The Mothership

Yoshi’s Island DS (DS) – It’s really more of the same of the original Yoshi’s Island, which is just fine as the original was a great game to begin with. This sequel primarily adds dual-screen support so you can see more vertically, some new minigames, and the ability to change between different characters as Yoshi’s rider (from between Mario, Peach, Bowser, Donkey Kong, and Wario), each of whom has different abilities that are necessary to get through certain spots or to find secret areas. It’s still a fairly easy game though, and I’ve already collected over 100 lives so far.

Viva Pinata (X360) – Beneath the cutesy exterior, this is fundamentally a resource management game. You have to figure out how to lay out your garden in the right way to attract new pinata types, try to breed them and keep them happy, fight off the bad ‘sour’ pinatas or convert them to good ones, prevent fighting among your own pinatas (some types don’t get along with each other) and take care of sick ones, and so on. Taking care of all this once your garden gets larger can get fairly hectic. There’s no real end goal, but it’s a fun enough way to kill some spare time.

Phantasy Star Universe (X360) – This is a rather unusual single-player/MMORPG hybrid similar to the previous Phantasy Star Online games, though I haven’t played those. There’s a single-player campaign that unfolds in chapters, much like many other RPGs, but the engine mechanics and world layout, with towns and instanced mission areas, are clearly designed to support the MMOG-ish multiplayer mode.

I’ve already got too many online game subscriptions as it is though, so I’m sticking to the single-player game. The story is pretty standard, and some of the crafting and collecting mechanisms look neat, but the combat and environments have been a bit repetitive so far. Hopefully it opens up and becomes a bit less linear later on.

Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana (PS2) – It’s very much an ‘old-school’ Japanese RPG, with an isometric view and turn-based attack/magic/item-choosing battles. Its main distinguishing feature is that instead of casting spells, you collect elemental resources by whacking things with a staff, and then use alchemy to combine them into magic items with various abilities. You can also combine items you find lying around to produce new items at certain shops, and you can often vary the ingredients you combine a bit to produce a different item.

The system’s interesting enough to appeal to the collector in me, at least. The story’s fairly light-hearted, but the voice acting isn’t all that great. If the catgirl in my party says ‘meow’ out loud one more time, I’m going to toss her in a sack and throw her in the nearest river…

Lost Planet (X360) – A fairly traditional third-person shooter, though fairly well-executed, as it looks great and controls well. It keeps you on your toes, as you have to keep moving and defeating bugs in order to gather recharges for your ever-decreasing thermal energy meter, and you occasionally get to hop into mechs for some additional firepower and protection. The boss battles are pretty good too, with a decent variety of different tactics necessary. Its main problem is that it’s really short, taking less than 10 hours to go through the single-player campaign, but the multiplayer is supposed to be fairly fun too (I haven’t tried it yet).

I’ve still got way too many PS2 games to get through before even thinking about the PS3…

Radiata Stories (PS2) – A traditional Japanese RPG in many ways. I kept thinking to myself that it was a bit too cutesy and simplistic for my tastes, and yet I couldn’t stop playing it for a while. Its main feature is that there are well over 100 different NPCs you can recruit, each one a little sidequest in itself, and I guess that triggers the obsessive-compulsive in me.

There’s a branching storyline, so you have to play through it twice to get the whole story, but once you’ve beaten it once you can carry over a lot of your skills, equipment, and friend list to the second game, so it goes much quicker. Thank goodness, because I’m already approaching the 50 hour mark on my first time through…

Super Monkey Ball Deluxe (PS2) – After playing Marble Blast Ultra on the 360, a search for similar games led me to this series, where the single-player game has the same basic premise: lead yourself (in this case a, uh, monkey in a ball) through an obstacle course to the goal line within the time limit. The SMBD courses tend to be a lot shorter, with only a one minute clock versus MBU’s multi-minute courses, but there’s a lot more of them and a greater variety of obstacles. There are also a bunch of minigames that are fun to fool around with for a bit, but you really need multiple players to get the most fun out of them.

Its only major flaw is that the graphics are a bit disappointing in the PS2 version. Even though the courses have fairly simple geometry and detail, the jagged edges and swimming textures can make it a bit difficult to tell what’s coming up in the distance. I probably should have gotten the Xbox version instead, but it seems to be harder to find.

Midnight Club III DUB Edition Remix (PS2) – A solid enough arcade-ish racing game, with plenty of competition, lots of city to see, and no cheesy storyline that gets annoying fast like nearly every other racing game nowadays. I probably won’t put much time into it though, just because there are so many other, newer racing games coming.

Tiger Woods ’07 (X360) – I hadn’t played a golf game in a very long time (since, um, Links 386 sometime in the early ’90s?), so I figured it was about time I caught up. I passed on the ’06 version due to bad word-of-mouth — it sounded like a rush job to hit the launch date of the 360 and had very few courses — but the ’07 version seems to be caught up again.

I don’t really know what the state-of-the-art in golf games is right now so I don’t really have anything to compare it to, but I’m still enjoying it a lot. Besides the regular tournaments, there are a lot of training exercises, minigames, and head-to-head challenges to mix things up. The currently-controversial advertisements and purchasable cheats aren’t too intrusive either, compared to other games, but that’s a whole other article…

The only slightly awkward thing is that since you build up a character’s golfing skills, it’s often not clear whether you screwed up a shot because you didn’t wiggle the stick properly, or if you just happened to ‘roll a critical miss’.

Splinter Cell: Double Agent (X360) – I hadn’t played a good stealth game since the Thief series, and I’d heard good things about previous entries in this series. I was torn between either getting it for the Xbox 360 or waiting for the PC version, but wound up getting it for the 360. Usually I prefer to play games with shooter elements on the PC, for the mouse/keyboard control combo, but since this is primarily a stealth game it’s not as important here. Plus, my PC is four years old now and would likely run it fairly slowly and/or at lower graphic detail levels.

I’m not too far into it yet, but it’s enjoyable so far. I prefer the ‘feel’ of the Thief setting and the tools that were available there, but you have some nifty special moves in this one, too.

Tomb Raider: Legend (X360) – And I hadn’t played a Tomb Raider game since the original (are you sensing a theme yet), so I picked up this latest installment. Well, that’s not entirely true, I did get Tomb Raider: Angel Of Darkness as part of some video card bundle, but I played it for all of five minutes before giving up due to horrible controls. Fortunately the controls are much improved in this version, and there were only a few spots where I died or failed to make a jump because the controls didn’t seem to respond properly.

It has all of the climb-jump-n-swing platforming you’d expect from a Tomb Raider game, with a few driving sequences and ‘traps’ where you have to push the displayed buttons in time to avoid failing. Those traps were a bit annoying since you’re often not expecting them and fail them the first time, but then they’re no problem on the second attempt. The story’s a bit cliche, but not horrible, and the scenery is very nice in spots.

It’s short though, and only took me a little over nine hours to complete. It was only $20 though, so it was still well worth it. Going back and getting the rest of the trophies, doing the time attack runs, and getting the other achievements would take longer, but I’ve got too many other games still waiting to be played.

I’ve got a lot of catching up to do…

Doom (360): I never actually finished Doom when it first came out, as I think I only ever had the shareware version. It was just rereleased for the Xbox 360, so I picked it up on a whim, and…it actually holds up fairly well. The graphics are ancient and the controls extremely primitive compared to modern shooters, but it’s still full of plenty of action, tension, and challenge.

Okami (PS2): An action/adventure game in the Zelda vein, where you go from area to area fighting monsters, collecting upgrades, and helping people. Except you’re a wolf. With a paintbrush. The art style is definitely different than your usual game, and keeps you from tiring of the scenery. It also has a unique new feature in that you can temporarily freeze time and ‘draw’ on the screen with the analog stick, which has various effects depending on what you draw and where. It sounds gimmicky at first, but it gets used so often that it starts to feel natural after a while.

Defcon (PC): Nuclear war is harder than it looks. Defcon seems simple enough at first, just place your air bases, radars, missile silos, and navies, and unleash hell. If you want to ‘win’ though (or at least lose the least badly), you’d better have good strategies behind those placements, managing fleet routes, providing bomber and fighter cover, watching enemy defences, timing launches…

And aaargh… I’m one mission away from 100% completion in Lego Star Wars II, but it keeps freezing on me. It’s happening in only a few different specific spots to other people as well, even on the PS2 and PC versions, so it seems to be a bug in the game itself. Hopefully there will be a patch to fix it.

Test Drive Unlimited (X360): It has all of the usual types of racing you’d expect, plus various types of delivery missions, but TDU’s real hook is that you can roam around the entire island of Oahu, Hawaii, encounter other Xbox Live players driving around and chat with them, and challenge them to on-the-spot races. You can also use an editor to create your own challenges and post them for other people to beat, and form a club of people. The club feature seems a bit underused, since it’s hard to meet up with specific people and perform purely intra-club challenges, but there’s still a ton of other things to do.

Kameo (X360): This is a pretty decent little platformer, with plenty of okay-what-special-ability-do-I-use-here puzzles. It’s a bit short and easy though (unless you go back for the time attack achievements), so I probably should have rented it instead of buying it…

GTR 2 (PC): I was initially hesitant since the demo for this was pretty much exactly like the original GTR, but the full game does actually add a few new features. There’s the ‘driving school’ tutorials on racing basics, some more 24H events, unlockable smaller custom championships, and a few new tracks and cars. At only $30 for some reason, it was well worth it. Now I just have to get my wheel hooked back up…

Lego Star Wars II (X360): It’s cute and fun, just like the original. What more do you need? :) It feels longer than the original, and there are a handful of new features like additional ‘time attack’ modes, rideable vehicles within the levels, and new things that can be build with gold and orange blocks.

And I’m now at 97% completion in Saints Row, though a bit stuck. Those level 8 drug trafficking missions are just nuts…

Me and my crew rollin’ around town in my pimped-out ride:

I’ve been playing a lot of Saints Row recently, and it’s a pretty decent Grand Theft Auto clone. The storyline isn’t all that great and takes itself a bit too seriously, but they’ve improved on a lot of the gameplay mechanics (driving and shooting stuff feels a lot more natural now), and there’s a ton of stuff to do.

They’ve added some new mission types like ‘insurance fraud’, where you have to throw yourself in front of or ram other vehicles and try to cause accidents with as high a dollar value as you can. It even uses the ragdoll physics model to rate you, based on whether you fly through the windshield or not, how high and far you get tossed…

It still has a few other problems, such as missing motorcycles, which were my favourite way of getting around in GTA:SA, there are no countryside areas, multiplayer is somewhat buggy, exploitable, and laggy (though a patch is on the way for that), there’s frequent screen tearing since they don’t use vsync, and it’s frozen on me a few times now. It’s still fairly fun overall though, and a good way to fill the void until the next GTA, which will hopefully pick up some of the improvements from Saints Row.

Top: Playstation 2
Bottom: Xbox 360

I was weak. :( But the zombies need to be stopped…

(Man, I need to dust.)