Well, St George's Day passed without anybody actually noticing. It's funny that St Patrick's Day is the talk of the town, but when our own Patron Saint's Day arrives, no-one really gives a toss. And correct me if I'm wrong (which I invariably am), but St George killed a big fuck-off Dragon (see pic, taken yesterday) and wore cool looking Knights Templar style armour...whereas all I'm aware St Patrick did was drink Guinness and swear at kids playing football. Speaks volumes really.
However, that's all academic.
What isn't academic is my stop/start progress in Shenmue. If anyone is still contemplating buying this game, please first ensure that you get your attention span surgically lengthened. See, since I got hold of the ever-elusive Shenmue 2, I have promised myself that I will not jump the gun and have a go on it (even if it is just to see how much better the visuals are) until I have finished the first installment. It'd be like watching the 3rd Harry Potter film before even seeing the first one, not having a clue what is going on and then branding the whole thing 'shite.' Which is what I did. Shenmue shall not go the same way - I am determined to play through it as it was intended...although those goddamned sailors have once again scuppered my progress - all because I missed a trickshot at a game of frigging pool.
*Sigh*
I spent another couple of days wandering around Dobuita trying to figure out what to do next...and then inevitably lost interest again. Bah.
So my interest wandered - but it didn't get far. Oh no my friends...not far at all. I may have mentioned that I also got hold of Zombie Revenge (which is quite frankly a hideous little game) and another by the rather dubious title of MDK2. I always thought MDK stood for Murder, Death, Kill - but it actually stands for Max, Dr Hawkins and Kurt - the three heroes you get to control in this unbelievably good 3D action adventure (above). And while the last sentence may sound like a press release for Interplay, I can assure you that when I say this game is incredible - I comes from the innermost caverns of my cold, dead, coal-like shell of a heart. Oh yes.
It's so original, features great stylised visuals and storyboards, and each character has a truly individual style of gameplay. Bear in mind that I only played the first two levels, but I was hooked and only the absurd difficulty I encountered in one section made me stop playing. A review will follow shortly, but I can't recommend this game enough. Zombie Revenge on the other hand, as described above, is akin to finding that your kitchen has become over-run with ants to such a level that they are in your bread, cereal and teabags. And as much of what is written here is based on real life experiences, Zombie Revenge must be described as sickening. However, smearing the box with Nippon Ant Killer (pictured) WILL NOT remedy the problems of sloppy graphics, poor graphics or atrocious voice acting. It WILL, though, make you very ill if you don't wash your hands after using it. Hmmm...
Finally, just a quick note to apologise for the lack of updates - Blogger wouldn't let me publish for about 2 days.
I'll apologize right now for that terrible pun but hey, what's this? What are a bunch of Playstation games doing within the collection of anti-Playstation Sega Freak Gagaman's? Well, if you didn't already guess from the title, I finally got some games to try out the Bleem Beta that has been leaked across the net. If you haven't heard of it, it lets you play these ol' games on your Dreamcast, with smoother graphics too. Because it wasn't complete, however, only some games work well whereas others are either riddled with bugs or just give you the black screen of death. And thus the hunt for compatible games begins.
Firstly, how does it work then? Plain simple, it's just a case of disc swapping. Modeled by my cat above, all you need is a copy of the beta burned onto a disc, and any PSX you can find to try out on it. I've never actually owned any PSX games before, due to going with the Saturn for the 32-bit era instead (I don't regret it, the Playstation's games libaury has never really excited me quite as much, and, to my possible mistake, made me buy a Gamecube instead of a PS2, even though hat has turned out to have a lot of interesting games), but luckily the games are as common as muck at bootsales, and can picked up for daft little sums of money. For example, just today I picked up Cool Boarders for 50p, Driver 2 for 25p, and Time Crisis, which I will be demonstrating with, for £1.50). Stick the disc in and this below is what you get.
Here's Time Crisis running on it. I always have loved these games in the arcades, and would even go as far as to say it blows Virtua Cop 2 out of the water. The game runs almost perfectly, except unfortunately it's not compatible with the Dreamcast light-gun, so the controls can be sort of awkward. The other obvious problems is the DC pad lacks three buttons - L2, R2 and Select. For games like Driver 2, it prevents you from getting where you need to, although you can grab a PSX/Saturn controller to DC port off Ebay. The other obvious problem is not being able to save, although luckily that's not such a big deal for arcade titles like Time Crisis anyway. Below is some shots of Cool Borders 2, which doesn't have sound and looks major buggered in any mode other than championship, with textures going mad including black and green snow. Gran Turismo 2 is another game that runs almost perfectly, which is nice.
Ok, so it's a totally geeky and almost pointless way of playing Playstation games, but the games that do work look bloody brilliant, much better than they do on a PS2, and hey, it's a fun novelty and saves having to own a console that looks like a toilet on your desk. Also, if anyone does decide to hunt it down and try it out, here's some guys' incomplete, but very handy compatibility list.
