Showing posts with label Nintendo Game Boy Color. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nintendo Game Boy Color. Show all posts

Saturday, 27 December 2014

Maybe it wasn’t just our nostalgia this whole time…

Okay, over the past few days, something quite amazing has been happening! One day, my little brother (who is 11 at the time of typing this) decided to come to my room, as he was bored, and then asked me if he could play my GBA. I told him he could, and then we went […] ...To receive more of these posts, you should follow my new blog, over at wordpress, the link is: https://cobraretroroom.wordpress.com/2014/12/27/maybe-it-wasnt-just-our-nostalgia-this-whole-time/

Sunday, 13 November 2011

Retro Diary - 13/11/11 - Prepare to cry, FIFA fanboys...

Dear Diary, and yes, I am going to be adding this every week for authentic-ness, I guess.

On Monday, we sent off the CD32 back to the seller to get it fixed or replaced, because the disc tray wasn't closing properly, we just received an email from the seller saying he got it on Friday and he replaced the top bit of the console and will be sending it back on Monday.

When we played FIFA 11 on PS3 my brother said, for a joke, "Imagine FIFA 13 being released for the Jaguar! Or even the Saturn!", and then I added, "Or, more importantly, the N-Gage!", you know, having a laugh. Why am I telling you this? I don't know, I guess to just create conversation. Besides, it was unusual for my brother to make a joke like that, that's usually the type of joke I would make.

I've been playing both FIFA 12 and Pro Evolution Soccer 2012 over the week because I had nothing else to do, and also, to decide which is better, because from the little I've played from both, my opinions were more-a-less the same, but I've played enough from both to decide which I think is better.

Believe it or not, contrary to public belief, I actually think Pro Evolution Soccer is better, the controls aren't as stiff as in FIFA, especially when sprinting, and overall just feel better, and the game also has a far better atmosphere than FIFA. Don't get me wrong, FIFA is still very good, but PES is better in my opinion.

As you may already know I went to that charity shop again, and got 6 VHS tapes for £1 and the Matrix Soundtrack for 50p.

What I didn't tell youse, mainly because there was no point, is that on Friday, I got 2 more CDs for £1, the first one is the soundtrack from the Rocky Horror Picture show, I've never seen the film before, but the reason I got the soundtrack is for the Time Warp song! I absolutely love that song! The other CD I got was the Darkness Album "Permission to land", which contained the song "I Believe in a Thing Called Love", which was the song that introduced me to The Darkness, so that was why I bought that.

They both work and I've been listening to both soundtracks.

On Sunday, we went back to Gamecube week.

I played a little bit of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 until my cousins came, nothing else to say about that except I was still playing for a little bit even after my cousins arrived, I was talking about what I said back up there, and it turns out one of them agreed with me and that he always thought the same, and that people only preferred FIFA just because they have more licensed teams, even though PES has the better gameplay. (In our opinion)

We were playing that game throughout the day where we pretended it was a past year, and we act like anything that appeared after that doesn't exist, or that we just haven't heard of it. This week we pretended it was 2004.

After that, we had a few games of Mario Kart Double Dash and when I say a few, I mean, roughly about 20 races, it felt like it.

After that, we played Mario Party 6, which is always a blast to play! Unfortunately, we didn't expect for it to last as long as we did, we set it for 20 turns, big mistake there, the game lasted I think 2-3 hours or something, after we finished, he turned off and were rushed to get back home because it was late. Despite how long it lasted, it was on hell of a game, we had great fun!

In a nutshell, here're the games we played:
    As usual, in the order we played them:
  • Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4
  • Mario Kart Double Dash
  • Mario Party 6

So yeah, in theory, since it was Xbox 360 last week, due to one of cousins being absent that week, and now it's back to the usual order, it should be PS3 week next week, but my brother, the one with the PS3 wants to save PS3 for after Christmas. So we're skipping to Wii week, and as we all know, the Wii can play Gamecube games...

One last thing, I was getting sick of my little brother always asking me questions about what happened in Pokémon Red, Green, Blue and Yellow, spoiling himself, I know he's young, but he should be playing through the game himself to find out these, it's more rewarding, so I told him to play the game himself, then he said he doesn't have it, so I let him play though my copy of Pokémon Red. At the same time, my younger brother asked me if he could play Mario Bros. Deluxe on my Game Boy Color.

Fancy that, I've got my 6 and 8 year old brothers hooked to Game Boy Color games! I don't know if I should feel happy that they're playing proper games, or guilty, because they should be playing games from their time.

That's it for this weeks entry, again, next week is Wii week see how that turns out.

Cobra!

Sunday, 23 October 2011

Retro Diary - 23/10/11 - "It's like they're on the moon..."

A lot happened this week, at least as far as retro gaming goes.

On Wednesday, my friend came over to my house to have a game of FIFA 12, on PS2!

He thought it was rubbish compared to the Xbox 360 version, well, he said it was completely different and that it didn't fell right, but he said that it might be okay once you get used to the controls, even though I didn't say so, I agreed with him, because after seeing gameplay of the Xbox 360 version, it looked MUCH better.

We then watched some Red Dwarf and some Fawlty Towers, then he was playing Pokémon Pinball on my Game Boy Color, he was playing that for a good while.

We played a few more games, here's the complete list of what we played:
    In the order we played them:
  • FIFA 12 [PS2]
  • Pokémon Stadium [N64]
  • Pokémon Pinball [GBC]
  • Half-Life [PS2]
  • Timesplitters: Future Perfect [Xbox]
  • FIFA Football 2003 [PS2]
  • Ready 2 Rumble Boxing [DC]

The most fun we had was playing Half-Life and Timesplitters: Future Perfect, we played both of them for hours and before we knew it, it was time for him to go, so we played a couple of games of Ready 2 Rumble Boxing and then he left.

On Saturday, my Atari Jaguar Memory Track arrived! So now I can save data on my Jaguar CD games. (well, game)

It says on the back it can box "125,000" bytes of data, that's only 250KBs, even back then, in 1996, where you had the fairly small 1MB PS1 memory cards, that was rubbish, and it says also that it can store data from up to "250 Jaguar games" but when I went to the memory track manager, the previous owner had data from 3 games, Battlemorph, Hoverstrike: Unconquered Lads and Myst, and that almost took up the whole cart, only about 100 bytes remained! 250 games my ar*e!

On Sunday, before we went to grans, my brother wanted someone to play him at Co-op in Super Mario Bros. Wii, he asked me first, I didn't want to, so he got our dad to do it.

When I went down for a coke later on, he was still playing and looked so bored playing it, so I thought since I had nothing else to do, I thought I'd take his place, and surprisingly, I enjoyed it, even if it was my brother playing it, he always shouts and makes loud noises while playing it, we got every star-coins, whatever they're called, in world 1 and managed to unlock level 1 of world 9, we didn't complete it, but I'd love to give it another shot!

At grans, it was PS2 week, and since my cousins were still to arrive.

So I decided to play a game of FIFA 12 career mode, when I first played when the game arrived, I didn't like it the framerate was very unreliable and the controls were very awkward (I'm playing on "Be a player" mode by the way), but playing it a second time, I started to really enjoy it, the dynamic camera angles you get when your near a goal I thought were a very nice touch, and I managed to score 2 goals, and it felt very rewarding... and then I got sent off, after "bumping", for lack of a better word, the score to 2-0. Then the opponent team scored not 1, but 4 goals against us! Talk about a bad move, eh? I had to watch the rest of the entire match, the first half wasn't even over yet, I couldn't skip, I could quit, but all progress would be lost and it was count as a retire, it was some of the most boring moments of my life. The score ended 3-4, we lost, and I got the blame, the newspaper said it was my fault and that I was sorry for the loss, bullsh*t!

Then my brother wanted a shot at career mode, but as a manager, so, since I had plenty of memory card space, I let him, and he was playing for about half an hour, despite claiming he hated it,
I told him "I thought you hated this game.",
and he replied "Well, I suppose it's alright when you get used to the controls.",
which was exactly what my friend said, well, assumed, and he was right according to what my brother said.

When my brother started playing, my cousins arrived, and we were talking about how there's still PS2 games being made and making jokes like
"(Cobra!) has probably made a spike in the sales charts for the PS2 version!",
I played along, saying stuff like "Breaking news! Someone bought the PS2 version of FIFA 12!", we had quite a laugh.

I was also mentioning what I wanted to get for Christmas, spent with my EMA money (I know, I'm buying my own presents, sad isn't it? Well, I'm not buy all of them, just most of them.) as I have £300, if saved up, to spend, and I mentioned that I got a 3DO with a few games for just £50! Not bad considering they usually go for £120 with no games, and I told them that I found an Amiga CD32 for just £40, although it had no controller and a EU plug, I can buy both easily for a decent price.

So if you want a CD32, there are 6 available, so get yourself one, just leave one for me, please?

Then, after my brother was done playing FIFA 12, we popped in Timesplitters 2 and played some co-op multiplayer, we only finished 1 level when the cousin I was playing with had to leave.

My other cousin was still there so we decided to play some Timesplitters 1, since he never played it before and was curious as to what it was like, it was kind of boring, I was aware that all of the goals were, get this, then go back, and that it was repetitive, this especially showed in co-op multiplayer, I got bored of it after just 2 levels.

We then had a game of WWE All Stars, just to show him how bad it was, and the game was so bad, it was awesome! Surprisingly, we had a great laugh out of it, because of all of the over the top moves. He said that "It's like they're on the moon!" because of this, and I mentioned that the bad sound effects and lack of music (Yeah, there's no music in the PS2 version.) kind of helped that effect.

So as it turns out, WWE All Stars is like the PS2's Monster Truck Madness 64, it's so horrible, that it's awesome!

Here's the complete list of games we played:
    In the order we played them:
  • FIFA 12
  • Timesplitters 2
  • Timesplitters
  • WWE All Stars

On the way back, my cousin was dropping me off my house, due to our car not being there yet, and on the way, we were actually talking about this blog, and he mentioned that he liked the logo at the top and I mentioned that it was outdated, as my collection grew quite a bit since, I got a Jaguar+CD, a Game Boy Color, an N-Gage,
and he added; "...with a 3DO on the way!",
and then I added afterwards; "... and a CD32!",
I was surprised at the fact that it even remotely interested him that I was getting a 3DO, of course in a good way, my only guess it was because I was at one point hosting a competition for a game about what console to add to it, and he entered with the 3DO, I cancelled it due to lack of entries later on, so technically, he was the winner, although the game was cancelled.

That was what I was up to this week, next week is Xbox week, a very underrated console in my opinion, in fact I'm probably the only person in the world to prefer it over the Xbox 360. Hopefully, it will be as fun as this week was.

Cobra!

Sunday, 2 October 2011

Retro Diary - 2/10/11 - What!? That's not Random!!

Yes, it's that time again, folks, it's time for another retro diary, the most bland, boring and repetitive blog series on the face of the internet!

This week was the console that started all of this Retro nonsense, the Nintendo 64, and we had alot of fun, surprisingly.

Unfortunately, my cousin forgot to bring his games and controllers, because he thought it was Dreamcast week, I'll explain how the week system works below, so we were stuck with just 2 controllers, kind of ironic when you think about it, because we had 4-controllers on PSone week because of the multi-tap, when we usually have 2. It's just as well I brought in my copies of games he had, just in case he forgot, what I forgot myself, as to bring in Lylat Wars, I was exited about that!

My other cousin gave me back my controller after giving his back a few weeks back, after the mix up of controllers after Gamecube week all of those weeks ago.

Anyway, here are the game we played:
    In the order we played them:
  • 1080 Snowboarding
  • Ridge Racer 64
  • Goldeneye
  • Pokémon Stadium
  • Super Smash Bros.

We were playing Ridge Racer 64 the most, I forgotten how much fun it was.

I was humiliated this week, as somehow, I've lost ALL of my games, I guess I wasn't on top form today, because I did awful in the game I thought I was good at.

If you're wondering what the title is all about, well, it's yet another in-joke, where we, for a joke, assume that "random" is it's own stage/song/whatever rather than choosing all of the existing ones randomly, so when random does it job, and randomly chooses a stage/song/whatever, we're like "That's not random!", "You call that random!?", stuff along those lines.

Ever since I've started this series, I've never specified the list of weeks that we're doing, as in, what console do I own, and what order we're doing it weekly, I'm going to rectify this problem, just to clear some heads:
  1. Mega Drive - 1990
  2. Atari Jaguar + CD - 1994/1996 - Optional, as I only have a couple of games and only 1 controller for it.
  3. Sega Saturn - 1995
  4. Sony Playstation - 1995
  5. Nintendo 64 - 1997
  6. Sega Dreamcast - 1999
  7. Sony Playstation 2 - 2000
  8. Microsoft Xbox - 2002
  9. Nintendo Gamecube - 2002
  10. Microsoft Xbox 360 - 2005
  11. Nintendo Wii - 2006

My brothers have been playing Pokémon Stadium all week, and I'm sick of it, the only people to visit my room are my brothers asking to play it, I suppose I should be somewhat happy that SOMEONE has an interest of old games, but these guys are 6 and 7 years old. I suppose I shouldn't be complaining, so I won't be.

One last thing, I've made up a game, pick a year, any year, usually a year associated with the console your playing, pretend it's that year, and if anything released, made, born or happened after the chosen year, you go "What/Who's *Insert object here*?", you can also keep count if you like, me and my cousins play it alot.

Why an I telling you this, no reason really, it's just that if you're that into retro stuff, then you could give it a try with your friends or cousins.

That's it for todays retro diary, I'll see youse here next week when it's Dreamcast week!

Cobra!

Sunday, 18 September 2011

Retro Diary - 18/9/11 - "Just because *I* have a working Atari Jaguar CD!"

Despite the impression you might've got from reading the title, it was actually Sega Saturn week! "Well then why the f*ck did you put the Atari Jaguar CD in the title!?" I hear you ask, well, I'll explain later.

First off, though, it's been quite an eventful(ish) week this week, let me tell you everything that happened in chronological order.

I'm going to skip the arrival of my (working) Atari Jaguar CD, as I've already posted an article all about it. My brother, for practically the whole week, was in my room playing Spiderman 2 for the Playstation 2, I saw practically, I mean every minute where he wasn't in school or sleeping, in some nights, he was even playing until midnight, so yeah, he hogged my TV, but I didn't mind, because I enjoyed watching him play it, especially since he comments as he plays, like a let's play, in fact while I eat, I prefer watching him play it than watching something on the internet.

This is sad, I'm going on about how I enjoy watching my brother play a game while I eat, how low I sunk to!?

Anyway, on Thursday, after I came home from College, my Gamecube controller arrived, this is the one that is purple at the front, and clear at the back, and this is an official controller, I never knew Nintendo made these kind of controllers!

I've yet to try it out, I will once I get my old one back from my cousin, and play my brother at a game or two or Marvel Nemesis!

Speaking of college, in college, we play Quake 3 on the PCs at break times, which is cool. Not much to say about that other than, it's alot of fun!

Before I went to my grans today, I went to a car boot sale, and got myself a few still, some good deals, some bad.

but before that, I want to mention that I saw a bunch of Laserdiscs for sale! If you don't know what they are, you could say they were the precursor to DVDs, because they were discs that played videos, but there was one problem with them, THEY WERE MASSIVE! Seriously, I had to stretch out my hand just to hold it from the centre to the edge! The most surprising thing I think, was that this guy had Toy Story for laserdisc, I would've thought that laserdiscs were well dead by the time Toy Story came out, but it turns out I was wrong.

Anyway I got the Simpsons Movie Soundtrack, Special Edition, brand new, sealed, for just £1, and the seller wasn't a con artist, I checked the disc, not a scratch on it!

I also got Theme Park World and a Multi tap for the PS1 for a total of £4, Theme Park World worked just fine, I'm totally addicted to that, but the multi-tap is useless, it doesn't work, I have 2 game that support multi-tap (Klonoa Beach Volleyball and Cubix: Race n' Robots), and it doesn't work on either.

At lastly, I got the Godfather Trilogy boxset on VHS, unfortunately, this doesn't work, in fact, it's the opposite, it almost ruined my VCR! Luckily, we got it fixed in the end, but I am NEVER going to touch that boxset EVER again!

When it was time to go to grans, I brought my Sega Saturn, as it was Sega Saturn week, and just in case, my Game Boy Color, we didn't play that though, it was all about the Saturn.

The game we played:
    In the order we played them
  • NiGHTS: Into Dreams...
  • Fighters Megamix
  • Resurrection: Rise 2
  • Sega Rally
  • Virtua Fighter 2
  • Daytona USA: Championship Circuit Edition

The games we enjoyed the most were Fighters Megamix and Virtua Fighter 2. Fighters Megamix, if you don't know, and you probably don't, it's rather obscure, it's basically like a Sega Smash Bros., only it came out before, you can even play as a car from Daytona USA!

I mentioned above that I was going to explain why I mentioned the Atari Jaguar CD in the title, well I will now, when I'm losing in a game again my cousins, for a joke, I go "Just because *I* have a working Atari Jaguar CD!", sorry to dissapoint you Jaguar Fans, that was all I had about the Jaguar CD in this, well, I suppose except we have an in joke where we say "When I grow up, I want to be a *Insert inanimate object here*!" and when we were saying silly stuff like that I said "When I grow up, I want to be an Atari Jaguar CD!"... Well, it was funny at the time.

That's about it for todays Retro Diary, now if you'll excuse me, I have a Theme Park to attend to...

Cobra!

Wednesday, 3 August 2011

Retro Pick-Ups: Nintendo Game Boy Color + Super Mario Bros. Deluxe

This is a new feature I'm going to do, it's where I post whatever it is I pick-up, as long as it's retro-related (or in rare cases, something modern), with pictures and the story of how I got it, if it's interesting.

My family were going to the beach today, but they didn't have enough room in the car for all of us, one of us had to stay, so I decided to stay, I didn't want to go anyway.

So since I'd be on my own, I thought I'd go to my cousin's house for the day, and we were playing the Xbox (Original) and N64 all day. We were going to play the Gamecube, but he lost one of the controllers, so we went searching for it, and I found a Game Boy Color, suddenly, memories came rushing back, I wanted it so bad, so I asked him if I could have it, along with the game inside it, which was Super Mario Bros. Deluxe, and he said I could, saying that I would give it a better home than he would.

Here they are (Warning: Pictures are rather blurry, sorry about that):
Game Boy Color (Green) Super Mario Bros. Deluxe (Cartridge) Game Boy Color playing Super Mario Bros. Deluxe Game Boy Color and Super Mario Bros. Deluxe cartridge together

I'm very pleased to own one of these again, I've had so many memories with it, and I'm looking forward to reliving them...

Cobra!