FLips

Thought I was in On Topic for a minute there. Bambie Thug’s spooky bollocks might be over for the shock value but you can’t beat the blue eyes baby lasagne and his woahs. He’s going over in the main.

I took your advice and tried to immerse myself in the world of Red Dead. Maybe I was approaching it wrong, and I'd enjoy it more if I slowed down a bit. So yesterday morning I started in camp and I shaved my beard and rode my horse into town for a fresh haircut and a wander about. I petted a dog, petted my horse but sadly couldn't pet the pigs or chickens. I went around town saying good morning and hello to everyone until a guy on his porch decided I'm too friendly and shouted at me, so I defused the situation and walked away. Instead of trying to go all GTA about it, I decided to do the main missions as I was clearly still in a tutorial at this stage. I got a new horse and naturally called it Epona. I am now so attached to the horse that if I hold X I can do drifts on it. I'm more concerned about the horse's wellbeing than mine. I overhear two men arguing in the road and one gets shot. The shooter challenges me to a duel which I gladly accept. I don't know how to duel and the game tries to teach me on the fly, which in a quick draw situation, is a bad idea. I'm promptly gunned down. DEAD. I take on a bounty to apprehend a snake oil salesman. I park my horse a little down from the cave he's hiding in and slowly sneak up through the bushes to ambush him with my lasso when a prairie dog or some sort of rat bites me on the shin. I surprisingly remain unheard and approach the bounty but sadly the game needs me to talk to him because it's a set peice where I need to chase him downriver after he jumps in. A little disappointed but fair enough, it was fun fishing him out of the rapids, hog tying him and riding him to jail. Next thing I know I'm hunting a legendary bear. For the first time playing this, a character says "it's a couple of days travel" and I don't get overcome with dread. Maybe this is finally landing for me. I successfully kill the bear and ride back to town with my legendary pelt, excited to sell it for a high price to donate to my camp. The shop won't take it. I look it up and there are trappers I need to sell pelts to exclusively and my nearest one is aaaaages away. The benefit of the doubt I was giving the game starts to fade but I make it there in the end and get a cool bear hat. All is forgiven. I start making the habit of greeting everyone I pass on my horse and constantly stopping to feed and brush it. Reassuringly patting it when a snake spooks it. I chase a drunk reverend down and get sidetracked sitting in for him in a game of Poker. I lose all my money and then chase him to a nearby plain where I fend off his attacker and get wrongly accused of murder. I chase the witness down but misjudge the terrain and eat a load of shit flying off a bank. Between all of this I've started to find some of those weird Rockstar side mission characters, spent 40 minutes this morning before work playing dominoes, went and done some debt collecting and everything is slowly started to take shape for me. I'm starting to get a feel for the character and the world around him. If the travel takes it's toll I set up camp and do a little cooking, or go off the beaten path to sight see or hunt. My mistake was wanting too much at once and getting next to nothing. Slowing myself down and doing missions is opening the world up to me and I'm finding doing it this way is actually more liberating than riding off and trying to do it myself. It's giving me breathing room to let me discover things at a nice pace rather than expecting it all at once. Doing the dumb little things like greeting strangers, getting haircuts and getting all My Lovely Horse about it is making the game more fun. Giddyup.

We’ve been playing demo discs all night and I will go into them in more detail but I had to share just how mad the startup on the Pizza Hut one is. Order a pizza and we’ll send you a PS1 game! IMG_9158.mov Between the two discs there’s some real good stuff. Crash Team Racing which excitingly is in full beta mode and has a load of differences compared to the full release, Spyro 2, Speed Freaks, Wip3out and a trailer for Final Fantasy VIII make up some of the bigger names. Can’t believe we had it this good and blew it. Edit: I found a hidden video if you leave it stationary too. Love it. IMG_9167.mov

In a deal that in hindsight was likely to end in me being murdered, I just met a guy called Dante Pizzalover in the car park of a Lidl to buy some Pizza Hut and McDonalds exclusive PS1 demo discs for £5. I'll report back what's on them but the ones with cases show that I at least got Stuart Little 2 on one of them.

A thread for all your car boot/thrift shop/market/ebay purchases as we now approach the summer seasons and getting back out the house again. We went to two car boots yesterday at Sedgefield and Seaham with mixed results. Sedgefield we'd not been to in years, actually the last time we went I bought Lego Dimensions figures so we're maybe looking 5 or so years. It was pretty naff in terms of what we were looking for and mostly every table had rusty old tools and drills. That being said we did come away with two pickups. First of all The Simpsons Board Game for £2. Naturally after doing a check when I got home there are peices missing. It looks like maybe 3-4 tokens per character which isn't surprising as they were falling out of the box when I was looking at it as the guy had clearly shoved it all in there without thinking. Strangely all 50 of each of the cards are there which surprised me. To stop further tokens falling out he gave us a carrier bag that had a small slug on it. Probably still playable but there's an Ebay seller selling replacement parts for it for pennies so might top them up using that. Could still have a complete thing under £5. From my quick read of the instructions it seems interesting at the least and not quite what I expected. There's basic board game play of moving squares, but the Skinner and Moe cards have a mix of things like trivia, karaoke, weird instructions/dares and in-game movement penalties. It looks all over the place and even the back of the box describes it as seven different games with their own set of rules being played at once. My wife also spotted an official PS2 DVD remote for 50p. We keep an eye out for PS2 stuff for our mate. No dongle so it won't work on an old fat PS2 but he said the slims are meant to have a sensor built in. Either way it was 50p so who cares. I think he'd dug it up out of his garden so I gave it a quick clean when I got home. After that we went to Seaham which is our car boot of choice. It generally has a lot more range and is a nicer setting, located on the cliffside field overlooking the sea rather than an old knackered racecourse. It's pricier to get in if you go as an early bird (£5!) but it gets so busy at 12pm when the price drops to £1 that it's worth it as all the sellers are usually set up by 11am so you have a nice hour-long sweet spot. It's also about four times the size and has a meat auction, so worth the trip. A little more luck here. I've picked up really good stuff over the years including my SNES, my first CRT and my wife got bin bags full of wool. This week wasn't as successful but I got a few bits. 3 PS2 demo discs for my mate for £1. Love a good demo disc as it's a pot luck of what you'll get on them. Like a nerdy lucky bag. I'm not sure about the PS2 ones but the PS1 demos often had alpha/beta builds on that varied to the full release so alongside the banging music and kaleidoscope backgrounds they were worth it for that alone. After my wife told me I'd never find a pizza peel at a car boot I found a pizza peel at a car boot. Well, it's not a pizza peel, I'm not sure what it is. A guy had three of them and when I asked if it was a pizza peel he said no, his wife used it for ? (he said what sounded like salon or salad but I don't have a clue even after asking him to repeat it) but either way it looks like a pizza peel and as you can see by my photo worked absolutely spot on as one when I made fresh pizza last night. £1 bargain. My wife got an incense burner with several cones and sticks, and a cauldron shaped mug that says Witches Brew on it. The incense did make the house smell lovely to be fair and apparently one of the sticks she got keeps flies out which will be useful when we start having the door open all summer. About £25 all in but it was from a professional stall and not someone selling stuff out their loft. We got a couple of 1/4lb cheeseburgers from the van with onions on. For those of you who know what van burgers usually taste like you'll know that they're both simultaneously shit and also hit the spot on the day. I almost got a copy of Metroid II: Return of Samus on Gameboy but the cartridge had chinese text on it and a chinese region code so it was either chinese or a knockoff which either way is no use to me sadly. Shame. My wife also refused to even let me ask the price on two things. One was a Kenan and Kel wall clock and the other was this... Can't win them all I suppose. All in all a pretty low-key day. No major purchases but I'm happy with the pizza peel or whatever it is, my mate is bringing the PS2 over later to mess about on the demos and my house smells really nice now so a success I would say. Excited to get out to more of them.

I'm starting to fear I just don't get it. Since my last post I founded my little camp and got battered with info about my beard and how fat I was and then it was like "bring back animals you've hunted to feed to camp". Ok, how? Where is the bow I had? Where do I go because there is no animal trails I'm picking up? Ok whatever, I'll mooch about camp. Here is a charity box, I put $10 in and it does nothing. Maybe it does, it's not explained to me. I eat some stew and drink a coffee. Again, it's making me manually do these things by holding buttons. I feel like the game is deliberately just trying to waste my time. Hold X to pick up the stew bowl, hold RT to eat the stew. Hold Y to drink some coffee, hold Y to drink some more. Press B to stop. Please leave me alone. Ok so I'll try a mission. Oh I'm back in the wagon again and have to hold A for 10 minutes to go to the next town over. Hold A to chase a man on a horse, Hold A to run the horse back to town. Here's a bar brawl which becomes very obviously scripted after a few punches. Hold Y to pick up your hat. Ok so now I'm in the town. I've done a horse chase, I've done a scripted brawl, I've held A a lot. Here's a dozen symbols on your map. Want to know what they are? Fuck you. I shot a guy in the legs for no reason and the cops gunned me down in the street like a dog. It felt like a more fun outcome than the inevitable A holding back to my camp. I remember the day I got GTA V on the 360 and a load of us gathered in the Uni dorm to play it and it took no time at all before we were zooming around the city with the radio on, hunting down the airport and getting eaten by sharks. Red Dead seems to be only the parts from GTA where someone phones you and you get forced to walk everywhere.

After years of hearing how great Red Dead Redemption 2 is, combined with it winning the UKFF's favourite game, I finally picked it up cheap. I'd always held off on it because I knew the size of the game and quite frankly couldn't be bothered, and times when I could a more appealing big open world game like Tears of The Kingdom was out. It's early doors, so don't take this as my final thoughts, but this game is exhausting already. I've spent something like 3 or 4 hours on it and finally got to the part where I think the game is going to open up as I can finally manual save it (where you park your wagons and make a camp) but I feel all I've done for those 4 hours is Hold A and listen to boring conversation. I get it, they're building a story and need to teach me mechanics, but fuck me. Holding A to follow a horse or drive a wagon endlessly has not made me feel good about this game so far. The controls are all over the place and not particularly welcoming. Two different wheels to put a mask on, swapping and changing weapons on your horse, holding X for some things and Y for other things which aren't really different things and maybe could just be one button. To converse with someone while on horseback I had to hold and press about four different buttons to keep my horse moving, open the dialogue box, select an option and also steer the horse. At one point during a train robbery I was told explicitly "Hold RT to aim" and so I held RT and accidentally shot a guy. LT was aim earlier so why is it RT now? During the wagon ride which went on forever, I had to go up a hill and round a corner and following the yellow trail on the map steered me into a rock and as soon as my horse got a sniff of it, it collapsed dead and I had to do the whole wagon journey again. I finally set up camp and the game bombarded me with a load of sim mechanics. Watch your weight, change your clothes for the weather, your beard is getting long. Just give me GTA with horses and let me play the game please.

The show was OK. A B-PPV that didn’t come close to overdelivering in any sense. Obnoxious crowd and that awful chant they do after every single two count might make them my least favourite crowd of all time. Had me begging for WHAT and TWOOOO chants by the end.

Looks like Houchen is going to win Tees Valley. Seems to have lost a lot of his large majority though which is promising. Still a nightmare though.

It's neck and neck between Labour and the Tories here in Teesside, both polling at 47% each. The Green candidate dropped out last minute and the Lib Dem candidate basically doesn't exist so as usual it's a two horse race. I can't say overall I'm thrilled with Keir Starmer or Labour as a whole but with no alternatives and looking like it could go either way, I voted Labour. Our current mayor is Ben Houchen who is the real-life nephew of Keith Houchen (the footballer, not ours) and despite being born and raised in the area has done his best since 2016 to put it in the ground. He's an arsehole who a quick google search will make his failures and corruption very clear. None funnier though than this line from the 2024 Tees Valley Election Wikipedia page. I hope with all my heart he gets demolished.

I never played Croc 2 until years and years later, I think through emulation. With most games of that era that tried to transition from tank controls to Mario 64 controls, it was pretty badly done if I remember rightly. Swang way too far in the other direction and was a bit of a loose mess.

My PS1 came yesterday and the seller was nice enough to send a couple of chipped games that he didn't advertise as part of the bundle, South Park and Croc: Legend of The Gobbos, along with the advertised TOCA World Tour Cars and Official Multi-tap which are both legit. I already had Croc in my collection. It's a fantastic game for an early years 3D platformer and if it controlled a little smoother I think might be spoken about in the same breaths as Crash and Spyro quality wise. In terms of people naming PS1 mascots though I think he's deservedly already in the conversation. Cute character, catchy music and lovely bright graphics make up a decent package from the creators of the original Starwing, Argonaut Games. At my request a while back, my crafts-crazy wife made me a little crochet Croc which, if I say so myself, is perfect. She also made me an Ono-Michio from the Yakuza/Like a Dragon games and Mr Drippy from the first Ni-No-Kuni game. I did request a Psygnosis Owl but she's yet to make that after discovering how to make socks. South Park is a first person shooter, which like the other South Park games on the PS1 (Chef's Luv Shack and South Park Rally) are real stinkers. That's not to say I didn't get my money's worth at the time though as I was South Park mad as a kid, as most my age were during the boom. I had a room full of plushes, figures, keyrings, and other bits. I remember playing this one on a wet november night with my mate after school. We played this, watched The Worst Witch and then went to the local hall that used to do an after-school club with footy and a tuck shop and that. Even for a PS1 FPS it's rough though. Riddled with fog, sluggish mechanics and what very well could be the most annoying enemy in a game ever with the turkeys. They're the most common enemy and they come at you in swarms gobbling, but it's like the sound team never capped the volume so you get high pitched turkey swarm noises relentlessly. You can upgrade your snowballs by pissing on it and throw farting Terrence and Philip dolls though, so 10 year old me couldn't get enough. I did some extensive testing on some of my own games too and everything seems to be running spot on. Much faster and full of energy than the replacement launch 100X model I had and so far hasn't had any issues reading and playing discs. It also plays NTSC games in colour without the need to use that Scart cable I had to buy for the 100X so all in all really happy with it. I've never played TOCA so might give that a go at some point but for now it's relegated to the pile under our bed. My SNES Super Scope came today too and I gave that a go during my lunch. It's a strange thing that I'm not sure there is a comfortable way to hold. It takes 6 AA batteries! The smaller scope attaches diagonally to the side of the gun and has one of those small circle inside of a big circle gimmicks for more precision aiming. I played 15 minutes and my shoulder and neck were knacking. It seems accurate though and I was aware when I bought it that it would be a thing I'd rarely play and just wanted to experience. I'll give it a better go at some point as I also want to pick up the weird rail gun shooter Yoshi's Safari for it.

1 sausage and 7 tomatoes is a tough ratio.

The covers are night and day aren't they? The PAL cover is awful in it's own right.

Fun coincidence actually. I was watching @Big Bully Busick’s Youtube channel and he picks a game up and says “what on earth is that”. I knew what it was straight away. It’s the Japanese copy of Mr Moskeeto! It’s definitely a fetish thing.