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I don't particularly like the Guitar Hero games, but I do like that the games continue to incise guitarists, or people who consider themselves to be such. Much like passing gas, this never seems to cease amusing me.
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Finishing up the Orange Box. Some of it I liked and some of it I didn't. Frankly I thought Half-Life 2 was pretty awful. Not in a "look at those 2004 textures" kind of way, but the level design, weapons, music, story, and general pacing were all various degress of terrible. And the vehicles........UGGGHHHHHH! People really look at this like some kind of classic? In comparison I thought episode 1 was very good and episode 2 was at least pretty good.

And as for Portal...ehhh. It's cute. But I'm not sure why everyone has been blowing it for the past year.
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de Blob. Certainly in the running for Wii GOTY so far. Why didn't I listen when folks were all talking about this a month ago?

Perhaps not the tightest platformer I've ever played but it's so fresh and fun (tm) that I'm willing to forgive a thousand sins.
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Beautiful Katamari. It's fun I guess. There's nothing wrong with it exactly, but it just feels so....lifeless. I'd heard that about the game, but it really is true. This is really a series that didn't need any sequels (though I haven't played We Love Katamri yet. I hear it's fairly clever in some respects). So it seems Namco has done a pretty good job of grinding the series into dust.


Pity. It started out so fresh.
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As much as I liked Ultimate Alliance, Justice League Heroes is much better. Tragically overlooked, and it never gets mentioned. Too bad WB decided not to make a franchise out of it. It came out the same winter the Wii did, and kind of got lost in the shuffle of huge games that were released that season (as can often happen).

I'm a little surprised someone besides me has played it.
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Finished up Overlord today. Fun. It's pretty much just an evil version of Pikmin. Don't know why no one described it to me as such, because that's totally what it is.

Went online to try the multiplayer and immediately regretted it. It just doesn't work. The game wasn't meant for it. I know there was this kind of unofficial Geneva convention of games about 5 years ago where reviewers decided that everything has to have online multiplayer whether it needs it or not, lest they penalize it.... But it's a broken mess here. So bad that it feels like my otherwise positive view of the game has been slightly tarnished by it. It's a shame really. The time and money spent polishing that nonsense could have been leveraged to make a longer main quest, more enemy/minion types, sidequests, etc.
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I don't know if I dislike it exactly...but I certainly didn't like it either. I don't know if I could say Ninja Blade is bad for sure, but this is a very bad demo of Ninja Blade. 70% of it is the stupid quicktime stuff, a large lame first boss, and only a scant couple of minutes playing with the actual sword combat. The combat is decent, and I like switching between the three different swords on the fly... but did anyone else find the shiruken to be way too overpowered?

Eh. I'll give it the benefit of the doubt.
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I'll third that Riviera recommendation. I played it and enjoyed it on the gba, but I'd imagine it plays the same on psp.
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Well finally got 1000/1000 in Resident Evil 5 today. Obviously I enjoyed it. But professional mode was a nightmare. It's basically Dante Must Die Mode, where one hit from anything takes away all of your life. You've got to have those stages pat, and even then sometimes something will just kill Sheva out of nowhere. I wouldn't recommend it to normal/sane human beings.
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Super Punch-Out!! came out on the Wii Virtual Console yesterday, so that's what I've been obsessing over. I know people love the original a lot more, but I've always thought this was far superior. 3x as many boxers, a super-meter that isn't tied to stars that you'll randomly get (and lose just as quickly) for punching at some specific time, better fighting routines, better campaign mode, etc. High level play on the NES often resulted in a specific command string that would magically work like a charm. Here you can just use good reflexes and do just as well. On the NES is was substantially more difficult to win on your wits alone. The original Punch-Out!! was still fantastic though; I suppose it's a bit like saying blowjob X was a letdown compared to that one. I mean they're both good. As is all Punch-out!! pretty much.
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Yeah, playing Rhythm Heaven too. I'm not quite sure why everyone is so smitten with it either, as there are some terrible desgin choices here.

Personally I'm not crazy about the soundtrack. I like Built to Scale and DJ School, but the vast majority of the songs here just aren't very good. The ones with English vocals are the worst. And I don't mean that from a jack-ass elitist Japanese importer point of view either. One who assumes everything Japanese is better by default. The singing is just poor. Terribly flat. There are plenty of VO actresses who can sing. I've seen it constantly on their CV's. So why didn't they hire one? Perhaps it was one of those things where they just pulled whoever was walking by the hallway into the recording booth.

And since it's on the DS, it has to have stylus control, and that pretty much ruins a lot of it. In the majority of DS games it isn't a big deal, but the amount of precision required by a lot of these games - where a tenth of a second is the difference between success and failure - makes it a huge problem here. If I mess something up in a button based game, the fault lies entirely with me. Either the button was pressed down or it wasn't. But here maybe I'll swipe, but the game won't recognize it.

There are other problems too, like the cycling perfect opportunities. I've been getting mostly gold ratings when I go back, and if you earn a gold, you have the opportunity to try for a completely perfect score. But only when the game lets you. The opportunity randomly presents itself every 5 games or so, and is only available for three attempts. If you fail, the opportunity is lost until the game might randomly choose that song again (after playing something else 5-ish times). So if you try really hard and get a perfect it's meaningless unless the game tells you that you can. This is a horrible design element, and I can't fathom why they would set it up that way (and this is saying nothing about how insane some of these challenges are with the crappy stylus controls).

I guess Rhythm Heaven could have been a good game. But it's on the DS.

(post script: yes I know this is the second game in the series and the first was on the totally button based gba. Don't care. I'm not gonna play it. I can't justify spending $60 to import a game whose instructions are in a language I can't understand that probably takes 4 hours to beat anyway)
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Hurm, yes well I'm playing through Silent Hill Homecoming. I can't quite make up my mind about it yet. I go back and forth on my opinions of Silent Hill Origins for the psp (another American developed SH) as well. Sometimes I think it was a pointless exercise and other times I think it turned out surprisingly well. Perhaps once I've beaten Homecoming, I'll check out the thread on it (since it'll probably be pretty spoilerific).

Initial impressions:

* The voice acting is universally excellent. Alex sounds weary and beleaguered without sounding like the VA is trying too hard. And listen to the way his mother's voice cracks and trails off silently at the end of a sentence. Very impressive.

* I'd heard the story starts off very slowly. I heard correctly. This is the fifth game in the series. You just can't have the first three hours be the main character asking other people "What's going on in this town?" We know what's going on. It's Silent Hill. This needed to move faster.

* There seems to be no subtext to the story at all. Say what you will about Origins, but it was fascinating to find out what Travis really was if you could read between the lines. It just feels like a standard monster movie thus far. Now to be fair, I haven't seen whatever twist is in store, and I haven't seen any of the end game, so that could change. but thus far nothing.

* The environments look great. They got both the fog and the noise filter just right. The character models, not so much. Too sterile. They lack the gritty quality of the previous games.
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Afro Samurai. So-so. Feels a little too loose for an action game. Too many dial-a-combos and the timing is just too strict. Not "Onechanbara with blood on your sword" strict, but to the point where I only get what I want about 70% of the time. Copare that with something like DMC or GoW or Blood Will Tell where I perform the move I want every single time.

One thing I will say is that it tells the story much better than the anime. Certain things (like the nature of the Justice character) are made a lot more explicit. Normally I wouldn't necessarily be in favor of over-explanation, but this series was in desperate need of it, as a lot of it was vague to the point of being meaningless. To be honest Afro Samurai was definitely a "wouldn't it be cool if.." kind of show, and unlike Silent Hill or something, personal interpretation didn't do the series any favors.

Oh and the new ending is 100 times better despite lasting all of a minute.
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I've been playing Condemned 2 recently. I hate to admit it, but that old adage about survival horror games is true; the better you are at combat the less scary it is.Because the combat is much better. You can fight (and fight well) barehanded now, and the blocking is so much more forgiving. Guns are more plentiful, and now there's even (gasp!) ammo!!!


But either because of this, or less intelligent design, it's just not all that scary. The first had me jumping all the time. This one not so much. I think another problem is that there's too much plot. The first game was rather sparse, but now there are a ton of cutscenes, a ton of characters, and a ton of cryptic filler that just doesn't add much. I think it's better when you're just left alone to wander a little bit....
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Played a little more Punch-Out!! today. Damn this is a good sequel. You look at something like the abysmal Golden Axe revival and wonder why companies like Sega couldn't just follow this model; take a good long look at what works, and just include that. Because this could have very easily had an overwrought story-mode, or Wii-mote training mini-games, or stat building or other various pieces of modern fluff, but it really doesn't.

It looks great too. I know cell-shading feels very 2003, but damn if this doesn't look like a living cartoon. And the animation is what really makes the visuals pop. I really hope the rags give this game it's due in that department come January's end of the year "best of" featurette season.

I won the championship belt and have just got started on title defense mode, which is kind of ingenious. If you weren't aware, basically what happens after you become champ is that you have to defend your title against all the other boxers looking to get a second crack at you. Except they act totally differently and move in ways specifically designed to mess you up if you think you know their patterns from before. It's a blast. So while the 13 pugilists doesn't sound like a lot, in reality it's more like 26 unique fights (plus one secret one (check the internet if you're curious)).
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Kiken, I played this about a year ago, but could never finish it. How do you beat the temple stage in the Babylon Rouges story? I know of all the shortcuts, and it seems like I was usually playing the course close to "perfectly" (proper braking, hitting every boost pad, etc), but it seems like no matter how perfectly I play it, everyone always catches up to me near the open air "village" looking section near the end of the race.
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Onimusha 4 (Dawn of Dreams) is the secret best title in the series. For whatever reason, few people played it, and I almost never hear it talked about....
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