Pint N’ Play #010

Games played this time: Guerilla War, Robo Army, Bloody Wolf, Nitro Ball, Time Soldiers, and Metamorphic Force

The Vita Report

First time (successfully) playing an Oddworld game. It was pretty fun. The way you could keep missing prisoners, who would all die if you moved on without them, always put me off in the past. I never knew about those little trap doors, or that there were some pits you could jump down into for secret areas instead of instant death, or that you can use your chant to possess enemies, which the game waits way too long to tell you about for some reason. Yeah, things could have been explained a little better and this particular version of the game is a bit glitchy (many glitches, freezes, and the weird inability to use any of the other usually acceptable programs while it was in use), but still mostly good in that Out Of This World kind of way.

Now Playing: Wing Commander: Prophecy (1997)

The final entry in the Wing Commander series, which is also the first game in the main series with zero involvement from Chris Roberts, and it shows. It’s not a bad game though really.

Now Playing: Wing Commander IV (1996)

After the success of Wing Commander III, Chris Roberts and crew apparently got a much larger budget for IV. The frequency and scope of the cutscenes increased quite a bit, with the actors even performing on actual physical sets instead of being pasted on cg backgrounds. Apparently there was a rare, special DVD version back in the day too, for the ten people who had DVD-roms on their PCs back in ’96. It was interesting to see all the ultra-90s design and effects in “high quality”.

Pint N’ Play #009

Not my favorite episode. Mostly disappointment and frustration due to bad and/or broken games and one insanely difficult one at the end that managed to defeat me. Oh wellllll.

Edit: even worse of an episode, because I have instantly received multiple copyright claims on Youtube over the music in the game Undercover Cops, so I guess no one will actually be watching this until that is resolved by them dropping these claims or me editing those exact 3 minutes or so out so no one can STEAL THE UNDERCOVER COPS SONGS, which must be a big problem overseas, I’m sure. I may just have to avoid playing any more Irem games in these in the future if this is going to be an issue *shrug*. We’ll see.

Edit edit: Victory. Or really, it looks like this whole dispute was just some automatically generated response that no one actually gave a shit about. No one ever replied so I won by default. I guess maybe they win in the end, because if I have to go through this bullshit every time I want to include an Irem game in a video, it’d be easier to just not play them. On the other hand, is it not I who have won? Because honestly, Undercover Cops was a shit game and I’m probably better off not playing more like it.

Games played this time: Gunforce 2, Undercover Cops, Ikari Warriors, Victory Road (Ikari Warriors 2), and X-Multiply.

Now Playing: Wing Commander III (1994)

Ah, Wing Commander 3. Back when I was a kid that was just starting to get into PC games there was stuff like Wolfenstein 3D that caused me to say “Holy shit dad, we need a Sound Blaster!”, there was stuff like Return to Zork and Wing Commander 2 that caused me to say “Holy shit dad, we need a CD-ROM!”, and then there came Wing Commander 3, which led to the first “Holy shit dad, we need a whole new PC to play this shit!”.

Now Reading: Marvel Cosmic (1973-2016) Part 1

I suppose it’s debatable what falls under a blanket term like “Marvel Cosmic”. There are many series like Avengers that deal with some pretty cosmic events at times, but when I say it, I just mean the (mostly) strictly cosmic characters and events, most of which are from the same small handful of people and originate from the work of Jim Starlin (and usually involving Thanos somehow…).

Pint N’ Play #008

Yes, I’m still going to do these. No, I don’t care if only 2 people are watching the damn things. Deal with it!

Games played this time: Bad Dudes, E-Swat, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Mad Motor, and Gunforce.

The Vita Report

As in some various Vita stuff over the last few months that I just don’t feel like doing whole individual posts for. Stuff like…

Uuuugh. I tried and tried to like this, but I just kept putting it down and not wanting to pick it back up again. It’s so damn slow paced and the interface is so very awkward. Exploration is in this weird place between top view and isometric, is zoomed in too close, and has no map, so you’re constantly wandering around these identical looking places, constantly manually rotating the camera in 90 degree increments to try to get a good view of things, and mostly just wasting your time as it turns out there’s not much to be found and really nothing of importance to be said by all the people waddling around. Combat is equally clunky and boring. You use a combat system that seems needlessly and ineffectually complicated, which mainly consists of you just button mashing your way through a lot of incredibly repetitive battles. You’re supposed to be able to use different attack combinations with varying effect and the game tells you that you can keep track of experience levels of each combo in your menu, but you go look there and it just lists a bunch of Japanese names with numbers next to them and doesn’t bother to tell you what combo any of them actually are. Maybe I need to go read the manual or something? I don’t care. Bored.