Games

Quiet around these parts really. In Leicester a piece of road has melted and the Sun are convinced that in the current heat, estimated at 35 degrees centigrade, people are going to get cooked alive on the London Underground.

As a comparison I spent a day out in Lincolnshire fixing computers, where the only cloud in the sky was far to my left, and it was randomly purple. This was at 13:10. The secret is aircon.

Derick and I have a little project that we’ve started running recently - you can view it here, Leek and Potatoes. We’ve both decided to adopt a football team to support as neither of us really follow a local team… you can read up about our EXCITING and ZANY exploits there.

Also, bought a Nokia N-Gage but I’ve been too busy playing FIFA 2005 on it to post any impressions. A sneak peak - “It isn’t actually all that bad”.

It’d be a real shame if Sega didn’t capitalise on their new technology displayed in WCCF by making a Yu-gi-oh machine. Obviously one credit would only pay for the first two thirds of your battle, the second credit would be taken up mostly with a recap of what happened in the last fight and you would get extra power if you did the voices yourself.

“You are a massive penis, Yugi”

The deluxe edition could consist of two satellites positioned facing each other with a clear perspex screen with the action overlayed on to it…

I’m thinking too much about this.

One of the few things I did manage to get a photo of in Brighton, via Louise’s camera on her phone, was this.

World Championship Club Football, or WCCF for short, is something you’ll find in a few arcades dotted around the country - basically a trading card game and football management crossover. Unlike most games of this ilk, like the MTG Online series where your cards are all virtual, WCCF requires that you buy a starter pack .This itself contains your club card and 11 player cards - which are actually made out of plasticy card rather than being something you see on screen only.

From here, you lay your players out on the pitch - that green bit on the console - in formation, do a few training sessions and then hit a match proper. This is where it gets really mental - to alter your formation in-game you actually move the cards around. Want to push a winger up the field into a useful crossing position? Slide his card upwards. Want to alter your formation from a 4-4-2 to a 5-3-2 by moving one of your midfielders into Central Defence? Move your four existing defenders out a bit and slide his card into the centre of them. Bonkers.

Shooting and basic goalie actions are also controlled by you - tapping the appropriate button when you want to shoot, for instance. In-game you also have basic tactical choices, from what direction to attack and whether to counter etc. All very strange at first sight but would see me traipsing to Meadowhall (my nearest machine) every weekend were it not for one slight issue…

A managerial contract lasts 100 games. One game per credit. £2 a credit? You might well get one whole free card after every game, but are they having a laugh? It costs roughly £1.40 for four credits in Hong Kong. £2 a credit?

…

£2 a credit…?

This arrived for me on Saturday morning - having decided to treat myself to one for no other reason than I’d been meaning to get one for ages. After debilitating for a while whether to spend a bit extra and go for the properly boxed versions of games rather than the cart-only games which are available in abundances (I have no source but I’m sure I read somewhere that when SNK realised that they were going to have to stop making the NGPC due to lack of funds, they’d already manufactured a certain amount of game cartridges, and a lot less boxes. Hence, many games are available widely in just their plastic shells rather than the full clamshell cases) I went for the fully-boxed versions and the wretched nerd inside me absolutely loves it.

SNK stuff is renound for maintaining value and attracting collectors. Now I finally own some of their output, I can see why:

That’s a totally mint and complete copy of Puzzle Bobble Mini. There’s the cart, its shell, three instruction manuals (English/Italian/German), an orange warning leaflet and a pink slip with SNK’s worldwide addresses on. The outer case itself is reminiscent of a Megadrive case, only these have a ’snap-lock’ mechanism that keeps them shut. For a handheld, the boxes are ludicrously well-constructed and in many cases can add a fair amount of value to a game.

Naturally, if the pink slip is missing then the value is reduced - any mint-condition collectors won’t be as interested and hence the price you can feasibly charge for it drops.

Yes, it is absolutely crazy but for some reason holding a physically quality product can send people giddy - it appears I’m one of them… I’ve purposefully held off buying the ‘real’ Neo Geo console - I think the absolutely huge boxes and ludicrously-sized carts would just see me spiralling into a huge debt problem!

The games are astonishing too, especially for the era. Standouts so far are Puzzle Bobble Mini - which is basically Puzzle Bobble with slightly different graphics to account for the fact that it’s, er, mini; Metal Slug 1st and 2nd Mission¹, which aren’t ports of the Neo Geo AES games, rather brand new titles in their own right; Sonic Pocket Adventure, which is reportedly the best Sonic game in ages; and SNK vs Capcom: Match of the Millenium, which is a one-on-one fighting game in the vein of every other SNK/Capcom offering. What’s strange about this one is just how well it flows and plays - most handheld fighters have been a massive drossy mess, but this manages to capture the feel of a ‘real’ fighter amazingly, somehow. I’m not even going to speculate on how. The NGPC’s mini-joystick controller really helps with the awkward specials, too (Shoryuken, anyone?)…

Definitely well impressed from both a games and sad nerd point of view, a real shame this little thing didn’t sell massive quantities - perhaps it’s just a huge irony that there was functionality in Match of the Millenium to connect to the Sega Dreamcast.

It’s almost worth getting annoyed over; the best doesn’t always win.

¹: Metal Slug: 2nd Mission has this gem on the back of the outer case…

‘Works exciusivery with NEOGEO POCKET COLOR. Not works with other hardware.’

Well, I did it. Oddly it wasn’t as difficult as I was expecting - certainly challenging and technically above and beyond anything else in the entire game, but instead of getting stuck repeatedly doing the same thing over and over, I did the last two bits on my first go, not knowing what to expect.

That’s right; I completed Guitar Hero.

Very satisfying it was, too. I’m giving it a rest for a few days before going back to tackle a few of the bonus tracks to improve my ratings and scores and that, and then with any luck I’m going to pick up a real guitar and blunder my way through learning some stuff again. Unfortunately initial signs do not bode well; I can’t remember a single thing but at least I’m out of the habit of gripping the neck badly, rather than positioning my thumb on the back of the neck.

Thank you videogames!

The games-buying drought has come to an end too, after selling a few bits and bobs I suddenly found myself buying a Neo Geo Pocket Color. As with anything with SNK written on it, the prices are almost a law unto themselves, certain titles hold their price like you wouldn’t believe. Indeed, UK Pocket Reversi is almost legendary in its rarity, commanding prices of up to £400 for a fully-boxed copy. In typical games nutter style, the boxes can make a massive difference to the price of a game.

Just waiting for it to be delivered now… can’t think of a decent excuse for its purchase… oops…

Singstar, unexpectedly, has turned out to be brilliant. I haven’t actually played a huge amount of it yet, probably about 60-70 songs’ worth but despite the slightly rubbish tracklisting for a game that primarily centers around Rock music - Gwen Stefani and KT Tunstall indeed - it’s horrendously fun.

Current favourite is ‘Apply some Pressure’ by Maximo Park, which I have horrendous trouble singing along to. It’s not so bad on Easy, where you are able to sing up to a semitone off-key in either direction. While the game tells you that you’re doing well, listening to the replays can be a somewhat harrowing experience…!

Never underestimate the fact that rubbish songs are made so much more interesting by participation. Also, more games need to feature rubber ducks.

Definitely a good example of how to do something right though. The interface is clean, not annoying, easy to navigate and the presentation is wonderful, you get to watch the video of the track you’re singing along to in the background. Also, fears I had about the game being easier for girls were unfounded - thankfully all notes in the game aren’t octave-specific, meaning you can sing an octave above or below if your vocal range can’t cope. So long as you’re in-key. Which is proving to the be problem.

Karaoke done right? Not far off. The only problem is the fact that you have to sing a bit robotically - there’s no room for embellishment of a note, vibrato is often registered as a bum note and if, like me, you ’slide’ your voice from one note to another it will be registered as a miss. But hey! Videogames helping change Karaoke from being a rubbish thing that girls do to a brilliant thing that girls are too shy to do in the presence of, well, anyone else that’s not a girl.

Brilliant!

There’s a good chance you’re aware of the Electronic Entertainment Exhibition (E3) that’s currently underway in the US - the yearly trade show of all things new in the videogames world. We’re in that lovely part of the gaming timeline that only happens once every four or five years - existing technology and platforms are becoming obsolete and new and improved consoles are being announced at this time of year… the upshot of which is that very soon, the bottom will fall out of the market for this generation’s software and even new titles now are cheap.

Obviously the XBox 360 is already upon us, and so far my experience of it is that most people I know are just playing Halo 2 on it. There’s definitely no real killer app to get them flying off the shelves - Project Gotham Racing 3 is supposedly quite nice but after my three-lap evaluation on a demo pod, I could care less… but not much.

Halo 3 has been announced at E3, however - definitely something to get the units off the shelves but it’s just not here now. So we’re still left without said app. From what else I’ve read on Microsoft’s showing at E3, they’re pushing their Live system about a bit - Noticed that the new version of MSN Messenger is actually now ‘Windows Live Messenger’? There’s some bonkers connectivity shenanigans brewing and it will either be very exciting or very shit. Judging by the recent versions of MSN Messenger, I fear the latter, if not for adverts alone.

I appreciate that MSN Messenger is free but I feel the adverts should not spread to paid subscribers on XBox Live.

Sony appear to have made a bit of a meal of their Playstation 3 launch, too - general consensus of the XBox 360 launch is that having two different versions is a rubbish idea and should never, ever be done again. So, what are Sony doing?

Yep. As a side note, they’re also championing Blu-Ray media, and making the PS3 a DVD/Blu-Ray player, much in the style of the PS2. Blu-Ray is capable of storing High Definition visuals (for use with those shiny HiDef tellies that I know very little about, besides that at the moment they’re a massive faff), but the ‘budget’ PS3 model will not be able to output in HiDef. At all. Not even via an upgrade.

(The ‘budget’ model will retail for 500 Euros. The ‘deluxe’ for 600. What…?!)

They’ve also put some motion-sensing equipment into the controller, mimicking the Nintendo Wii’s Wiimote, and a ‘Home’ button, blatantly copying the XBox 360’s, um, Home button. That and triggers (at last!), and also the removal of the rumble function. Initial response seems to be a big fat ‘why?’ to the removal of rumble, but it looks like the designers are claiming it is needless and to be consigned to the past.

Everybody else says ‘no it’s not’.

Aside from that, however, I’ve not heard anything else about the PS3, which is surprising considering the PS2’s market dominance - I would have expected all the faff to be about it. However, it appears to have fallen to Nintendo to steal the show, with the Wii (nee Revolution)…

The Wii’s control mechanism is its main difference to the other consoles out there - instead of using a bog-standard control pad with analog sticks and what have you, they’ve stuck some clever technology into a remote control-shaped thing and attached an analogue stick to it in a nunchaku fashion. It appears that the nunchaku will be interchangable.

Either way, you do stuff by waving the controller around. How is that not the best thing ever? Reports seem to indicate that people are having a tough time getting used to it as it’s not what you’re used to, but we’ll see what happens yet…

They’ve also got a sequel to Yoshi’s Island coming out at some point in the future, a new Mario game and the rumblings that the Wii will be retailing for a ‘price that you will like’.

I’m quite excited about how this is all going to pan out.

I’ve just picked up Singstar Rocks! from Tesco Extra (in Grimsby of all places) with the microphones for a measly £19.97. Now I’m putting off playing it because I’m well aware I can’t sing for toffee.

The microphones appear to be decent enough too though, and have standard 3.5mm jacks - can’t argue with that for under twenty quid.

I was housebound this weekend just gone. Well, I say ‘housebound’ - more like I would have received a kick to the shins on my return from Louise, having asked me to keep her company as she worked from home this weekend, so I did the good thing and hibernated upstairs instead.

Since picking up some of the latest and greatest in terms of videogames, I’ve totally neglected everything else - the Megadrive got a brief look in for a whole hour of playing Castle of Illusion but now I don’t think the sound is working on it any more. The Dreamcast hasn’t been touched in ages, nor the N64 or SNES… which leaves the Saturn. By far my most-loved console of all time.

So, I fired her up just after noon on Saturday - a quick session of Baku Baku to warm up with, having never really given it much serious playtime before. Insanely difficult, but I imagine that given time new and ingenious ways of feeding randomly-falling animals will present themselves. Very satisfying countering a big attack with an even bigger attack though, it’s possible to completely incapacitate your opponent with just one chain.

Suitably happy, I then revisited Guardian Heroes, an old favourite that kicked my arse all over the shop regularly. I’d forgotten how good this one was - a surprisingly deep scrolling fighter which, to its credit, doesn’t rely on certain moves to defeat certain characters. It’s all about tactics, and it works very well.

Somehow I managed to complete one of the routes, something which I’ve never done before. I think it was the miraculous discovery of the ‘block’ button…

Saturn Bomberman came next, and this one came as a bit of a surprise to me. Again, it’s another game that’s gone straight on the shelf after purchase, and to be honest is a franchise I’ve never really clicked with. This one is decent though - a smattering of different gametypes and a frankly insane 10-player free for all battle mode on an absolutely giant map. I am totally useless at this.

Then the old classic - Sega Rally. Unfortunately it dawned on me that a few years back I had a problem with my memory cart which eventually led to it getting wiped, along with all my sparkling Sega Rally replays… now I have only the one, in which I stutter around the Desert course and somehow manage to clock up a 52.7s lap, seemingly entirely based on fluke.

It’s getting late now and I’ve still got lots more to go… so a quick go on Sonic 3D before bed and more the next day, I reckon. ‘Quick’ meaning ‘Discover you can’t save at all and end up somehow completing the game on your first go, ending at 1:50am’. Mediocre at best, but one less thing to go ‘ooh, I must play that at some point and see if it’s any good’.

So, bed.

The next day I awoke with the prospect of either playing more games, or cleaning the car. So, games it was. Grabbed Dark Savior off the shelf and had a quick run around - another game I never did manage to complete, and so another one I look forward to replaying… The intro sequence is lovely, you are stranded on a burning seaship and the captain is being attacked by some alien thing. You have to get to the captain’s cabin as soon as you can, and depending on how long it takes you to get there, you get a different storyline from a choice of five. A lovely game. Very much like Landstalker on the Megadrive.

Besides a bit of Manx TT and NiGHTS before bed on Sunday though, the one that surprised me most was Myst. I’d never played Myst or anything similar to it before, besides a game called Dragon something-or-other on my first PC which was massively rubbish - basically, for the three people in the world that have never heard of it, Myst is a graphic adventure where you are stranded on Myst island. Your task is to find out why you’re there, what’s going on and how to get away from the island, and you have no backstory whatsoever - everything is slowly unravelled to you in the game by hunting for clues and solving puzzles. The whole thing is horrendously compelling, and smacks so much of the ‘Multimedia’ dream that many companies went on about so much back in the mid-nineties.

Navigation around the island is achieved by looking at your surroundings - a still picture - and then deciding where you want to go. You’ll be greeted with another picture. And another one. And another one. The entire game is full of audio clips and many books you find strewn about contain small, grainy video clips. The whole thing just feels like it was created on the premise that it had to be something that couldn’t be done with floppy disks.

Despite all that, it’s surprisingly lovely and is also the first game since Ultima IV on the Master System which has compelled me enough to take notes. I’m sure it’s going to swallow up a horrendous amount of my life…

I’m back on the Halo again.

The playlists have been updated - a few irritating gametypes have been removed and a new bastard-hard playlist has been implemented, ‘Rumble Hardcore’ - basically a FFA BR start to please the MLG-wannabe nerds. I’ve played five or six games of it so far - not a single one has been a quiet game, there’s always been some idiot moaning about how they’re getting spawnkilled, or - gasp - shot with guns.

A while back I was doing a CD-a-week thing, what with spending a lot of time on the road in my job - listening to the same CDs over and over got a bit tedious so I upped my buying. Unfortunately I ran out of money, but still pick the odd thing up - and after hearing good things about Graham Coxon’s output after ‘The Sky is too High’, from which I loved the off-key bonkers feel, I took a peek around HMV and found ‘Happiness in Magazines’ for a fiver in their sale.

I could list countless albums and bands that have failed to live up to what I’ve wanted to hear from them. Unfortunately it’s just one of those things though - the feelings you get from the first time you hear a new album from your favourite band which is better than you’d expected (cf ‘()’ by Sigur Rós), or the first time you close the last chapter of an amazing story - the fact that things may never be quite as good again.

After ‘()’, Sigur Rós released Takk - a poppier effort, focusing more on songs rather than the gorgeous, meandering noises they’d been slowly refining for so long. One of the tracks from Takk has since become known as ‘the music from Planet Earth’ after being used on an advert for the show.

Machine Head released three quality albums at the start of their career - refining their style throughout. Their fourth, ‘Supercharger’, was absolutely shocking.

VAST released a debut album out of nowhere, encompassing quiet, industrial psuedo-goth sounds and a real feeling of mystery. Their second album, ‘Music for People’ focussed more on poppier aspects; from then on things just went pearshaped. The original magic was gone, for me at least.

Which brings us back to Mr Coxon. He’s learned to sing and according to the sticker on the front of the album, is ‘found back to the sparkling form which produced Coffee & TV’.

I suppose you could say they were right, but… some of us liked the change.

Have still been playing Guitar Hero these last few days. It’s still kicking me all over the place most of the time but I’ve managed to finish about half of Expert mode in lieu of having The Fear of the last section on Hard after getting chucked off stage during Cowboys From Hell three times in a row during the completely ludicrous solo.

Am hoping that playing Expert for a bit will hone my skills like a finely-tuned… thing, and will be able to blitz the last bits on Hard without even thinking about it. Not likely though!

Also managed to unlock the Grim Reaper, who now adorns my Expert career. There’s something deliciously wrong about making him play songs by The Donnas. Somewhat akin to a homosexual Action Man.

The new Lardpony album, ‘This is Lardcore’, arrived over the weekend and already Louise is trying to steal the free badges that came with it. The album itself is lovely - to begin with it’s a spot worrying as it launches into a semi-serious guitar-based instrumental which is about as polar an opposite as it gets when you’re expecting twee ditties.

All becomes well after the second track, however - the main riff is played on a recorder, which sets the precedent for an absolutely gorgeous album, a 50/50 mix of deviant love songs and witty tales of days spent down the pub.

For an album that’s been in the works for many years now - I first heard Post-Apocalyptic Love Song three years ago - you really can’t ask any more. Smiles all around.

http://www.lardpony.co.uk

Guitar Hero is still maintaining attention - perhaps the only game this year so far that’s driven me far enough to want to attempt things I’ve failed over and over again until I can do them. One problem with playing so many games is that when things get difficult it’s all too easy to give up and start the next game ad infinitum - Halo, Outrun 2 and this have successfully avoided such a fate so far though.

Guitar Hero’s Easy and Normal modes are almost a way of easing you into the ‘proper’ game - the guitar controller has five fret buttons, and Easy mode uses only three; Normal mode four. Hard mode uses all five and Expert is just ridiculous. However, in Easy and Normal you have no problems with hand placement on the neck - you have four fingers (unless you are unlucky or stupid) and these rest on the first four frets respectively.

The problem you’re likely to encounter in Normal mode is the fact that using your pinky may seem a little difficult - the same applies to anything similar, be it typing or other finger-intensive tasks. Your index and middle fingers (and your thumb, for what it’s worth) have a tendon each - your ring finger and pinky share a tendon, which is the main reason why they are more difficult to use for precision tasks than your first two fingers. Thankfully the required amount of dexterity is easy enough to build up, though it may take a few sessions before you’re able to play comfortably for an extended period.

Moving on to hard is where the game’s design decisions really begin to show. Here, the number of frets outnumber your fingers, and it’s taken some clever design in the note placement in-game to bring out the similarities between playing a real guitar and playing the game.

Above is the scale pattern for a major scale, as played on a real guitar (cheekily pinched from cyberfret.com, which just happened to be the first hit on Google for “guitar scale”). To put it in perspective, the vertical lines are the frets and the horizontal ones signify strings - the blobs signify where a note should be played, and reds for octaves. The numbers in the blobs tell you which finger to use.

To put it in a Guitar Hero perspective - on the sixth string you would play red with your middle finger then blue with your pinky; on the fifth string, green with your index finger, red with your middle finger, blue with your pinky; etc. Obviously there is no definition of strings in Guitar Hero but this brings in the concept of positioning - playing on the first four frets of a real guitar is called playing in the ‘first position’, and thus playing with your index finger on green, middle on red and so forth in Guitar Hero will be the same.

The second position would involve starting to play the same shape on the neck from the second fret; the third position from the third fret; the seventh position from the seventh fret… I think you can see where I’m going with this. This is usually marked above sheet music in Roman numerals - obviously there is no need in tablature. But I digress, back to Guitar Hero… once the fifth fret comes into play, having a knowledge of positioning is beneficial - at first it’s pretty tempting to just stretch your little finger whenever an orange note comes along, but soon after the first few tracks you’ll realise that’s not possible to maintain as an effective method.

So, you’ll be wanting to use the second position - that is with your index finger on red, middle finger on yellow, ring finger on blue and pinky on orange. Guitar Hero’s design is such that the game is intended to feel as much like playing a real guitar as can possibly be managed by using a 3/4 sized Gibson SG with buttons and a flappy thing to resemble strings and nothing in the way of tonewoods; only plastic.

Thankfully for the most part, the game succeeds in doing this - the best song to see the obvious effect with is “I Wanna Be Sedated” by The Ramones on Hard. The first half of the song is played in the first position until the inevitable punk song key change occurs - and from then on, the rest of the song is played in the second position, just like on a real guitar.

Similarly, many of the fast solos in the game adopt a similar technique - most parts are in bursts of three notes and while they will take a while to get the hang of, most of the difficulty involved is in nailing the timing and knowing which fingers to use depending on your position (an art in itself) rather than having to zip around the neck at lightning speed. Whilst your fingers will be moving fast your entire hand won’t have to move about that much.

Whilst there’s loads of nice little touches in Guitar Hero, such as the hammer-ons and pull-offs, which amusingly I am rubbish at, to the fact that on single notes you can have lower frets on the neck held down with no detrimental effect (for instance, on a single yellow note you can keep red and/or green held down too, but not blue or orange) - the element of positioning is the thing that impressed me most, and for me is certainly the one thing that makes Guitar Hero valid to an extent as being similar to ‘the real thing’.

For a game which has the sole purpose of enabling people to rock, that’s no bad thing.

There’s a theme that runs through my videogame purchasing habits. For 364 days of the year I’ll scour bargain bins, 4-for-£20 and 2-for-£20, £2-for-£10 and BOGOF offers for new stuff to play - the titles that almost everyone is bored of now that new things have been released, not just junk. I pick up some quality titles this way, and only the odd turkey.

As for the remaining day of the year? I go bonkers.

In 2003, it was Pokémon Ruby for the GBA, at £30. In 2004, it was F-Zero GX for the Gamecube, at £30. In 2005 - well, very late 2004 - it was Donkey Konga, also for the Gamecube, at £40 and an extra £20 for another set of bongos.

This year it’s Guitar Hero. £50 for the game and a miniature Gibson SG controller, and already it’s worth the money just for the sheer amount of smiles it will give you. The entire game is just… pure joy, from the way it’s presented with high scores being written on toilet walls and all the menus being in the form of posters. The game itself obviously doesn’t feel like you’re actually playing a real guitar but it retains just enough of the feel of… ‘rules’ of playing the guitar and the way things work in real life for it all to come naturally enough.

http://www.guitarherogame.co.uk

On my shopping trip I finally procured a stupid memory card and a second pad, and a few games. A remote control also arrived through the post a few days back and it’s pure joy being able to switch the console on and off with it! Unfortunately the eject button doesn’t work with the slimline PS2 what with the disc door being mechanically operated rather than electronic, but I’ll let that slip. Either way it’s a lovely touch and for less than a tenner it falls nicely into impulse buy territory rather than being a needless extravagance.

The presentation of all things PS2 is generally quite nice too - nice enough to set my nerd alarm off at least. All peripherals and the console itself are packaged in sunshine yellow boxes or blister packs and have a really uniform look, although the boxes have stupid tabs which mean that when you open them for the first time, they rip - presumably a mechanism to prevent people claiming that things haven’t been opened, but it’s stupid all the same; the peripherals themselves match colour-wise and even the spines of the game cases - even the ones with cardboard slipcases, gatefolds etc - they all match, with the black tab at the top and the game’s title going down the side in the same font, same capitalisation, everything. Lovely. As nice as Sega’s Saturn boxes look with all their logos and pictures on the spine, ditto the XBox, so far the PS2 catalogue is sending out a very ‘grown-up’ vibe in it’s appearance.

The closest match I can find to it besides the original Playstation with it’s black cases (and the ugly platinum releases) is the Dreamcast - I think they defaulted to a set font for most releases but there were a few with logos which breaks up the flow.
The thing that surprised me most, however, when out shopping was the sheer availability of RPGs for the PS2 - having only shopped for the XBox in recent times I struggled to find any bar the odd war-based strategy-RPG doodad and one that I forget the name of, which is renound for being a big stinking pile of cack… so picking up two for £20 is welcome indeed.

The two were Shin Megami Tensei (which I’ve heard people rabbiting on about recently) and Unlimited Saga (as it came in a nice gatefold box which says “Square Enix” on the front).

They won’t get played for a while though. Guitar Hero takes up most of the time and making cups of tea while I load up Psyarivar for a quick blast takes the rest. I’ve not been on Halo 2 all weekend - which might not sound like a long time but when you see I’ve been playing it most nights for the last two or three months, it’s almost a gulf.

With the imminent release of Guitar Hero in PAL territories (allegedly 07 April, though allegedly Red Octane have been worryingly silent about the whole PAL release) I’ve been tempted to pick up a Playstation 2 - I’m a sucker for rhythm action and funny controllers, and to my peril, Guitar Hero’s got the lot.

But, you know. I was intending to wait a couple of weeks and pick one up if any bundles surfaced, but a strange thing happened on Saturday. Or should I say two strange things.

The first one is that I walked out of a high-street chain store with a yellow box and a ‘Quiz Show Simulator’ under my arm.

The second one is that the store I walked out of was GAME.

GAME, of all places! Renound for bad value, bad staff and bad products. And yet, in all their forced-bundle malarky - I didn’t notice a solus PS2 anywhere besides in the second-hand sections - they got one right - PS2, Buzz!: The Music Quiz, and Buzz!: The Big Quiz. For about £20 cheaper than I could find anywhere else.

I put it down to a pricing error. Anyway, I’d been itching to see what the fabled PS1 backwards compatibility enhancement gubbins was like for ages, and so after a few games of Fantavision, I stuck Wipeout 3 SE in the tray and waited patiently.

Unlike I was expecting and hoping for though, I was greeted with an identical copy of the game I was used to playing on my £15 PSOne. No framerate improvement, no draw distance lengthening, no high-res, no nothing. At all. I even checked the manual - the two options it gives you are for “Texture Smoothing” - which appears to just blur stuff a bit; and “Fast Loading” which does what it says on the tin, apart from on some games, where it, um, breaks things.

Even the Dreamcast did high-res through Bleem!, so the PS2’s performance is pretty rubbish in comparison. So, so far so unimpressed - Buzz! is fun though doesn’t really stand up in single player, the controllers are nice and it’s always good to have a dose of Jason Donovan in your life; Fantavision (the only other PS2 game I’ve got besides Buzz!) is lovely but doesn’t really stand up to long periods of play, the small form factor makes it look lovely but you can’t press the power/eject buttons without the unit sliding away from you, and I’m also a prat and forgot to buy a memory card. Putting a hard disk in the XBox was a stroke of genius that makes you wonder why memory cards were even invented in the first place. Well, it makes me wonder but that’s probably because I’ve got nothing better to do with my time.

I went to Hull today. It smelt.