FLips

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.

My mate just sent me this. AI doing wrestler themes from prompts. The AJ Styles and Hulk Hogan ones have sent me to another dimension. Bad laughing at them.

I thought Braun was great when he was feuding with Roman but just like Ryback before him, once they stopped pushing him and he wasn’t doing squashes and main event brawls he was exposed as pretty useless. You can’t just have a guy his size be a regular roster spot or you go from Kane to Albert really fast.

Orioles and Mariners have been a pleasure to watch this season. Orioles are good fun with a great atmosphere but the Mariners are starting to show a little bit more character than usual. It's been an odd season for us so far though as it feels like every team we've played so far signed one of our players during the off-season. The game against Atlanta today was ace. Opened with Jarred Kelenic explaining how he's grown as a person since he played for us and did an interview crying his eyes out because he accidentally broke his foot kicking a bin and ended with us walking them off in the bottom of the 9th. You love to see it.

My mate is a big PS2 collector and so over the last few weeks I've been playing some stuff with him. I can't remember if I already mentioned it in here but we finished the PS2 Altered Beast which isn't anywhere near as bad as people say, but I also wouldn't go as far as to say it's good. It's a very solid, right down the middle 5/10. There are some decent boss fights and the as someone who isn't a fan of the genre I don't find the combat any less monotonous than something like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta. That being said, the fact you have to watch the human to beast transition every single time is a nightmare because the game encourages a lot of transforming. Like how Metal Gear Solid games are 30% gameplay and 70% cutscenes, this was the same ratio in gameplay to transforming. We also played Castlevania: Lament of Innocence which is chronologically the first game in the Castlevania story and is about the origins of Dracula and the Vampire Killer Whip. The gameplay is what it is but it's the overall package that worked well here. Really good soundtrack, interesting puzzle elements and hammy voice acting all made it a good laugh to play through and the solid if unspectacular gameplay held our attention long enough. We started Castlevania: Curse of Darkness over the weekend and while Lament had a central hub and areas you could play and go back to in any order, this one is more like Symphony of The Night where it's one big connected world. The music is jammin' but I was underwhelmed with the gameplay so far as there are a lot of areas with nothing in them and it doesn't have the atmosphere to pull it off like Symphony does. We 100%'d the Pamela Anderson quicktime event shooter/rhythm game VIP which took a couple of hours and we didn't stop laughing through the whole thing. I'm not going to lie to you and say it's a good game in any way but I think he got it for a tenner and if you're looking for a way to pass a couple of hours and piss yourself laughing at how amazingly bad it all is then this is the game for you. Another game in the lineup is Mr Moskeeto which is absolutely bonkers. The game opens with some pro-mosquito propaganda and then has you play as one terrorising a Japanese family. Each level is a family member in a room and you have to suck a specific amount of blood from them. They follow a routine and you have to pick your spot to zoom in and start sucking. If they see you it starts a david vs goliath fight where you have to fly around them and hit their "relaxation points" to calm them down. The whole thing is a bit unsettling. The daughter of the family is 17 and there's a level where she's in the bath with the top of her tits above water and straight away my mate went "wonder where the weak spot is in this level" and right enough it has you suck the blood out of a 17 year old Japanese schoolgirls tit. Other stages have you bite gross areas like between toes or on the lip and it's all just a bit much. He has the usual lot of WWE games. We tried Smackdown vs Raw vs ECW 2009 and the original Smackdown vs Raw in that order. 2009 has an old school feel still but it's right on the cusp of when they were moving to a more simulated style. Slower pace, analogue stick controls and borderline boring mechanics. We got a bit of fun out of the roster and our Sandman vs Marcus Cor Von match was a laugh but we quickly stuck the original Smackdown vs Raw on and that was way way better. Nostalgia right off the bat with the 2000s playlist full of enjoyable shite like Breaking Benjamin and Powerman5000, a gyrating Sable and Torrie Wilson on all the menus and a roster that is an absolute blast. The gameplay was fast paced similar to HCTP and other games before it and we had an absolute riot on it. I can't remember how good the ones between this and 09 were but my brain is telling me this was the last proper good one. I don't remember any of them as much as I remember putting this one on and being blasted by EVERYTHINGSFALLINGAPART as soon as it loads. Good times. Outside of the PS2 I've been playing the original Fallout before and after work which I've always been a big fan of since first playing it back during the 2012 London Olympics (at home as a viewer, not as a participant). It's very much required that you save-scum your way through it as you'll find yourself in deep shit a lot. I love the graphics though, always found this 90s/00s pre-rendered style really nice and I wish we saw more games now that had it. Got good memories of this one outside of the olympics too as when me and my wife first started dating, the first night she stayed over at mine I made us bacon sarnies and we played this the next morning. When she saw I was playing it again she made us bacon sarnies and sat with me, the wee cutie. During work I've been playing Fallout New Vegas (the benefits of working from home) and that's been good fun as well. I wasn't surprised to see it show up in @RedRooster's favourite games thread as I've always held the opinion this is the best one. This, what must be my 3rd or 4th playthrough, hasn't changed that opinion either. It's janky in places but the characters and places and joys of exploring the wasteland were never matched. I do want to give Fallout 4 another chance though as I didn't think much after playing it at launch. And lastly the three of us (me, my mate with the PS2 and my wife) have all been playing Fallout 76 again. It's perfectly fine as an online with your mates game but it leaves a lot to be desired as a Fallout game even with all the updates it's had. The usual issues that bog down MMORPGs are all in this, including old favourites carry weights filled with junk, no way to do main missions as a team so having to do them seperately at the same time, and forgoing exciting unique encounters to instead have repeatable public events. Is what it is, we're having fun but not as much fun as if Fallout 76 was single player we feel.

I don't do anything outside of here. I've said it before but I'm a UKFF exclusive haha. I did do the Twitch thing during lockdown and back in my late teens I used to write for a couple of websites/magazines but like with most things in my life I never pursued it fully. You're not the first person on here to ask me about doing stuff outside of the forum and I'd love to say one day I will but I'm sure I'll always find an excuse!

Yeah CEX fluctuates up and down with retro. Some things they price high but still around Ebay average, but some other things you'll find for beans. You'll find CEX has a better range of rarities than dedicated stores sometimes because a lot of the time the person selling it just wants quick cash and indy shops don't have the money to just chuck around. My town has 2 CEXs a minute's walk apart and they get decent stuff in. One had an Atari Lynx the other week, the other had an Amiga mini. When me and the wife were clearing out some of our more decorative items like Amiibos and the Fallout 4 Pip-Boy edition we sold them at CEX because they offer a decent price. --- On a side note I ordered a knockoff repro cart of Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse from AliExpress today. It's not something I'm particularly thrilled about but I settled on the fact I'd never own the real thing as the PAL-A version sells for hundreds and thousands. I did have a bid on a region free repro of it on Ebay the other day that ended up going for £78 and then got relisted because the buyer never followed through. I shouldn't have bid on it at all really as I knew AliExpress had something similar for £15 and upon close inspection it's the exact same cart. Saved myself a lot of money there. Apparently it works by pressing the reset button to change regions so assuming it works as advertised then it should run 100% like the real thing as it's all on original hardware. In the mail also is a Nintendo Super Scope and game that I'm excited to play. The game itself doesn't look outstanding but I've only ever known one person own one of these when I was a kid. Weirdly the same house where I first experienced DOOM on PC which his older brother had, and also I was round there once and his older brother called us both in to watch him fight Psycho Mantis on Metal Gear Solid. A lot of good gaming memories round there, but we used to just use the Super Scope as a bazooka when we were playing with toys (that Fisher Price castle with all the knights and catapults and stuff!). I also (someone please stop me doing this) bought yet another PS1. The model 100X I got as a stand-in a couple of month ago has been more trouble than it was worth. First having to get a dedicated cable to play chipped games in colour, and even with a laser swap it picks and chooses what games it wants to load. I just bit the bullet and bought a 9002 model which aside from a missing gameshark port has all the bells and whistles my beloved 7502 model had. Comes with an official multi-tap too so if I find two more friends I'll be laughing.

Just had a quick look (I’m meant to be working) and as someone who also scours CEX and retro stores at any chance it seems right up my alley! Will watch properly later, nice one.

Interesting how so many 10s never made the list at all. Some really big hitters on there.

Excellent job Rooster, and everyone that did a write up. A really enjoyable list that brought back so many memories! There are some games on there that if we could pick more games definitely would have made my list. Here Comes The Pain and Vice City for sure. If push came to shove those two and Timesplitters would make up some of my favourites on the PS2. I'm sure I learned the Vice City map off by heart! Champ Man 01/02 as well. I didn't have a PC at that point but I would go round my mate's house and hammer that, Age of Empires 2 and some absolute shovelware game he had called Inca II: Wiracocha. We'd have pizza from Milano's and cans of pop from the corner shop, we'd stick wrestling tapes on and just have a blast on them. I remember Pro Evo 4 being the year where our group of mates all collectively decided Pro Evo was better than FIFA. The gameplay was just an absolute blast. I still haven't played Red Dead 2 so that might finally need to happen. Everyone I know who's played it adore it but I'm still mad about the ending to the first one!

My wife is an Orioles fan and I find I enjoy watching them much more than the Mariners. Exciting team, great ballpark and fans, and the home commentary is consistently good.

"We're Pepsi and they're Coke" isn't going to get the headlines or people online talking like the Weinstein line has and that's likely all there is to it. It doesn't change the fact it was unprofessional and embarrassing, and like others have said maybe he should look inwards at his own company. It's straight out of the Eric Bischoff Monday Night Wars playbook to be fair to him.

Think about what you're saying here.

The Final Fantasy games should all really be held on their own merit. Everyone has their own favourites and least favourites for one reason or another, though obviously there's a select few that are deemed classics by nearly everyone. If by "the first one" you mean Final Fantasy I then you're probably not going to fall in love with the series or get a full representation off the back of it. Like all of them it has it's merits, but it's the first attempt at a game they didn't think would even become a series. It's maybe good for the time but it's never going to live up to the ones that came later down the line. All the mainline games are individual stories as well, so there's no reason to start from 1 and do them chronologically. If you want a better representation of the series then there is probably no better place to start than Final Fantasy VII or Final Fantasy X as they're both (in my opinion) two of the most accessible and also two of the better ones in the series. If you want to stick with the pixel graphics then IV or VI are the best ones to go for.