Sci-Fi World 2014!

November 4, 2014 by stopXwhispering

The weekend before this last one I went to a sci-fi convention in Helsingborg called Sci-Fi World. This was the first time I ever went to a sci-fi convention, and apparently this year they had more visitors than ever before! :D There were loads of cool things to see and do :) They even had two tables selling retro video games! :D And loads of amazing cosplayers all over the place ^_^

The first thing I encountered was while waiting in line to enter, a Jason Voorhees cosplayer was just standing in a glade, staring at people. So awesomely creepy! :D

Me and my friend NinjaBrite got our picture taken for charity with the emperor and guards ^_^

The first thing I bought were two really awesome illustrations by a guy called Anders Larsson. They pictured Super Mario riding Yoshi and Pikachu ^_^

Then I also found some retro games of course ^_^

There were two sellers there but both of them were quite pricey… I did however get a decent deal when buying a couple of games from one of them. I got 6 NES games: Adventures in the Magic Kingdom, The Hunt for Red October, Ferrari Grand Prix Challenge, High Speed, Addams Family and Wrestlemania Steel Cage. Nothing really exciting, but I didn’t previously have them at least ;D

I also picked up a game for Super Nintendo called King Arthur’s World, I’ve never played it before, but I do recall someone telling me it was good once.. so I bought it ^^

There were LOADS of amazing cosplayers as well! :D Like these baby storm troopers and jawas! :D Adorable!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There were loads of other Star Wars characters there as well :)

My friend NinjaBrite posing with the Silent Hill Nurse and some other guy I did not recognize (?). Damn that nurse is creepy though >-<

And last but definitely not least! I found out that it was my friend Ulrik that was hiding behind this awesome home-made Predator cosplay costume! :D Here’s the Predator with NinjaBrite ^^

Ok, now I’m off to prepare for this last weekends re-cap! Namely, the awesome Gamex/Comic Con convention! IT WAS AMAZING! Stay tuned … ^_^

Updates in the Famicom Collection

December 9, 2012 by stopXwhispering

It’s been a busy week.. first I got this huuuge package of games from Japan:

Sorting, cleaning, organizing and trying them all out has been taking some time. BTW, I really love the japanese store stickers, they are always so easy to just peel off without any effort! :D And from this Ebay seller the stickers even had a corner folded in so it was really easy to grip and rip ^^

Apart from that I have been updating my Famicom Collection, now I am finished with “S” which was the largest letter! 64 games just starting with the letter “S”! I also added a few other new additions like Lot Lot, Mississippi Satsujin Jiken, Madara, Maniac Mansion, Meikyuu Jima (Kickle Cubicle), Ninja Jajamara Kun, Obake no Q Tarou, Paaman, Perfect Bowling, Puzslot, Quinty etc.. You can check them all out in my Famicom Collection >>

Some games I would like to highlight:

Paaman
A really fun platformer, where each boss battle is like a boardgame race to the finish line, even though it’s in japanese it’s quite easy to follow ^_^

Puzslot
A fun puzzle game, kind of like Columns where you have to match colors and shapes falling down in pairs, except here you first have to stop the slot-machine-like pieces so it’s quite random what you will get and if you don’t stop them fast enough you won’t have time to place them correctly.

Salamander (Life Force)
I love this shooter!! Great music, great gameplay ^_^

Kyattou Ninden Teyandee (Samurai Pizza Cats)
Another game I added today. A really fun platformer where you can change between different cat characters that have various abilities :)

Seikima II: Akuma no Gyakushu
An entertaining platformer based on a heavy metal band. It’s really hard though.

Seirei Densetsu Lickle (Little Samson)
A great platformer that I think most people know about already. It looks really great, and sounds really great and it’s fun to play ^_^

Shufflepuck Café
A really interesting air hockey type game. I’ve made a review of it here >>

Splatterhouse Wanpaku Graffiti
A really cute but still brutal platformer! I’ve made a review of it here >>

Star Wars
Gotta love Star Wars ^^ This one is a platformer. It’s really hard!! AVGN mentions it in his Star Wars episode >>

Street Fighter 2010
A really challenging and well made platformer. AVGN has a great review of this one as well, check it out here >>

Super Mario USA
And of course I have added all of my Super Mario games for the Famicom as well. Super Mario USA is the Japanese release of the PAL/NTSC Super Mario Bros 2 :)

Atari 2600 – Pac-Kong, Crystal Castles, Star Wars and more!

September 2, 2012 by stopXwhispering

I recently purchased some Atari 2600 games. I haven’t gotten anything new for that console in a while so finding these made me really happy ^_^
I looked up some gameplay videos of them before buying, and I only bought games I thought looked enjoyable. The games I got were Pac-Kong, Star Wars the Empire Strikes Back, Crystal Castles, Solaris, Kangaroo, Reactor, Gangster Alley and Smurfs. I also took the games out for a little photo shoot today since they are all so pretty that they deserve it! :D

Star Wars the Empire Strikes Back I already had for the C64, but it loads way faster on the Atari ;D The gameplay is basically about taking out the AT-AT Walkers. When you’ve shot them a few times they change color until they eventually vanish.

Crystal Castles is a really fun game. I’ve played the Arcade version a lot on the Game Room Arcade simulation on Xbox 360. The Atari 2600 version has of course much more simple graphics, but the concept is the same and the gameplay is fun! You are a little bear who has to collect all the dots while avoiding enemies to get to the next stage ^_^

Solaris looked like a fun game. You’re flying through space and the effects are kinda cool for being Atari 2600. I didn’t quite get what you were supposed to do though.. You can shoot stuff, and you travel through hyper-space or warps or something.. and sometimes there’s a map o_O

Kangaro is kind of like Donkey Kong, make it to the top of the platforms while avoiding enemies or obstacles. Except you are a Kangaroo, and you can jump and punch stuff ^_^

Reactor I bought mainly because I saw this ad from when the game came out in 1982. The actual game made no sense though. I just kept getting blown up.. I think?

Pac-Kong I bought without hesitation just because of the name! Pac-man and Donkey Kong in one game??? With a picture of a Transformer on the cartridge?!? Well, it was definitely similar to Donkey Kong, the main character looks a LOT like Super Mario, and there were also similarities to Pac-Man if the enemies were supposed to look like ghosts, which I believe. It was hard to avoid them though..

In Gangster Alley you have a cross and you’re supposed to shoot the gangsters in the windows. It lacks sound though, except for a tiny effect when you shot, it made it kind of dull.

The Smurf’s had nice animation for being Atari 2600. The sprite actually looked like a Smurf! :D But, I couldn’t make it passed the first obstacle, a STUPID FENCE! I kept trying to jump over it but no matter how close or how far away I was from it I couldn’t get past it >_<

Stupid fence…

Commodore 64 and so many games!

July 1, 2012 by stopXwhispering

I’ve recently purchased a Commodore 64C with a cassette drive and joystick, but I didn’t get any games with it so I basically couldn’t test it.

I had also never played a C64 before in my life so I had no clue of which games to start looking for, however I got some advice on games to get from the nice people over at Retrocollect.com and then I started Ebay-ing…

The Commodore 64C I got was in quite good condition considering it’s age, but it had a bit of discoloration, but I don’t mind that, it just adds to the retro-feel to it ;D It’s also a Swedish version so it has the Swedish keyboard.

The Cassette Drive (I think it’s called Datassette) was in really nice condition! Compared to the console it had hardly any signs of wear, not even discoloration! Both came with original manuals, in great condition as well, but unfortunately no box..

The Joystick was pretty ^_^ It’s called TAC 2, I’m not sure whether this is something that originally came with the console or not.

So here’s the first bunch of games that arrived, some which I had been advised to get and other that just seemed interesting because of the titles and artwork and I was buying a bunch from the same seller anyway. The games are Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back, Star Wars Return of the Jedi, Subsunk, Castle Master, Ghostbusters II, Bionic Commando, Commando, Hunchback, Monkey Magic, Se-kaa of Assiah, Booga-Boo (The Flea), Ring of Power, Impossamole, Little Computer People, Batman the Caped Crusader, Heroes of the Lance, Dizzy Panic, Buggy Boy, Blasteroids, Barbarian II, Bouncing Heads, 4 Most Cute and 6 Shooter (containing among others Wizball, which someone recommended).

For those of you who don’t know much about C64, the games come on actual cassette tapes. I didn’t know they could program games on those, I thought they were only for music back in the day! It’s baffling to me ^^ There is also games on floppy disks for the C64, but I don’t think I can play those without getting some kind of disk drive to connect to it first..

I haven’t been able to try them all out yet, mostly because of the outrageous loading times! It took me 10 minutes of this:

Then I got to the starting screen and the Ghostbusters soundtrack started playing, and it said “PRESS ANY KEY”, after listening to the song for a bit I pressed a button and was greeted with another 10 friggin’ minutes of a flickering loading screens!

After that finished I got to the story of the game. A still image of some person with what I guess was a ghost attacking, and a text that started scrolling telling the story with the ghostbusters soundtrack playing. At this time I had just been waiting too long so I just wanted to start actual gameplay so I pressed start again… and once again.. 10 minutes of:

So after a total of 30 minutes I finally got some actual gameplay. Stage one was so hard I couldn’t beat it.. >_< And every time I failed a screen popped up with a text that read: “You are a worthless slimeball! … but you have 2 more chances, press fire to try again”

That is NOT very encouraging!!! >.<

A game that I really enjoyed though was Commando, mainly because of the extremely groovy and catchy music! :D I recorded it and posted it here for your enjoyment:

I also tried some Star Wars the Empire Strikes back.

It was a space shooter, and the music was a nice impression of the original soundtrack. What I found odd though was that they had those AT-AT walkers from the Snow area of the movie, but they were flying around in space o_O

And here’s Bionic Commando:

This was really cool! And just like in the other Bionic Commando games you can only move upwards by using your grappling-hook-thingy. I made it a couple of stages but then I quit to try other games.

I’ve only been able to try out about 8 games so far, and today I got another bunch of 6 more games, and I’m still waiting for 10 more to arrive:

The games were Bubble Bobble, Dizzy, Camelot Warriors, DJ Puff, Rainbow Islands and Rick Dangerous.

I will try to make time to try them all out! ^_^

Second batch of games from Japan

May 8, 2012 by stopXwhispering

So here’s the second batch of games I bought in Japan, a bunch of Famicom Disk games and also some more Famicom games:

Some that I’m really happy with are Star Wars, Kamen no Ninja Hanamaru, Eggerland, Castlevania II, Alien Syndrom and Hatris (which was only 100Yen =about 1.25 USD, in mint condition!!)

This weekend I tried all the games I purchased in Japan out briefly (in total 64 games and one system), and all of them worked, except for one Famicom Disk game (Breeder) which I actually think I broke myself o_O Not really sure what happened there..

Also when I got home I had a package waiting for me, with 4 reproductions I had ordered earlier ^_^

The games are reproductions of Cocoron, Recca and two Castlevania games which are fan-made in 8-bit ^_^ Can’t wait to try them all out!

I’m sorry for the shortness of this post, but I’ve been really busy since I got home, I will try to make a longer post tomorrow ^^

Super Star Wars for SNES

February 13, 2012 by stopXwhispering

So here’s the review of Super Star Wars for SNES!

This game was not a disappointment! It narrated the original story of the first movie amazingly! You got to relive many of those memorable scenes and play as your favorite characters through levels that were really detailed and true to the story.

Like visiting Obi-Wan in the desert…

… finding Han Solo and Chewbacca at the bar…

… rescuing Princess Leia from the Deathstar…

Or encountering Darth Vader!

The game also had a great variation of gameplay, from side scrolling platformer to driving a hovercraft and even piloting an X-wing when hunting down Darth Vader and destroying the Deathstar ^_^

The bosses were classic SNES type boss fights, taking up half of the screen but having a weak spot. Not always something that happened in the movie, but always with some connection to it, very imaginative! Like Banthas!! =D

After encountering new characters you unlocked them so they were playable, you could choose between playing as Luke Skywalker, Han Solo or Chewbacca. I preferred Chewie since he had the highest jump, even though he was slightly slower. Luke was the only one with a lightsaber though, but I still preferred shooting laser ^_^

Han Solo looked real silly when he was wiggling his gun around..

Having the old Nintendo Power issue for Super Star Wars helped me and my friend out a little bit, but mainly they just described the scenarios. They did mention that there was a hidden place on stage 5 where you could get unlimited lives. This was very helpful! Since you don’t have unlimited continues. We finally beat the game in about 4 hours. I speed ran it the morning after in about 1.5 hours. It’s faster when you have figured out how to beat each boss and where you will have to jump not to fall to your death (yes, on some places you were supposed to fall down a platform but if you didn’t know to jump at the end you would fall into lava and die immediately)..We actually had more help from the latest issue of LEVEL (a Swedish gaming magazine) that had a retro review of Super Star Wars Trilogy where they had a small walkthrough for each boss in all the games. The Nintendo Power issue actually only covered the first 9 stages (!) There is 6 more stages after that!! An example of advice given from Nintendo Power for the Kalaar boss “Jumping to avoid the attacks takes precise timing“.. no shit?! That’s it! This was one of the hardest bosses and it took several lives before we got lucky and pushed him back to avoid him hurting us. Thank god we have Youtube today!

Look at Luke’s silly surprised face ^_^

All in all it was a great game, hard and challenging, but just enough to make you try again and finally beat it =)

Here’s a little video of all the cutscenes from Super Star Wars, it’s quite fun to see the famous movie scenes in 16-bit ^^ The music is really great!

I also edited together a video of all the Boss battles of Super Star Wars.