Todays game haul!

Got some more packages in the post today, one of which was a redelivary. I opened a case for the game on ebay, but it turns out that it required a signature, and said that a card was left.There is a sign on the door for such occasions, the postman was obviously retarded as he ignored the sign, and he didn't even leave a card at all; so the text on the royal mail website was a complete lie. A complaint is going through for this, as this is not the first time (or even the first complaint) about cards not being left.

Here is what I got today!

 'Shox' is an interesting racing game under the 'EA Sports big' label. This game actually surprised me in that case; as it is actually really good! This is an arcade rally racing game, with offical cars and some really nice looking tracks. You start off with a free choice of your first car, and from then on you have to earn money to buy more cars. There are about four sets of races and with in each of those sets you have tracks to complete.

An interesting feature of this game is with in the courses you have 'shox zones' in which you have to get from the start of the zone to the end of it and then you are graded from bronze to silver to gold depending on the time you take. This earns you extra money as well as other bonuses if you get all golds.

The game is quite challenging with the AI always on your arse all the way through the race. It is unfortunate that some of the AI cheat the game phsyics a bit in order to get around the track which makes it a little unfair to the player.

In order to unlock the other sets of races, you need to earn enough in order to afford to pay for a car type to use. That is all, you don't have to come first in al lthe previous sets of races, you just need the money to buy the cars.

I really enjoyed this game, but it does have its flaws. The AI isn't flawed par-say, but it is a bit of a bugger. There is a gambling system in the game in which you use to buy cars cheaper than buying them out right. You gamble a set amount on the car, then you have to race that car in a 1-2-1 race; beating it gets you the car. The flaw though? that car gets a head start and is away with the clouds before you even know what is going on, you don't really have a chance at all. So you loose your money and you are buggered. It really makes me wonder what sorts of morons come up with these ideas in games companies.

I give this game 4 out of 5.


'Gumball 3000' is a racing from A to B through various courses through traffic. Not a great car selection at the begining, AI is ok I suppose, controls are ok-ish, but the game isn't fun! kind of boring, and the time limit makes it next to impossible to get any where.

I recommend starting with the Porsche or anything that is not the hummer, as it is seriously slow and will not win you anything. Getting busted doesn't stop the clock so makes it even more annoying. Bah.

2 out of 5!


'Motor Mayhem' is a vehicular combat game, in the same vain as the 'Twisted metal' series. There are various modes, a main story type mode, quick battle etc etc. An interesting selection of characers/vehicles to choose from; all looking like a cross between something from 'mad max' and 'hot wheels' cars.

Not a huge selection of levels to choose from, but about average for this sort of game. Small, medium and large levels to choose from with varing terrain types. From jungles, to aircraft carriers, to temples; it is quite an interesting selection.You then choose what opponants to face, choose weapons and kill limits and things and off you go. I recomend changing the controller type to 4 as the default setting has the accelearation on the up left stick which is really not natural at all.

I like the game, it is very similar to 'twisted metal', vehicles are easy to steer, plenty of weapon pickups and such. Fun!

4 out of 5!


'Star Wars Racer: Revenge' is the PlayStation 2 version of the Dreamcast and Nintendo 64 game; 'pod racer'. Similar sort of thing to 'wipeout' hover vehicles racing around futuristic courses, on other planets.

This is of course based on the horrible 'Star Wars: Episode 1' movie, which unfortunatly I sat through. I am not a Star Wars fan at all, I consider the original ones boring, I could never get into the world of it all. I do however like some of the games, such as this one.

You race, earn, and use your earnings to upgrade your pods. Couldn't be more simpler than that really. Various folks to choose from, from the annoying little turd Skywalker, to a bunch of alien guys.

It's fast, it's furious; and all without Vin Diesel. Now even though the PS2 is actually less powerful than the Dreamcast; this version seems to look better. This could be due to the fact I am using a HD componant cable on the PS2 though, and just a scart on the Dreamcast.

Watch out though, if you hit too much stuff and your pod blows up, the race is over!

A classic game in my books! I give it 4 out of 5!


'Wipeout pure' - The wipeout games are the daddies of all anti gravity type racing games, game series developed in Liverpool from the days of the playstation/sega saturn to last year when Sony closed the game studio down. Now why they did this stupid thing I do not know.

Sony should not have been allowed to buy the license in the first place; the wipeout series used to be cross platform, Sega Saturn, Playstation, Nintendo 64 and the PC where all given the greatness that is wipeout. That is until Sony baught the licence from the dead Psygnosis game studio. Then games made after only came out of sony consoles. Then they killed it off. Bastards.

Anyway, you race your craft around courses; shoot at your opponents, and kick some ass. That is all really, fun stuff.

This game uses the loyalty points system, where if you keep using the same craft, you earn points for using it, earn more for winning, and unlock stuff. Not that great of a system, but it's there.

This one is quite challenging, so make use of everything! get used to those air brake controls, you're gonna need em.



This game was also released on the Playstation 2 (which I also have in the collection).

4 out of 5!

Game collection and today's haul

Lately I have been on a game collecting kick, adding playstation 1 and 2 games to my collection and some PSP titles. This is mostly going ok, but of course with the state of the games I got from one seller; you really have to wonder what is wrong with people.

I was looking for 'Wipeout 2097' for the playstation, and when game hunting, I like to go for bundles with a few games that I like in there. Included in the auction was 'Wipeout 2097', 'Destruction derby' and the first 'Gran Turismo'. I only wanted the first two games, and for a bout a fiver it ended up being a good deal... or so I thought.

The posty arrived with my games and excitedly I opened the package. Now a bit of background; some playstation games came in slightly smaller cases with a brown trim, with the inserts also being a little smaller. 'Destruction Derby' is one of those titles to have come in one of these cases.

The previous owner must have been a total idiot, they swapped the cases along with inserts for 'Destruction Derby' and 'Wipeout 2097', the inserts for wipeout where ripped and folded for them to fit in the smaller cover, and the front insert for derby is obviously too small to correctly fit into the larger cover. The rear insert for derby is also a complete mess, it has been cut in half for some reason.

This sort of shit seems to be common place for PS1 games, why do people treat stuff like this? seriously, what the fack? Have been more lucky with PS2 games, they are usually in good condition (well apart from 'Star Wars Racer' which was missing the disc. Amazon seller in this case, got a refund so now have a useless empty case and book!).

The only game that was in perfect condition was 'Gran turismo'. I REALLY do not care for that game series at all. Oh well.

Today's haul is pretty good, take a look:

I have been wanting to replace my 'backups' of various games from various systems, and the PS1 is a good place to start. Some of my favorites can be obtained cheaply, but there are some (like castlevania) that are WAY too expensive to bother getting hold of.

The 'Moto Racer' games (apart from the third one) have always been my favorite motor bike games, they are fun to play, and have nice easy controls. These days, bike games are all simulation ones with hard to use controls, not fun at all. The first one offers a modest selection of bikes and tracks, both road and dirt bikes, and best of all: two player split screen (not like anti-social online gaming). The second one adds tonnes of tracks, nice rock sound track and a track creator mode! Yes you can create your own tracks if you grow tired of the ones on offer in the game. (I also have the PC versions of these!)

The 'Need for Speed' series dates way back to the days when 32 bit gaming was just starting to get popular. There was a need (hah) for 3d games, and EA took the initiative and brought us the first need for speed game. It was obviously popular, the games series is still around today. Unfortunately EA dragged it through the mud and it's now crap. The best of the games for me, are the playstation ones. 'Need for speed' offers a good balance of simulation and arcade racing, with good controls. A nice selection of licensed cars, and some nice locations to race on. Again, best of all is the split screen feature! me and my bud had LOADS of fun on this back in the days, along with wacky cheat codes that let you play as the traffic. Yey for wrongly scaled school buses!

'Max power racing' is an odd one. Not because of the game itself, but because of the titles. This game was actually released twice, on the same console, but under two different names. wikepedia states that 'C3 Racing' (the original title) was released as 'Max power Racing' in the UK to tie in with the magazine. However, the game did come out in Europe (in English) under the original title and did end up on UK shelves. Crazy eh? This game is a decent arcade racer, good selection of cars and tracks, and another one that is loads of fun playing split screen with yer mates.

When I had my first Playstation years ago, to save cash and whatnot my father helped me out and took my system to a guy to have it 'chipped'. This allowed backups to be used, and moral BS aside, it allowed me to have a nice selection of games. Some guys in the town centre used to sell them on street corners for £5 each. Those game can just be downloaded these days of course, but I am buying up originals.

It is all quite nostalgic, and most of the games are still fun to play today; but do look a bit crap on the HD big screen TV. The thing that makes the 'Moto Racer' games even more for me is the fact that my late father (who was not a gamer) also enjoyed them, and I did play them with him some.


Even under all the circumstances, my father did try his best to keep his kids happy, and without him I would not be a gamer today.

I will keep up the blog with game hauls, figure hauls and all of that stuff! To finish off, here is the Playstation shelf (PS1 and PSP on top, then PS2 and bottom more PS2 and PS3)

Cotton-Eye Joe

Gotta love the creativeness of people on 4chan. This one had me in tears (of laughter)

>Be 21
>Girlfriend’s 19
>Been dating for months now
>This guy named Joe comes out of fucking nowhere into my life
>He’s my new coworker at my company
>Find out he has no money, no place of residence.
>Moved here for the job and can no longer afford his hotel
>Decide to open up to him
>Keep him in my apartment for weeks
>Bro is pretty cool
>We play the vidya, drinks beers, watch football
>This continues for months
>Afterwards, find out girlfriend is pregnant
>By all tradition, I have to marry her now.
>One night, eating out at dinner with wife
>Joe stayed late at the office for some overtime
>I pop the question to my wife
>She admits she was raped by Joe and the baby isn’t mine
>She isn’t ready to make a commitment after being violated
>Go home in a fucking rage.
>Throw out all Joe’s shit
>Gonna fucking kill Joe when he gets home.
>Joe gets home about 1 a.m.
>As soon as he opens the door, I fucking punch him in his bastard face
>Eye swells up like a boll of cotton
>He swings at me
>Dodge and sweep his leg
>He falls down
>In a giant fucking rage now
>Go to my room, grab my handgun out of my drawer
>Go back to confront Joe
>Joe jumps in his car and fucking hightails it out of there
>I haven’t seen or heard from him since
>On the phone a month later with my brother
>He finally asks why I’ve been so depressed
>I tell him that if it hadn’t been for cotton-eye Joe
>I’d been married a long time ago
>Where did you come from, where did you go—
>Where did you come from, Cotton-Eye Joe?

Piracy is big business

There has been a lot of buzz in the media these past few years about piracy on the internet. There are still some people that believe everything the media tells them, and you see them posting stuff on forums like "all pirates are dirty thieves!" and that sort of thing.

It's a shame they wonder around with their eyes closed, and more than likely they themselves benefit from piracy. Allot of technical achievements have come about because of pirates. Oh yes, both in hardware and in software. The big companies that claim to be losing millions are actually making millions due to these advancements made because of pirates. Let's take a look at a couple of these things:

Digital music formats: The internet was getting more popular, people where downloading things and a music format were needed. The MP3 format came a long which solved the problem of large file sizes while retaining decent enough audio quality. From this came many advancements in audio codecs, audio formats, and hardware to play them on.

Apple somewhat legitimised digital music downloads with iTunes, while also developing the iPod which made them millions of dollars. Of course they were not the first company to make an MP3 player, but they made it popular and so the market grew and grew. Millions of pounds a year is being made from hardware that plays digital music files which are mostly obtained illegally.

So when Sony claims it loses millions because of music pirates: complete bull shit. The Sony walkman is still a popular brand today; they have a HUGE range of portable digital audio players.

Video file formats: pretty much the same thing as audio formats. People wanted to download videos, movies and such. Divx/Xvid took care of this bit. Commercial DVD players support this format, as well as PVRs using the format to record shows from the TV. Advancements where made, better compression, higher quality, higher resolutions in small manageable file sizes. In comes the creation of X/H.264. The Blu-ray format is HEAVLY influenced  by the h.264 codec. Half the work was done for Sony when they joined other big companies to create the Blu-ray format. Work done because of pirates. How much money is made off this format in both hardware and disc sales? BILLIONS.

There is also a big market now for media players that connect to your TV that play all these formats used by pirates. TVs made by the big brand names such as Sony and Samsung also play these formats.

Let’s look at computer hardware, especially storage: hard drives. These of course used to store many types of files, work, media etc. Storage size gets bigger each year; I think to date the biggest commercial hard drive is 4TB. The bigger sizes seem to be the most popular. Why so big though? Do family photographs really take up that much space? No, they don't. That's right; people are using them for music and video. I wonder how much money is being made from sales of these every year.

Piracy is big business and big business is piracy. Welcome to the internet.

Internet Grave Yard

I received an email from Google today on my other, older Google account asking me to move my old blogger blog onto the new system and link it to a Google account. Here is me thinking it's my old 'hobby log' (I had a page about my figure buyings and stuff, but I ran out of money at the time and never got back to it after that!)

To my surprise though, its an older blog from all the way back in 2003 with just two posts. I think quite possibly it was the first time I signed up and used a blog and obviously got bored of it rather quickly.

I've now added it to this account, I might just delete it; but for now as it stands http://ubertron.blogspot.co.uk/ here it is. What a tool the old me was LOL.

Popularity isn't always a good thing

You can always tell in the computer world what the most popular device or what the most popular software is just by the amount of viruses/malicious files that crop up. For example, windows isn't any less secure than Linux or mac; despite what nerds claim.

It's the fact that the more users there are,  the more people to steal credit information, to spam and to generally piss off. And when there is a will, there is ALWAYS a way.

It probably doesn't need to be said, but Android clearly has more users than iPhone's IOS, quite a few malicious files are cropping up taking credit off of phones and stealing personal data. Not so musch on IOS.

You could say though that IOS is more secure, just by the fact that you are not allowed to do anything with it other than what apple tell you. With android though you can add any software you want as long as you select the option to do so.

Secured or not, people have to be care full of the things they install on computers or phones.

As for windows phone, never used one so I don't know much about them. But again: it won't be any less secure than Android or IOS. If it ever did become the dominant product in smart phones you would see allot of malicious start to appear.

Still plodding along

Howdy folks! It has indeed been a while since my last post. Not really been that much to talk about really. Not done any videos (apart from the one today showing a glitch in castle miner, but that was made more for the dev guy). Not gotten any new retro stuff lately; nothing has taken my fancy really. Just been playing on my Nintendo Wii quite a bit.... lets talk about that plus some other random things.

Wii Stuff:
Recently I softmodded my Nintendo Wii. Took me a while to do, some trial and error and lots of googling. I ended up using an exploit that loads up via your emails page (called letter bomb). In order of what took place: download exploit (you need to enter your Wii mac code and you hit download. mac code so the letter will show up). Put it on an SD card, load it up, install Boot Mii and the homebrew channel. You then use the homebrew channel to install custom files so you can then run various things. (I have perfected this now, I did this for a friend and had him up and running within the hour).

With the Wii hacked, I now have my USB games hard drive hooked up to my Wii and on it is a folder full of Wii games. The USB loader on the Wii reads NTFS formatted drives so I didn't have to buy a new hard drive just for Wii games. I now have over 100 games.... I'll talk about some of my faves some other day. You can also download and install stuff you would buy through the Wii shop channel like N64 games, WiiWare games etc.

Xbox 360 Stuff:
One of my favorite Sega Saturn games is now available to buy on Xbox live: Guardian Heroes. Made by Treasure, published by SEGA. This game is sort of like streets of rage/golden axe scrolling beat-em-up. Good fun! has a graphics filter too (optional!) that will make it look less blocky. Makes it look decent IMO.

Been playing on castle miner a bit, very similar to fortress craft. You build stuff from blocks in your own world etc. Both have their pros and cons, fortress craft has only one save but on castle miner you can have as many saves as you want so you can make more than one world. Castle miner also has a choice of different types of worlds to build on! has standard, coastal, desert, etc. Good stuff! also has more types of block design to choose from where as in comparison: fortress craft has very little. Although on fortress craft you can make your own block and whatnot sooo..... yes good points and bad points of both.

Some up and coming games for Xbox 360 that I am looking forward too, biggest being Sonic Generations! combines classic sonic game play from the megadrive days, with sonic colours type gameplay from... these days. Levels are re made ones from previous sonic games, from the meegadrive era, dreamcast era, and modern era. You can choose to play as classic sonic or modern sonic and you get two completely different game play styles! so each level really is doubled. Demo is out on XBL, both sonic play styles are damn smooth. With all the screw ups SEGA have made with sonic over the past 10 years, this game really is a nice surprise.

And yet more SEGA goodness this year with Daytona USA on the way! FINALLY this game gets the home port it deserves. The Saturn version was good, but graphically not anywhere near as good as the arcade version at the time. The dreamcast version was ok, controls seemed a bit iffy though. But now we get the original one in HD. Brill!

Movie stuffs:
Saw the animated movie adaptation of the CLASSIC Batman: year one graphic novel, today. The book really is a complete masterpiece. You see in the 1980s DC had to reboot allot of their comics as the storyline continuity was allover the place. This story is about Bruce Wayne becoming the Batman, as well as Jim Gorden (who later on becomes commissioner). Christopher Nolan also based Batman begins on this book.

Bruce Timm is of course behind the animated version, and it turned out decent. The animation style is sort of part CG with the drawing style used in the book. That came out rather well. The story seems to follow the book without making changes. I feel though that they missed something... it just seemed like they rushed over some of the details to keep the run time down (or to cut costs I dunno). The guy that voiced Batman was completely lifeless and sort of spoiled it a bit. I know Kevin Conroy is too old to voice a younger Bruce Wayne which is fair enough: but why get someone in that can't voice act? The rest of the cast where fine though. Over all it just lacks the substance that the book has.

With this in mind, I really hope they dont screw up any more classics like the long Halloween and the dark knight returns (which I hear is next on the list)

Other stuff:
I've been buying a few action figures here and there: mostly transformers stuff. I have finally completed my collection of the deluxe range of bumble bees (mold wise anyway) all accept nitro bee, which quite frankly: looks like shit.

I picked up a couple of transformers from the third movie: shockwave and megatron voyager size ones. Nice figs! I sware though with these figures getting smaller, they are taking the piss charging the same prices. Voyager range figures when you bought them at least you where pleased at the size of item you received for the money. But now? that megatron is fucking TINY.

Also keep collecting marvel universe figs, got a nice little collection going. A few include figures from the recent marvel movies. Picked up a Steve Rogers figure when hes not captain America but still doing missions for shield. (i think bucky is captain America at this point or something). Also got a DR Doom figure which is pretty cool.

Got a couple of megabloks mini marvel figs, same as the halo ones really... you can even part swop to make a custom figure. These come in blind packs so you dunno what you are getting. I ended up with a spare iron man, so I did some parts swopping and gave him a new armor while creating a trainee ironman! Yeah it passes the time doesn't it?

Been looking at hama beads on youtube. Interesting things these..... you make designs and iron on top to make em solid. Seen some cool retro pixel art beer coasters! I wanna make some too!

That is all for today, thanks for reading.