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I'm currently playing... too much games. Got into this fairly vicious cycle of buying a couple of games at a time, starting them both, then finding that a couple of others have come out that I want to get. So I pick those up and put the ones that I've already begun on the shelf 'temporarily'.
Basically, I need about two years' holiday to complete any of them to my own satisfaction.
So, alongside the Wii games that I've mentioned in the relevant thread (Zelda is currently on hold, as I've just finished the penultimate dugeon and find that I don't particularly care to dedicate the couple of hours needed to polish the thing off - it's such a depressingly forgettable release) are:
Picross DS. This is actually providing the meat of my gaming right now, and is disturbingly addictive. Ads all over the tv for it. You've go a grid, along the axes are numbers. The numbers tell you how many of the squares on that row/column you need to fill in and how many of them should be adjacent to each other. You need to figure out the best line to start with and figure out the rest from there, by a process of elimination, in order to form a pixel image.
I've played it before in another form - as Picture Puzzle on the NeoGeo Pocket Color - but there are aome slight changes to the forumla here that make it less frustrating (the biggest one being that, in the normal mode, instead of score, you're given a 'best time' for each puzzle, with mistakes hitting you with time penalties).
Excellent game, especially considering the price.
Viewtiful joe 2 (GameCube). Picked up after mentioning the prequel to Flyboy in the 'I would like a game like...' thread. Had a quick play on it, which isn't anything like enough to produce a proper opinion from, but it already looks like everything's in palce for another superb scrolling fighter. Although, that said, I remember from various gaming boards back when it originally came out that Capcom shifted the emphasis away from the fighting mechanics and onto the puzzles in this sequel, which disappointed a lot of the first game's fans - certainly, the puzzles were the weakest part of that original. We'll see.
1080 Avalanche (GameCube). I remember this getting a bit of a slating on a lot of message boards for not being enough like the N64's 1080 Snowboarding, but I've put a lot of time into this now - and played the N64 one to death, and beyond - and I'm happy to find that those complaints were absolute bollocks. It's significantly easier than the N64 game, it's true (landing jumps required the sort of mastery that most games never demand of you), but that doesn't make it bad. It's also far more thrilling - I love the screen shake effect when you're travelling at speed, I love the descents that see you triggering and being chased by avalanches.
Music was shocking at first, but now that I've become used to it I think iot fits well. Although, that said, you generally tend to get used to any music once you've been subjected to it enough times.
Earth Defense Force 2017 (360). Budget third-person shooter. Japanese budget release originally, from the company that releases a *lot* of cheap shovelware on the PS1 and PS2. There are occasionally some diamonds in amongst the crap, though. This is entertaining stuff, but in a crass, dumb, B-movie style. I dunno. It's fun enough, but uou're never going to want to play it for more than twenty minutes in any one sitting. Your brain would melt through tedium.
Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops (PSP). I *really* don't know what to make of this. It's Metal Gear Solid with small, self-contained levels and the ability to swap between a number of characters in any one level at will. You sneak around, knocking people out and carrying them back to your truck so that you can bring them over to your side and access their abilities in future missions.
Also some stuff with managing teams indirectly, sending them out to spy in certain areas, which changes the stats of enemies in those areas (and probably does a fair amount of other stuff - a couple of hours' play hasn't taken me much further than that) - or having people assigned to medical or technical support teams.
Ashely Wood-drawn animated comic book interludes are a mixed bag - great animation style, messy and indistinct art (which, y'know, isn't exactly unexpected considering the artist). Not anything like as much atmosphere as there was in the insanely good MGS3, but this may improve as it progresses. Looks sharp enough, if a little boring. Has a couple of significant control issues which you get used to, but never feel entirely happy with.
I love Kojima for wanting to play around with his prize series like this (not too sure that it isn't a kind of death wish, though), but - just as with Metal Gear Ac!d - the end result seems to be interesting and deeply flawed.
Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth (PSP). Square RPG, port of a PS1 game (that, afaik, never made it over to Europe, although it came out late in the machine's life and may just have slipped past without me noticing). One of those weird titles that you find yourself drawn to, despite its faults. Put in about an hour with it earlier this afternoon and... well, it was all storyline. I think there were only three moments in that entire sixty minutes where I pressed a button to do anything more than forward the dialogue on.
Sounds interesting, though. Finding humans on the cusp of death, then taking them and training them up to be warriors for heaven in the upcoming battle against hell. or something along those lines. I find myself strangely addicted to Japanese RPG mechanics an tend to pick up as many translated releases as I can, just to experience as many different gameplay styles as I can. I barely ever get enough time to play one through to completion and, while I hope to buck the trend with this one, I'm not going to fool myself into thinking that it's likely to happen.
Other stuff: Guitar Hero II again (nothing like as good as the first game, I've now decided), a bunch of the downloadable PC Engine/TG16 games on the Wii (the three notable shmups, obviously, Loderunner [which I've never played in any of its many incarnations until this rerelease]) and a few of the 360's Live Arcade games (the pinball one and Xevious, mainly - adore Xevious, even though it's as basic as they come). |
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