Random Hoo Haasthe blog with the guff

Some games I played in 2024: Spud!

Wednesday, October 30, 2024 at 11:02 am Comments Off on Some games I played in 2024: Spud!

The games I played in 2023 review is done with the addition of Lois & Clark and Combo Rangers. Hopefully I can freakin’ write some different things for a change! In the meantime… uh, more dumb game reviews, sorry.

Have you ever played a game, read a book or watched a TV show forever ago, left it unfinished, and wondered how it panned out in the end? And if you do decide to finish it long after the fact, is there any hope of it matching your expectations…?

Spud! is a game my brother and I were bought in the early days of PC gaming, a point-and-click adventure where you’ve got to rescue Santa Claus from the evil Dr. Chillbane with the help of toy gnomes and fluffy bunnies. Its first-person perspective for its point-and-click puzzles is really unique, offering 360 degrees of panoramic view at every waypoint, though perhaps to the point of excess — does even your inventory need to be a sprawling dome of shelves…?
It’s decidedly off-kilter, between its questionable depictions of Santa’s reindeer and the kooky characters you meet on a tropical island, not to mention its penchant for bloody violence — if you don’t send out the gnomes or bunnies as human shields (or the species equivalent), Spud is liable to come a cropper via a spear through the eye!
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Talking about RPGs because I don’t know!!

Monday, October 19, 2020 at 9:59 pm Comments Off on Talking about RPGs because I don’t know!!

I dread being asked what my favourite anything is. I’ve a whole lotta favourites! Literal stacks of favourites that I shuffle between depending on the mood or time of day! It’s like asking what my favourite pair of socks is — I cycle them! You can’t ask me to rank one pair of socks above the other! They’re all the same colour! And it’s at that point the analogy begins to fall apart. Not unlike my socks, actually.

This stinks because I sure would like to engage with folks on Twitter a bit more often, but unless it’s a multi-tweet thread about a topic that’s of interest only to myself and no one else living or dead, then I typically don’t wanna do it. I do appreciate folks daring to tag me in tweets, but it invariably results in a week of hand-wringing whether I’ll respond or not… and then not responding anyway because to reply after waiting a week just feels rude. Rest assured I read all emails, DMs and correspondence, and I appreciate it and give them a lot of thought, and then rarely actually put those thoughts into a reply. I don’t think that’s very reassuring, actually. My apologies.

Whatever point I was trying to make, I assume it applies to when pal herrDoktorat tagged me in naming iconic RPGs I’ve played in my life. There’s maybe a dozen I’ve played long enough for me to say with confidence I have played them, but RPGs aren’t really my strong suit…! To name off three game titles without context doesn’t gel with my brand of being needlessly fucking verbose, so let’s just rattle off all the RPGs I’ve played enough to have a tangible opinion on. I never said they’d be good opinions, so I’m throwing myself on the mercy of the court! You’re talking to a man who associates Mario with RPGs more than flippin’ Dragon Quest…!

Final Fantasy VII

My introduction to RPGs! A friend of my dad’s just gave the game to us for whatever reason, and it was unlike anything we’d played before. I, as a dumb youngster, was put off by the fact you couldn’t jump. Why have all these detailed 3D environments if you can’t jump!? But watching my brother play it was fascinating, seeing the story play out through text and many varied setpieces and environments. When Shadows of the Empire on Nintendo 64 was as cinematic as a console game had gotten in our experience, this was a whole other kettle of fish.

Because Europe missed out on so many iconic JRPGs, this was probably how most folks were introduced to the genre? Without Chrono Trigger or the like, the only alternatives were obscure Game Boy titles or flippin’ Rings of Power on Mega Drive, I don’t know. Even in America it seems like the first RPG to take on mainstream success, thanks to its big-budget advertising campaign.
As such, it’s kind of resulted in a lot of people reading the game the wrong way; for your first RPG to tackle a complex narrative and themes of unreliable narrators and withheld memories is going to cause some complexities, even before you factor in its iffy translation. I should be the last person to judge people for reading a story the wrong way, (Dok will attest to my lousy reading comprehension), but it’d be nice if people got their personalities right once in a while. Aeris is meant to be spunky!
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“If I don’t play soon, I’ll die of boredom.”

Wednesday, June 12, 2019 at 12:47 pm Comments Off on “If I don’t play soon, I’ll die of boredom.”

Updated Scans & Bits with what you’d usually expect. More obscure Mario guff, rarities like some F-Zero and Landstalker manga, dumping raws on MEGA for the likes of Rockman ZX Advent, Ninja Turtles and Kirby, plus two new pages for game manuals and guidebooks.
Oh, and the officially licensed Shrek manga. Yeah, I had a double-take when I saw it existed too.

I had a case of the unwellies a few weeks ago which left me nigh-incapacitated… and it says a lot about my priorities that my first thought was, “now’s probably a good time to play Donkey Kong 64.” A debilitating flu really takes the guilt out of playing a nine thousand hour-long game!
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Some games I played in 2018

Monday, December 31, 2018 at 10:29 pm Comments Off on Some games I played in 2018

eyyy nothing better than updating your web browser only to find the newest version of my plugins stink and it now displays foreign language text in a needlessly bulky font, ruining my otherwise lovingly-spaced page designs. I dread to see what it’s done to the Bomberman shrine!

What’s new this month?
Scans & Bits has a bunch of stuff because I wanna see people translate this stuff already (I’LL COMMISSION), including all of the Super Princess Peach and Sonic Generations manga, plus the rest of the Sly Cooper in my possession because it got a lot of buzz for some reason.
Metal Slug: Missing in Action updated with some reader submitted bits and bobs, including hopefully more user-friendly methods of accessing Metal Slug Advance’s unused stages and debug dipswitches.
The Bomberman Shrine is just some junk I had lying around, though the Pocket Bomberman page is worth a goosey if just for its unused material, complete with .IPS patch so you can sample some of it yourself!

It’s that time again: writing thoughts about the media I gorged over the past 12 months. At this point this routine is just a formality for my ailing memory – I keep needing to remind myself, yes, I’ve beaten Star Fox Command and gotten all the endings, I can’t just keep making excuses to play it again!
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Wild Guns: Live & Reloaded

Friday, February 9, 2018 at 9:02 pm Comments Off on Wild Guns: Live & Reloaded

Metal Slug: Missing in Action updated recently with some debug menu gubbins for 7 and XX. Still holding out for that debug menu in Metal Slug Advance! Anything to close the book on that game!

I’ve been playing a heck of a lot of Wild Guns lately, both the SNES original and the fancy-pants Reloaded edition. For some reason it’s simply pushing all my buttons, it’s the exact type of game I want to play at this point in time! It’s short, it’s sweet, it’s intense, and it pushes me to play better with every attempt. I’ve finished the game on the hardest difficulty with all characters in one credit on both versions now, and I’m still playing it… partly because I don’t know what to move on to next! Bot Vice, maybe?
I’m still kicking myself for short-changing the game’s new content in my last “Some games I played in 2017” post, though I’m shocked there still isn’t a good list laying out all the changes and differences yet. The game’s been out for over a year! Not that it’s a huge deal, the preview trailers do a decent job of showing the highlights, but I’ve been playing both versions so much I want to get it down just for posterity.
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Some games I played in 2017

Sunday, December 31, 2017 at 10:10 pm Comments (1)

Sneaking in a quick Bomberman update with Bomberman 2001, a game that barely existed as a game. Any chance of finding new information it via search engines had already been squandered when at least three forum threads sprung up about it, so I might as well chuck this up. If someone happened to have raided that E3 booth seventeen years ago and done a runner with its contents, maybe we’ll learn something!
Despite no intentions of another yearly review article, I still keep track of the media I consume. I played nearly sixty games this year and watched eighty-something movies… and I’ve, like, barely anything to say about any of them. I’ll try and squeeze out some thoughts on the noteworthy ones under the cut!
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Some comics I read in 2017

Sunday, December 24, 2017 at 12:58 am Comments Off on Some comics I read in 2017

Another year’s about to wrap up, so you know what that means – I write dumb opinions about media I barely remember! I know, I’m sorry too. I’d no intention of doing a full article, and even the abbreviated list for last year was just too boring to go through again… but I still had a whole bunch of dumb opinions on media I barely remembered that needed an outlet. So, hey, let’s talk about some comics I read! If the thought of writing more doesn’t lull me and the audience into a never-ending sleep, expect another post for games and movies too, maybe.

Star Fox (Nintendo Power)

I’d been keen to read this since my big Star Fox kick last year. My early years online drifting around tiny fansites suggested people found it more compelling than the games, portraying a darker and deeper take on Star Fox lore that, most importantly for fanfic writers, gave Fox a girlfriend, Fara Phoenix. (he can’t fuck Wolf and Falco all the time!)

It’s a breezy light-hearted space romp that paints a fun picture of the Star Fox world. I guess to a young audience it might seem slightly mature, what with Fox grieving over his lost parents and hating Andross so much he’s willing to go on a kamikaze mission, forcing Falco to pummel him senseless… but it’s just so breezy it’s hard to see it that way. The dialogue is jokey and full of dreadful puns, and Andross’ goofy schemes undermine any attempt at seriousness, including his Gundam-shaped living-battery android pig assistant, and his brilliant plan to work alongside a clone of himself is foiled when his clone gushes his love for Fox’s gal. It’s a 80-20 skew of cornball and melodrama, and I love it.
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ONM Remembered – #478

Thursday, March 23, 2017 at 11:00 am Comments Off on ONM Remembered – #478

“Ed’s a loopy alien who, while cleaning up his spaceship, accidentally chucked a can of cosmic tonic down to earth. Oops!”

from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 86 (November 1999)
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ONM Remembered – #473

Tuesday, March 14, 2017 at 11:00 am Comments Off on ONM Remembered – #473

“Surely this must be quite exciting? Actually, no. We’ve made more exciting cups of tea.”

from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 07 (September 2006)
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ONM Remembered – #472

Saturday, March 11, 2017 at 11:00 am Comments Off on ONM Remembered – #472

“Apparently, us British love to eat sissy scones with our tea! What a cheek!”

from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 88 (January 2000)
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