Digital Distribution is bad for your wallet

The sales going on at GoG and Steam right now are crazy! I just can't resist. You can buy Torchlight for £3.74 today. £3.74! I tried to hold out but I've spent a good £20 already. These deals are just too good to pass up.

So far I've picked up-

















I'm kind of hoping The Last Remnant goes on sale at some point. I'd snap it up for a fiver guaranteed!

A 360 owner once more

My dad got a 360 on the cheap from work and gave it to me O.o It didn't cost much since it was literally just the console and power brick (it wasn't stolen :p). It didn't come with a HDD, Ethernet cable, controller, display cable or plug. Thankfully I have spares of everything bar the HDD and already have it set up and working. I'll grab a cheap HDD soon so I can re-download all of my XBLA games and have a look out for any 360 exclusives.

Now I'll be able to play Alan Wake again! I still hate you Microsoft.

Wii out of action

My Wii sensor bar cable got sucked up by my vacuum cleaner while I was having a spring clean, the wire was tore right in two -_-

Insert Coin 09

Link

I found out about this far too late :( I hope there's another event next year.

VideoGame Nation

So a week or so ago I went to a game exibition in the Urbis centre in Manchester called VideoGame Nation. It was pretty good, it saddened me that they were using LCD TVs for just about all of the old games but what can you do? NES Micro Machines was by far the most popular retro game there and I couldn't believe just how sharp and light the NES pads were. It felt nice holding one after some 15+ years though :)

Anyway they had some cool stuff like an Amstrad GX4000, design documents from Revolution Software for Broken Sword and some cool 8bit computer games like Jetpac. By far the coolest thing there though was a 1983 Star Wars arcade sitdown cab. I couldn't believe it, I wasn't sure if I'd ever be able to see one in the flesh and here it was! I had a go of course and it was very impressive, hard as well! It was a little beat up but being able to actually have a go on one really made my day. They also had a Galaxian and Space Invaders cab. Space Invaders would have been much more impressive had I not been able to pump a cocktail cab version full of 20p's a few years back ^^

Overall it wasn't too bad, kind of small but fun and there was a nice focus on British games and computers which was cool, people need to know their history!

I did take some pics but it was on my camera phone so...




















A NES hooked up to an LCD TV and stretched to widescreen... What the hell.


NES pads are so small, light and sharp. Playing on a real machine again sure brought back some nice memories though :)


Cursed reflections.

Hanabi Festival

It's back!



I definitely want Ogre Battle but I have enough RPGs to last me a life time as it is ^^; I wouldn't mind Kirby's Dreamland 3 as well. I'll have to pass on Pulseman since Sega force their imports to run at 50Hz. You can see the difference below...



Speaking of Hanabi Festival games, DoReMi Fantasy: Milon's DokiDoki Adventure looks and sounds great, I think I might have to buy that as well at some point.



Fantastic.

VC in PAL Land

Yes, it sucks for the most part, outside of the C64 (and maybe the N64 surprisingly) it isn't worth buying any PAL releases since they're all gimped. I changed my Wii's region firmware to NA to gain access to their VC store but it seems the Wii's NTSC signal doesn't support RGB Scart and since my TV doesn't support S-Video I'd have to either use component on my LCD (ugh) or composite on my CRT (ugh). So yeah, that got changed back to the EU firmware sharpish and I resigned myself to only buying 60Hz VC games and using homebrew emulators for everything else.

I was surprised to find Ninja Gaiden (called Shadow Warriors when it was originally released, lol @ the EU being afraid of the word ninja) was the NA version. I love this game so I picked it up, I also grabbed Super Mario Bros. 2: The Lost Levels which is kicking my arse and The Dynastic Hero (Wonderboy in Monsterworld on the MegaDrive). I know some people say the MegaDrive version is better but I only have access to the PAL version of that so... meh.

Retro Game Challenge

I've finally completed it :) It's a shame the sequel probably won't be getting an English release, if it was out right now I'd pick it up and start it straight away.

Guadia Quest

I've done it, I've beat the red Game Guadia! He kicked my arse the first 4 times I tried to beat him and when I was finally making progress on my fourth try my first two characters ran out of mp (they couldn't heal and didn't have any healing items). I stocked up on Wild Herbs and bought myself a Gold Orb to help lower his stats. First I used the last remaining Guardianip I had to lower all of his stats by 50 and then quickly threw the gold orb at him to lower them again by 30. His attacks were still powerful though so I spent the next few rounds buffing my team up with offensive and defensive spells while attempting to keep my HP up. The green Game Guadia I'd previously made a pact with helped with healing every now and then which helped when the red Game Guadia decided to do party wide attacks that did upwards of 100 damage. Once I'd made it through all that I started to try and take him down but even with his stats lowered as far as they could go and my def maxed out his special attacks would still do crazy amounts of damage. I got my magic user to increase the str on my fighter in the hopes that I could take him down faster while having everyone heal when needed. It was working until he sent a continuous barrage of special attacks at them eventually taking two characters down. I quickly revived them with magic and items but it wasn't long before the magic user was dead and my revive items were depleted. Then the second character went down and it was just my fighter. Luckily he could withstand the attacks as long as he could heal every time the enemy Game Guadia did a special attack. When a normal attack was used against him I'd have him hit back and somehow, I won! It was getting close, my health items were running out and I didn't know how long I could keep it up, if he'd used his special attacks all the time I'd have had to keep healing until I ran out of items and died.

Thankfully he didn't :)



So that's that. I've beaten the game, defeated all of the special bosses, made a pact with the most powerful Guadia in the game and got the most powerful sword in the game by defeating that Guadia. It's a shame it's not longer really, I had a blast.

Cosmic Gate, Guadia Quest and Robot Ninja Haggle Man 3 have all been beaten, I think I'll go through Haggle Man 1 and 2 now.

Musings

That's what this is, just a general place for me to ramble on every now and then about games I'm playing.