News Report: Intellivision Gen2 For PSVita and PSHome

So...  Sony today  made an announcement of something called PlayStation Home Arcade. This is where you can play Arcade games such as Frogger and Asteroids on you PSVita. But here's the cool bit, Intellivision are going to release "Intellivision Gen2" on this service. These are going to be remakes of Intellivision games, there's going to be a remake of Shark Shark, and my favourite Intellivision Game, AstroSmash. What's cool is that when you purchase these games, in similar ways to Playstation Minis, you have two licenses, one for Vita, and the another for...  PlayStation Home!?

...Yeah...  So much for getting me excited about a possible Astro Smash remake. As I don't own a PlayStation Vita, I would have to play it on PlayStation Home of all things... For those who might not remember, PlayStation Home was Sony's chance to plagiarise Second Life and put it on to the PS3, and failed doing so... But clearly someone is supporting this, as they're releasing these games on PSHome.

Kotaku reminding us how weird Second.... Ahem, PlayStation Home is... 

My experience with PlayStation Home is a boring one, I simply fiddled with it, tried to see what I could do with it's limited pieces of generic looking furniture, and going into the town to see what I get for free, which is hardly anything...

Then again, this whole PlayStation Home Arcade reminds me a lot of another arcade game service that another certain games manufacturer released a while back...

Another blinding success...  Oh wait...  no it wasn't...  Despite me still thinking that I own the most achievements for Game Room in all of Xbox Live, Seriously, I played Game Room a little too much than it deserved. But Game Room is, wait, was a way not to present a way to play classic arcade games on your new-fangled HD console.

The idea of Game Room was to build your own arcade, decorate it, put machines in it, etc, etc... Then your friends would come to play in your Arcade, and you would earn tokens that allow you to try out new arcade machines without having to purchase them. Sounds like a good idea right? Not really...

Rather than enter your "Amazing Arcade", yeah right, most of the time I ended up just selecting games from the main menu. It's quicker, and just looks better than entering a faux arcade. Making the whole "Build your own arcade" thing a little pointless. It would've been better if these arcade games themselves were just actual Xbox Live Arcade games, rather than having them inside another interface to load up before playing them.

Thinking about this, it makes me think, why is Sony doing this? What's the point if their competitor has failed doing a similar thing. And why are the Intellivision Gen2 games playable straight on the Vita, but you have to run Home to play them on the PS3? Personally I think this is a little odd, and Sony should just release these as PSN games.

Why do I still own an Xbox360?

OK, it got me thinking, after my last post about my little rant about screwed over you get if you're a non-live user. So...  Why do I still own a 360 then?

Pinball Simulation...

Arabian Nights without the financial limitations and finding physical space? Count me in!

One thing I do like about the current generation is how Pinball Simulation has improved little by little. Now granted, you can play these games on the PS3, Wii, and even tablet computers. But it so happens that I got these pinball games on the Xbox 360 before I even owned a PS3 and a tablet computer. But even then, that's not entirely true as there's a very good set of pinball games made for PSP that are very good too, infact I would even say that the PSP games got me into getting Pinball games for the 360.

Pinball FX1/2

Pinball FX was the first Pinball game I got the Xbox 360. And for a pinball game that's not based on actual real tables, it's a very good effort. It certainly feels like pinball, and Pinball FX 2 even goes far as including franchises such as Marvel, 'Splosion Man and Plants Vs. Zombies. Plus it includes a great tables called Epic Quest where by it mixes pinball with role playing games very well whilst mixing a good dose of humour!

A pinball quest of finding loot!

The Arabic themed table, Pasha, is a very entertaining table in Pinball FX 2

The Street Fighter 2 table from Pinball FX 1 might not be based on the real Gottlieb SF2 table, but it's still great fun!

Williams Pinball Classics

This game is actually hard to come by on disc over here in PAL territories, but fortunately, Microsoft made this available as a download for about £15. Feels a little steep, but when people are selling copies on eBay for a whopping £25 second-hand, a £15 download sounds damn cheap to me!

Medievil Madness, one of my favourite pinball machines, now to own in digital form!

Who wouldn't play FunHouse!?

The masochistic yet awesome Black Knight!

Pinball Arcade

Unlike the Williams Pinball Classics on the 360, and the Gottlieb Collection on the PSP and Wii. The Pinball Arcade is a collection of great pinball machines from Bally, Williams, Gottlieb and Stern to give you the best Pinball simulation experience possible. To do this, FarSight Studios, the developers of the game, took each pinball machine, took it to pieces, examined each piece and made a 3D model of it. Then they put the 3D model pieces together in the game to build the most realistic pinball tables in digital form.

Bride of Pinbot in all of her metal cladded glory on your Xbox 360.

The very luminescent Black Hole.

The Famous KickStarter funded Twilight Zone Table.

So with all these awesome pinball tables, with descent pinball physics, and great gameplay, plus not being anywhere close to a descent pinball arcade, my Xbox 360 is my number one place to play some good pinball!

Return to the Review: Galaga Legions

OK, here's a section I'm going to introduce, "Return to the Review", this is where I pull out a review I wrote back a few years a go. So here's a review for XBox Live Arcade's Galaga Legions.

Galaga was one game that I remember when I was very small, and to hear that it would get a proper sequel sound awesome considering that all the other versions of this game were just ports or remakes of the classic arcade game. 

The game feels like Geometry Wars in which you can move across the whole screen; however you can only shoot up. This is where the satellites come in; you can place a satellite to shoot up, down, left and right with the right analogue stick, however the satellites stays static in that place until you go back to it and pick it up by moving over it. This is where I felt a little put off by this game, the original Galaga was nothing like this, it was more like a beefed up version of Space Invaders, where you can only move left and right and just shoot upwards. 

Another part of this game that I was disappointed with is it’s method of shooting, there’s two ways or doing this, Automatic and Manual mode. Automatic mode shoots lasers without the need to press the right trigger, whilst Manual mode needs the player to pull the right trigger in order to shoot; but the shooting it more like a modern Sh'mup where you create a horde of lasers rather than shooting individual lasers with multiple button presses. Plus the point to the original Galaga game was all to do with how accurate you gun down the aliens, but this is gone in this new game. In general the game doesn't really feel like a Galaga game at all, and more like a new game that sports sprites that match those seen in the Galaga arcade game. 

However I did find some things in the gameplay that I did enjoy. In certain points in each area of the game, a possession item will appear, the idea to this is that you keep on shooting it until it breaks, and it’ll cause a black hole that consumes all enemies on the screen. After a few seconds the consumed aliens will come back out, but they’ll be on your side and will allow you to shoot a huge barrage of lasers against the enemy, plus they can attach themselves to the satellites meaning that the added fire power can be shot in each direction. 

As for the graphics, the game is presented in a cool updated mode, which is pretty to look at. At the same time there are two different style modes, Original mode, where you get the updated looking ship, and Vintage mode, where you can play with the original ship seen in the arcade game; however in Vintage mode you’ll only get a sprite change, the background is the same like in Original mode. The game has a look that matches itself with Pac Man Championship Edition; Smooth, Updated, yet at the same time not totally over the top; which is good considering that we all know what happened to Sonic the Hedgehog. I wished that I own an HDTV to really see what this game is like in 720p. 

Sound? Well the game features the original score heard from the arcade game, yet it remixes it into an awesome soundtrack. What’s nice about the music is that just like the graphics; it’s updated, but not totally over the top, and will leave you humming to it. Sound effects on the other hand are a little lack-luster, rather than coming up with new ways to update the classic sounds of lasers, alien swoops and explosions; it sticks to more of an Ikaruga style sound effects where the lasers and explosions match that of modern Sh’mups. It’s not a bad thing, but since PacMan C.E. managed to keep all the sound effects in place, you’d think they would do the same here. 

In conclusion, this is an OK game; it’s not bad, but it’s not amazing. If I was to compare games here; Pac Man C.E. is better than Galaga Legions, and so is Space Invaders Extreme. Space Invaders Extreme is a great example of how you reinvent an old game; Galaga Legions though isn't quite there. As I mentioned above, it’s more of a new game that inherits graphics from an older game. I could easily think of plenty of ways to improve this game and make it feel like Galaga, just like how Pac Man C.E. was to Pac Man, and how Space Invaders Extreme was to Space Invaders. In my opinion Namco should have worked on this game a little longer and work in ways to make it feel a lot more like the classic arcade game. In the long run it’s not bad, and I'm not saying it totally stinks, but as I've played the original before, I was expecting more of the same, but it turns into something a lot more different. 

Should I recommend this game? This is where it gets tough… like I said, it’s not a bad game, but retro gamers may feel put off from its new gameplay mechanics. However the “Halo” crowd may enjoy this game, but will have no idea what its legacy is. For 800 Microsoft points, the game does feel a little steep considering that it feels like another twin stick shooter; its best that you download both demos of Legions and the Original arcade game onto your hard drive and personally decide which game you like better. In this case I would've chosen the original game, but hey, I wouldn't be able to write this review without getting the full version of this game!

 Galaga Legions on XBox Live Arcade for 800 MS Points.

A game I really want to play...

There's one game that I would really love to play with real hardware.

Sheriff was Nintendo's second arcade game in Japan, the first being EVR-Race (pronounced "Ever Race"), a digital version of a mechanical horse racing game. Sheriff was Nintendo's attempt to make a rival to Taito's Space Invaders, clearly Space Invaders was more successful, but as a lot of people still believe that Donkey Kong was the first arcade game that Nintendo made. That's true for the USA, DK was the first arcade game that Nintendo released in America, but EVR-Race and Sheriff were the first two arcade games released in Japan in the seventies.

So...  How do you play Sheriff? Well, that I can tell you, mainly because you can play this game on the GameBoy Advance through WarioWare as an unlockable. But the two versions are different. The GBA game is simpler as you move the Sheriff with the D-pad, and you shoot with the B button. However the Arcade version is more unique, and plays very similar to the likes of Robotron 2084, but there's no second stick.

Not the real control panel for Sheriff, it's a re-build, a very good one that is, and it's a better picture.

On the left, you have your typical either direction joystick, but on the right there's a rotary switch where you twist to change Sheriff's aim, and it can be pushed down like a button to shoot, allowing you to move and aim independently.

It's a huge shame that when you find pictures on the internet of Sheriff (or the pirated version called Bambido) where people have ripped off the knobs off the joystick and rotary switch!

But going back to how to play Sheriff. In typical old school shooter fashion; you have to shoot your enemies, but they're not aliens, they're villains wearing sombreros, OK OK I know I tried to avoid using the word Mexican, but remember, you don't have to be Mexican to wear a sombrero kids! These villains have kidnapped your fair lady, Priscilla, and you've been surrounded inside a bar as the sombrero cladded gangsters shoot at you through the windows. You can shoot through the windows yourself, though you (or the gangsters) can shoot down parts of the wall making it easier to shoot through. Every so often a gangster might hop inside the bar and go "mano-a-mano" against you for some point blanc shooting. One thing in this game that is very comparable to Space Invaders is that an eagle will fly over the north of the bar, if you shoot it you earn bonus points, the you score more points if you shoot it just as it enters the screen. You go to the next screen each time you clear the Sombrero Mob, and you rescue Priscilla after every 3 screens, where she doubles your total score and have a chance on earning a new life.

The cool thing I like about Sheriff is that it has a background tune to it. Sure it might not be as epic as the Space Invader march tune, but it's still pretty entertaining.

So yeah, I would love to play this game if I ever find one. Though I have found a forum using Google of a German guy who found a Sheriff arcade machine...

...and again, people keep pulling off those damn knobs!!! At least it's in pretty good condition.

For the Love of Galaga!

I'll admit, I do love a good shooting game, and by shooting game I don't mean First person shooter! I mean a “sh'mup”, a genre where you're likely to control a space ship and you shoot things with lasers. Oh yeah... Now, I had experience with Space Invaders, as I had it on a Arcade compilation on a tape for the Commodore 64. Later on in my 16-bit days I played a lot of Super RType on my friend's SNES, a little later on I found a love for Gradius on a Famiclone that my cousin once got for Christmas. Then there's Ikaruga on the Gamecube and so on... But there's one “Sh'mup” that really gets the love from me.

Galaga...

My love for Galaga started when I was about eleven or twelve years old in the mid 90s when I went on holiday with my Mother to Hunstanton. Rather than doing the typical Searles Holiday Camp vacation. We stayed at a rather nice little Bed and Breakfast with an indoor swimming pool inside! Mind you the indoor swimming pool was the size of two large hot tubs, but it was still impressive that they crammed a swimming pool in a small Bed & Breakfast. But as I walked into the Bed & Breakfast, I saw an arcade machine that was turned off, it was still attached to the wall socket, but it was switched off; I walk up to it, flicked the switch on the wall socket, and saw a game boot it, it was Galaxian, and what was better, it was set to free play!

I loved the game, it was simply an evolution to Space Invaders that I would play on my Commodore 64. The aliens would swoop down and try to kill you by either shooting lasers at you or crashing into you. Plus the ship actually displays when a laser is ready to shoot as you can see the readied laser as a yellow line on the top on your space ship.

Now, I can't remember when or how I feel in love with Galaxian's sequel, Galaga, but from what I remember, it was a compilation pack, so possibly Namco Museum, or another Namco collection, but at tghe time I was hunting for Galaxian, but I couldn't find it, but I found Galaga, and I was telling myself "I don't want Galaga, I want Galaxian!". But I played Galaga anyway, and then said to myself "Hell yeah! This is actually better!". What made this better than it's predecessor, were the new ways the enemies would swoop down to attack, and the enemy could steal your spaceship and lose a life. 

But that's where the game gets interesting, because you can claim the ship back and join the two Spaceships together to get...

Double Ship! Hell yeah!!!!!

Once you get yourself the double ship, you are able to shot two lasers at once, which is essential to perfecting the game's Bonus levels and clearing levels quicker. This gameplay mechanic itself I believe was what started the idea of "Power ups make you take more hits". Without this Gameplay mechanic, Mario might lose a life on a single hit, and no mushrooms to make him bigger to take a hit before loosing a life. This for sure is an evolution not just to Sh'mups, but to gaming itself.

So here's a Salute to you Galaga!

Before I end this though, let me go over a few sequels to Galaxian/Galaga series...

Galaga '88/'90

Pretty much a remake of the Original Galaga, made in Japan in 1988, and the US in 1990. Pretty much it adds new gameplay mechanics such as exploding enemies, where it's blast radius can kill other enemies and there's an item you can collect where you can skip levels or find new levels not seen in a typical play-through. There's a TurboGrafx version of this game that is really good, and it's worth getting if you have one, otherwise it's available on the Wii Virtual Console for 600 Nintendo Points.

Galaxian 3

Galaxian 3 is a behemoth of a machine it's the size of a couple of office cubicles put together and supports 6 players in their own chair. There's a huge screen inside, and each player controls a coloured cross-hair where you play a "one rails" shooting game where the SpaceShip would move by itself and each player plays as the guns. I've never played this, but I have seen one in the wild when I was about 10 years old and I was outside of Disney Land Paris, and one of these were outside an arcade with a gyroscopic After Burner near the door. I honestly can't imagine how much it would cost to play one of these, or even how much the arcade paid for it. But being close to Disney Land Paris, I can only imagine they did make money from it with all the kids visiting the theme park!

GaPlus/Galaga3

A bit of an oddity this one, this is Galaga game that aloud you to move in 8 directions rather than the traditional 2 directions. The game has graphics that share from both Galaga, and Galaga '90. The new gameplay mechanic in this game was that there's a weapon you can collect that allows you to abduct the aliens, rather than the aliens abducting you, and with your new alien buddies, they would act as this games double ship, however you can collect up to six aliens, meaning you had the chance to shoot a whopping seven lasers at once! However you have a bigger chance of being hit as movement becomes limited. Some Arcade cabinets in the US replaces it's "GaPlus" name for "Galaga 3". You can download this onto the Wii for 500 Nintendo Points (600 Points in  the US) from the Wii Shop Channel.

Galaga Legions/LegionsDX

The Latest in the Galaga series, released on the 360 Market Place, and the PlayStation Network Store. Galaga Legion is a bit of a black sheep, as it doesn't really follow the original Galaga gameplay mechanics too well. Rather it's more akin to GaPlus, but includes the ability to place satellite guns on the play field in one of four directions, up, down, left and right with the right analogue stick. These will auto fire until you press the bumper buttons to bring them back to the ship. Typically a legion of aliens will have one big alien, and shooting the big alien will cause the smaller aliens with it to die with the bigger alien. In similar vein to GaPlus, a black hole can be collected to suck up aliens, and use them as extra fire power against the alien hordes. Galaga Legions DX was released a year after, and plays a bit more like a twin shooter such as Robotron 2084 and Geometry Wars.

What made this Nintendo fan-boy broaden his horizons?

As a kid in the nineties, Super Mario was my hero, and Nintendo is where you played Mario games. My first experience with Sega and Sonic wasn't a great one as I thought it was too fast and too hard for my 7 year old mind. So through out the nineties I was a big supporter and fan of Nintendo, disliking Sega, and eventually disliking Sony due to the PlayStation's “slow” loading discs. But by the turn of the Millennium, my tastes in video games were going to grow a lot, but how did this once Nintendo Fan boy buy himself a PlayStation in 2001 you ask?!

Dance Dance Revolution and Dancing Stage...

Yup, it's a little embarrassing to admit it, but when I went to the Millennium Dome in London back in 1999, there was a tiny arcade inside, and one of the few machines inside, with a couple of Pinball machines and crane games was a Dancing Stage. For those outside Europe, Dancing Stage was the name to Dance Dance Revolution in Europe, no idea why, hunting on Google and Wikipedia didn't give any results either, but regardless to the name change, it was the same game by Konami with a couple of licensed tracks thrown in. I popped in a £1 coin and began to play the game. As to anyone playing a dance machine for the first time, I was terrible at it, but at least I got to my third and final round before failing. There was a lady in this tiny booth watching me play the game. And when I had finished she walked out and pulled out a plush toy from one of the crane games and had told me that I was the only person who had gotten to the third round since the Millennium Dome was opened. I was kinda chuffed, accepted the toy, and began to think on how to could get that game home.

That's where it struck me. The only Nintendo versions of Dancing Stage and Dance Dance Revolution were only available in Japan, there was a version on Game Boy Color that came with a mini platform you mounted on top on the portable as you make your fingers do the dancing. I thought that was pretty silly (I say that when most people think stomping your feat on pink and blue glass panels is silly!), there was an actual version of DDR on the N64 in Japan, but it was the Disney Rave Mix, Disney “Rave” Mix? I'd hate to see what happens to Mickey when dropping Es at a rave. In the mean while, I was waiting to go on holiday to the coast to scour the piers and arcades for actual Dance Machines. The waiting and hoping that a version of DDR and Dancing Stage could appear on the N64, Dancing Stage Euro Mix got released in 2001 for the PlayStation. At that point I thought to myself, I can't play DDR on the N64, I gotta go and get myself one of those “Slow Loading” PlayStations. At the time the PS2 was reaching it's first year in Europe, and I didn't care for it then, I wanted to see how cheap I could get a PlayStation 1 just so I could get my DDR fix. Before Christmas of 2001, I managed to buy an original PlayStation 1, not the PSOne, from a bloke at a Market/Car Boot sale for £40 (I still regret paying that price for a second-hand PlayStation) and got myself a copy of Dancing Stage Euro Mix and a dance mat from GAME. So I got what I wanted, a system that I got my DDR fix from. But as time slowly moved on, I would return to the same car boot sale for other PlayStation games that might grab my interest.

Someone bought this for £94.90!? Ouch...

Going with the Rhythm game theme, Europe got Beat Mania, think DJ Hero before DJ Hero existed, and was made by Konami, the same people who made Dancing Stage and DDR. It was a pack that came with a poorly made turn table controller that broke on me. I handed it back to the bloke at the car boot and demanded a refund, but he refused; at around the same time I noticed that GAME were selling off copies of Beat Mania to clear space in their warehouses for a fiver a piece, I bought one, then handed over the one I bought from the Car Boot Sale inside the box that I got from GAME to get my money back.

And into more Rhythm Games, I got a copy of Vib Ribbon. Now this is an interesting game as it never got a US release. Developed by Nana Onsha, the same team behind Parappa the Rapper. Vib Ribbon was a simple game whereby you jump over obstacles of different shapes generated from the sound being made from your music CDs. There are 8 different obstacles, each obstacle had to be jumped over in a different way by pressing a different button on the PlayStation controller; some required you to press two buttons at once. Think of this game like a Canabalt or Temple Run; you play as a wire frame bunny rabbit character who is running to the right (or the left depending on the camera angle) and you jump over holes and walls, it's a rhythm version of an endless runner game, except it's not really endless as the level would end at the end of the track.

Something a little different from Rhythm games, Final Fantasy IX. Before I got the PlayStation, I owned the PC version of Final Fantasy VII, and loved the crap out of it. There was a version of Final Fantasy VIII for the PC, but I didn't know where to find a copy, and Final Fantasy IX never had a PC release. But with my own PlayStation, and a WH Smith £10 book voucher, I got myself a copy of Final Fantasy IX. For the time I had it I enjoyed it, though I didn't beat it, and by the time the GameCube came out, I traded it in for a copy of Super Smash Bros Melee at a local small Games Shop that I would eventually hate big time.

After this revelation in gaming, this Nintendo Fan Boy was fan boy no more, my taste in games were broaden, and soon after picked myself up a DreamCast, and used eBay and Car Boot sales to pick up other consoles such as the Master System, a Mega Drive, and later on pick up a TurboGrafx and an Atari 2600.

So yeah, DDR made me like other systems, Let's dance!

Dont ask me why exercising anthropomorphic rabbits and Cotton Eye Joe have in common...  Only Konami knows! lol!