Pickups and Trades #1

I thought I’d do a semi-regular blog series about the games I’ve bought and traded over the past month, to chronicle and catalogue the games I’ve been buying. There are enough pick-ups videos on the internet to suggest an interesting subject matter, so I thought I’d give it a go. I normally try to keep my blogs to 700 words, as that’s usually all anybody’s got time for, but due to the nature of these blogs, they’ll be a little longer depending on how much I bought and traded. Nonetheless I’ll try to be as concise as possible.

On Steam, I downloaded a couple of games for my laptop, both of which I’d made a note of in my Interesting Games list and both of which had come up on a Steam Sale. They were:

Cosmic Star Heroine: A futuristic RPG with pixel-art graphics. I haven’t played it yet but it looks like it could be an interesting game.

Slain: Back from Hell: This is a 2D platforming game with a Castlevania-like setting. I understand it wasn’t too good on launch, but after receiving feedback, the developers modified this game for a significant improvement. It’s worth a look for that, if nothing else!

Volume: This was on Steam Sale. It’s on my list of games to collect; I’m a fan of Mike Bithell’s previous game, Thomas Was Alone, covered in a previous Backlog Beatdown. I’m looking forward to playing this; I’ve been enjoying smaller level-based games lately so this should be good.

I also visited CEX in Stourbridge towards the end of the month, and picked up the following games for the Xbox 360:

Assassin’s Creed 2: It took a while to find this, funnily enough. Finding the fun in Assassin’s Creed made me more willing to check out the next one…

Binary Domain: I got this one off a Metal Jesus video. It looks like a fairly standard shooter but no one else has mentioned it so far so I look forward to seeing how it works.

Condemned 2: I’m not usually big on horror games but I’ve heard from both Metal Jesus and Yahtzee that this one’s pretty good.

Wet: I’ve heard some poor comments about this one, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a good game in there somewhere. Plus the girl’s voiced by Faith from Buffy.

 

Looking forward to playing
some of these!

Also, on the Playstation 2, I bought Atari Anthology. Atari 2600 games and their arcade counterparts are before my time, and it wasn’t something I was particularly keen on exploring. But after watching Metal Jesus on Youtube, I found a game talked up on this compilation by John Riggs: Major Havoc. I’m looking forward to trying that, and I should have a pretty decent time with the rest of the games as well.

 

Now for my trades, there’s a new shop opened down the road from me called Get Gaming. It’s a pleasure to go in; the guy in the shop, Jay, has a lot of retro consoles as well as some modern systems, and will trade your older games. It was with this in mind that I went to the shop looking to trade some games I hadn’t played for a long time and probably never would again, for some DS games which I could pick up and play. So here’s a quick run-down of what I traded and why:

Xbox 360

Shadowrun: Oh dear. Anybody who had the misfortune to buy this game knows what the problem is. It’s not a fantasy/hacking based RPG that the property is based on, but a not-very-good multi-player-only shooter that tries to incorporate elements of magic into it. The main selling point was that it was cross-compatible with Windows Vista; a hard sell even at the time, and few people talk about Vista fondly three iterations of Windows later. There will inevitably be disparity between the people playing on PC with a keyboard and mouse, and the people on console who are playing with a controller. It was never a good idea, and it performed so badly that the servers were shut down only a few months after launch.

Xbox

Call of Duty: Finest Hour: The original Call of Duty game. I can only really play Call of Duty games for their single player modes, and not the multiplayer battles that the games very often trade on. This single player campaign is OK but I downloaded it onto my 360 a few years ago and haven’t played this game since, so I moved it on.

Def Jam: Fight for NY: Ah, I’ll miss this one. A brutal fighting game where you could beat different rappers, and one of the first fighting games I played with a good story. But I’ve played through it twice and I’ve got all I can out of it. Jay knows how good this game is and was happy to pick it up.

Lego Star Wars/Lego Star Wars II: The first of the many licensed collect-a-thon games which I still enjoy. But as I’ve got The Complete Saga on my 360, which is better balanced and more convenient, I won’t be coming back to these.

Sonic Mega Collection Plus: Sonic is great and will always be, but the majority of these games I have on later compilations, and I can’t say I’ll miss the ones that aren’t.

Playstation 2

Devil May Cry: Another game that I’ve later replaced on the 360 with the HD collection of the first three games. It’s still great but I’ve got no more use for it.

Medal of Honor: Frontline: For some reason I bought this on the Xbox about 10 years after I bought it on the PS2. I prefer it on the latter so I let this one go.

Smackdown vs Raw 2007: I played this for No Game New Year, and I enjoyed it, but I won’t be playing it again due to the iterations of the game that have come since.

Sega Mega Drive Collection: Most of these games are on the Ultimate collection on the 360. Of the ones that aren’t, Ecco Jr and Virtua Fighter 2 were OK but Sword of Vermillion wasn’t great. Nonetheless, Jay was interested in picking this one up.

Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel: I covered this in No Game New Year as well. It’s not a very good game and requires far more time than I’m prepared to put in to it.

Hyper Street Fighter II: There have been many iterations of Street Fighter II. There are two things that set this apart: Firstly, you can mix and match different versions of the characters in the same game, so you could have the Street Fighter II version of Blanka fighting the Super Street Fighter II version of Chun Li or DeeJay. Secondly, it comes with the animated film on the disc. Having seen the film and owning the Street Fighter games on other compilations, I saw no need to keep this, but Jay was interested in it.

Gameboy Advance

Tournament Tactics. A good game, but I hadn't played
it for years!

Yu-Yu-Hakusho: Spirit Detective: I played this game years ago when I first started this blog! It was competent enough but not one I will return to.

Yu-Yu-Hakusho: Tournament Tactics: I played this one as well and I enjoyed it a lot more, but I’ve got all I can out of it; time to move it on.

Phantasy Star Collection: They’re great games, but once again I have them on later compilations so there was no need for me to own it now.

Here are the Nintendo DS games that replaced them:

New Super Mario Bros: As I’ve been enjoying pick-up-and-play games a lot more, I thought I’d pick this one up, as the level-based system of Super Mario means you rarely have to play much of the game in one sitting.

Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword: I had no idea about this. I know the Ninja Gaiden games can be very hard and I’ve even played one or two of them but it will be interesting to see how it performs on the DS.

Children of Mana: Ah, another long-form RPG. But I like these kinds of games, and I’ll happily give this one a chance. I’m just not expecting to beat it any time soon!

Here’s something interesting: The Gameboy Advance games I traded had their boxes, and the Yu-Yu-Hakusho games had their manuals too. But Jay is finding the full boxed games harder to sell than the loose cartridges! He thinks it’s because people are buying GBA games to play them, rather than to collect them – so when you can buy four loose games for the price pf one with a box and manual, the complete game is a hard sell. He’s got a boxed copy of Super Mario World that he’s struggling to shift, although that could be because you can download that game onto the WiiU without having to physically store it!

So, cleared some space, and picked up some more games I’ll play in the future. See you next month!