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Thanks so much to @phillv85 for nominating me this time – this will be my first pick from when we switched to nominating individuals, but I was the person who originally suggested Parodius back in 2019 when deciding on poll candidates, so it's probably my second pick overall. I know we've already had a few rounds with fighting-themed games, but I feel like we haven't had a pure 1v1 fighter for a while. And it's a genre that's relatively easy to pick up and enjoy in the space of a fortnight! That being said, the game still needs a little bit of background for the uninitiated. Pocket Fighter or Super Gem Fighter Mini Mix is a "chibi" 1v1 fighter that is sort of a love letter to many classic Capcom games – with more than a few cameos and references – as well as being a fun blend of fighting game staples like super jumps, guard crush, special moves and super combos. It's a three-button game where you have a punch, kick and "special" – and the properties of these can change when holding a direction, crouching or jumping. Furthermore, there are easy chain combos in this game – as long as you start with a punch attack, you can press more punch/kick buttons to chain together a combination of attacks that can result in a powerful ender. As you fight with your opponent, gems of various colours and sizes will explode out of the characters, and picking these up will fill up meters (of the associated colours) at the bottom of the screen – with bigger gems filling the meters more quickly. You'll want to build these meters to improve your specials: in front of the meters are icons that show a particular special move and the corresponding command. So Ryu has an icon of the fireball move in front of the red meter, and if you collect red gems you can power up your fireballs. Items can also burst from onscreen chests – there are items you can hold on to and toss out with kick+special, and food items you can pick up for recovery. You'll always begin with a throwable item at the start of the match – it'll be shown as the circular icon next to the two small heads below the lifebar. (I think your easy chain combo can result in a new chest appearing as well?) Super combos do exist, and your super meter is below the health bar at the top of the screen. Most of the time you can get a super combo out with two quarter circle motions and an attack, so try stuff out or ask in here! Also, if you find yourself in a tight spot and have a super meter full, you can press all three attack buttons simultaneously for the Mega Crash move – this acts as a burst and knocks the opponent back, but you lose your super meter and gems. It sounds like there are a lot of systems in there, but you can still thrash around with the easy chains and have fun – and then if you're after something more, the depth is there too. Pocket Fighter saw releases on PS1, Saturn, WonderSwan, in the arcade, and in the Street Fighter Alpha Anthology. I believe it's also available in the Capcom Fighting Collection released in 2022 - but someone might need to confirm. I actually have a copy of Alpha Anthology in my shelving unit at the moment, but I don't have a PS2 right now, so instead I'll probably go for the PS1 version via DuckStation. (I may also have the WS version on my RS97, but I need to check.) My goal is to at least make it through arcade mode with a character before the next game is nominated! Previous nominations:

The perfect podcast for the gamer that loves the PS2 era. We breakdown PS2 games one at a time and then rank them in order. Polygon symphonies is the no nonsense retro gaming show dedicated to exploring the PS2 library. https://polygonsymphonies.buzzsprout.com/

Mines been despatched from Gameplay, ill be playing this tomorrow. Unless the postman gets caught in a snowstorm or something.

Hi All Anyone have any experience of these cheap, and nasty PS2 Memory Cards off eBay? They say 64 & 128MB (but know SDs off there can be dodgy) https://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/0?mpre=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.co.uk%2Fulk%2Fitm%2F362101926789 Any info and opinions- pro & con appreciated. Don't like having to keep swapping out 8MB standard cards much. Thanks Andy

This month we have a lovely foil cover celebrating the making of Final Fantasy XII and the 30th anniversary of the series. There's lots more too, including. 35 Years Of The C64 Ultimate Guide: The Ninja Warriors Collecting Guide to 8-Bit Codemasters Games Making Of Starcraft Making Of Obsidian Archives: Tronix Publishing Licence To Thrill: Platoon In The Chair: David Kelly Minority Report: Mega Drive Modem And loads more I can't remember, because I'm at home..

My PS2 pad in getting noticeably decrepit -- had to happen sooner or later but it does put me in the market for a replacement and wondering what folk would recommend? Any trusty gizmo that'll let me plug in an Xbox/PS4 pad, or a reliable supplier of original controllers, or am I doomed to [clutches pearls] hawking Ebay for 3rd party claptrap? Guidance plz my lovelies.

Can anyone suggest the best place to sell bulk lots of PS1 and PS2 games?. I don't have a huge amount and certainly don't have any so called rare games but I would like them to go to a good home as I just haven't got the room in my new house that I did when I first started collecting them. Are there any website (excluding ebay). I will also put them up on here but I would really like to sell the lot and get them collected.

Usually I make these threads as I've just started a game, but I recently finished Maximo just a couple of days ago after playing it over the last few weeks here and there. I was interested to hear what others thought of it in general, as it clearly is quite a decent game, but hard as balls in parts and was close to the bin or e-bay several times for me. I did persevere, and with the fortune of finally figuring out how to properly use the save system, it became doable for the first time. After not long since going through Devil May Cry, and remembering the moaning I did about how it was difficult, but later became excellent and doable, well I had a similar sort of experience with Maximo. There were some parts which made it feel difficult and hit and miss, but many of the enemies just need the right approach. Maximo seems to be some sort of spiritual sequel to Ghouls & Ghosts but with a different name and updated into a 3D environment. I'm sure I once read an article on why we'd never see another Ghouls & Ghosts game, although can't remember what it was, and I'm assuming here that licensing is all over that one, hence the change in name. Does anyone actually know? One thing for sure though is that Maximo is very close to the original titles in terms of difficulty and trying to keep up the instant death scenarios. It can be brutal and so frustrating at times, but the more I played it, the further I got. It also has the same idea from the original games with the ability to build up pieces of armour, only to lose this if you get hit too many times, eventually resulting in you being left in your boxers. You can even buy or find replacement boxers but I'm not actually sure if this was for aesthetic reasons. Now I don't know if anyone else had this same issue, but someone replied to a comment I made about playing this game over in the "What are you playing now?" thread in Discussion, and it seemed to me he had the same problem figuring out saves properly. The game gives out very little information about what things actually do. I remember it taking me a while to figure out how to activate a check point when first playing, which is done by jumping twice and then slamming on it with triangle. It would have helped by including a quick message by the first one at least. The biggest problem for me though was the save points at the pools. I'd seen in its format, that you begin on a full level, only to finish off and appear in a hub world connecting the remaining levels for the current world you are in. In each hub there is usually some kind of circular pool that does nothing if you go on it, but it can save if you stand on the right brick around the outside. It took me until about the third world before I even figured this existed, and even then that was by complete fluke as I walked on it and could have sworn for a split second I saw something appear and then disappear on screen quickly. Until then, the only way I assumed you could save was to beat a complete world in itself with all the levels and then the boss character. The bosses are actually not too difficult once you know how to beat them, but some can take a bit of time to work out how to damage them at all. One of the best ways to get through the stages is really to try and keep yourself stocked up on powerups and just not die or lose too much too often. In this way it reminded me of those scrolling shooters like Gradius which are much easier to progress, providing you keep your ship upgraded and just don't die, because if you do then you become open to all sorts of attacks and cheap deaths. The final boss encounter had me confused a bit as on the first part of it, I hadn't got a clue what was actually going on, and somehow it just ended after so long, but celebrations we not quite ready as it slams you into another boss battle without a save during the very last encounter with some kind of beast in pitch black. What seemed very frustrating turned out to have a knack to it though in the end and didn't take too long to beat. Maximo is definitely worth playing if you want challenge, but a challenge that you can get through if you persevere. There's a second one on the PS2 but I know nothing about that as of now, but definitely interested in picking up one day. It's funny how I initially hated this game in the early parts of it, but grew to really appreciate how good of a game it actually is, exactly like Devil May Cry was.

Well now that I've finished Psychonauts, I thought I'd pick away at more of my unplayed PS2 collection. Broken Sword 3 I've had for probably around a year now and still haven't tried it out at all yet, probably because I'm partly bothered about it being entirely on the crap side, as I haven't hear many great things about it. Part of my reasoning to try out BS3 was to see how the third one fared against the original two, both of which are excellent point a click adventures of my past. BS1 is probably one of my own personal most nostalgic games of this type too, as it was one of the first for me to get into and play to the end. Technically it was Mad Dog Williams on the ST but that doesn't really count as it was a demo. The biggest noticable difference with the third title in the series is that it made the transition to 3D and also allowed you to directly control the character, and as I'm sure many of you are aware, this took something away from what made the early games special. I've decided to go into this without the expectation of returning back to what the old games were all about and instead just play it for what it is. I'm happy anyway knowing that there's a BS5 in the works via kickstarter anyway and may even try and locate the mysterious 4th title that most of us didn't even know existed, providing I get on with this game to some extent. Come to thing of it, I'm sure I might have actually created a thread for this a while back but fuck it, I'm here in a new one and will try and keep it updated with progress for anyone interested in learning more about what it's like. From my personal point of view, I'm hoping that the gripe most people had was the 3D transition, but we'll see. Main title screen So upon firing it up, I'm greeted by a rather dark looking title screen and after a quick look into the extras, it seems I can view a brief set of text with images the storylines behind the first two games. It was actually a good thing to see as I'd pretty much forgotten entirely what the original stories were about. The whole Templars thing started to ring a bell and from what I remember, you embark on a journey searching for answers to an assassination at a french cafe, eventually to uncover some dark masonic plan to unleash an evil. I think there was always a subtle element of fantasy towards the end of the game or here and there which I felt was quite cool to see as most of the time it was based around real believable material. I don't know if anyone has ever read James Herbert books, but the ones I read all seemed to have a similar thing going on where the ending would reveal a true fantasy ficticious finale, and for the rest of it, the whole thing was always plausably based on logic. Back when I first started BS, I had absolutely no knowledge on Mayans, Templars, Masons, Illuminati etc, where as now I've read and seen a lot of this sort of stuff, so I can usually relate better to it all. It made Assassin's Creed all the better too for the same reasons. Broken Sword 2 takes place 6 months after 1 which was good to be reminded of as I've forgotten 2 more so than 1. I tend to find the first game in many series tends to be more memorable than the sequals if played around the similar time preiod. I think it's a similar thing though this time revolving around a recovered artifact of ancient historical importance, and ultimately there's some sort of plan to uncover an (forgotten the word im looking for) apocalypic order of evil proportions. Interestingly there some other readable things in the same bonus section which talks about some geo electrical thing and quite interestingly, the great mysterious book of vonitch or whaever it's called. It triggered a memory about a similar thing I'd seen in a documentory about a year ago, and indeed, it turned out to be the same thing. Anyway I've only really just started the game so haven't gotten far at all, but graphically it was surprisingly quite good as I was expecting worse. I'm sure I read the voice actor who plays George Stobart is different, but he seems so far to do an alright job. Reminds me of the original one, unless I've just forgotten entirely what the proper Stobart sounds like. Unsure on the other voice actors. The story begins with George in a plane with a simple minded bloke flying a plane over a jungle somewhere in hope to find a scientist, but things go wrong as the plane crashes due to a storm and lands on the edge of a cliff. You begin by trying to escape the plane and bringing the pilot to safety as he passes out in the cockpit. Walking towards the front of the plane severly puts you in danger as the whole plane tips up. So far it feels like the old games as far as searching things goes just without the cursor but forces you to move around physically. Pushing a box to the back of the plane rebalances the weight. I also picked up a bottle of beer (which wake up the pilot better than slapping him in the face) and a bottle opener. Shortly after escaping George comes across the scientist who just so happens to be moments away from the edge of the cliff but is stopped by two evil looking blokes who I think kill him (not sure can't quite remember), but aparently he's trying to develop something that creates limitless power. Meanwhile you switch over to Nico who also makes a return to the series where she hears a gunshot go off in her apartment just as she's giving up hope on ever getting another interesting story to cover as a journalist. A guy who aparently has sussed out the hidden code behind the ancient Vonich manuscript also gets held at gun point. Little is known who that is though as of yet. So far it doesn't seem too bad at all, but time will tell I guess. I'll try and update this thread when I can.

I was late to the party with the PS2 - I went from the PS1 to the Gamecube, then Xbox, then got a PS2 around the time of the Xbox 360 launch. I feel I may have overlooked some of its great games, as many have said it was one of the best consoles ever and yet I'm not massively fussed about setting it up again. Pulling from my database, my list of games is: 24: The Game Ape Escape 2 Bombastic Canis Canem Edit EyeToy: Play Global Defence Force Gran Turismo 3 A-Spec Gregory Horror Show Ico Katamari Damancy Kuri Kuri Mix Monster Attack Ōkami Pro Evolution Soccer Pro Evolution Soccer 2 Shadow of the Colossus SingStar SingStar '80s SingStar '90s SingStar Boybands vs Girlbands SingStar Legends SingStar Party SingStar Pop SingStar Singalong with Disney Space Channel 5 The Getaway The Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning Tomb Raider Anniversary WipEout Fusion Some rubbish there which i pricked up cheap, indeed. What games am I missing, great RLLMUK? I've just noticed that I never got R-Type Final, so have bid for that on eBay. Bear in mind that most great games I will already have had on the Xbox or Gamecube, and if things are available there then I'd prefer to play them on a different controller. I wouldn't pick up games that have been rereleased on HD collections either unless there's a good reason why the PS2 version is better. [Oh, and the Katamari I have is the Japanese version, but my console can't play Japanese games. Oops.]