I beat Ape Escape 2 last week before one of my classes. I was very glad to have beaten it, as this is one of my favorite series around. Once I beat it, something that I think violates some principle of game design happened. After all the ending movie played through and came back to the home base after the credits, I went to go back to one of the levels to get the rest of the monkeys that I missed and some video plays saying that Spector, who I had just caught, escaped again. This wasn't so bad, as it meant more replay value, but it took a monkey away from me on the levels that I had already caught them all. This meant I would have to play through them again to get that last monkey. I'm not a game designer just yet, but erasing the player's progress in order to create replay value isn't the way to go. It's not that big of a deal, but it's not great to see extra work that I put into the game being taken off to force more replay value into it. It's a great game, but this kind of soured the thought of going back to catch the rest of the monkeys I had missed.

I'll jump right back in sometime in the future. I just want to beat some games first. I took a bunch of games into EB yesterday to take advantage of a good trade-in they had, which was trade-in 4 current-gen games and get an extra $10. I took in about 16 games and got nearly $100 in credit. I put $5 down on a preorder for Naruto: Ultimate Ninja since I enjoyed the hell out of the E3 demo. It should be out later this month and I cannot wait. :)