Retro Diary - 19/8/12

Monday 13th August 2012

Batman Arkham Asylum arrived today! It's just as awesome as the demo made it out to be! I've been playing that all day.

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Tuesday 14th August 2012

Quoted from the Retro Pick-Ups video posted that day: I was spending the day with my friend, as a sort of birthday get together, as his birthday was coming up, while we were out, we went to CEX, which a store that people bring old games, CDs and DVDs and they sell them, my cousin, Giancarlo, goes in there a lot, and says it's a great store, so I went in, and disappointingly, it was mostly PS3 and Xbox 360 games, I managed to find a section that had 6th gen console and PC games, so I browsed around that part for over half an hour.

I got 007 Nightfire on both PC and Gamecube, because I heard that the PC version was cut-down from the console versions, but I wanted to try it anyway, it was only 75p anyway, so why not? The Gamecube version was £1.50.

I also got Reservoir Dogs on the PC for £1.50, I'm a big fan of the film, I have it on DVD, have it's soundtrack ripped to my PC (Turns out my dad used to have it, well, we found it at our old house.), and I always wanted to play the game, now was my chance.

Lastly, I got RC Revenge Pro on the PS2, just because I can!

Nightfire on the Gamecube was brilliant, it got every right, it's not as good as Goldeneye, but it's definitely up there! The PC version, however, is actually kind of rubbish, they've changed the game completely! The only thing that remained is the story, and even then, many scenes have changed, everything else is completely different.

Reservoir Dogs was badly optimised and was an extremely shoddy console port, but it's good fun in my opinion, so I'll probably be playing it to the very end.

I've still to play RC Revenge Pro, I want to get and complete the original RC Revenge on the PS1 first

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Wednesday 15th August 2012

I tried out a demo of Need for Speed Underground 2 on the PC, owning it on the PS2 and Xbox wasn't enough for me!

Well in all honestly, I loved the game, but didn't like how it ran slow and looked rather blurry, after realising there was a PC version, it shouldn't have surprised, need for speed originated on the PC and 3DO and every game in the series is available on PC.

It was much better than the console versions in my opinion, it runs much faster, you can turn all the blurring effects off! However, it doesn't support widescreen resolution, but the beauty of PC gaming is the modding community, and low and behold, there exist patches (user created), that make it support whatever resolution you want, so I installed one, and it looks great!

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Thursday 16th August 2012

I got a pack of 3 games today, all Codemasters racing games, all with creative titles, they are DiRT, GRID and FUEL!

The awesome things about DiRT and GRID are that when it comes to selecting your profile, you get to choose your nationally, and you can choose to be Scottish! Finally, games that acknowledges us a separate country! The games are a lot of fun as well, I had a bit of trouble running DiRT at first, but once I was sorted, I was off!

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Saturday 18th August 2012

I got a Need for Speed Collector's Pack today, which contained Need for Speed Underground 1 & 2 and Most Wanted, I've only played the Underground games, I loved them both on the consoles, and it's only made better on the PC because of the higher framerate and the ability to turn off those annoying blur effects, the only downsides to them is that don't support widescreen resolutions, so I get thick black bars on each side, but you get used to it.

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Saturday 19th August 2012

It was PS1 week this week, and Steven couldn't come, and Giancarlo had to move all of his stuff to his new flat, and only had time to play a game for 5 minutes. Basically, like every other week recently, everyone's either not present or don;t have the time.

I played a bit of Jinx and Formula 1, then me and Giancarlo had a few games of Tekken 3, then he played a game of Vib Ribbon.

After that, he had to leave, is it me or are we not playing games nearly as often as we did when I started this?

I'll see next week if we get time to play next week's consoles (I'm leaving it to my cousins), to see if the time and effort put into packing them and setting them up is worth it.