Retro Game purchases October 2019

My purchases for October started on the 1st of the month when I grabbed a few bit, I got Project Gotham racing, project Gotham racing 2, conflict desert storm 2, medal of honor rising sun, and dead or alive 3 all for Xbox boxed complete for £1 each from a charity shop and then I went and got Shrek 2 for GameCube complete for £1 from a different charity shop.

On the 4th of October I travelled to a run down looking charity shop in a town I dont usually visit and I grabbed a few things, I got The incredible for GameCube complete for £1 , Wrestlemania x8 for GameCube complete for £1 and kick off for NES cart only for £1.50 , it seems like a long time since I've got a NES game that cheap.

On the 5th I went to a retro game fair which was held in a hotel conference room today, I figured it would be all £100 boxed rares and nothing I'd feel like paying for and yeah there was some stuff like that but there was also a few cheap bits to pick through.

I got the following

Columns cart only for game gear for 50p

Wave race cart only for gameboy for £1

Game boy gallery cart only for gameboy £1

Golf cart only for gameboy £1

All star baseball 2001 cart only for gameboy color £1

F-1 world grand Prix cart only for gameboy color £1

Perfect dark cart only (missing battery cover) for gameboy color £1

Super hunchback cart only for gameboy £1

Gundam SD cart only (Japanese) for gameboy £1

Total soccer manager cart only for GBA £1

Nintendo scope 6 cart only for SNES £1

PGA tour 96 cart only for SNES £1

Secret of Man cart only (Japanese) for SNES £1

Donkey Kong Land cart only (half missing label) for gameboy color £1

Kirby super deluxe cart only (Japanese) for SNES £4

Robot Wars EX cart only (Japanese) for SNES £2

Two disc only copies of Alien Trilogy , a disc only copy of grudge warriors, and a disc copy of lion and the king £1 for the lot,

A Joytech PS1 essential pack sealed , includes 3rd party 1mb memory card and 3rd party mini analogue controller

and a boxed complete Japanese SNES game that I first believed to be a pinball game for £6 but it turned out to be a blooming pachinko game which somewhat annoyed me. I have since found out its called Hissatsu Pachinko Collection 2

On the 12th during a visit to yet another charity shop I got 14 loose PSP games for £9.  I got 2 copies of Ben 10 protector of the earth, Lego Indiana Jones, GTA vice city stories , GTA liberty city stories, Miami vice, ghost rider, mercury , crash of the titans, pro evo 5, FIFA 09, star wars clone wars republic heroes, star ward battle front 2 and Colin McRae rally 2005 plus. I also grabbed Animal crossing for the Wii for £2 from this shop.

On the 15th I grabbed a few loose carts from an indy game shop, I got F-1 World Grand Prix 2 for N64 for 50pence, V-Rally Edition 99 for N64 for £1.50, 1080 Snowboarding for N64 for £2 and Batman Returns for GameGear for £1.50

On the 18th I went to a charity shop and for £5.95 I got a Nintendo Wii.  OK so first the bad part it has no sensor bar, no TV wire, no wiimote or nunchuck, it also has the door for the cube pads missing. The good part is it has its charger and its stand but more importantly it has the homebrew channel installed, a 32gig SD card in it, a 32gig USB key in the back of it.

On the 19th I popped into a indy game store and I grabbed two loose gameboy carts for £1 each today WaveRace and Nintendo World Cup.

On the 20th my daughter grabbed me Nagano Winter Olympics 98 cart only for N64 for £1, makes me more happy than anything that she thinks about me enough to grab me a game while shes hanging with her friends

On the 21st I went in an Indy game shop after work and got Adventures of lolo 2 for the NES cart only for £5. , I'd never heard of it but it said it was by Hal on the label so figured I'd give it a punt.

On the 25th I got a few bits from an indy game shop I got an American cartridge only copy of The Simpsons Bart's Nightmare for the SNES £5, Fifa 95 complete for the Megadrive £1, Fifa 97 complete for the Megadrive £1, Mega games 1 complete for the Megadrive £1, Kingdom hearts 2 for ps2 for 25p the discs good but the manual and cover have some water damage, Final fantasy x2 disc only for ps2 for 25p and Monopoly party complete for Xbox for 50p

On the 26th I once again got a call from my daughter to tell me I owe her a little bit of cash because shes been picking me up stuff again, she got me Devil may cry 1, 2 and 3 for PS2 for 50p each complete, Devil may cry 4 in a steel case complete for ps3 for £1, Uncharted 2 in a steel case complete for ps3 for £1 and Heavenly Sword for ps3 complete for £1

On the 28th I got Mission Impossible operation suma complete for the Gamecube for £2. I dont think I have ever played it but I played the living heck out of the N64 MI game.

  

My retro purchases ended on the 29th when I paid £18 for a cart only pal SNES copy of The Flintstones The Treasure of Sierra Mudrock. I have never seen it in the flesh before and wanted to buy it to review it, it's been a long time since I've wrote a new SNES review even if I've made videos for old reviews lately. After having made my Barts Nightmare video Flintstones felt like something I'd like to tackle. It did feel like a big spend on one item though.

So in October 2019 I Spent £99.95‬, an amount that has left me pretty darn shocked as I dont think I have come close to that in a long time, my purchase of the month has to be the hacked Wii though, I just think with the SD card and USB key and what I can do with it just makes it an absolute steal.

150 SNES games reviewed #27: Top Gear

Top Gear (or as our friends in Japan would know it, Top Racer) is a racing game for the SNES. It was developed by Gremlin Graphics and published by Kemco.

 

It was one of the first racing games to be released on the SNES, so when it came out it was immediately popular. Everyone I knew back then seemed to have either this or Exhaust Heat with the lucky and truly dedicated having both. Top Gear and its two sequels – Top Gear 2 and Top Gear 3000 – were created by the same developers as the famous Lotus series of games which had been released earlier on the Amiga and the Mega Drive. It is important to note before anyone gets too excited this game has no connection to the TV show with the same name.

My Top Gear YouTube Review 

The good points are that the game feels very fast. I hadn’t played it for a fair few years and when I started playing it this morning I was very surprised at how fast it felt. It is also very bumpy in a way which is kind of hard to explain, but it is worth noting because I remember back in the day a few people I knew couldn’t play it because when it was in motion it made them feel sick. I love it as it actually helps to make you feel like your in there racing. But it’s important to note before anyone goes out and pays for this game, it might be worth looking for some footage on YouTube so you can see if it affects you.

I lost my first few races which meant instead of progressing I kept seeing the starting screen again. But I soon realised I wasn’t paying proper attention to my gears. You don’t get to choose a car or buy add-ons for it, or to even mess with its handling and tires. If this is something that is important to you then your probably better off with Exhaust Heat. Once I started paying attention though I soon found I was up there fighting for pole position again and again. This is when the game began to get really fun, but just when I thought I had seen it all, when I thought I had it in the bag, that’s when things changed a little bit.

I’d noticed there were pit stops but I had never seen the need to use them, sure I had got a little bit tight on fuel at times but there was always just enough to see me fly past the flag in first. You see short races don’t  really require a pit stop and refueling, but the lengthier ones will see you come to an abrupt halt half-way around the track in one of your later laps if you’re not careful. This adds a whole new level of strategy to proceedings as you begin to have to think about when to have a pit stop, how long to stay in the pit, sure you can see your position getting worse while you’re being filled up but you know that in the longer races if you don’t fill up then you’re going to come to a stop and lose. Whole races can be won or lost based on your judgement of when you should pull in for a pit stop or how long you can put it off.

The graphics are good for the time. The screen is always split even when you’re playing on your own. In this case there is a computer rival in charge of a car on the bottom half of the screen. I like the music in this game, it might not be technically brilliant but it is fun. It fits its purpose of pumping you up for the races brilliantly and makes a change to all those games back then which suffered from having no sounds in game apart from that farting rumbling engine sound which used to be popular. I would give this game a good solid seven out of 10. It is a fun game but I miss having a choice in terms of what car to drive and the options to tune it up and buy upgrades. Basically this game just seems like a very big slice of arcade fun not that that’s a bad thing, but you need to keep that in mind if you’re thinking about getting this.

A lot of times when I have seen this game online its been about £8 for an import cart or about £15 for an PAL one, with a boxed copy being as high as £30. I only paid £3 for my cart. The sequel does seem to be a little cheaper and easier to get your hands on though (I will get around to reviewing that sooner or later).

150 SNES games reviewed #18: ESPN Speed World

“EA Sports – It’s in the game,” as some of the old games used to say. I never quite got this. I didn’t quite know what it really meant. I presumed it meant that EA Sports games had great playability, a certain je ne sais quoi (a special quality which defies explanation).

 

ESPN Speed World You Tube Review

 I never got this myself though. Sure from time-to-time I would enjoy a EA Sports title but most of the time I saw them as being a celebration of style over substance. It was less about what was really ‘in the game’ and what they could put around the gameplay. What they could add to the presentation which would make there game seem like the A* football game or A* american football experience.

This might have seemed a slightly strange start to this review when I tell you that the game I have been playing is ESPN Speed World and that the game was made by a company called Park Place Productions and was published by Sony Imagesoft, you’ll see what I mean with the rest of this review though. The game was released in 1994 exclusively in North America as it was based on a TV series of the same name that was shown over there. The game has an official ESPN license but despite being about racing, Sony didn’t gain a NASCAR license, so you’re racing NASCAR Winston Cup stock cars but the real-life drivers’ names and likenesses are not here. At the start of the race though your met with some digitised footage of ESPN sports broadcaster Dr Jerry Punch which I am sure back in the day looked and sounded amazing but to my eyes now it looks rather poor.

 

Everything seems to be there – the tracks, the cars, the commentary – it’s only when you start driving that you realise something is really wrong. You don’t feel like you’re in control of the car at all. You feel like your in control of a skidding line. With some practice you can start to score wins but it never feels fun, it feels like a chore from start to end. I have literally have had more fun on racing games on the ZX Spectrum than on this game. This is when you start to realise that people would have realised this game was a pile of trash much quicker if it wasn’t for the licence and the fancy digitised speech and graphics glued on to this basic mess. It is a real lesson in how video game companies tried to polish a turd with licences and a bit of fancy presentation.

I spent £5 on this game including postage. I basically bought it because I was looking for cheap games I hadn’t played or really heard of before. I figured that I would take a shot at this game, and in honesty I regret it. If you want to try this game either because you don’t believe me or you like bad games there are a few important things to consider. The first is it was only released in the US so you’ll need either an NTSC machine, a modified machine or an import converter,  and the second is that you’re more than likely going to have to import it from the US (buy it from an eBay seller over there). This means even if you can get it cheap there’s going to be a fair bit of postage, a pain in the butt weight and a larger risk of it getting lost in transit, or the post services trying to charge you some kind of import tax on it. I strongly recommend you don’t bother as I rate this game as a three out of 10 at best, its certainly one of the worst ones I have played for this series so far.