At school we were told to stay away from odd strangers.

The PS vita is fast becoming my console of choice for older games, not only can you get all the ps1 res evil games on it you can now get classic xbox games as well!

First on the list for me to download was the overlooked classic  "Oddworld, Strangers Wrath HD".

The controls suit the vita really well as xbox games used twin analogue sticks the same as the vita does, the lack of shoulder buttons is made up for with touch screen commands that work surprisingly well (i'm not a fan of touch screen as yet finger prints all over the device while you play) and the game controls feel natural.

The game is from back when the xbox was in it's prime so the visuals have had an overhaul and look very crisp and the colours are bright and striking.

As the res has been upped and the draw distance has been improved on the original it looks fantastic and the living ammo for your crossbow looks crazier than it did the first time round!

It says something about modern shooters on the vita when a 10 year old game can show them up for the hollow and bland run and guns they are.

Strangers wrath is a classic that's been polished and tweaked for the modern age, lets hope that some other Xbox titles are given the same treatment. "Brute force" anyone?  or maybe "mace griffin"?

Comment with your xbox titles to be upgraded.

The same but different, an old draft i found.

I was going over my blog stats and found a part typed blog entry I never published, as I own nether version of the Saturn console was I was blogging about back in the heady days of 2008 I don't know what other variations there were, I was right about Gamestation though wasn't I?

Draft post 2008....

Having just found a new Saturn in gamestation in Crawley (the only one in the south that still sells retro stuff, although not for much longer) I compared it to my faulty model and noticed how different the two were.

The first thing i noticed was the extra logo on the left hand corner,

 

A breed apart

After the last Vita firmware update the store now has a new section, PlayStation mobile.

After filtering through the dross of mini games and IPod cast offs I found Alien Breed.

I remember this team 17 classic from when the Amiga 500 was still king of home computers (users of other formats may dispute that, and it is there right to do so...even if they are wrong) and I loved it and its many add on's.

So, after downloading it via my Wi-Fi connection and realising I should always use the ps3 to do this in the future (why does it take sooo long???) I started it up and saw the familiar loading screen (pictured above).

Much to my delight I saw that it had the classic mode and a new updated HD style mode, Joy!

the only gripe I have is the shop, it is still index systems, but you can now open it at any time and you can even pay actual cash for lives, guns and ammo!! this completely destroys the hard as nails arcade shooter I know and love as you just have to keep shooting non stop and never have to worry about running out or having no life left and being half a level away from the computer terminal shop.

On the plus side the new visuals and the ability to walk backwards while shooting really add to this and I can't really moan, the original was from a time when you could actually die in a computer game and not just hide behind a box till your life recharges (thank you for that one Halo).

It's nice to have a few revamped classic 16 bit computer titles to choose from and not just ps1 games and angry bird clones.

Retrospective

While i was updating my collection log book (a book where i log my collection, surprisingly) i have had the happy realisation that i have in fact made a profit from my hobby over the last 5 years.

I estimate i have spent around £1650 on items and games in the last half decade, and if i add up the amount of money i made on ebay and car boots plus collector fairs, it comes to around two grand, add to this the fact that the nicest items i bought, i have kept it adds up to around 2.5 k.

Now i'm not in it for money, i don't have the time or Patience to run it as anything other than a hobby, i am happy to learn that i can at least justify the £200 i just spent on the second hand 1942 arcade coffee table my mate Phil just sold me (1942 the game, not the age of the table).

Salvation is at hand!!!

I may have found my game life salvation.
I was ready to give up on the whole game thing, throw in the towel on the increasingly casual gamer orientated industry, but then I found the DSI XL.

Its basically the DS gaming handheld, but with a whole load of extra multi media goodies tacked on.

You get the dsi camera and all the alt reality gaming promise it offers, its

Go on now go! walk out the door.....

After getting the PSP from an import shop a year before the UK launch I was always unhappy with the size of the bloody thing, even after the slim and lite and the 3000 came out it was still far to big.

When i saw the PSP Go! i finally thought the psp Go might be worth upgrading my 2000 for, boy was i wrong.

The screen is nice, its a bit smaller, the controls slide out cell phone style from behind the main body so its allot smaller.

It also has 7 gb on board memory, which is good till you realise that there is no UMD drive so you will have to store your games on it and that its not going to hold allot after you have put your music and videos on it as well.

You also cant load you old UMD games on it so you may as well throw the game you already own in the bin.

The main issue i have is the lack of game you can get on it, and the games you can download from the Sony store are a mix of overpriced new releases, old "classic" psp games or shit Disney guff.

All the new games are 8 to 10 quide dearer than gamestation or tescos and you don't even get the box to go with em.

Full screen goodness!

Just a quick update from my last post.

After searching the net and Sony's vita home page i finally found out that if you touch the screen for 3 seconds while running the PS1 emulator you get the option screen.

Sony have not exactly gone out of their way to advertise this fact, like actually noting this in the online Manuel of anything, it's not like it's an important part of the the software, it just lets you change the screen size, swap the discs you have loaded and a dozen unimportant things like that.

Now that i know how to do this I am 100% happy with the PS1 classic range for vita. Now we just need some actual classics on there, any chance of clock tower 2 Sony? or Hydro thunder? or even Steel Harbinger (it's a classic...really it is...)

 

Oh dear oh dear, FMV, big hair and bad scripting. It was the 90's alright :P.

PS one "classic" games now resident on the Vita.

After last weeks vita update Sony has seen fit to add the ability to play PS1 games to it's new hand held.

It has taken them 6 months to add a feature that was promised from way before the system was launched, but with a strong launch line up and lots of cheap fun mini games i can't really moan, except i just have, so i can....let's get back on track shall we?

These new PS classic games, I say classic, half of them a re dross or games that sold well but are not exactly what i would define as classics. However among the slew of movie tie ins, retro Atari collections and Disney games, there were a few very good games.

My favourite so far is the resident evil series. With the 2 sequels and the directors cut of the original (you get a whole new camera angle and some birds for your money over the original version) which is great.

My fav has got to be resident evil 2 (or bio hazard 2 if you go by the original native launch title), its hard as nails, allot prettier than the first game and you get to play it 4 times, from 4 different perspectives (Leon, Claire,Hunk and a stick of Tofu- really you can, check out the screen shot).

The game plays very well, however I'm not happy you can't change the aspect ratio on the screen, it's stuck in the middle of my lovely wide screen Oled as a 4.3 square and is very small.

The sound from the vita speakers is of high quality and the music is clear, however with all hand helds headphones are the best option, especially on the train, yes I'm talking to you the 15 year old emo prick who thought it was okay to play Fifa at full volume on his crappy psp while i was trying to read on the train!

The save system is handled well, you can save your original mode games and arrange mode games separately and you get 2 memory cards as well, nicely done Sony :).

All in all the vita ps1 emulator works really well and once a few bugs are squashed and a few more classic games are released (not pixar ones Sony, i know they sell but try and think of the non 5 year olds who buy the vita please) it will be a great feature for the system (ps, can you release Steel harbinger, pretty please, I know its crap,  it was the first game i got for my ps1 back in the day cos my dad was a cheap skate, thanks for listening :) ).

Tofu, see i told you!

Lucky man!, she's a honey (its from a colgate add...it's only funny if your brittish and 80 years old....) oh shut up!

Forget miracles in a can, forget "retro brite" online cleaning chemicals. All you need is kitchen towel, a tooth brush and some plain white tooth paste.

After 30 mins of scrubbing and quick wipe over with a moist towel i turned the above pictured yellow nightmare into....

this bright white lovely.

Ideal home horror show

I just finished Home by Benjamin Rivers, a modern day horror game with a 16 bit mid 90's game style and presentation.
What I thought would be an amusing creepy bit of fun turned out to be a deeply disturbing spine chiller.

You wake up in a dark seemingly empty house with no memory of the events that led you to be there.

To say anymore would ruin a game that by rights should not be able to invoke the kind of chills that this hour long game instills into you.

For under 2 quid you should not let this one pass you by, role on the ios or android versions.

Whats in the box? whats in the box? (it's not Gwens head...)

I love limited editions.

Whether it's a special comic book tie in, a rare CD sleeve or a DVD box set. Special editions are just...well their special.

But my favourite type of limited edition has got to be games ones, i have bought allot over the years and lots have been clever, funny or down right weird (a blow up beach ball? really capcom?).

But among the art cards, making of DVDs and sound tracks have been some crackers.

Listed bellow are the top three full special editions and some other items that have come free with games that i think are great (not the games, the stuff that came free, some of the games sucked the big one.).

First of all lets start with Halo; Reach.

The game was okay, but that's not what I'm talking about today, the limit edition is the most detailed i have ever seen. There are items inside that actually add to all of the Halo games so far. Want to know who Master chief really is? (and i don't mean just his name, it's John by the way) then you will find it in the beautifully authentic diary.

 

It contains....

A hard back Scientists diary sealed in an evidence bag made of black bubble wrap (very red dwarf).

3x photos of covenant troops taken by security cams and satellites

A UNSC ID badge in plastic.

Letters from UNSC command with orders and lots of classified info.

Cocktail napkins and paper towels with ideas she had for improving the Spartan DNA.

Test subject files and fingerprints.

Inter system news print outs x3.

Plastic DNA chart x1.

DNA marker charts.

An art book

and 3x xbox live codes for in games items.

All of this contained in a sealed hard box shaped like a cargo container.

The second in my list is the awesome GTA 4.

Grand theft auto 4 goes all out when it comes to special edition stuff.

The box its self is a safety deposit box, not a plastic one, an actual metal lock up box.

But it does not stop there, oh no....

It contains,

Lock box,

A rockstar keyring

Soundtrack CD

Art book.

Making of DVD

And a proper, lined rockstar gun bag hold all,

Next is Wraith of the Litch King, the 3rd expansion for the World of Warcraft MMORPG.
Most art books you get free with games are leaflets with a few pics, some artist quotes and not allot else, sometimes you get it in hard back like GTA4 or demon souls. But sometime you get a book like the one included here, its a proper 300 page hardback tome, it has paintings, sketches and notes and whole chapters on how and why thy used the art and style they did.

includes...

Game in a nice cardboard case.

Soundtrack CD.

Art book as mentioned.

And an in game pet that cannot be bought from any on line store or in game. in a game that its hard to stand out in, a free pet that only a few have is a real extra to love.

And finally there are the extras that stand out from the selections of things that I've got free over the years, although the the other dross that came in these box sets was not Worth mentioning, these few items stood out and deserve a mention.

From top right to bottom left...

The mass effect art "pamphlet" not as thick or as nice as the WOTLK one but still some nice pics and some back story.

Legend of Zelda sound track C.D. . Kind of a greatest hits from the last few Zelda games.

Alone in the dark art book, this is more like it! it's hard back, longer than most and has some very nice pics and sketches, shame the game was sooo boring.

Armachan catalogue, this came with Fear 2, it's a buyers guild for all the weapons that the armament firm make when they are not being torn limb from limb by killer little girl ghosts or having their brains eaten by Paxton Fettal.

Demon souls art book, another hard back art book with some nice illustrations of all the major players in this harder than hard RPG hack em up.

And last but not least "destroyed Beauty" Gears of War art book and mission statement for the next 3 Gears games. lots of lovely art, sketches and proberly more story than the whole first game.

So i hope you have enjoyed my fav special editions, if you have any you think i should have listed please comment.

And one more little item, in case you get a spot of zombie breath...

Umbrella inc mints! MMMM minty brains.

This is the droid your looking for....

I've always tried, when i can to play real games on real systems.

There is nothing like actually owning the cart or disk and using the real controller, pad or stick with the proper game.

Sometimes however, this is not possible, either the game is hard to find, or its too much effort to unpack, setup and boot the system the game you want is on. This is when emulation is handy.

if you are Reading this blog then you don't need to be told what this is and how it works, suffice is to say that it allows the playing of retro games without he hardware to play them on (at least not eh original intended hardware).

I am just adding this article to mention a new emulator i have found for android OS ICS and honeycomb. its called SNES Droid and it allows snes and nes Roms to be played on your tablet (in my case a Xoom) or phone.

It could not be simpler, you just install, copy the Roms of games you own (legal reasons) into the ROM folder.

It plays really well at the correct speed, very few dropped frames and with great audio.

I really like this and may write more on it latter, check out the screen shots bellow.

I dream a dream of casts gone by.

I've got my Dreamcast back!

After selling my last one on a boot sale I've picked up one from the ropiest game shop I've ever been in.

Just off London road is a side street that looks like it should be in the shades (Pratchett reference) and not in Brighton, on this particular street is a place called game hive, the grimiest, dirtiest crappiest video entertainment emporium you will ever find (except maybe gamestation Worthing).

In the window of said flea pit was a Dreamcast, sun damaged dusty and yellow maybe but for a tenner you could not say fairer...or so I thought.

I went inside and the guy in army surplus combat trousers and a grubby quicksilver hoodie glared at me over his copy of Metro.

"How much is the Dreamcast in the window?" I asked. "you cant buy it, its show only"
"okay, do you have any for sale?". "maybe, you buying?" okay this was not going easily, at this point I notices the a sign on the counter, well I say counter, more of a pasting table with a crap till on it. The sign said "closing end of April". so this place was going out of business? there was a surprise.

Turns out he had a box load of Dreamcasts, an actual box full, they were thrown in a brown card board packing box , wires curled round each other and the consoles smashed together by which ever Neanderthal had decided this was the best way to store complex ageing electronic goods.

I convinced the ape behind the till to let me test them and find one which A, looked okay and B, actually worked at all.

After 40 mins of me rigging up several consoles Donkey pong announced he was closing the shop early (it was 2 in the afternoon) so I picked the one that was not too smashed, yellow and stinking of fag smoke and actually booted a game and paid him the sum of £20 for the console, a broken one for spares and some games that looked like someone has gone over them with an angle grinder. as I left I picked up a pad and 2 vm units as he tried to get the till open by repeatedly swearing at the stuck draw, I'm not paying £20 just for a yellow stinking console!

I got it home, took it apart and vacuumed the inside, ran a lens cleaner over it and reassembled it.

I gave the plastic a good scrub with bleach and toothpaste to it came up nice and white (toothpaste will clean any sun yellowed plastic, SNES consoles and pads look great after 5 mins of scrubbing).

Here's a pic of the results, not to shabby if I do say so myself.

 

Update, 20/12/2012

 

 

I walked past Game hive today and it is now boarded up and empty, as is gamestation Worthing, I think this is probably for the best.

I'm back from the dead!!! well..ive started collecting retro game stuff again...so not actualy dead...oh shut up.

So, it's been awhile, I'm a little older, a little wiser and a little richer so Ive decided to start collecting again.

It wasn't my intention to start it up again, after selling my last console (a dreamcast) on a shoreham car boot at the end of 2010 i was going to call it a day, and i did.
I closed my blog, gave up hunting carboots and charity shops for old copies of radiant supergun and snes carts. I stopped my ebay shop where i sold and items i had duplicates of or didn't need.
I even gave my boxed Amiga A1200 to my mate and my whole box of A500 games to my bud Paul.

I was finished, i took up photography and painting, moved house, twice and got a new job working for a heath insurance firm (the one with the blue green logo, you know the one).

Then one rainy morning i spotted something in a shop window. It was a Saturday (other mornings are available)   and i was walking down London road in Brighton ( i don't advise this to the faint of heart, its a bit lively down that way) when i saw a box i recognised in cancer research uk's window.

I went inside and found a fully boxed gamecube with 2 pads, games and memory cards, something stirred that i thought was well and truly gone, i took it to the guy behind he counter and asked how much they wanted, a look of panic ran over his mid teen spot encrusted mug as he tried to deconstruct and reassemble the complex and nuance laden request i had just forced into his subconscious so early on a Saturday morning. How much? yes i said how much? i tried to not look like i felt, ready to hand over all the loot i had to play the collector edition res evil 4 that sat on the shelf next to it.

After he panicked and fled to the back room a older gent in offensively festive knitwear informed that it would be £9 for the system and all the stuff that went with it (turns out it ha a dance mat and a 2.1 sound system from logitec) i handed over the reddies and took it home with me.

The wife took one look at my face when i came in the door, "what have you bought now?" she asked with suspicion. "just an old console"i said, she took one look at my face and walked away, she knew it was only a matter of time.

I'm collecting again.....