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Showing posts from May, 2020

Musings

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1. Vita-ing in 2020 As I mentioned a few weeks back, I recently un-retired my Vita. Unfortunately, my memory card was corrupted so I lost all of my saves and everything needed to be re-downloaded. So, over the last month, I have been reinstalling my library piece by piece. While I was at it, I decided to try some of the dozens of untouched titles that I'd accumulated over the years, most of which came from PS+. Severed was the best of the bunch. I bought it in 2018, but discarded it early on; I just wasn't in the mood. My experience was very different this time around, however. I love the art style, the manic swiping and the dark, vague story, and I played it right through to the very end. I also finished Burly Men at Sea , an adventure as short as it is charming (it is quite charming). I was starting to get into Titan Souls, but the 15-20 seconds delay between dying, respawning and re-confronting your foe is too long in a game where death is constant. It desperately nee

The Secrets of Sega Rally

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I am a fraud. I had a copy of Sega Rally Championship from 1996-1998, back when I owned a PAL Saturn. I rebought it in 2006, when I grabbed a Japanese system, and have held onto that version ever since. It is one of my favourite games on my favourite retro console, and is something that I've played on-and-off across four different decades. It is arcade racing perfection - fun, colourful, inviting, easy to pick up but difficult to master. Sega Rally Championship features three courses - Desert, Forest, Mountain - and two cars - the Toyota Celicia and the Lancia Delta. This was known. Or at least it was, until my world was turned upside down over the weekend by a picture retweeted into my timeline. It was a screenshot of a fourth course and an unfamiliar car, claiming to be from Sega Rally Championship. Must be some sort of PC mod, I thought to myself. Those PC gamers are out of control. But then I dared to dream. Could it be possible that I'd been completely unaware of

Final Fantasy VII Remake - MidYah or MidNah

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I still can't believe that those mad bastards remade Final Fantasy VII. I always dismissed it as a fanboy fantasy, for which Square Enix would never have the appetite. I was wrong. I finished Final Fantasy VII Remake last week, and I'm glad that it exists. It adds something worthwhile to the VII menagerie. It works both as a companion piece to the Seven canon and as an interesting deviation. I enjoyed it, but much of that enjoyment was down to nostalgia. Remake is good, but Remake is also bad. It's complicated then, but so are most games that are worth remembering. In an attempt to organize my thoughts, I have committed them to a "wot I liked" and "wot I didn't like" blog. Or a MidYah and MidNah blog, if you will. Because Midgar is the setting of Remake, and Yah sounds like a exclamation in the affirmative and, well, you get it. SPOILERS, obviously. MidYah: Nostalgia Square Enix invented nostalgia two decades ago, when they started