Crusader: No Remorse PS1 review

I recently came across Crusader: No Remorse for PS1 and bought it because it was only a few bucks. I was going to get the Saturn port because it has a sweet big saturn case, but it was more expensive, and I could get a sharper picture from the PS1 version through an HDMI cable.

I've played Crusader: No Remorse and Crusader: No Regret on my PC years back, so I'll just list some of the differences in this port from about 5 minutes of playing it:

- The game's resolution is 320x240 instead of the original's 640x480, so there is a lot less detail in everything.
- There are 5 setups for mapping the buttons to the controller. It really makes me wish there were at least two more buttons on the dualshock controller. It would have been a lot better if the game just let me assign buttons to commands myself instead of giving these premade setups.
- You can set the game to absolute movement instead of relative, which makes it so that you don't have to rotate your little man to change the direction he's facing.
- You run all the time and you cannot walk. Your weapon is always readied.
- You can roll forward.
- The automatic pistols have been removed from the game and you start with the first machine gun.
- According to the manual, there is no lasor pistol and no riot gun.
- There is a new weapon, the "Massdriver", which uses ammunition and energy.
- The shotgun does not fire more rapidly when you crouch.
- The HUD is more in the style of No Regret's HUD.
- The sprites are mirrored instead of having animations for facing left.
- When you hold down a shift button, and then left or right to roll or strafe, your little guy will keep strafing or rolling nonstop if you have the shift button pressed but stop pressing left or right.
- Some floors that used to be able to fall apart due to explosions are now solid floors.
- The music doesn't loop properly. And it seems to select a random track each time it is paused and then unpaused. It can play the final stage's music and the option screen's music during the first stage.
- Walls can be changed to transparent so you can see your little guy when you're behind them.
- Moving doesn't feel as precise as in the original version. It feels like the little guy slides around a bit.
- Because you cannot unready your weapon, there is no animation for the Silencer standing still with his arms at his sides. When you enter a health booth, he will not move to face outwards as his health recovers.
- You can see blood splatters from enemies as you shoot them.
- Robots are much more difficult to control because they can only walk in four directions now.

Note: I haven't played the original in years and I'm going by memory of what it was like.

Space Invaders Infinity Gene review

Space Invaders is a pretty old vimeo game. It's one of those games that it's cool to tell people you like it. Sort of like how people will talk about how they love to play Pac-Man or how the best vimeo game ever is Galaga. They're okay games I guess, if you like to ignore every single better game that has come out since then - which these people probably do. Either that or these people just like these games for the cooldude points they get from talking to other people who know even less about vimeo games than they do. I hardly ever play these games, and I bet the people who claim they love them have played them even less than I have. I don't feel like reviewing the original Space Invaders from 1978, so here's a review of a new version of it I played on PS3 that was released recently:

Space Invaders Infinity Gene
- developer: Taito
- publisher: Square-Enix
- for: iOS
- ports for: Xdude 360, PS3
- on: you can't display it on a shelf because it's a download
- released: 2009/07/27 (iOS), 2010/09/14 (PS3), 2010/09/15 (Xdude 360)
- type of vimeogame: Spaceship Shooting Game

At first this game is like Space Invaders. You get a spaceship that can only move left and right, and it sucks at shooting. And then the game changes and becomes completely different as you keep playing, giving you things like super rapid fire, the ability to move everywhere on the screen, and different weapons to choose from before starting a stage. The game will tell you some quote about evolving and adapting while it does this. I guess you're supposed to adapt to Space Invaders becoming not Space Invaders. The original Space Invaders had an interesting thing going on with the destructible barriers between you and the aliens, and how you're going to automatically lose if you don't make sure to kill all the bad guys, but this game is all tons of bad guy formations flying around all over the place while you whale on them.

There are wire frame graphics everywhere in this game. It looks kind of boring. In addition to the standard alien enemies, there's a bunch of random shapes that fly around for you to shoot at. All your favorites are here, such as star, hexagon, the other hexagon with two lines in it, large wireframe battleships with rectangles inside of them, and I think I even saw octadecahedrons.

I quickly found the real reason to play this game: the Music Mode. What the game does is take a music file you pick from the hard drive, and then construct a stage based on that file while it plays that music as the stage music. I had a lot of fun playing music from other spaceship shooting games and pretending to myself that I was playing a better spaceship shooting game instead of Space Invaders Infinity Gene. Also fun is playing music that is totally inappropriate for a spaceship shooting game, like Lady Gaga music. I guess that you could just instead play any other spaceship shooting game with the music volume set at zero and have something playing on your laptop though, and it'd be better. This game only lets you have one song per music stage and do one music stage at a time, so when the boss appears, it just loops the song from the beginning again. I've never felt the need to change a game's music something else though. Games's normal music always suits them just fine, unless I'm making a youtube video of me playing the game. Then I would have to replace the normal music with Korn.

I rate this spaceship shooting game 0 out of 2.

Adult Content

I'm taking the adult content warning off my internet. As funny as I think it is -- because of how content warnings are stupid -- I found it annoying when trying to translate my internote into french with google translate. Also it probably turns people away from the internote because it's an extra step you have to go through to L@@K at it.

Candy Bars

I ate some candy bars recently. They're kind of similar. It's Three Musketeers, Milky Way, and Snickers. I used to think that Snickers was the best and Three Musketeers was the worst because of how much junk is put in each one, but now I feel the opposite way - mainly because of the nougat part of the candy.

Snickers - This has peanuts and caramel on top, but it has the lowest quality nougat inside. Also most of the space in the candy bar is wasted with the peanuts.

Milky Way - The nougat in here is better than in the snickers, but I feel like the caramel is a waste of space.

Three Musketeers - This thing is all nougat. I know what I'm getting and I like it. Also, I like the name better than the other two candy bars I talked about here.

If I had a choice between all three candy bars, I would pick Three Musketeers nearly all the time. The other times I would pick snickers and milky way to remind myself of why I like Three Musketeers more.


Update: It has come to my attention that the name of the candy bar is actually "3 Musketeers" and not "Three Musketeers". Maybe I was just excited to spell out the number.

Sardines with BONES

I had a good experience with those sardines in tomato sauce I ate before. I think some of it might have had to do with how it was King Oscar brand and that just seems real classy to me. So I got sardines again, but these ones are big and in soybean oil instead of tomato sauce.

I first thought something was wrong when I opened it up and it smelled awful. I didn't realize there were tons of bones in it until I started eating a bit and had a bunch of little crunchy things in my mouth. They're like tiny little rib bones all over the place and I was eating them.

Here's what was going through my head while I ate it:

"I'm going to do it. I'm going to eat those sardines. Ugh, this is so disgusting. It smells so bad. They're huge disgusting pieces of sardines. It makes me want to vomit, looking at it with the smell too. ...here I go. ... That was rough. I shuddered when I was eating it. Okay, time for a second bite. Maybe I liked them more last time because they were in tomato sauce - this time it's soybean oil. I don't know.. I don't know if I can do it - finish the can. ... ughhhhh, spine bones! It looks like a bunch of dead rotting fish. mannn.. ughh.. no, I can do it. I don't give up on food. ... mann, freaking bones. I hate bones in fish - they're small and everywhere sometimes. When you eat chicken, you know where the bones are gonna be and it's cool. Also you don't run into spine bones. I swear, I'm supposed to be looking at food, but all I'm seeing is the cover of Doom II Master Levels. ... man, ughh. little crunchy things I'm chewing on. ... man, freaking bones! I feel like I've been through this scenario before. And it's like, why the hell is this part all purple/dark red colored? Am I supposed to eat that?? I don't even know what to do. Man, these spines. And all those tiny little ribs. Okay, so I've eaten like two thirds of it so far. I can do it. ... man, okay. ... I ate all the meat. I did it. I'm not feeling so good. I need to rest or something."



There's a million little bones in this and they break off the spine so easily that it's impossible to remove them all. And after I was done, it looked like some kind of boneyard. It was disgusting, and I rate this food item zero of two.

Peanut Butter Sauce Pasta

I just got like three jars of peanut butter, so I'm all excited to eat a lot of peanut butter. I looked up online some recipe for a peanut butter sauce to use on pasta, but I didn't remember exactly what all the instructions were for it while I was in the kitchen. It probably doesn't matter because I wasn't about to start measuring things anyway.

Okay, so first, I cooked some pasta. It's wheels. I kept some of the boiling water in a glass cup so I could use it for my sauce.



Then for the sauce, I dumped in a bunch of chunky peanut butter because I thought it would be neat to have a bunch of little peanut pieces in the end. Then I poured in about the same amount of hot water as there was peanut butter. I was going to use some half and half next, but mine was chunky and smelled like old yogurt, so that's no good. Instead I used a glob of bacon grease from when I ate a ton of bacon. I remembered it said something about soy sauce and garlic cloves, so I poured in a bit of a pack of soy sauce and then some garlic herb powder I had. And also cock sauce.



So the sauce recipe is like this:
- chunky peanut butter
- hot water from the pasta
- bacon grease
- soy sauce
- garlic herb powder
- cock sauce

There are no amounts or measurements! You're supposed to eyeball it and taste it a ton as you do it!

I rate it two of two because I love peanut butter and I'm proud of myself for this after my last pasta disaster.

Do you like the name "Zeefer"?

The reviews are in!

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091205115943AAbNKmR

"I can't help but think of weed when I hear zeefer."

"Zeefer is a bit strange!"

"I'm not sure about Zeefer. I don't know, I like unique names, but Zeefer is a little too unique. It reminds me of a transformer!"

"Zeefer is awful."

"Zeefer--absolutely not."

"Zeefer.... well I'm just unfamiliar with it."

"Zeefer sounds like reefer so no"

"Zeefer is horrible! That poor child!!"

Bacon substitutes

I found myself craving a BLT, but I've never cooked bacon and I wasn't sure we had any. But I did find a can of bacon-flavored SPAM. The result was this:

I'm sure it would have tasted just as good with regular SPAM, but I wanted the vague bacon flavor to remind me of what I wasn't actually eating.

It's worth noting that the SPAM is much more consistent to lay on the bread, as actual bacon requires time-consuming, careful placement for a comfortable-to-wield sammich. And this was one comfortable-to-wield sammich.

"Lots of Good Stuff" Giant Shell Pasta

After finding out about giant pasta, I decided to build upon my previous nutella and pasta food experiment. This time, it's giant shells, and instead of just nutella, I filled some with peanut butter, and a few with marshmallow creme. Then I poured honey all over the top. If it looks like there's not all that much nutella in some of them, that's because it's a tip of the iceberg kind of deal.

Honestly I think this is kind of too intense, and I would not eat this for dinner every day of the week. Maybe only on special occasions or when I'm not thinking clearly.

I rate this food item one out of two.

Fluffy Tapioca Cream

As someone who's only ever made instant pudding, the idea of using a 20-year-old box of Tapioca mix that requires egg and sugar and vanilla extract to be mixed in should have seemed daunting. By the way, here's the box:

It looks older in-person, not quite as vibrant, and you can see the old-fashioned type as you turn it over.

Anyways, it should have seemed daunting. Everyone was saying I should just use the instant mix, and be done in 5 minutes. But no, I wanted this:

And it tastes like tapioca! I'm hoping that when it cools it's also fluffier. That nice bowl of it was made using just three tablespoons of tapioca mix... so next time I'll use double the ingredients and take pictures of the process. Something tells me I should use up that box.

Oh, and yes, I post here now. There can never be enough food-related internotes.