Getting on for a decade ago now, Scoob bought the two X-Men Legends games on the PS2. After borrowing it from him, the first one became one of the few games I ever completed on that console (well, I do only own eight). We played most of the second one co-op, but never got around to finishing it for whatever reason. Nevertheless, we both remember those games fondly, and the chance came to re-visit that era when I picked up Marvel: Ultimate Alliance for the PC cheap from eBay.

I'd recently bought a 360 controller to finally get around to Witcher 2, so we started off with Scoob using that and me on keyboard. Unfortunately, aiming ranged attacks while using keyboard is almost impossible, so I was forced into using close combat champs. We formed The Skumsplattaz superhero team with Scoob using Wolverine and Thor, while I went with Deadpool and The Thing. When using the keyboard had got on my nerves enough, I looked at other options. Luckily I found out there was a new, better way of installing PS3 controllers on Windows, as I was not a fan of the software that I used for Resident Evil 3 a couple of years ago. Of course, this means I didn't need a 360 controller after all, as I could have just used both my PS3 controllers. But whatever.
With joypad in hand, I replaced The Thing with Iron Man, to get some long range energy blasts in there.

So what's the game like? Unfortunately, we found the whole experience very underwhelming. Maybe it's because we're older now and button mashing brawlers just don't suit us anymore. Or it might be that the game just isn't as good as the X-Men games were. Without a doubt, the way that levelling up is handled in this game is inferior to those X-Men games. Rather than spend your experience points on increasing your hero's stats, you instead have to find stupid little drops throughout the game that do this job. Meh.

In terms of gameplay it's pretty much exactly what you would expect. You just run around clobbering bad guys and jumping around like a lunatic.
There were definitely a few things that really annoyed me. Firstly, there were way too many little cutscenes that took control away from us. Sometimes these were used for dialogue exchanges between bad guys, but usually it was just so the camera could spin around and show us something in the world that we needed to see. The thing is, if that thing it was showing us was necessary to continue, we would have found it anyway, quite easily, without the need to lose control.
There were also no real interesting boss fights. In pretty much every one, the fight was just a series of quicktime events, which was really disappointing as we really wanted to have a proper down and dirty scrap with these characters but couldn't.
Most of the time the camera was free to move, but some times it was strangely locked to a certain viewpoint. Very frustrating in some situations where we were fighting right on the limit of one fixed camera angle and another, meaning every second or two the camera angle would flick back and forth.

But still, it's another one down, so can't complain.

A few days back I had an email from Blizzard giving me 7 days free in World Of Warcraft. Not that I really wanted to reinstall such a big game for a few measly days, but I thought it would give me the chance to do something I wished I'd done years ago.

Now, I have a bit of an unhealthy obsession with names and characters, so much so that when I used to play WoW I even named all my mounts, including ones I hadn't even collected yet. Yes, I'm a tit. But still, I figured logging into the game again would give me chance to screenshot all those mounts, which I had forgotten to do years ago.

Now I didn't want to download all 28GB of the game on my crappy internet, so I got a head start (so I thought) and dusted off my game discs all the way up to Cataclysm. After installing those, the game went to the net to update, and I found out the game now requires the Battle.net application which manages the updates. The problem is, Battle.net wanted to download the entire game, and would not continue the install I'd already done. It just kept saying no Blizzard games could be found, and when I pointed it to my WoW folder it just said the game was the wrong version and wouldn't update it. So I had to download the damn thing anyway. Stupid Blizzard.

But it eventually happened that I logged into the game for the first time in nearly 4 years, and I'm seriously glad I had no intention of playing, as I could not remember a single thing. Even Orgrimmar seemed unfamiliar as I had only played Cataclysm for a few weeks at most, and I never got used to its changes.

I didn't really investigate any of the big changes I saw, but pretty much the only change I liked was actually the reason I had logged in in the first place: the mounts. In the years since I last played, Blizzard have added something called collections, which are available to all characters on an account. And one of these collections is the mounts. Any of the mounts any of your characters have ever unlocked are now shared to all of your other characters for them to use, provided they have the riding skill, and the mounts are not locked to a specific faction or class. To me this sounds like a great change, but I bet there were some angry people out there who had been questing and grinding for hours on different characters to get them all the best mounts multiple times, and all for nothing.
Still, none of that matters to me, and I finally got to take all my mount pictures:

Show / hide mount gallery

28 mounts is not a lot considering how many mounts are in the game, but I worked damn hard to get some of those back in the day, so I don't care.
Not that anyone's interested, but here's how I was choosing the names for all the different kinds of mounts:

Bears = names of Warhammer 40,000 Ork clans.
Drakes (normal and Proto) = names of Sith Lords from Star Wars.
Drakes (Netherwing) = names of Warhammer 40,000 Eldar Phoenix Lords.
Hawkstriders = names of confectionery.
Horses (living) = names and places from Farscape.
Horses (Undead and demonic) = names of any other skeletal and undead characters.
Kodos = names of combiner team Transformers.
Mechanical = names of tools.
Nether Rays = planets from Star Wars.
Raptors = names and places from Final Fantasy VII.
Wind Riders = names and planets from Battlestar Galactica.
Wolves = names from the Warhammer 40,000 Space Wolf novels.

There were some strange things I noticed being back in the game, though. For a start, my Paladin Ashaai seemed to have had a strange hair mishap, as gone was his white hair to be replaced by black, for some reason. So a trip to the barber's was required to correct it.

Logging into my very first character, the poor old Ally Pally Jackgooty, revealed that somehow he has about 6 gryphon mounts available to him, despite me never unlocking any gryphon mounts at all. He doesn't even have enough skill to fly them. I can only assume, as Kropotkin had unlocked a bunch of the Wind Riders, it automatically unlocks the corresponing Alliance mounts.

Most strange though is the mystery surrounding one of my brother's old Alliance characters, a Night Elf hunter called Khi. Unsurprisingly, when looking down the roster of both our Horde and Alliance guilds, no character had been logged in for years. That is, with the exception of Khi, who was logged in 8 months ago. In addition, the poor hunter's name has been altered to Khixyz. I can only assume, around 8 months ago, another player wanted the name Khi, and my bro's character was changed to allow it. However, a search for a character called Khi on that server finds no results. It's a mystery.

For the hell of it I took Gooty for a spin and did a kill quest in Hellfire Peninsula. All kinds of memories came flooding back, but overall the game is still as boring as it ever was. If it was free to play I could imagine logging in occasionally with friends, but why millions of people still pay subscription fees to play it is beyond me.

A marathon of an entry kicks off with the completion of another old Amiga game, in the form of Space Crusade. The board game of this got me into wargaming back in the early 90s, and I also played the computer game a little bit with my friends. I don't ever remember finishing a single mission properly, on the board game or the computer game. But that has changed now with this completion.

I know it's old and simple, but the game was a pain to get through. It was just so slow, constantly switching to pointless little animations that got old real quick. I'd have preferred if there was an option to turn those off. There were other annoying things such as the Soul Suckers being present instead of the Genestealers for some reason, and a few graphics bugs, which may have been down to the emulator.

I went into this controlling both the Imperial Fists and the Ultramarines, not knowing that the Blood Angels are supposed to have the best cards. Still, it made it more of a challenge I guess. Overall it was quite easy, up until the last couple of missions anyway. That was when the weaker Imperial Fists got slaughtered twice when under heavy close assault from many enemies. But the Ultramarines with their better close combat cards and medkit managed to forge a path through every level. Kind of a shame, as I prefer the Fists to the Ultramarines, but oh well.

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Another game I thought I could quickly blast through and tick off the completed list was Star Wars Dark Forces. I got to the last level of this back on my original PC in the 90s, but never managed to beat it. Recently I found there was a mod for the game called DarkXL which made it a bit more up to date. After installing the game using DOSBox, I was soon playing the DarkXL version. However, I came up against several problems which stopped me in my tracks. Firstly, the game's very loud music can not be turned down or off using the mod, and also the graphics were incredibly dark with no brightness or gamma control in sight. Also, reading the t'interwebs, there are many bugs with the mod that make the game impossible to finish anyway.

So instead, I booted up the classic game on its own, but had issues there also, particularly the lack of mouse control and the lack of targeting reticule. Just how did I play like that back in the day?
Hopefully, DarkXL will get updated, as it is still in alpha. If it does, I'll be back to this in the future, but for now it's going back to its forgotten corner where it belongs...

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My Amiga emulator got another workout when I had a bit of a fad recently on good old Sensible Soccer. I played four leagues on the trot, each one including more and more teams as I thought of new ones to create. It was honestly quite a bit harder than I remember it when I was a kid, and I continually failed to win the title until the fourth league where I really knuckled down.

Even then, throughout the course of the madness, I had a fair few second half meltdowns, playing very badly in the second half after doing good work in the first.

But it was so much fun to just go nuts on a fondly remembered game from twenty-odd years ago.

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Me and Scoob have continued in our efforts to find other interesting multiplayer games to play, but unfortunately none of them have really worked for us.

Up first, we tried Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine from Humble Indie Bundle 11. This was fun enough, but after a few levels we quickly got bored, and the blocky art style really spoiled it in my opinion. Had the graphics been created with a sharper, more up to date style, without all the blockiness, I may have continued a bit more.

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We also tried Empire Earth which I'd grabbed from GOG, as I was hoping for an interesting strategy game after the failure that was HOMM 3. This thing was a bit of a ball ache to get into, and it seems to be one of those games that starts off slow and builds up to the action. It didn't help that it seemed very close in style to the old Age Of Empire games. I'm not ruling out coming back to this, but if we really fancy playing a game of this type I'm sure we would just go and play Galactic Battlegrounds.

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And then we tried one that I bought a while ago, System Shock 2, that I was really looking forward to getting into, mainly because it can be played 3-player co-op, and I thought me, Scoob and JIK could give it a go. In the end, I got tired of waiting for all of us to be available, so me and Scoob tried a 2-player game. I think I'd built it up in my head far too much, and was greatly disappointed. This thing was all kinds of clunky, especially the HUD and inventory. The combat and controls were also slow and frustrating, and we had no real idea what was going on. I went in expecting an interesting FPS horror game, and got psychic monkeys shooting energy balls at us. Hmmph.

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Ever since Riot activated intermediate bots in custom games in LoL we've been challenging ourselves more and more against them. The latest challenge, and as far as we can tell, the hardest one we can create, was to go against five burst champions who could root or stun while using fairly weak melee champs ourselves. When the enemy bots grouped up we could not touch them, and they beat us a few times until we changed tactics. Rather than try and team-fight them, we instead outplayed them and pushed the lanes to their base. We were easily able to take their nexus down before they touched our own, with just five kills in the entire game. We have since gone on to beat them with a host of different champs and in straight up fights, so we'll need to find a new challenge...

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Had a bit of an RTS revival recently, playing a few sessions with Mr. Gallear. Included were some games of Rome: Total War for the first time since my days as a Wild Monkey general.

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We also played some Soulstorm, with one 2v2v2v2 battle lasting nearly two hours, and another 2v2v2v2 battle where every army was Necrons. Crazy fun.

Me and Scoob went back to our school years yesterday when out of the blue we decided to play Pang on my Amiga emulator. I played quite a lot of this fun bubble-burster with my mates back in the day, but it was one of the many frustrating games of the time that had no save and therefore no real way for us impatient kids to complete.

However, the Amiga emulator has a very useful save ability that allowed us to keep reloading everytime we got killed.

An hour or so later, I was able to tick this off the list of games that I'd always wanted to finish.