I recently completed a little game called Counterspy on PSN.

This is an espionage-action 2D side-scrolling game with a heavy 1960’s influenced art style. The art style feels quiet cell shaded and reminds me heavily of Evil Genius (which was partly what drew me to playing it). I’ve got to say it’s a lot of fun.

The game play is mostly fast paced pick-up-and-play action and the levels are all fairly short and proceduraly generated, so you shouldn’t face the same military base twice (although you will notice similar sections).

Using cover allows you to get a 3D perspective on various areas, shooting down corridors to knock out security cameras or drop the guard at the back of the room minding his own business.

The game play is less run and gun and more stealth and plotting, well, before everything goes wrong and you need to shoot a lot of nameless goons in the face. I appreciate a game that doesn’t necessarily throw you down a single lane, but let’s you choose your gameplay style.

If you want to kick the door down and go in guns blazing, by all means – take a rocket launcher and blow up the base – but, if you want to try your hand at sneaking about and stealth killing it’s a lot of fun and way more challenging to get away with, you can always fall back to blasting your way through too.

The difficulty seems to scale quite well as you gather more information about the Soviets and/or Allies, with the game adding more enemies to the bases and creating more complex situations to solve. Ammo isn’t unlimited, but rather than preserving it (which isn’t really an option most of the time) you just need to make sure you come equipped with the right weaponry; there are ammo refill points on some levels (again – randomly generated) but that will only get you so far and although there’s no knife, you can snap necks or just punch the guards in the face.

The game is quite light-hearted and doesn’t take itself too seriously – there’s a silenced pistol you get early on called The Diplomatic Pistol – an appropriate name if I ever heard one.

Silenced pistols are always a good choice – use them.

It has to be said that I am more of a destroyer than a creator. I am much more at home taking things to pieces than I am creating something new. I do however have my moments, and this week was a particularly good moment.

I took a weeks leave from work and set about doing all the things you do when you are not working. Sorting through old cupboards, beating it, giving the house a good clean, beating it, a spot of decorating, more beating it and making a NES Zapper into a lamp. Yeah that’s right. I said making a NES Zapper into a lamp!

Now I am not afraid to admit that I am mega proud of this one. In fact I would be hard pressed to pick a favorite between the Lamp and the Zombie Box.

So here comes the science part. First off I broke a lamp. This gave me all the light based gubbins I would need.

After the lamp had been killed to death I set about the careful deconstruction of the Zapper. My aim was to have as little impact on the frame of the gun as possible. I wanted to keep the option open to convert it back to a light gun should I ever want to – I am happy to report that this is possible!

Taking the Zapper apart not only gave me spares for my other Zappers but also let me get a good look at that super satisfying trigger. I wanted to keep this functional in the lamp. Ideally I wanted it to be the on/off switch.

Once the Zapper had been gutted I needed to cut the lamp pole thing down to size. It needed to be long enough to support the bulb and shade, but short enough to fit in the barrel of the zapper. I took a quick look at the lamp pole, had a glance at the barrel and then I cut a chunk off the pole – Luckily it was the perfect fit.

The plan was to use a NES cart as the base for the Zapper Lamp. There could be only one cart for the job and that cart was Duck Hunt! I sacrificed one of my many copies of this glorious game and drilled some holes. These holes would be used to screw the Zapper to the cart for a secure and professional finish.

I was now ready to start putting everything together. I gave the main body of the gun a go on its new base. This revealed the gun to be sitting somewhat on the piss so corrective action was required.

Whilst I considered my options to straighten things up, I set about running in the lamp bits. The grooves in the barrel that used to house the lens came in real handy for keeping the lamp straight in the gun. I popped a washer in place of the lens and used an exact amount of black tape to fix the lamp pole in place.

Next I ran the cable through the gun and secured the trigger back in place. Sadly I could not get the trigger set up as the switch for the light. Not yet anyway…

Once everything was screwed back together and locked down to the base. It was time to give a test! I over came the bentness by popping a cheeky little Game Boy game under the bottom of the shooter. It turns out they are the perfect height and, in my opinion, add to the greatness of the lamp.

All it needed now was a new shade and we were done. My excitement was hampered slightly by my the one error I made. Once I had finished this fine piece of Nerd Porn/Art I made the fatal error of showing it to a girl. She described it as “kind of cool but also really ugly.” (like your mum!) She then went on to add that this was a worthwhile use of my time off! – a comment heavy-laden with sarcasm.  I did what every self respecting proud nerd would do. I told her to piss off and went back to enjoying my new lamp.

Well its not really a fight. More of a comparative review of sorts. But what’s on the menu? The answer to the question you have all been asking.

Which is better – Buckley the pug vs Ski or Die?

Background

Buckley or Buckles, as he is sometimes referred to as, is a 1 year old black pug. The pug is a breed of dog known for its lazy nature, wrinkled face and tendency to lean towards the obese end of the weight scale. One of his eyes may point a little off center but he doesn’t seem to mind… at least we hope he doesn’t.

Ski or Die is the 1990 Palcom follow up to Skate or Die. Yeah that’s right. If skiing or dying didn’t tickle your fancy, you could always skate or die instead. At first you may be puzzled by the title and the lack of death in the game. But play on and all will become clear. I was also amused to boot this bitch up and find that out of the 5 game modes only 2 actually involve skiing! For this reason I  will now refer to this game as “Winter Based Activities or Die”

Gameplay

To say we got off to a good start on the gameplay front would be a big fat lie. The kind of lie an 80s TV personality may tell when questioned about his sexual exploits. For years we were treated to moving a cursor (or character) around a selection screen with the use of the D-pad. Winter Based Activities or Die took one look at this great idea and decided to “improve” it. What you need to do is press the A button to move forward and then steer your little super 80’s skier guy around with the D-pad, and down the path to the option you desire. This of course can only happen once you have placed your skier over the title of the option you wish to select, spun around on the spot mashing the B button for a few minuets, before realising you have to ski off the screen and not simply select the option you wish to play – like in a normal game.

The rest of the gameplay is quite straight forward. Across the 5 modes. You have Snowboard Halfpipe (not skiing), Snowball Blast (not skiing), Innertube Thrash (not skiing), Downhill Blitz (skiing) and Acro Aerials (skiing). All of which require you to move and sometimes jump. The catch is that now you no longer have to hold A to move! But wait! In order to move down the hill in Downhill Blitz, you must press UP to move forwards. That sounds fine yeah? But forwards is DOWN the screen! Pressing UP would be acceptable if I were moving up the screen, but I am not. I am Skiing down a hill – So surely  I should be pressing DOWN?

Buck, happily, pretty much does what he is told. If you go left he goes left, if you sit down he sits down and if you sleep he sleeps. There are times when things get a bit confused and he may well go right when you are heading left, or he falls asleep straight after you have woken him up. That aside his direct method of control makes for some fluid and immersive  gameplay. He is capable of the odd game of fetch but due to his size and laziness it often doesn’t last past a few rounds. The sleeping and eating modes are defiantly where its at.

Graphics

Awwww! Look at his little dog face! As opposed to Winter Based Activities or Die, Buck is a deep and glossy shade of black (like a well groomed Ninja!). He is rendered in full 3D and comes with countless graphical tweaks in the form of tiny jumpers and costumes to dress him up in. If you get the settings just right he can draw quite the crowd of doe-eyed women and attract many likes on instagram. He also appears to be quite the hit with teenage boys – if you are that way inclined. Or a teenage girl…

Winter Based Activities or Die is mainly white. White with some blue bits and the odd tree or rock. The most graphically intense part of the whole thing is it’s drug induced mode selection screen.

That’s right kids! Its Rodney’s Shop. We are pretty sure Rodney is selling more than ski gear and he clearly has a hefty coke habit. When he is not tempting you out on to the slopes, he is offering up some freshly laid powder off the top of his toilet cistern. It is sad but true – this is as good as the game gets looks wise. It is also sad that Rodney is a smack head, but at least the drugs will end his life early and our kids will be safe.

Sound

Snorty, grunty little pig beast. That’s what Buckley is. For a dog a bit bigger than a rugby ball he snores like a 20 stone man. Barking is sometimes achieved but mostly grunting and huffing is what you get. At times of emotional turmoil there can be crying but we only played Winter Based Activities or Die for a brief period so it was short lived – We are not monsters (not all of us anyway). Despite all the snoring it is hard to be mad at him. Look at his little dog face!

Winter Based Activities or Die is a heady mix of fast paced 8-bit music mixed with some creepy computer voices. Now computer voices were a big thing at the time so this was quite an achievement to have them in this game. That or they spent all their money on the voices so had none left to make a game with? The opening credits are followed by what sounds like a computerized kids voice shouting “Ski” followed by a creepy computerized male voice shouting “or Die”. I can’t help but feel that the male voice is Rodney and this will not end well for the excited child and their shouts of “Ski”.

Conclusion

So we have covered the Ski but what about the Die? Well the Die part comes after about 5 minuets of playing this game. Once you have selected a game mode and experienced the sheer delight that is Winter Based Activities or Die you will want to die! There are far more interesting things to do than play this – such as sitting in the dark and thinking about the sum n=1 to infinity n^2/(n^4+1)

I would suggest that instead of getting this game you get a pug. Once you get this pug you should dress him as E.T and sit back as the near endless stream of girls (and teenage boys) flock to you.

Productivity across the planet is about to hit an all-time low.

The Internet Archive is a digital library, one that seeks to preserve culturally significant content – but also allow free public access to all.

It reportedly hosts 10 petabytes of data – a number that even Chuck Norris would struggle to count to in 30 seconds (but he’d probably manage it anyway).

In their infinite wisdom, they’ve used a presumably insignificant amount of that data to host over 2000 MS-DOS games: all playable through the browser, via a version of DOSBox.

What are you waiting for? Prince of Persia, The Oregon Trail, Wolfenstein 3D, Maniac Mansion, the original Metal Gear and of course the incredible SimAnt are ready and waiting – amongst thousands more. The 1001 progress is about to get a boost.

Play the full list here.

TIP – if you’re having trouble running the games, hit the ‘exit beta’ in the top right of the page.

Christmas. Done! New Years Eve. Over! You know what that means? Its time for a look back over the past year with the UCHG 2014 Retro-Spective.

January

The Year started off with Brad making promises he couldn’t keep. He drew up a Backlog and swore to play nothing else until it was done. He hit the ground running with Alan Wake and Organ Trail ticked off the list early.

Elsewhere in the big wide World a Nintendo World Championship cart was sold on Ebay for silly money – £60,536 worth of silly money.

February

It’s happening again! Fen proved he still has what it takes to complete the Hanger Level of THPS2 in under 2 minutes – This is why he gets all the girls.

Ross took a look at Guacamelee and Dust, an Elysian Tail declaring them to be both awesome and the most fun you can have with a co-op game. Only not in that order.

We were also introduced to the sheer perverted goodness that are the Penis Brothers!

March

Ikaruga. That’s what happened in March, and nothing else. In honor of this March 2015 will now be renamed Ikaruga. There was a point behind this and that was Fen ticking off the 90th game on the 1001 list. Only another 911 to go. That’s the number nine hundred and eleven, not the date, to be clear – You can’t be too careful with a beard like Brad’s on the team

April

The truth was finally out as a plucky film crew, in the style of a modern day Indiana Jones, discovered ATARI’s dirty secret buried in the desert. E.T had come home to remind us all just how awful that game really was!

Brad took the number of games played on the 1001 list up to 91 with CHOPLIFTER! on the ATARI 7800. He had a little bit too much fun squashing prisoners as opposed to saving them.

May

After discovering an old review for Super Godzilla dating back to 1994. Ross did what all good retro gamers would do – He went and played it! Ignoring the reviews score of a mediocre but foretelling 5 out 10, Ross booted up the SNES and gave it a bash. Was he impressed? No. The game was declared to be “one of the most boring strategy games ever made” 

May was also the month that our old friend Operation Flashpoint was made free to anyone who wanted it for one weekend. This was more than enough reason for Fen to get back on it and ticket number 92 off the 1001 list.

June

The summer was on its way and so was a cause for celebration. Not only where most of the female population about to start wearing less but Tetris was 30 years old. Who would have thought that a game about stacking shit would still be so popular after 30 years? Well it is – and we think that’s great!

July

Beers. Beards. Bass! SEGA Bass Fishing on the Dreamcast, in slow-motion all whilst drinking beer? Whats not to like about July?

August

As the summer hit it’s peak Brad hid away inside and played L.A Noire. In an effort to tick it off his Backlog he played it for a few days straight and as result ruined the experience. This caused some division at the UCHG but Brad stood firm and called it tedious, frustrating, cumbersome, dumb, idiotic and repetitive.

Although he did admit to enjoying driving a fire engine around.

September

Ross essentially became God when he obtained the Genesis Titian in Reus. This was no easy task and after 61hrs of God like gaming Ross had it beat! This is why he now gets all the girls Fen used to get.

As well as worshiping the new Ross God, PAC-MAN Championship Edition DX+ was played and LEGO Batman was ticked off Brad’s Backlog.

October

October may have had Mirror’s Edge struck from the Backlog of Brad in a rather enjoyable fashion. But really it was a month all about one thing.

Halloween Splatterhouse Pt.2 – Splatternormal Splativity

One year on from it’s beginnings the boys finally saw the credits roll on Vin Diesel’s epic arcade adventure. It is said that there is no better celebration of Halloween then Vin Diesel punching his way out of some sort of giant monster vag.

November

To commemorate the end of the 2014 F1 season and the crowning of a British Champion. Steve raced from the back of the grid to take the win in Ayrton Senna’s Super Monaco GP 2. In honor of this epic drive Brad ran over the man who waves the chequered flag – seems fair.

December

The end of the year was here again. Christmas meant that due to overindulging on food and alcohol none of us can remember the games we played. The only evidence that December 2014 ever happened is this picture provided by Ross

So here we are. 2014 has been 100% completed and we are all very pleased with our Steam achievement! Who knows what is out in the 2015 fog of war? Ore? Wood? or maybe Orcs? It had better not be Orcs. Not after what happened the last time.

We would like to thank everyone for all the views, comments and Twitter love we have received over the past twelve months -we are truly grateful.

Happy New Year!