Sam’s Scores V
4) – Age of Empires II & Sim City 2000
I’m not a huge PC gamer, but if I see titles that I know, or have wanted to check out I will buy them, if they’re cheap enough. Both of these titles are pretty big names in PC gaming. I’m well aware of what Sim City 2000 is, but I wasn’t prepared for just how awesome Age of Empires II truly was.
Sim City 2000 -$.30
3) – Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 and NFS: Porsche Unleased
Here we go back to my console asylum, two Playstation games. Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 and Need for Speed: Porsche Unleased are two games I’ve enjoyed quite a bit since I bought them. I am a huge fan of Need for Speed, and I’ve played the heck out of THPS2 on my N64, so I knew I would enjoy it.
2) – World Series 2k2
World Series 2k2 on it’s own isn’t anything special, but the fact that Dreamcast games are getting harder and harder to find makes it at the very least a great deal. Everything was included and everything was in great shape, but the price was the best part of this score.
1) – Final Fantasy Origins
Final Fantasy was the very first RPG that I ever played, and the RPG that started off my love for the genre. I knew they remade it for the Playstation but I could never find a copy at a price I felt was fair, until now. This is another reason why I check the CD bins and make sure I don’t skip over titles. Although it is missing the manual, the game is the most important part (to me) and that is mainly what I paid for.
Driver 1 & 2
two·fer (noun) \ˈtü-fər\ – Two articles available for the price of one.
With the recent release of Driver: San Fransisco, I figured I would take the time to review the origins of the series. Both Driver 1 and 2 were given their own individual releases for the Playstation, but were also later released together as a twin pack. Driver was originally released in 1999, Driver 2 in late 2000 and the twin pack in 2004. All three of these also saw a release as the Greatest Hits series.
In the Driver series you play as Tanner, an undercover cop with exceptional driving skills who puts them to good use to bring down crime syndicates. In both games you’ll be presented with the same premise, to perform different driving based tasks to accomplish your goal without totaling your vehicle.
There are 3 base modes to play: Driving games, Take a Ride and Undercover. Driving games offers short driving missions that are based on what you’ll be doing undercover, so you can use these to brush up on your skills or just enjoy making and beating high scores. Take a Ride is where you get to openly explore and roam each city. Undercover is the main story mode of the series.
Each game gives you four different cities to explore as you progress in your undercover missions. The original Driver offers Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York while Driver 2 takes you internationally to Havana, Cuba, Rio de Janeiro as well as Chicago and Las Vegas. These cities are expansive, wide open and they’ve done a good job of making you feel like you’re actually driving around these cities.
Driver is fairly simple and although you’re playing as Tanner you never really play any character, as much as you’ll be driving around assuming Tanner is behind the wheel. The cities are fun to explore with plenty of hidden areas and jumps to find but the roads are all straight and nothing more. In Take a Ride mode you can choose Day or Night in all but Los Angeles, as well as you’ll be limited to one vehicle to explore each city in.
Driver 2 is much the same as Driver, but it’s gameplay is a bit more polished. A very useful feature in Driver 2 is the ability to exit vehicles (as long as the cops aren’t on your tail), making missions and exploring the cities even more fun as now you can ditch a nearly wrecked vehicle for any other vehicle on the streets, as well as find switches to unlock hidden areas and cars. The four new cities are once again expansive and this time the roads actually bend and curve, adding a nice touch of realism. Take a Ride, this time, offers a handful of different vehicles to start exploring each city in, or you can just take anything else driving around.
The Driver series was among the leading edge of open world games, allowing you to explore on your own terms and throwing a lot of interesting twists in along the journey. Although the series has expanded as the gaming systems have, I have to say Driver 2 is my favorite. Despite Driver 2’s graphics being a bit grittier than the original, the fact that it doesn’t really make much use of the ability to exit your vehicle and sometimes the frame rate can drop pretty drastically, it still retains the true heart of the Driver series, which seems to have been lost after the first two installments.
Sam’s Scores: Playstation
4) – Playstick for the Playstation
Although you may guess otherwise, I’m not a joystick fan by any means. I do however like to own odd controllers for various video game systems. Apart from the huge Advantage style joystick and the Steel Battalion layout, I had never seen a joystick for the Playstation, but here it is! This was sitting on a Goodwill shelf right next to another score I’ll be posting about another time.
3) – Interact’s Barracuda
This is yet another strange controller, but not entirely the strangest of all my controllers. This thing has switches and buttons all over the place, in an oddly comfortable layout. This thing jumped out at me from a wall of controllers, so I had to have it.
2) – Sony PSOne controllers
I bought both of these at different times, but they’re the same thing so I figured I would cover them together. Obviously one is in better shape, which cost slightly more than the other one. They’re both fully functional and since I own a PSOne, I figured I would need the controllers to go along with it. The one missing the analog grip has become my favorite PS controller, for some reason I think the missing grip has a better feel to it.
1) – Sony PSOne
Although I already own a PSOne, it doesn’t work. Being me, I decided to keep my eyes open and if I found another one cheap enough, I would buy it too. The price tag says $9.99, but that isn’t what I paid for it because it was on sale. So far everything works just fine with this one.
Emulation vs Original
A while back, a friend of mine acquired an Atari 2600 and wanted me to test it out and clean it up, knowing I love doing that sort of thing. After I got the system running, I was playing through some games when it dawned on me, sitting there with the joystick and it’s single button was the best feeling I’ve had playing Atari 2600 games in quite a while! I own software for PC and my other consoles that allows me to play most of my favorite Atari 2600 games, since I can’t play them on my own (broken) system, and it just isn’t the same.
When I play Activision Anthology on my PS2, sometimes I get confused as to what to press because the PS2 controller has more buttons (and 2 analog sticks!), not to mention the shoulder buttons being mapped to emulate the switches on the Atari deck. The Atari was super simplistic with merely 4 to 8 directions and 1 button. If I’m playing a game designed for the PS2 there is no confusion, it all comes naturally with the mental understanding that this game has a feature for most if not all the buttons on the controller. Video games have come a long way since the Atari 2600 and thankfully so, but when they try to reach back there seems to be a disconnection within that transition.
Don’t misunderstand me, I believe it is a great idea to offer classic video games on next gen consoles. I believe it helps keep the classics alive and bring them to a new audience that may not have been exposed to them beforehand or possibly can’t find or wouldn’t be caught dead with the classic systems these games were programmed for. There are many pros and cons for each side and I can understand them both equally, but I still feel that personally I would rather take the time to hunt down an old system and it’s software so that I can connect with the originality over playing them on a console they were never designed to be played on.
Emulation and software remakes have done a lot of good for classic video gaming, with companies like Atari, Activision, Namco and many others releasing multiple (albeit usually the same games over and over again) compilations of their classic games for many of the next gen consoles. I use emulation as a learning tool, sometimes they might offer games I’ve never heard of or haven’t seen before so I try them out and find out whether its a game I would like to add to my collection or not. While I must admit, I do own them, will probably continue to buy them and for the most part thoroughly enjoy them, I’m simply saying that emulations and software remakes are not a perfect alternative to the decades of bliss and simplicity that the original hardware has provided before.
College Slam
In 1996, Acclaim decided to go back to school and released College Slam for all major home and handheld systems. College Slam seems to be a more polished, albeit college themed, version of Acclaim’s smash hit NBA Jam. With NBA Jam you will probably remember shooting three pointers from just about anywhere and slam dunking from half court, all of which is still here in College Slam, as well as a few added features to increase the longevity of the game. Sadly, it seems since this game didn’t have the big names that it’s predecessor did, it didn’t translate with the audience as well as Acclaim may have hoped.
College Slam’s game play is identical to NBA Jam. You still have turbo to boost your player around the court for a short period of time before needing to recharge it, you can still shoot the ball from anywhere, steal the ball, push the other players over, elbow them and even catch fire. But unlike NBA Jam, you can call a time out at any point you possess the ball and substitute for 1 or 2 fresh players. College Slam also borrows from NBA Jam Tournament Edition with it’s more fluid movement and of course the tournament mode, as well as offering a more upbeat announcer who has more dialog than he did in NBA Jam. As you would expect, College Slam follows the college rule of 2 halves instead of four quarters.
To get started, you pick your team from a list of over 40 colleges, then select any 2 of 5 positions, as opposed to NBA Jam’s strictly 2 players per team. With College Slam there are no names, simply different stats for each position, which I like to think of as an advantage for re-playability. No matter when you play this game, you can just imagine you’re controlling your favorite college player (even if they weren’t even born when this game was released!) instead of being stuck with outdated rosters. From there you go to the Tonight’s Match-Up screen, where you can enter codes as the announcer tells you which 2 teams are playing and you prepare for the opening tip off.
Some people may prefer NBA to college, but in my opinion this game shined it’s whole career, but never made it to the draft. I own a complete in box set of this game as well as another cartridge strictly used for playing the game. Certainly this game will never become rare or highly valuable, but its a secret treasure for me to own a complete set of the game because I enjoy it that much! Still to this day I enjoy (win or lose) firing three pointers from the other team’s goal just to see whether I can get them to fall or not. NBA Jam has all the big names, but College Slam has the perpetual starry-eyed heart and determination it takes to make it to the big time.
Sam’s Scores: GTA Collector’s Edition
I’m a HUGE fan of Grand Theft Auto, and have been since it’s initial release on the Playstation. To me, GTA is more of an RPG than a game of bloody horrors, as the media tried to portray it. Roaming freely through the expansive, open city, running from mission to mission, it all just seemed like an RPG with a modern day crime theme to it. I personally own almost every GTA released across many different platforms, and to be totally honest I only wanted my PS2 so I could play Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories (though it is good for other games too!).
Back when Sony released the PSOne, Rockstar released the GTA Collector’s Edition, a boxed 3 disc collection including the first Grand Theft Auto, London 1969 expansion pack and Grand Theft Auto 2. I’ve never owned this collection because I already own both GTA and GTA 2 for the Playstation and never felt the need to buy the whole thing just for London 1969. I think fate had another reason for why I would never buy the collection, as I’ve had many chances to buy London on it’s own before this purchase. You may be wondering by now why I’m devoted an entire Sam’s Scores to just one thing that possibly everyone owns and had probably forgotten about…
In the store the box was taped shut so that the cases couldn’t be removed or fall out, so when I got home I had to make sure I didn’t just buy a box of empty cases. To my surprise all 3 games were inside, albeit in the wrong cases, but everything was there. What I happen to find in one case got my collector’s juices flowing!
This collection had a different label on the top of the CDs than the normal GTA games, so that you could never just stick the normal GTA games in these cases and pass them off as the collection. Only 2 of mine were the collector’s label, the other…BLANK! Yes, my copy of the first Grand Theft Auto had absolutely no label on top of the CD what so ever.
My mind quickly thought to test the CD to make sure it was real and sure enough GTA played without any problems at all. I thought to myself this had to be rare, perhaps some kind of promotional ticket from Rockstar much like Wonka’s golden ticket? I wasn’t sure what to make of it so I fired off an email to Rockstar to find out.
Through 3 different support members at Rockstar I’ve gathered this game shouldn’t be like this and it may be a real 1 in a million error disc that missed the printing process, somehow. After talking to co-writer Will, he informed me that there were companies that made black CD-Rs that looked much like the Playstation discs. Could this game be a hoax cooked up by someone? I’m not sure anyone has broken the original PS booting scheme to create a disc that boots flawlessly like this one, but I may be wrong.
Whether this is an extremely rare error or just a practical joke created by someone, I don’t care because either way it plays Grand Theft Auto without any problems. If nothing else I own 2 parts of the collection, and I will probably keep an eye out for a single copy of the collector’s edition GTA. Even though the box is a little beat up I’m still excited to have it, because the whole collection came at an extremely cheap price.
Sam’s Scores III
Welcome to the third edition of Sam’s scores! I believe I’m finally getting things in order as I’m going to start weeding out the average everyday scores from the unique or harder to find items. I’ve literally found hundreds of games, systems and other classic gaming related items, obviously they are all scores to me, but not all of them are unique in the scope of collecting. I will also be cutting back from 8 to only 4 items per edition for a more streamline look and feel.
4) – A Bug’s Life N64 w/case
You may be wondering why on Earth this would be a score, well it isn’t much but it came with a case. Some of you may find out if a classic video game comes with a case, for some reason the store thinks the value is quadruple what it really should be! Now I bought it for 3 reasons, the case, the fact that I didn’t own one beforehand and the fact that it was only….
3) – Gameboy Pocket AC Adapter
After acquiring my Gameboy Pocket, I’ve fallen in love with it’s outdated dot matrix screen and vintage Gameboy charm in a smaller case. Sadly, with the technology of it’s time, the system eats batteries like the Cookie Monster eats cookies! You either pumped more batteries in or bought the power adapter! I happened to find the wall adapter, in really good shape, at a 50% off sale in a thrift store recently….
2) – NAMCO NeGcon
If you’re not familiar with the name, don’t worry I wasn’t either! I found this at a thrift store during the New Year’s 50% off sale, yes that long ago! I had no clue what it was and I didn’t purchase it on my first trip, I went back a month later and it was still there. The item had no price tag and I wasn’t sure what it was, to me it was rare. After some research I found they sold poorly in the US and only later did they become popular. Want to know why or even what it does? You’ll have to wait for a future series! Until then….
1) – 6x NES Controllers
Yes, you read that correctly, six NES controllers! Why do I need so many? I don’t! They had been sitting in my favorite thrift store for quite some time and to make room for new merchandise I got a really good deal on them. Naturally they all needed cleaned (2 are a really cool nicotine yellow — yuck!) and a few needed some internal cleaning and pad replacement, but overall they’re worth the price.
