Retro Diary #69 – Tony Hawk’s Racist Wasteland

On Monday, me, my sister and littlest brother went to M&Ds, which is a theme park in Scotland. (and the only one…) There, they had plenty of arcade machines, from Pacman to Flappy Bird. The first game I played was some street racing game (which is rare(!)) made by Namco, but I can’t for the […] ...To receive more of these posts, you should follow my new blog, over at wordpress, the link is: http://ift.tt/2s5RTbu

“N64 isn’t dead yet! THPS 3 is coming out”

I stumbled across something midly interesting. This is an old thread on IGN forums from 2002 discussing the announcement of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 on the Nintendo 64, which would then turn out to be the final game on that console! I feel like an architect discovering ancient ruins or like I stepped into […] ...To receive more of these posts, you should follow my new blog, over at wordpress, the link is: http://ift.tt/2so1zeI

Smash Bros 64 (N64) Jontron, Mike Matei and James Rolfe!

This is funny! I would’ve never expected Jontron to have met AVGN or Motherfucker Mike. I obviously didn’t make nor do I own this, I just shared this here so I can share it on Facebook, etc. (Yeah, I know, I’m lazy!) Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzJRyB3-WvU&feature=em-uploademailFiled under: Shared Stuff Tagged: Nintendo 64 ...To receive more of these posts, you should follow my new blog, over at wordpress, the link is: http://ift.tt/1L6puRv

New feature – 5 Word Impressions

First thing’s first: Yes, I’m still alive! I just haven’t had anything to post in a long time… Okay, anyway, I’ve been to a retro gaming cafe known as “Megabytes”, which is a great place, everyone should visit if they’re ever in Glasgow. So I decided to do this thing where you get to try […] ...To receive more of these posts, you should follow my new blog, over at wordpress, the link is: http://ift.tt/1NX930z

Retro Diary – 10/02/2014 – All about the PS2!

Dear Diary, Monday 3rd February 2014 I was at college, during break in the morning, my lecturer noticed my ZX Spectrum bag, and we started talking about the ZX Spectrum, he showed my his ZX Spectrum Emulator on his Iphone, and even showed me some games he bought for that emulator, and he showed me […] To receive more of these posts, you should follow my new blog, over at wordpress, the link is: http://ift.tt/M4x06Z

Cobra!'s Retro Diary - 22/9/2013

It's been a long time since I've done one of these, but then again, it's also been a long time since I was able to bring a console to my grans house and play some golden oldies with my cousins!

I have been on a shopping spree with CEX and GeForce, it's kind of like Steams summer sale, only with physical games.... and it's cheaper! Most games sold there are really old, so don't give me that rubbish about cheating publishers out of their money!

The most notable game I got was Dave Mirra's Freestyle BMX on the PC, it was only £2, I though it wasn't a bad price, even considering it's an Acclaim game.

Acclaim had made some brilliant games in their time, don't get me wrong, but most of their games were kind of... meh. So I bought it, thinking it wasn't going to be great, but I was pleasantly surprised! The game is so much fun, it has tight controls, a great soundtrack, brilliant physics for it's time (Ragdoll bails!), and it has features in the game that even the Tony Hawk/Mat Hoffman games haven't implemented at that point, such as trick modifiers, spine transfers, double trick variations and manuals! (I believe the game pre-dated Pro Skater 2 by about a month (I can't be bothered looking it up!)) The game was way ahead of it's time, and apart from the physics, I think the game has aged very well!

In my opinion, the game is almost criminally underrated and undervalued, it was the best £2 I had ever spent! If you can find a copy for £10 or less, jump at the chance, you won't be disappointed!

Sunday, 22nd September 2013:
I brought my Nintendo 64 to grans because I knew one of my cousins, Giancarlo, was going to be there, so I set the console up, and tested it, because I haven't tried the N64 I brought in a long time, it was covered in dust when I dug it up. So I put on Tony Hawk's Skateboarding, and apart from a slightly blurry screen (that might be just because I'm so used to watching Blu-rays and playing PC, Wii and Wii U games in HD.) it worked perfectly!

So after a wee session of that, me and my cousin had a few games of Goldeneye, and the memories it brought back! It has only been a few months, but it's felt like years!

After that, we watched one of the worst if not the worst film of all time, Troll 2! It was awful, we had so much fun watching it! That's one half of my goal fulfilled, now I just need to watch The Room, and decide what is the worst film ever!

That's it for my diary, I know it was short, but that's all that happened, sorry about that! I just hope I get to make diaries more often!

That's all I have, see youse in another few months!

-Cobra!

Retro Diary - 31/12/12 - Last Retro Diary of the Year

I've been thinking of redoing the blog for a while, I kind of missed it, to be honest.

I will do them again, however, I won't be as active as before, 2013 is going to be a busy year for me, for starters, College is starting to take up a lot of my free time, having to do all sorts of assessments and test at home, (At least I can't say I have too much free time, I won't be looked down on as much, but not sure if that's a good or bad things, though.), and I'm working on my new game: Rossies 3D, which will be made using the Unity engine, so it will be easier (but it's just as genuine) to make games, so I hope I won't give up on this one...

Anyway, next year, you might be lucky to get more than 1 post in a month, but hey, being not very active is better than being inactive, right?

So without further delay, let's begin:

To sum up what happened between my last post and now, PC games, lots and lots of PC games! Most notably the Tony hawk games, which all have insane modding communities, making the PC a great platform for the Tony Hawk games.

I'll tell youse what I got for Christmas:

Tony Hawk's American Wasteland [PC]
The Orange Box [PC]
Train Simulator 2013 [PC]
Skateboard Tycoon 2003 [PC]
Snowboards Tycoon [PC]
Sonic 4: Episode 1 & 2 [PCDL]
Sonic Adventure 2 + Battle [PCDL]
StarFox Adventures [GC]
The Legend of Zelda: Ocerina of Time [N64]
Incredible Crisis [PS1]

A new PS2
and a bunch of Blu-Rays

May seem like a lot, but most of them didn't cost that much, so that kind of balances it out.

Train Simulator 2013 was easily the best game I got, it's brilliant, although it didn't come with any Scottish trains or routes, I had to pay about £50 worth of DLC to get them, and this them on a sale with 50% off, so usually, it would cost me about £100! The game is still fun though, speeding trains, derailing them, making them crash into things, it's good fun!

Sonic 4 is pretty good, but I can't help but think it's just a shoddy attempt to recreate the original games using 3D graphics, Generations is far better! in my opinion at least.

Sonic Adventure 2... It doesn't work, if Sega are going to be putting out 10+ year old games, they could at least make them work, they are lucky I didn't buy myself and that a Steam sale was on...

I only got Orange Box for the unlikely event that Valve goes bankrupt and you can't download their games anymore...

I've yet to try out the console games, but I look forward to once I get around to it.

As for the PS2, the one I had broke, it stopped reading discs, so I had to get a new one.

Did you know that the PS2 went through another redesign? Yeah, it did! They even made a new box for it, take a look:


I love how it's the same blue theme as the PS Vita and new PS3 and PSP boxes! It's clear Sony haven't forgotten about their good old PS2!

The PS2 itself went through a redesign as well, now the left of it is entirely piano black, and caught dust and fingerprints after 5 minutes! The only problems I had were that the power and eject buttons are now very small and hard to reach, and that it only came with an EU plug, it didn't even come with a converter! Luckily, I had one myself:


Looks alright, doesn't it? It works great, so all is good!

That same day, we were going to our grans for a Christmas dinner, so I brought the new PS2 along, seems only fitting, right?

We played a bit of Timesplitters, and that was about it... We spend most of the time chatting and watching Doctor Who, hopefully, we can have a proper week next year...

Well, that's all I have to say, see youse.... in my 2012 year review!

Retro Diary - 23/9/12 - "HA! Beat THAT!"

Monday 17th September 2012

I've completed Sleeping Dogs today! It was an epic game! I really hope they make a sequel!

I got a 6-pack of AA Batteries because my TV remote needed new batteries as it wasn't working, or so I thought, they don't work, so that means the remote is broken, so I can't play any console games until either the TV gets fixed, or I get a new one. The batteries I got came with a free download of the London 2012 game for the PC, well, a demo of the game, but you can only get it through getting the batteries, so I did that, gave it a shot, and I have to say, I wasn't entirely impressed, the game seemed average.

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Wednesday 19th September 2012

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD is now on PC!!!
Sure, it's only a download game, sure, it's a remix of an old game, and sure, the reviews aren't brilliant, but it's the first time in years a new Tony Hawk game has come on a platform that I have!
It's been years since I've had that feeling of getting that new Tony Hawk game near Christmas time! Just to get that feeling again, I might just get it!

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Friday 21st September 2012

Before I write anything, Happy 5th Birthday Gamerstorm!

I've been trying out this thing called "Game Gain", which is supposed to improve performance for your games, I've tried this before, on Stranglehold, but didn't see any difference, but that was a bad game to test it on, as it ran on 60+fps normally. Since I have a lot more games that can't run 60fps on high settings, I thought I'd try it out again, and I actually noticed a slight increase in performance, nothing major, but it's impressive how they improved performance at all with the same specs as before.

My Copy of Space Station Silicon Valley for N64 has arrived, too bad I don't have a working TV to use to play it, I ordered the game before I found that my TV is broken...

I've tried out the F1 2012 demo, because I found that along with FIFA and PES 2013, people were buying F1 2012, so I thought if there's a demo, I'd try it out, I really enjoy Codemasters' racing games, not just because you can select Scotland as your country, they're genuinely fun games, and also I like F1, not the sport itself, as it more for the money, at least these days, but I have a lot of F1 games so I thought combing the two, it should be good.
Initially, at the country selection for your profile, it was at "United Kingdom", I thought, "That sucks!", but then I found you can still select the countries in the UK, so that's good, but why anyone from the British Isles would choose the UK, which isn't a country, over their actual country, is beyond me.
I've only tried the tutorial stages of the game so far, and first impressions are good, like all Codemasters games I've played on PC, it's very well optimised, it can run 1080p on high settings on my PC easily, and the game itself is quite fun from what I've played.

As if by a miracle, my TV started working again! So I had a shot of Space Station Silicon Valley, and it's great fun, but after seeing the first cutscenes, I had to make this!:

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Saturday 22nd September 2012

Pro Evolution Soccer for PC has arrived today!

I've just opened up the box, and the manual and disc look really cool!:


The manual is also in full colour! Which I haven't seen in years! It feels so good to not be reading in black and white:




I've played the game itself, and it's the same fun game as last year only... the same, it controls and plays the exact same! Oh well, Hopefully next year's game will be different/better with their new Fox Engine...

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Sunday 23rd September 2012

It's PS2 week this week.

I played a couple of levels of Transformers until Giancarlo and/or Steven came in.

Then I played a couple of games with Giancarlo.

Then we played Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam.

Then we played a few fights of Mortal Kombat Armageddon.

Then we and Steven played a few games on Timesplitters 2, then me and Steven played two levels (Wild West & Atom Smasher) in Co-Op Mode.

Then we played 4, (yes, 4!) games of Horse in Shaun Palmer's Pro Snowboarder, The first two Steven had won, then we decided to change the handicaps around (usually I'm set to lowest and he's set to highest) and I won that time, so in the final match, we set both of our handicaps to +5, and it was good fun, we were both equally matched, I say that, I mean he still annihilated me... Although the horse name then was "YASSS", making me a YASSS, YASSS!
It's 17-8 to me, he's catching up, I see this as good, I love a balanced battle.

After that, we had to go.

Next week is Xbox week.

Article By: Cobra!
Help Provided by: Steven (CobrbDB)

Retry Diary - 2/9/12 - "CobrbDB! My arch nemises!"

Monday 27th August 2012

YES!!!! For years, I wanted this handheld system called the "Wonderswan", or more specifically, the "Swan Crystal", because that's the last in the line of Wonderswans, so I can play all wonderswan games, that and it has the clearest and best screen.

I ordered (Kaze no) Klonoa: Moonlight Museum for the Wonderswan a few days ago, I forgot exactly when, because I am a huge fan of Klonoa, and this game was rarely comes by, but I found an item on eBay, and got it, despite not having a Wonderswan, that is until now.
I saw a Swan Crystal in eBay yesterday, in that "Crystal Blue" colour I wanted, it was £50, so I made an offer yesterday of £40, and they accepted!

Like I said, I wanted a Swan Crystal for years, but never found one until now, I guess it's true when they say good things come to those who wait...

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Wednesday 29th August 2012

Nothing of note really happened on Tuesday, so I'm skipping to Wednesday.

My and my brother played a few games (or "Duels" as the game calls it) of Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, 4 games to be exact, and I lost all 4, 2 of the games my brother went on medium while I went on easy, he still beat me...

I tried out both the Driver and Dri3r demos on PC, Driver 1 ran great, even on high settings, although coming from a 13 year old game (Jeez! Is it that old!?), I didn't expect any less!

Before I get to the Driv3r PC demo, I have and played the PS2 version, and also played the Xbox version, the PS2 version had a choppy framerate it ran awful! The Xbox version ran more-a-less the same from recollection, maybe a bit better.

I was worried that perhaps this was one of those games that ran at this same framerate regardless of the hardware you're using or what your settings are, like Reservoir Dogs or 007 Quantum of Solace.

Luckily, it wasn't, and it ran beautifully on PC, bye bye Choppiness!

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Friday 31st August 2012

I think I have become addicted to GTA IV, because I've noticed that that's all I've been playing, and according to Raptr, when I play it, every time it's for at least 2 hours straight! Who cares, though, it's a great game!

I am officially done with Nightfire for the PC, not because I've completed it, but because for some reason, at this one level (Elevator Action), it's become so buggy and laggy, that's it's unplayable, seriously! I don't even know how they managed that, since it's all the same engine, it should stay the same for the whole game, but apparently not.

Before this level, it was functional, maybe boring at some parts, and the levels drag on, but it was fine.
However, once I reached this level, it was full of bugs!

For starters, it didn't auto-save once the level started, like the other levels, which was strange, but that's only the icing on the cake. Sometimes I couldn't move, the mouse lags, the aiming sometimes lags, and what I mean by that is that it constantly switched from zoomed in to normal, the camera does a similar thing, for one frame or so aims the opposite direction, some enemies at some times are you can't kill, even if they're in a wide open space, not behind anything, and you're pumping mountains of bullets into them.
Worst of all, and I know this for a fact that's it's unbeatable, there was a part I was stuck at for ages, I consulted the trusty Strategy Guide, and it said I was to use the grappling hook, but guess what... you have no grappling hook! I read back to see if I missed a part where I was to get it, but nope, it didn't mention it until that point...

That's f*cked up! Did EA even play test this level!? Probably not, because hiring play testers would've involved EA spending money...

There are even several patches to the game, but none of them bothered to fix this problem!

Like I said, the rest of the game is fine, so why suddenly now does it glitch out on me.

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Saturday 1st September 2012

My Klonoa: Moonlight Museum game arrived today!

Since it was from America, it came in one of those US parcels, I thought it looked cool, since we obviously don't get them here in Scotland. So I took a photo, here it is:


One thing I have to say about the game, or rather the box itself is.... it's tiny! I expected the box to be a taller version of the Game Boy and Game Boy Colour boxes! Here's a size comparison:


See what I mean?

Unfortunately, I still haven't got my Wonderswan (otherwise I would've mentioned.), so I can't try it out...

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Sunday 2nd September 2012

I decided to bring the N64 over the Dreamcast (I was struggling to choose between the two) to gran's this week.

I was going to show my cousins my Wonderswan, but it hadn't arrived, but as mentioned earlier, a game I ordered alongside it did, so I just brought that and showed them that.

I mentioned also about the US parcel, and me and Gaincarlo had a little interesting conversation about, you could say, Exotic parcels? Well, he mentioned he ordered a Zelda: Minish cap off of eBay, and the seller was from Hong Kong, so his parcel was has a lot of Cantonese writing. I kind of hope my Wonderswan will come in a parcel that's got Japanese writing on it, being that it's from Japan, it probably will.

I played a mission on Mission Impossible.

Then me and Steven played WWF Attitude, had a few games, funny to play as always.

Then we played Goldenwhy! (Goldeneye), we had 2 games of that, I won 1, and he won the other.

Then Giancarlo joined in to play Perfect Dark with us, we had a few games of this, I was played a guard with Shigeru Miyamoto's head! Steven took the alias as "CobrbDB" referencing a typo I once made in a game, although I forgot which, maybe Steven could tell me... Throughout the time we were playing, he got the most kills, so I declared CobrbDB as my nemesis!

Then me and Steven played Riiiiiidge Racer 64, then after a few races, Giancarlo joined in.

Then me and Steven played Tony Hawk's Skateboarding for the N64, we had a game of horse! Instead of horse, though, it was "EQUSFEZAA"! I won the match, but he did manage to get a letter or two out of me, and he said that was enough for him! Fair enough, it also made the game look less one sided. Even at that, it's 14-5 to me now, the whole thing looks one-sided, and I'll be honest, I don't like that, I hope Steven steps up his game and gets himself a few wins, maybe we'll play the games he's good at...

Then finally, we played the Pokémon Stadium mini games, it was first to 5 wins, and he won...


That's it for this week, next week we're back on schedule, it's PS2 week!

Article By: Cobra!
Help Provided by: Steven (CobrbDB)

Retro Diary - 26/8/12 - The most active Sunday EVER!

Monday 20th August 2012

I downloaded this thing called "Game Room", which is a virtual arcade on Xbox live, however, I learnt that there's also a Games for Windows Live (PC) Version, so I downloaded that to try it out, and it's rubbish, you can't do anything cool unless you're willing to give Microsoft all of your money, this is why I hate free-to-play games...

Quantum of Solace Arrived Today! Thankfully, the lag/stutter that was in the demo isn't here! It's still full of bugs, and it runs choppy on my PC, and no matter what the setting are, it runs the same, and this PC can run Blood Stone on High Settings at 60fps! Once you look past the flaws, it's a brilliant game, it's no wonder it got so much praise back when it came out!

I also got Rugrats: Search for Reptar on PS1 today, I used to have this back in the day, which is why I bought it again, I expected this to be one of those games I loved back in the day, but wouldn't enjoy now, but surprisingly, it's just as fun now as it was back then!

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Wednesday 22nd August 2012

I was at an induction to my college course today, and on the way back, I popped into G-Force, because I had plenty of money left, and wanted to spend some of it on something, because I've run out of things I really, really want.

I found a few things I wanted, and were all cheap too!

The first game was Mission Impossible on the N64, I've recently become a fan of the Mission Impossible series, and I've been tempted to get this game, luckily, G-Force had it fully boxed with manual and inlay for only £5! A Steal!

The second game was Beyblade for the PS1, again, I've been slightly tempted to get this, and this game was only £4!

The final game was Virtua Tennis, this I wanted for a long time, I always heard good things about the Virtua Tennis games, and wanted to give it a try myself. This was only £3!

All 3 games came to a total of £12 roughly.

I remember leaving the store and checking the game, and it had no disc, so I went back in, and they put the disc in, I probably should have mentioned there was no manual either...

I've tried out Mission: Impossible, and it's a pretty good game, one thing worth of not is that it's one of the few N64 games to support widescreen!

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Thursday 23rd August 2012

I got Blur and Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box for PC today.

Both games have a similar problem, registering, the games install just fine, but you need to register the games when you start them, but guess what, servers for both games are down, so I couldn't, thankfully, for both games, you only needed to register the key to play multiplayer, and seeing how both servers are down, that's not a huge loss.
However, because both games are no longer online, it's be hard to patch them, burnout paradise wasn't a big deal, you can download the patches from websites that host patches no problem. Blur, however, you could only download the patches from their servers, which are offline, and the latest update further optimises the game (makes it run smoother), so it was a big deal, eventually, I managed to download the patch after literally hours of research.

Both games are terrific! So much fun, and it's great to know that you can play them after the servers are down and the game has ceased production, because it's already happened!

I've completed Quantum of Solace today, and what a game it was, although the final boss was too easy in my opinion, even for easy mode.

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Friday 24th August 2012

As if by some miracle, I was suddenly able to connect to the Blur servers, and registered my game! Yes! Although no one is online... Oh well, at least I was able to connect to my Facebook account, that has to count as something right?

You'll never believe this, but I was able to connect to the Burnout Paradise servers as well! I couldn't register, because it turns out it used your Origin account, or so I assume, so I did this and I'm connected with that as well, although the thing that kind of annoyed me was that because I did that, I got extra content, I can't help but feel that they took them out for those who can't connect to the burnout servers on purpose, I just have a gut feeling...

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Saturday 25th August 2012

My brother got Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock on PS3 today, I had a shot, and it's a lot harder than it looks!

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Sunday 26th August 2012

It was PS3 week this week, because my brother requested it, well, it was supposed to be, but before he could even take it out of the bag it was in, we had to leave, we were only there for half an hour! Shortest console week summary, ever!

That's it for this week, I hope next Sunday will have more happening, I decided since it's my last week on my summer holidays and until I go to college again, I'm choosing what console to bring, I'm stuck between PS1, N64 and Dreamcast...

After that, the console weeks will go back on schedule, so in case I forget, I'll remind my future self, we're at PS2!

Retro Pick-Ups: Mission: Impossible [N64], Beyblade [PS1] and Virtua Tennis [DC]

I was at an induction to my college course today, and on the way back, I popped into G-Force, because I had plenty of money left, and wanted to spend some of it on something, because I've run out of things I really, really want.

I found a few things I wanted, and were all cheap too!

The first game was Mission Impossible on the N64, I've recently become a fan of the Mission Impossible series, and I've been tempted to get this game, luckily, G-Force had it fully boxed with manual and inlay for only £5! A Steal!

The second game was Beyblade for the PS1, again, I've been slightly tempted to get this, and this game was only £4!

The final game was Virtua Tennis, this I wanted for a long time, I always heard good things about the Virtua Tennis games, and wanted to give it a try myself. This was only £3!

All 3 games came to a total of £12 roughly.

I remember leaving the store and checking the game, and it had no disc, so I went back in, and they put the disc in, I probably should have mentioned there was no manual either...

Anyway, here are photos of proof:

Retro Diary - 12/8/12 - My birthday week

Monday 6th August 2012

I saw the Dark Knight Rises today, and it was brilliant, it's my favourite film this year, and seeing how brilliant all the other films I've seen that came out this year, it's saying a lot!

I've downloaded the Batman Arkham Asylum Demo today, but at first, it didn't work, but I manually installed a patch for it, and it worked just fine, and I loved the demo, I am without a doubt getting the full game as soon as I can, preferably the Game of The Year Edition!

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Tuesday 7th August 2012

I've finished Stranglehold today, and what an epic game it was! As I keep telling you...

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Wednesday 8th August 2012

I went to a Basketball summer training camp with my friend, Jamie, or "Midfield Maestro", as he likes to call himself. I'm mentioning this because he's staying with me for 2 nights after that, when we got home, the first thing we did was play FIFA 12 on the PC, the second thing we did... was play more FIFA 12! Then we played PES 2012 on PC. Then FIFA. Then Fronte Del Basket 2, Then FIFA 12, then NBA 2k12, which he somehow beat me at, his big ego never shuts up about it, then FIFA 12, then we watched some videos, and finally, some FIFA 12! Finally, we watched some Fawlty Towers.

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Thursday 9th August 2012

Both me and Jamie watched some Spongebob Squarepants, just thought I'd tell you that.

We played FIFA 12 all morning, then one of my old friends came up, it's been years since I've seen him, and he hasn't changed one bit! For this purposes of the blog, and since I don't have permission to use his real name, I'm going to call him "Rydo".

The three of us played FIFA 12 and PES 2012 on PC for most of the day, then my cousins came along, and we played a bunch of games, I forgot the order we played them and we played some of them at the same time, a couple played one, while the rest played another, here's what we played:

• Metropolis Street Racer [DC]
  
• Mashed: Fully Loaded [Xbox]
  
• The Sims 3 [PC]
  
• Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 [GC]
  
• FIFA 12 [PS2 & PC]
  
• Pro Evolution Soccer 2012 [PS2 & PC]
  
• Tony Hawk's Pro Skater [N-Gage]
  

I got a lot of Birthday money today! As well as that, my cousin, Giancarlo, gave me a couple of games he got from CEX, I got The Broken Sword Trilogy on PC and From Russia with Love for PS2.

My mum got my birthday cake, she showed it to me, at first, I expected, since I was 18, it would be about some rubbish about beer/alcohol, even though I'll never drink, I hate the idea. However, it turned out it was a cake modelled into a PS1! Brilliant!

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Friday 10th August 2012

It's my birthday!!!!!!

My mum said she would give me my "Main" present early, it was a 160GB Ipod Classic! I always wanted one of them! What has it got to do with this blog? Who cares!

I got an Atari Flashback 3, what that is, click here.

I got a whole bunch of games and Sims 3 expansion packs, which are:

• TimeShift [PC]
• Grand Theft Auto IV [PC/Games for Windows]
• Dead Rising 2 [PC/Games for Windows]
• Strong Bad's Cool game for Attractive People [PC]
• Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures [PC]
• Sims 3 World Adventures [PC]
• Sims 3 Late Night [PC]
• Sims 3 Generations [PC]

I've been playing them pretty much all day.

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Sunday 12th August 2012

Instead of going to grans this week, since she was at England, along with my cousin, Giancarlo and his family, to watch the closing Olympic ceremony, my cousins came to our house for a barbecue, a perfect opportunity to play some games with Steven, and anyone else who might want to play games.

We played some Atari 2600/Flashback 3 games first, Starting with Combat, then Sprint Master, and finally Maze Craze.

Then we played WWE All Stars for the PS2, we played a few games.

Then we played a 10 minute game of Goldeneye for the Nintendo 64, then unfortunately Steven had to go, he wasn't there for long...

Before he left, I gave him a lend of both Stanglehold and Blood Stone 007, since they were DRM-Free (Well, DRM in the anti-used game sense.) and I completed them, he said he had always wanted to play Blood Stone, but was waiting for a Steam sale (All digital gamers are the same!), so I gave him a retail copy to borrow!

Next week we'll be back at grans, instead of doing PS2 week, I'm brining a mystery console, I haven't decided on what it is yet, so as of now, even I don't know what it is!

Retro Diary - 29/7/12

Sunday 22nd July 2012

After I posted my Retro Diary last week, me and Steven had a game of Left 4 Dead for the PC, we completed the 2nd chapter.

After that we were going to have a game of Goldeneye Source, but neither of us could get a server running or join any public ones, so we couldn't...

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Monday 23rd July 2012

Trials 2 arrived today! The case seemed tatty, and the autorun was in a foreign language, but the game itself was in English, and it was lots of fun!

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Tuesday 24th July 2012

I've just been playing Sims 3 and Blood Stone 007 today. However, I've discovered This thing called Raptr, which is one of those databases for games for a signature/widget, but this one automatically updates your status, and the games you've been playing by connecting to your Steam, Games for Windows Live and/or X-fire accounts, I connected all 3, so whenever I play a game, this widget (Located on the right of the page), will automatically update, it even saves my signatures. It also supports Xbox 360 and PS3 games, and you can also add old games, but you'd have to manually track how long you play them, which makes sense, there's no other way of telling it.

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Wednesday 25th July 2012

I got Hard Boiled on DVD today, and what a film! I can definitely see why so many people love it! Although considering it was made in 1992, a year after Terminator 2, it seems behind it's time in terms of video and audio quality, that doesn't affect the awesome gun scenes and exiting plot of the film!

I saw Ice Age 4 in the cinema, it sucked, but while we were waiting for the picture to start, which was just under an hour, we went to an bowling alley/arcade, which happened to be near the cinema, I played Razer Storm, a shooter and Dead Heat, a racing game, they were both pretty fun.

I completed Blood Stone today, the game was kind of short, and I thought the ending was disappointing, I won't be spoiling anything.

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Thursday 26th July 2012

I started playing Stranglehold, it seems for a while, my goal currently is to beat Mirrors Edge, Blood Stone and Stranglehold, and I've completed the former 2, so I'm at the last stage of this "Goal" of mine.

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Friday 27th July 2012

I was playing a bit of Street Fighter X Tekken just there, I was playing in normal mode, much harder than the easiest difficulty I usually do, and flipping heck was it intense! Especially at the last battle! I was frustrated at a game for the first time in ages, but when I finally finished I, it felt so satisfying! I also unlocked a good few achievements on he way, so something came out of it...

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Sunday 29th July 2012

It was N64 week this week, I was bringing the N64, and Steven brought along extra games and controllers.

I've forgotten the order we played the games, so bear with me.

We (Me, Giancarlo and Steven) first had a game of Goldeneye, usually we do Licensed to Kill Slappers Only, but this time, we did a normal gun match, makes a nice change, and it was fun as always, even if Steven dominated the match.

Then me and Steven played 1080 Snowboarding.

Then the three of us played 007 The World is Not Enough, like Goldeneye, we just did a normal gun much, or rather a few.

Then we played Super Smash Bros, I was, as always, last place, except surprisingly the last match.

Finally, me and Steven had a quick game of Perfect Dark, and we didn't even finish it, because we had to leave.

When I got back home, my download for the Borderlands free weekend was done, and surprisingly, my PC struggled to run it, well, it struggled doing 60 fps, it can run on all high settings at 30+ no problem, but why do 30, when you can do 60? I played around a bit to get the game as awesome looking as possible, whilst running fast, I took out all post rendering effects and dynamic shadows and Bam! 60+ fps!

I have to say, I love the cel-shaded graphics, I'm an absolute sucker for those kind of graphics! I also loved the game's RPG elements, and interesting characters. I'm definitely getting this game!

Then I played more Sims 3 and that was it.

Next week is Dreamcast week! One of my favourites!

Retro Diary - 3/6/12 - "This-game's-diff-rant!"

Thursday 31st May 2012

My brother, presumably out of boredom, challenged me to a game of FIFA 12 on the PS3, since I was bored as well, I accepted.

Before I continue, I like to set my sliders to make the game fast paced and arcade like. In translation, shot and pass error to 0, speeds of both and acceleration to 100, and goalkeeper ability to 20.

It turns out, my brother did a similar thing with his game, so I would fit right in!

Surprisingly, in the first match, I was kicking his ar*e, I think I won 6-2! A fluke you say, maybe, he got one back, with 3-1 to him.

However, in our next match... He still won, but it was close, VERY close, I mean the he-scores-I-respond kind of close, the score was 6-6 in full time and the match went into extra time where he scored once more, and I failed to respond, to match ended, as you might have guessed, 7-6 to my brother.

Then we moved to FIFA UEFA EURO 2012 on the PC. Why? because we could! For all the matches, I went as Scotland and he went Netherlands, for some reason...

For some very odd reason, at that time, my eyes were watering, and my eyesight went really blurry, I could barely see the screen, I couldn't just wipe my eyes or close them, because one eyelid hurt when I did, which only caused them to go worse, it's probably just hey fever...

This put me at a major disadvantage, but despite this, I won the first 2 matches, then we won a third, which made us equal, with 3 wins each, so we decided to play a final match, however...

A problem arose, because in order to play multiplayer on the PC, I needed to get another Xbox 360 controller (I have a wireless receiver, oh, I'm so spoilt!), so I used my younger brothers, as he was away at the time, however, I forgot at the time that his Xbox 360 had a problem with recognising controllers, but he came back, he was raging, and it took me an hour to fix the problem he was having.

After all that, we went back to playing FIFA 12 on the PS3 to play that "final" match, we went as an El Classico, I believe I won 10-5! So he asked for a rematch, this time, I went as Celtic, he went as Real Madrid again, and I beat him 5-1!

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Friday 1st June 2012

This morning, my mum brought some old Vinyl record from my grans! They were originally my dad's. My mum said I could keep them! The reason for this is because I've had a recent fascination with Vinyl records, and was soon planning on getting a record player. (An ION one, to be exact, so I could put the song onto my PC, like I do with CDs!) My mum must've been aware of this and gave me the records.

Throughout the day, I was bored out of my skull, so I browsed through my games to see what I haven't beaten, and I found the Timesplitters 1 and 2, and realised I haven't completed them, but I completed Future Perfect multiple times, "That's not right!" I thought to myself, "Time to (split, and) sort that out!".

So for a few hours, I played through both games, it was a lot of fun, I got more the series' awesome story, and it's not that difficult, so why the heck did I not complete them earlier!?

Anyway, I successfully completed both games, and now I feel whole again!

Also, today, a game I got off eBay a few days ago arrived, chances are, you haven't heard of it, it's an E.T. point and click adventure game, simply called "E.T. The Adventure game", it's a PC point and click game by Ubisoft back in 2002, back then, I loved it, and and having recently gotten into point and click games, thanks to TellTale games, I thought I had to own this again, so I looked it up on eBay, and only one English copy popped up, there were other copied, but they were foreign, so I bought it before anyone else could.

I got it, and already completed it, the game is surprisingly short... I was a bit disappointed with the game, it was a great as I remember it to be, simply put, it was way behind it's time, it was short, and in some parts quite frustrating. However, I like it for it's nostalgic value.

Out of boredom, I decided to play Angry Birds Space, and I actually beat the game, well, I beat all of the "available" levels anyway.

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Saturday 2nd June 2012

I was bored, so I decided to browse through the free games on Origin, and came across a game called Need for Speed World, and it didn't say demo, or anything like that after the name, so they must be offering the game for free.

I thought "nah, it's probably a crappy 2D flash-like game, either that or they say it's free, but you have to pay to progress in it" but since it was free, I thought I'd try it anyway.

After downloading and installing it, and I played, and to my surprise, neither of the things were the case the game was 3D, it was pretty detailed as well, the graphics were very good, I never saw anything that asked for my money, you can buy in game currency with real money, but you can earn it by doing races, and after setting it up, I played the actual game, and surprisingly, it was a lot of fun! So I've been playing that all day...

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Sunday 3rd June 2012

Well, that was the most boring party in my entire life!

I expected me, Steven and Giancarlo, would do nothing but play awesome multiplayer games all night, like the old days.

I played exactly one game, and only 2 levels, me and Giancarlo just played 2 levels in Co-Op.

After that, I was in my room for a few hours doing absolutely nothing except for writing this.

After that, Steven came in, and he seemed strangely enthusiastic about everything, I thought it might have been alcohol influenced, but upon secretly testing him by engaging him in a conversation, and getting him to enter a cheat code in Goldeneye, he seemed sober, well, sober enough.

So the first game we played was Mashed: Fully Loaded for the Xbox, we kept playing until at least one of us won, and that surprisingly took ages.

Then we played Robot Wars: Extreme Destruction, we played a couple of annihilator matches and a couple of sumo matches.

Then we played Medal of Honour: Rising Sun, we completed the first level, and that was it, and... oh yeah, we did our trademark "Medal Of Honour Dance", where we look up, keep spinning while constantly toggling between crouch and stand!

Then we played Goldeneye 007 for the N64, we played a gun match with turbo and paintball cheats on, it was frantic! Then we played a quick "You only live twice" game before Steven had to go.

Overall, I guess it was fun, but not nearly the party I hoped for, but I suppose it wasn't my party, so my cousin couldn't spend their whole time with me, I guess that's fair enough.

Next week, it will be Wii week, where (hopefully) Giancarlo will bring the week. It's time to dig up Wario Ware Smooth Moves!

Retro Diary - 27/5/12 - "We're going to play MSR in a whole new time zone!"

Dear Diary,

I decided that instead of writing the entire thing on the Sunday, I'd write it as it happens, so some of the stuff may be in present tense, probably not, but just a warning...

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Friday 25th March 2012

For a while, I've always wanted to try out FIFA Manager 12, because I already had FIFA 12 and UEFA Euro 2012 (Both physical copies!), and it seemed as though if I had manager, that would be the PC collection complete!

So after looking a bit on Origin, I found there was a downloadable demo available, as well as Sims 3 and pets, so I downloaded them, and gave them a go.

I surprisingly enjoyed FIFA Manager, I previously tried the Football Manager 2012 demo, and I found that boring, this was pretty fun, though, even if it's pretty glitchy...

I really enjoyed Sims 3 and pets as well, the Sims 3 "Teaser", as they call it basically give you a minute trial of an area and you move to the next, you get to go to 3 areas, the pets demo is basically just the create part, nothing else. Although now I'm considering getting both games, but I can't, as I'm saving up to pre-order FIFA 13 and PES 2013 on both PC and PS2...

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Saturday 26th May 2012

My sister came into my room while she was visiting, and she asked if she wanted to play Tony Hawk's Underground for the PS2, so I let her, and she was playing for about 10-15 minutes, even though she wasn't doing any tricks, and was hardly jumping, she seemed to be enjoying it for a while.

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Sunday 27th March 2012

This morning, since I recently got a new ISP (O2, we used to have AOL), I thought I'd try FIFA 12 and PES 2012 online, before hand, it just didn't work at all, I was lucky to play half a match on either, but with the new ISP, I played several full matches without a problem!

I won my match on FIFA 4-2, we were both Barcelona. On PES 2012, however, the people there are complete ninjas! The first match, I lost 8-2! Not only that, my 2 goals, were my only shots in the whole game, the other guy had, I kid you not, 22 shots! Another Barcelona, Chelsea moment... The second match I played was even worse, I lost 13-2! I would've rage quit, but if I did, the game would restrict my account, it's nice to know that system works...

It was PS3 week at grans today, we only played FIFA Street, me and my brother, played 2 matches of "Last man standing", which, if you score, the player that scored gets sent off, and player who send their entire team off first wins, he won both times.

The me and my cousin, Giancarlo, played a 5-a-side match, which I won 6-2 I think. Then me and my other cousin, Steven, had a game, I don't remember the result for that.

After that, I left.

Steven came up to our house not long afterwards, and we played a bunch of games!

We decided to try a challenge, and attempt to play all of the consoles that night, we just called it: The Console Challenge, it's good enough, plus it has alliteration.

We started off by playing FIFA 12, in celebration that FIFA 13 was coming to PS2, widescreen and in 60Hz! I went as Barcelona, and he went as Athletico Madrid. We enjoyed it, despite the game being completely different, but not for the better, and the game kept slowing down, we played a match, I won, but I don't remember by how much.

We then played PES 2012 for the PS2, in celebration of PES 2013 coming to PS2, I went Barcelona again and I think Steven went as Manchester City ,more of the same here, except the game had no widescreen mode, not that it's that important.

Then we played Timsplitters, and trying to figure out what to do! If you don't know what we mean, the game's objectives are very simple, literally, every objective is take something, bring it back, me and Steven have an in-joke of pretending that we don't understand the objective! We couldn't pass the level we were on, because we had no idea where the item in question was and there were too many guys pumping lead into us.

Then we went up a step, and played Timsplitters 2! We were on Neo Tokyo, where you had to follow someone without her noticing you, we finally passed it!

Then we played Vib Ribbon on the PS1, I challenged him to complete a 'Weird' Al Yankovic song on it, as I mentioned to him it was almost impossible, he couldn't do it!

Then we played the revolutionary Rise of the Robots for the Amiga CD32! We played a couple of matches, He won the first, I won the second.

Then we played Sonic Adventure 2, we played a Kart Race, I don't remember my position, but Steven came last. Then we played a couple of action stages, I won both, which was enough to show him the levels we never played in before.

Then we played Metropolis Street Racer, we set the time to the console default (midnight 1st Jan 1998), but we set the time zone to a random one to mix things up, and it landed on GMT +9, then Steven said "...and now, we're going to play MSR in a whole new time zone!" Brilliant! At that moment, I knew I was goign to use that for this diary's title.

We played a couple of races, both of which I won, the first one, which was in Tokyo, by quite a margin, 20 seconds between my finish, and Steven's, the second one, which was in London, was close, but it was still clear who won.

Then we played Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 on the Xbox, so we could get our Horse of the week, we played in the airport level, where it all started! The "horse", was wVjlYSfRR4! I won it despite my handicap! 11-5 to me!

Then we played Mashed: Fully Loaded on the Xbox, we played f*ck knows how many matches, we got addicted for a short while! We had force ourselves out to play something else!

Then we moved onto the Saturn to play Sega Rally Championship we had a race, unfortunately, I won the race...

Then we had a game of FIFA 97, also on the Saturn, and it was awful, but in the awesome kind of way! We soon realised why the Sega Worldwide Soccer games got so much praise back in the day and still to this day has a fan base... this was the alternative!

Then we played Forsaken on the N64, the game is fun on single player, not so much on multiplayer, pretty disappointing, especially since the N64 is the system for multiplayer games!

Then we played 007 Goldeneye, on, what else, the Sega Saturn! Oh wait... We played a game of licensed to kill slappers only, as always, but we had turbo mode on, which, as you might have guessed, speeds up the players, and it was a lot of fun, I expected it to be frustrating, because you might not be able to hit the players, that was the case, but it was still fun! Then, for the first time in a long time, we had a proper gun match, with turbo mode on, but still, and we had an absolute blast! We should do this more often!

Finally, because all we needed was the Gamecube to have completed all the main consoles I have, we played Beyblade V-Force: Super Tournament Battle, once I finally explained to Steven how to launch the Beyblade in the game, once that was over and done with, we played a proper match, and we enjoyed it, well, at least I did.

We were about to play Sonic Heroes on the Gamecube, but Steven had to leave unfortunately, so we weren't able to, obviously.

Before we left, I showed him my recently acquired key chain Beyblade and launched it, and asked him "Doesn't this bring back memories?", he said "Aye, it does.", just thought I'd tell you that.

Here's what we played:

In the order we played them:
• FIFA 12 [PS2]
• Pro Evolution Soccer 2012 [PS2]
• Timesplitters [PS2]
• Timesplitters 2 [PS2]
• Vib Ribbon [PS1]
• Rise of the Robots [CD32]
• Sonic Adventure 2 [DC]
• Metropolis Street Racer [DC]
• Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 [Xbox]
• Mashed: Fully Loaded [Xbox]
• Sega Rally Championship [SS]
• FIFA 97 [SS]
• Forsaken [N64]
• 007 Goldeneye [N64]
• Beyblade V-Force: Super Tournament Battle [GC]

It was a fun week overall, next Sunday, we're having party for my brother's communion at my house, and all of my cousins are going, it's going to be a frantic week!

The week afterwards will be Wii week, because it's been far too long since we played a game of Wario Ware Smooth Moves!

Article By: Cobra!
Recall help provided by: Steven

Retro Pick-Ups: Starblade [3DO], FIFA 97 [SAT] and Forsaken [N64]

I went into G-Force again, which is a shop I sometimes go to on my way home from college, for those new to this blog.

I noticed the old games weren't where they usually are, I thought they threw them out, but it turns they did almost the opposite, they now had a whole dedicated to them, not only then, they had more games for more consoles, like 3DO, NES, SNES and they had more Saturn games!

So I thought since my EMA came in that week, I thought I'd buy some stuff, and I found that a lot of the game were quite cheap, the NES games went for only £5 each, they were loose carts, but that still doesn't sound bad.

and that was the NES, that apparently did awful over here, I found a few games I had wanted for a while, I had always wanted to play Starblade again, I used to play it in Tekken 5, and I knew for a while there was a 3DO port, and was apparently the only version to make it outside Japan, I could be wrong though, and luck would have it, the store only had one 3DO game, and it was none other, than Startblade!

I think it's a US copy, I could tell by the CD being pretty thing, in the US, they had Big boxes with little jewel cases inside them, over here, I believe we just had jewel cases, but they were the double CD cases you used to get.
However, on the back of the case, it said "This title displays in letterbox format on the 3DO PAL System", and on the bottom it said "Made in UK", hmm...

I also got FIFA 97 for the Sega Saturn, I normally wouldn't have bothered, but it was only £2, so it was a why not.

Last, but not least, I got Forsaken for the Nintendo 64, my friend said he loved the game back in the day for the PS1, and the N64 version is supposed to be the same, but with more levels, nice!

This really isn't a "Pick-Up", but I thought I'd post it here anyway, my copy of Back to the Future the Game on PC! Unfortunately, I got impatient and opened the seal before I took the photos, but hey, look at the bright side, I can show you what's inside now.

Speaking of, here are the photos:

Retro Diary - 15/4/12 - "That's now how you USE a Fire Flower!"

Dear Diary,

Right after I wrote my last entry, I was playing Garry's Mod with my cousin, Steven, we made some new "robots" for our robot wars, I'll make an article with more details.

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On Monday, We went to grans because my gran had leftovers from the night before since it was Easter weekend, Steven was going as well, so I thought I'd bring along a console I wouldn't normally bring, because we're going on a day we don't usually.

So I brought my Amiga CD32 with me, so we can play the game that redefined the fighting genre, Rise of the Robots! We played a bit of that, but we were a bit bored, and there were a whole pile of, albeit burnt, CD32 games that we haven't tried, I haven't even tried them, so we decided to browse through them all to see if there any fun multiplayer games, out of about 20 or even 30, we only found 2 that were multiplayer, or at least playable in multiplayer, and one of them was a football game.

The other game was Shadow Fighter, which was actually pretty good, it wasn't exactly Mortal Kombat, but it was fun to play, although it only used one button, like many CD32 games, and you had to choose between music and sound effects. (although, if you choose music, you still get a few sound effects.)

So we were playing that for the rest of the time we were there, and like I said, it's surprisingly a fun game.

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On Saturday, there were keys given out online to download the new Garry's Mod 13 beta, only 19,000 got it, and me and Steven were luckily among them.

My first impressions were mixed, I understand that it's just a beta and it's mostly for programmers to try out their new entities, props etc. rather than messing about.

The Toybox was absent, and a few garrysmod.com stuff aren't fully compatible, however, the steam workshop is pretty awesome, the menu's improved in my opinion, and the new construct level is pretty awesome, it's far bigger! I still prefer the original, because I think it has a better layout, but I love the new one as well.

I hope they get around to fixing these problems soon.

So we were messing about in that for a while.

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On Sunday, it was N64 week, my other cousin, Giancarlo couldn't be here, I don't know why this time.

This is entirely out of recollection, as I might get some info wrong.

We (me and Steven) started off by playing Goldeneye (There goes the main event... ah well), we played a few game of licence to kill slappers only, as usual, and it was fun, especially since we haven't played it in a while.

We then played wipE'out 64, we played a couple of races, first one I was first, and we was 13th, in the second race, my ship got wrecked, and he reached 11t I think.

Then we played Pokémon Stadium, we played the mini-games, I won the game we had, it was first to 5 wins.

Then we played Super Smash Bros. and we got my uncle, Steven's dad, to play it because he played it with us way back in the day, and I remember he actually at one game scored as low as -34! The lowest he got out of the matches we played was -11 I think, he's improved since the old days!

Then we played WWF Attitude, we had a triple threat match, I stupidly set the time limit to an hour, since I thought the match would end way before then, but as it turns out, it lasted half an hour, but was a fun half an hour, we had a great time!

Then my uncle had to leave, we decided to play a game of TEEEEEN EEEEIGHTY!(1080) Snowboarding, we played a load of games, first few of which I won due to him retiring from taking too much damage, then I say "Oh, Steven's dead... That means Cobra!'s the winner!", it's an in joke we have. The last race he won.

Then we had a couple of races in Star Wars Episode 1 Racer.

Then we played RIIIIIDDGE RAAAAAAACER! 64, and had a couple of races of that.

Finally, we had a quick 2 minute/5 kills game of Perfect Dark, the match ended before either of us got 5 kills, I won due to having more kills.

Then they had to leave.

Overall, it was a fun week, and was problem-free, next week is Dreamcast week, my tied-1st favourite games console ever. (Tied with Playstation.)

Article By: Cobra!

Recall help provided by: Steven

Retro Diary - 22/1/12 - "Come here square fists!"

Dear Diary, I totally forgot to write notes for this, so everything written here beyond Monday will be totally out of recall.

On Monday my sister came over to play my Mega Drive, big surprise, eh? However, she, or rather we, I was playing a bit as well, almost completed it, we reached Death Egg Zone, by that point, I was shaking in excitement, my heart rate was going three times it's normal speed, I'd be sweating if I were the type to sweat, this was it, one the first games I've ever played, the game that always got me p*ssed off, the game that I- as a child- played for hours upon hours on end, but never got far, it was time to finally finish off a childhood game, a game that always won, to get past a very large obstacle, to jump over a very high hurdle, I- sorry we, were going to beat Sonic 2 once and for all!... I suck at build-ups...

...and we died, lost all of our lives and continues, bummer...

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On Wednesday, I was staying over at a friends house to watch the El Classico, while we were waiting for it to start, we had a few games of FIFA 12 on Xbox 360 and a couple of match of Smackdown vs. Raw 2009 for the same console.

I pretty much lost all of the matches we had of both games, I have no choice but to blame the Xbox 360 controller, I'm usually good at both games on PS2, usually...

After the El Classico, which I enjoyed by the way, we watched The Emperor's New Grove on VHS, then we went to bed.

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On Saturday, I got a new TV! Well, not exactly new, my brother had it before, but only since Christmas, so it's still relatively new, and I came across a problem, with the PS1, the the TV takes about a minute to find out what type of picture it uses, so by the time it shows a picture, it's well into the intro or the Press Start screen, it's not a big problem, since it gives off a great picture when it finally shows, but I'd love to get it fixed.

Other than that, I love it! It gives off a great picture to anything connected and I got a HDMI cable for my blu-ray player, and it gives off a great picture, it even does 1080p... but it's only 14-inch, so it doesn't make a massive difference.

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On Sunday, it was Nintendo 64 week at grans, I played a fair bit of Turok before my cousin, Steven finished his lunch and then we played a bit of Goldeneye, then we played a bit of Perfect Dark, and to finish off, we played Mario Kart 64. Nothing much happened.

While we were playing Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, we made up playful insults related to the graphics, for example: "Come here square fists!", "Take that Pyramid hands!" and "You can run forever cuboid legs!".
Games we played:

• Turok
• 007 Goldeneye
• Perfect Dark
• Mario Kart 64

Yeah, nothing much happened from recall. Next week, we'll be Dreamcast week, Chu Chu Rocket!

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Article By: Cobra!

Title quote provided by: Steven

Retro Diary - 15/1/12 - "BEEEEEAAASSSSTTTTTT... Robots!"

Dear Diary, sorry I'm late with posting this week, you'll find out why later on.

On Tuesday, My sister came to my house to play my Mega Drive again, she was playing the one I found in grans the week before, like I said, it works better than my other Mega Drive, because it doesn't need the power cord to be plugged in at a certain angle in order to play it.

You guys wont believe this, but she didn't even know how to spin dash in the game! I can understand if she's totally new to the game, but she played it when it came out all those years ago with our older cousins, so I would've though sometime then she would've learned, but apparently not. Oh well, she knows now.

She got to Oil Ocean Act 2 before she got a game over. She had 6 lives and 3 continues and managed to lose them all at that zone. *tuts*

She decided to play through it all again, she's dedicated I'll give her that.

She reached Metropolis Zone Act 2 this time.

Then she decided to play through it all again!

She reached Oil Ocean Act 2, the exact same spot - the boss - before her 3rd game over.

Later on in the day, she came back for a 4th try, this time she reached Green Hill Zone Act 2 before deciding to stop playing.

She later returned though for a 5th play though, well technically 4th, but whatever.

She reached a record of 15 lives! She reached Mystic Cave Zone Act 1 before she had to leave for the final time.

I think I can safely say that after all of that, the Mega Drive found in the closet/cupboard is in full working condition!

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On Wednesday, me and my cousin, Steven, had another Robot Wars session on Garry Mod.

After a few battles, we decided to try and build new robots, but neither of us had an idea that worked, so we gave up. I swear Steven's idea of connecting an office chair to a sentry gun with a 100ft pole was going somewhere...

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On Thursday, my sister returned to play some more Mega Drive... while I was at college! She said she reached Living Fortress zone when I was away.

When I was there, she reached Oil Ocean zone Act 1.

Her goal it seamed from that point was to get as many lives as possible.

On her second attempt, or at least the 2nd I've seen, she reached Aquatic zone Act 1 with 15 lives before she had to leave.

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On Friday, College ended early, but I didn't have my mobile phone, so I couldn't tell my mum that so she couldn't pick me up, so since I had a couple of hours to kill, I went over to my friends house for a few hours.

We played a could of El Classico on FIFA 12, if you don't know what "El Classico" is, it's the Spanish old firm, Barcelona vs. Real Madrid.

Unfortunately, my friend had taken all of Real Madrid's good players and put them on Barcelona, so I didn't stand a chance.

So I went Bayern Munich (Spelling) and he went Milan, and you won't believe this, but I actually scored not 1, but 2 goals against him! He did equalise in the second half and scored a 3rd goal, but I got him back with a 3rd goal from my team, then he scored again, then the matched ended, it was surprisingly close!

We had a rematch, and this time, he scored a goal against me earlier on, and then... no one scored since, and the match ended 1-0.

This guy has been collecting FIFA games for years, so he's most likely an expert at them by now, I'm just a new comer, and I surprisingly came close on both of our balanced matches!

We then watched Aladdin on VHS, it's my first time watching it believe it or not, and I really enjoyed it!

Afterwards, we decided to have another game of FIFA 12 again, but then I had to go.

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On Saturday, my Sam & Max DVD boxset finally arrived, after 2 months of waiting! I watched it all at once, it was worth the wait! Brilliant show!

Steven came up to my house, we played a few games in my room, we first tried out Hi-Octane, and it was kind of fun, but it was drag, because the game's circuits have too many laps, seriously, some even go up to 12 laps! They;re not short either, they're pretty long! So it kind of drags on after a while, but for a game that only took 8 weeks to build, it's pretty fun!

We might've played wipE'out 3: Special Edition, but neither of us are sure about that.

Then we played WWF War Zone for the Nintendo 64, like ECW Hardcore Revolution, which we played on the Dreamcast and which is also made by Akklaim, the game is so bad, it's awesome! So we had a couple of matches of that.

We were going to hook up our laptops, he brought his over, to play Garrys Mod on multiplayer using LAN, but we didn't have time, he had to go.

In summary, here are the games we played:

• Hi-Octane [PS1]
• wipE'out 3: Special Edition [PS1]*
• WWF Warzone [N64]

* = We think.

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On Sunday it was PS1 week, my cousin was playing a few games of Vib Ribbon, we were about to pop in Tekken to play it, but it wouldn't load that or any other games since, my PS1 just died on me... and that was why I never posted my Retro Dairy on Sunday

Luckily though, I guess, me and Steven brought our laptops to keep us occupied, we wanted to try our Robot Arena 2 multiplayer, if know what that is, it's a Robot Combat game released only in America, however, alot of people in the UK own it due to the popularity of Robot Wars, in fact I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised if most of the copies the game sold are in the UK now!

Anyway, we found out that although you need the disc to boot it up, you can take it out after it's loaded, and it would still function perfectly, so we ran the game on both of our laptops, connected each others laptops using a cable to play LAN multiplayer and surprisingly, it worked! So we had a few games, then we left.

In between games, we chatted in the built-in chat system in the robot selection screen, and we were quoting videos from KSIOlajideBT's videos, but adapting them to Robot Combat, the most notable of these was parodying his "Beast" videos, where he talks about good but unknown football players in FIFA: "Shut up and welcome to BEAST! Where we talk about BEEEEEAAASSSSTTTTTT... Robots!"

On closer inspection, and recall, it turns out that I made a mistake, you see, I have 2 PSones, and I was bringing the other one every other week because the one I brought broke, the whole time it was broken, so all of my grieving and being a little mad and stressed all went to vein, well, at least there's not much to be sad about.

I cleaned the lens anyway, just to see if I can bring it back to life, popped in Tekken 3, and it actually kind of worked again, I say kind of, it loaded the intro and menus just fine, but couldn't load the actual game. At least I'm making progress, eh?

In summary, here are the games we played:

• Vib Ribbon [PS1]
• Robot Arena 2: Design and Destroy [PC]

So, next week is N64 week, the return of Slapper action in 2012!

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Article By: Cobra!

Title quote provided by: Steven

Retro Diary - 8/1/12 - "He is okay, Wo-mon!"

Dear Diary, I've had a busy week this week...

On Wednesday, my cousin, Steven, came over to fix a problem with my mum's Paypal, so I can get a copy of one of the old McDonalds demo disc 1! I invited him up to my room to play a few games.

First, we had a few game of the infamous Rise of the Robots on the Amiga CD32, being that he was the 2nd player, he got to choose the opponent, I couldn't. I had to stick with the Cyborg.

The first match, he went as the Sentry droid, a.k.a. "Rook", he won that match.
The second match, he went as the Soldier droid, a.k.a. "War", I won that match.
The third match, he went as the Builder droid, a.k.a. "Ape" or "Prime-8", it turns out that Ape didn't have any aerial attacks, and since the game usually consists of them to win matches, that was a bad thing, I won the match because of that.
The forth match, he went as the Sentry droid again, I won again.
It was 3-1 to me, yes!

Next we played World Tour Racing for the Atari Jaguar CD, it turns out that the control setting only apply to the first player, even if it's the second player choosing them, that sucked! We raced in England, which didn't look like England at all. However, we were amazed at the graphics, they were great for the Jaguar, it was a fully 3D textured-polygon game, which is rare for a Jaguar game.

Next, Steven had to help my brother in Portal 2, but as well as do that, he showed us a secret level, which was cool!

We then went on Garrys Mod on my PC, because I said to him the face poser in the game didn't work, it turns out they didn't work with the Team Fortress 2 characters.

We then had another race at World Tour Racing, nothing to say about that.

Then we had a game of wipE'out 64 for, what else, the Sega Saturn!... Wait, that's not right...

2 player in the game was surprisingly smooth and fast, I might even go as far as to say it runs faster than single-player!

After that, he had to leave.

In short, here are the game we played:

In the order we played them:
• Rise of the Robots [CD32]
• World Tour Racing [JagCD]
• Portal 2 [360]
• Garry's Mod [PC - Steam]
• wipE'out 64 [N64]

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The next day, my sister came over, and she discovered that I had a Mega Drive, she had, what is called, a "Nostalgia-gasm", which means, she got a memory triggered of something she remembers dearly, and get exited to play it again. She said for a joke that she wanted to move back into the house.

I popped in Sonic 2, and she pretty much played it all night.

It was probably the first time my Mega Drive had been booted up in years!

She said that she's going to buy a Mega Drive off eBay, and asked me if she does, if I would go over to her house to help her set it up, I said I would, it wouldn't be a problem.

She took a photo of the Mega Drive on Facebook, and said it was okay if I posted it here, so here you go:


She got to Zone 3 Act 2 before she had to leave.

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Friday was an awful day, it was the day my Sega Saturn died, I was trying out Sonic 3D, and it didn't read it, so I cleaned the lens, the outside, pushed the lens to the top, left it for a few hours, even opened it up to see if the drive was connected properly, but none of those worked, it wouldn't read anything...

R.I.P. my Sega Saturn, 2008 - 2012... Oh well, time to find another on Amazon and eBay.

---

On Saturday, me and my cousin, Steven, were having a Robot Combat battle on Gmod, can can find more info on that here.

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Today, at Grans, it was 3DO week, and it wasn't as fun a I hoped, but I had a good time nonetheless.

We started off by playing Corpse Killer, which is one of those it's-so-bad-it's-good FMV games, my cousin, Steven got up to a fortress level of sort until it became too hard, not in the challenging way, they just threw too many zombies at him, most of which were invulnerable to bullets, which isn't fair!

If you didn't know, Corpse Killer is an FMV game that tried to be a rail shooter, but fails miserably, the main protagonist, apart from your character, is a one-dimensional stereo typical Jamacan man, who's always saying stuff like "Foo-pah!", "He is okay, Wo-mon!", there's a female character by the way, who has no personality whatsoever, at least not that I've seen.

Next, he played a race in The Need for Speed, not to much to say about it, except while he was playing it, we were writing that Gmod article I linked to above.

Then we played Twisted, we never finished the game, we had to leave before we could, but we enjoyed it.

In summary, here are the game we played:

In the order we played them:
• Corpse Killer
• The Need for Speed
• Twisted: The Game Show

I had a great week this week, next week was supposed to be Saturn week, but as we know, my Saturn died, so we're skipping to Playstation (1) week!