I'm really not sure why, but just recently I had the hankering to retrieve an old electronic game from the loft and give it a good old renovating. The game in question is Super Cup Football, made by Tomy back in the 80s. Ordinarily, this thing runs on batteries, but I wanted to change that, along with a bunch of other little tweaks.

Up first, the entire thing needed a massive clean, not only to remove all the dirt but also those silly stickers I'd used to indicate which lever controlled which player. So I went over it with WD40, followed by using some toothpaste with an old firm toothbrush to really get into the corners. It's mostly come up pretty well. I just wish I could do something about the state of the pitch.

Now, I sure as hell wasn't going to bother with batteries for this old clunker, so I decided it needed to be mains-powered. To achieve this, I removed the wires that took the power from the batteries to the motor, and drilled a hole through into the battery compartment that the wires could go through.
Then I got an adjustable power supply that came with a multitude of different attachments. One of these, originally meant for an LED strip, was perfect for the job. It allowed me to screw the two wires into it, so the mains adapter could then be attached and unattached at will.
The only thing needed after this was to drill a hole so that the power cable had access into the compartment, and all was golden.

I also gave the game a good clean under the hood, paying attention to all of the whirring rods, before re-greasing them to allow the players to move up and down the pitch as freely as possible.

Speaking of movement, there was one little problem I was unable to solve. All those years in the ever-changing temperatures of the loft have slightly warped the plastic pitch, meaning not enough pressure now pushes down on some of the boxes that move the players. This in turn means the little gears sometimes don't fully connect, and some of the players can stutter a bit as they move up and down.

I saw someone on Youtube, in the middle of repairing one of these games, who also had a similar issue. He glued on an extra thin layer of plastic to create a bit more contact and pressure, but while I have tried a similar thing, it doesn't seem to have done much.
Oh well.

The last thing that I could do to update this old beast was to repaint the players. I'd originally added a little paint to the red team back when I was a kid to make them look like Man Utd, but the blue team were untouched. I decided both teams needed work, and I've made them look how very generic red and blue teams from many years ago would have looked. I think it suits the style of the game much better.

So that's it. All done. Who knows if this thing will ever actually get any use again. But at least it's an option now if anyone ever fancies it.

For now, the poor old rattler has gone back into the loft, so that I can move on to something else...

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Back in August, I got to play a whole bunch of 8 and 9 player games of Secret Hitler while on holiday with a group of family and friends. We'd not played this in many years, but it only took a little while to get back into it. The new players we introduced to the game also seemed to really like it, and upon returning home, I started work on a new version of the game. This version is based on a community re-skin of the game called Secret Sith Lord.

I'm looking forward to finishing it so we can play the game without some people feeling like a right bunch of Nazis.

Earlier this year I got stuck in the hellscape that is home renovation. Unfortunately, while this means my available gaming space is now neater and easier to move around in, it does mean I've been left with far less storage space for "stuff". So now I'm having to try and be more economic with the space I do have. And it also means in the near future I'm going to have to be ruthless with some of my gaming belongings and probably get rid of some things.

It also probably means a lot of the terrain plans I had will have to be shelved, as there will be simply nowhere to put anything I create.

Up first, to save some shelf space, I thought I'd finally get rid of the old toolbox I'd been keeping my paints in for the last twenty or so years.

So I got hold of some small, simple acrylic shelves, and mounted them to some MDF that I painted black, and screwed the whole thing to the wall. It's not fancy, but it does the job.

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The space saving ideas continued when I bought some new boxes for all of my Epic scale infantry. These are wide and not very tall, meaning I can fit a lot in each box without the models climbing all over each other. All it needed was a bit of support made out of some foam board, and the boxes can now all be stacked on top of each other, saving me a great deal of space.

All I need now is some new solution to all of the metal Epic models and I'll be sorted.

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Something awesome happened just recently when Scoob straight up gave me his elf Blood Bowl team. What's even better is he also gave me a treeman model to go with them.

I never played Warhammer Fantasy like he did, so I had to do a bit of research to learn that this is actually the old Durthu model, who is one of the characters from the wood elf army. While it was super freaking cool to just be given this model, I knew I would have to modify it at least a little bit, as I really didn't like him having that massive arm up in the air and looking all goofy.

So out came the hacksaw and other tools in order to completely re-pose and pin the arm so that it didn't look so weird. It will also fit into a storage box much easier in this new configuration.

All that was needed after that was a little Milliput to fill in the gaps and strengthen the joints, including where the treeman meets his new base.

While Scoob intended this model to be on the wood elf roster, I think I'm more likely to use it as the star player, Deeproot Strongbranch, as it is quite big. So I'll have to get another one for the team.

Speaking of the team, in terms of painting them, I really want to choose some colours that you would never normally associate with wood elves. It makes sense to use a lot of purple and/or red, as these are Scoob's favourites, so I started making up some ideas in Photoshop.

I really like all three options, but I've already got a black and red team in my undead team, and a red team on the way courtesy of the lizardmen. So it means the purple and blue option might be the way to go. No rush for any of that though, as I'll need a few more players to fill out the roster first.

Still working through my PS4 games, and the latest one to join the completed list is Guardians Of The Galaxy from a couple of years back.

The game sees Quill and the rest of the gang out to stop a powerful and malevolent entity that has been released from the soul stone.

Overall my experience with this game was very mixed. For probably two thirds of the game I was very frustrated with the gameplay, until my ancient brain finally started to catch up with the sheer amount of buttons and button combos that were required and I finally started to get into it a bit more.

Of course, it didn't help my anger levels by being a shooter game that I was having to use a controller for. Yes, I've had that whinge a million times, but it's never going to change. And what was worse in this game was the weird acceleration curve on the analogue sticks. The turn rate of the camera didn't seem to speed up while pushing the stick further, until getting nearly to maximum, when the turn speed would rocket right up. Irritating.

And the load times. Sheesh, the load times. What was all that about? I know I've not got an SSD in my PS4, but I don't think I've ever had to wait so long for a game to load since I used to play on my old ZX Spectrum back in the 80s. Even dying and restarting a fight, which should be fresh in the console's memory, would take just as long. I almost had time to go and make a coffee on each reload.

The QTEs also boggled my brain at times. When I've played a game with QTEs in the past, the idea is usually to hit that button as fast as possible when you see the prompt appear. But here, that would often see you fail the task. Instead, you have to wait until the exact moment. It just flew in the face of QTE mechanics I was used to.

The combat in the game can quickly get chaotic. I didn't find it too bad when fighting against one tough enemy like a boss, but when there were loads of weak to medium enemies all over the screen my brain and fingers really did struggle to keep up. Only later in the game when muscle memory had started to form did I begin to find it easier and more enjoyable.

I think my main issue was with my team mates, who don't really do anything unless you tell them what to do. It was also annoying that, whenever one of them is knocked down, the others will expect you to go and help them out rather than doing it themselves. And then when you get knocked down it's game over, with your team given no option to come and help you at all.
Definitely needed to be more like the Ghostbusters 2009 game, where the other Ghostbusters did their part helping out if someone got taken down.

As a last kick in the teeth, the penultimate boss fight against a guy called Raker even bugged out and wouldn't continue, so I had to do the whole thing all over again.

So what about the story? This is a game based on Marvel comics after all. Could the game excel in this area?

Well, unfortunately, I found it very middling here as well. While I really liked the characters, especially how they got better at working together as the game went on, I found the plot kind of "meh" and the villains very very weak indeed. I was not aware of the game's main villain, Magus, before this game, and hopefully I'll never encounter him again. He was just an angry mass of black swirling weirdness, who was using some dumb religious nutjobs to try and bring about an end to the universe.
Simply not that entertaining.

As to whether I would play this again, or recommend it to anyone else: probably not, unless you're a huge Marvel fan, or enjoy 3rd person shooters.

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Over the passed few months, a game we have attempted is ToeJam & Earl: Back In The Groove. I have very vague memories of playing an old game in this series on Scoob's Mega Drive way back in the day, and we were both up for re-visiting these weird characters.

In this game, which is essentially a remake of that old original one, you play as aliens who have crashed on Earth. You must then traverse floating islands to find all the pieces of your damaged space ship, so that you can get the hell off this weird rock.

I'm sure I'm not the only one to do this, but often I remember old things being better than they were. Unfortunately, this game turned out to be much the same.

It didn't help that the tutorial world kept bugging out on us, so we were forced to go into the full game without really knowing what we were doing. Sure, I could have scoured the internet for the manual (which I later ended up doing, not that it helped), but I didn't fancy doing that at first.

Our adventures into the main game's "fixed" world started much brighter. Though we still didn't know what we were doing, we got to level 17 of 25 without actually losing any lives. However, somewhere around here, the game's difficulty spiked like crazy, and we were both dead by the time we got to level 19. As neither of us particularly fancied giving it another go, our adventures stopped there.

I can't speak for Scoob, but I got super frustrated by the end, just by how fast the enemies moved compared to the player characters. And by the later stages of the game, if any enemy touched you, they would take off a good 90% of your life bar.

The thing that definitely annoyed us both was the way the split-screen was implemented. Even when I switched the option to fixed, it would still work in this weird dynamic way where player 1 would sometimes be on top of the screen, and sometimes at the bottom, depending on where the two characters were in the level.

So this might not be a game that I ever finish, but that doesn't matter. It was just a freebie from Epic Games after all, and we used it solely to re-visit our childhoods for a few hours.

The 2017 game Nier: Automata was next on my list of PS4 games to clear. I didn't really know much about this game other than it was about androids, there were multiple endings, and a few years back everyone online was obsessed with 2B's ass.

Well, fair play I guess. I mean, it's certainly not one of the game's downsides.

But what about the actual game? Mostly, it's a hack'n'slash-style 3D fighter, though interestingly, the game also includes sections from plenty of other genres. At any point, you might find the camera switching to a different position, which is the signal that the game is about to switch to a side scrolling platformer, or top down shooter, for example. Some of these sections were pretty cool, but mostly I thought they would have been far better just sticking with an over-the-shoulder, 3D fighter-style camera.

When it comes to setting, the game takes place in the very distant future. You play as one of several different androids, who were made by the last few surviving humans who now reside in a secret base on the moon. Your job is to retake planet Earth from the machine army that was created by aliens who invaded many years prior.

Starting out, there was very little help from the game's tutorials. Because I wanted to hit the ground running, I had to get acquainted with the wikis to figure out what I was doing.

I knew going in that multiple playthroughs were going to be needed, which I was not looking forward to. Still, I went in with good intentions at first, aiming to do everything I could in the initial run, where I was playing as the game's poster-girl, 2B.
However, this desire soon faded as I got further into the game. Unfortunately, the game started to feel like a bit of a slog, and so I ended up doing far less that I probably should have done.

It wasn't until the end of the game when I unlocked the chapter select that I saw how many side missions I had missed. And I tell you now, I was nowhere near done. You could easily spend weeks polishing up this game.
After my experience though, I doubt I'll be going back to clear any of the others. The game just outstayed its welcome for me.

There were a number of reasons for this. Up first was having to replay large chunks of the game as another character, 9S, who I didn't like using as much. This was primarily because his speciality is hacking, upon where you have to play a weird little mini-game that I really wasn't into. As a character, I also found he became a little insufferable by the end of the game.
You don't really spend a great deal of time with the third character, A2, but some of her later fights are also annoying as the game constantly switches you between characters during the battles. It can just take you right out of the moment and really break your focus. At least it did with my aging brain.

I was also very disappointed that there was no photo mode. In the middle of so much chaos, I found it really difficult to get cool action shots, so it would have been preferable to have a way of getting much better images. Oh well.

The biggest faux pas the developers made while making this game was right at the end, which left me quite pissed off. You see, to get the final cut scene, you have to get all the way through the end credits. Not a problem, you may think?
But think again.

In this game, the end credit section is another stupid mini-game, and by far the hardest one in the whole game. I didn't know at first, as I keep my consoles disconnected from the internet by default, but this end section is made far harder when not connected. This is because help can come to you on behalf of other players, as long as they have offered up their save data to the nerd gods.

Absolutely pathetic and stupid decision by the devs to implement this idea in a single player game, and proves what I had read about the devs in that they are just massive trolls.

In conclusion, the game had some real potential, with its characters, setting and story. But its far too many frustrating sections and elements turned it into a game I didn't really enjoy playing. So while I did get some enjoyment out of it, I highly doubt I will ever want to play it again.