Vacation roundup

by belajjal on Monday, July 13th, 2009 at 08:24 - Comments: 0

Only 2 weeks of vacation this summer. Sucks! But I managed to nail the "best" (read hottest) weeks of the summer so far but the problem is that I'm not at all comfortable with 30+ degrees Celsius in the shadow.

First few days was spent in a constant drunk state (I still managed to finish Luigi's Mansion) in my home town and then we went to the west coast for a few days. While my wife was sunbathing and sipping on a drink I sat in the shadow playing games on my laptop. I finished Zelda 2 (see review below) in one go before going out for beer in the evening. We went back home and I was assigned to play Metal Gear Solid next. The goal is to play MGS4 but I wanted to refresh my memory of the series first and I hadn't played the GameCube remake. I started playing but real life events stopped me from continuing.

A few days went by with BBQs and beers before we took the train to visit my mom for a few days. Weather was still hot as hell so I stayed away from the sun most of the time. This gave me an opportunity to play some more games. After a routine playthrough of Killer Instinct I needed a more solid challenge and found Donkey Kong Country that I hadn't played since the 90's. I remember the biggest video game magazine in Sweden gave it 100/100 (which they now see as their biggest mistake ever). I guess they were simply blinded by the graphics and flow of the game, nothing on the SNES is even close. Everyone at E3 '93 were shocked and the hype was incredible. The game is still fine but it's no Super Mario World. I finished it in 3 hours with a 15 year old memory of the game. I know there are bonus rooms that you need to search for but still... Were games this easy back in the days or did you just suck? Now someone probably says: "Yeah right, go play Ghost 'n' Goblins or Ninja Gaiden etc" and they are of course right but still, I've played many of my childhood favorites as an adult and I'm really let down on how easy and short they are when I remember spending several months completing games like Zelda.

Vacation over and back to reality. A week passes and I try to find time to play MGS. I find a few hours here and there and finally finish it on Friday night. The game is basically the same as the original but with completely new cut scenes (apparently done by the guy who did Versus, which shows). The mechanics of MGS2 are also applied, which includes FPS mode and some other things. This makes for a somewhat new experience as the game is so much easier with these features and the feel of the game is "Americanized". I remember the original to have a Japanese feeling but that is almost gone. Still a good game but I prefer the original.

Saturday morning I was zapping through Xbox Live's arcade games and found Gunstar Heroes. I have read many good things about this old Mega Drive game form shmup master Treasure but never got around to play it. 400 MS points was cheap enough so I went for it. The game is basically Metal Slug but faster. Attention to detail is almost as good and I had a blast playing it. It's not close to as difficult as Metal Slug but it's not created as a penny eating arcade game. A few hours and 200 achievement points later I ask myself why I hadn't played this before.

I struggled for a while to get MGS3 to work on PCSX2 emulator (My PS3 doesn't eat PS2 games and I have my PS2 lent out). I got it to work fine but some areas caused massive slowdowns so I gave it up. On the forums people recommended to adjust the camera to stear away from these areas (mainly flowing grass) but I want to play it the proper way. I was then assigned to play Silent Hill 1 which works perfectly in ePSXe with a really great graphic improvement. A few hours in and it's almost as scary as I remembered it but more on that later...

tags: metal gear solid donkey kong country gunstar heroes vacation