Pick Ups - Last Few Months.....(part 3)

Right, a bit later due to being busier than I had planned, but this last post should bring us up to date with the best of my pick-ups! Well, I say best, but this first lot of games might not fit that description very well at all....

I've got about 450 games for the PS2 now, but instead of stopping collecting like any sane person would, I'm continuing to pick up games for 50p or £1 whenever I find one I don't have. Because of this, I'm picking up a lot of lesser known, but pretty terrible, games...

Trigger Man is a third-person shooter, that despite seemingly having a budget that the developers could blow buying a sandwich, actually kept me playing for way longer than I probably should have. The AI of the enemies is pretty terrible with baddies standing around doing nothing, and when you try to shoot them they take about ten shots unless you manage a headshot. Levels are boring and blandly designed....it's a mess basically! But I still played it for an hour....

Police Chase Down is a hard-to-control, fiddly police-motorbike game that lets you shoot enemies as they try to destroy the VIP vehicle you're trying to protect, At least, that's what the first mission consists of. I dunno about the rest, as the fact my bike moves way faster than the slow-ass limo that I'm protecting and the fact that to shoot the bad guys I have to rotate the camera around meaning I have no idea what I'm driving into, put a stop to me playing the game any further....

The Shadow Of Zorro gives an initial impression that it might be quite good, but then when you start playing it quickly becomes apparent that it's a shoddily designed mess, with a stealth mechanic that doesn't quite work and a weird QTE combat style! Might be worth playing a wee bit longer to see if it improves, but it seems to be a huge disappointment so far...

Maniac Mole is a side-scrolling platformer that feels like it was made with one of those game-creator programs that lets you do your own graphics but only has the most basic of gameplay. It's pretty poor, with crappy level design and annoying collision detection....and the music is infuriatingly awful!! It's terribleness might keep you entertained for 15 minutes or so, though....

Legion - The Legend Of Excalibur I've only recently picked-up, and so have yet to really play it properly. It's a mix of RTS and action RPG, and seems like a fairly average example of such, but it was probably the first of it's kind on PS2...Might be worth looking into further, but I generally don't have much patience for these sorts of things unless they're amazing!

Cocoto Platform Jumper is one of a series of games starring a cute little red devil, and this one does exactly what it says in the title. Taking place in rotating-tower like levels, you create Rainbow Islands style platforms to make your way to the top, killing and avoiding nasties along the way! It's actually quite fun, and easily the best of the bunch! Maybe one worth returning to later on the blog....

Another recent pick-up is this Moomin book...found it in a charity shop for a couple of quid, and having been a fan of the Moomins since I was tiny and used to watch the creepy fuzzy-felt-style series, I had to snap it up! It tells the story of Moomintroll building a house for himself and the Snork Maiden, after Little My decides to invade his room at the Moomin house and basically annoy him into leaving....

Can't really remember where I picked up these Buster comics, but they'll be added to my collection....I lost loads in a previous move when my dad decided to burn loads of stuff instead of bringing it to the new home! Packed all the best stuff up into boxes and he told us just to leave it and we could get it later, then went out and burned the lot so we didn't have clutter in the new house! 

Old books, toys (including my entire Matchbox car collection and some vintage Starsky & Hutch dolls), games, and hundreds and hundreds of comics.....Never forgiven him for that and never will! Probably goes a long way to explaining why I collect as much stuff from my childhood these days too!! Hehe...

Another charity shop find was this bunch of old gaming magazines for £2.50 each! They had loads more, but I just grabbed what I could afford...including issue one of the classic SNES mag, Super Play!

Definitely a bunch o' bargains! Was interesting reading the Club Nintendo member's mag as well, as I never ever joined but remember seeing the ads for it at the back of all of SNES game manuals...

A few more 360 games next, and these were between £3-£5 each...yet to play any of them properly, as they've been piled up on the increasingly massive backlog of 360 titles.....

Infinite Undiscovery looks like it'll be a fairly decent RPG to get my teeth into once I've finally got back to finishing another 360 JRPG, Lost Odyssey.....

The Last Remnant is another one that will be eating up large chunks of my time If I ever get around to playing it! It seems to focus a lot on large battles, so it'll be interesting to see how it plays...

Warriors : Legends Of Troy is an Ancient Greece themed entry in Koei's Warriors series of games. It seems to be quite a bit gorier than the Dynasty Warriors games, but has similar hack-n-slash gameplay. Looks like I should have fun with it....

Another trip to the charity shops unearthed these Strategy Guides, all for £2.50 each! The Dino Crisis and Devil May Cry ones still have their posters attached and have interviews with the game devs,  and all of them are filled with some great maps and artwork! I was very happy to find them....

I found in yet another charity shop this selection of Comic Book Day 2013 comics! These were given away free at comic shops on the actual day, but obviously I had to pay 50p each for them. A couple (Star Wars / Avatar and Dragonball / Rurouni Kenshin) are double-sided. A nice find, as usually by the time I get into town for Free Comic Book Day, Forbidden Planet has run out of copies of the freebies...even if I manage to get there for 10am!!

In the same shop I found this Dirty Pair book, also for 50p! And that's the last item in this bunch of pick-ups!

So there you go! Quite the grab-bag o' goodies, I'm sure you'll agree! I'll do another pick-up post once I accumulate enough new things and stuffs....but should be back later in the week with some more scans of things I'm finding in boxes! Probably best not to promise that though, eh!? ;)

Laters, Stuffers! :)

Pick-Ups - Last Few Months....(part 2)

Blimey! It's tomorrow today already! So let's get straight back into looking at the next set of pick-ups! 

First today are these The Real Ghostbusters comics from Marvel UK, to add to my already sizable collection from when I was 12 and used to have the comic ordered at the shop down the road! The stories in these ranged from okay to terrible, with more terrible ones towards the end of its run. The best bits were the text stories and, of course, Spengler's Spirit Guide...which was a page supposedly written by Egon about the various entities the Ghostbusters would come up against in their adventures. I'll probably look at the comic in a bit more depth in a later blog post, when I get round to shifting my collection into boxes! But yeah, these were about 50p each....

Some PS2 games next, and these ones are a bit of a mixed bag...all picked up for about £1 or £2...

Impossible Mission is a version of the classic C64 game that includes a few upgraded graphics, although you can play it in the original style if you like...and you probably will, as there's little difference really! Anyway, it's alright, but ultimately pointless if you have the original...

 Final Fantasy VII - Dirge Of Cerberus  is a third-person shooter set three years after the events of FFVII, and I have yet to play it properly despite wanting it for ages! I played it briefly and it seems a little odd control wise, but I'm sure I'll be able to work it all out after a while...

Sub Rebellion is a submarine-based shoot-em-up, and is actually quite interesting and a bit different to the usual shooty-fare! Definitely almost a bit of a hidden gem, but not quite worthy of that status....maybe it's a hidden shiny-pebble!

Legion - The Legend Of Excalibur is a real time strategy / action RPG game, that I only picked up at the weekend, so again have had little time to actually play it yet. First impressions are that the voice acting seems a bit iffy, and that although gameplay seems to be okay, it probably isn't going to hold my interest for long enough to give the game much time...might be wrong though...we'll see...

Downforce is a slightly-futuristic, arcade style F1 racing game, and a reasonably decent one! There's not really much more to say about it other than it does what it sets out to do, and is a fair amount of fun...

For Christmas, one of the presents I got from my mum was this Madball annual/comic combo! It seems that the annual features reprints of the first two issues, and the comic is Issue 3...a fact that my mother was unaware of! She was also unaware that I already had the Marvel UK reprint of issue 4, meaning that I now have the full first four issues in readable print! How's that for Deadpan Flooky-ness!? 

It's pretty cool being able to read the supposed origin of the Madballs, as I love the toys! I'll need to remember to put up some pics of my collection of those at some point on here too....

Some DVD pick-ups now, and I've yet to watch any of these, although I have seen parts of Babycart in it's mashed up Shogun Assassin version, which was made famous by Tarantino in Kill Bill! That collection was a charity shop find for £2.50! 

Triangle is a film that I saw the trailer for years ago and have been looking forward to watching ever since, but suddenly finding it extremely hard to find...I finally found it in a charity shop for £1 a week or so ago, and will most likely be watching it tonight!

 (And yes, that is Angel from Home & Away in the starring role!)

Next pick-up....a Fighting Fantasy Gamebook called Armies of Death to add to my gamebook collection! Haven't played it yet, but apparently it's a bit different in that you and your army have attributes for combat.... 

Lastly for today's post are some Minecraft books, the first being a straightforward Strategy Guide.....

The other one is a bit more interesting...It's the 2017 Official Minecraft Annual, which was on sale in Poundland for, yes..a pound!

It's filled with lot's of tips from Youtubers on how to build things, ideas for challenges and information about various Minecraft stuff, including how it's helping to improve slum areas around the world with it's Block by Block programme...

But yes, that's enough for now....I reckon I should fit the rest into one final post tomorrow! Pop back then to see my last lot of stuffs and things!

Pick Ups - Last few months....(part 1)

I was going to post some more scans of things I'd found, but then I realised I haven't put any pictures up of my pick-ups since June last year! I've picked up a fair amount of stuff since then, so I thought I'd better share some of it with you over a few posts...this being the first of such (obviously) ! 

First up are these cool little collected-comic books of old Marvel stories! I found them in a charity shop for £1.50 each.....

This hardback Dark Souls Strategy Guide (complete with greasy fingerprints) should prove useful when I decide to go back and have another crack at the famously brutal game! Only made it to Blighttown in my first playthrough! Anyhoo, this cost me about £3.99....

Picked up quite a few 360 games as usual....here's a look at the first lot!

Ace Combat - Assault Horizon is a pretty groovy, arcadey-flight-sim-shooter....I don't usually go in for such stuff much, but I played the demo and it impressed me enough to warrant a purchase...

I'd also played a demo of Call Of Duty : Ghosts multiplayer, and enjoyed it way more than any of the other COD multiplayers I'd tried, so I bought this too...

Metal Gear Rising Revengeance is a bit of a departure for the series in that it's an all out hack-n-slash...Only picked this up yesterday, but it seems bat-shit crazy and loads of fun, so I look forward to playing through it...

Venetica is an odd game....sometimes the graphics look beautiful, sometimes they look like they should be on an N64...the gameplay can be a bit fiddly, the voice acting and script leave a lot to be desired, but somehow it's still interesting enough to seem like it needs to be played through. It's the type of game that probably would have been awesome if it came out on original Xbox, but it didn't, so....

Quake 4 is just...well....decent. It seems to have lost a lot of soul since the previous games, and become just another generic space-shooter filled with military grunts. It's not a bad game, it's only that it's far from the sequel that the previous Quakes deserve...and feels very much like an add-on to Doom 3! Very average....

Assassin's Creed 3 is pretty much what you'd expect, only with more free-roaming, and added hunting and boat battles! Still, it's a pretty good series of games...it's just Ubisoft could do with releasing less of them and spacing them out a bit! But I'll need to get back to this...I just sort of stopped playing, and I've got the 4th one where I get to be a pirate waiting for when this one's done! :)

Next in the pick-ups is this rather groovy Art Of Darkwatch book that I found yesterday for £3 in a  charity shop....

It's filled with interesting info on the design of the game, including the slightly odd revelation that it was originally going to be a lot less serious...

Anyways, here's a look at some more pages....

The next pic is cool..it shows how they were thinking ahead of potential future games in the series, with various designs based on other periods in history! I'd love the series to make a comeback and get some sequels..I've always felt it was a bit under-rated....

Another game next, and this is one I picked up purely because it was sealed, and also had packaging that pushed my nostalgia buttons! Zorro on the ZX Spectrum for £2.99 on Ebay! I'm usually more interested in playing the games than keeping them in sealed boxes, but I have many fond memories of popping down to Toys R Us to get some new Speccy games every other weekend...and I feel that this just makes my Spectrum collection more complete somehow! But I'm not going to be buying up loads of sealed copies of everything...

Last for today's lot, is this nice book of collected strips from DC Thompson's back catalogue...

Dennis & Gnasher & Friend's Cartoon Capers is filled with various strips from masses of different comics, and I especially like the fact that it usually tells you which comic the strips actually came from, by means of a handy added box at the top of the pages! There's lots of obscure characters featured, and I heartily recommend hunting this book down if you're at all interested in the history of British comics! I got mine for £1.95 in a local charity shop!

Right, that'll do for now I reckon! I'll be back with more stuff tomorrow..

...until then, stay groovy, stuffers!! :)