This post is just an update dump. Instead of coming up with smooth transitions, I have sectioned my thoughts off by topic. I had a lot of thoughts floating in my head, and they needed to come out. So, here they are.
Prince of Persia Woes
I have been playing through the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time trilogy, and it has been rough. The games are fine, but getting them to play has been an ordeal. I own the trilogy on PlayStation 2 and PC. I opted to play the PC versions despite the compatibility warnings. It has been a long time since I have had to work to get a game running on PC, but these games proved difficult.
Sands of Time is the oldest, and it has the most issues to overcome. When I installed it, the game launched without any major issues. I wanted to play with a controller, and the game has zero support for XInput (the PC controller standard since the Xbox 360 controller). The game had zero support for widescreen resolutions. So, off I went to PC Gaming Wiki. The wiki page for Sands of Time has fixes for both the controller and widescreen issues. It also lists a bunch of other fixes to issues I most likely would have encountered. After spending a couple of hours of downloading shady programs, I had Sands of Time running just the way I wanted it. I ended up having one issue where the audio during cutscenes lagged behind the video. My computer runs the game at a very high framerate, so the audio couldn’t keep up. To get around this, you can limit the FPS in the graphics card settings, but the game did not like that when I tried. So, I just dealt with it.
Warrior Within required the least amount of tweaking. Before doing anything, I launched the game to see if anything was broken. Controller worked great, but I still needed widescreen support. I downloaded the recommended widescreen fix. While on the Wiki, I noticed a common issue is “no audio during cutscenes.” I was not sure if I would have the issue, but decided to download the mod anyways. It turns out, the mod also upscales all of the assets to 1080p. I am glad I downloaded it, because the game looked really nice. There were other fixes, like an unofficial patch, but I skipped them. I had no issues running the game.
The Two Thrones did not have the most issues, but it had the biggest issue. I launched it after installing it, and it booted to the menu screen. My controller worked even better than Warrior Within, but I still needed a widescreen fix. I went straight for the unofficial patch on the wiki page; it looks like it fixes most of the potential issues with the game, including a game breaking glitch. I went to launch the game, and… uh oh… it closed immediately. Alright, let’s uninstall everything, and reinstall without mods. It still closes immediately. Double uh oh. I ended up fiddling with the Windows compatibility mode settings, and it eventually launched with the unofficial patch installed. I was not optimistic, so I closed the game right away, and tried to relaunch it. No luck. It closed immediately. I messed around with it a bit longer, and finally gave up.
I decided to try emulating the PS2 version of the game. It had been long time since I used PCSX2, so I had to get reacquainted with it. Since I had to spend time learning the ins-and-outs of the emulator, I decided I might as well try out some HD textures, widescreen support, and 60 FPS support. I was actually surprised at how easy it was. The community has built a lot of HD texture packs for games, and they have spent a lot of time figuring out widescreen and 60 FPS support for games. It took me about an hour and half to install everything, but my computer ran the game flawlessly. It is really nice to have access to save states. Out of the three games, it is probably the most pleasant of the experiences. My controller actually has vibration support.
I’m not done with Two Thrones yet, but I think these games don’t need a remaster. They are fun games when they work, and they look fine. The problem is getting them working on modern systems. I think Ubisoft should get the three games running on modern system, fix the glitches, add widescreen support, add controller support, and unlock the framerate. If they want to get some goodwill, they should just release an update for each of the games on PC. They can port over their fixes to consoles, and resell them there. They won’t do that, but I would just be happy if the games were playable on PC with quality of life additions. They are iconic games from that era, and deserve to be preserved.
PlayStation Vita Games
Last month I bought a hacked PlayStation Vita. I decided I needed to buy some games for it. Vita games are still available from the PlayStation store, but it is a pain in the butt to buy them. You can’t use credit cards; you have to add funds to your wallet, and then you can buy games. I decided to spend a little more on used copies of physical games. I ended up buying four games: Uncharted: Golden Abyss, Resistance: Burning Skies, Earth Defense Force 2: Invaders From Planet Space, and Earth Defense Force 2017 Portable.
Getting Uncharted and Resistance completes my collection for those two series. Getting EDF 2 completes my mainline collection for that series as well. Having a hacked Vita opens up some cheating options, so I am looking forward to playing EDF 2017 again with some cheats to remove some of the grind. I am excited to actually play games on this thing.
My Zelda Collection and Old Consoles
While I was buying used games for the Vita, I decided to complete my Zelda collection through Breath of the Wild. I was missing Zelda II for the NES, Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask for the N64, Minish Cap for the GBA, and Spirit Tracks for the DS. I have never had any desire to play Zelda II, but I suppose I’ll play through it with Retroachievements now that I own it. I am not looking forward to playing Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask at 20FPS, but I guess I’ll do it for Retroachievements. I emulated Minish Cap when I did my Zelda binge in highschool, but I don’t remember much about it. I am looking forward to doing a Retroachievements run. I suppose I’ll have to play Spirit Tracks, but I am not looking forward to it. I have given up on Phantom Hourglass a few times, and I feel like I should try to complete it before playing Spirit Tracks. We’ll see. Now, the only Zelda game I do not own is Tears of the Kingdom, and I am hoping to snag it on sale this fall.
I cleaned up the games with alcohol, and made sure they worked. I ordered some Custom Game Cases for the games. I might have to do some photo galleries of my collection someday. I usually emulate games, because of Retroachievements, but I have been really thinking about consoles for playing my physical games. I have the Analogue Pocket which plays handheld cartridges, but I actually don’t own anything that can play NES, SNES, and N64 cartridges. Analogue is releasing a console for N64 games, but they stopped selling their NES and SNES counterparts. If they make an “all-in-one” console, I’ll probably get it. There are consoles out there that will dump the cart and emulate them, but there are not a lot of options for playing cartridges on an FPGA console. Of course there are used consoles, but I’d like something with HDMI.
Humble Bundles
I did not want to buy a lot of games this year, but I ended up buying two Humble Bundles. One was for the Saints Row and Red Faction franchises. I did not have most of them on PC, so Humble Bundle was a good excuse to get them. It is a little bittersweet with Volition being closed down a few months ago. They deserved better.
The other bundle was an Earth Defense Force bundle. I have the mainline series on console, but I didn’t have any of the spinoffs. I’m looking forward to playing the games on PC. Being able to use mods and cheats to speedup armor and weapon collection will be good. I’ll binge some TV shows and play through the series. I gotta review the story since EDF 6 releases later this year… well not really. The story is there to make me giggle. Every game seems to retcon the previous game’s.
Royfuss Games – All Games and Sorting
I added an All Games page to Royfuss Games. It is a cool page that displays every game header in alphabetical order. When I did that, I realized my sorting sucked. Not on just that page, but other pages as well. I ended up adding a “sort name” field to all of my scripts for each game. The scripts change special characters to non-special characters, just to make sorting more logical. They make sure the first “The” is excluded from the title when sorting. I thought about doing the first “A” as well, but my mind does not sort that way for some reason. Since this is my sorting, I’ll do it however I want. I might change my mind later. Numbers are also not sorted great, but that’s a more complicated issue. I did start taking the platform into consideration when sorting. For example, if a game shows up on PC and PlayStation, the PC will be sorted before the PlayStation game in all instances. It is not a big deal, but it bugged me when I noticed it not being consistent across titles.
Final Thoughts
I have been thinking of doing smaller reviews for video games. I write down a lot of notes while I play games for review. If it gets long enough, I usually try to write up a full review and post. If I don’t have a ton of notes, then I save it for “Games of.” I have some notes I want to change over to reviews, but they are not super long. I thought about just posting them on Infinite Backlog, but if I am going to do that, I might as well do it here as well. We’ll see.
I have something brewing which I will be releasing this weekend. Check in here to see what it is.