Irrumator Inter Scortilla

4:03am: Welcome to 2009, communists
Let's just say that the past 15-16 months have been the worst of my life and move on from there.

I've got 903 PlayStation 2 games now - 904 if tribaldemon works his mojo on a fucked up copy of "Ratchet and Clank".

Other news? Well, I'm still not wearing pants. Fun times include my job, an extended period of writer's block and neglecting contacts, family and friends (sorry, quietdarkness, I feel guilty about you in particular). Eating and sleeping is still good, though, and I gave up drinking last year - April? Something like that. The 6 of Labatt's Blue will stay in my fridge forever, however, as a testament to quality beers.

All things considered, at least I'm not French.

3:29am: I've finally started a master list of all my games - just typed up the Wii, GameCube and Saturn titles. Needless to say the SMS, PS1 and PS2 lists should be an ordeal. Why do I always have to start getting productive at the end of a weekend instead of the beginning of it?

5:08am: I can't decide whether to shit or go blind, I'm sick of running gamuts all the time.. everyone can take their gamuts and fuck off, I'm just going to pace slowly for a while, instead.

..and as for the good news, there is no fuckin' good news! So let's rock, with one of our golden oldies.

2:58am: Nothing's helping anymore.

2:04am: New review: Postman Pat for PS2
OK, I totally lied, here's the review.

1:43am: New review: Lost Odyssey for 360
On Charlie Brown's Teacher here.

Next up will be "Postman Pat" for PS2, but I have to get up for work in a few hours, so I can't be assed finishing it up.

I did manage to finally mount the last two marquees to the wall behind me here - the dedicated reader might recall I mounted a few to the wall here a while back - after borrowing a hammer drill from a friend. Here's a shit quality photo, I seem to be good at taking those. I should really upgrade my cellphone and/or get some talent.

4:20am: Lost Odyssey on 360
A terrific game - I've put 65 hours into it so far. It's one of the very, very few times with an RPG where I've, well, first of all, tried to even complete it, and second of all, had a proper go at finishing as many of the side quests as I can. It's Final Fantasy X with all the wrong taken out and some right put in. Also, I love commas.

Recent events.. marginally better handled stress at work, new pool pump and filter, no panic attacks for months, even in the face of the occasional cockroach, and I just won "Armored Core 2: Another Era" (from eBay UK), which I never figured I'd see any time soon, seeing as I've never seen it in Australia at all. Who knows, maybe things are getting better.

12:49am: New review: Aegis Wing for 360
On Charlie Brown's Teacher here.

Life is a great big awesome cake with super sprinkles on it, so much so that I think I'll spectacularly fail to describe it here.

1:27am: Christ
I just used math to work out how many PS2 games I have, and my latest count is 712 retail releases and 7 promo releases (full games, in jewel cases without manuals). I'm still trying to decide whether this makes me a better person or not.

Here's some shit quality pics

11:43pm: More new reviews
I've added three new reviews on Charlie Brown's Teacher for PS2, including Mystic Heroes, Hardware Online Arena and RoboCop. I also have finished transferring over MegaDrive reviews, and I think I added a couple C64 reviews, too.

8:28pm: I bet a lot of you would be good at it
I recently "won" PS2 FIFA 2005 for 99c from eBay Australia, and it arrived today. It turned out to be the French and German localizations on the one disc (the first time the Germans and French have worked together that closely since Vichy France). I swapped it over to German, and, well, I'll let the image speak for itself.

( huh huh )

1:14am:

Lots more content on Charlie Brown's Teacher. I need to work out an aggregator or a homologator or a selfmanipulator to automate update notification or mirror reviews here or fuck myself, something like that.

11:30pm: Another review: PS2 Xena Warrior Princess
Not to be confused with Xenu. Check it out.

9:14pm: PS2 reviews: Frank Herbert's Dune and Puyo Pop Fever
Now available on Charlie Brown's Teacher and also Charlie Brown's Teacher.

8:48pm: Announcement: Charlie Brown's Teacher
I've started a new project, a wikipedia containing all my game reviews, called Charlie Brown's Teacher. I've been and am in the process of transferring over the reviews I've written here and will also put copies of reviews I've written for Collector Times and Digital Press, and will also put future reviews there.

If you give a crap, go take a look and let me know what you think. It should be possible to tell which pages have reviews on them from the different coloured links on the letters, but the majority of the reviews are under PS2, with a couple for Wii. Adding more all the time, and as I add new content, I'll mention it here.

As such, I just knocked out a quick review right now: PS2 Time Crisis 3

8:37pm: Wii Wing Island

Wing Island is a horribly mediocre flight game. You can’t call it a simulation, as it’s got a very, very simplistic flight model/control set. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing if implemented well and used for entertainment’s sake, but Wing Island.. Ah, Wing Island. It falls short. I can’t say I wasn’t warned, either. This was one of the games that piqued my interest at launch, but even then, I had a feeling that it would end up one of the first launch bombs, one of the first games to go cheap quickly. I never actually got around to picking it up until recently, over a year later, when a reasonable opportunity presented itself – hell, wouldn’t you trade Wii Far Cry for practically anything else, safe in the knowledge that things couldn’t get worse?

Perhaps I should start with the positives – there’s surprisingly little brown, the music’s cheery and the Charlie-Brown’s-teacher-speak never fails to impress. Also, there’s a rather cool minigame where you have a giant sphere of balloons and must fight against the AI or another player to fly through as many as possible in a time limit.

The bad bits? The main storyline. Have you ever played Pilot Wings on SNES or N64? It’s an attempt to encroach on that millieu, but unfortunately unsuccessfully so. The first couple missions I played involved dropping crates on targets, dropping nets on cows, and dropping fire retardant on a burning forest. The next mission after that was dropping the DVD back into the case, turning the Wii off, and returning to the ongoing, doomed quest for modern porn involving women without tattoos. It’s easy enough to control the plane (or planes) with the Wiimote, but the things you do are just so humdrum. If you must get a flight simulation for Wii, get Blazing Angels, otherwise I’d suggest you keep hoping for Wii Pilot Wings from Nintendo. Also, if you’re French, please hold your breath while you wait.

“(or planes)”? Yes, you can control more than one in some missions – a formation, although it’s essentially the same as flying a single plane, just with less direct control over the other planes. You use different motions to go in different formations. A v-shape for better turning, a straight line for speed, a plus formation for .. variety? Who knows. Surely you didn’t expect me to pay attention. All I know is that it made it an extra 7% more interesting than if you flew one plane constantly.. which, if you use science, isn’t really all that much.

The most bitter disappointment of all? You can’t do Immelman loops. The fact I don’t know what they are and just remember the term from the manual to “Chuck Yaeger’s Air Combat” is immaterial. Well, second most bitter – the first would be when I looked down in the shower this morning to discover those pills from Czechoslovakia didn’t work.

4/10

12:18am: Wii Alien Syndrome
Yes, I'm back. It's not very good, but it's broken the drought at least. A good start, much like a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the ocean, or badkalla on his knees looking up.

“Alien Syndrome” was a fun arcade game back in its time – a bit of a variant on “Gauntlet”, and definitely inspired by the likes of “Aliens”. You have to go from ship to ship saving your comrades in arms within a time limit, collecting different kinds of weapons and then using them to mess up various and interesting bosses. Going back to play it nowadays, it’s still fun, but probably not as good as you remember. Certainly it’s not as timelessly cool as “Gauntlet” or “Out Run” or “beating off to repeats of Baywatch on your living room couch”, whichever way your tastes lie.

Sega have brought “Alien Syndrome” back for a new generation – Wii and PSP owners. I’d say “I haven’t tried the PSP version”, but according to most accounts, the Wii version looks and sounds identical, which is rather disappointing. When will people rise and take up arms against the cheap PS2/PSP port oppressors and demand that Wii’s capabilities be stretched? This is not to say that it’s completely hideous – I’ve certainly seen less attractive generic corridors in shades of brown and grey, and more indistinctly generic creature designs in shades of brown, but … wow, did I mention all the brown? The “alien syndrome” referred to in the title must have something to do with colour blindness.


The game is another variant on the console Baldur’s Gate idea – essentially a dungeon crawler where you build up experience and collect items of various power and utility. The Wii version has a few minigames to make things (at least briefly) interesting. You have to play a minigame to increase your character’s stats when you encounter DNA mixing machines, involving blasting away bad germs and dragging new capabilities to your DNA strands – it’s fun, at least once you work out how to do it, and for the first few times after that. A somewhat similar minigame is used for unlocking chests – place beacons to attract nanites to corrupted parts of locks and energize them while zapping bad germs with nunchuck motions. Integration of the Wii controls into the standard gameplay itself isn’t too bad – the ability to move with the analog stick and aim your projectile/laser/flame/whatever weapons with the Wiimote is nice and works well, but angling the camera can be dodgy with nunchuck motions, and the hand to hand combat is a bit aggravating.

I bought this from an eBay auction for about half what it normally goes for in stores here, and I have to admit I’m not exactly sitting around thinking how awesome I am for owning it. Still, my loyalty to favoured arcade games of the past and Sega in particular demands that I check these kinds of things out – just learn from my example, instead of the hard way. Don’t waste your time unless it’s in the $10 bin, or you really, really love dungeon crawlers that do practically nothing new or interesting beyond a couple minigames - and if you have a Wii and aren't bored of minigames yet, you should watch more American TV, or have sex with tribaldemon, as you're obviously easily pleased and scared of innovation.

5/10

7:06pm: I also took 17 pencils today, a new personal best

1:04am: Send him... to Detroit
A buddy of mine just asked if I was thinking of updating my livejournal any time soon, and I guess when you're sitting around in your underwear at 1AM listening to the Pet Shop Boys and sorting the latest PS2 purchases into your meticulously alphabetised PlayStation 2 shelves, it's as good a time as any.

squeekyhoho, this update is for you.

PS: Rush's lyrics suck.

7:14am: I'm finding it next to impossible to care enough to want to write anymore, as you may have noticed.

6:08pm: here's why my friends are awesome
( A 'you got a parcel' card from my mail today )

..to be fair, I did start this by sending him a package addressed to
"Josh Seedtarget".

12:07am: Finally a useful quiz

5:33pm: The 8th Letter
I've just realized I'm a big fan of H words.. hypocrisy, hyperbole, histrionics, handjobs.. oh, and a restaurant chain back in Canada called Harvey's.

9:00pm: Whatever
Stuff's happened, nobody cares.

I finally tried "Forbidden Siren 2" earlier, after it sitting on my living room chair for at least 6 weeks, and it starts with you playing a child who hears a vague commotion, then walks out of his bedroom, down into the living room, sees his father's corpse and starts crying. At that point, I said "owned, you fucking orphan!" and put the controller down. Easily $20 worth of entertainment right there, yet alone playing it for any longer than that 40 seconds or so.

1:12am: Aren't I fucking sexy then?