Happy New Year, Stuffers! Hope you've all had a good festive season! Now that I've munched my way through the chocolate and drunk all the wine, it seems a good time to get back to the blog and get writing again....
The first thing I need to do though is get through a few post showing off my random pick-ups and Christmas gifts and things that I've accumulated since the last pick-ups post! And there are a lot. A big lot......
So let's not waste any more time and get on with showing you guys the things wot I have got!
First up is this weird Super Mario comic I picked up in a charity shop for a pound!
It's a bit tonally weird, with some nasty guy who thinks all beggars should be shot and delights in killing Mario off in Gameboy Super Mario Land acting as a conduit for the evil baddie Tatanga (again from Super Mario Land) to travel to our dimension and take over the world.....
Luckily two kids manage to summon Mario to our world too, and they help defeat Tatanga and save our dimension! Then there's another story where the same weak-willed numpty from the first story again brings Tatanga back, and a little girl manages to get Mario's help again and once more put a stop to Tatanga's evil plans!
It's definitely all a bit odd, but is quite a cool thing to add to my collection! There's at least another 3 books in the series from Valiant too, so I might see if I can track them down at some point....
Next, I found this Droopy book for 50p.......
It tells of Droopy's unfortunate toothache and an odd ballooning adventure that results after he tries to get rid of the offending tooth....Clearly for tiny kids, I picked it up just because I don't really have many things involving Droopy, who is one of my favourite cartoon characters.....
Some video games now, and here's one for original Xbox and one for the 360! Both cost me about £2 each....
Batman Arkham Origins is the third of the Arkham series on 360, and looks to be a lot of fun, but I'm waiting until I get through Arkham City, the 2nd game, as I still have that to finish....
Blood Wake is a boat combat game and again seems like it'll be pretty groovy, but I have so many other games to finish, it's going straight into the backlog......
Playstation type stuff next, and these four were also charity shop finds for between £2 to 50p each...
Shadow The Hedghog is a game that I would like to like, as I think he's quite a good character and the cutscenes are nice, but the game itself is just far too annoying...I can't seem to get the hang of any of the 3D Sonic games, and constantly just run into things and die...In fact, I've never really been a huge an of any of the Sonic games for similar reasons! I mean they're alright, but I've always been more of a Mario fan! I do like Sonic Spinball and the Arcade Sonic though...Oh, and Mean Bean Machine!!
Project Eden is a game I keep buying, somehow selling and then buying back again.....think I must have had it about 3 or 4 times now! It's actually really good and has a nice character swapping mechanic that allows for a lot of variety in the way you approach puzzle and play through the game! Well worth a look....
Gungriffon Blaze also on PS2 is a big stompy Mech game where you stomp around in big Mechs, but seems to be a bit speedier and action packed than a lot of other stompy big Mech games! haven't played it much yet, but it seems decent and I needed a big stompy Mech game to add to my PS2 collection......
And finally, Matt Hoffman's Pro BMX for PS1 is a game I remember playing the demo of and loving when it was released. It's essentially the same as the Tony Hawks Pro Skater games, but with BMXs instead of skateboards...and it's a load of fun!
Back to comics again, and I picked up these two Commando comics in yet another charity shop purely for the reason that they involved spooks! 75p each!
More book finds, and these two Buster Books were a pound each....here's a few choice pages to read.....
And lastly for this first part of pick-ups, is a weird gnome/wizard/green man head that my brother noticed and I picked up from yet another charity shop for about 50p.....
It has really weird looking eyes and you can stick a candle in the back for even freakier night time shenanigans! Anyway it was so weird, I had to pick it up!
So there you are, the first of probably quite a few posts....I've barely scratched the surface! The next one should be up tomorrow sometime, so I'll see you then-ish! Later Stuffers! :)
I don't know how many computer game characters start off their games having lost their memory, but it must be at least in the triple figures...and that is exactly the predicament that the hero of Overblood finds themselves in when you load it up on your Playstation...
Waking up in a freezing spaceship from a cryogenic sleep, his first priority is getting a source of heat, and after hunting around he finds a jacket, and also a new friend in the form of Pipo the robot! After you get him started up and he gets done with his best R2D2 impression, Pipo can also be controlled, and turns out to be rather handy at opening doors and getting into spaces that our main hero (who has discovered his name is Raz) can't squeeze into...
After wandering around the spaceship a bit more, it soon becomes apparent that something has gone very wrong and weird zombie-type creatures are wandering around, seemingly infected with some sort of virus...a virus that Raz also seems to have contracted...
And so Raz, Pipo and eventually another amnesia-ridden playable character Milly, explore the ship to try and figure out what the hell is going on, whilst trying their best not to be killed by monsters, traps and the rather nasty environment they find themselves inhabiting!
Overblood was released only a few months after the original Resident Evil, and is quite similar in terms of tank-controls, viewpoints and atmosphere. It does have quite a few interesting differences all of it's own though. For starters, you don't have to stay looking at those spooky camera angles, as you can change the view to either being directly behind your character, or even a first-person camera that lets you move and look around from the characters viewpoint.
Also, rather than have you play through the game again as another character, the ability to swap between them is a nice feature that Resident Evil would borrow in later games. And instead of hunting around for ink ribbons, a voice recorder lets you save the game at any point that you're not in danger.
Unfortunately, the game has a couple of other ideas that don't work quite as well. The biggest problem is that a lot of the items aren't noticeable on the screen...so a key could be sitting on a shelf, but you won't see it sitting there, you'll only find it by searching the shelf! And you pretty much have to be at exactly the right part of the shelf to examine it! Needless to say, this is very annoying and makes you get stuck when you really shouldn't be getting stuck.
This problem is added to by the fact that if an item is on a lower shelf, or indeed on the ground, you have to kneel before the character will pick it up! I can see what they were trying to make it more realistic by adding this, but again it just leads to a lot of frustration when you realise you've missed something and need to backtrack.
Another issue is with the 'push' function not having a button, and every time Raz or Milly go near anything other than a wide corridor, they start trying to push things that aren't there! Again, this is a bit annoying, but you could argue that Resident Evil also had this issue, but to a much lesser degree. And some of the animations can look a bit daft, with characters looking like they're constantly pointing their hands, hoping that monsters don't realise they don't actually have a gun sometimes, perhaps....
Having said all that, the gloomy, sci-fi atmosphere and odd story do mean that you'll want to keep playing, and when you add in the comical animations and some terrible voice acting that almost manages to top Resi for cheesiness, it's a survival horror game that does show some rewards for perseverance. And when you finally get to grips with the mechanics of searching eveywhere and everything (and using the internet when you get really stuck) it actually becomes quite enjoyable!
Worth a look then, and probably a lot better than most folks these days give it credit for!
Please remember to go and check out the other groovy ghouls and boils that are taking part in the Countdown To Halloween, as they're posting lots of cool stuff on their blogs too!
Just click the pumpkin below to be taken to the hub, where you can access all of the Halloween horror from!
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!? ;)
Whilst reading a Super Nintendo magazine ( probably Super Play ) in the nineties, I saw a review of a game that looked like it would totally be my cup of tea! It featured a weird looking little chap who fired darts from his hair at all manner of freaky ghosties & beasties! Tagging along with him was a little eyeball with a body, which reminded me of a character I had created in my own rubbishy comic strips called Eye-vor!
I really wanted to play that game, but not having the cash for a pricey Japanese import, it wasn't until years later that I red-discovered it through emulation of the game on ZSNES. You can read what I though about if further down this page, but a few years later I discovered there was another game on PS1, and this led me to research exactly who this dart-haired character was and whether there were any more games based around him....
Kitarō started life as a Kamishibai story from 1933, told by various storytellers who travelled around on bikes from village to village, entertaining the locals with their tales. One such Kamishibai artist was as interesting as the old stories he drew and told...
Shigeru Mizuki had fought in Papua New Guinea during WWII. Having seen his friends die from various wounds and diseases, he himself contracted malaria...all of which obviously affected him greatly. And then during one allied air raid, he was caught in an explosion that blew off his left arm.
Being left-handed, Shigeru had to relearn to draw and write with his right hand. After spending time as a prisoner of war, he returned to an occupied Japan, hoping to go back to New Guinea where he had been befriended by the locals, but was prevented from doing so mainly due to his injuries and also the fact that his brother had been convicted as a war criminal for killing prisoners. Aster working as a movie theatre operator for a while, he decided to revisit the Kitarō Kamashibai stories as a manga series...
Hakabi Kitarō ( Graveyard Kitarō) was created in 1959 and ran for a few years as a rental manga, but it was considered a wee bit too freaky for children, and so Shigeru lightened the tone and eventually in 1967 it became GeGeGe no Kitarō ( Spooky Kitarō ).
Kitarō himself is a small boy who was born in a graveyard, and apart from his father, the aforementioned eyeball-with-a-body, is the last living member of the Ghost Tribe. His hair-covered eye is in fact missing, and as stated earlier he has the ability to shoot darts from his hair. His main ambition it seems, is to fight for peace between the humans and the Yōkai demons. Proving popular in Japan, the manga series has been adapted over the years into various anime cartoons, a live action movie, video games and even has a street in Japan filled with Shigeru's characters! 2008 saw the latest game and anime series, so as you can see it's still going strong...
But it's the games we're mostly interested in today, so lets have a look and see how they've turned out! I'm not sure if any of these received a proper Western release, so import or emulation is the only way you'll be able to try these out....
No 21: GeGeGe No Kitarō - Youkai Dai Makyou (NES) :
This game actually did make it to the west, although it was a bit butchered, re-skinned and renamed as Ninja Kid. The original though is definitely a Gegege game, with our hero Kitarō shooting his darts at evil yōkai in a horizontal scrolling platformer.
Occasionally, you'll find yourself controlling Kitarō in the skies too, but mostly you'll be on the ground collecting pickups and racking up the points by blasting the baddies back to oblivion. There's a decent range of weirdos to kill, with some familiar faces popping up from the manga, and various other influences (see the mini-Frankenstein monster above..)
You access the different levels from an over-world map, and this appears to have different randomly chosen layouts to help keep things fresh when you start a new game, which is a nice little feature! I always like a little random factor!
The occasional boss pops up every now and then too, like this giant eye below, which will take a few extra hits to defeat. It's all pretty straight-forward, typical platforming stuff. Unfortunately it's also very tricky for the most part, and you'll quickly lose your paltry three lives as you're bombarded by enemies from every side.
Some levels are easier than others though, and the random map helps you to see a bit more than you would otherwise, so it's not completely devoid of fun. It's just a fairly average, tricky little platformer that's only really worth playing to see Kitarō's first foray into video games!
No. 20 : GeGeGe no Kitarō 2 (NES) :
His second NES adventure takes the form of an RPG, this time only released in Japan. Luckily someone has gone to the trouble of translating it into English, and so with a little searching online you can find a translation patch and fire it up on an emulator.
Again, unfortunately this is really damn tricky. Even with the translation, it has the same problems as a lot of early RPGs in that it doesn't give you much of a clue as to where you're supposed to go or what you're supposed to do.
On top of that, you seem to start the game extremely under-powered, and it won't take many hits from the enemies until you kick the bucket and end up transported back to your house. It's a shame, as it would be nice to get a bit further and experience what the game has to offer. There'd be plenty of fun to be had in a decent RPG based on Gegege Kitarō, but this one is just too annoying to stick with for long...
No. 19: GeGeGe no Kitarō: Fukkatsu! Tenma Daiou (SNES) :
And so we come to the game that started me along this crazy path to Yōkai land! And yet again it's the trickiness that lets it down. What would otherwise be an enjoyable shooty platformer is again hampered by not being able to get very far before running out of energy and having to restart the level.
The enemies always seem to be just out of reach, and when you get a bit closer so you can hit them with your own projectiles, that's exactly when they start hitting you and rapidly eating away at your health.
Despite this, the enemies are varied and weird enough to warrant a bit of your time exploring the levels, and once you've worked out some of their patterns you do seem to be able to get a little further into the game.
And of course, it's all in Japanese so you won't really have any idea what's going on plot wise. So what we're left with is another disappointingly difficult but somewhat charming adventure, that's fun to try and get to grips with but ultimately a bit frustrating. A bit of a pattern forming here....
One other thing I discovered just as I was about to stop playing the game was that by choosing the second option on the title screen, you appear to start a 2-player game with this little Yōkai demon chap below as the second character. Not having anyone handy to play as the second player, I've no idea if this would make it any easier, but it might be worth giving it a go if you have someone willing to help you out!
Things get a bit spookier and even more confusing with the PS1's first GeGeGe game. Again it's all in Japanese, so the plot is a bit tricky to decipher, but it would seem that after pressing start on the first menu option you take control of a schoolgirl, and view the game in first person from her viewpoint. Here's my experiences with trying to comprehend what's going on...
Starting off in a classroom and fumbling around trying to work out what buttons did what, I managed to find my way out in to a corridor, where someone starts talking to me in Japanese. As they move forward it becomes apparent that they are in fact some sort of brain-suckin' zombie fiend!
After succumbing to a hideous end in my first attempt at escaping this undead annoyance, on my second try I ran back into the classroom and discovered I could hide in one of the lockers, in a Clock Tower style fashion! The zombie entered the classroom and had a quick nosy around for me, but being a bit dense, couldn't work out where I was...
After the zombie left the room, I clambered back out of the locker and went back into the corridor where I found a key marked 1A. Checking the doors by pressing the circle button. I found room 1A, but couldn't see anywhere to use the key inside. So out I went again wandering around the school, trying to find out what the hell I was supposed to be doing. The only thing I could find was lots of locked doors and a crow on a desk in one of the rooms...
Checking on Youtube to see if that held any secrets, I could only find one video of the game. It did show me that other areas could be accessed by clicking different options on the start screen, so I chose the second banner and went back into whatever game 2 had in store.
This time I appear to be Kitarō himself, and after leaving a small cabin I'm in the middle of a large wood! After heading through a maze of trees I discovered this set of three statues that appears to have some sort of food sitting on it. I pick this up...
After wandering around for a bit more, I discover a tree house that some old big-nosed, big-mouthed resides in. Unfortunately I can't show you a picture of this as I don't have any way of capturing the screens (the others come from that Youtube video) so you'll just have to take my word that she's there! After ranting at me in Japanese for a while, she eventually shuts up and by clicking on various items it would seem that it's a shop she runs. Having no idea what to say or do, I leave and wander around for a bit more, getting hopelessly lost and going round in circles! Time for the 3rd choice on the menu!
Selecting the third option on the menu screen takes us into another area where again we seem to be someone else, waking up as Kitarō and his father leer over us. In the intro that just occurred there was a spooky doll, so maybe that's something to do with something....
Nope, it appears that there's quite a few of these dolls around and none of them seem to do anything. In the room with the one above, I found some spooky old pictures on the wall and clicking on them starts Kitarō's dad talking about something, but I've no idea what.
I find another rrom with a phone in that seems to be some sort of save point, then head back to where I started. Upon re-entering the first room Kitarō's father starts talking again, but then I can't work out what to do next at all..
So there you have it! An interesting but completely incomprehensible wander through the game! If anybody else decides to play this and can get any further and drop me some clues in the comments, please do so! It does seem like it would be a great little game if I could only work out what the hell was going on! Still, it was fun trying to work everything out, and it probably seems a bit spookier because I was absolutely clueless!
No.17: GeGeGe no Kitarō: KiKi Ippatsu! Youkai Rettou (GBA) :
Ah! Now this is the one I got a bit further with! It's another platformer, this time on Gameboy Advance, and despite being in Japanese yet again, it does have the occasional handy button-prompts posted on boards around the levels, so you can learn at least some of the moves!
It starts with the origin of both Kitarō and his father! Apparently a blood bank worker visits some Yokai who are after some blood for different means than we humans would use it... But after his mother and father die before he is born, the blood bank worker buries the mother. Something weird then happens ( as if it wasn't weird enough already) and Kitarō's father's eye pops out of his decomposing body and somehow retains his memories! Then it grows a body and hops outside to rescue Kitarō, who has just been born in his mother's grave!
After controlling Daddy Eyeball for this sequence, we appear on a map screen and after a bit of button fiddling manage to get into one of the levels.
It's standard platforming action yet again, but t's done rather wonderfully, with nice graphics and some slick controls. It's also a lot less difficult than previous entries in the series and it's a lot easier to progress.
In fact the most trouble I had was navigating the menus and actually getting Kitarō to land on the first level on the map screen! But yeah, a nice little platformer, and probably the most instantly accessible game in this post.
Of course it is still in Japanese, and so you still won't have much idea of what's going on. but it's definitely the easiest one to get to grips with and so it's the one I recommend playing if you're not likely to be a Kitarō fan and just want a new platform game to mess around with for a while!
No.16: GeGeGe no Kitarō: Gyakushuu! Youkai Daichisen (PS1) :
The last game I'm looking at isn't the last GeGeGe no Kitarō game. There are others on PS2 and other machines. But it's the last one I can actually play, not owning machines capable of playing the remaining few. And it's yet another rather difficult platformer, taking it's style from the SNES and Gameboy Advance titles.
You should know what to expect by now. It's enjoyable but once more the fact it's in Japanesemakes it difficult to know what options to choose, and the difficulty makes it more annoying than it probably should be. But it's still worth picking up if you're a fan, or want to experience something a bit different on your Playstation. You even get a nice version of Kitarō's theme song to sing along to!
So I hope I've interested you in Kitarō at least a little by checking out these games. Even if you think you'll just find them too frustrating, or you don't like importing or emulating games, you can always check out the manga or anime series! I'm certainly going to be watching more of the cartoons now I've found them on Youtube.. I might even put some more up in another post later! But for now, we'll leave Kitarō in peace and let him get back to what will probably be a rather busy next few days battling demons!
