ゲームを楽しもう!

(this opening section was written back in october 2025 when the movie first released, i'm only just getting around to editing and publishing it now, apologies for any inconstancies or weird bits.)

as long time readers will know I actually started conan with one of the later movies in the series, movie 27 "the million dollar pentagram". I loved it, so much so that I started watching the whole show from the start and up until now I've made pretty good progress of it. this is to say that I love this show. it's an easy top 5 anime for me and when I saw the 28th movie was coming to local cinema's I was so excited for it. the 27th movie was my favourite piece of conan so i'd hoped that movie 28 would manage to reach that heights, especially since the focus this time was on a snowy part of Japan and my favourite character kogoro mouri. the movie managed to live up to it though and while I think I enjoyed the adventure of movie 27, I had an amazing time watching this and I love it almost as much.

the focus on Nagano prefecture is an easy highlight. the shots in both the town and mountain are beautiful and the snow gives it an amazing atmosphere and there's some really cozy scenes in the town near the mountains. a lot of my favourite episodes of the show take place in snowy cabins and this was up there with those. I just love this setting so much and the movie makes great use out of it, especially with the finale which is set at a huge satellite dish with shootouts and a cool chase sequence. the movie also has some amazing lighting to it, there's some really nice environment work in the mountains and the sunrise and sunsets look amazing. that whole finale was probably the highlight of the movie for me, but the avalanche scene and the fight between ran, genta and the assassin was also pretty great.

it's a lot more serious than the previous movie too. the tone is dark here and people die, where the last movie had a sense of adventure this one has a real feeling of threat and danger. I like that. the story is a lot more political at face value too, sure pentagram had the twist with the *spoilers* WW2 nuke but this one is all about statue of limitations laws and plea bargains and big government coverups. it was really informative actually and it really tells you a lot about the Japanese justice system, it's neat. the characters are also great! it was my first run in with morofushi and i loved his energy and design, his silly little mustasche is cool looking. rei too was a ton of fun in the movie and kind of cute to boot, though he isn't in it much. he's also far away from where i am in the story admittedly, though i do know he has his own spinoff later on which I'm super excited to watch. he gives me red flags but i like that in a man. i loved seeing more development for kogoro too. the side cast don't get much to do here but he has so many good scenes and i always love when conan gives my favourite character a real chance to show what he's capable of. i love him being a sleezy goofball but when kogoro steps up and shows that he is actually cool as heck, that's when conan is at its best for me. it reminded me a lot of movie 2 in that way. this has a lot of my favourite mouri moments overall.

The music is generally solid, though not as memorable as something like the 14th target."Yugo Kanno" did the music here and he's worked on some really cool stuff like "nioh 1, 2 &3", " D.C. ~Da Capo~", "warriors all stars", "gundam versus", "resident evil: infinite darkness" and the anime adaptation of "stone ocean". standout tracks for me would be "繋がる宇宙" which would fit right in as the winter town theme in an RPG. "天文台へ行こう!" has a similar energy to it. "思い出話に花を咲かせて" is a super nice piano track, which is shared by "無言の再会" and "ワクワクの絶景" . "名探偵コナンメインテーマ (隻眼の残像ヴァージョン)" is another great rendition of the theme to the show. "WILL ～弔い～", "アベックとカップル", "博士のクイズ ～長野編～", "寄り道しよう"and "星を描こう" are all also very solid. i love the track "重い車内", as well as " 雪崩の話" which is one of the most relaxing tracks on the OST. " 雪の中に咲く花", " 夢と現実の狭間", 最悪な知らせ" and "エピローグ ～それぞれの友情～" round out the last of the good tracks, though sadly a lot of them are much too short to really enjoy for too long.

The vocal track this year I'm just not as into, it doesn't quite match up to last years Aiko track. "twilight" by king gnu is the track and while it's fine, it's just not as good as the music they usually pick for the movies. it's not bad though and i usually like king gnu's work on things like JJK, but this is one of their lesser tracks. i will say though if you aren't already heavy into Conan, this isn't one i can recommend. where stuff like "14th target" and "million dollar pentagram" can be easily enjoyed for a newcomer, that's just not the case here. if you do love the show though this is an obvious recommendation. it's more Conan, and more importantly than that it's just good Conan.

so after watching the third movie in this series i decided to go back and try the first out, this one is called "whispering corridors". while i enjoyed "wishing stairs" i actually found this to be even better and of the three movies I've seen in this series it's easily my favourite. it's a classic ghost revenge kind of story but it's a very solid one that has the best atmosphere of any of the three movies. the school has much more of a sense of place and the way it's shot is just very good looking especially during the night scenes when the school is all dark and spooky, it's helped a lot by how low resolution and fuzzy the DVD version i watched was. it's all about the central mysteries with the teachers dying and the abuses within the schooling system, the latter does make it kind of a hard sit sometimes, but you at least do get to see the teachers get whats coming to them. there's also a really cool twist that i was able to guess, but it still really hits like a truck when it's revealed.

the movie is pretty slow and the kills are spaced very far apart, but there's some really scary scenes in there and i love one scene near the end involving a classroom literally covered in blood. it looked really pretty. even the characters are really interesting and i found all of the friendships the movie is centred around felt really natural and compelling to watch play out. it's the hardest to track down of the 3 that got released in my region but you can still get the tartain release for around £8-10 on the net, i super recommend tracking it down since i think the low quality of the transfer really ads to the atmosphere in a way i don't think a higher quality rip or blu ray ever would. if you can track down it's an easy recommendation though.

the first of todays games is westlife fan-o-rama. when i saw this in a thrift store for pennies i didn't initially think much of it beyond the fact it's rare to ever see PS1 games in places like that now. i wasn't even going to pick it up but when i looked at the back of the box i realized that I'd actually seen it before somewhere, on the net. it was actually in a classics of game clip and one of my favourites which I'll link below at the bottom of the article. i figured why not, I'll give it a shot. the game itself is about how it looks though. it's a quiz game with some funny and awkward FMV, clips of the bands songs and some very weird comic book cutscenes with even worse acting than the band members. the actress even flubs a line entirely and they just left it in here, it's very poorly made but in a way that i think is really charming. they do have variants depending on how well you do though and there are seemingly a lot of clips to unlock. i wasn't able to get a ton though, it won't shock you to know that i don't really know much westlife beyond what i sometimes hear on the radio so i didn't get a very high score. my max across my 5 runs was 2500 and it wasn't enough to beat the game, sadly.

at the end it puts you in a sudden death round with 7 questions you need to get right, get one wrong and it's over. i was able to guess my way into round 3 but i could just never get any further. this game had its point in time and it is long since past that so the amount of people who could beat this are likely few and far between now and i am not one of those people. i had a good time with it though. it's awkward in a charming way and that FMV and VA work is comedy gold so i do recommend you give it a try. get some friends over and you could have a fun night with it trying to unlock the funny FMV scenes, maybe even pair it with cheggers party quiz or golden balls for the ultimate euro kusoge experience.

i also played the game "how to train your dragon 2" for the PS3. I'd also picked this one up in a thrift store but it was a long time ago, years even and just never played it. i mostly bought it because i remembered a years old series of videos on the net where Derek from classic game room undertow reviewed every single port of the game and was miserable the entire time. he clearly didn't want to play them. i assume the higher ups running the channel just uncaringly put them in his lap and told him to cover it. it made for a hilarious few videos though and they always stuck with me as being some of the best stuff on the channel. it always made me curious to see how the game was and after playing it, i honestly think that Derek was being pretty diplomatic about the game. it really is very rough, but it's not without it's good points.

the game is basically drakengard for kids. you fly a dragon around and compete in Mario kart style flight races with them. you fly through rings that denote the path of a course and take down enemy riders with ranged attacks and powerups. there isn't much variety to it. the whole game takes place on one level, a huge island akin to wuhu island from pilot wings resort but with a lot less variety in locales. It's basically just forests, rivers, mountain and even some snowy mountain. you fly through rings either alone as a time trial or during a race. sometimes pick up and deliver sheep or deliver sheep during a race and sometimes you get to do a very not good rail shooter target gallery segment with the slowest reload i have ever seen. it's rough, really rough. there's no story, fairly bland music and the controls are not the best but you do have a few riders to pick between and it is very short, clocking in at 2 hours long and being able to be beat with relative ease since you don't have to win any events to beat the game. it's an interesting game conceptually with it being a drakengard style flight sim for kids and i think adding that with Mario kart races is a neat idea, but in execution it comes out closer to superman 64 than anything else. i didn't hate it though, it's unique and it had some fairly fun events even if the controls and rubberbandy AI tried to thwart my fun at every opportunity. I'd recommend it if the phrase "drakengard for kids" is in some way a selling point, which i have to imagine it will be for some of you. Check out those videos too, they're a great time. i really miss undertow.

similarly i found it hard to get into the PS4 horror FPS "get even". it's one that i never looked too much into before but it was one of those "leaving ps plus" games and it had Bandai Namco's name attached to it, as well as a separate team who's work i liked in the past. that team being farm 51 who made painkiller: hell and damnation, a personal favourite FPS, as well as deadfall adventures which i super enjoyed but never finished. Sadly the game just didn't do much for me. the basic idea is that it's a stealth horror FPS with a military theme and some psychological horror going on. that sounded great to me and the game has a decent opening with a pretty good shock finish. it falls apart pretty quickly though. the British TV drama thing it's going for is just a style i really dislike and i found it growing off-putting pretty quick. British media is already my least favourite and i find this specific kind of gritty, edgy drama to be some of the worst of it. it was written by people primarily involved in British TV so it at least has some authenticity there, even if i dislike it. The gameplay wasn't much better. while it has combat and stealth it's very basic and it's closer to a walking sim with basic puzzles which are broken up by occasional stealth. the stealth and gunplay are both very basic and not very fun. the stealth especially is pretty bad since it's based on cones on the map and doesn't seem to take into account things like walls and cover.

i had multiple times where i was put on alert since i entered an enemy cone despite being in an entirely different room with a wall and no doors between us. you do get access to a cool gun though called the "corner gun" though which lets you shoot around walls. that was rad. some of the horror is decent too when it is in the asylum and tries its best to be like condemned or manhunt and there is some solid imagery there. you even get some moral choices to make which i liked and not all of them are signposted, though i didn't get far enough to see which ones end up paying off. the environments aren't all that interesting on the whole though, the asylum has some cool parts but you trad over the same parts far too often and a lot of the game is set in bland warehouses and fields. there is a cool skyscraper level though that reminded me of perfect dark. a actually dropped this one though, so take all of this with a big asterisk. i got pretty far in but i just wasn't enjoying myself and after spending the lead up to my latter 2 play sessions dreading actually playing it. i just called it quits. it does some cool things but it just wasn't for me. if you enjoy this kind of British drama or you really like stealth focused horror, this may be for you though so do consider it if it sounds at all appealing.

as I've been going through my games i want to clear from my collection i landed on this one, Rambo: the game. it's always been a game i was aware of but one i just never got around to, i knew of its reputation but it always struck me as a game undeserving of the amount of hate it gets. from the outside it looked like a standard, if janky and fun rail shooter that got weirdly maligned by people unfamiliar with the genre. this is mostly true! the game is very standard and very janky and it can be a lot of fun if you enjoy rail shooters and have the patience to put up with its quirks and difficulty. though it's a game with some real issues that you should at least know going in.

the game is a mostly standard rail shooter with you taking out waves of enemies on a set cinematic track through a solid variety of levels. the levels are all split into chunks all based on set pieces from the first 3 movies. you get set up with a range of guns that you can slowly unlock, though some are set like the bow during stealth segments and each level has one locked weapon it wants you to use. you can customise the second slot though with a variety of light and heavy weapons. you get some perks and some level ups for better stats, a rage mode that slows down time, gives infinite ammo and refills your health for making kills. there's things like QTE's or boss fights where you need to destroy enough of the environment and a cool gears of war style QTE for reloads that can gift you bonus ammo if you do well. it's got a lot going for it to make it stand out from other rail shooters and for the most part it works pretty well, especially if you play with the move. the gameplay is a fun time, for the most part anyway. i think the first 2 movies are a lot of fun to play through but once you hit the third the games difficulty gets to be a little much and it becomes more frustrating than fun, even on easy. it does put a damper on what was a pretty fun time up until then.

one thing i liked a lot was the level gimmicks. each major themed level has its gimmick and they can be pretty fun. the DLC has things like claymores you can shoot and a level where you need to use a flashlight. first blood has you trying to disarm the cops for a higher score over killing them. part 2 has a cool section with a grenade bow and some cool boat levels and part 3 has some environmental destruction as well as tank and helicopter segments. it does a lot to change up the levels and they're mostly pretty fun, though i like the cop one more as a neat thematic thing rather than actually being fun since it does suck being deducted for most of your kills and it was far too easy to kill someone even if you shoot their legs or arms. there's also a lot of variety. small town Washington, cool forests and deserts, swamps and caves and bases. you travel a lot of the world and for the most part the environments all look pretty solid. that same can't be said for the rest of the visuals though, the games character models are *rough* but in a way i find charming. same with the audio which uses a lot of archival audio for it, it's authentic but noticeably super low quality which i thought was really cute.

the story is also just taken from the movies, though heavily truncated and the audio is very low quality. i haven't seen any of the movies so i can't speak to its quality in comparison, but i followed along well enough and could very much tell the sequels seemed to not fully get what the point of the first one was. the game is pretty short, it'll run you around 2-3 hours depending on skill and i think it's a good time. it's on the more difficult end but if you play on easy you get infinite continues, so it'll be beatable for most people. the music is just kind of generic movie stuff, I'm not sure if its from the movies but it's not particularly interesting or catchy. the game also has some free DLC with the baker team expansion, it's a 40 min set of 3 levels and they're some of the games best. it's clear the dev team learned a lot during the making of it and i think the DLC shows off the games strengths at its best, it's well worth a try. if you want to try the game though it's sadly pretty expensive these days, it'll run you around 35-45 which is a lot for what it is. it's hard for me to justify that price but i do think if you love rail shooters, or the movies, then it's worth a shot. i had a pretty good time with it.

+ Video link here.