Haven't posted a haul post in a while, so here's what I've katamari'd over the last six months or so. Pretty much snapped up stuff I wanted to play once it hit a certain threshold (<$20 unless it's super recent and unlikely to drop below $30 within the next year).



I've been preordering the Nippon Ichi store exclusive limited editions as they roll out since I really dig what they're doing with them (sole source, single print run, a lot of stuff crammed in there, etc). MGS HD Collection LE was preordered as well...lesson learned after Subsistence LE, so I make it a point to preorder new MGS LEs from Amazon as they come out. Love love love love the Metal Gear series. Still need to play Acid 2 one of these days.

Didn't realize that the Velvet Game of the Year Edition of Two Worlds II was a Euro-exclusive, but that explains the pricing on it at Amazon. They actually didn't have enough in stock to fulfill my order, so the company emailed me and asked if I wanted to have a free copy of the normal version while they waited a week or so to get more copies of the VGotY in. Then they gave me free strategy guides to both the base game and the expansion pack. Topware Interactive: going well above and beyond on their customer support. Heard tons of good stuff about the game and the expansion, so I'm looking forward to the adventure. Behind it is the Royal Collector's Edition of Two Worlds II for PS3. Again, killer release with a lot of neat stuff and the price was right (<$30 IIRC).

Other than that, nothing terribly embarrassing outside of maybe Mindjack and No More Heroes PS3. I'm curious to see Mindjack firsthand and while I didn't much care for NMH on Wii, I thought maybe I'd give it another chance on PS3. It's been getting hit hard in the reviews. I wonder how much of that is from people bummed that it runs like crap and is repetitive as hell and how much of that is from people bummed that they didn't bother to fix the crappy framerate for the "HD" release.

Phantom Hourglass was some nice Zelda comfort-food, but the touch screen controls (particularly for movement) were terrible and the execution of the Ocean King's Temple was outright bad. There wasn't a single point of time in the game where I thought "oh wow, this touch screen-based movement is effective" and there were plenty of times where I was outright cursing them for their inaccuracy. Thankfully, I only have one more touchscreen Zelda to play.

The Ocean King's Temple would have been much better if it was either a persistent level or you had the option to warp to whatever level in the temple after completing them. There was a single midway point in there and you had to redo every puzzle on each playable level everytime you came back. Sure, some of the levels got quicker with the more inventory items you got, but it didn't prevent it from being a tedious time-suck.

That said, it still hit the spot for the time being. I can't wait to play Skyward Sword, but I'm going to look at knocking out some shorter games for the next few weeks. Resistance 3, Gears of War 3, Killzone 2 an 3, and whatever else I get in the mood to blow through. I just want to shoot shit in the face for a little while, I guess.

I wish my laptop could play Bulletstorm. That's the ultimate shoot-shit-in-the-face game, complete with with language so filthy that even I felt a little dirty hearing it.

If you've got a bit of an FPS itch and a DS, Moon is alright.

Moon has some impressive tech behind it and, for the most part, is tuned to run silky smooth for pretty much the entire game. Unfortunately, there's points where you can see how they over optimized things. For instance, if you try to use the corner of a wall for light cover (hiding the enemy's gun) in a manner similar to, say... Duke Nukem 3D, you'll see that the enemy shots will travel directly through that portion of the wall and still hit you. They also travel through other enemies, so you can't game them into killing each other or use them as cover like you could in Doom.

The art style has a real Metroid Prime vibe to it. Level structure is generally linear and the action is serviceable. Don't come for the story, because while it starts off interesting, it drives straight off the logic cliff like Thelma and Louise and ends before resolving pretty much anything.

One thing that I appreciated but didn't realize soon enough is that enemies tend to drop ammo for the most useful weapons in a level. It didn't click with me because I was using the most basic weapon (because it had unlimited ammo), so combat was taking me much longer than it should have. Some of the levels in the last quarter of the game got tedious, so I switched to the finite ammo weapons and had a hell of a lot more fun. I guess after years of being conditioned to ration ammo that I've just developed a couple of "bad" habits here and there.

Last night I fired up Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass. Had to order another copy from Amazon to get my fix since:
A) My copy is at home
B) It doesn't work on my AceKard2i

The controls are taking me a little bit to get used to, but I'm so in love with the "Celda" art style. No idea how long it'll take to beat, but it'll feel really good to clear it out of the backlog finally. Maybe one of these days I'll be able to finally play through Majora's Mask and Skyward Sword.

Beat Ghost Trick the other week but didn't have time to post about it. It was pretty damn good, though incredibly linear. I knew very, very little about the game prior to playing it other than it was a Japanese adventure game, it was unique, and it was supposed to be good.

After playing it, I can agree that that was true!

The storyline was pretty catchy and the writing was fun, but the graphics really stole the show. Holy hell was that animation amazing. I would recommend giving it a look-see for the animation alone. Come for the graphics, stay for the storyline and fun little ghost trick mechanic.

For the most part the challenge was pretty low. There were maybe two chapters that were a little tricky to figure out (one in particular stumped me because I knew what I generally had to do but couldn't figure out why it wouldn't work..only to discover that I had to move the object a little closer to the character to trigger the proper option), while the rest were fairly straightforward...but possessing random objects and hopping around the level to trigger everything was still good fun.

I decided to clean out the backlog a little bit, so I fired up Moon from Renegade Kid. It uses an advanced version of the Dementium engine and has a kind of a Metroid vibe despite the linear level design (mostly because of the art design). The little rover is overused throughout it, but it otherwise does a really solid job of showcasing the nonstandard FPS potential of the DS. Feels a bit like an N64 game but way, way smoother.

With work being the way it is, I'd be happy if I was able to put the time necessary into it to be able to beat it within two weeks. I've heard it's short, which is refreshing. The only way I'll be able to beat anything at this point is if it's somewhat shortish in length.

When I have the time again, I'm totally going to take a stab at The Witcher and Two Worlds II. God, do I want to play those. and The Last Story. and Gothic II. and Disgaea 2. and a mountain of other games.

I would not recommend Resistance: Retribution. If you liked the PS3 iterations, stay way the hell away. It's a generic and unimaginative third person shooter loaded with repetitive content and burdened with clumsy controls. It's a worse entry to the series than Assassin's Creed Bloodlines was to the AC series, if that means anything.

Next up: Either Ghost Trick or Oath in Felghana.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Resistance back when I played it a few years ago (starts off a bit weak and then turns into awesome) and enjoyed Resistance 2 well enough (I missed the departure from Resistance's classical film serial-style animation), so I've been wanting to check out Resistance Retribution for a while now. Finally had some time over the last two weeks to start it up and...

....it's really not that good. It's a bland third person cover shooter set in the Resistance universe with some of the Resistance weapons, but it lacks the charm of the first game and the level design is so painfully linear that it makes Call of Duty: Black Ops look like Operation Flashpoint in comparison. There's some neat things you can do if you link it up to Resistance 2, but they don't salvage it and with as far as I've made it over the last few hours, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone looking for a good portable action game.

I'm maybe halfway through and I'm interested in seeing if it picks up at some point, but right now I'm mostly looking forward to just finishing it off and being done with it. Being from the same guys that did Dark Mirror and Logan's Shadow, I'm seeing an unfortunate trend. I'd plant this one closer to Dark Mirror than Logan's Shadow in quality, both of which were a big drop of the enjoyment I had with the PS1 Syphon Filter games. Their most recent game is the Vita's Uncharted game...which I don't think I'll be bothering to check out anytime soon.

Finished my first 3DS game this morning on the bus to work, but it sure wasn't a new game. Rayman 3D is more or less a direct port of Rayman 2 from Dreamcast, but it suffers from a few quirky graphical glitches (particularly when it's raining) and, I'm going to have to fire up the DC version again, but it seemed like there were some minor bits of slowdown that I don't remember seeing before. I think the PS2 version is still the best looking of the available versions and the 3d effect on Rayman 3D ranges from "ok" to "this is unusable. fuck it, I'll turn 3d off".

As a game, it hasn't aged as well as some of the other platformers of the era. I was a little disappointed to discover that given how highly I had regarded it, but I really don't have much choice other than to knock it down a few notches on the list of favorite 3d platformers ever. On the N64, I think Banjo Kazooie has aged quite a bit better. No idea about Banjo Tooie yet. Haven't gotten around to playing 4J Studios' 360 port of it.

Took 8 hours and 51 minutes, got about 90% of it completed. Probably won't be going back for the remaining lums and cages...I need to start playing through Resistance: Retribution finally.

Had to cancel my Syndicate and Binary Domain preorders because I just found out that The Last Story was coming out this week. Went ahead and ordered the limited edition. Gotta preorder the US release of Xenoblade today, too. I need a higher paying job and more free time.

More to come in time, I'm sure. Next up is Super Mario 3D Land...not sure about Resident Evil. I still haven't played 4 or 5, so I'm pretty far behind on the series.

I'm still plugging away at VCII as time permits and it's still fun as hell. The AI can make some really bone-headed decisions and it's not that hard to abuse, but the strategy portions are still a blast. I'm not too sold on some of the new character classes and the upgrade tree, nor am I a super huge fan of the grinding that it takes to be able to progress through it, but the core game makes up for it.

Really sad that we most likely will not be seeing VC3 stateside, especially after hearing so much positive press and word of mouth for it. If it winds up getting remade for the Vita, I will buy a Vita just for it.