Gabriel

I might pick up Legend of Legacy and/or Stella Glow. I haven't really decided on either yet. Other than that, I haven't seen much of anything of interest to me in some time.

RayStorm

Guncon. Time Crisis

I sometimes miss playing Deathsmiles. I unhooked my 360 a few years ago and even though there are times I'm tempted to hook it up and play something on it, it's just not worth the effort when I could play hundreds of other things. But yeah, if Deathsmiles was on Steam for under $5, I'd pay for it to play it again without having to haul the 360 out of the closet. Other than that. Nah. I don't really care.

It depends on how you define "your own money." In 1983, my great grandmother gave me the money I needed to purchase my Atari 5200. It wasn't like my 2600 and Vic-20 which had preceeded it and gifted to me without me ever seeing how much it cost. She knew I was going to buy the 5200, but there was no real condition on how I used the money which had been given to me. So, it was basically my own money which I used to purchase the 5200. If the definition requires the money not be gifted, and be earned through a job, then that console would be my Sega Genesis. I bought it along with Star Control and Golden Axe in 1992. I almost didn't buy a package with Sonic included, but my best friend talked me into getting one with that pack in game, and I didn't regret it.

I've seen it, but only one time. It was some kind of bump the cart mid-play glitch in my case.

I adore mine. As the PSP RPGs go on sale, I snap them up and put them on my 64G card. It's so nice finally playing these on TV, and so nice to avoid the hassle of the PSP AV cable. I'm not sure what people are complaining about in regard to compatibility. Must have vastly different tastes in games than me, because the only title I've wanted which isn't compatible is Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles.

I luvs me some Ultima 4.

Hmmm. The Shantae image has decent composition. The main character (Shantae, I presume) easily dominates the image and has the dominant color presence. Her sword and the lower arc of her hair nicely frame her. The other characters aren't obtrusive. I don't see any problem with it. It's actually pretty good. The second one is... well it's several books/cases or something tossed haphazardly on a yellow orange fire background. It's not a composed image. So, I don't know what the problem is. Are you complaining random stuff tossed down in a pile is random? The third one is another composition with good focus. the arc of the oriental dragon, the flow of the girl's cape, the wing of the western dragon, the shield, it all draws attention to the lady who is central to the image. She also stands out in the image because of her color composition, with the other humanoid characters of mostly muted shades to diminish their focus. Another perfectly fine image. The next one is just a bunch of poorly drawn shit tossed on a page. Sonic looks particularly bad. It's definitely of the school of thought of throwing a bunch of shit on the page and hoping something sticks. It's the only one of these which strike me as matching your description of epileptic nightmare. Even for the style of image it is, it's just bad. Finally there's the last one. I'd just characterize this one as a poor image. It seems to be going for a pseudo-caricature style. But it does at least have a concept behind it, even if I think it's poorly executed.

Everyone please observe a moment of silence, because my beloved Radica Space Invaders Plug n Play died today. I sat down to play some Phoenix today, and it wouldn't power up. This passing was most unexpected, although it's sound did have a lot of abnormal buzz yesterday. This plug n play introduced me to Colony 7, which was a game I was previously completely unaware of. It also introduced me to Lunar Rescue, another fun game. Mostly though, I played Phoenix on it, and enjoyed many hours of fun fighting alien birds. My Space Invaders plug n play will be missed, and is survived by a Super Pac Man plug n play which is still currently in service. I always kind of figured this plug n play was a NES on a chip. Does anyone know if there is an NES Phoenix port?

Thanks for the tip. Jeanne d'Arc didn't show up in the Deals section in the store on the PS3. I had been waiting for it to go on sale again to buy for my PSTV. If not for the tip, I would have missed it.

Not really interested at this point in time.

Let's be absolutely clear what this guy is saying. Here's a key quote: Just so there is no miscommunication, here is the implied sexual reward for males to ogle over and fantasise about. This is what Tom Pitt finds objectionable and implies that his heroine finds objectionable. That's it. The crude graphic just stands there and waves at the player. Let that sink in. This is the type of content these people find sexually aggressive and offensive. There is literaly no bar so low that their sense of offense can't limbo under it. I won't even get into the fact that these people have to dredge up completely irrelevant games from 30+ years ago in the form of Custer's Revenge which were sold under the counter to adults only and then try to paint the picture that they were mainstream titles with broad acceptance in the industry. Of course, they resort to these arguments because they are the adolescents they rail against. Won't we please think of Anita Sarkeesian?? This plaintive cry is the new version of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHmvkRoEowc But according to the wisdom of Tom Pitt, I'm in denial. Someone exercising critical thinking skills and dismissing these people's arguments for the nonsense that they are is in denial. Let me know when an adult comes into the room to talk.

It's clearly meant to show off the water effects. Yep. Water effects. ... WTF did I just watch?

I bought Forgotten Realms Pack 2. This is the 4th or 5th time I've bought these games. I have the individual, original releases. I have the Forgotten Realms Collection from Interplay. I have the GameFest packs. And I've probably picked up at least one or two partial collection packs which I no longer have. $10 for all these is a no brainer. Not having to mess with configuring DOSbox is icing on the cake. And not having to hunt down hacked versions to bypass the code wheel stuff is very nice too. Every time I've tried to get these games working in DOSbox, combat always runs at transwarp speed no matter what I do. These versions don't have that problem (or at least Pool of Radiance doesn't). Now if they could just do a pack with the three Dragonlance installments.

Ugh.

Thanks.

Has anyone ever hacked Balloon Fight into a Joust sequel? I'm not a fan of the official Joust 2, but I think Balloon Fight with a Joust reskin would be pretty good.

I don't know. Either I'm going to drop playing Lost Dimension and forget about it for a long time, or it's going to become a classic with me. I honestly don't know which. In many ways, I enjoyed Hyperdevotion Noire more. HN's battles were far more fun. Battles in Lost Dimension really only revolve around making sure everyone is in range of the same target so Assist Attacks can trigger. Lost Dimension's battle scenarios aren't so much interesting as they're just arbitrary, with difficulty in most fights coming from how the party is mandatorily split up. Combat isn't bad, but it is kinda dull. A huge chunk of Lost Dimension revolves around finding the traitor. Every few battles (each floor) you have to go into a room and vote someone out of the game Survivor style. Every floor there are three potential traitors. You have to identify these three and then pick the real traitor from among them. This plays out like the board game Mastermind. Of course, all the other characters vote too, and they may vote to remove you from the game. So you have to maintain relationships, as well as make sure others like the non-traitors and dislike the traitor enough to vote for the right person at the end of the floor. The result is that I find myself constantly doing relationship grinding to lower or increase characters preference for one another. The characters are just as two dimensional in their personalities as their character portraits. Mana is my favorite because she's obsessed with cuteness, speaks in a fake British accent, and is "off" in an entertaining way to me. Whiny bitch Marco irritated the holy shit out of me and I was so happy when he turned out to be a traitor and I could have him killed. George Jackman also made me hate him, but fortunately on the first playthrough it's pre-scripted for him to be the first traitor and be erased. Nearly all the other characters are just bland, uninteresting, and borderline irritating. It's pointless to bother listening to what they say, as none of it has anything to do with whether they're a traitor or not. The characters all have different abilities, but only a couple of them add anything special to the course of battle. Zenji and his Mimic/Link abilities is probably the most innovative character, but the battles are so basic and his abilities require so much work that it's not really worth the effort to learn to use him effectively. Agito is a personal favorite, because his special ability is teleporting with the exact same effect as Nightcrawler from the X-Men. Not only that but he has a fantastic evade, decent defense, does ludicrous amounts of damage, and he's stupidly easy to get good relationship levels with everyone thus improving Assist Attacks. He is just basic brute force brokenly awesome. If I keep playing it's going to suck if he goes traitor. Anyway, the problem is that most of the game feels like it's only there to service the Mastermind/Find the Traitor mini game. It makes everything feel like busywork. I've often found myself completely disinterested in playing battles, and only doing so because I could make some progress on identifying the traitor. The story seems OK or at least servicable so far. One of the main problems is that all the other characters talk, and it's one of those games where the writers feel that every conversation exchange has to involve all the characters. The biggest problem is that all the other characters are utterly irrelevant. Since the traitors are random and any and all of the other characters can be eliminated from the game, they can't really be integral to the main story. The result is there is this semi-interesting plot going on between the main character and the villain, and then there's this noise of all of the other characters babbling about nothing important at all. Some things are nice. For instance, you can look at an upcoming battlefield and enemy list before choosing a party and committing to that battle. That may not sound like much, but I just got done with Hyperdevotion Noire, and it didn't offer that basic perk. Another nice game feature which proves the designers intended people to play and enjoy this thing is when you Erase someone in the voting chamber, they turn into a piece of equipment which can be used to access their special abilities. Also, when someone gets Erased, you get all their equipment instead of it being Erased with them. Something I don't like is that some missions are level adjusted based on the lead character's level. I guess I should be happy that all battles aren't like this, but I really dislike it when tactical RPGs do this. If I have to grind I want to see a battle benefit for it, not be stymied by level adjusted encounters. I guess that's more than enough of a rant. I actually really want to like this game, but I feel so mixed on it right now.

Playing Lost Dimension. Not sure what I think of it.

Why so? For me, TF4 (Lightening Force) simply has better visuals and music. I absolutely love the stage 8 theme, and have been known to pop in the cart just to listen to the music. The gameplay just feels more satisfying to me as well, and the bosses and environments seem cooler. In the interest of full disclosure though, I was exposed to TF4 about 15 years before I ever got a glimpse of TF3. TF3 really has that mid/early Genesis title look, and it's hard for me to go back after how polished TF4 is.

I didn't vote, but right now I don't have a PS2 hooked up, but I do keep my PS3 hooked up and semi-regularly play something. Make of that what you will.