Dear Diary,
Sorry I was late, I didn't have any time to write this weeks entry yesterday, I had to get up early the next day, personal reason, I'd rather not mention.
I had a fairly busy week this week, but I need to write notes down from now on, because I forgot the order these events happened.
Throughout the week, I have been revisiting old games that I had in my 'collection' which I completed ages ago, but was tempted to do again, Timesplitters 2, the Tony Hawk's Underground, Tony Hawk's Underground 2 and Tony Hawk's American Wasteland.
I've still to play the latter of the list as I'm in the middle of Underground 2, I and if you must know, I'm playing the Gamecube version, I've never played that one, I completed the first Underground on PS2, and after playing the Xbox version before... wow, I have to say, the PS2 version looks kind of rubbish, as for the Gamecube version, I've never played that, so I can't comment on it.
I was playing Timesplitters 2 on PS2, but while I was on that, I went to my cousins house, and we played through the Xbox version it there, so I didn't see the point in completing it on PS2 if I've more-a-less seen everything. Alright, I lie, we only went through a couple of levels, but you get the idea.
While I was at my cousin's house, we played some games, mostly on N64.
I brought a few games with me in case we got bored, just as well we did I guess, but we had a problem with the N64, it wasn't able to save or load data from cartridges, so when I put in Ridge Racer 64, it said the memory had gone corrupt, and the data in Perfect Dark was gone too, but when I went back home, and tried them on my N64, the data was still there.
Anyway, that didn't stop us from playing a race or two on Ridge Racer 64, although I was moody the whole way through.
First, we played Tony Hawks Skateboarding on N64, my cousin told me he never played the original Tony Hawk game, I was surprised, he loves Pro Skater 3 and Underground, but never played the first game!? Alright, fair enough, I was like that at first, but eventually I got the whole collection up to Tony Hawks Proving Ground on PS2.
Anyway, we played a few games on Graffiti, and I more-a-less annihilated him, with scored like 12-4!
Then, we had a few games on Hockey on Monster Truck Madness 64, and he got me back, he kept beating me with scores like 6-0! I think I an safely say, I've lost my touch...
Then we had a game of Ridge Racer 64 and tried to play Perfect Dark, but like I said before, the N64 had problems reading the data.
Then we played Timesplitters 2, and like I said, we played through a couple of levels until I had to leave to go back home.
Here are the games I think we played, in the order I think we played them:
- Tony Hawk's Skateboarding [N64]
- Monster Truck Madness 64 [N64]
- Ridge Racer 64 [N64]
- Perfect Dark* [N64]
- Timesplitters 2 [Xbox]
Speaking of Perfect Dark, I was also playing games I haven't completed before throughout the week, such as Matrix: Path of Neo [Xbox], Driver 2 [PS1], Burnout [PS2] and Perfect Dark [N64].
Perfect Dark was the only games out of those games I actually completed, I'll go back to the others and complete them eventually, but man did Perfect Dark feel rewarding for one reason, I was given a bonus mission that's mostly about shooting anything that moves! That was alot of fun!
On Sunday, at grans, it was Sega Saturn week, we restarted due a confusion, I'd rather not mention why.
I played a match with my little brothers on Fighters Megamix, of course with a handicap for balance, and they were having an absolute blast, they kept bugging me to play more.
Eventually, I convinced them to try out Sega Rally, they didn't like that too much, racing games, as I've discovered, aren't my little brothers' strong points.
Then they wanted to play the Sonic games I had on the Saturn, so we had a game of Sonic 2 on Sonic Jam, and then we had a couple of races in Sonic R. I actually convinced my uncle to play a game of Sonic Jam with me at Sonic 2, we had fun, although we didn't get far.
Then my cousin arrived, and we had a game of Virtua Fighter 2, then he wanted to watch the Fifth Element, which was coming up on Channel 5. I wanted to play him in a couple of fights every time an ad break starts for 3 reasons:
- I wanted some time spent towards playing the Saturn, we didn't spend much time playing for it.
- To make the ad breaks seam shorter.
- To give the Saturn rests, to keep the Disc Tray and Cartridge slot working, so then we could load my Virtua Fighter 2 data from the Backup Cart, so we can play Virtua Fighter 2.1!
Believe or not, this did all 3 jobs perfectly, it made the ad breaks seam much shorter, we had a blast every time, and the Saturn for the most part, kept working perfectly.
We even gave ourselves a name by the last ad breaks, we called ourselves the "Rapid Virtua Fighter Response Unit", or the RVFRU, because the second the ad breaks came on, we literally rushed to the TV, turned the Saturn on, switched the channel and played a few games! I think we were overall equal in the record, I won alot of the matched, but he won alot as well.
As for the film itself, It was brilliant! I had no interest to watch it before and never pictured myself actually liking it that much, but wow, were my expectations blown out of the water, (get it?) it had a little of everything I wanted, it had alot of funny moments, it had an all star cast, I loved the environments, it had a great atmosphere to it, and the story, although it seamed a bit ridiculous in my opinion, was very good and kept you watching until the end. I'll definitely be getting myself the DVD soon...
During the film, We recognised the actor that played as Ruby Rhod, or at least he was familiar, but we couldn't figure out where we seen him, then I said "He looks and sounds just like that guy from Rush Hour.", then my cousin looked it up on his smartphone (or 'daft-phone' as I like to call it.), and it turns out I was right, he was played by Chris Tucker, who played James Carter in the Rush Hour Films, so that was where we'd seen him!
In a nutshell, Here's what we played:
In the Order I think we Played Them
- Fighters Megamix
- Sega Rally
- Sonic Jam
- Sonic R
- Virtua Fighter 2/2.1
Afterwards, I went to my other cousin's house... again, and we were playing FIFA 11 on the Xbox 360.
My brother was playing with my cousin in a match, I forgot the result of that.
Then we had a match, I lost.
Then he a match with my brother again, and my brother lost, with a 8-1 score no less!
After that, we left, we didn't stay very long.
The following day, we were at my old flat, literally, everyone in the family were there, even close friends and old neighbours were there, again, I don't want to mention why.
Good thing I started to keep notes, there are thing here I never would've remembered!
Me, my brother and my cousins got kind of bored eventually, so I decided to go to my house and bring a console, but by the time I went there and back by bus, as I have no driving license, they would've gone, so my uncle said he'd drive me there and back, I always feel bad when I get other to do stuff for me like this, but he said he didn't mind, so we agreed that I'd do that.
I asked my cousins what console I should bring, at first, they said "Whatever you want." like they didn't care, then I said, or at least I practically said, "I meant should I bring the Saturn, so we can play Virtua Fighter 2.1 again, or bring the Playstation, as that's next on the list.", then they said, "Bring the Dreamcast!", of course, I happily obliged, I brought the Dreamcast.
When I did, one of my older cousins was intrigued by the fact that I bought the Dreamcast, he lived through that era, (Lucky b*stard, I was too young back then!) and remembers it, and so we played a few 4-player games.
Before that, though, we were talking about games in general, and because I was a retro gamer (Who knew?), we were talking mostly about old games, and I found out that my Mega Drive that I have now, I bought from my cousin: Giancarlo, it was actually his Mega Drive originally (The older cousin, not the one who sold me it.), and he gave it to him before selling it to me, however, he apparently had the Mega CD attachment for it, but I didn't find out what happened to it, I would've loved to have that though!
We were talking about a game on the Mega CD called "Night Trap", which was meant to be a cult classic, but is supposed to be one of those games that's so bad, it's good. After that, we were making fun of how enthusiastic the old FMV videos were, they were over the top, saying that they said stuff like we were going on adventures, when in reality, we were just pressing buttons in a sequence, I made fun of them by saying "Are you ready to press buttons? Then let's go!"!
We have this partial in-joke, I say partial, because I'm p*ssed off at the reason that I made it, basically, when someone mentions the Xbox, I, for a joke, assume that they mean the original Xbox,
let's say for argument someone says, "I'm getting Modern Warfare 3 for the Xbox!",
I say "There's an Xbox version!?",
The conversation would probably go on like:
"Yeah, it's on Xbox and PS3."
"Isn't there also an Xbox 360 version?"
"Yeah, that was what I meant."
"Then why did you say you were getting it for the Xbox?"
"Shut Up! You knew what I meant!"
It does p*ss me off how people just call the Xbox 360, just the Xbox, because I have an original Xbox and still play it today, and I'm probably the only one, but nevertheless it still really annoyed me, so I created the in-joke.
Why am I telling you this Dear Diary? Well, because the cousin who lived through the Dreamcast era. (I need to give these guy nicknames, I don't want to give away their real names.) was talking about something for the Xbox 360, I forgot what it was, but he referred the Xbox 360 as just the Xbox, so I done that In-joke on him, he was confused at first, but then my other cousin explained the in-joke, and then for a joke, he called me a "Retro pedant!".
We played a couple of games of Ready 2 Rumble boxing, a Dreamcast night just isn't a Dreamcast night without that! I was facing Giancarlo at first, I won, then I faced my older cousin (nickname pending), and he won, but he was button bashing, even my youngest brother gave him advice by telling him to keep pressing the Y button, and it worked...
Then we played Chu Chu Rocket, 4-player! It was madness, just as I expected!
Then we played WWF Royal Rumble, just to try it, I didn't expect much out of it, but surprisingly, we had an absolute blast playing it, we played a good few matches of that!
Then me and Steve (Nickname from 007 Nightfire a few weeks back) had a game of Tony Hawks Skateboarding, he said he'd be better than me in the Dreamcast version, I didn't believe him, but then he actually beat me in a game of graffiti, I beat him the next game, then we tied, so it was neck and neck, next time we play will be a decider. I have a feeling though he used an N64 emulator to practice the N64 version... Then we played a game of horse, unfortunetly, you couldn't change the name, so we were stuck with 'horse'. So we played a game, and I lost... wow.
Then we played Tony Hawks Pro Skater 2, we played a game of Graffiti, that I won, then we had a game of horse, but this time, we could change the name, so what did we do, we both moved the d-pad in random directions and kept tapping A, and then came the final result:
I'll be introducing a new feature, perhaps outside the Retro diary as I think it deserves it's own articles, we call it, the "Insult of the Week".
So, without further adieu, we present to you, the Insult of the week is...
DCCJJIBCSS!
Hopefully, I'll document the highlights of the matches we will have and make it a new full feature of the Blog, but the score will be backdated.
So the match winner was... Me! That's 3-0 to me! Steve is the DCCJJIBCSS!
Afterwards we played WWF Royal Rumble again, but this time, we did a Royal Rumble Match match, it never seamed to end! It turns out that we needed to eliminate the computer opponents, (Because this game supported up to 9 wrestlers at the screen at one, which is very impressive considering that the newer Smackdown vs. Raw games can only handle 6! So we did that, and all we had to do, was eliminate each other, but once you were eliminated, you can go right back in by pressing start after you've been eliminated, so theoretically, in a 4-player game, it can be never ending! Just as well it didn't but it take half an hour of our lives!
We then had a game of ECW Hardcore Revolution, because it was so much fun to play, because it's so bad, so yeah, we played 3 matched, we had a good laugh out of it.
After that, I had to go, and then wrote the blog entry.
Note to Self: Take notes from now on.
Cobra!
