Wednesday 28 July 2010

Downtown, everything's waiting for you

Wen't downtown today, with my mother alongside me, not really believing I'd find anything interesting. Maybe end up buying Space Invaders for PS2 or something crap like that but not find anything I'd really like. Bollocks to that.

First fleamarket had two bundles of cheap CD-roms and games. One CD of the first bundle, I noticed, had Heart of Darkness on it so I immediately made the decision of buying that whole bundle, not caring what other crap there might be.
The other bundle included three games, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron 3D, Ultimate Skate Park Tycoon and Serious Sam. Sneaky bastard, whoever brought them there. I couldn't see it until after I got home since the games were tied together, but at least Serious Sam seems to be all in Russian, and the Skate Park game also had some text in Russian on the back cover, so...
No big deal, though. Serious Sam isn't really the most plot-heavy of games if I recall correctly, and maybe I'll even learn some new languages this way. The bundles were so cheap that it doesn't really matter much, and my mom decided to pay for them anyway (although waste of money still always hurts me, sometimes even more so if I see other people do it and especially if they're wasting their money on things to buy for me).

At the next location, in my favourite gaming store of all time, I bought three games: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and CSI: Dark Motives for PC, and a game I've been actively searching for ever since I played the demo of it, War of the Monsters. I've seriously been looking for War of the Monsters like six years now, and finally got it, cheap no less. Maybe next year I'll see Maximo vs Army of Zin somewhere for 5 euros.
I bought the CSI games mostly for my mother. She's a big CSI fan and she had a birthday yesterday, so now I'm going to force her to play through the games with me, to celebrate her birthday. I'm so caring and selfless, aren't I.
I know none of the CSI games are supposed to be the pinnacle of adventure gaming or anything, but from what I can gather after reading some reviews, they're easy and fans of the TV series should enjoy at least these first two I bought. Should be perfect.
By the way, the store had a special offer: buy 3 PC or PS2 games and get one free! I got a free fucking game! FREE!!! Free is an even better word than affordable.

Next stop, another fleamarket. Surprisingly this fleamarket has started selling video games and new DVD movies very seriously. We looked through the movie section and what do you know, it's Clue! Only one of my top 5 favourite movies of all time sitting there for 3,90€, still in plastic wraps. Neither me nor my mother, who works in a megastore and can check information on DVD releases right from the importer and across the databases of other stores in the city, has ever seen Clue being sold anywhere, and here it just sort of jumps right in my face as I take my first look at the shelf. Spooky.
My mother picked up Rocky 2 for my sister, who is a big Rocky fan. She also searched for Blues Brothers since she absolutely loved it when I recommended it to her when the movie came on TV just some weeks ago, but we couldn't find it. I suppose hitting your pickaxe on two large gold veins in one mine would be too much to expect, eh?
I moved on to the game section and bought five games from there, three for the PS2 (Death By Degrees, Rumble Roses, Paparazzi) and two for PC (Diciples: Sacred Lands and Heist). Never really heard much of the two PC games before but they look interesting despite being ancient, and two of the PS2 titles are at least technically good and most likely entertaining games, but the Paparazzi game looks to be the usual absolute Japanese Z-grade garbage import shit. You know, the type they only import to certain parts of Europe after some heavy editing and place right behind the copies of Michigan: Report From Hell because even Michigan looks good compared to them. Thought I should buy some crap to go with all the goodies, you know, to avoid being too excited about everything when I get home.
(I just checked and apparently Paparazzi is part of the Simple 2000 series of games that, to my knowledge, only include really shitty, short, pathetic excuses for games that only offer bikini-clad female ass-kickers and/or monsters with lackluster gameplay. Back cover images and the game manual of Paparazzi shout: "Description spot-on").

After that fleamarket me and my mother went to the last place for the day, a music/game/movie store. We weren't really looking for anything specific anymore seeing as how we found such great crap in every other place, but I was hoping to find a couple of movies on DVD. What we found were: Sudden Impact, Magnum Force, Blues Brothers, Rocky Balboa and First Blood on DVD. Couldn't find whatever I was hoping to find there, but at least we got something.
Then we bought some cheeseburgers to go and went home. We had planned to check out some second-hand book stores, but we were way too beat and broke to spend a single more minute or a cent this trip.
We watched Sudden Impact and ate the burgers, my sister came to visit us as she has no television at home and comes to watch a couple of her favourite shows here, and later in the evening we all watched First Blood and Clue back to back. The films played back to back, we were facing the TV screen.

So, long story short-- too late!--, a pretty marvelous day, apart from this horrible headache I've had for a week now. God damn this heatwave from Hell!

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