Old & New

I've been sorting through my old physical PC games and donating some that I won't play again and aren't worth anything. I assumed my old Games For Windows Live titles would not work, but they do! They absolutely do! GTA IV: Episodes from Liberty City, Fable III, Lost Planet 2...etc, they all work perfectly. They have some installation quirks. You do need the latest GFWL update and they can take an age to install, so long in fact it feels like the installer has crashed in the case of Lost Planet 2, but if you leave it be it will complete and then work just fine.  I also found out that I could still install the GFWL version of Resident Evil 5 on Steam and that also works. It no longer shows your serial key on Steam but I was able to use my Lost Planet 2 serial key on it instead. It seems some GFWL titles used a shared key database and aren't locked to a specific title. Red Faction: Guerrilla and Flatout Ultimate Carnage also still have their GFWL versions available on Ste...

I purchased a white Sega Saturn with a new PSU that works in the UK. I also grabbed a Saroo card so I could load all of my ISO's on to it. It runs great, everything is super fast, I'm very impressed.  I've mucked about a bit, and I'm playing through Deep Fear for the first time. It's... not so great. It has a very Resident Evil 1 vibe to it, but just not as good. I've had monsters spawn and attack me as soon as I went through a door, a boss drop down directly in front of me just off camera... it's.. yeah, not great. I did have to escape a sinking submarine which was fun, but then I died before I could reach a save point afterwards. It came out six or so months after Resident Evil 2. It has it's moments so I'll keep on playing it and see how I get on. The new Backloggery site is not to my liking. I do not like the layout, or the look. It looks dreadful. I know they put a lot of work into it, but the design is so dreary and off putting, it has no charm...

Baldur's Gate III finally comes out this August. I need to crack on with replaying Baldur's Gate II. I'm not sure what to do with CyberPunk, I just can't seem to get into it. Part of that could be that I'm playing it on PS5, where the text is super small and you can't plug in a mouse and keyboard. I might just sell it and try the PC version in 5 years or something. I won't be buying a PC that can play it for some time. There's a lot coming out at the moment that I'm interested in. I didn't get round to buying the newest Fire Emblem or Yakuza but did pick up the latest Theatrhythm which is fun. I went for the Switch version for the option of mobile play, but I've only played it on the TV so far.

This game really caught my eye back in the day. Psygnosis took out a two page advert in Total PlayStation and the artwork just wowed me. The art style, music and dark story, filled with tragedy, despair and desperate attempts at holding on to hope really struck me. I've always had a soft spot for it. I never beat it though; Alundra is one of the hardest RPGs I have ever played, far too difficult for my 13/14 year old brain at the time. Even now it's brutally hard. Puzzles can span multiple screens, involve timers and absolute jank top down 2D perspective platforming as well as respawning enemies.  The game is genuinely too hard for its own good, I can't imagine many people ever completed it. Still, it pulls me back in. I love the game world and want to finally see it through. I need to see what happens in this story.

 Yeah it's made a good first impression. Astro's Playroom was absolutely fantastic and I'm loving Miles Morales. The pad is a step up from last generation and I love that you can play just about any PS4 game on it.

 I somehow managed to format my 2TB HDD instead of the 128GB flash drive I was looking to use. I want to give myself a massive slap right now. 20 years of curated roms, isos, emulators and videos gone in an instant. And yes, I can use recovery software, and I am, but it's not as easy as clicking 'undo'. It was stupid and while I do have a 1TB HDD with some of the files on it, I haven't used that drive since 2014 at the earliest. I suppose its time I looked into a backup option, more to protect against my own stupidity than anything else. It's be nice to have something setup that I can connect to using any device int he house and stream movies/music from tbh. I'm going to look into it.

 It's almost here. I have the disc version pre-ordered. I don't have any games pre-ordered but I will be picking up Miles Morales.  I'm hesitant to start any new games now since it comes out so soon. I did pick up a copy of Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise to play on it. Hopefully the backwards compatability holds up and its not in that 1% of games that don't work.

Nintendo have a bit of an Atlus sale going on via the EU eShop so I picked this up for practically nothing. I briefly searched eBay and said nah, I'm good going digital here. Strangley, the game seems to be dpad only which I don't think I've ever seen before with a 3DS game.

I'm 5 hours into Seal of Evil. The game doesn't explain any of its mechanics in-game so you have to read the help menu/manual and kind of figure it out as you go. Essentially, everything from attack to defence to individual enemies comes down to being one of five elemental types: Metal, Wood, Earth, Water and Fire, with each element being stronger than the element after it and weaker than the element before it. Mixing and matching equipment and skills/spells helps you take on different enemies in each area. I'll be honest, I was fumbling at the start; combat felt boring and slow initially and it was the artwork, music and wuxia setting that kept me going. Then I had to fight two giant spider bosses with two health bars each, who spawned smaller enemies in an enclosed, blocked space and found myself woefully unprepared. I did a little bit of levelling and looked into the crafting screen, which is just labelled "Creation". By mixing and matching different item...

Getting this running was a little bit of work but it's not impossible. Firstly, you may need to temporarily disable Windows Security's real time protection to get the installer to run. If you don't, you may get corruption issues. Once the game is installed you may as well grab the NOCD. It's probably not essential but it does make things easier. Next, you need to add the game's exe file as an exception in DEP (Data Execution Protection). DEP can be accessed via Control Panel > System > Advanced System Protection > Advanced > Settings button in the Performance box > Data Execution Protection tab. From there add the game's exe file. If you don't do this then Windows 10 will stop the game from even running. Then you need to add three .dll files to the game's root directory which can all be found in 'WineD3D For Windows'. The three files you need are d3d8.dll, libwine.dll and wined3d.dll. If you don't add these three files,...

With my focus narrowing to pretty much the NES and PSX I think I'd rather move from a mixture of cart and CIB to just CIB with the NES. It'll be a little pricey for games like Ninja Gaiden III but worth it.

Yeah, it's happening, the games don't get played so what's the point?  I would like to play them but I'll never get round to it, too many other games I'd rather play first. Better to let someone else enjoy them, free up some space and pocket some extra cash. I hacked my Vita recently so I can play all of my PSP and Vita games on it now with my bluetooth headphones connected no less. I kind of like hvaing my small little Vita collection on the shelf but all they're doing is collecting dust so they'll be going as well.

I finally got round to purchasing a small media PC for my dance pad and living room TV. It's a Dell Optiplex with a Core i3-2100, 4GB RAM and an Nvidia 610 GPU. Hardly the latest and greatest but it's small and more than enough for Stepmania. I gave it a test run yestrday and everything worked great. Right now I'm downloading some more packs but it's taking awhile since they're all hosted on Megaupload. I'm probably going to give DDR via PS1/2 emulators a try as well. I'm thinking input lag might be an issue but we'll see.

It's just time, they aren't getting used enough and the games... just won't get played. It's a shame but with the never ending onslaught of new releases they're just going to end up being pushed further and further back.

So I just got back from a two week trip to Japan, it was my first time out of the UK in 12 years and it was long overdue. It was also awesome; I saw a ton of places, ate amazing food and bought a ton of PSP rhythm games along with a PSP 3000. I also grabbed a few Saturn games, 7th Dragon on the DS, Mario Kart 8 on the Switch along with a Pro controller and also an iPad. Japan is really pushing tax free purchases right now and I took full advantage of it. There were other games I wanted to buy but tbh, I didn't want to spend all of my time rummaging through game stores. Japan has a lot to offer and as fun as it might be, it would be a waste to spend two weeks just nerding out.

I'm never going to get round to playing everything I own even if I want to. That's just a fact. It's time for a cull and not just of games. I don't need the SNES now that I have the SNES Mini and I don't have any attachment to the Xbox 360 either. Since the library of games I have for it is small I'm going to concentrate and beating what I have and then sell it all off.

I got one, it's gorgeous. There's a few games on it I haven't actually played such as the Kirby games and Secret of Mana, I'm looking forward to playing them. I'm impressed with how well everything looks and feels on my TV and I'm looking forward to seeing it get hacked. I won't be putting much on it like I did with the NES Mini though, just a few more SNES games like Chrono Trigger and SimCity.

I put so much time and money into DDR, Easy To Dancer and Pump It Up in the early to mid 2000s. Every week I'd be down at the local Namco Arcade Station putting money into those machines. Then I bought the home versions and eventually started using Dance With Intensity and Stepmania. By the end of 2004 I'd had my fill though and moved onto Initial D which had just made its way to my arcade. I was pretty much done with rhythm games for the next decade but now I have the itch again. It started with Final Fantasy Theatrhythm and the Project Diva games and more recently I've been playing a ton of Stepmania again. It's been fun, it's been incredibly fun. The next step was to get a dance pad. I'm not close to an arcade unfortunately and a dance pad would be more cost effective anyway in the long run. It has to be a hard mat but finding one used in the UK is next to impossible and no one makes them new over here anymore. I did some research and the Omega GX from Pr...

Total amount spent on games in 2012: £617.39. A lot higher than I wanted to be honest but I did buy 2 NTSC NES consoles, an NTSC N64 and a 3DS XL. I bought 43 games but beat 57 and removed 3. For 2013 I'm not going to buy a single new game until I have at least less than 10 unbeaten games in total. Purchase Record 2012 January's Game: Assassin's Creed Cost: £7 Status: Beat February's Game: Goldeneye 007/CC Pro Bundle Cost: £19.99 Status: Beat March's Game: Ys: The Oath in Felghana Cost: £9.99 Status: Beat April's Game: Mega Man X4 Cost: £20.76 Status: Beat May's Games: Arma 2: Combined Operations Cost: £20.29 Status: Bought solely for DayZ Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance Cost: £0.99 Status: Sold Tiny Toon Adventures 2: Montana's Movie Madness Cost: £1 Status: Beat Donkey Kong Land 3 Cost: £8 Status: Beat June's Games: NTSC N64 + 6 games Cost: £63.99 Status: Beat Wario Land 3 Cost: ...

So apparently Direct2Drive became Gamefly and I lost 3 out of the 5 games I purchased on there. I lost Swat 4 Gold, Sonic and SEGA All-Stars Racing and RollerCoaster Tycoon 2: Complete. I do still have Gothic 3 and Mount & Blade but I have those on Steam anyway so who cares? So yeah, fuck that and fuck them.