is called Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) which is a type of psychotherapy particularly used for treating post-traumatic stress disorder PTSD. so what is EMDR well its a technic which uses a patient's own rapid rhythmic eye movements to try to dampen the power of emotionally charged memories of past traumatic events. Basically the therapist will move their fingers back and forth in front of your face and ask you to follow there fingers with your eyes while they have you recall the disturbing event which caused you to have PTSD. This will include not only what happened but the thought that were going through your head at the time as well as the emotions and sounds and sensations that you heard and felt.

Gradually, the therapist will guide you to shift your thoughts to more pleasant ones. In my case this involved you having to tell the story to the best of your ability remembering as much of it as possible in as deep as detail as possible finishing off by moving yourself to some kind of mental happy place. Your happy place is something that you pick for yourself, you can basically pick any place and then you will fill out the details of this place and talk about it to kind of ground yourself back down to earth and let the negative feelings go away. My happy place was in my childhood bedroom playing Super Mario World on my Super Nintendo knowing that my family were around me and I was safe.

I find it hard to know how much the therapy helped me, I do know that it got a lot of details I had forgotten about the robbery to come out of me, I remembered things I had forgotten and I am told that remembering everything as painful as it is is all part of helping your mind file it away and put it to bed. You never forget what happened but as time goes on you kind of find yourself more able to talk about your experience without falling apart. I think one of the things that helped me the most in the end was getting fired by work, knowing that I wouldn't have to return to that environment again, that I wouldn't have to deal with the people again who had been so unsupportive who in my opinion had known they were breaking me was just such a big relief it felt like I was getting a large part of my life back. All of this was only the start though and it took me years and years to rebuild myself. I am happy now, I am a survivor but I also know that I am a very very different person to the one who was held hostage that night, whether that's for the better or the worse would probably depend upon who you ask.

X-COM: UFO Defence AKA UFO: Enemy Unknown Games Room Review

This is a review I have wanted to do for a very long time, but it took me awhile to get round to it mostly because I wanted to record my own footage for the review and for some unknown reason every time I would try to record it something would go wrong making the footage unsuitable, but here it is complete and finished, for those who prefer to read reviews instead of watching them the written version is below the video.

X-COM: UFO Defence known as UFO: Enemy Unknown in Europe is a science fiction strategy video game developed by Mythos Games and published by MicroProse in 1994. It came out on PC, the Amiga the CD32 console, and the PlayStation. My first experience of it was on the Playstation. I loved it from my very first go, it was quiet simply unlike anything I had ever played before and I found myself constantly returning to it just because it was so different to everything else in my collection, it was also one of those rare games which a lot of my friends also seemed to get into. Every so often there would be a game which my whole friend group would seem to buy and this was one of these games, we would all play it separately but kind of come together to talk about our in-game adventures and our tactics it kind of made the game exist beyond the confines of the screen.

Ok so to explain X-COM UFO Defence as a game to anyone who has not played it or heard of it before well it’s a game which basically mixes a real-time management simulation game with a turn-based tactics game. The player takes on the role of commander of X-COM – an organisation which is an international paramilitary organization which exists to defend the Earth from aliens.

So, when you play the strategic part of the game you are in charge of the research and development of new technology, you’re in charge of building and expanding your home base, with the choice of also building additional bases, you’re in charge of the organization's finances and personnel, and alongside growing your organisation your also in control of monitoring and adequately responding to UFO activity.

When you respond to UFO activity by sending your men to a crashed or landed UFO then you enter the tactical section of the game, as soon as your craft lands you are tasked with issuing orders to your individual X-COM troops, you tell them where to go and what to do. You can only see enemies on the map when they are in view of one of your units. At the start of the game your men will have conventional weapons, pistols, rifles and grenades and you will be fighting with Aliens who have Plasma based technology. This is where the two game types connect, if you want to have better equipment in the field then you need to research it and develop it, if you can either kill all of the enemies on a map or pick up a defeated enemy’s weapon and then retreat then you will be able to take their weapons and equipment back to your base and start the process of researching this otherworldly technology.  Obviously having a working team of researchers and other staff requires money, and how do you get money well you answer to a council made up of members from the various nations, if you help to keep their airspace clear and to eliminate aliens who land on there soil or conduct terror attacks on there cities then they will fund you, keep failing them though and they will withdraw their support which will lower your funding.

The game received strong reviews and was commercially successful, acquiring a cult following among strategy fans; several publications have listed X-COM: UFO Defence as one of the best video games ever made, including IGN ranking it as the best PC game of all time in 2007, the game has directly inspired several similar games, including UFO: Alien Invasion, and UFO: Extraterrestrials. The game had many sequels its first sequel was very similar to this game but was set under the sea, but after that for my taste at least the games strayed too far away from this formula the third game was overly complex and none of them captured the spirit or the fun level of the first two games.

IN 2012 there was a remake of the game called Xcom: Enemy Unknown created by Firaxis Games and published by 2K Games. While this remake is a fantastic game that I would heartily recommend I wanted to show the original game and review it as I don’t think the original should be replaced both of them are brilliant games which deserve to both stand tall.

By today’s standards X-COM: UFO Defence has incredibly basic graphics and sound but the core gameplay is still incredible, it’s a great example of a deep tactical game which can literally eat away days and days of your life, if you get into it the game all of the basic graphics just cease to be an issue. Sure, the remake is fantastic in its own right but I would argue that this version is possibly a deeper tactical game, there are things you can do in this game that you can’t do in the original, for example you can shoot walls to destroy them, you also take far more men out in to the field which I think gives the game a slightly bigger feel. I am not putting down the more modern remake both of these games are very rare cases of games which I would score with a solid 10 out of 10.

My Review of Fall Guys

 So as the game Fall Guys went free to play and found its way on to more platforms I decided that it was time for me to check it out, this was also helped by a certain few factors one being that I knew GamePass users were going to get some kind of freebie for the game and I had also heard that there would be some kind of cross promotion between Fall Guys and Fortnite leading to unlockable stuff, so I figured why not give this title a bash and then review it. Here is my Review of Fall Guys I hope you enjoy it

My Review of Fortnite

So I kind of missed the boat on the whole Fortnite thing, I didn't pay much attention when it initially launched nor did I pay that much attention when people started talking about it. My own daughter told me how good it was but as she was a late teen/early adult I kind of just thought hey this is one of those things for the young folks. It wasn't until I was babysitting my nephews and they played it infront of me and started asking me for my help that I reluctantly picked up a pad and had a bash at it. This bash turned in to me downloading the game myself on both my Xbox and Nintendo Switch and then piling a whole bunch of hours in to it. So big apologies to my daughter I should have took your advice and tried this a long time ago.... With that said here is my late 41 year olds review of Fortnite a game I had always viewed as a kids fad.

My Review of Obi_Wan Kenobi

Star Wars has always been a big part of my life, I cant remember exactly how and when I first saw it but I do know that it was very early and it made a big impression, I think I can limit the way I first saw it down to one of two scenarios I am just not sure which came first. Ok one way I saw them was on TV. When I was young the original 3 Star Wars films were always on the TV around the Christmas Holidays, it would be something like Star Wars would be on at some point on Christmas day and then you'd get Empire on Boxing Day and Return of the Jedi on new years eve or some variation on this theme.  So watching it in this sort of way might have been my first experience of Star Wars but I also remember my Dad owning a Super 8 cine film 42.5m film reel which showed a sort of condensed around 8 minutes version of Star Wars which my Dad would show me by using his Super 8 projector to project this on to a small roll away cinema screen. This wasn't the only film my Dad would show me he would show me all kinds of cartoons and Black and White horror films via projector, it really is something which helped a real love of film to grow within me, from a young age I was able to set up a cine film projector and screen and thread the films into the projector and play them. I must have watched this 8 minute version of Star Wars thousands of times, my Dad has given it me and I still own it to this very day. My dad was my big introduction to the world of Science Fiction and to this day I still love watching stuff with him. Every time a new Star Wars film has come out I have had to run out and see it as quickly as possible. 

So with this in mind I had to watch Obi-Wan Kenobi and I had to make a video giving my thoughts on it.

My Retro Game Purchases June 2022

Ok so here I am back again with another retro purchases monthly report. I am not going to add up the value of the stuff as a lot of it is debatable whether its retro or not, if its not the current gen or the gen before that then I am calling it retro, same with something i am using for retro purposes If I am using a modern pad to play retro games then I am going to talk about it here.

So on the first of the month I grabbed a Nintendo Wii for £25, its far from the first one I have purchased but if you look at the following picture its probably easy to see why I grabbed it.

As can sort of be seen it included a balance board, 2 official Wii-motes, 4 official nunchucks , 2 official classic controllers, 1 official classic pro controller, the sensor , power supply, the standard TV lead, a better official composite lead, the sensor bar, the stand, a bunch of those silly attachments, a 2Gig SD card inside it, not in this picture are an unofficial stand complete with a charging dock in it with chargeable batteries for 2 Wii-motes. I very much purchased this console for all of the equipment that came with it as by CEX/Pawn store standards there was around £100 worth of controllers

On the first of the month I also got 6 Japanese GameCube games for £30

These are

Naruto: Gekitou Ninja Taisen ,the disc the plastic case and manual no card cover

Naruto: Gekitou Ninja Taisen 2, complete

Naruto: Gekitou Ninja Taisen 3, the disc the plastic case and manual no card cover

Gash Bell!! Yuujou no Tag Battle, the disc the plastic case and manual no card cover

Donkey Konga ,complete

Groove Adventure Rave: Fighting Live , complete

Other than a Japanese Baseball game I grabbed last month these are the first Japanese Cube games to enter my collection, I love the size and shape of the plastic boxes for them, not so keen on the carboard covers

I then waited till the 14th of the month when I got another Japanese Gamecube game complete for £8 (Mystic Heroes)

I also got a joystick for the C64 Mini boxed for £5, sure its a modern item but its retro themed and will help me to play more retro stuff, not only can I use it on the C64 Mini I own It would also be cool for using to play games from that sort of age on my laptop C64 and Spectrum etc

On the 15th I managed to get a loose SNES cart of Tiny Toons Adventures Buster Busts loose for £4 its not in perfect condition but its a good game so I was quiet happy to grab it.

On the 17th I grabbed two things one of them was this loose cart of Quackshot for the MegaDrive for £5 this is actually one of my top twenty games on the system, if you haven't played it then I highly recommend it particularly if your a Duck Tales fan.

The other thing I grabbed was Arc Twilight of the Spirits for PS2 I grabbed this for £5 it's missing it's manual but I'm happy. I didn't realise there was an English Language Arc The Lad game on PS2, in fact when I saw it I did a quick google search to see if it was an Arc the Lad game. Arc the Lad was a game that formed a piece of my teenage life, you see I had a friend who was so in to his RPG games that he couldn't get enough of them to the degree that he started buying Japanese RPG's that had not come out in England and trying to play his way through them despite the language barrier and the main ones I remember him playing are Arc the Lad and Arc the Lad 2.

On the 18th I got Little Big Planet for the PS3 from a charity shop for 50pence, it was just nestled in with the kids DVD's, not every retro game needs to cost the earth and its a great game.

On the 22nd my favourite pawn store closed and I had a last visit to say goodbye to the staff who have helped me with so much stuff. Grabbed this little pile of stuff for £20, my final purchase from a great shop and a great bunch of guys. As can be seen there are 3 sealed wired Joypads for use on PC or PS3 should be great for retro gaming, theres also a PS2 pad with an adaptor to allow me to use it on a PC (great for emulation), then there is a PS3 Blue Ray remote and a broken laptop.

I got that Laptop up and running its a Dual Core 1.7ghz processor with 1gb of ram and a 120gig Hardrive (which I have since upgraded to a 500gig Hardrive) and I bet you can guess just what I have done with it.

On the 25th I finished the month of by buying a whole bunch of stuff

Grabbed these 4 original XBOX games for £1 each.

These PS3 games for £3 in total

These 3 games for a total of £2

This lovely looking 2DS for £30 it's in great condition, came with official charger and a 4gb SD card, also had Tomodachi life on it. I have since hacked it, hey if Nintendo are going to shut down there online shop and stop me getting all the patches and stuff I might need in the future I am going to be ready for it.

And here are the last of that days games that I grabbed, Super Street fighter 2 American for £8 ,ECW hardcore for GBC for £1 , Stunt Race FX for SNES for £4, Microsoft puzzle collection for £1, and JaJa Maru for Famicom for £3