After not being able to get together with Scoob for any gaming since before the stupid pandemic began, today we had the chance to sit down and have a bit of a button mash. The game we played through was Streets Of Rage 4, the latest game in a series that got a lot of play time out of us back when we were in high school.

Like its predecessors, this is a side-scrolling beat em up, and has much of the same mechanics. The main difference here is the art style, which has changed to a very clean comic-inspired look, rather than the old pixelated look of the originals. Not that that's really a bad thing, as many character sprites from the old games are unlockable as you play through the game.

There were lots of things that I couldn't really remember about the old games, but Scoob could remember loads of the enemies, what games they were in and what their moves were. Whereas I could only remember Max and his slide tackle, as he was the character I used all the time in Streets Of Rage 2. Unfortunately he is not available (at least by default) here, and he only shows up in the game as a brainwashed enemy boss. The cheek of it.

Instead, I used Axel, while Scoob plumped for Blaze, his regular character.

It was seriously cool to play through this, though we breezed through it on our first attempt. The only level we had to re-do was the end level, and only because a room full of tubby enemies weakened us so much we barely had any health for the bosses. But we soon went back and showed them.
It was certainly nothing like back in the day, when losing all your lives meant starting the entire game all over again. Like other modern games, getting a game over screen just means starting that level again.
Though there is a way to play through the game in the style of the old classics, but I wouldn't really want to try doing that these days with my aging brain and thumbs.

I have been feeling a little bit rebellious lately as I'm starting to get somewhat worn down by people screeching on the internet and trying to dictate what other people can and can't like in their entertainment.
In my opinion, you can like whatever you want as long as it's not illegal. After all, movies, games and the like are completely fictitious and fantasy, and are supposed to be about escapism. Last thing I want is shitty real life issues being brought up all the time, when all I want to do is get away from all that crap and enjoy myself.

The first game I played in this little "stand up to the online censors" segment is called Sense: A Cyberpunk Ghost Story. This had people attacking it purely because the main character, a young woman named Mei, is fairly endowed in the chest department. I mean seriously, as if there are no women out there with big boobs. These people need to grow up.
You've also got to take into account that this has fairly manga-inspired visuals, and is set in a cyberpunk future where it's established that cosmetic surgeries are commonplace. On top of that, pretty much every other female character (and at least one guy I saw) was bigger up top than Mei was. Just proves that these critics didn't even look into the game at all.

Well gladly, the developers basically told these weirdos to go to hell, and that's why I decided to support them.

So what is the game, and what is it about?

Well as established, you play as Mei, someone who finds herself seeing things through her cybernetic eyes that nobody else can see, such as supernatural events and spooks. She finds herself trapped in an apartment block that has been sealed off from the world for the best part of a century (I think) and learns that she must exorcise the spirits and ancient evil from the building in order to escape.

The gameplay is very much like a point and click exploration game, but without the mouse as an interface. Instead you just use the keyboard or a controller. Unfortunately, I found it a janky and not very smooth experience, especially in terms of animation. I mean, the backgrounds scrolled by and animated in other ways very smoothly, but the animations of Mei and the other characters seemed very jittery and stiff, especially in faster motion such as running.

And there were bugs. Holy shit there were bugs. Even in the first few minutes there were obvious things like dialog seeming to skip or repeat. And the inventory, map and journal system was infuriating, as it reset each time rather than remembering where you were last time. And the map always loaded at the first floor, even if you were on a different one. Quality of life things like this should never be skipped from the development of even the simplest of games, yet they were here.

But the main issue I had was at one point I figured I'd got to use this key making machine, as I had got the code for it and could seemingly do nothing else to progress, but the game just wouldn't let me, so I turned it off. Then when I tried again later it immediately let me use it. Which was dumb.

Later on in the game, combat elements are introduced, but these are maybe the worst part of the game, as the fighting is laughably bad and clunky, consisting of pressing a single button to swing a sword at the right time, almost like a light QTE.

Overall I found the game quite disappointing, and definitely not worth what I paid for it. But this is because the game itself is pretty bad, not because of the proportions of the character. I actually think there was nothing wrong with the art style at all, and many of the characters were very cool looking. There were also interesting things going on with the story, though I didn't really get my head around a lot of the folklore that is alluded to throughout.

The ending was also a bit of a let down, despite the fact that quite an interesting thing happens, which is you playing as another character who is trying to figure out what happened to Mei while she was in the building. They could have done something really cool with this as you go through and piece together the puzzles, but everything just kind of stops and fizzles out and doesn't go anywhere.

Oh well.

This is going to be a strange blog entry. A strange one indeed.

You see, Star Wars and I go back a long way, ever since I saw my first Star Wars film, Return Of The Jedi, in the mid 80s. Despite the disappointing prequels, and the strange stories in the novels, and the childishness of the cartoon series, it would remain my favourite franchise for more than 30 years.
There was just something very special about the setting, the characters, and the visual style of it that elevated it above anything else in my opinion.

I've played a lot of games over the years. I've read a lot of books. I've watched a lot of fan films. Some I liked. Some I didn't. Some I thought were sheer fucking brilliance.

But then Disney bought the franchise. And things immediately changed. I wasn't angry per se that they threw the old EU out of the window, as I understood the decision. But I was still definitely disappointed. I also didn't particularly mind The Force Awakens, as while it wasn't a particularly good Star Wars film, it was an alright and somewhat entertaining action film, that mostly still felt like it could fit in the Star Wars universe.

But then came The Last Jedi. What a joke that pile of shit was. I still remember how I felt walking out of the cinema. I wasn't angry, or upset in any way. Maybe I should have been. Instead, I was just empty. Disney had done it. They had done something I didn't think was possible. I no longer liked Star Wars.
See the main problem with The Last Jedi was not the fact that it was a bad Star Wars film, or even the fact that it was not a good action film. Both of those I could have handled. I could have just forgotten about it and moved on, just like I did for Attack Of The Clones for example.
No, it was the fact that it had retroactively changed many things about the old films that was the issue. I mean, it didn't even answer any of the questions or continue any of the threads set up in the previous movie, let alone pay respect to the old films. It felt like the film makers had squatted down over the entire franchise and just took a massive steaming dump all over it.

I stopped watching Rebels, so I've still never seen the last season. I haven't watched the final Clone Wars season that dropped a while back. I never went to watch Solo, or Episode 9. I haven't been watching the Mandalorian.
And I never plan to watch any of these things.

Because the entire franchise is ruined in my opinion. I'm simply no longer a fan.

Still, over the last few years I've dipped in and out of the Star Wars franchise here and there in the form of games. Most of these were old ones, usually ones I had played in the past and wanted to finish. The only "new" Star Wars I've consumed was The Fallen Order, and that was only because it was cheap at the time, and was supposed to be very good. I ended up thinking it was remarkably mediocre.

And now I'm at the point where, with a heavy heart, I realise I just want to wash my hands of the entire franchise, and pretty much forget it even exists.

It's a shame, but things change, and we move on.

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Before I can say my final farewells to my once favourite franchise, I thought I could do with addressing several Star Warsy things that were outstanding.

I still have a bunch of games that I've never finished, and several I've never even played. Some of these are old ones that I still have on physical media, and some are games I've bought digitally. Truth be told, I didn't really want to play any of them considering my feelings at the moment, but when I looked down the list there were two that stood out as games I really should do my best to finish.

First up was X-Wing Alliance. I reached the end level of this when I first played it about 20 years ago, but when I flew into the Death Star the game totally spooged out. I don't know if I was clipping through the tunnel walls, or there were some weird graphics bugs, or something else entirely.
Basically I gave up and turned it off, fully intending to go back to it another time. But this is me we're talking about, and so I never did.

Coming back to this was eye-opening. I found some missions very hard, and as early as mission 4 was having to replay over and over in order to complete them. I don't remember it being this hard years ago. It's probably a combination of age slowing down my reactions, and looking back with rose-tinted glasses.

Conversely, on some other missions my wing mates seemed to do all the work before I could even get there, and the level would complete. Such strange difficulty balancing.

The game was also buggy as hell. The worst one I found was the map screen. Very often, whenever I would look at the map and then return to the main game screen, all of my laser energy would be fully drained and I would have to charge it up again. It was so infuriating.
There were also lots of audio glitches, with sounds playing on annoying loops, which would sometimes continue even after the mission had ended, forcing me to quit and re-load.

And the most game-breaking one I had was on a mission where I had to liberate some slaves from some shuttles. I had already played the damn mission several times figuring out the tactics required to complete it. And when I finally managed to do my part right, all of the transports arrived to free the slaves and then promply just froze and would not move.
I sure as hell was not going to go through all that again, and was considering quitting, until I saw there was a skip mission option.

When I finally arrived at the last mission, as soon as I entered the Death Star, I got my first hard crash of my playthrough. I re-loaded, fearing that this game's final mission was cursed, and I would not be able to finish it after all this. But thankfully it didn't happen again.

Still, part of me maybe wishes it had. Because finishing the last mission was an absolute arse, and I must have replayed it 12-15 times trying to figure the damn thing out. Even after I sort-of knew what I was supposed to do, I still had to play it a few more times due to little glitches and bugs that were preventing me from getting through it.

Also, during all these years since I first played it, I was wrongly remembering that you were still playing as the main character Ace Azzameen in the final missions, even though you fly the Millennium Falcon. This playthrough made it clear that it's still Lando and Nien Nunb that are flying it. I really did not appreciate this, as there's no explanation to where Ace went. And I'd have much rather flown the Otana or an X-Wing in the attack on the Death Star.
An X-Wing definitely would have made it easier to fly through those tunnels, as I did not keep Lando's promise to Han while playing this. That poor Falcon got scratched. Reeeaaaal scratched.

But thankfully it's all done. At very long last.

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The other Star Wars game I decided to have a crack at is Shadows Of The Empire. I had never played it before this, but I'd read the novel several times, and the urge to see Dash's side of the story meant I had more desire to play this than any of the other games.

However, things took an immediate turn for the worse when I started my playthrough and I got a load of the controls. I know this game is old, but come on. What were they thinking? Pushing the mouse forward and back moves your character forward and back, rather than looking up and down, with no way to change it? What kind of backwards world were the developers living in? At least some other weird things like having the space bar be activate and X be jump were rebindable.

The basic control of Dash was also a bit shoddy, in terms of him feeling like he was running on an ice rink. There was a somewhat similar feeling when I played Dark Forces II a while back, but this was even worse. It was especially bad on one level when you have to traverse a train, which needs you to jump from one track to another. And when in the air, I swear Dash just did his own thing. The amount of times I fell off was just nuts.

So I struggled through to the fight against Boba Fett, during which he killed me when in his ship. And rather than put me back to a checkpoint or the start of that stage, it put me all the way back to the start of the level, which was probably about 30-40 minutes of play time. If I was really enjoying the game, I'd have pushed on and done it again. But I was really fed up by the old shitty controls and lack of interest in Star Wars by this point, so decided to just abandon it. I can't imagine I'd have gotten any more enjoyment out of the game even if I'd got passed Slave I, and I want to keep up my decent gaming momentum this year by getting back to games I enjoy.

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<Old Stuff>

Over the years, but not for a very long time now, I have tried my hand at writing stories.

Only one of these stories is anywhere near good enough to even allow people to read it. As it is a Star Wars one, it makes sense for it to find a resting place here, in my "Goodbye Star Wars" blog entry.

The story has its roots in the early 2000s, when my friends and I looked at making a Star Wars fan film. Due to technical restraints, mostly from our poor quality MiniDV camcorders, we soon decided the project was beyond us, and I instead began writing some stories, expanding the ideas we had come up with for the film.

I only managed to finish one of the stories, being the one directly translated from the original fan film idea. Some moderate work was done on several of the others that I was planning, which were set both before and after this one in the timeline.

The original story that was finished in 2004 got a big re-write in 2011, which I was much happier with. But though it was always my intention to go back and write the others, I struggled to find the time or motivation. Then in late 2018 I finally admitted defeat and decided to abandon the stories for good. I think this decision was spurred on by Disney wiping out the old continuity, which these stories were set in, and how disappointed I was in the new Star Wars films at the time.

Instead, to put the saga to bed, I scoured through the old notes I made in the mid 2000s and created a basic outline of events that led up to and followed the one completed story. As the outline is based on old ideas, the final stories may have been quite different if I had ever finished writing them.
But now I guess we will never know.

The saga is set in the old Star Wars EU continuity, beginning roughly 15 years after "Return Of The Jedi". It follows the adventures of three young Jedi, from the moment they start their training through to Knighthood and beyond...

Note that all three of the following links go to their own pages.

Before The Dark Side Of Do'Naar (basic outline) The Dark Side Of Do'Naar (full story) After The Dark Side Of Do'Naar (basic outline)

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After scouring some old hard drives I've been able to find some of the test footage we shot while trying to figure out whether the fan film was within our capabilities. The first two videos were filmed in late 2002, and were edited using a program called Alam DV. There were several other little test action shots filmed on that night, but I can't find any more footage, which has cheesed me off a bit. I thought maybe I just never added effects to them, but then I stumbled across a tiny little picture that I uploaded to Facebook about 12 years ago from one of the other saber duels that we did that night. So where all that other shit went I have no idea.
There was also some pretty cool CGI animations that my brother did of an X-Wing in a dogfight, but I don't have that either.

The last video was filmed by my brother and I at some point in 2003 or 2004. I think by this time we had already decided not to make the fan film, but we went ahead with this anyway. It was rotoscoped using filmstrip files and Photoshop, which took weeks of free time.

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While I was searching my old storage mediums for possible Star Wars fan film content I've also been able to find some very rough sketches of what I was aiming at with the new species called the Garron-Hinn, who were going to be one of the main villainous groups later on in my stories. There's also a very, very bad attempt at a watercolour painting of the Garron-Hinn home world that I did in 2014 when I had my little art spurge. I rightly thought back then that it was not good enough to upload here, and I still think that way now. But I guess I don't care any more.

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<Old Stuff>

While I'm having this big Star Wars clear out, I thought I'd bring back these images from my old site, which were from just the second MMORPG I ever played.

I played on Star Wars: Galaxies for a few months back in 2007 as the awesome Mon Calamari medic Splapdink McWildpants. I didn't really get up to much, mostly spending my time working through the "introductory" quest called the Legacy Quest, which pretty much got me to level 50 out of 90. Outside of that, I mostly did space missions, and spent a few evenings hanging out and getting killed with my work mate Big Dave.
Even though I didn't play on it for long I was a little sad when I heard it was to close in late 2011.

Show / hide gallery

I again revisited my childhood recently when I went up against Gozer (but not really) in the old ZX Spectrum Ghostbusters game. I've learned over the last few years that I can't really trust my childhood memories, but as far as I remember it, I managed to get to the final Stay Puft section several times on our old 48K machine, but could never make it into the building to win the game. I'm not sure how, as it wasn't as hard or awkward as I remember it.

There wasn't really much to it, and once I'd messed around a little bit to figure out what I was doing, I completed the game on my first effort.

I don't think the people who made this game really watched the film though, as there's no mention of Gozer, and Zuul is a building on the map where the Keymaster and Gatekeeper are trying to get to. Whereas in the film, Zuul is the Gatekeeper. But oh well.

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There was another Ghostbusters game I played a lot of in the distant past that I never managed to finish, and that was the Amiga version of Ghostbusters II. Back then, it took me weeks of intermittent play to figure out how to get passed the first level. After that, beating the second level came a lot faster, but I could never figure out how to complete the third and final level.

Well, all I can say is: save states for the win. I didn't need them on the first level, managing to finish it on my third and final life. But I used their capabilities on the second level, and quite a lot on the third as I figured out finally what to do.

And so at long last, I managed to defeat the big dumb Carpathian, even though I lost Egon along the way. And that was just a cheap shot from Vigo, considering the real life status of the actors.

But again the trend continues with these developers not watching the movies they are adapting into games. In the manual for this one, it says the Ghostbusters brought the marshmallow man to life to help them defeat Gozer. But in the film, the marshmallow man was Gozer in his/its destructor form. Sheesh.

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After playing the first two Ghostbusters games, it only felt right to play the 2009 game through again, especially as I got it for free (and DRM free to boot!) on Epic Games late last year. Now I had already played this through about four times a decade ago on the PS3, making it my most played game on that console. But I thought plenty enough time had passed for a refresher while I was on this Ghostbusters kick.
Also, it's not a super long game, and is a really good follow up to the films, so to hell with it.

I was really looking forward to two things about playing it on the PC: being able to get some screenshots, and also being able to use the keyboard and mouse. Unfortunately, the mouse acceleration in the game is atrocious, which really spoiled my enjoyment of using this control scheme. But still, it was not bad enough to make me use a controller again.

Can't lie, it was a lot of fun playing through it again, for what might be the last time. Sure, the old annoyances were still there, like the sluggish character movement and the useless team mate AI, but whatever. Just to test the original Ghostbusters, I would sometimes weaken the ghosts and throw a trap down, just to see how long it would take them to do the rest. Frankly, I'm not sure how they're still in business. I mean, I pretty much had to do everything.

While the gameplay has its ups and downs, it's the story and having the original cast reprising their roles that really makes the game shine. Because in truth, without the Ghostbusters skin, this game would be painfully mediocre. Whereas having it link so well back to the 80s films, as well as being a solid narrative follow-up, makes it one of the best movie tie-in games ever in my opinion. I strongly suspect that the new film that's coming out at some point will completely ignore this game as canon, and that will fucking suck.