Iron Tank

 

Last night I finished Iron Tank on stream so I wanna say a few things about it

When I first fired up Iron Tank I was expecting something more akin to Jackal but with a tank instead of a Jeep or whatever that game had.  While not completely off the mark it's a fair bit different in that Jackal is quite fast and arcade-like while Iron Tank is a bit more methodical in its approach.  That's not to say Iron Tank is a slow game by any stretch but careful progression into each encounter is very clearly the best route to success with this one.  

The premise for Iron Tank is simple, you are a tank and you start at the bottom of a long map and you're one and only objective is to get to the top of the map and blow up the big bad at the end 

 

While you trundle along the various paths you can get various power ups for your tank that involve a longer range shot, power powerful shots, exploding shots and rapid fire.  There's also a very rare "?" ability which wipes the entire screen of enemies and even some bosses and there's a reserve health bar that you never really get to use because this game is stingy as hell with HP.

Now I'm willing to cut the game a lot of slack given its age but the controls in this game are awful and until you get used to them they will be the prime reason for you eating one too many bullets and blowing up more often than not.  The standard stuff makes sense like moving with D Pad and shooting regular bullets with A and tank shells with B but things get real fucky when you have to start manipulating the direction of the turret.  To do that you have to hold down A and then move in the directon you want the turret to face.  The problem with this is that you cant move the turret by itself so you get into situations where an enemy is right up in your face and you end up taking collision damage because you ran into him when trying to turn the turret to shoot him.  This then has the knock on effect of the turret then being the wrong way so another enemy can come from the other direction and shove a shell right up your exhaust pipe, which is a little annoying to say the least.

But to be fair to Iron Tank, it's EXTREMELY forgiving with its checkpoints.  You get them constantly and each one even comes with a password so you can continue from that check exactly next time you play.  Even if you game over you get to start from that very same check point so considering how mosts games of this era are, Iron Tank is probably one of the most forgiving I've ever played. 

But this idea of fairness goes totally out of the window in the games final stage.  By itself, if you come prepared with items out the arse and you are ready to throw down, it isn't THAT hard.  But if you use your resources getting to that final boss and then dying on him, God have mercy on your soul because you aren't getting back without a fight.  The power up that makes your shot stronger and go through walls (F) is REQUIRED for that final area but there isn't any pick ups of it to refill.  So in my playthrough I made it to the end, pretty easily I might add when I was geared out, but then died to the final guy because if his hitbox comes even 1 pixel on top of you, you die instantly.  This then led to a good while of me trying and failing to even get to that final boss again because I only had a weak shot and the only powerups that the game was giving to me was rapid fire and some useless AOE thing.

What I COULD have done is used a password for an area or two back so I could make sure I had enough F for when I got to the boss but I was at wits end with this nonsense so I pulled out a game genie and gave myself infinite health.  I'm not proud of it really but even with the cheat the boss could STILL kill me with direct contact and that was about the only part of him that was a problem so I'm taking the win, sue me.

Despite my final area frustrations though, I had a lot of fun with Iron Tank and it has a pretty good set of achievements on Retro Achievements.org so I'm more than willing to git gud and give it another go.  It's hard to suggest because of its janky controls but if you feel like thats something you could get around then give Iron Tank a try, a solid 6/10 NES game

Valkyrie の Jank

 I know I said not too long ago I would be trying to use the blog for daily posts about my gaming activities but I shortly found myself in a bit of a busy situation and so things fell to the wayside for a while.  I'm still mad busy but I figured at least attempting to write something short for the day is better than nothing at all. 

Today has been a sort of uneventful day for gaming.  A day in the office meant that my time to game while managing this other thing meant that I wasn't really able to do anything until I got on stream.  When I did get on stream though I kicked things off with a bit of Megaman 1, a game I'm attempting to learn to speedrun.  The world recording is an absolutely insane 18 minutes-ish and while I'm struggling to stay under 30 minutes progress with the PB is coming nice and gradually.  There's a TON of very precise tricks in that game to skip massive portions of levels and I can pull of about 2 of them with any kind of reliability, 1 I can get sometimes and the rest I can't do yet at all.  If I want to get serious about cutting that time down learning those skips will be super important.

The main focus of today's gaming though was Legend of the Valkyrie on the NES as part of my 100 game challenge on stream.  It's a fun little game, I described it in my first session as it playing similar to Hydlide but if someone who was actually competant had made it.  Well I say competant but it's got a fair amount of bullshit involved with enemies spawning in at random and flinging fireballs that do a large chunk of your HP.  A problem that's circumvented by wandering around and grinding exp, sure, but it takes so long to get a single level that doing laps of the in starts to become a chore after a while though.

The most annoying thing about this game though is the password system.  Like a lot of games of it's time, when you want to stop and take a break, you have to generate a password.  It's not a huge password like in something like Megami Tensei but it's long enough and the entry screen annoying enough to be a bit of a pain in the ass.  You would think, with a password of that length, it would store everything in your current game but it doesn't.  When you put in the password you start with your current gold and exp intact but your inventory is completely wiped and you start on the first island.  That means that every time you play, you have to walk all the way around the mountains, kill a worm thing and get the boat, then ride the boat all the way to where you were before.  There are teleporters that I've not used yet that may solve at least some of this issue but I've been told that beating the game without the boat is impossible so at the very least you have to do that task every session.  When I played Metal Gear and put in that password that game was able to keep track of all my stuff and even exact location on the map but Valkyrie feels the need to rob all my shit as punishment for turning the game off, what a time vampire.

Anyway, at least the game is kind of fun to play and hopefully I can just sweep though the whole thing in a single session next week.  If you've got a long Sunday afternoon to kill and you wanna try a weird NES game then maybe give it a try, there isn't much text and there's a guide online so it being Japan only isn't really a problem.

Hopefully I'll have more time tomorrow for a bit of SMT V but for now I'm going to bed

Gargoyle's Quest 2

 

As I've been working my way through my 100 game NES challenge on stream, I've started to lose a little faith in the system overall.  It's a system held in such high regard by most people in retro game circles but the thing is absolutely teeming with really awful, trash games that are borderline unplayable.  But then Gargoyle Quest 2 came along and reminded me just how good games on this system can really be.

You play as Firebrand and you are tasked with going through the Ghoul Realm to stop something called the black light.  A simple plot for a simple game but we aren't really here for a detailed narrative experience now are we? We're here for that sweet platforming gameplay.  

The game is split into two sections, top down overworld exploration and side scrolling platforming.  In the overworld sections you walk around a big map, find towns, talk to demons, get items etc. and then when you reach a place of importance the game switches into the side scrolling mode.  When you're platforming you have a standard shot attack to kill enemies and you have a wing meter that lets you hover for a limited time after a jump.  The hover mechanic takes a little bit of getting used to at first but when you get good at it it becomes really satisfying.  As you play through the game you get upgrades that allow you to jump higher, shoot stronger, make platforms and float longer and as you aquire the game throws obstacles at you in just the right intensity to allow you to get used to your new abilities before tasking you with some pretty challenging stuff near the end. 

Now you might recognise Firebrand from a different game, Ghosts and Goblins, also on the NES and as most people know it's a LEGENDARILY difficult game that requires not only precise platforming and some really annoying enemies, but also two consecutive clears to get the proper ending.  This may lead you to believe that Gargoyle's Quest 2 is equally hard but have no fear because you'd be quite wrong.  With the exception of maybe the final two stages, most of the levels in this game are an absolute breeze and even then the last two levels are nothing compared to what the rest of the main series has to offer.  The hover makes a lot of the platfoming extremely lenient and even if you do find yourself struggling, you can farm "vials" in levels and on the world map to buy extra lives very quickly.  The bosses in each stage are also an absolute joke most of them dying in a small number of hits and with patterns that are extremely easy to figure out.  Even the last guy, with his one hit death orbs is an absolute joke when you realize that, by that point, you have infinite hover and anything dangerous he throws at you can be countered by just shooting it.  That said it's not a complete walk in the park but you probably will never end up in a position where you have to repeat a stage ad nausium because some bullshit enemy keeps killing you like in GnG.

It seems that this game is pretty well known and pretty well regarded and I can't believe it took me so long to dicover it for myself.  If you've not played it and you're looking to kill an afternoon with an NES game, then this is a pretty good one to fire up.  Also if you really like it and wan't more, Gargole Quest 1 is avaliable on Game Boy and a sequel to this game called Demon's Crest on the SNES is also waiting for you.  I've not played either of those but I enjoyed this one so much I'm about to go give them a try

Sweet Home

 

Sweet Home for the NES has quite the bit of buzz surrounding it with it being a sort of inspiration for the Resident Evil franchise and finally I got to play it.  This is not to be confused with the recently released Sweet Home TV series on Netflix which is a Korean drama about a monster based post apocalypse, I made that mistake when looking through my listings but more on that another day.  

Sweet Home is an RPG about a group of people going into a haunted mansion to try and un-haunt it.  To do so you must solve a bunch of puzzles and fight a bunch of monsters gaining strength through levels along the way so you can exorcise the big bast ghost at the end.  It's a NES game for fucks sake, the plot isn't that involved.

What is quite involved however is the gameplay.  At the start of the game you have 5 characters, all of which you can name yourself.  Each one of those 5 characters has an item that is specific to them.  For example one guy has a lighter for opening paths, one guy has a medkit for curing ailments and one gal has a key for opening locked doors.  On top of that each character gets 2 free inventory slots and a weapon slot so managing equipment and puzzle McGuffins/healing is an integral part of the gameplay.  But, to make things just a little more intense, the game features perma-death.  So if one of your guys falls in battle, they are GONE, for good.  You won't find yourself stuck because the game provides regular versions of the character specific items so you can progress, but if that happens you are two inventory slots down, a weaker party AND you have to manage your shit even more meticulously than before.

The puzzles Sweet Home range from insultingly obvious to so obtuse I have no idea how the fuck you are supposed to solve them without a guide.  There's one bit in particular where you have to use the look command on a fountain and on the second or third try the fountain starts spurting blood which changes a thing for progression.  What I imagine most people do there is look at it once, decide it doesn't do anything and then get stuck for HOURS until they look at a guide and find out they have to spam the look command a few more times for it to work.

Overall though Sweet Home is a pretty good game and you can see the little aspects of it that were lifted for Resident Evil, almost like looking at the rings on an old tree stump.  The inventory, the way items are managed (identical to RE0 pretty much) and even the little animation that plays when you unlock a door for the first time.  Yeah, it's got some jank to it but it's not that long either so go give it a try. 

Snake Rattle and Roll

 

When you think of "the worst NES games" what usually comes to mind?

Silver Surfer?

Dr Jeckle and Mr Hyde?

Action 52?

Yeah, screw all that, THIS is the worst game to ever curse the NES.

Snake Rattle and Roll is a game where you have to slither around eating balls in order to make yourself heavy enough to hit a bell attached to a High Striker in order to open a door to progress to the next stage.  There are a couple of stages that don't do this and instead opt for straight platforming challenges and all in all you've got to get through 10 levels of the stuff before you can see the ending.

There are 2 problems with this game, one minor and one major.  The minor problem is the perspective.  The game has this sort of isometric camera that was probably really cool to see on the NES back in the day but in a game that needs precision platforming, the camera makes it sort of hard to judge where you are in relation to platforms and enemies at certain points.  I call this a minor issue though because it's the sort of thing you can just get used to after a short amount of play time.  The major issue though is the ice physics, probably the dumbest, most obnoxious ice physics in all of video games and I say this without hyperbole.

The last 2 levels are these icy gauntlets that are full of one hit kill rocks coming at you and the balls you must put in your mouth to reach the end of the stage are flying, so while you're slipping around trying to eat them you're liable to fall of the stage A LOT.  The game also has a garbage respawning system so more than once I would die only to respawn off the ledge again and fall right to my death.  The big problem though is the ice itself because you never EVER get a break from it pulling you all over the place, meaning that the ice physics are working on your snake EVEN WHEN YOU'RE IN MID-AIR.  So if there's a small platform you need to hit, you'll always either undershoot it and slide back down whatever hell mountain you were climbing or you'll over shoot it and fall to an instant death.

The game only has a handful of continues too so if you mess up too often on those ice stages, enjoy being knocked back to stage one every time.  Also don't give me any shit about the stage 8 warp because actually hitting that is a pain in the ass as well.

Sometimes playing shit games is fun because having a nice controlled rage at something obviously shit can be cathartic.  Sometimes they can be so jank that they sort of come full circle and become weirdly entertaining in their shitness.  Snake Rattle and Roll isn't cathartic to yell at and it isn't jank enough to be fun, it's just shit.  Shit in it's purest form, unfiltered and untainted by any traces of quality game design, just a massive pile of doo doo.

There is a version on the Mega Drive too but I've not played that, so I dont know if it's any better.  But to be honest, after the experience I had with the NES one, that version can suck at a fat one.  Don't play this game, it's not good

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light

I would be willing to bet a few hundred of my Yen that when Super Smash Bros Melee came out on the Game Cube and people saw Marth in this roster, they had NO idea where he was from.  Melee came out in 2001 and Shadow Dragon, the DS remake of this game, didn't come out until 2008 so I bet for a long time Marth's origin outside of "that dude from that FE game" was a mystery to a lot of people.  Hell, I even saw people who looked at Hector in FE7 on the GBA and was like "is that Marth?" when his name and weapon are clearly different.

Silly comments about Smash aside, I recently finished Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light on NES.  The game follows Marth doing some stuff against some bad dudes, I actually have no idea what the story is because the entire game is in Hiragana and if you think I'm going to read long textboxes of only that, you have another thing coming.

If you're unfamiliar with Fire Emblem then it is a series of strategy RPGs where the main feature is permadeath.  Over the course of your 25 level adventure with Marth, you'll meet and recruit a number of people of various classes and skills that will level up as they fight stuff on each map.  However, if one of your allies falls in battle they are dead forever, no coming back, end of the line.  This of course means that MOST people who play these games will have a save before each map and will instantly restart as soon as one character goes down.  I tried to avoid this on stream to make it more interesting but I did have a selection of 5 or 6 core team members who, if killed, would trigger a restart. 

Fire Emblem 1 isn't actually all that dissimilar from its sequels but there are a couple of features missing from this game that make it grueling compared to the others.  For example, this game lacks the weapon triangle from the later games and instead has weapons just having certain qualities.  For example swords are accurate but don't do all that much damage while axes are inaccurate and will cleave a guy in half like its Mortal Kombat.  In later games, you have a sort of "swords beat axes" type thing so if you take advantage of that the guy with the axe is a lot more likely to miss.  FE1 doesn't have that so occasionally a raider will just walk up to one of your mercs or even Marth himself and just send him to the shadow realm in a single hit and there's nothing you can do but curl up into a ball and cry.

Crits also seem significantly more abundant in this game for both sides.  I got out of many stick situations with a lucky critical but also I lost a fair deal of good, well leveled and geared units over the course of the game to some guy who usually does 10 damage, suddenly doing 30 damage to my guy with 27HP max. There's a lot of frustration with these games but that's what makes them all the more satisfying when you eventually beat them.

I wouldn't recommend Fire Emblem 1 on NES to someone new to the series, I don't even know if I could recommend it to a fan either.  It's not a bad game but its sort of obtuse, slow and seemingly unfair at times.  If you're new then I'd say go and play Three Houses on the Switch because I heard you can turn off the permadeath in that game so if THATS the feature that's turning you off, you can test the waters with a game that doesn't do that.  If you don't mind the permadeath though, go dig out your GBA and play Fire Emblem (7) instead although I'm only saying that because, despite owning Three Houses since December, I haven't actually played it yet.

I personally never want to play THIS installment ever again although I was digging through my old NES carts on Sunday and I found the sequel, Fire Emblem Gaiden so despite everything I just said about this game being obtuse and unfair, I'm probably going to start that very soon.

Regarding Megaman 2p1c

This weekend I was scheduled to do a 2 players 1 controller marathon of Megaman 5, 6 and X at Critical Hit Nagoya with the owner of the establishment however as I'm sure you're all aware, the world is getting fucked over by COVID right now and of course the best course of action for most people is to just stay home.

As a result of this, I'm sorry to announce that the Megaman marathon this weekend is cancelled for April.  That does not mean its cancelled completely, once this whole virus thing is over and we can safely gather once more a new date will be set and the stream WILL happen.  A 200 GBP incentive was met for this thing, there's no way its getting cancelled forever.

Instead of the 2p1c marathon, on April 11th and 12th I'll be doing two 8 hour streams consisting of a two hour session of each of the stream segments.  So the schedule will look something like:

100 NES Game challenge

Cuphead Challenge Project

DQ5 Playthrough 

Chillstream -> More than likely to be FF7 Remake

Also I'll be doing a long-ish stream of the FF7 remake on Friday, 10th April because I'm excited as all hell for that game.

So while it's a shame that we have to cancel Megaman for now, it's probably best for all of us to stay inside and stay safe.  It will happen, and for now we can enjoy the new releases and some classics over the weekend! 

Monster Party

Now that I've finally finished Famicom Wars my NES 100 game challenge continues and the first game out of the 100 years war was a weird little title called Monster Party.

The game starts innocently enough, your character gets approached by a weird gargoyle dude who tells you that his world is full of demons and he wants you to go there and deal with the.  You get swooped into demon land and then have to play through 8 stages beating enemies and killing bosses until you get to the end.

All but one of the levels is your standard move to the left and kill all the enemies and throughout those levels are little doors.  Going into a little door will take you to a room that will either have a boss enemy or nothing and the goal is to find all the bosses, get the key and go to the next stage.

What makes this game so weird is that it seems almost as if it was developed by two entirely different people.  One of these people was trying to make a sort of cutesy platformer about a young boy and his gargoyle friend beating some monsters and the other guy was trying his damn hardest to make a spooky horror game complete with some really gruesome imagery.  If you've ever played a game called Eversion it has a sort of similar feel to that in places.

This is spoiler territory but the game gets really weird in its final cutscene where your gargoyle friend gives you a treasure box that, upon opening you find a princess inside.  Mail order princesses for heroes is weird in and of itself but after that she begins to melt, corrupting the area around her and causing you to melt as well and all this accompanied by some quite harrowing 8 bit imagery.

Despite the games sort of fucked up nature in places its actually really fun to play and if you get find a way to get your hands on it then I recommend it!  It's not very long but its a great way to kill a few hours.

February/March Stream Marathons

Over 12 hours of Sekiro was successfully completed and while I didn't come anywhere close to finishing the game, we all hand a grand old time watching me beat bosses in the exact opposite way that the game wanted me to do it.

Now, thanks to some extremely generous donations made at the weekend I can now announce the marathons for the next two months!  

February will be the NES Wheel 12 hour mini marathon.  Basically the same as my usually scheduled NES wheel but for 12 hours over a weekend instead of a 2 hour slot on a weekday.  Exact dates are still to be decided and I'll announce on Twitter (@Taurinensis) once I've made the plan.

March 1st however, will be a little bit more interesting.  The marathon will be another 2 players 1 controller with Pithoui only this time, instead of Megaman 4 and 2 very easy games, we will be doing all the classic Megaman games back to back to back.  Megaman 1 through 6, 2 players, one controller.  As a stretch goal, if we get another 100 pounds for the charity we will add Megaman X on the end of the marathon!  So tune in for some absolute madness in March

Don't forget you can see these marathons AND regularly scheduled streams at 

www.twitch.tv/taurinensis

Gun Nac 1 Credit Clear

Had this video set to private for ages, oops!

River City Ransom

So I finished River City Ransom on Stream a few days ago and despite it being my second time to finish this game I've never said anything about it on this blog, which is weird considering how good it is.

On the off chance that you're not familiar, River City Ransom was a game released in 1989 for the NES and you play as a dude called Alex, and maybe one other guy if you're in two player mode, as you go around the town beating up thugs.  The game is actually the third entry in the "Kunio-Kun" series preceded by Super Dodge Ball and Renegade before that.

Gameplay involves walking around a town, beating up dudes until you find a boss dude, then beating him up and getting a hint on where to find the next boss dudes.  When you beat all the boss dudes you go to a school and beat up the final boss dude on the roof and the game ends.  As you beat dudes up they drop money which you use to go to the various shops and buy food items to increase your stats.  I have no idea what most of the stats actually do but you should just aim to get big numbers so you can relieve dudes of there cash in one punch rather than multiple.  It's got a small but open world so it's really up to you to explore and while this can be a little confusing your first time round you'll never really get truly lost.

Despite the NES being famous for having hundreds of really hard games, River City Ransom is kind of on the easy side.  It can be a little challenging at first but once you start to get your stats up and your head round the combat the game becomes an absolute cakewalk.  Late in the game you can pick up some cowboy boots that make your kicks strong enough to kill most enemies, including bosses, in a single attack so once you buy those it really is just game over from there.  My only complaint about this game is that occasionally the enemies will go absolutely crazy and just bully you in a corner until you die and you can't do shit about it.  However this is only really a mild annoyance because in this game death doesn't mean a restart, it just means you lose half your cash and go back to the last shopping area you visited.

So if you've somehow gone your whole life not having played this, go grab it.  I'm sure it's been released for virtual console or whatever given it's legacy and failing that I'm sure you could use some slightly more dubious methods to play it if you were that way inclined.  This series is actually still going too with some of the most recent entries being released for the PS4.  Go get to know good ol' Kunio-Kun, he's a stand up lad

Die Hard Isn't That Bad

So usually when I come to near the end of a game or after I've finished it I'll do a blog post on it,  I've you've been watching the stream you'll have seen I'm doing a 100 game NES challenge and I've not really talked much any of the games I've finished on here so I want to talk about the game that was, so far, probably the most fun.

Die Hard came out in 1990 for the NES and basically follows the same plot of the movie.  You are tasked with stopping the crooks of which there are 40 in the building and you have to kill them all before the timer runs out and they get away with a bunch of money.  It's a simple game and it's easy to pick up and play in short bursts thanks to  the in game timer keeping a single attempt down to about 30 minutes.

Now the game ain't perfect by any stretch.  In fact, there's a hell of a lot wrong with it really.  The two big problems with it, for me, are the controls are sort of crap which makes aiming shots and killing crooks way more stressful than it should be and the foot power gauge mechanic.  I get that it was a thing in the movie and of course, if you walk over broken glass you're gonna fuck your feet up but in this game the gauge drops just from running.  Considering this is a game where time is very much of the essence, the fact that you are punished for running is BEYOND stupid.  This games lack of quality however has been well documented by our good friend, The Angry Video Game Nerd.  The episode he did on this game, while entertaining, I think gave it a bit of a reputation that it doesn't deserve.

If you can get used to the shit controls and stupid foot system it's actually quite clever.  For example if you kill a crook and steal his radio, you can listen in and find out where the other crooks are going.  The crooks will of course wise up to you though and stop radio chatter, but if you used the radio to call the police, they will contact you and tell you where crooks have been spotted throughout the building.  If you go into one of the lower floors and blow up a computer you can fuck with the hackers efforts to open the safe, thus giving you more time to kill crooks or if you spend too much time crawling in vents, the crooks will start attacking you through the vents.  It's nice to see the game react to the way your playing and there's even a way to cheese the game by getting all the crooks to fight you at once at the end but this is stupidly hard to achieve.  There's also a pretty decent number of endings for a game this old, most of them being "you lose" endings but my favorite is that it's entirely possible for you and the final boss to kill each other at the same time and the game will be like "You saved the day but you died as well, GAME OVER" and I can't think of that many games that give you an ending for a double KO.

So if you saw that AVGN video and wrote of Die Hard as just another shit movie tie in game, I implore you to give it a go.  If you have no idea what I'm on about then go give it a go anyway because despite all it's glaring flaws its a surprisingly fun game

Identity Gaming 2019

Well holy shit it's already nearly the end of 2018.  It's been a bit of a shit year for the Identity Gaming blog and YouTube channel mainly due to a lot of personal shit happening involving me changing jobs twice but at least the Twitch stream is still going strong (www.twitch.tv/taurinensis, follow plz)

Anyway instead of dwelling on that negative nonsense let's just look forward to the coming year.  Here is some content that you can expect  to see throughout 2019.

More YouTube Stuff

The YouTube side of things has been a bit neglected so I'm going to put a bit more effort into that side of things.  I've actually had a Shovel Knight playthrough in the can for MONTHS but put off uploading it so I could do that stupid Lone Survivor playthrough in October.

Speaking of that, the 3 episodes of Lone Survivor have been deleted from the channel.  I wasn't happy with them and the glitched difficulty really fucked me off and made me not want to play it.  One day I'll do it again but for now I'm just fucking it off and focusing on other things. 

Still though, I have many a game that I can make a play through for that isn't a glitchy piece of shit AND there are plans for all sorts of fancy new series to upload.  I do want to expand on some of my previous, untouched things such as the thing where I talked about Japan exclusive arcade games or my series highlighting free shit for you to enjoy.  I'm also going to start a hall of fame/hall of shame so when people ask me questions like "Hey what's your favorite game" or "what do you think of X" I can just link them a video instead of having to tell people for the 95 billionth time that my favorite game is Panzer Dragoon Sa......I mean Bad Rats.

I'm also going to try my hand at some semi serious vlogging as I try to document my entire year in a weekly video that I'll upload every Sunday.  I'll talk about shit I'm playing, give site updates if there are any and if I come across and video game news that I feel is worth touching on I'll comment on that too.  I'm doing this 50% because I'm a self important little prick that craves that e-attention and 50% because when I think back to 2018 I can't seem to remember anything that I played other than Dragon Quest 11.  That either means that 2018 was a shit year for games (not true) or I'm just a forgetful idiot (more than likely true) so please join me through my 2019 journey. 

The Wheel of NES

I fucking love Wheel Decide, it's like my favorite website.  My other favorite thing ever is to set myself stupid challenges that I'll probably never finish but I like to think that maybe one day I won't be such a quitter so here I go doing something publicly so maybe the potential jeering and disrespect at my failure will make me not just give up as soon as I get bored.

So I've made a wheel on Wheel Decide of 100 NES games.  I'm going to play them all on stream (link above, don't forget to follow) and see how long it takes me to finish all of them.  I built the list by googling "best 100 NES games", using most of those and then taking some titles from the Angry Video Game Nerd playlist and throwing them in there so that maybe I can entertain some of you with my suffering.  Although Silver Surfer is in there and despite what that guy said about it, that game is awesome and if you think it's bad then you're just wrong. 

The Year Of Spookyness

So my favorite holiday season is Halloween.  I'm in love the the genre of horror as a whole and every year I plan all these great things to do for IG for Halloween and then I get busy or I go to Halloween parties and get drunk and subsequently hungover and none of this stuff ever happens.  So because I'm absolutely sick of that shit I'm just dedicating the entirety of 2019 to the horror genre. 

Expect to see a lot of horror related content in the coming 12 months be it about books, movies, games, whatever, if it's horror, I'm blogging about it.

Finally, despite all these cool plans for streams, videos, posts etc. don't forget that I'm still doing this all for charity so if you enjoy the content please throw a donation or two to the Alzheimer's Society charity.  It would be awesome if we could hit the current goal this year and maybe get a nice ways into the next one.  I'm planning to overhaul the incentives page so sit tight and some cool things might happen with that soon too.

Happy new year!

Retro Game Snobbery

Snobbery is something I think anyone who is seriously into gaming is guilty of in at least some form.  If you really like a series or a specific title and you know a lot about it then it's impossible for it not to manifest at least a little bit.  People who enjoy retro games are no exception to this but for some reason it's this group of gamers where the levels of snobbery are the absolute worst.

I'm no angel myself really, if you start talking to me about Silent Hill or Shin Megami Tensei then I'm going to find it at least a little difficult to reel myself in on that topic.  Lord help you if you say something like "Homecoming was best Silent Hill" or "Persona is better than Nocturne" because I might pop the fuck off and bore you to death with series factoids and long drawn out plot explanations but that's about the worst of it.

I understand this kind of reaction though.  If you really like a thing and then you FINALLY meet someone who also likes a thing but they aren't quite as up on it as you think they should be, you want to sort of "educate" them.  It's not a case of belittling their opinions but it's a case of trying to help them appreciate the thing as much as you do.  A lot of the time however, it never really comes off that way and things get out of hand pretty often, it's why I don't like talking to "fans" of even things I enjoy doing.

But with people who enjoy retro games this is a completely different barrel of fish.  Now for the most part, people from the retro game community are actually extremely friendly and accepting.  A bunch of people who love sharing their love of old games from their youth or even accepting younger gamers who enjoy that retro style of game and want to learn more.  But when a retro game snob does rear their ugly head good lord the best bet is to run away.  For these people, retro gaming isn't so much a hobby as much as it is a competition and they just HAVE to let you know about it.

For example I saw a post on a retro gaming group that said "Some "so called" retro gamers didn't know you could put two NES advantages into the system at the same time" thus implying that if you weren't aware of this one fact then your entire love for the sub-hobby of retro gaming is now brought into question.  I never had an NES as a kid but I thought that plugging in two controllers would have been pretty simple.  The point is though that for a retro game snob, you cant just enjoy games from the past, you have to be constantly judged on what you play or even how you play it.  Forget controller knowledge, if you bring up the idea of playing on an emulator for convenience then you might as well be sent to the firing squad.

But that level of snobbery, while obnoxious, is sort of similar to what I said before. What really gets my back up is the CONSTANT one upmanship that these people also employ.  For example I met a guy once who, if you brought up a deal that you found for literally ANY retro game, he always had found one better.  You could say "Yo, I'm so happy today, I found X for Y price" and he would respond with "oh yeah? well I was on holiday and got it for Z price" where Z is always at LEAST half of whatever you said Y was.  I've seen other examples of this with people saying stuff like "oh well you can't REALLY call yourself a retro game fan if you haven't at least beaten Takeshi's Challenge on original hardware, can you?" completely straight faced and unironically.

Like I said, most retro game fans are fine people who are helpful and will be happy to suggest their favorite obscure gems to you so that you can discover some cool new games but if you encounter one of these special breeds of gaming snob run for the hills and sound the Silent Hill siren because no one needs that shit near them. 

Chip 'N Dale in 11:40

R.I.P. FC Dual

A LOOOONG time ago I bought a system called the FC Dual.  It's a Chinese made multi-system that plays NES and SNES games.  At the time I bought it I was quite happy with it, it played the games I wanted it to play and I didn't have to shell out 10k+ yen for both individual systems.  However, I made a mistake because this fucking piece of shit just died on me for no goddamn reason.  After taking a moment to reflect on the system I have concluded that it's a huge piece of shit and I would have been better off just spending extra on the original systems.  Here's why

1)  It looks like shit, feels like shit and the controllers suck

This thing is obviously made stupidly cheap because this thing has worse build quality than some of the children's toys at the school I work at.  It's probably the cheap build quality that caused it to die because one moment it was fine and then one cartridge swap later and BAM, no more video output.

The controllers are also fucking atrocious with a terrible D-Pad and shoulder buttons that hurt your fingers after a while.  Everyone knows that the Xbox 360 had a fucking awful D-Pad but the FC Dual somehow out-sucks even that.  Also the black wire covers were coming off the controller and I have no idea how THAT fucking happened considering I treat my gaming collection with the utmost care.

2)  It treats carts like a dog that doesn't want to let go of a tennis ball

More true for FC games than SFC games but HO-LY shit the FC Dual is the system that just doesn't want to let go.  When you are taking a game out you have to pull really fucking hard, almost to the point where you want to stop out of paranoia that you might break the fucking thing.  I found that you could take them out calmly but rocking them left and right out of the slot but that took about a minute and a half to do which is bullshit considering that the original systems have fucking eject buttons.

3) Compatibility

So a while ago I bought Dig-Dug 2 from a retro shop near my house.  I take it home, pop it in and the fucking thing wont load up.  So I take it back to the shop and ask for a refund where they promptly shove it in a normal Famicom and the thing works absolutely no problem.  I have a couple of other obscure Famicom games that don't work in the FC Dual but will work completely fine in a regular system.  Once I realised what was going on with Dig Dug I started getting paranoid every time I bought something that the fucking thing wasn't going to work.

So there you have it, 3 big reasons why the FC Dual is a massive piece of cock.  I know it seems really cool to be able to play 2 consoles worth of stuff in one system but they are so cheaply made that it's almost not worth it.  Just shell out for a original system and you have something more reliable and you don't have to contend with shitty controllers or comparability issues

The March Retro Haul

February Retro Haul

I Miss Quirky Peripherals

My post yesterday evening about rail shooters got me thinking about video game console peripherals and just how boring they have become in the modern age.  We have stuff like the Kinect, the PS4s pad thing but I only seem to ever come across people complaining about those.

I mean what the fuck happened to every console having a gun.  Back in the day, every motherfucker and it's dog had a goddamn gun in order to play all those arcade rail shooter ports.  The Wii kinda had a gun thing going on but that was nothing more than slotting your remote into a hunk of plastic.  I want shit like the Sega Saturn Predator back.  It was fucking heavy as shit, lit up when you fired it and it was fucking big.  You knew that when you got that motherfucker out the draw, shit was going to go down.

Back then, developers were always trying to do interesting shit with their systems and giving you interesting ways to play.  NiGHTS on the Saturn saw the release of a "3D" controller which looked kind of like an arcade stick and was designed to make playing that game a bit easier or something.  The Dreamcast had a fishing rod for use with Sega Bass Fishing but also worked with Soul Calibre so you could swing it around like a sword.  This resulted in getting smashed by someone with a controller but it was fun nonetheless.  Nintendo were famous for their weird fucking peripherals such as ROB the Robot for the NES and the Game Boy Transfer Pack back when Pokemon Stadium came out which blew peoples fucking minds back then

Sure, they were gimmicky and the number of compatible games was kind of low but the point is that a lot of the time they were fun to use.  I spent HOURS playing ports of rail shooters and HOURS with the fucking DC fishing rod just because it was a novel way to play.

With modern systems, a lot of the shit is built in or has been done before a long time ago and it worked better (Kinect and Eye Toy for example).  Things like touch screens were novel back when the DS was new but in 2014, a touch screen on a modern device is fucking standard.  The closest thing we have to a proper interesting peripheral is the Occulus Rift or any other VR headset thing.  That thing is pushing boundaries and giving people a chance to experience games in a way they never have before which is awesome.

It also makes the console a bit more interesting I think.  I'm constantly finding weird bits and bobs in the retro stores around Japan and sometimes I have no idea what the fuck they would ever be used for.  40 years from now when people are going around retro stores for PS3s or whatever, there isn't going to be anything all that interesting to find in a junk box because aside from the standard console/controller/cables/games there wasn't really much else to fuck about with.

I know it's mainly a problem with technology being what it is and the need for all this quirky bullshit being reduced to basically zero but I'm sure the creative minds in the games industry could come up with SOMETHING that would make me want to play their game based on the method of input alone like they did back then. 

Maybe one day.

The July Retro Haul

Picture unrelated I guess, but whatever

Here is this months retro haul.  Fuck Front Mission