Onimusha 2 is Insane

 

I'm a big fan of the first Onimusha game.  To sum it up in a pithy, not quite accurate way for anyone who’s never played it, it’s essentially classic Resident Evil but with samurai.  It’s one of those games that I return to at least once a year or so to take up the blade as Samanosuke and show the demons of Gifu Castle what for.  Despite my deep love for the first game though, I have extremely limited experience with the sequels.  I played 2 and 3 briefly at launch, never beat them and then largely forgot about them.  I briefly watched the final moments of Oni 3 in a video game bar a few years ago but I was off my face drunk and not really paying attention so I can’t tell you anything outside of “Jean Reno was there” and you can tell that from the box.  

So recently I decided to make a change to this lapse in my gaming experience and I sat my ass down and played through Onimusha 2 and I did not quite get the experience I was expecting at all.  I hesitate to call the game “bad” per se, but maybe I’ll sink as low as “weird and annoying” 

Right out of the gate, from the moment you hit start the vibes are just off.  Onimusha 1 was a different beast compared to Resident Evil but the DNA was still there.  The horror elements didn't really hit with the fantastical designs and stilted English voice work but an effort was being made.  Oni 2 kicks off with an honest to goodness anime OP but with the vibes of a period drama shown on Japanese tv at 1pm for the housewives circa 1995.  This vibe sticks throughout the whole game with an extremely corny and forced romantic sub plot which is occasionally broken up when it remembers what it’s supposed to be a sequel to.  

The weirdness continues as you are greeted with a gold counter on your menu and the ability to gift items to a number of side characters, which by itself is fine but what makes it weird is that you are totally locked out of the system about 2 hours in.  My 6000 gold from the start of the game sat in my inventory untouched until Nobunaga ate shit at the end.  The other thing is that neglecting this system, because I thought I could engage with it later, completely FUCKED my play through.  I found Onimusha 2 to be brutally difficult, something I wasn’t expecting considering the first game is a free clear.  The ending stats showed me, however, that my neglect for the friendship system locked about half the game out for me which is cool from a replayability standpoint but bad from a first play stress standpoint.  I struggled HARD with the final boss due to a lack of healing resources, a lack I would not have had if the ninja could have opened the trick chests or having extra scenes which I assume would have had more meds and herbs.  

Despite the easily missable game systems, the moment to moment sword play was great.  Basically the same as Oni 1 but the enemies in this game are actually sort of threatening and not just piñatas full of exp to farm as I run from one boss to another.  That said though, the bosses are insufferably shit, feeling mostly unfair rather than posing any kind of interesting challenge.  The worst being the weird pig woman with the umbrella who has attacks that I swear cannot be blocked and does insane damage unless you’ve been pumping your armor and completely ignoring your damage output.  The final form of the final boss also just drops the sword play to turn into a boss fight from Sin and Punishment (N64) but with bad controls which was certainly something I wasn’t wanting or enjoying 

The cutscenes are where things get really unhinged though.  I want to call the English voice work terrible but it’s SO bad that I have to wonder if it’s actually being done on purpose and if that’s true I have to wonder why this game is being treated as such a joke.  The game as many laugh out loud “what the fuck?!” moments that need to be seen to be appreciated such as any scene with the foppish umbrella haircut demon swordsman.  Introduced as what I thought as comic relief, harasses you until the end of the game as a main antagonist where you then have a climactic duel with him in the penultimate area.  The one that got the biggest laugh out of me is when Nobunaga’s first form goes down and he shoots some orbs into a slot machine that spins and then turns into an elephant.  Not a sentence I thought I’d be able to write about Onimusha of all things.  I hate that cliche gag of “were they high when they made this?!” But SOMETHING was being abused in both the writing room and the office of the people making the cutscenes, I’m sure of it.

Overall, I like 2 significantly less than 1.  That said though, I’m excited to go and revisit it now equipped with the hindsight of a first play through.  The weirdness of the presentation is something I don’t think I’ll ever get over but I’ll be interested to replay and re-evaluate in about a year.  Watch this space 

Evil Dead: A Fist Full of Boomstick

 Confession time.  Despite being a massive fan of horror books, games and movies I have not seen ANYTHING Evil Dead related.  Not a single thing, not the original 1981 movie, not the new Evil Dead Rise from last year and absolutely nothing in between.  I have drunkenly watched some scenes from the various movies on YouTube with friends but never sat down and watched something from this franchise from start to finish.  Not that I have anything against it, it's certainly on my to-do list, but my watchlist is almost as big as my gaming backlog so its really just a case of being lost in the crowd.  

So as someone who knows fuck all about franchise, A Fistful of Boomstick was certainly an interesting experience.  Series main character Ash Williams (portrayed in game by the actual Bruce Campbell, very cool) gets embroiled in what I assume is yet another encounter with demonic monsters called Deadites and it's up to him and his trusty boomstick to make them go away.  This translates into a pretty generic (for the time) yet quite entertaining PS2 action game where you lay waste to demons while solving puzzles to progress a predictable yet decently entertaining enough plot.  The story certainly feels like a bit of an afterthought, a phoned in excuse to facilitate demon murder but judging from the fact that the franchise is about a man with a chainsaw for an arm I think moaning about the predictable twists and sub-par storytelling would be akin to moaning about the lack of story substance in something like Doom.  It's not what we're here for.

So gameplay is king in this one and it's decent enough.  One button for gun, one button for chainsaw arm, kill most things that move until a cutscene happens and then do it again until credits.  Sounds like something that might get repetetive and boring but the game isn't long enough for that to really happen.  I played through the whole thing in one sitting that took around 6 or 7 hours and right as I was maybe starting to get fed up it had the good sense to finish.  Just the right length.  Aside from the boomsticking and the chainsawing Ash also gets access to a spell book which comes with a few offensive options but is mainly used for solving puzzles.  The problem with the spellbook is that it's such a crap offensive option that it's easy to forget that you even have it and then that forgetfullness causes the game to stall horribly as you flounder around with a puzzle that's easily solved with a quick incantation.  For example there was one part where I got a Possess Deadite spell, a spell that you are supposed to use in order to grab a couple of items stashed behind an unkillable horde of the bastards.  A simple puzzle meant to show you how to use the spell but I died there multiple times trying to run in and brute force it (despite the game telling me not to) because I just flat out forgot that I had even picked up the spell.  I was so comfortable in filling everything full of buckshot that the function of my R1 button had completely left my brain.

Despite my own stupidity in that one instance, the other puzzles in this game aren't much better.  There was one puzzle that required the possession of a dog, a spell I DID remember but it then fails to show you that there is a live dog enemy behind an automatically closing door which led me to run around a mostly empty map for about 20 minutes looking for a different dog enemy to possess.  Like trying to solve a jigsaw where someone has just hidden a couple of the pieces around the house and not told you about it.  Aside from that there was a couple of annoying "put the McGuffin in the right sequence in the thing" which would have been fine if the menuing wasn't so slow and one puzzle that involved finding gems with an alarm thing which gave me Sonic Adventure 2 Knuckles flashbacks and I'd rather not thing about those sections of that game.

The bosses are also an incredibly weak aspect of the game pretty much consisting of low-tier Zelda dungeon bosses.  One where you tennis a projectile back, one where you make him run into a wall and the final boss is LITERALLY just stationary King Dodongo.  I would have liked a bit more out of its bigger fights and it's a shame we got this lame, generic, My First Video Game Boss tier shit.

All in all though, these problems aren't enough to ruin what is a pretty decent movie tie in game.  I'd argue that it's worth it just for some of the Bruce Campbell one liners.  It's not going to blow your mind or change your life but Fistful of Boomstick will give you a decently fun action game experience and a sensible chuckle

Silent Hill 3's Weird Bad Ending

 

Silent Hill 3 is my favorite entry in the series.  Unlike the vast majority of the fanbase that seems to hold 2 as the best one, I actually like the occult stuff from 1, 3 and 4 and I think the third entry in the series has some of the best scares of the entire franchise.  But they are all (all being 4 and before, anything after 4 can fuck off) good, really that just comes down to personal preference but despite having played SH3 a ton and it being in my top spot since my teens I have never gotten it's weird bad ending.

I didn't even know it was a thing.  Silent Hill as a series is known for its multiple endings thing but 3 didn't really have that. 1 had the Good/Bad + or not plus thing, 2 had endings based on actions you took in the game, 4 has a bunch of endings based on how you treat the escort and how good of an exorcist you are but 3, I thought, only had 2.  It's a definitive story about the aftermath of the first game, there's not really a lot of wiggle room for an ending.  Heather has the unawaked demon god inside her, some shit happens and then she kills it, done and dusted.  Of course, there's the UFO ending which basically every game has to have as a tradition but then there's the "Possessed" ending.  I only found out about it when I was drinking with my friend and he mentioned it in an off-hand comment and it took me completely by surprise.

First of all, you can't even get it on a New Game, you have to be in New Game + or else it won't play even if you do the other requirements.  Once you've done that, you have to get your Hotline Hill on and kill over 100 enemies while also letting them smack you around because you yourself have to take over 1000 points of damage.  Forgive the woman in the confessional near the end of the game and then kill the final boss and boom, bad ending.  I won't spoil what it is exactly here, you can either go look it up on YouTube or go do it yourself.

So it's no surprise I never knew about it really.  Silent Hill 3, despite it's quality, is not the kind of game I tend to play more than once at a time.  The game is so exhausting (in a good way) that after I'm done I'll put it down for a handful of months and then come back for another playthrough when I get the itch.  It's like crawling under a nice blanket....made of flesh and it's bleeding, but it's comforting nontheless.  Usually when I come back to this playthrough I don't do NG+ from a completed file, I usually just do a flat new game on normal/normal.  I've done the UFO ending long ago but that's one of the only times I've engaged with the plus stuff but I'm mainly here for the narrative and not to shoot anime beams at flesh beasts.

It was a nice thing to discover though, gave me an excuss to do two more playthroughs of one of my favorite games on the PS2 and I suggest you give it a go too.  If I'm being honest it's not REALLY worth the effort to get but if this post can get even one person to replay SH3 again then that's good enough for me.  Go play it

Baldurs Gate Dark Alliance

 Baldurs Gate is a series one might be quite familar with if you're into the Dungeons and Dragons RPG games for PC but if you have never played Dark Alliance and expected something similar to those PC entries, then you're in for a bit of a surprise.

Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance, released for the PS2 in 2001, does away with the slow, methodical RPG-based in table top style game play of the PC versions and instead goes for a more action oriented approach.  You start the game by picking a Dwarf fighter, a human archer or an elven mage and as far as character creation goes that's where it ends.  You watch a cutscene and then are quickly thrust in a sewer to go kill a bunch of rats, as is common for these kind of games.  The game probably bares more similarity to something like Diablo more than anything else where you go through dungeons, hack and slash your way through hordes of enemies and hopefully collect some sweet loot on the way.

That's not to say that ALL Dungeons and Dragons stuff has gone completely out of the window.  Each monster you slay gives experience and when you fill up your bar you gain a level.  Gaining a level grants you skill points to apply to various feats which are things ranging from hit harder and die less to all new skills to play with depending on which starting class you picked.  The last playthrough I did I chose the Dwarf fighter, so all my feats were pretty much hit harder and die less but I did get one skill called Bull Rush which made traversing the environment a bit less dull sometimes.

There is also a cool multiplayer mode where you and a friend can slay things at the same time but the game doesn't automate any of the loot sharing, it's all first come first serve so if you have a particularly greedy buddy you can expect a few arguments from time to time. My recent play of this game was solo so I'm not entirely sure but I think that experience isn't shared either which is extra annoying if you can't get any killing blows in because your buddy who stole all the good swords is doing all the killing instead.  I'm basing this on a memory from when I played this with some school buddies though so there's a chance my memory is flawed on this one.  

The one thing I can complain about for sure is the bullshit damage values on hard mode.  When I played this game in my younger days, I played it on Normal, a time before I made playing games on hard my personal standard.  Going back to it to record for the stream I thought to myself "this game is easy, I'll play it on hard!" and while it's no Dark Souls by any stretch, sometimes this game takes the piss with how much damage enemies do.  Damage in this game is always done in a range of values, for example a weapon you pick up will have a strength rating of, lets say, 4-19 or something like that.  So when you hit something it's taking that range, plus whatever stat bonuses you have and then it's applied to your strike.  The same goes for the enemies too only I think their ranges are jacked up in hard because sometimes you'll get hit and less than 1% of your HP will fall away and then a moment later you'll get hit by the same guy only he'll one shot you and cause you to reload a save.  The game IS pretty easy and almost all enemies can be beaten hitless by running in little circles around them but it can be annoying when you take a hit and either have to run away chugging HP potions like some kind of addict or you just flat out die.

Overall though it was fun coming back to Dark Alliance.  If you're looking for a sort of brain-off hit the goblins till they die kind of action game then give it a go.  Even if you aren't into table top games AT ALL it's a fun little romp through a bunch of location severing scalps from heads for EXP and gold and it's just generally very much worth playing

Memories of Def Jam Fight for New York

It's 2004, I'm about 15 and in high school.  I have a friend at school who, for the sake of this story I'm going to call Mo.  Mo and I were two very different people who at first glance you probably would expect not to really get on.  He was a huge dude from the West Indies who played a ton of sports, liked to party and listened to hip hop, rap and all that stuff.  I on the other hand was a sheltered white kid from a suburb who spent almost 100% of his time playing video games and listening to the old cassettes of late 80s/90s pop music from my mothers old collection.  However at school I bonded with this guy over games like Megaman, anime like Dragon Ball Z and...Linkin Park of all weird things.

We would often go to each others houses to play video games, usually an overnight stay so we could just play into the wee hours of the morning.  I remember going to his place and spending a LARGE amount of a day just playing Wind Waker and REMake when those came out and he would come over and we'd play stuff like Megaman X, Dragonball games or one of the obscure RPGs from my collection.

There was one time though he brought a game round to my place, which was Def Jam Fight for New York.  I didn't know anything about Def Jam other than the fact it was a rap label and therefore didn't want anything to do with it.  I called him a piece of shit for having garbage taste in games and didn't want to play it.  However he was twice my size and a lot more assertive than me so we ended up playing it anyway.

The game fired up and I scoffed at him for all the features in the game that I perceived as pointless and stupid.  All this heavy bass and emphasis on buying bling for your custom fighter in a story mode that was some cliché garbage about thugs fighting over territory or something.  Then we started getting into fights and the game is essentially a wrestling game that plays sort of similar to the old WWF games or whatever.  You pick a fighting style and that fighting style dictates how you KO people in each level.  If your a street fighter then getting their health low and clocking them in the head with a powerful haymaker will win you the fight.  If you were into grappling you'd have to make your opponent submit by putting them in various holds.

The first thing that really caught my attention however was the games blazin' moves.  When you fill up a meter you can enter a "blazin" state.  In this state, if you grab the guy and push the right stick you'll do a special attack.  These attacks are INSANE, gravity defying, multi hit combo, earth shattering attacks that really make you feel like you REALLY just ruined a guys day.  There's one in particular that I think Ice T does where he punches you twice in the gut, and flips you over his shoulder so that you got your head down and your ass up.  He then winds and essentially rugby punts the opponent right into the goddamn Shadowrealm and everything about these attacks and the combat in general is incredibly satisfying.

What really got me into the game though is when you get to the 3rd fight venue or so and you get to fight Sean Paul. Sean Paul I don't particularly dislike, even back then, but I always perceived him in my teenage ignorance as just some fuck who rapped about doing drugs, fuckin' bitches and drinking copious amounts of alcohol so I really started paying attention when I found out one could beat the shit out of him with a custom character.  So we wailed on him and the grabbed him and slammed his face so hard into a jukebox that he lay defeated as a twitching mess on the floor and I fucking loved it.

I loved it so much in fact, that I ended up buying the game for myself, playing through the story mode multiple times and unlocking basically everything there was to get.  One thing that I also started to warm up to though was the soundtrack.  The soundtrack is comprised of different songs composed by people from the label and I actually found myself really enjoying them, thus broadening my horizons with my music tastes.  The solid gameplay, the bumpin' soundtrack and the performances from the rappers themselves, despite being in a corny gang war story, are actually quite entertaining and even pretty hilarious at times.

So not only is this is a long winded way of me saying that Def Jam Fight for NY is a fantastic game that you should try if you have not already but I also, in case he reads it, wanted to thank my dude Mo for not only introducing me to a great game but for also heavily broadening my music tastes.

Tl;dr; This game is sick and you should play it POST HASTE

Haunting Ground

Thanks to a donation from Twitch viewer VicePresidentFruitly I played through Haunting Ground on my stream.  Since I finished it last night I thought I'd take the chance to write a few words on what I thought about the game.

Haunting Ground is a game that came out in 2005 for the PS2 as a sort of spiritual successor to the Clock Tower games.  If you aren't familiar, Clock Tower is a series of games where you play as a young girl running away from a crazed killer and you have no means to defend yourself other than hiding inside or behind various things.  Obviously there's more to it than that but if you want to try and visualize it then imagine a sort of hybrid between Monkey Island and Amnesia.

In this game you play as a young woman called Fiona who gets in a car crash and winds up in some kind of castle.  After a short time she starts to get chased around by some kind of half human, half gorilla thing and to aide in her escape she joins forces with a dog called Hewie.  Together you must solve puzzles and run away from not only gorilla man but a whole host of colorful baddies who all want to do really bad things to you.

Gameplay wise, you walk around the castle solving puzzles until you run into whatever baddie is trying to kill you at which point you must drop everything you're doing to run for dear life.   You can call on Hewie to bite at the enemy to buy you some time but essentially you have to find a little hidey hole and wait there until they go away at which point you can resolve puzzle solving.  Keep doing this until you have a boss "fight" which is less of a fight and more of just a puzzle that you have to solve under high pressure of murder.

There are also some really annoying aspects to the game, chief of which is the panic system which is something that's been carried over from Clock Tower and then made 100x more irritating.  If Fiona gets punched up a bit or sees something a bit scary the screens colors will start to wash out and the controller will start rumbling.  Once you hit breaking point Fiona screams and promptly turns into a run away freight train with no breaks and taking damage in this state is likely to lead to a game over.  Since a lot of the corridors and areas in this game are so cluttered or narrow, if you're being chased and become panicked it's probably better to just put the controller down and wait for the end to come.  The other thing I dislike greatly about this game is Fiona's fussy kick.  If you press square you perform a little fussy kick.  The kick itself is fine and there are obvious things in the castle to fussy kick for items but there are some puzzles that require the fussy kick and it's so obtuse that it's easy to get stuck on something VERY easy for no reason.  For example there's one part where you need to kick a generator to get it working but the hint says "Looks like it needs a jolt" or something along those lines (I was playing in Japanese).  So I'm running around looking for cables or something to give it an electrical jolt but what it really wanted was for me to just fussy kick it three times.  The kick is so weak looking as well that you think there's no way it'll jolt a generator or break a pipe but that's exactly what it does.

Anyway, it's a pretty good game despite those gripes I had with it.  It's got some hilarious voice acting and the cast of villains alone is enough to keep a player going.  After beating one character I was genuinely excited to see what kind of weirdo was going to chase me next and the whole game has a sort of comedic vibe flowing through it that'll leave you giggling just as much as you are terrified.  It's not that easy to get hold of (I  think) but give it a go if you get the chance, it's pretty good. 

Reminder: DPD Are An Awful Company

This afternoon I was browsing the "memories" section of my Facebook account and apparently, 6 years ago today is the day I discovered that most of my gaming collection from the UK was stolen!  I've blogged about what happened in the past but I'm going to jump at any chance I can get to bash the company that stole all my shit.

I remember it clearly, I had just finished my course at university and I was gearing up not only to leave Uni but also the country.  My family had moved from England to Sweden and I was moving from England to Japan.  I had such a large collection of games at the time that there was NO WAY I was going to lug all of my shit to Japan so I decided to send it to the family home instead and have it sit there.  I only took my PS3 collection and my portables since those are region free/small and the rest I loaded into boxes and gave to a courier service to deliver.

So some time past and I get messages from my mother saying that the boxes arrived to the family home but they weren't the boxes I sent.  Instead of games my mother received boxes of Jay-Z albums and Bill Clinton bobble head dolls or something.  I was mad, my mother was mad, everyone was mad, so of course we call up the piece of shit courier service that we used called DPD.  According to them and the tracker, the boxes were at some warehouse in Germany.  Why the ended up there I have no idea but for some reason they "couldn't be sent" and shortly after that they were just "lost".  Now I'm not an idiot, I know full well that at some point on my collections journey, some fuck face must have cracked open those boxes, saw all the games and decided to help himself.  Here's a list of what was stolen

All my PS2 games (nearly 100)
All my Wii games (about 50?)
All my Xbox 360 games (about 70)
A random assortment of PS1 games (a decent 20 or so)

The company is pretty adamant that no one stole my shit and paid me £600 in compensation.  If my shit wasn't stolen then why pay me any compensation? Also £600 to replace ALL THAT SHIT, good fuckin' luck.  Luckily thanks to Steam and the abundant game stores offering old stuff for cheap I've been able now to replace a good chunk of it but I'll never forgive the gigantic sacks of shit at DPD for stealing my shit in the first place.

The moral of the story is don't EVER use DPD for ANYTHING.  If you are planning to send something and you're thinking of using DPD to deliver, DO NOT.  You'd be better trusting Garett to run your shit to the location, a literal member of a thieves guild, than having DPD even go near one of your boxes of stuff.  We're all going to lose games at some point, maybe by stealing or by wear and tear but to lose so many all at once still hurts 6 years down the line.

I Hate Blitzball

If you've been watching the stream you'll know what I'm about to say already.  I'm in the final part of my FFX playthrough but this involves some HEAVY grinding to get the stats and gear needed to kill the Dark Aeons and ultimately the games hardest boss, Penance.

In order to make life a lot easier for yourself you get acquire the best weapons in the game known as Celestial Weapons.  The only drawback to these weapons is that when you first get them they are useless with the only skill on them being "No AP" which basically means no experience.  Once you do power them up though using a crest and a sigil they do crazy stuff like break the damage limit or charge your overdrive meter at triple speed and shit like that.

Now for the Dark Aeon stuff Wakka is a very important character because his limit Attack Reels is basically one of the best moves in the game.  With Wakka fully powered up and geared out he's doing 12x99,999 damage which is a hell of a lot of hurt.  Getting him to this point is the annoying part though.

Getting his crest is easy, you just go to a locker in Lucca and press X and you have it.  The sigil on the other hand requires you to play an absolute shit ton of blitzball, which might be the single most boring mini game in Final Fantasy history.  You need to play it 10 times in a league to get Attack Reels, then play games until a tournament with Status Reels pops up THEN finish the league you were in to start a new one with Auroch reels AND THEN play 10 more league games for the sigil.  This doesn't sound so bad but Blitzball is just eye gougingly dull and shouldn't be forced upon anybody like it is here.

I think for me, the main reason it's so disappointing is that in that opening cut scene Blitz looks like this sick, crazy underwater rugby with people being flung out of the arena and people smashing each other in the face every which way.  When you actually get into proper blitz though it's a boring turn based affair where you just pass to Tidus and Jecht Shot every few moments to win matches against incompetent AI.

What's weird is that I know people who actually LIKE Blitzball.  I don't get how one possibly could because it's already an easy mode snoozefest if you put no effort into it but if you actually research how to get and use the best players then the whole thing becomes a joke.  I guess it must just be relaxing or something but as far as I'm concerned Blitz can just fuck off forever.

Sony Slim Woes

I'm not the kind of person who treats my shit badly.  I try to store everything the best I can and my systems will, at worst, get a little dusty.  However for a few years now I've been having constant problems with the slimmed down version of Sony products.  I own a slim PS3, a Vita 2000 model and a slim PS2, so lets work our way through that.

PS3 Slim

To be fair, this one has behaved pretty well.  I bought it in 2011 or so, used, and it's been pretty much perfect.  I've carried it half way across the world from Japan to Sweden and then back to Japan again and it works just fine.  Despite being the "slim" version it's still sort of big and bulky so I guess that's why I'm not having any trouble with it.  I did have an issue where the controller would just randomly start pushing buttons on its own but this just kind of went away on its own.  I have no idea what caused it and no idea what fixed it but I'm just happy I can play my games.  That's more of a controller issue than a system issue anyway.

PS2 Slim

I bought this guy a few years ago when I came back to Japan long term.  Generally speaking it works pretty well but there was one issue about a year ago that pissed me off pretty hard.  My wife fired up the thing to play Kamaitachi no Yoru 2 with her friends where the system just wouldn't make the disc spin.  The fucking thing wasn't recognizing that the drive door was closed so the disc wouldn't spin and therefore you couldn't play the fucking game.  I realized that inside the system there's a little switch that gets pushed down when the door is shut and for some reason this wasn't being pushed.  I put some tape on it which remedied the problem but I had the original PS2 from pretty close to launch and used it all the way up to the end of university with no problems, this thing is just built like shit.

Then there's the issue of the controller which for some reason will just start going right and won't stop until I smack it.  I have a new controller that seems to work well now though and once again that's more of a controller issue than a system issue and could be because I bought it used.

PSP 2000

Now this fucking thing has been a problem since I bought it years and years ago.  I probably should have traded it for a less defective fucking thing but I was too lazy and now I'm paying the price. 

The first issue I had with this thing was dead pixels in the screen.  A red one and a greenish looking one  which should have set off alarm bells in my head but they are in such unimportant parts of the screen that I didn't think anything of them.  While annoying in any part of the game that goes bright white, generally speaking they aren't noticeable but it's frustrating that they are there.

The second issue is a bit more serious.  During game play I will randomly get the grey "Do you want to quit the game" message despite the fact I've not touched the home button.  The button itself isn't sticky and I think it has something to do with a little switch behind the UMD door but I have no idea what the fuck is going on really.

Then a few days ago I went about 10 minutes down the road to a place with my wife, took the thing in my pocket.  I didn't fall down, run or jump on anything and yet when I arrived at the place and took it out for a spin, there were some strange transparent lines going down the left hand side of the screen.  Play it for too long and I get graphical distortion and more lines and a quick google search seems to indicate that the fucking thing is dying.

---

So if I've learned anything from this experience it's that slim type Sony products are a bunch of shit with the exception of maybe the PS3.  I know that when I go and buy a new PSP in a couple of days I'm going right back to the PSP 1000 with its metal frame and bulky ass case.  Reliability over portability from now on.

It's Not Called PSX

This pisses me off way more than it should but goddamnit, every time I see it I get pangs of rage.

The above console, as most of you reading this post probably know, is the Playstation.  It was a system released in Japan in 1994 and kicked off a great line of gaming systems that has stuck with us to this very day. 

There was a redesign for the original Playstation, here's a picture

This was released in 2000 and was called the PSOne.  It sold like hotcakes and even had some funky LCD screen thing that looked pretty cool but I never saw anyone actually using it.

Now, there are people who have plenty of fond memories with the original Playstation hardware and rightly so since it has a plethora of awesome games.  However, there are people who refer to this console in conversation as the "PSX" and this is fucking retarded.  At no point in time were any of these commercially available systems called the "PSX", it's just some stupid shit that people use because they think it sounds cool.

There is a reason that people use it though, it just happens to be a fantastically fucking stupid one.  PSX was the code name given to the system during it's development, according to a quick Google search.  Calling the PS1 the PSX would be like referring the the Gamecube as the Dolphin or the Wii as the Revolution.  People don't do that because it's stupid to do so.  I've heard it argued that there was a Magazine called PSX or something but that doesn't fly either because then you'd be talking about the magazine, not the fucking system.

There does exist a machine, made by Sony, called the PSX though, check it out.

It was released in Japan only in 2003 and was a digital video recorder with a fully integrated PS2 inside.  THAT is a PSX and it's the only thing that's ever officially been called a PSX and therefore, it's the only thing that should be referred to as a PSX.

I know I'm being pedantic about this whole thing but whatever.  The Playstation is NOT called a PSX and I can't help but feel that anyone who calls it that is a bit of an idiot.

The PS2 Adventure

Oh my fucking god, this shouldn't have been this hard to get my hands on a god damn PS2.

A long long LOOONG time ago when this blog was still nice and young, I made a post about how all my shit had been stolen by a mailing company during my move from England to Sweden.  Ever since then, and since moving to Japan, I've been trying to get my hands on a PS2 so I can start putting my collection back together.

However, finding a PS2 in Nagoya was the hardest shit in the universe.

Near my house, there is a place called Book Off.  Book Off is a used manga store but because my branch happens to be slap bang in the middle of a big city, it does basically everything.  Books, games, clothes, you name it, Book Off probably has it.  What they didn't have in stock for some reason was PS2s.  They have plenty of 3s, a few 4s and a bunch of Vita's and PSPs but no PS2s, which was a real pain in the ass because it's usually Book Off that give the best deals.

Now, on the other side of my house there is a street filled with retro stuff.  These retro stores are for collectors and the owners go out of their way to make sure everything is in as close to perfect condition as humanly possible.  The one store that I usually go to was selling PS2 Slims for about 20,000 yen which is equal to about £116!  

For that same goddamn price I can buy a Wii fucking U and THAT'S a current gen system.

But that isn't the only retro store that sells systems on that street, but the other one is run by a total ass clown who ramps up the prices of his shit so high that it's never EVER worth it to buy hardware from this guys store.

He had an absolute crap ton of PS2s but here is what he wanted for them

7000 for the system
1500 for the video cables
1500 for the AC cables
2100 for a controller (x2 because I need to be able to accommodate people)
and 500 for a memory card

That's 12,600 Yen, which is less than the asking price for a slim but considering that this is the price for a big fat old model PS2 it's still a total fucking ripoff.  So when it comes to buying systems these specialist stores can suck my ass.

But then I waltz into Book Off yesterday and they are selling SLIMS for 6000.  That's still a little higher than the prices that I've heard about in some other stores where a few of my friends live, but for Nagoya it's a fucking bargain.

Moral of the story, if you live in Japan and want a PS2, don't come to Nagoya.  Japan may be one of the best places to be for a retro collector (even though PS2 isn't really retro yet) but good lord is it total bullshit sometimes.

That PS4 Announcement I didn't Watch

With me living in Japan and time differences being what they are, I didn't see this conference thing which was Sony giving a little talk on the upcoming PS4.  That said I've done some reading and poking around and here is what I've discovered.

1. It's going to be really quite pretty

Well it better fucking had be.  It'd be a bit of a shock if the PS4 came out and it looked WORSE than a PS3 somehow, this isn't news.

2. It has integration with Facebook and UStream

OK, the UStream thing is kind of cool.  Apparently the controller has a "share" button, where you can upload shit to Ustream for all your friends to watch, which is a potentially cool feature.  Facebook however, needs to fuck off.  Granted that I fucking hate facebook and use it as no more than a glorified chat service to keep in touch with buddies in different countries, but I don't need to broadcast every fucking game I'm playing to my news feed.  Fucking stupid, Facebook and video games should NOT mix.

3.  The controller has some kind of funky sensor thing in it and a touch pad.

I don't see the big deal here, it's a fucking controller.  As long as I push buttons and the game does things I want it to, then I'm happy.  The light bar and the touch pad are all great and stuff but I don't know how these are going to be used yet, so whatever.  At least this one has a mic jack so you don't have to use those fucking blue tooth headsets.

4.  You can use your Vita as a screen.

As someone who owns a Vita, I'm quite happy that I can now take a shit and continue whatever game I will be playing on my PS4 if and when I get one.

5.  You can resume play right away after turning "off" the system

This isn't news either, PSP has been able to do this for yonks, who cares?

6. Something to do with Gaikai cloud gaming

I didn't give a fuck about OnLive and I sure as hell don't give a fuck about this thing.  Maybe it'll be cool but I'm just not interested when I still have a PS1, PS2 and PS3 with plenty of games sitting around.  A feature I don't need, but I'm sure some people will be happy to have.

Obviously I have not mentioned the games but Diablo 3 being announced was quite possibly one of the most disappointing things I heard.  But still, the features I'm aware of so far sound good enough.  I wouldn't say that I'm particularly hyped for the next Playstation, but things are shaping up to be pretty good at least.  Hopefully more will be revealed at E3.

Also I'm aware I probably missed some things, but I'm gonna keep reading around for more info.

Killer7

I was browsing youtube to kill some time when I see that someone that I subscribed to covered this game as a part of their Halloween scare-fest thing.  This instantly prompted all the awesome memories I have of what is, to me, one of the best games (quite possibly THE best) game on the Gamecube, so I thought I'd have a little gush about it right here.

So, unless you've been living under a rock, you are probably aware of who Suda51 one is.  In case you do live under a rock, or you don't game as much as everyone else, Suda51 is the guy behind the No More Heroes games and the more recent Shadows of the Damned.  Now people loved stuff like No More Heroes, but I was quite disappointed with it, because I was comparing it to this thing.

So, Killer7 follows a group of assassins as they try to take down a terrorist organisation known as Heavens Smile.  The 7 assassins aren't actually real though, they are all different personalities in some guys psyche that are given form somehow.  Basically, the plot is the fucking strangest thing I've ever played through, but it's actually really good.  There is a big story arc about relations between Japan and the US and government conspiracy and stuff, but some of the chapters seemingly have no link to that, but then they actually do, and....oh god, shit's nuts.  Just play it, it's really hard to explain.

The only real way to describe the gameplay, along with pretty much everything else in this game, is unique.  You are on rails all the time, but you still have freedom to choose where you want to go at junctions in the level, and the levels get more sprawly and complicated as you go.  You have to stop and go into this first person mode to fire your weapon, but before you can shoot anything you have to scan the environment since the enemies all come with built in stealth.  Combat aside, it has those kind of survival-horror esque puzzles of finding weird shit to use as keys to open various things.  On top of that, each personality has it's own ability, which you have to make use of in order to progress.

The other big thing about this game is the art style, and it's really pretty but still retains a sort of bleak atmosphere.

It's cel-shading out the arse, but it's done in this really masterful way and the game looks really good as a result.

I could probably fill up about a weeks worth of posts just talking about each individual aspect of this game and why it's just so damn good.  But instead of me yapping on, I recommend that you hop on e-bay or amazon or something and fucking find a copy.  Gamecube version is better than the PS2 version, but whatever version you play, you won't regret it.

A dark day for my game collection

Well, I was gonna use this space to write about Castlevania 3, but the most insane, idiotic thing has happened and it feels like it would be a crime not to rant about it.

Basically, at the end of May I moved to Japan, and previous to this my family moved to Sweden.  While all this shit was going on, I was attending university in a city called Preston and I couldn't exactly cart 5 consoles and all those games to Japan with me, so I sent them to my new home in Sweden. 

Anyway, I fuck off to Japan and I'm having a grand old time when I hear there are some problems and the boxes are being thrown back and forth between Preston and Germany like some kind of shitty fucking tennis match and eventually I just give up paying attention to the situation and bank on them arriving eventually.  I mean after all, even if they arrive I can't use them for a year at least, so no point worry about it, as long as they get there right?

FUCKING. WRONG!  So today, a single box arrives in Sweden filled with SOME of my stuff.  The majority of my rarer PS1 and Gamecube titles are intact but the consoles, and 4 sleeves worth of Xbox360, PS2 and Wii games are still not accounted for at the moment.  In place of my consoles and a shitton of games, I got a metric crapton of cutlery and dolls of Bill fucking Clinton.

I mean seriously, what the fuck, how do you fuck this up so bad?  I give the company NOTHING but video games, and they some how mix it in with fucking Bill sodding Clinton dolls?!  Oh yeah, and on top of that there is an assortment of Jay-Z CD's and some other artists that I've never heard of and are probably wank.

Now while writing this post, I got an update saying there are 2 boxes just milling about in a German depot somewhere that need to be delivered, so hopefully they contain all the shit, or at the very least the 100+ titles in those sleeves.

Tomorrow, I'll get back to the gaming and not post personal rants on how my shit that I can't use or talk about on here has gone missing, but this story is so stupid it needs to be told.