Five for a Fiver (or perhaps less)

I'm playing an awful lot of Bioshock Infinite at the moment, and I'm marvelling at how I'm able to give new significance to the early events of the game, now that I know what's going on. I highly recommend playing it a second time. In the first playthrough, you're told the story, in the second you understand it.

Anyway, I've been a bit isolated from the wider gaming world recently, but happily, just as I was looking for something to talk about, my Bethesda loving friend stepped into the fold with an idea.

Five for under a fiver!

So I'm handing the floor to him.



As a little side project we decided a fun thing to add to the blog would be a countdown of five great games that we've handpicked each month that you can pick up and play for under a fiver. Most of these games won’t be life changing (Final Fantasy VII anyone?) since these archetypal 'amazing' games usually come with an 'amazing' price tag. You may not agree with our choices but, well, tough! Joking aside, we really hope you like this list and take a chance with some of these titles! The list will change each month with different games you should play for the price of a Big Mac…

Here’s this month’s rundown

#5:
Mission Impossible: Operation Surma (Multi Format)

Ok, so how many of you read Mission… and turned off thinking it was the awful N64/PS1 game based on the Tom Cruise movie? Well actually I loved that game, for all its flaws (Grownup Gamer says, "So did I!"). But anyway Operation: Surma is thankfully far superior. Mostly. You play as Ethan Hunt, and what starts as a simple tag 'n' grab mission evolves into a story that quite rightly should have been its own film. The added stealth tactics are a welcome addition to its predecessor, as are the clever uses of gadgets and silent takedowns instead of headshots to outwit the enemy. These additions help take this Mission Impossible game back to its espionage roots. While clunky at times, the game overall is superb. If you buy it and think what I've just said was a bunch of crap, then I urge you to take it past the first level and reconsider. I happen to think the skydive sequence towards the end is amazing. This game was one of the first I bought for my PS2 10/12 years ago, and is still on my shelf. 
rearms and

Where to buy it: Amazon
Prices: £1.99 INC postage (PS2) £1.49 INC postage (Xbox) PREOWNED (Available sealed on Xbox currently for £4.89 INC postage)

#4:
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 (Multi Format)

Arguably the best Pro Skater of them all. I remember this being the first Pro Skater I played, having played it to death on my PS1. The soundtrack is awesome, I still skate around The Foundry with 96 Quite Bitter Beings by CKY or Blitzkrieg Bop by The Ramones pumped at full volume feeling like a skating god. Graphically the PS1 version of game is quite sketchy, but the PS2 and  GameCube versions hold up pretty well. The game, in any of it's guises remains a gem. Also, if you need just one reason to play this game. Darth. Maul. As a skater. Complete with Lightsaber. ‘Nuff said. If you need another? Wolverine… 


Where to buy it: Amazon
Prices: £2.04 INC postage (PS2) £5.51 INC postage (Xbox) (I know… technically over a fiver… but £2.03 of that IS postage so TECHNICALLY it’s only £3.48…) £4.02 INC postage (For an acceptable copy on PS1 – Although this blogger has found numerous copies of this game lurking in Cash Generator for a measly 99p) £3.49 INC postage (Gamecube) 

#3:
Tomb Raider 3 (PS1/PC)

Ahh, Tomb Raider 3. The pinnacle of the great gaming lady's original incarnation. Great though her previous and following two encounters were, Tomb Raider 3 just stands head and shoulders above the rest. It's also, to my eternal shame, the only PS1 Tomb Raider game I’ve ever completed! What isn’t there about this game to love? Well for starters, it contains my favourite of all the Tomb Raider weapons, the Desert Eagle. Then there are locations, from the freezing tundra of Antarctica to the dizzying heights of London (and the lows of Aldwych Tube Station) to the mysterious and supposedly hidden(?) Area 51 in Nevada. The story and characters are great, even the Butler, who is cleverly covered in targets as you wreak havoc in Croft manor, because Eidos just KNEW we’d shoot him. Genius. The fact that you could play the story sort of in any order you like is a nice feature, whilst India has to be first location and Antarctica has to the be last, you can pick and choose the sequence in which you visit the other three. The classic Lara death scenes were back, my personal favourite? Piranhas. This game is one of the best Tomb Raider games of all time in my humble opinion. And I’ve played them all, even the one that must not be named. Yes Angel of Darkness, I’m looking at you! 


Where to buy it: Amazon
Prices: £3.27 INC postage (PS1 – Platinum, Black Disc will set you back £5.30 INC postage) £2.04 INC postage (PC) – But this blogger recommends PS1!

Drawing close to the end… With the #2 spot going to…!

#2:
FFVII - Dirge of Cerberus (PS2) 

Lordy! As a lover of Final Fantasy, especially Final Fantasy VII, and especially Vincent Valentine, how could this game not appeal? It oozes sexiness from the bleak Midgar backdrop and the lovingly crafted steampunky locations to the platform/hack and slash gameplay. Beautiful. As a massive fan of the Devil May Cry games, for me, this was Devil May Cry set in the world of FFVII,  playing as the *other* character dressed with a pronounced love of guns. Its fast paced, frenetic and provides a lot of back story to the FFVII universe, including some fresh insight into Vincent’s story. It introduces some new characters and allies to aid him during his journey, and you can use his iconic Limit Breaks from FFVII to help you in battle. As a happy bonus for us, Square Enix revamped the game for the Western Market, as it fell short in Japan. More combos, slicker, quicker. I'm glad they did. I remember the first time I played this. I did not stop until I had finished It. I was about seventeen I think, and remember staying up all night to finish it. I remember the last level provided a perfect ending to the game. Coupled with the Death Penalty, Vincent rampaged through the skies. If you are in any way interested in finding out how Vincent became, well, Vincent, then this game is a must play. In fact, any self-proclaimed Final Fantasy fan should own and play this game. One of, if not the best spin offs from a Final Fantasy title ever. 

Where to buy it: Amazon
Prices: £3.66 (PS2) – Best. Buy. Ever. 

This month’s #1 spot goes to:
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (Mega Drive)

How could this post be complete without the addition of our favourite blue hedgehog’s arguably best adventure on the Mega Drive. The levels were amazing, the game seemed faster and Tails made his first appearance. It was quite fresh to play as Tails, despite how awful he is as a character, but I remember playing as him instead of Sonic and was like, "Whoa! Whole new Game!" Sonic 2 contains one of my all time favourite Sonic levels, Chemical Plant Zone. The soundtrack to that level was amazing and every time I think of Sonic 2, it's Chemical Plant that I think of. Another feature I liked about Sonic 2 was the spin dash. No more awkward backtracking and building up speed to get round the loop de loop like in Sonic the Hedgehog! Great addition. Weirdly, I love the change in design of the Shield powerup too. In Sonic 1 it was just a boring 'bubble' but in Sonic 2 it was this vibrant pulsating swirly blue thing. Incredible. I recently downloaded this on XBLA and played through for about half an hour and reached the Mystic Caves. Sadly this was very late at night and I eventually had to retire, but was one of the best half hours of my life. I have so much love for this Sonic game, especially the special stages. They're equally as frustrating as those windy mazes and GOAL! bars in Sonic 1, these special stages required a certain amount of rings or you fail at each checkpoint. I still to this day have NEVER managed to fully circle over the halfpipe and catch all the rings in the air. How you are meant to do that still baffles me, almost 15 years after first playing it. If you haven’t played this then do. If you are a fan of Sonic then play this game. This game actually was one of those life changing games. It renewed my love for Sonic and ensured I bought the sequels too.

Where to buy it: Amazon
Prices: Mega Drive games rarely come in the box or with instructions (not sure why!) but as a cartridge only you are looking at £4.15 INC postage. A boxed with instructions copy will cost you between £5 and £10 depending on where you go usually. (I actually managed to score a copy at a local car boot fair, for an award winning 50p). 

We hope you enjoyed this post and please keep reading and sharing! We'll be sure to let you know about the next Five for a Fiver feature

Vintage Values

This week I spotted a tweet from Keith Stuart, the Guardian's gaming correspondent (@keefstuart). He'd bought an NTSC copy of the near mythical Snatcher on PC Engine. Despite not actually owning a PC Engine. Long story short, he replied to a tweet of mine about me looking for Snatcher on Mega CD saying that he was too, along with Sonic CD, which is fetching silly money. 

This surprised me, because I own a copy of Sonic CD, having picked it up from the bottom of a bargain bucket full of unloved games for unloved consoles for about four quid sometime around 1995, so I never expected it to be all that expensive. Yet somehow in the intervening years prices for it have shot up, so much so that a used copy of a twenty year old game costs almost as much as what it did when it was new. The first hit from a cursory search of eBay has it going at £37.00, with a sealed copy going for a whopping £499! This is madness! First of all, why are there any sealed copies of a game that old even in existence, especially a game as good as Sonic CD, and second, £499! Sonic CD isn't even all that rare, is it? What kind of insane nerd would pay that out that sort of money for a game?

Wait a minute, that would be me. I spotted Mickey Mania on eBay afterwards and the thought genuinely did cross my mind. Mickey Mania is a title I've wanted for years. I somehow had a demo of it and it was so far superior to the Megadrive version that it became a case of the Mega CD version or nothing. Unfortunately by that point, Mega CD games were already getting pretty hard to find, so I wound up not getting it. Now I've seen it on eBay though, I've wound up valuing titles already in my Mega CD collection, just for the kicks. They're mainly titles that I'd thought were pretty insignificant in the history of gaming, yet would never get rid of because they are some of the first I ever bought with my own money. 

So let's look at them. I searched Mega CD in ebay and arranged by highest price first so that I could pick out titles in similar condition to my own, ie, immaculate. After the initial shock of the £999 copy of Final Fight (which I don't have) the first find was Keio Flying Squadron. Would you like a copy? Why that would be a minimum £50 my good man, unless you want a sealed copy, then it would be £494.99. Paws of Fury, yours for the bargain price of £44.99. Battlecorps, £20, or you can have it sealed for £42.99. Ground Zero, frankly awful, yet a great investment, I picked it up when I didn't know better for a fiver in '95, today it's £35. Pugsy is going for £34.99, Microcosm, £18.99. Shockingly, even Road Avenger, Tomcat Alley, Thunderhawk and the Sol Feace/Cobra Command double Pack are going for a tenner each, and they're as common as a very common thing. Then there is Pitfall, which I couldn't find on eBay. I should hope so too, I spent eight years tracking a copy down. Perhaps it's a title so rare that I could name my price, but probably not. I've taken to Twitter to see what the retro gaming community I seem to have fallen in with thinks. 

Still, my collection of bad to middling Mega CD games is somehow worth a fortune and with the notable exception of Sonic CD, which is rightly considered a classic and one of the best in the series, I have no idea why. I mean it's not as if your life is going to be enriched by playing Ground Zero. It's wank. Really, it is. Great though I believe Thunderhawk to be, it's by no means a classic and although Paws of Fury is beautifully animated and a lot of fun, it's not a title that would ascend to the pantheon of fighting game greats. Also despite what I said earlier, after seeing these insane values and thinking about them like a rational adult, I've really been turned off trying to find the games I wanted so badly all those years ago and couldn't get hold of. They're all titles that are sort of considered in some circles to be their definitive versions. Titles like Flashback, which seems to be impossible to find anyway, Final Fight, Earthworm Jim, the Ecco games, Mickey Mania, Eternal Champions or even Shining Force CD. Really, I'd given up hope of owning Snatcher or Shining Force CD years ago, they're rarer and harder to find than traditionally mined, naturally sourced, billion year old Sea of Tranquility Moon Cheese after all, but somehow even Mickey Mania costs three figures now, and it's just a platformer whose defining features were a trip through the titular character's greatest hits and the level where Mickey gets chased by a moose. I could get it on PS1 for one figure. But I don't want to, I want it on the Mega CD because I had a demo of it, and that's probably why the values on games like this are so high.

Despite all the ranting, now that I'm starting to come to terms with the shock that other people besides me like the Mega CD, I now want to value my N64 collection. There's a boxed copy of Conker's Bad Fur Day in there, and it's in great condition. Like the Mega CD, I bought most my games cheap on the second hand market after the N64 became a defunct console. And that was mainly because I couldn't afford a PS2 but needed new games to play. It's quite likely that their individual values have appreciated greatly. I could be sitting on a fortune. While I'm at it, I might as well check out my stack of PS1 games too. There's a few esoteric titles in there that might be worth a bit as well. Sometimes I even wonder how much my Atari 800xl cassettes would be worth if I still had them. Really though, there's no point, because knowing the value of my retro games collections isn't going to matter a tiny bit. I'm not going to be selling any of my old games anytime soon. Perhaps I'm being irrational here, but they have a far greater sentimental value. They're like a record of my childhood almost, although that notion is perhaps no more irrational than the way some retro titles are valued on eBay.

Nostalgia it seems, is now worth an irrational amount of money.

Retracing Steps

I've been away a while. You know how it is, too much to do, not enough life to do it in. Mostly though it's because of Persona 4 and Spec Ops: The line. This post was supposed to be about Spec Ops, but over the weekend Edge Magazine ran an article on Yoshi's Island, and I was really impressed by how well the overall look of the game had aged.

Have you played anything old recently? Did it look like total ass? Probably. But then again, maybe not? You might be lucky enough to have played something that inexplicably looked great even though it was made before some of the people you know were even born.

That really does happen to people. You don’t realise how old things are sometimes. My girlfriend recently had to explain what a floppy disc was to the kids she was teaching. Really. My sister didn’t know you could play both sides of a vinyl.

But I digress.

If old games look good, they look good for two reasons.

1: Absolutely sky high, top notch, incredible art design.

2: The ability of the artists to translate that into polygons or pixels.

Take Ridge Racer Type 4 as an example. It arrived late in the PS1’s life and Namco had really got their Ridge Racer mojo. Hell, even the intro movie looks great and it was made in in the last century! Ridge 4 is bursting with personality, from the Pooka trackside on Phantomile, to the Cessna buzzing overhead on Wonderhill. Each locale is lovingly crafted, yet clear and clean. Grab a screenshot and you can see the attention that went into every single inch of every single track. There are blazing orange sunsets, taxiing aircraft and bright blue seas. There is something like Chinatown, cobbles and winding mountain tarmac. Ridge Racer has always felt like a great place to drive in, but Ridge 4 is unmatched, before or since. 

Really though, the thing that still makes Ridge 4 pop is the cars. Almost every one of them beautiful to behold, with great race liveries, despite the low resolution. Watching them blazing through the night trailing red streaks from the tail-lights is still a joy to behold. Gran Turismo had real cars, but Ridge 4’s were desirable. To this day, I want an Assoluto Bisonte, and if I ever become a millionaire I’m going to approach Namco for the models and find a way to build one on top of a Ferrari chassis. All the supercar houses in all of Europe never made a car as beautiful as the best that Ridge 4 could offer. 

Another great example from the Playstation era is WipeOut. Play any WipeOut game released before WipeOut HD and you'll be surprised by how fresh and clean they still look. A lot of this is down to the peerless concept work of The Designer's Republic, whose sleek, clean and bold vision of the future of racing seemed to jump fully formed into the hands of Psygnosis all those years ago.

Art quality is crucial to how well newer games age. If you check out most last gen games with realistic graphic design, they will look pretty bad to your modern High Dynamic Range Lighting addled eyes. I remember the first Max Payne blowing my socks off, but returning to it now, it's not so pretty. On the other hand, games with a really stylised look fare better. Ratchet and Clank, Jak and Daxter, Sly Raccoon, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus may not outshine more modern games, but I've never said, "Ugh, this looks awful," whilst playing them. In the future, it will be games like Braid, Alien Hominid, Limbo and the flat out gorgeous Bastion that will have us commenting about how well they have aged.

The same holds true to 16-Bit too. Mortal Kombat has looks pretty bad next to contemporaries such as Street Fighter II or the fabulously obscure but tons of fun Brutal: Paws of Fury. Compare MK's digitized sprites to the fluid animation of Brutal's silhouetted character select screen and there's no competition.Yoshi's Island's crayon aesthetic means it still looks as charming now as it ever did, whereas the SNES' other SuperFX fueled graphical powerhouses frankly don't. 

I could go on and on with games like Flashback, Spyro, Crash Bandicoot, Wind Waker, Alundra, Final Fantasy, E.G.G and Sonic. In the end it always comes back to the art. Good art, it seems, is timeless and without borders. Just as the art connoisseur can appreciate the works of the old masters in the gallery, the gamer can find good graphics no matter what the age of the system he or she is playing on.

All this makes me sound like a graphics whore, and you know what, I am. I'm not afraid to admit it. And while there are a lot of great games with badly aged graphics (here's looking at you GoldenEye), there's a pretty strong correlation between games looking nice and playing nice. Besides, everybody likes to look at something pretty, and it can be a great way to get people to look at classic games who may not necessarily check them out. The next time someone tells you they don't play old games because they look rubbish, or because they play badly, find a way for them to play Yoshi's Island. If you can't lend them a SNES, find it on the GBA or emulate one. It's easy enough. At the very least, show them a youtube video and get them to guess how old it is. I guarantee you they'll probably get it wrong. Even if they don't, they'll jump on the retro wagon eventually.

Retro gaming is getting a lot of love at the moment. Old, but cool is how it was described in Wreck It Ralph, and that's pretty much on the money. Personally I think it's because there are people old enough now to have been around gaming for as long as they can remember. They're looking back and wanting to recapture the memories with their mates, or in cases like this on Penny Arcade, sharing the past with their children. That's cool in itself, although realising they game you're playing with your young 'un is older than they are can be pretty harrowing experience.

It seems to come to us in different ways. I have a friend who can quote correct eBay prices for rare games off the top of his head, who is consumed with the desire to own every Gamecube game ever. There's me, always late to the party, trying to get hold of something I missed out on first time round or looking out for old stuff that remains easy on the eyes. I recently paid £23 for a thirteen year old copy of Discworld Noir on the PS1, and I'm irrationally excited about it. I've even managed to find room on my memory cards so that I can play it on the TV rather than emulate it on my laptop. I have a feeling that G-Police and Colony Wars will be next on the list. Then there are the hardcore retro heads, like the guys who run 8-Bit Lounge at the Hare and Hounds in Birmingham. That they have access to all this stuff in itself is amazing, but that they are willing to share it all and let you play for free is special. If you haven't heard of them before, check out the site and perhaps show your face at the next event. It's a great show of how inclusive gaming can be, and a side of our hobby that's rarely seen by a mainstream  media that sometimes focuses too much on the negative aspects of games.

We are getting to the point now where gaming has a long enough history to look back upon to appreciate the significant works of the past in the way we do with other media, such as film, music or art. Interest in old games is something I think will continue to flourish as the medium as a whole continues to mature. After all, you've got to know where you've been to find out where you're going. No matter how well, or otherwise, the graphics have aged.