FLips

Another day another Demo. This time up is McDonalds Demo 3 which is serving up Pink Panther, Rayman Rush, World Rally Championship Arcade and Destruction Derby Raw. Pink Panther is up first. It's a platformer as you could probably imagine, and not a very good one. The demo starts you in a big house which acts as a hub and half my time playing it was trying to find a playable level in the house which required me to basically force myself through a window to access it. The playable level is a Donkey Kong style dinosaur boss where you have to climb up the level and avoid the boulders it throws down, then put a bone on his platform and quickly grab a bomb and put it there too before the bomb blows up, so the dinosaur eats them and takes damage. Pink Panther is a floaty mess. His movement is all over the place, and the hit detection is shoddy. You have a spin attack to help but it rarely works at the time you expect it to. Grabbing the bomb and bone in time is a faff on too. The biggest crime is it doesn't even play the Pink Panther theme either. I didn't like the cartoon as a kid and I don't like this. PS1 has a banquet of great platformers and even some of the midcarders like Bugs Bunny Lost in Time or Rugrats are a lot better than this. After playing the demo it's a no-go for me. Would not have bothered. I followed that up with Destruction Derby Raw which is by Studio 33/Psygnosis. Psygnosis had a really strong presence on the PS1 and it really is a shame that the console was their last hurrah. Not much to see with this one though. There aren't many options to choose from and the racing isn't that responsive. There was one particular corner where I slammed into it every single time because the turning was so wide and slow. Not really sure what the aim of the game is either as there's a lot less emphasis on the destruction than I thought there would be. Like Cool Boarders 4 the winner is whoever finishes first and so the destruction was a pointless addition as it makes more sense to avoid everyone. There is a cool bit of programming at the end of the demo though where on that last corner (the one I kept crashing into) during the final lap, the game cuts your controls and forces you to drive head-on into the barrier so it can cut to black and end the demo. That impressed me. If I was playing it back in the day though I can't say I'd have been looking to get it. It doesn't hit any right notes as either a simulation driver or an arcade driver, it's just kinda there. Rayman Rush was next and this very well may be the most barebones and unfinished of the demos on here. A lot of plain text menus, not much pomp or circumstance. You get to play one level and that's that. I was a massive fan of the original Rayman. My cousins had it and I thought it was beautiful even if I couldn't get past Band Land. Even to this day I've only ever "completed" it once and I have to put air quotes there because I had to use a password to unlock the last boss as you can't fight him unless you 100% the game which I just couldn't do. So I've done every level legit, but balls to doing it properly. As soon as Rayman moved into 3D he lost me though. Rayman 2 has never been one I got on with. You name 2D platformers on the PS1 better than Rayman and it's a struggle to even make a list at all, but as soon as you get into 3D he's competing with Crash, Spyro, and sadly thanks to my tastes at that time even Gex. Rayman Rush sticks with a 2D/3D combo where you play some parts of each except now it's a racing game. Maybe it's just way ahead of it's time as a speed-based platformer like Super Meat Boy or Celeste or maybe it's just junk from Ubisoft, a company that has produced almost exclusively junk for decades. Again, not a fan of this one. 3D Rayman has never worked for me and making it a 2 player platform racer was a poor decision. Upon further research it seems this game is actually a demake of a PS2 game called Rayman M featuring worse graphics, less gameplay options and less players. Not actually sure why they bothered and it was rightfully panned. Weird to see a demo of a PS1 remake of a PS2 game though, so i'll give it that. Last but not least is World Rally Championship Arcade. I'm not sure if that's Arcade like Gran Turismo 2 had Simulation and Arcade or if it's a port from the Arcades or something else. The demo opens with an advert for a competition to WIN A SONY WIDESCREEN. Entries close August 31st 2002. Over 21 years ago and on that day not only were Blazin' Squad #1 in the charts with Crossroads but someone won a TV. Great day for them. The competition was really weak but this is by far the best demo on the disc. Only one track (Argentina) and only one mode (Time Trial) but it lets you pick from 8 cars and they're all different manufacturers with different stats which is really generous for a demo disc and if you like the gameplay means there's plenty to be had here as it also saves your times. The graphics are genuinely impressive too with some terrain effects that even today have stunned me a bit. There are muddy patches that if you drive through them spray mud everywhere and it makes your car look dirtier, then later there are large puddles and if you drive through those it cleans the mud off. Terrific. The cars handle pretty well though like most racing games of this era the drift is lacking. Games like Gran Turismo, Ridge Racer and Crash Team Racing have the leaders in functional, easy to learn drifting and this one sadly isn't up there with them despite the "arcade" banner. When it all comes to it though, as impressed as I was by the presentation and the generosity of the demo, I wouldn't be buying this one either. The only "realistic" racing game I was interested in on the PS1 was V-Rally 2 after seeing a feature on Big Breakfast about making your own tracks and that is one I ordered a chipped copy of. Again though, my Brother was more into stuff like this and had the Moto GP games and that so he'd have maybe went for this one. Personal taste aside it is a really good demo. So that was McDonalds Disc 3. 1/4 ain't bad. --- As a side note to the demos, I recently won a GunCon off Ebay which arrived yesterday so I've been playing Time Crisis with that which as you'd imagine is fantastic. Next time I get blank discs I'll have to get the Point Blanks and another few light gun games I've heard good things about. Also need to keep my eyes peeled for a Konami Hyper Blaster which is the other main Light Gun for the PS1. I had no idea but it seems only some games are compatible with certain guns which is a huge shame. Thankfully all the best ones seem to be with the GunCon so I'm ok for now. I also won a huge bundle of PS1 demo discs too which were dispatched today. The winning bid by mere pence! Can't wait!

It's all about the positioning of the bread as well. If you took those hot dogs, snapped the bun in half and placed them on their side they'd be a sandwich.

Yeah my 13 year old neice is into Korn as well. Not so much when me and my wife (as seen in the Eric Andre bit above) do our best impressions of them or ask if she's seen the South Park episode where they go on a spooky mystery tour.

What a good angle is is subjective but in terms of good/memorable/famous angles that weren't famous for being bad... Kane's debut/feud/relationship with The Undertaker never and to this day still doesn't really make sense. Hogan vs Rock had an attempted murder in it Austin vs HHH likewise had an attempted murder in it Shane McMahon vs Vince McMahon/Shane just swooping in and buying WCW The Invasion or any invasion style storylines Any time a champion leaves with the belt or threatens to leave with the belt. That's theft and if they did take it the company would just make a new belt and move on while criminal proceedings took place for said theft. E.g Punk at MITB Wrestling as a concept doesn't make sense and we shouldn't really try and make sense of it either. Like LaGoosh said it's a mad bubble world.

Cool Boarders 1 and 2 were developed by a different team to 3 and 4 so maybe they were the good ones that left the legacy! @RedRooster There are still snowboarding games, I think the most recent one that was meant to be good was called STEEP. I haven’t played any since SSX 3 on the Gamecube though.

Still not many older games impress me as much as the Dreamscape port of Soul Calibur. It’s absolutely stunning.

That’s fantastic. The Sega Dreamscape is what I will be calling it from now on.

I won’t lie, as someone who didn’t know about him at all and looked him up after seeing all the glowing tributes in here, I can’t say he came across as the nicest of people to put it lightly. I can’t see the X thread but if it’s the same article he wrote that came up on Reddit about how he’d love to sexually assault 12 year olds then it was pretty grim stuff. I’m not going to go all Lance Storm about it but I can certainly see why he wouldn’t be missed.

Been playing through the demo discs and as I've said before, I find them absolutely fascinating. In a period where most of us could get chipped games for a few quid, having demos there was a great way to decide what names you'd circle next time you got a look at the games list. They were so easy to get hold of too as most magazines gave them away and as I now know, you could order a pizza or a large meal and get a disc thrown in with it. I adore the aesthetics of them. The trippy backgrounds, the house/techno/dance music that plays on all of them, and the way they all lag when you choose a game. I remember seeing the Manta Ray/T-Rex Demo and genuinely thinking games would never look better. Some games I even associate more as a demo game than a full release (I'm looking at you Overboard, Kula World, and Kurushi). I'm going to work my way through the ones I have (I have my eyes on more on Ebay too) and basically come to a decision on whether or not the demo would have enticed me back in the day to buy the game. I don't have McDonalds Disc 1 (yet) so I've started with McDonalds Disc 2. The games on there are Ape Escape, Cool Boarders 4, Ace Combat 3 and FIFA 2002. The Ape Escape demo has two playable stages with the water net tutorial in between as you need it for the second stage. After that you can try three of the other gadgets that will feature in the main game, the RC Car, the Sky Flyer and the Monkey Radar. There's no voice acting yet so the dialogue is all text boxes that aren't present in the full game. Other than that though there's not much difference between this and the full game other than a few graphical changes and other minor changes. All of which can be seen here if you're bothered https://tcrf.net/Proto:Ape_Escape It plays great as you would expect. It's a little basic with all the monkeys being really easy to catch. The main draw here though is the unique control scheme, which has mandatory dualshock requirements as your net and other gadgets are used by pushing the right stick. The music is from the full game too, which has a banging OST. Would I buy the full game off the back of the demo? Absolutely. Ignoring the fact I know it's a good game and judging it purely on what's presented in the demo, it's a good showing that gives you a taste of a little bit of everything. Unique but easy gameplay, bright graphics comparable to Mega Man Legends, a good sountrack, and as the cherry on top it lets you play with 3 of the more fun gadgets from the full game. Solid demo. Next up was Cool Boarders 4. Cool Boarders is one of those games I always knew existed but never had any interest in. I assumed they must be good though as the PS1 had four of them. I was wrong. This is a dud of a demo. It's one level with one character and SSX it ain't. Really heavy controls and gameplay that encourages you to not play it in order to win. It's a downhill race and similarly to Tony Hawk Pro Skater you Hold X to build up speed and store your jump at the same time, then when you do jump you can press a direction and square or circle to do tricks, with triangle allowing you to grind. Cool Boarders 4 though leaves no room for error. You eat snow trying a backflip and the race is lost because the other three racers don't even attempt tricks and despite having a score there seems to be no benefit to increasing it. I stumbled downhill and the three of them met me at the bottom where I fell to my knees in disgrace. Would I buy this one? No chance. It's clunky, no fun and has counter intuitive gameplay. If you want a game like this then get Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. I wouldn't have spent £3 of my pocket money for a copy of this. Third in line was Ace Combat 3 which looks really good. The environments look shoddy but the model of your jet looks brilliant and the game knows it. Plenty of close ups, camera angles and replays to show it off. The demo gives you a stage that looks like possibly above New York where you have to dogfight other planes and blast a couple of SAM sites on the nearby ships and docks. It's interesting to see how little games like this have evolved over time. The control schemes, the way the plane handles, the lock on systems, everything is the same here as you would expect it to be now. As you would expect from a game like this, you're just turning in circles as the enemy planes constantly go behind you just as you're about to lock on. That being said it's easy to pick up and play and when you blow an enemy up it makes a big fuss of it. Pretty decent. Would I buy the full thing? No. That's not to say it's a bad demo but games like this aren't my bag. My Brother probably would have loved it and he would have likely bought it though. This isn't like Cool Boarders where I see no upside to it, it's one I'd recommend to others. Last but not least is FIFA 2002 which generously lets you play one half of a France vs Brazil match. They do Zidane really dirty on the walk-out as he looks like Friar Tuck. Absolute egg in a bun. My history of football games at this stage would have been World Cup Italia 90 on the Mega Drive and Three Lions which I got with my PS1. This is better than both of those. The controls are very FIFA but there's no through-ball option, with triangle wierdly being a sprint that didn't seem to work. It's a little slower than what it would be like even on the PS2. It functions fine though, but a 3 minute half is no time at all to get a proper feel for the game. It was over as quickly as it started at 0-0. If I'd played the demo at the time and was in the market for a football game then yeah I'd have probably went for this. It's a lot better than it's peers (that I'd played) at the time, the graphics are decent and the gameplay is a little slow but I quite liked it wasn't just constant sliding tackles and rubberbanding. Overall of the four games Ape Escape is a definite buy, and FIFA 2002 and Ace Combat 3 are good representations that if I wanted a game in those genres I'd have probably went for. Cool Boarders 4 is a dud. Not sure how there was 4 of them.

To be fair I’ve only had two horse theft encounters. One where a gang ambushed me on a bridge and another where some guy was pretending he needed help then jacked me off the horse before I promptly shot him in the back of the head.

I did the mission where you sell a horse to buy a horse and I bought the cheapest one there. Admittedly I have dolled her up a bit with a fancy saddle and everything though.

I wish people would stop trying to steal my horse. I’m leaving a lot of bodies in my wake.

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.