FLips

It’s 52 degrees but it feels like 48.

Sami Zayn match was decent but if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all. The best match he’s ever had was when Kevin Owens never gave him his shine back and powerbombed him into a stoppage. Glad the sad sack finally won one though.

Ladder match was ok. Again, at this stage what is there left to see in a multiman ladder match? Nothing impresses any more. R-Truth winning was ace though, good for him.

Main Event was match of the night for me. Fun brawl that didn’t feel as long as it was. Rock looked a lot better this time around than his previous run. Felt like a Wrestlemania match which is more than could be said for most of the card.

Rhea looked a star and I was glad she won. Becky Lynch’s book reading entrance is up there as one of the worst of all time for me and the match didn’t impress.

Rest of it was completely missable. Jimmy vs Jey was pretty weak and I have no interest in the lucha stuff. Nice to see Jade Cargill get a win but the match wasn’t up to much.

The issue with Wrestlemania these days is it cannibalises itself. You watch Night 1 and it never feels like a Wrestlemania because you know Night 2 has all the big main event matches, but then you get to Night 2 and you’re already four or five hours of Wrestlemania deep and it doesn’t feel as special. They really need to stop just giving everyone a payday and have it on one night at about 4 hours again. 

Got this 26” whopper for £50. My wife said she wishes I looked at her the way I look at it. 
Took us both about 15 minutes to get it up the stairs. 

1 hour ago, hallicks said:

Are they like the Gameboy carts that just have a C battery in them that you can replace after prising it open?

Yeah, like the GB you need the specific screwdriver for it as well.

1 hour ago, Jazzy G said:

Lotus 3 is a banger I played it loads on Amiga. Kim Justice has a video out about Hugo The Troll which looks interesting. 

@FLipsis the save battery in the NBA Jam cartridge alright? I was gutted when I dug out my Megadrive copy of TE and it'd gone. Great game. I also love DK 94 on my 3DS, in spite of it only being the Game boy ROM. Nintendo missed a trick there by not having a Super Game Boy option with their original Gameboy games. 

I’m not sure about NBA Jam as I haven’t played it enough yet to notice!

I know the battery ran out on my copy of Sim City though which let me tell you isn’t a game you want a battery dying for.

24 minutes ago, Merzbow said:

Whichever loader you're using should have a force pal/ntsc option, too, iirc. If you ever find yourself with a Yank game that's still black and white.

Oh does that sort it? I thought it was to do with the colours running through the composite into the hardware? I'll have a try thanks.
The Wii/GC had a "Force Progressive" which people were recommending before I downloaded the same roms in PAL but that just made my screen black.

I got a cheap Wii as planned and fell down a huge retro rabbithole.

My initial plan as previously mentioned was to get a Wii for cheap (£35 in the end) and mod it to play Wii and Gamecube natively on. It took less than an hour to get the mod working, very easy to do with just an SD card and very little faff. I had issues with the games including the classic of getting NTSC roms without thinking and ending up with a black and white image, and old fan favourite getting games in the wrong format. Eventually though it was all up and running and let me be the first to tell you how good it all looks on the old CRT I'm sure you're all sick of hearing about. I had a mate round and Mario Kart Double Dash looked so good he asked if I upscaled it.

After spending the morning/afternoon playing various Wii  games including:

Disaster: Day of Crisis (a game former Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime hated so much he cancelled the North American release of it)
It's not actually that bad. It's a light gun shooter with 3D roaming between shoot-outs where you look for survivors of disasters and rescue/heal them. It's very arcadey and it has dozens of different game mechanics for rescues, driving, shooting, and action sequences almost like mini-games. One might ask you to spray water on a survivor's wounds to clean them and then turn the control stick to bandage them, another has you waggling the Wiimotes to run away from lava. It's nonsense and good fun. Not sure why Reggie hates it.

Castlevania Judgement which is a 3D arena fighter like Power Stone. It got panned at release and I can see why, we never got much fun out of it. Camera is awful, roster is small and the gameplay is very basic with little in the way of moves. We had a few fights and moved on.

SPRay a NTSC exclusive (one of the sites I use for roms somehow converts roms into PAL so they run correctly) platformer where you have an angel and devil on your shoulder and one sprays water and one vomits, and you use the two to solve different puzzles like putting fires out or covering symbols to match puzzles and open doors. It feels a little bit Zelda dungeon-lite in the puzzle execution but overall there's not much going on with it. It's so unknown that it doesn't even have an IMDB page.

and Gamecube games:

Mario Kart Double Dash which if you saw my entry in RedRooster's greatest games of all time thread is in my top 10. Still great fun, especially with two of us. Birdo kept fucking us over, in one case knocking my mate off 1st Place by a single point in the last race of the cup.

Legends of Wrestling 1 and 2 which were shite back then and even worse now. I'll package them both together as other than some presentation upgrades in 2 (including an opening FMV to Saliva's "Superstar" and playing "Headstrong" by Trapt over our opening bout which popped us both a bit) they're the same game. Nobody looks like anybody, they're all blobular chunks with no discernable features and you can only really tell some wrestlers apart by their attire. The entrances are awful in 1 but in 2 a little better with some licensed music in there as well. The main issue with them is that for as much as 2 improves in terms of features and content, the gameplay remains the same. Clunky, weirdly timed with no variation. Bad all over.

Kirby Air Ride which is a Kirby racer that used to be bargain bin shite you couldn't give away back in the Gamestation days but now is worth over £300 if you want the disc. It's very bare bones and basic. You auto-accelerate and then press A to touch the ground to drift or hit boost pads. It's like something you'd play on a mobile now. Don't rate it.

Super Mario Sunshine Looks gorgeous and bright, still an overlooked classic. Something I'll definitely be up for playing fully through in time.

All in all though the Wii/Gamecube side of things was a huge success. The games look great and have completely lost that weird blur that I remember from previous emulation or ports. Maybe it's the CRT or maybe it's because they're on proper hardware, I'm not sure. Either way I'm really happy with it and can't wait to deep dive the library I have.

It was after dinner my mate started asking about my plans for the Mega Drive because as I'd mentioned on here my plan was to get the console and an Everdrive cartridge to put roms on. It turns out the Wii-specific emulator runs Mega Drive better than anything other than having original hardware with a perfect setup and is barely noticeable. He drove round to his house to get his harddrive full of roms and 5 minutes later my Wii was packed with Mega Drive games. It runs MD and CD but not 32X which is a bit of a bummer but also not really.
Online folks were right about the emulation too, it all looks and plays great, even compared to when I've been playing on PC for the Mega Drive thread (which I'll get back to, I've just been busy/lazy).

So after installing that we played a few Mega Drive bits too:

Alien Storm fun 2 player beat-em-up with a mechanic in the 1st person sections where you could shoot and steal each others powerups which had us cracking up. We got maybe 6 or 7 stages in and got Game Over after I died with a load of spare energy I'd stole and left him to fight the boss with none. If you want 2 player arcade action you can always trust Sega. Great stuff.

The Terminator We accidentally started in normal mode where you don't start with a gun which was intense, but after I did the first stage with 0 seconds left on the clock we took turns each level by level and finished it. Still a great game,

The Terminator CD If the MD Terminator isn't the best Terminator game then this is. Fast-paced run and gun action with grainy FMV cutscenes and CD quality but mostly ill-fitting music. Looks great, plays great and has a decent balance of difficulty. We got to the very last stage and got a game over. Hasta La Vista, baby.

Mega Bomberman one of my mate's favourites of all time. He put it on while I was cooking us all a spag bol and watching the Orioles game so he was blasting away at that. I swooped in to do Stage 2 and nearly lost all our lives. I promptly backed down and went back to the cooking and he then went on to have what he called " the best run of my life" as he made it through the entire thing without dying once (my deaths not included). I do like the game, I'm just shit at it.

Glad to have the Sega on there. Should be a blast to experience them all (close to) properly again and may use it for the rest of my Mega Drive thread stuff.

After we finished that off and had tea he finished his run through PS1 classic Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub Zero which last time he played round here bricked my console. Now I have an up and running PS1 again he tried his luck and thankfully finished the bloody thing. Absolute fever dream of a game.

Then the cherry on the top came when I discovered there's a made-for-Wii Amiga emulator which was a doddle to install thanks to this guide -

So after installing that I've been playing Amiga on the CRT with a speaker setup and I'm in love with it. I don't know why I like the Amiga so much as I've never owned one or played one round anyone's house or anything. Looks and sounds as brilliant as you'd expect and they manage to pack every control option you'd need into a sideways held Wiimote including a virtual keyboard and motion control mouse pointer. Excellent bit of kit.

Played a few bits this morning and spent some time adding some missing games I fancied playing.

Chuck Rock Still a banger of a theme. Don't know if it's an option I accidentally picked but it played the theme all the way through the levels as well. Didn't make much difference as I was made extinct on the second level.

Turrican 2 Looks and sounds brilliant. Still not a huge fan of the "up to jump" controls but don't want to rock the boat too much with the emulation and controls. Still a rock hard game but a blast to play and you can't fault the music at all.

Magic Pockets Still up there as one of the coolest most 90s videogame intros. Gameplay is enjoyable but difficult enemy placement makes deaths a little too easy.

Lotus III: The Ultimate Challenge Can't think of another classic racing game as good as this other than maybe OutRun. Smooth controls, excellent stage variation and an all-time soundtrack to drive to.

----

So yeah I'm knees deep in Wii/Gamecube/Sega/Amiga stuff at the minute. Had a really fun day with my wife and best mate hammering through a load of it and testing stuff out. I've been ill for the last week and really busy with work and other personal matters so it was nice to finally have a day where I felt good and sat morning to night with good weather, good company and good games.

You can still buy Bugels can't you? I'm sure I've seen them in Tesco recently. Put them on your fingers like a witch.

Lidl get Virgils in now and again too when they do the USA theme with the hot dogs and everything.

6 minutes ago, Loki said:

I thought the first one of these was brilliant but the sequel was a massive let-down wasn't it?  I remember the single player being a shell of its former self.

Not that I recall. There's was pushback at launch I think because of the perceived lack of content and how quickly it came out after Left 4 Dead 1 but that quickly died down at launch and they eventually added loads of content including all the L4D1 maps in shortly after launch as well I think. I'm not 100% sure but I thought it was class at launch and still play it on PC now so it can't have done too bad.

Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series - £39.99 £9.99 (75%) - Xbox Series S/X
A remake of the Wii port of PS1 game Klonoa Door to Phantomile and PS2 game Klonoa 2 Lunatea's Veil in a handy little double pack. Klonoa is one of my favourite PS1 games but I never played the sequel. I got this yesterday and it holds up lovely. Runs a little faster than you might remember as it makes the jump to 60fps but it looks gorgeous and the music is still great. Has a "pixel filter" which I assume to be classic graphics but it's not, it's an actual filter that makes everything look shite, so don't bother with it.
At this price you can't go wrong at all though as even if the PS2 one isn't up to much (I'll find out soon enough) then a tenner is worth the price of admission for the first one all day long.

Katamary Damacy Reroll - £24.99 £6.24 (75%) and We Love Katamari Reroll + Royal Reverie - £24.99 £8.24 (67%) - Xbox Series S/X
You roll things up with a sticky ball as you gradually grow in size. The order goes something like coins, batteries, cutlery, cats, people, houses, football stadiums, godzilla, rainbows, clouds, planets. It's fun, goofy and addictive gameplay with plenty of replay value. Not much difference between the two games but if you like one then you'll like both and for those prices they're worth a pop. Nothing funnier than the comic scream of a pedestrian as you scoop him up in a ball full of fish and playing cards.

--

Both are part of a Bandai Namco sale on Xbox at the minute so there's plenty on there but those are my picks. Keep your eyes out for Tekken, Arcade classics, Dragonball, Little Nightmares, Soul Calibur and the Tales series of games among others.

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker - 10
My favourite Zelda game and favourite game overall. I didn't even know what Zelda was until I got a Gamecube and my Mario Kart Double Dash had an extra Zelda disc with the demo of this on. I played it to death until the full game came out and was blown away by just how gorgeous and fun the whole thing was. I know some people aren't keen on the art style, but fuck em cos it's class. The music is wonderful too. When the Dragonroost theme started playing in Breath of the Wild I'm man enough to admit I wept a little. Did the exact same when it played again during the Colgera fight in Tears of The Kingdom.
Aside from being a great game, it brings back memories of a really good time in my life. Not a care in the world.
It's a 10/10 game and it gets my 10.

Spyro The Dragon - 9
A very close second. I got this as one of my original 3 games on the PS1 alongside Tomb Raider 3 and Three Lions. As a lad that went from NES to MD/SNES to PS1 I was blown away by the graphics and 3D gameplay. I picked it up so quickly and immediately got to playing this to death. It's a little janky these days but if that bothers you play the Reignited Trilogy which are fabulously done remakes. Just a really fun game with plenty to collect, ear-worm music and simple gameplay. I do like Spyro 2 and 3 but similarly to Crash Bandicoot they went real heavy on the minigames. If you want standard back to basics gameplay then this is the one for you. It's certainly the one for me.

Mega Man 2 - 8
It wasn't the first game I owned, to my knowledge that was Super Mario Bros 2 and Donkey Kong Classics. This was my first favourite game though. I would take my NES with me everywhere and this and Ninja Gaiden would come with me. As would Bubble Bobble. I have great memories of all of them but this was the one I loved. Fun gameplay, 10/10 music and just the right balance of difficulty that I could pick the levels I wanted to practice them over and over. I wouldn't play a Mega Man after this one until 8 which almost made my list too. Sat on the living room floor at my Grandparent's playing Bubble Man's stage always springs to mind. As does my Mam getting two of my uncles over to play it and watching them do Dr Wily's stage.

Animal Crossing Wild World - 7
It's not the best Animal Crossing game in terms of features, graphics or just about anything really, but it was my first one and it helped me through one of the worst times in my life. It was routine and a place to be outside of reality. Just a nice chill game to play where you can switch off for hours and doss about collecting fruit and shells. I've played all the games since and while I've loved every one of them, this is the one that will always hold that place in my heart. Waking up in the middle of the night and Poncho rocking up and saying "the night is young and so are we, Little Bear" was always oddly reassuring.

Medievil -6
It has risen again! Sir Daniel Fortesque see? The Hero of Gallowmere who fell at the first charge!

What a great game and all time great protagonist. Full of action, comedy and some really excellent level design. It has it's moments for sure, but similarly to Spyro there's always the remake to play if the jank is too much. Another one of my favourite soundtracks is the cherry on top of this goofy hack and slash.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to The Past -5
My other favourite Zelda and one that means a lot to my wife and I. There's a framed photo in our house of us completing it for the first time together. It's "our" Zelda game outside of our individual favourites (she likes Twilight Princess, yuck).
There may not be a peice of music that gets your blood pumping more than when you first go to the Dark World in this and that theme kicks in. Wowzers.

Mario Kart Double Dash - 4
There's an argument to be made that the Gamecube is one of the best consoles for multiplayer games ever made. If this was a top 20 then you'd be seeing Super Smash Bros Melee, Warioware Smooth Moves, Mario Party 4 and 5, and Super Monkey Ball all fighting for a spot on that list. I've stuck with Double Dash though for a few reasons, the main one being it's the whole reason I got my Gamecube. I read a copy of Gamesmaster round a mate's house and it was a full I think 4 page spread on Double Dash and I'd never played Mario Kart and not had a Nintendo console since the SNES. I just had to have Double Dash though.
The amount of hours me and my friend spent tearing up the tracks in Baby Park is disgusting and the gameplay still holds up today. It doesn't feel right voting for Mario Kart 8 because it feels like an unfair fight in terms of content so I've went purely with judging it for it's time and at the time this was mint. I'll always give it credit for having that Zelda disc too.

Theme Hospital - 3
Doctor needed in Inflator rooooooom.

Loved it on PS1, loved it even more on PC with music. Loved it slightly less as Two Point Hospital but still loved it. My wife tolerated it as board game Dice Hospital with me playing the soundtrack as we play. Great stuff.

Left 4 Dead 2 - 2
Has stood the test of time as it's still just an absolute blast to play through now, especially with all the available mods and fan-made levels. Get a couple of mates on this and you can play the same levels over and over and it'll be different every time. Still intense when the tank shows up, still terrifying sneaking past witches, still annoying as shit getting boomered and swarmed by a horde. Was great on 360 back in the day but PC is the way to go.

Pikmin 4 - 1
In a few years time this may sneak up the list, but having played it just the once and it breaking my Top 10 is as good a start as any. It's peaceful, charming, frantic and everything the other Pikmin games were but 4 has been refined to perfection. It's a beautiful game with excellent levels and a little something for everyone. Pikmin 1 was very close to making this list but I had to leave nostalgia at the door and just admit that even including remakes this one is better by far.
 

23 minutes ago, Keith Houchen said:

I play on easy and haven’t had this issue. I did have an issue with different settings for different modes but in the menu you can set your preferences as default. It’s a bit hidden away though!

The challenges have always been of varying difficulty but I ain’t touching those Xtreme things or whatever they’re called!

It’s fine for the Road to The Show, and March-October modes I think, but the story modes and Dynasty both auto-set the difficulty. The one on Jeter’s where you have to make base 4 times drove me up the wall.

Been trying a few bits and bobs on Gamepass over the last couple of weeks as we've both been off work.

MLB The Show 24

I played last year's quite a lot and this year has made some of the UI a bit easier to navigate and some minor gameplay tweaks, but other than that it's exactly the same game. My main issue with last year is still in this year's. I enjoy Diamond Dynasty and building a team with cards and collectables, but because this is the "pay to win" mode you're locked into Veteran difficulty so I basically play it for an hour and get sick of "Hit a Home Run" or "Get two RBIs" against Veteran pitchers who in some cases have thrown me for a walk and auto-failed the challenge. I got to the second last chapter in the Derek Jeter storyline and stopped playing for the same reason. I play on the easy difficulties and that's how I enjoy the game, but unfortunately the main modes all lock you out of doing that. I ended up just deleting it in the end.

Evil West

Trailer made it look like Gears of War with melee combat but it's more like a linear Dark Souls-lite with roll dodging and timing attacks that lets you fire weak guns. Not what I was expecting or wanting to play, didn't think much of it and stopped playing a few levels in.

Stardew Valley

Been playing this with my wife nearly every day and we're both hooked still as we approach Spring of Year 3. There's no denying it really falls off a cliff after you finish the community center and gives you very little incentive to plant crops or do anything other than find the easiest and quickest way to make money. There's a whole other island that unlocks after the main game but there's next to nothing there unless you want to grow different crops.

Brilliant game but falls so deeply between genres that unless you really enjoy a particular aspect of it you'll find the endgame underwhelming.

In the first week of Uni a guy called Mike had just moved in and was doing the rounds in an 8 floor tower to introduce himself. He came knocking and we all tried our very best to get a conversation out of him but he just wasn't biting at all. He was studying some sort of chemical engineering or something and we tried talking to him about that to no avail, we tried movies, games, sports, you name it. He had no social awareness that the conversation he was having with 4 or 5 people was dead and was awkwardly just stood in the doorway of our apartment.

We all individually made weak excuses like laundry or unpacking to eventually get rid of him and after he'd gone we all had a right bitch about him and how boring and weird he was (which I still defend he was) and branded him "Radioactive Mike".

Months later we have a fire evacuation in the middle of the night and as the whole building block are stood in the car park, our flat sees Mike walk past and he makes eye contact with us so we wave and say hello to him and he stops dead and goes "just so you know your walls are thinner than you think and I heard everything you all said about me" and walks off.

Woof.

I really enjoyed the last Ghostbusters to be fair, even the soppy ending which I think most hated. It wasn’t as good as the original one but I at least finished it which is more than I can say about the couple of times I’ve tried Ghostbusters 2.

The Apprentice 

Glassdoor has removed anonymity so now every employer you have left a scathing review for and every manager you have warned prospective employees about can see your real name which was added to your profile without consent.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/glassdoor-adding-users-real-names-job-info-to-profiles-without-consent/

I’ve not put much on there and nothing I did put was particularly outrageous but fuck them. Very quickly deleted my account.

Loves a bit of green shit on his eggs does Frankie.

I can forgive the peppered hash browns, but I won't forget the whipped black pudding.

Feel like I’m just cold take after cold take in the modern gaming thread lately but back on to Baldur’s Gate 3.

Playing co-op with my wife at launch I didn’t really think much of the game, a lot of it was down to mechanics and some in hindsight just down to gameplay elements that I either didn’t understand yet or weren’t actually explained. My wife got super super into it though and she’s about 4 or 5 plays deep now in solo games whereas I ducked out at Act 3 on our co-op run.

I thought that enough time had passed and I’ve seen my wife have so much fun on it that I’d go back and start solo and having more freedom in dialogue and combat and stuff would make the game more enjoyable for me. It did not. I still absolutely hate the randomness of the core gameplay. Dialogue options that you fail and it forces the character down paths you had no intention of being on, combat against scrub goblins where you constantly miss, and having to save scum locked doors and chests constantly.

I really like the characters and dialogue but I just wish it was more of a bog standard RPG where every action you make isn’t constantly down to chance. I don’t find any fun in the game doing the opposite of what I want to say or do 8/10 times.

A shame because I was really excited for it pre-launch but it’s just not for me and that’s twice I’ve tried it now so can’t say it’s due to a lack of.

Spent just over an hour on Balatro after hearing nothing but good things, but sadly I think it's confirmed for me I'm 100% over the rogue-like and deck building genres both singularly and combined. There's nothing wrong with it and if anything it was pretty easy, I reached Run 6 without much effort. Just the gameplay loop, same as I found with Inscryption, is just boring.

It's the first game I've refunded through Steam in my entire time on the platform, which isn't a slight on the game as I know it's well made for what it is, but it's just £12 is a lot of money for something I feel I saw everything it had to offer in an hour's time and know I won't go back to.

After the WWE Network randomly renewed two months after I cancelled it without my permission, I started watching old Manias during work and one thing I have came to realise is how bad the 20-23 ones are. I have great memories of watching them at the time, especially 20, but in hindsight most of it is either shite or tainted.

20 has some really awful throwaway tags on it where the likes of Garrison Cade and The Bashams are getting a pay day, Lesnar vs Goldberg is worse than I remember, Molly Holly has to shave her head to get the women's belt on the card, and the main event and following championship embrace to close the show is rough to go back to.

21 is much better but has stinkers on it like Trish vs Hemme and Akebono vs Big Show. The Cena and Batista eras beginning are important in the grand scheme of things but both of those matches had me snoozing. I did enjoy Michaels vs Angle a lot, and Money in The Bank still holds up.

22 has the MITB, Edge vs Foley and HBK vs Vince to prop it up but everything else on the card ranges from average to absolutely shocking. Boogeyman, a Mark Henry casket match, and a Playboy Pillow Fight stink the place up and Cena vs HHH going 20 minutes is a bad bad finish. The way the crowd has turned on Cena in the space of a year is fascinating though, they were up his arse when he was against JBL the year before.

23 may very well be one of the worst Wrestlemanias, period. MITB is ok but at this stage is already wearing thin, and Cena vs Michaels is decent. Undertaker and Batista I remember enjoying at the time but maybe we're spoiled with what we have now and what we know at least Undertaker could do at Mania, because I couldn't get on with it this time. The rest of this card though, fucking hell.  Khali vs Kane, ECW Originals, Donald Trump. It's bad. Melina vs Ashley Massaro goes less than 4 minutes in the semi-main, which isn't even long enough to actually go take a piss break.

Looking at that card for 24 as well doesn't fill me with enthusiasm.

For the first time I can remember as well one of the candidates outright said “Yeah I messed that up and take full responsibility” and it was completely ignored and someone else got sacked anyway. Wild.