We enjoy the trusty old PS2, but have no plans of “upgrading” to a PS3. Despite the continuation of the Lartigue-favorite Ratchet and Clank series on that platform, and the appealing Little Big Planet coming soon, the $600 price tag (that includes a non-optional high-end DVD player that I don’t want or need and that may well be obsolete soon anyway) is a deal-killer. We don’t play games that much.

But slowly the XBox 360 has been tempting me.

First, I have friends who are on XBox Live. Normally I’m not interested in gaming online, but if it’s with people I already know, there’s much more appeal. Some of the games they’ve released have been way tempting. Some of the future games, more so. The next Katamari Damacy game is going to be for the 360. Then there’s the boardgames. Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, Alhambra, and, rumored, Puerto Rico, playable online.

And now, Talisman!

All for half the cost of the PS3.

It’s getting harder to fight!

Looks like platform games are what I really like when it comes to console games. I’ve enjoyed stuff like Ape Escape (only played the first one), Castlevania (Symphony of the Night and Lament of Innocence), Lego Star Wars (I and II), and my favorites, the Ratchet and Clank series (all three, but I don’t know anything about the solo Ratchet one). Jak and Daxter (I only played the first one) was okay, but a little short. And now, on Dan’s recommendation, I have played Psychonauts.

In Psychonauts you play Razputin, who infiltrates a psychic summer camp in order to receive psychic training unbeknownst to his parents, who hate psychics. I get paid a nickel each time I use the word “psychic”. He uncovers a sinister plot and ultimately becomes the only person at the camp who can stop the menace. To do so, he has to learn and master various mental abilities, such as levitation, pyrokinesis, telekinesis, and so forth. He’ll use these skills when he enters other peoples’ minds and has to deal with their internal mental landscapes, which include a battlefield, a rave party, and a paranoid’s nightmare. Since it’s a platform game, he’ll also have to use acrobatic skills such as jumping and climbing, so it’s fortunate he grew up in the circus.

The game has some great characters and funny dialogue. The puzzles make sense (and you have in-game ways to get hints on how to deal with them). The jumping isn’t too bad, but there are a few hairy parts. At the end the difficulty gets ramped up pretty crazy, but I was able to get through it without a lot of cursing.

The level designs are great. Within each person’s mind is a landscape tailored to their specific personality, based on whatever it is their particular hang-up is. Some of them don’t seem to make thematic sense at first (bullfighting?), but as you work through them you start to see how it all falls into place.

The end of the game sets up Psychonauts 2, but I don’t know if it will ever see the light of day. From what I can tell, sales of this game were lackluster (we bought it used), and the official webpage hasn’t been touched in over a year.

Thanks to Dan for recommending this one. I’m open to more suggestions along these lines as well. I don’t see us getting any console other than the PS2 any time soon, so I’m limited to stuff that will play on that machine, but there should be a lot available I don’t know about.

Not only did I not stand in line for one of your PS3s (and nor did I pay homeless people to do it for me), but over the past couple days, here’s what we’ve been playing on the perfectly fine PS2:

According to our save game files, we last played this almost exactly two years ago.

I also busted this one out again:

It came out in 2000. I forgot how much fun it was, and it’s got me thinking I should upgrade. I bet I can find a copy of SSX Tricky for way cheap, now that it’s five years old.

XOXO,

Dave

Despite not being interested in about 95% of them, I do try and keep an eye on console games. So when I kept hearing about this ‘Gears of War’ game I decided to check it out. I went to the site for it and was immediately inspired to make a new policy:

Fortunately I was able to satisfy my curiosity elsewhere, and discovered what ‘Gears of War’ is all about.

It’s a third person shooter game where black good guys shoot at black bad guys with black guns in a sort of dark grey landscape.

Do you think I am exaggerating for humorous effect? Is your Hyperbole Detector going off? Then look at these screenshots I grabbed from GameRankings.com:

For all I know there’s clowns and unicorns in there, but they’re all colored black and hiding in the shadows. Do game companies do this simply so they can release the same game over and over and nobody will notice? Or maybe it’s an energy saving scheme, since you don’t have to actually turn on the TV to play the game.

Well, even if I were interested in playing ‘Gears of War’, it’s only available for the XBox 360, since that machine features Microsoft’s patented BlackMagic video process that renders shades of black twelve times faster than competing consoles. Also, it’s the sort of game you’ll want to play on their Live network, so you can thrill to conversations like this:

“Hahah! Headshot suckaz! Oh wait…that was a coatrack. Damn, I can’t see anything!”

“Guys, I’m in a room and I can’t find a door! I keep bumping into what I think is a chair or maybe a mailbox.”

“IF ANYONE TRIPS ON A GUN IT’S MINE I DROPPED IT AND FELT AROUND EVERYWHERE BUT CAN’T FIND IT.”

When you look at this picture, if all you see are a bunch of plastic pieces of modular shelving:

…then you haven’t been playing Lego Star Wars II.

Becky picked up our copy this afternoon!

It’s been a long time since I talked about the PS2, mainly because it hasn’t gotten a whole bunch of use. I got a few games for it a while back, like Destroy All Humans and Shadow of the Colossus, but I didn’t get that far into either of them. (The latter, especially. After sitting through about a three hour long cutscene I finally got to fight my first Colossus and sucked mightily at it. There must be more to it, but what I played just wasn’t much fun at all.)

However, I decided the other day to pop in a game I had played some, but which always got pushed aside for a Ratchet and Clank game or something: Culdcept.

Culdcept is a weird game for the PS2. It’s part boardgame, part card game. The way it works is, you have this path you and your enemy roll-and-move along. When you land on a square, if it’s empty, you can summon a creature (with the cards you draw) to capture it. If it’s occupied by an enemy creature, you have to either pay the toll or summon a creature to battle the enemy. Winning gets you the square, losing makes you have to pay the toll (and possibly kills your creature). If it’s occupied by one of your creature, you can make changes to your territory, such as “leveling up” land (making it more valuable and the toll higher, as well as boosting your creatures), changing the terrain type, or swapping out one creature for a different one.

The terrain comes in four flavors: fire, water, earth, and sand. Which I guess is also air. Most creatures also have a type, and as you can imagine, putting a creature into the right type of land makes it stronger.

The cards are done like a collectable card game. You start with a bunch of cards, and winning fights against other “Cepters” net you more cards. They have various levels of rarity, but they do seem to be well balanced as far as costs and abilities. You assemble a “book” of no more than fifty cards from your collection.

Battles between creatures are a one shot deal. After the creatures are selected, each player can select one card to assist that creature, such as a weapon, armor, or scroll. Some creatures can use other creatures for support. The support cards are revealed, and the attacking creature takes a hit. If the defender survives, it gets a hit. Of course, many creatures have special powers that let them do bonus damage against certain colors, go first even if they’re defending, confuse the enemy, and so on. There’s a wide variety of cards, and just when you think you’ve seen the weirdest of them you get one that features an anthropomorphic ear of corn in overalls.

There’s a plot to go along with all of this that you must pay careful attention to. See, there’s this goddess, Culdra, and she…hell, I don’t know. I’m only about four battles in and I don’t have the foggiest idea what’s happening. I just fight who they tell me to fight. The plot is gravy — the kind of gravy you scrape off your meal and forget about.

I just defeated this dude who was giving me the worst time. You can ask Becky, I was cussing up a storm at this guy. He wants to avenge the death of his sister, who he thinks I killed. Maybe I did, I dunno, I haven’t paid attention to the plot. She was probably asking for it. The talking magic stick I pal around with seems to think I’ve been framed. Anyway, this guy was soundly trouncing me over and over. Finally I went back to a previous battle against the king of thieves, smacked him around a few times to get some new cards, tuned my deck, and returned to finally defeat the kid. I’ll probably kick his ass once more before I move on, just so he knows it wasn’t a fluke. That’s how I roll.

The best thing about Culdcept is that you can get it dirt cheap. Right now you could probably head over to your favorite electronics entertainment store and grab it for $15 or less. If you have an Xbox 360 word on the street is they’re coming out with a version for that console that you can play online. Dan tells me this because he thinks this will suddenly make me buy a 360 and want to play online games. He is so wrong.

Since Japan is even worse than America about making anything remotely successful into a comic book, cartoon, cereal, action figure, or sex aid, you won’t be surprised to know that Culdcept is also a series of Japanese comic books. Since I enjoy the game I flipped through them a few times, but they seem pretty dopey. I must remind you again that you’re not playing this for the captivating plot. You’re playing it because you want that corn guy to kill that pirate with a Flame Tongue. That’s what it’s all about.

So Becky and I have played the hell out of We ♥ Katamari. We’ve rolled up fireflies, valuable items, cowbears, sumo wrestlers, friends, and the usual folderol. We both rolled up all our planets and the Sun. But there’s always more to roll up!

In each level there’s at least one of the Prince’s many cousins. So I took it upon myself to find and roll up all of them (with help from a cheat sheet). After much hard work, I successfully added Lalala, Miso, Drooby, Lucha, Johnson, and the rest to my collection of rolled-up items. Doing this unlocked the cousins level, in which you roll them up again, but at least they’re all in one place.

Once you do that, you’re treated to yet another ending, and then a flower appears in the select meadow. Lo, it’s a secret level! And on that level, your assignment is to roll up roses!

A million of them!

One at a time!

Okay, that’s exaggerating. Rolling up a million roses one at a time would just be absurd, obviously. The truth is, there are bunches of roses to help you get to your goal faster: bunches of ten of them. So each time you roll one up, you think, “That’s 1/100,000th of the way there!”

This is clearly a stupid thing to do. And yet, like morons, Becky and I have been doing it. We’re at over 100,000 roses! Fortunately you can save your progress; you don’t have to roll up all one million in one sitting. At one point we speculated that maybe as you got further along new locales for rose-rolling would become available (there seem to be only three at first) and opportunities for rolling up roses in vaster quantities would present themselves. We then realized that such things would only undermine the utter pointlessness and idiocy of the task. If you didn’t have to roll them up one at a time (or close to it), why do it at all?

Now, we could take the easy way out, as this enterprising individual did. He strapped a controller to an oscillating fan and let it play the game all night. Voila, one million roses! And, a beloved household appliance gets to have an experience few of its fellows ever will!^*

But no, no quick fixes for us. If we let machines do work for us, we won’t value the fruits of that work as much. Our giant ball of a million roses will have been earned by the sweat of our brow, like the Pilgrims.

—

^* - I’m reminded of a story from my high school days. In the computer lab, on the old TRS-80 Model IIIs, we had this little game where you moved left and right and shot at aliens crisscrossing the top of the screen. It was supremely easy, and this was demonstrated one day when someone went in before school, started the game, and set a tape dispenser on the spacebar (which was the “fire” button). By the time we checked its progress, later in the day, the tape dispenser had racked up a score so high it had gone into expanded notation. This crowned the tape dispenser as the undisputed champ.

However, fortune’s wheel eventually turned. The next game we got, called “Conqueror”, was exactly the same except the shot aliens would fall out of the sky, and you had to move out of the way or get killed by their plummeting corpses. The tape dispenser sucked at this and once again Man was restored to his rightful place as the computer game champ.