Yesterday's Worlds #9 - Some of the missing A's

Things, as they say, didn't go quite according to plan. I was going to play Aqua Aqua, ATV Off Road Fury 3, Atari Anthology, and Avatar: The Last Airbender. My PS2 console had other ideas.

 Aqua Aqua (Zed Two Limited/3DO/2001) Okay, I see what they were trying to do here - a 3D puzzle game where you drop walls Tetris-style to contain water. Cool graphics idea for a tech demo, I guess, but you need to have better controls! Maybe with a mouse it would have played decently. With the control sticks, it was a mess.

ATV Off Road Fury wouldn't read in the PS2. Bad disc? Maybe. I've never tried playing it before, so give it the benefit of the doubt.

 Atari Anthology (Digital Eclipse/Atari/2004) Collections like this are pure treasure troves of video game historical records. Those of us grey beards that remember the arcade and Atari 2600 days are transported back to a simpler time when games only gave you 3 lives for a quarter and joysticks had just a single button. On the down side, some of the games don't hold up well to our memories; graphics don't have the same shine that they seemed to have. Were they really better than what we see now, or were they that much more impressive for the day based on what we could compare them to then? Hard to say. I thought the recreations of old vector graphics games were handled particularly well. Trying to emulate an entirely different graphical technology is not easy. I could browse the bonus content of manuals, box art, arcade flyers, and magazine ads for hours. Oh, the feels!

Avatar: The Last Airbender wouldn't read either. This was troubling. One game not working, maybe it's the disc. Two games? It's a hardware problem. To confirm, I tried Bloodrayne 2. No dice.

I'd read about tweaking the dial for the DVD signal located on the underside of the laser unit. I tried this a couple of times, first turning it a little then a lot, but it didn't help. So, I replaced the laser completely with a replacement I got off Amazon awhile back. As of this writing everything is working fine but I want to get some white lithium grease to make the laser unit slide easier. If it keeps working, it will be my first successful PS2 Slim repair. Fingers crossed.

Yesterday's Worlds #8 - Filling in the blanks

Well, this sure took a long time to get back to. My last "Yesterday's Worlds" was on May 15, 2015 - nearly 7 years ago! A few things happened since then that I think I will skip mentioning here as it won't change matters. Sewage under the bridge, as they say.

I don't know if I was streaming any of my YW gaming back then, but it's something I do now. Today I started playing some of the PS2 games that I got since 2015, filling in the blanks on my spreadsheet.

  Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War (Namco/Bandai Namco/2006) It's been a long time since I played AC4 and 5, but I really found this entry to be harder to get into. My first missions involved trying to figure out what buttons did what, looking for enemies and getting shot down by missiles that I couldn't figure out how to avoid. Well, I can't complain about what I "spent" on this game...because I didn't spend anything really. I got a bunch of game stuff from a couple of nice ladies (courtesy of Next Door) and in it was a slightly battered PS2 fatty. The front of the drawer was broken off (fortunately included in the lot) and the drawer was stuck. When I opened up the system, there was this disc. Apparently, the previous owner (one of their sons) was into flight sims big time. Bose headphones big. More about that another time. Anyway, there's lots here, but nothing I want to get deeply into.

 Alvin and the Chipmunks (Sensory Sweep/Brash Entertainment/2007) As you might expect, I got this for my daughter, MsSarah, as she likes to listen to the Chipmunks CD I (foolishly) got for her many years ago. I had no real idea what kind of game this was - it was a thrift pickup and very few questions were asked. At it's core, it's a deep, heart felt, moving, socially conscious, action, Souls-like, rogue-like...rhythm game...without all the adjectives preceding that. It's a VERY simple button pressing rhythm game and I'm not sure it's even pressing buttons to any type of discernable rhythm! There are four colored circles in each corner of the screen. As stars are spewed out of the center, you have to press the L1, L2, R1, or R2 button that corresponds to the corner the star is going to. There is a Rockometer on the left side that measures how well you are doing - let it go red and it's Game Over, man! And...that's it. A few non-animated cut scenes, wooden voice-overs, and what I'm guessing is 18 Alvin and the Chipmunks songs to "play". Small wonder it garnered a stunning 33 on Metacritic. Honestly...and I'll deny this if I'm ever brought to testify in its defense, I kinda liked it? Also, the VOD didn't get muted, so there's that in the plus column.

Okay, so getting back to these. If you want to catch up, here are the previous seven Yesterday's Worlds blog posts (Note: Before I came up with the catchy title of Yesterday's Worlds, I was calling these Back to the Past. I think it was a change for the better.):

Back to the Past #1 

Back to the Past #2

Back to the Past #3

Yesterday's Worlds #1

Yesterday's Worlds #2

Yesterday's Worlds #3

Yesterday's Worlds #4

Yesterday's Worlds #5

Yesterday's Worlds #6

Yesterday's Worlds #7