the grunter

I was going to get some PS2 action going over the weekend, but couldn’t find the two memory cards that I’ve been using (one of them the original black card, the other a Virtua Fighter 4 transparent card). Pretty frustrating, not that I got precious game saves on there or anything (I’m not even gonna pretend I remember what I have in those) but it’s messed up when I really wish to play a game but because there’s no memory card in the console, I can’t really start playing. This is the one thing I like the most about cartridges where the game saves get stored in the game itself.. nowadays I gotta have a memory card, a gamer profile, internet connection, 6 kinds of blood/urine and stool samples before I can just crack open a game and enjoy for 10 minutes. Ridiculous.

So in the midst of flipping my video game accessories drawer upside down, I found this little guy sitting in a cool leather jacket. I must’ve gotten it with the Japanese release of FFXII, I honestly don’t remember having that. But oh well, welcome to the family, gonna be using you from now on.

Back in the day when the original Xbox was trying to knock PS2 off its throne of being the most popular console (and eventually failed), an internal competition within several titles of the then-new sandbox genre was heating up as well. Grand Theft Auto III by Rockstar Games was the champion and Mafia from Illusion Softworks(Now 2K Czech) was one of the challengers. Others include True Crime: Streets of LA and Simpsons: Hit and Run.

It has been a while since I finished Mafia, but I do remember it being quite an entertaining game. Strangely my instincts for picking games have always been steering me away from a lot of the mainstream titles, as a result I have never finished some of the classics such as GTA III, Kill Zone 2, God of War and much more. Mafia might have caused less damage to the undefeated GTA III than it desired, but I can say with confidence that if it wasn’t for Mafia, we wouldn’t be seeing other mob-themed sandbox genre games such as The Godfather and Scarface. I cannot comment on whether this was good news or not, unfortunately.

Mafia was original, it puts players in the time where the mob power was the largest in the city so it was a big deal, and the game definitely offered me something that GTA III didn’t (I didn’t finish the game, but I did get far enough to know this much).

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One of the high points of my early gaming years was on my cousin’s Famicom (FC), or NES for you North Americans.

I love action games, I played Super Mario Bros and thought that it’s cool, yet a little bit “vanilla”. Now “Double Dragon” and “Contra”, they involved people getting punched or shot in the face point blank, and better refined my definition of what a decent side scroller should be.

And then along came Capcom’s “Bionic Commando”, with a way cooler title name for the Japanese release – ヒットラーの復活 トップシークレット, translates to “The Resurrection of Hitler: Top Secret”. There’s no debate that this title won’t fly in the Americas and Europe, so all instances of the Nazi/Swastikas/Hitler are gone in the US version. Read more