Spacehost

It's amasing how many PS games simply vanished from the shelves of shops across the land, many of which were frankly fantastic- I'm gonna have to go dig out some old OPM demo discs and go bargain-hunting for some of them.

I think Robert Johnson deserves a mention, if only for managing to fuse melody and rythmn playing with an impossibly good sense of time, all the while singing in his oddly haunting way. See: Hellhound On My Trail.

That was brilliant, a recharging smart-bomb. Many a robot felt my wrath with that one.

Stupid, stupid weapon 1: the Bio-thingy in Devil May Cry. Eats your Trigger power, does little damage, bounces about crappily. Nah, I'll take my twin pistols, thanks. Number 2: Unarmed in ANY game if you don't get hand-to-hand moves. Why have it as an option?

For some inexplicable reason, most of these "rare" PS games listed here are still down my local library back home. Surely my local education authority isn't home to an army of obscuro-game collectors?

I'm afraid I've not watched a single episode yet, but the ads have me interested. Hannibal Lector and Gollum? I think it's fantastic. But then I am mad, so there you go. You should see the sort of stuff that me and my mates find hillarious, it's bizzare.

I'm still trying to get the pilot for my time-travel sitcom worked out, about a pair of time-travelling Glaswegian delinquents. "Chewin' the Fat meets Dr Who" is all I've got so far... :/

I usually die after a few minutes... Even if Edge aren't too optimistic, I think 4 is pretty promising on the scare-factor, just from the E3 trailer. Things coming through walls? Wierd hovering things? Some of the things look to be even worse than SH3's Scissor-hand monsters. Brilliant! Right, now I've gotta go play SH2 again, and try and do 3 on Hard mode. Bloody Shakespeare puzzle.

Oops, err, possible SPOILER there then.

I kinda wish they'd bring Raiden back for the next game- by the end of MGS2, he was a sword-swinging, army-of-robots-blasting hero. Part of the appeal of the game for me was watching him turn from green-as-can-be bird-shit-slipping fuck-up to hard-ass killer.

'Cause, like, in the first, you could completely change it? And the whole point of the last battle is that Solidus wants to kill you, retrieve your nanites (and brain) and use them to try and find out where the Patriots are. Well, MGS2's plot was a bit iffy, but it didn't bother me too much- after all, it's all about the responsibility of soldiers to look beyond your orders, and by battering your assumptions of what was going on into word-goo, you really don't know what you're fighting for. Which is part of the plot I guess.

There's about five of those scenes in the Gondor Seige- several good ones from what's-his-name the Rohan king. The one when the Witch King flies in in particular is a classic "you've gotta be fucking KIDDING" moment.

Isn't there a bug in PC DX whereby all weapons lose their augs if you drop them? Thus making it a bit of a moot point? I dunno, maybe they fixed it.

The first one isn't in-game for a start, it's a render-up from a cutscene that's been photoshopped as well for good measure. It's more noticeable in motion- MGS2 has lots of little graphical nuances (and many, many more shades of green). There's not much in it, but MGS2 > TTS, graphically.

Oh, and the best bit in RotK is the Ride Of The Rohirrim- if I had to choose one scene, it'd be the abject panic on the faces of the orks as an entire calavary army bears down on them. PWNed!!11

Let's see now- going for the obscure vote: The scene in Transformers The Movie where Optimus turns into truck form as the first keyboard chords kick in. When the hero in Robojox looks up at his nemesis from next to his robot, points his finger, and shouts "I'm gonna get in this thing, and KICK YOUR ASS!" The frankly wonderful bit in Phantasm 3 where the "only guy who was in all three films" replies to someone asking who the kid is with an overbaked, super-hammy, deeply-confused-sounding "him, he's, uh, Jimmy". As if the weight of all their lives is resting on that one question. The first blissfully chaotic seconds as the game begins in Mean Guns.

The PSP is ATRAC compatible, so it'll no doubt come bundled with the conversion software/ it'll be DLable. And that's a USB 2.0 port.

Oh yeah, another one- the codec fast-forward button in MGS2. No more reaching for the turbo-fire pad when someone starts reciting the works of Shakespeare.

I love them in MGS2, I have to say. Too bad no-one else seems to want to use them- they'd be handy in, say, Halo 2 to decide how hard to hit someone, or how quickly you reload (slowly and quietly would be useful in stealth situations, of course). Now, whoever decided to put PS2/ XB/ GC/ new PC games in DVD boxes deserves a big fat bum in the gob. No more breaking/ scratched cases, so that all-important eBay value is kept nice and high.

eBay, my good man. It's got squillions of copies.

Well, quite, optimisation is finding ways of making a system do more with less effort required. But it's semantics I guess. Mario Sunshine- I don't see how this game gets put up as a shining pillar of GC excellence. Eternal Darkness and Burnout 2 (for example) have always seemed to be more of a show of the GC's graphical prowess- Sunshine just seemed like it was trying to show off as much as possible.

It's good stuff, makes a change from scotch. And- future alcoholic?

Rockstar North used one of the VUs to do the DTS processing in Vice City, IIRC. I'm hoping we'll see some trully stunning work out of the PS2 before it joins it's grey father in the back cupboard. I think the system's Alien: Ressurection and Vagrant Story-age titles will be quite something to behold, even in comparision to the likes of GC and XBox titles.

At the mo, I'm sipping neat Jack whilst eating cheese toasties, and considering various Vagrant Story problems. Hah! I laugh at your so called "pint".