Obscure Gamers Portal

Once Covid's been kicked down......

With the amount of lockdowns in the UK and worldwide we all need something to look forward too. Which is why I'm asking for interest in doing a possible OG meetup sometime late in 2020 or 2021. This is all depending on how fast a cure is found.

I'm thinking some sort of meetup with music, food, booze (for over 18's..) and screens hooked up with games to play etc. And possibly (if we can get consent from developers) to show of some developer builds and allow users to play.

The only issue here is I'm out in the middle of nowhere which is why I've made a poll for locations in the UK that users would be interested in. All will have train/bus links.

Depending on the location and amounts I'll let users know. It may have a small entry fee but this is only so we know and I'll list venue locations on the two top voted areas.

Numbers likely would be limited to around 100 users but depending on how many request, and depending on how much to rent we...

Would have been included with some Game Boy Color development kit to show off the different color capabilities of the GBC. I wish I could say there is more, but sadly this is the only piece of the GBC development kit I found in the files for Asteroids.

Don't post here, Simple. bans await those that ignore.

Research/talk is fine but no linking of assets/source this includes third party linking.

This is an old review to fill up the empty space where I don't have anything to post. Please note that the writing may be more janky for that reason.

Chaotix (or Knuckles' Chaotix in the west) is a very unique Sonic game, but yet, I have a reason to not like it. Why, you might wonder, knowing that I enjoy sonic myself. There are two reasons, and I'll get to those when it comes time for me to explain the gameplay.

Graphically, this game looks AMAZING. It is beautiful for a 32X game, especially since most of them were either not very good games that were ported over from 16bit, games that just had no effort put into them, or Doom. Some games looked nice, like After Burner Complete or Space Harrier, but mostly games just didn't look that good. I mean, I've played darxide, and that's the worst game on the 32X, but maybe I'll get into that another day. Anyways, this game is ABSOLUTELY BEAUTIFUL, and if you were to look at it, you'd agree. The framerate is very smooth, and the sprites...

Doom 2016 is how you do a reboot. Not a game that isn't what the game was originally like, (no, this is not a jab at Doom 3), not a game that makes the originals look better, even with their technological inferiority, but a game that is game locked, cocked and ready to rock. A game that takes what is good about the previous entries and builds upon those previous games as a base. You don't make a comeback with a series that was so beloved and make a game that is sub-par and makes everyone want to forget that they paid real money for it.

You don't do Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 unless you want to be remembered as a joke. You just don't.

Doom 2016 was originally going to be what looks to be the death of originality for Doom, like what happened to Quake 4. Now before I turn this into Quake 4 review, that game will have its day. Believe me. It will have its day on the chopping block. But Doom 4 was going to be very similar to Quake 4, just now with glory killing. It would have probably...

Doom 64 is a great Doom game. Doom 2016 is as well, but that isn't the topic of this review. Tune in next week...

In all seriousness, I got a hell of a kick out of Doom 64, no pun intended. Some say it's an enhanced port of Doom, some say it's an all new game, I side with the latter. 32 new levels as well as a bunch of new secret levels, it's quite a great game. The sound effects, while being samples at 22.05KHz because they're on a cartridge, are satisfying and meaty. The music got quite a downgrade from the PS1 version, cartridge and all. It was composed by Aubrey Hodges, and I think of it the same way as i think of Quake's ambient music. Not a huge fan. But that isn't a big problem if you ask me.

The gameplay of Doom 64 feels good, at least if you're playing a source port. The N64 controller is not enjoyable to use if you ask me, and the way the controls are mapped for the N64 controller is just not much fun as well. But that doesn't matter, as there's two ports to the PC that...

I had a hard time writing this review. Not because of how I wanted to word myself, but because I couldn't bring myself to play the game. I tried and I tried, but nothing. Nada. Zilch.

I did not want to play Doom 3, but I tried. I really did. I really just could not play it no matter how hard I tried. It's not becuase it was "too scary", it wasn't because there is no duct tape on mars (well, I'll get to that), it was because the game was full of bullshit. Not in the way where everything was a lie, but in a way where you are constantly being jumped by one enemy or another, and you don't have enough ammo because you can't fucking see it because it's so dark. You're always being hit for bullshit reasons. Don't tell me that this is a commonality among Action/Survival/Horror games, because it isn't. At least, not as much as this game.

Gameplay. Here we go.

One of my biggest problems with this game is the jumpscares. All sorts of demonic things happening without any buildup, just "HA...

February was a bit of a missed opportunity with my reviews, with me only posting two throughout the whole month and one of those was an archived review that at this point isn't really much to look at. It's there, but I only posted it because I did it and I wanted to fill a week. March will be a bit of a change of pace, with how Doom Eternal is set to releae this month and all. I'll be talking about Doom games, albeit not really in release order. This first one will be the most lengthy, as I'm going to be talking about all four megawads on the idTech engine as well as briefly gloss over the tons upon tons of source ports.

Doom, much like its successor Quake, pushed hardware back when it first came out. John Carmack was obviously looking to push hardware among saying tons of other things, such as how story in a game is like story in a porn movie to the lead story writer of Doom. Funny that, as Doom 3 was very story based and Carmack still worked on idTech 4, but that is neither here...

Pitfall. A well-remembered game by David Crane. The game series that seems to bob in and out of popularity. Whether it be from mediocre or infamously poor games cough Super Pitfall cough or just not being that interesting. However this game, Pitfall The Mayan Adventure, seems to have been the beginning of that surge and resurgance of Pitfall every so often.

Was it a good game to come back on after the mistake Super Pitfall was?

Yes. Definitively yes.


QTE stage.

Pitfall The Mayan Adventure is a really good game that of which is actually a decent challenge. It's not super incredibly hard (honestly, some parts are complete bullshit), but it will give you a run for your money. It's been ported to a slew of consoles, most of them 16 bit, and it has a pretty good legacy. People still argue about which port is better to this day, but probably not as vehemently as they might have in the 90s.

Gameplay wise, this...

Please note that this is another old review because I wasn't able to get the review I wanted to publish this week done. I may redo others in the future as well, like I want to do with this one. This is really just a filler review for the moment. Also of note is that this is my first review.

I don't know where to start other than "I have a lot to say".

Sega Ages 2500 for all that don't know, was a series of video games released in Japan as remakes of old Sega hits. There were a few that were released outside of Japan, you'd know them from the Sega Classics Collection on the PS2. This one is one of them. This is...

Less than good.

I have a lot to talk about, so I'm going to explain why I seem so bitter towards this game.

To be perfectly honest, I really enjoyed playing Columns on the Mega Drive. It was great with both 1 and 2 players, and it was an enjoyable experience altogether. I love playing Columns 3, and on the subject of Columns 2, I've played it once before, but don't...

Parallax Software. A company who only exists in name alone and was, essentially, a one-hit wonder. Was it a bad one-hit?

Short answer is definitely not.

Descent and Descent 2 (as well as some expansions, I will talk about those later) ended up reorganizing Parallax into two companies. Why? Well, after Descent 2, half of the team wanted to go work on other things, such as Freespace, and later on Red Faction and Saints Row, so they renamed Parallax to Volition, and Outrage left to work on Descent 3. Outrage Entertainment ended up working on Descent3 and its expansion, D3: Mercenary. They also did a game called Alter Echo which nobody's ever played but it got reviews harbored at around 68/100, then by disappearing.

That is, until they banded together with Volition (perhaps it was Volition's own doing) as the Parallax Software name still existed legally and Interplay took the money they were making from Descent, and ran with it instead of paying their royalties.

Now, with that all...

Please keep in mind that this is not a new review. This is an old review from the original OG that I'm posting because I want to keep a weekly schedule. If nothing else, it's an archive and a filler review, hence the lack of many screenshots.

I've been one to try different games. I'd never played 1 on 1 fighting games when I first got Soulcalibur II & III, and I enjoyed them. When it came time to give Tekken a try, I saw Tekken 5 for cheap. I knew reviews were good, and the price was right, so I picked it up. I thought that finally playing Tekken 5 would be a fun experience, since I'd seen it in action and it looked cool. I also noticed that it had 4 extra arcade games, and so I picked up Tekken 5 to kill five birds with one stone (joke intended). I got it home, and tried it with a friend and thought "This isn't very much fun..." after playing a few rounds and so I took it out and played another game. I come back to it a while later, thinking that I'd have more fun, and so I found...

The Sega Neptune.

A prototype Mega Drive/32x combo. A way for Sega to sell 32xes to people that wouldn't be able to buy a Saturn. Pretty brilliant, honestly. Never came to fruition for many reasons, one of them being tons upon tons of miscommunication. It was promising, as that kind of upgrade to the Genesis could do it some good. Unfortunately, the 32x had a bunch of mediocre ports, a few good games for one reason or another but usually not both, and a game library that is small enough that it could all fit in a potato sack.

Hold on, why am I talking about this? I don't usually talk about hardware.

Well, Japan decided to do as it usually does and turned the Sega Neptune into an anime girl.

This here is Neptune. She will be your main character for this game.


All jokes aside, Hyperdimension Neptunia was originally a PS3 game from 2010. It was loved inside of Japan. It then gained a...

People may have noticed I've been away the past week or so. Here's a small update to those reasons and some general progress updates.

To start, I've been sick the past few weeks and stuck on some shit kicking meds. I was told to get some rest by the doctor who decided not to put me down. ?

The first part of this update has alot of speculation as we still don't know the full story. What we do know is this all happened around the same time and appears to be connected, and for these reasons I won't be naming those involved for protection and if you wish to read it'll be included in a spoiler. This part doesn't affect the site directly but has lead to me having to take time away.

"I ain't afraid of no Quake."
-Duke Nukem

Quake is something I managed to get attached to. The sort of game where once you start playing, by the time you stop, you look at the clock and each time it is many, many hours later. For some people though, that is Doom. I've played my fair share of Doom, granted. But there was something that got me interested in Quake instead. Whatever reason it was, once I got the CD, I tried it out on DOSBox. There was only one problem with that, and that was running it on DOSBox. That is something I will get to later, though.

Quake is a FPS from id Software back when they were their own company and so was Bethesda. Time has marched on, and now the Bethesda that made The Terminator on the Genesis, Home Alone on the NES, as well as other games that are infamously bad. Then they made TES and that magically cleaned up their track record. Quake was impressive at the time. Massively, MASSIVELY impressive, and is a possible reason why Cyrix...

As you may well be aware by now - unless you live under a rock - the year 2020 is upon us. With the new decade will come many changes, features and goodies to OG as a whole! In this post, I wanted to outline some of the things we have been working on behind the scenes, potential changes and new features coming to OG in 2020.

Merch!
To the surprise of me and some of the other staff members, one of the most requested additions to the site is OG branded merchandise. I have been hard at work on designing a plethora of goodies ranging from shirts, coffee mugs, lanyards, mouse mats and more! We are currently investigating methods to integrate merchandise to certain tiers of our Patreon page, but will also be selling merchandise individually to users who want to get something as a one-off purchase. I want to make it clear that users that do decide to purchase merch from our store will not recieve any special privileges over other users to keep things fair...