The Pleasure and the Payne...

Hello my beautiful friends! I'm back from my three week vacation in the beautiful land of Wales. I took the xbox 360. One day I was watching the Matrix and I just got totally into it for about the twenty seventh time. I went over to the little shop on the caravan park, and they were selling xbox and ps2 games two for £15 (which is kind of a rip off 'cos you can pick 'em up for peanuts over here...) They had 'Enter The Matrix' and 'Max Payne'.

Still, it was the chance to play a Matrix game and the weather this summer in the UK has been shit and I was on holiday and Mrs. K wasn't arriving for a week. I had plenty of gaming time available! So I bought the games. Enter The Matrix wouldn't load up immediately (I didn't have the internet to download the code or whatever). However Max Payne loaded up straight away. I'd played and loved this game on the PS2 (I've got two copies) but got stuck and couldn't progress and like so many games before I'd abandoned it.

To cut what is rapidly becoming a long story short, I played the game to it's conclusion and LOVED it! It had every element of a game that should be there for me. To give it the award it deserves it came close to Shenmue. I know that's nearly blasphemy but it's true. What I absolutely loved were the faux series on TV... Lords and Ladies, Dick Justice etc. I love that!

When I finally finished the game, despite having a stack of games I could play, I felt the need to play more Max Payne. I found the sequel in 'Summit Games', Bangor, for the much more realistic price of £4. That saw me through the second week of my holiday... If you've never played Max Payne 1 & 2 you HAVE to play them.



After that I needed something along similar lines. It proved to be GTA4 that has been in my house since it's release date. I'm loving it. I've never played a GTA game but now I literally am Nico Bellic, and Liberty City is my home! I've only played 10% of the game but I love it. I know I'm always behind the times but in this case the lag is not THAT long...


Good to be back brothers!!!

Postcard From Wales!

Hello gang!

Would you believe it? I'm actually posting a quick note to all from gloriously sunny Wales, courtesy of my son's new laptop and an internet connection stolen from the caravan site's main office!

Ha ha! After a fruitless weekend of searching through the dross of my PS2 collection for someting decent to play, I was plagued by one unsatisfying experience after another... RE Outbreak file 2? Terrible, with my AI "team mates" bungling around this game proved to live up to the awful reputation it owns and I was plunged into despair. Devil May Cry 2? I loved the look of this game, but the disk must be damaged in some way, as the load times between scenes was intolerable! Eventually it packed in altogether, and again dark frustration set in...

I tried Gun, but it wasn't for me and after that I was stuck... Eventually I got some pleasure from RE:CV Gun Survivor, played on the pad rather than Light Gun (Thanks for the tip Nebacha) and I was pleased for the moment...


I played Sensible Soccer with my son Martin and he lost on penalties... I quite enjoyed the silliness of it all, but he vowed never to play me again on that particular game... Still I'd picked it up brand new for £2... You can't complain at that can you?


I decided to gather together all my titles that I didn't play... The game of Spongebob Squarepants that I had bought for my youngest son, Virtua Cop Elite Edition, (my G Con gun doesn't work), Mark Ecko's Getting Up and so on and managed to get a trade in to the value of £23... which paid for a copy of God Of War II! Hurrah! My thoughts on that later folks!

I also got a copy of Pro Evo 4 for 99p! Result! But the game that has consumed me the most and which is fast reaching the top of my favourites chart, is Max Payne. Now I've never bought into Rockstar's productions, but this game ticks all the boxes for me.



The storyline is great, voice acting OTT, John Woo style action sequences satisfy my violent streak, and the graphics and comic book style presentation works for me too! Fabulous stuff!

Anyway, Gnome, Elderly, Caleb, Mikey, J, Nebacha and any other of you who stumble upon this page... Hello from Wales... I'll be back and commenting on your blogs on Monday, until then big love to you all!

This is FK signing off from the heart of the UK, in the ancient mystical land of Wales, enjoying clement October sunshine... And Max Payne!