Quick thoughts on MS's E3 conference... at least the parts I got to see. Thanks for GameSpot crashing AGAIN during E3. You know, there's a pattern forming here...

Fable 2 looks interesting, the new orb feature is neat. But will it be used? I mean, unless the game world is small, how often are you just going to happen to run by someone on your friend list who's also playing at the same time? Either way, I'm still picking it up.

Gears 2 I'm also picking up. Of course, I never really doubted that, so nothing's changed. But still, riding a brumak? Sign me up.

Lots of business stats, lots of patting themselves on the back, lots of TV shows and movies to download that I never will because they're so crazy expensive so it doesn't matter to me... ok, moving on. NetFlix thing is something I didn't expect, but since I don't watch movies at a high rate it's not for me, so meh.

The Avatars? Ugh. They're ripping off the Mii, they're ripping off the XMB, and they're doing a Home-lite... and they're making it REQUIRED for everything, totally designing the dashboard around it. What the hell? I don't use my Mii whenever I have the opportunity not to. I like how Home is a separate program that I'll only have to boot up when I want to use it, but I can stick with the XMB the majority of the time. Now I'll have a silly avatar that not only will dominate my dashboard, but be featured prominently in some games. No thanks! Can I cancel that update please? Oh, and that billion dollars of sales on XBLA for a half a billion pieces of content? I hope you didn't buy any gamerpics or themes, because MS just gave you a big ol' middle finger, and a "thanks for your money, we appreciate it, now will you buy new hip clothes for your avatar?"

There's a rule that every year, at least one company has to have a segment in their E3 presentations that will be mocked for years to come. This year it was, again, Microsoft. I thought that Jeff Bell doing some ebonics trash talking with Reggie Bush, trying to sound hip and cool and just like one of the frat boys, was embarassing. I was literally burying my face in hands I was just that embarrassed to WATCH it. But man, this year took the cake. I hope those execs who did that horrible horrible movie game gets a couple extra million of stock options to make that humiliation worth it. Also, what do you call an advertisement that begs you NOT to get a game? An un-tisement? An anti-tisement?

The Guitar Hero moment was nearly as funny as the Ridge Racer one. Dude yells out Guitar Hero, everyone's favorite game, hoping for a lot of applause... not one single person did. Repeat that later with the Metallica announcement. Ouch.

Lips is... hrm, MS copying yet another staple of their competitors, this time SingStar. GS cuts out from the presentation at this point to show a dancing Master Chief, likely due to licensing reasons for whatever poor singer is singing. Based on what I heard of her, I think a Master Chief dancing to generic music was much better to see and hear.

Portal XBLA is neat, but already announced earlier. The Banjo original coming to XBLA is neat though. Getting both.

Lots of Square-Enix stuff we know about, followed by the megaton of FFXIII coming to the 360 outside of Japan. NeoGAF was down for a few minutes after that. Literally.

In the end, the conference, personally, was a big negative for me. I already knew I was getting Fable, Gears, Banjo, etc., and already knew I wasn't getting RE5, VP2, etc., so nothing changed my opinions there. The new party game copies are stuff I'm staying far far far away from. Especially that movie game. Oh, yes, ESPECIALLY that movie game. There's two new Arcade games I didn't know about yesterday that I'm getting, but that's it. I mean, I already knew about Infinite Undiscovery and Star Ocean 4 and such. And I knew all along that even if FFXIII was coming to the 360 that would change nothing since I get PS3 multiplats anyway. In the end, the only bad thing that could happen from this is if the game is lessened to make it work with the 360 (the multiple disc things, lower audio quality, whatever), or if the 360 gets some exclusive stuff (which would REALLY piss off the people who got a PS3 for this game). So for the price of two Arcade games, I'll have my dashboard rearranged to Mii Too. Yay?

I also have no idea what MS's direction is now. I think it's... whatever everyone else is doing. They paved the way with an online service with Live, and that was the console's identity, both this one and the last one. Now? Their focus is just copying the features and other gimmicks of their competitors, hoping to gain their audience. The Mii-ripoff avatars, the XMB-like dashboard, the little vitual community-like interface on the dashboard... it seems all their new R&D is to just emulate what their competition is doing. Really, if you like the Wii, is having avatars really going to have you jump over to the 360? And couldn't they have put some effort into making them look a LITTLE different? They're literally HD versions of Miis, right down to the same exact art design. Let's make yet another music game, let's make a game like the EyeToy stuff from last gen, so on and so forth. MS just seems content to ride out this generation as is, to not try to do anything new and exciting. Just going for status quo, to make their console more like everyone else's.

Also, Too Human demo landed today. NeoGAF 1, Dyack 0.

I think I'm overdue from writing an impressions post about the games I've been playing recently.

Starting from my last post, I first played Ninja Gaiden II. I have mixed feelings here. My only prior Ninja Gaiden game I played was Sigma, and it was good. Challenging, and even frustrating at times, but you always could learn how to take down an enemy with practice. There were flaws, like the camera system, but since I was dealing with two or three enemies at a time, I was able to keep them on the screen and see them. Here, they toss out an endless stream of enemies. The worst part of that is that they surround you, so you often have to anticipate attacks from enemies you can't even see. The camera also freaks out in long narrow tunnels, and sometimes the action can move so fast that the camera can't keep up (especially that fight on the jungle pond with those agile robotic turrets). And in some boss battles, the camera just plain breaks. When your game is known for tough enemies, and you find the camera to be a more lethal foe than some of the bosses, that's an issue. But when it does work, it's so very good. It's just frustrating going from "whoa, this is pure awesomeness!" to "this level is causing me mental and emotional trauma" and rapidly switching from each when the technical limitations hold it back. Otherwise, the game is smooth (minus some big framerate issues at one point in Chapter 10), looks good, is very stylish, and has some nice different locations. In the end, if I were to replay a Ninja Gaiden game, I'd go for Sigma.

The next two were quick games I picked for a short experience before a long weekend on vacation, with the intention of playing MGS4 when I got back. First was Beyond Good & Evil, which I got because so many gush over it and the sequel was recently announced. I didn't get into it at first, in fact taking a rare break from the game to play the next game on my list first. But when I got back, I really started to like it. Yeah, it did feel short, partially because there were really only four "levels" to the game, but part of the reason why it felt like that is because you're left wanting more. After all, most games these days just add on lame filler content to pad a game's length, and it actually makes the experience worse. A pretty good mix of combat, stealth, puzzles, and taking pictures. Also, the music was just really neat at some points, particularly some races and in the bar.

Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode One (yeah, I just had to type that all out) is a game that more people talk about the price than the game itself. $20 for a downloadable game, which you may be able to stretch out to like eight hours tops, seems odd when other games are usually $10. But hey, I've spent $60 for ten hour games and enjoyed them just fine, so what's so bad about $20 for a game like this? Granted I'm a bit liberal with my gaming dollar since I budget so much of it to gaming, but hey, I really enjoyed the game. After all, you get to beat down hobos, punch mimes, and terrorize evil clowns. Essentially, it's a Penny Arcade game. Most reviews are way too wordy. "If you like Penny Arcade, you'll like the game; if you hate it, you probably won't like the game." Simple, no?

I've said a lot more about Metal Gear Solid 4 elsewhere, but to sum it up: it's great. I like the controls, I like how it always throws something different at you, and I like how the story turned out and it tied everything up. Sure, I have some complaints here and there about specifics, but overall it was good and it satisfied me in how it clarified everything. Act 4 was like this giant love letter to the fans.

The Answer, which is the expansion chapter in Persona 3 FES, was next on my list, as I haven't played a good RPG in a while. I played the original game last year and simply loved it. The expansion content was pretty good, but certainly not as good as the main game. Quite simply, the expansion is just straight up combat, nothing but dungeon crawling. Luckily that aspect is pretty good and entertaining, but what made the original really special was the inclusion of the social links and the other daily activities. Most of the combat wasn't that much harder than the first game, as the game claimed, but some of the bosses were simply killer and will test you.

Finally, I got around to playing BioShock. I expected to be a little underwhelmed about the game compared to the lavish critical praise it got based on comments from others. However, despite a very slow start for me, I really started to dig it once I got to the fishery area. As many are aware, the game is silly easy since you always just respawn to life with all the damage you've done to enemies still recorded. At the start, when I was resource strapped, I found it more strategically viable to just die and run back to the now-unhostile Big Daddy five seconds away than eat through medpacks. At the end, I was killing the elite Big Daddies in six shotgun blasts (which stunned them a couple seconds each hit), which was something of a letdown. Also, I exclusively used the wrench near the end since I've found it to be a lot more damaging than most guns (and I slightly rehealed myself with every hit). I was at max items, ammo, and money for half the game. Still, despite the cakewalk, it was still entertaining just from the amount of ways you could bring enemies down (hacking turrets and security cameras, hacking health stations so when they run and try to use them they get killed, telekinetic plasmids, electrocuting enemies in shallow water, freezing enemies and shattering them with a wrench, traps, or even "enticing" enemies to attack a wandering Big Daddy). Most of all, the art direction was just incredible, with the old 50's feel in this wonderful, and run-down, underwater utopian city. While the gameplay balance was questionable to say the least, it was among the most atmospheric games I've played by far and that really added to the experience. The audio-diaries were neat and provided glimpses of the back story, but they jumped all over the timeline as you found them, and gave short clips of the dozen people that recorded them, making it hard to piece together when things happened and exactly how without a guide. Definitely not a 10 like so many reviews claimed due to the balance and other little annoyances, but certainly a 9 at least just for the wonderful experience.

Like everyone else who uses their PS3 somewhat often, I went back to play some Super Stardust HD. While I've always liked this game, having specific goals to shoot for that provide a difficult but fair challenge at times certainly adds to the game. Now all they have to do is have other games support the feature and, you know, make the firmware work for everyone.

On the handheld front, I've tried to get into Patapon. It's creative and unique, and something you just won't find elsewhere. Basically, a quality game that the PSP really needs to help form an identity for the handheld. So why can't I get into it? I recognize that it's quality and it definitely isn't another "me too" game, and I really WANT to like it because of that, and I can see why so many others like it... sigh, oh well.

Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings is one of the best Final Fantasy spinoff games. Granted most spinoff games for the series are pretty bad, so that's not saying much. And it's certainly not a Tactics either. But it's a surprisingly decent game to pick up and play a mission here and there, as I have over a few weeks so far. But it feels like the major characters in Japanese games are getting younger and younger - Kytes and Filo feel like eight-year-olds playing pirate, and jump and cheer just a bit too often.

May has been weird. It's the first month this year that didn't have a major release, unless you count Haze. And no, no one counts Haze. So once I got done playing GTA4, I had a window of diving into the ol' backlog before Ninja Gaiden II and MGS4 hit. Good times!

I played Gears of War first, thanks to the GameStop sale (oddly not long before they announced a new Gears reissue with all the downloadable content, coincidence?). Everyone's played Gears before, plus I wrote my thoughts elsewhere. A quick summary of my verdict: looks great, if you like the color gray. It's very good but not great. How did Delta win the best characters of 2006 on GameSpot? I used to think exploding shirukins in Ninja Gaiden were the most annoying exploding things that you can be tagged with. Now, it's the Torque Bow. And why does the difficulty just suddenly jump up three notches in the middle of Act III?

Next my Wii was lonely, but there's few good Wii games that I haven't played yet (in my estimation, anyway). So, back to the GameCube I go. Well, first I hit up Star Fox 64, because it's always an entertaining way to eat up an hour and a half, even in 2008, and especially so because Nintendo refuses to make a real Star Fox game anymore. And on that note, I played Star Fox Adventures next. It's so obvious the decision to toss in the Star Fox license was done at the 11th hour. It has a fox, and that's about all that's the same, at least from the original game. It's weird that Fox never uses a blaster, but has this magical staff that shoots fireballs. Plus the combat is ultralame. Just walk near an enemy, and hit A. It'll eventually get through the attempts to block, and just hit A until they die. If there's more than one enemy, the others will just wait for your target to die before they mess with you. Really, very easy. The only parts that give trouble are a few minigame-like sequences, like shooting down missiles with fireballs from the staff while riding a dinosaur, and that's more with the way the crosshairs always trying to snap back to the middle of the screen, so you constantly have to fight the thing.

Otherwise, it's still a good game. Great looking, even today, though it's still odd to see Fox mingling with talking dinosaurs with British accents, and talking rocks with Scottish accents. Plus your sidekick, a baby Triceratops named Tricky, speaks with a "you want to murder me" accent. Seriously, I'm in a lava-filled dungeon and he whines that he wants to play catch with his freaking ball. I wish I could have used him as a ball and tossed him in the lava. But then I wouldn't have been able to progress further in the dungeon. Sigh, stupid details. However, the environments look great, and the puzzles are generally good. Enjoyable romp, but I don't see much of a need to go back and play it again, and there's pretty much no side quests and there's a decent amount of backtracking. Basically, it's Kameo, but in standard definition and you play a fox instead of a fairy.

The four main dungeons are chunks of the planet that have entered orbit, so naturally they threw in an Arwing section, being Star Fox and all. They're short and very easy. It seems the whole planet is covered in a force field, which only drops by flying through gold rings? I'm used to suspending my disbelief in games, but I just can't figure out that one, other than "it's Star Fox, the previous games have gold rings, so we'll have you fly through them". And since you're flying mostly by mines and small asteroids, all you need to do is just mash A and it'll clear out your path, so all you do is fly to the rings and hit A and don't even consider the enemies since they're no threat. Hooray. Having just played Star Fox 64 before this, it just makes it really stick out. Also, spoiler here, but the original final battle was scratched in favor of an Arwing section as the final fight, one that's very familiar, and which actually takes some skill to beat. So basically you'll finally need to learn the controls for the first time on the final fight. Brilliant!

Next I wanted a relatively short game, so I went with Pikmin. With a 30 day limit, and a max of 15 minutes per day, the game can't take longer than 7.5 hours. Short games aren't necessarily bad. In fact the general concept of the game is great, and a lot of fun. I just don't like time limits, because with 30 parts to get in 30 days, if you end up empty handed just one day you'll be playing catchup. I eventually did more than that, learning that it takes a couple of days for enemies to respawn, so hopping between zones made little else - just attack and clear everything out until you're done. Part of the disappointment, though, is that there's just three areas. OK, technically there's five, but one is just the final boss, and one is the opening tutorial area, with a second piece stashed away for you to pick up once you get the yellow and blue pikmin to go with your initial red ones. So in reality, three areas, which is a little disappointing. Good thing the game was fun and not needless filler, though the scenery is familiar. However, having an army of little minions to do your evil bidding, including swarming giant ladybugs to death, is entertaining. I'm looking forward to getting to the sequel when I find the time. No time limit should be more relaxing.

Finally, on the relative eve of NG2, I started Battlestations: Midway. Before this past holiday season, this and Kameo were pretty much the only two games on the 360 that I had any real interest of playing. Weird, huh? However, it's a strategy/action hybrid sim thing that lets you control fleets and squadrons in the Pacific Theater of WWII. Yeah, that's so up my alley. It's interesting too, with the strategic mix of carriers, dive bombers, destroyers, PT boats, submarines, and all that. It lets you jump and and control a unit when you want, or just let all the units run on preset orders. The main knock against it in reviews is it's pretty short, with the 11 story missions taking maybe seven hours, plus there's 10 challenge missions. However, the fifth one I've failed on a few times so far, coming very close to winning.

Maybe I won't be finished with this before NG2 like originally planned. Oh well, it's still entertaining. Plus I won't be able to play MGS4 until a week after it releases (partially by choice) due to a short vacation not long after it comes out. There's no way I'll play the game to the midway point, then go on vacation for four days. I'd go crazy wondering what happens next if I did that. Anyway, working through the backlog is a nice benefit of summer, despite the odd major releases in June. I've got goals for July and August!

I've been playing a few shorter games lately before, uh, some big long game comes out. Here's some thoughts on them.

I played Call of Duty 2 recently, and it caught me by surprise how much I enjoyed it. It's just the whole feeling and the teammates that I liked over the whole solo play, and the set pieces were great. CoD4 was no different. Short but well made and I just kept going through the campaign eagerly, which I tend to not get into FPS's all that much. Not exactly the happiest outcome from the story, but otherwise... I mean, it's no filler, it's just nonstop and varied stuff to do. I probably don't need to say too much more about this, since pretty much everyone has played it by now. The online was surprisingly fun, despite the fact that level 55's with a far better arsenal than me would kill me before I could take five steps after spawning. Still, got up to level 5 and messed around a bit. Better than I expected, but not sure if it'll replace Warhawk and TF2 as my two go-to online games. The uneven playing field sure doesn't help much at first.

Finally got around to playing Super Metroid. Very good, but A Link to the Past is still the gold standard SNES game, sorry. Nice level design and all that, but it depended too much on backtracking and remembering where you passed a different-colored door an hour before, plus there's too many required hidden passages. I swear I was shooting and bombing everything just to make sure I didn't miss anything. Still, the gameplay is good. Minus wall jumps of course, those suck. But otherwise just getting from point A to point B was enjoyable, especially the grappling beams and other exploring.

Just started messing around with Mario Kart Wii. The wheel is better than I thought it would be, mostly because the GC controllers make it really hard to both control your kart going into a jump and performing a stunt, which is the main focus of this game. If I drop my thumb to the D-pad, which controls stunts (why can't I change the Z button to do it?!), then I'm driving straight. The wheel has some crazy forced waggle (ugh) to do the stunts, but it works since I don't need a third thumb to do it. Still, when I shake the wheel, it tends to register a slight turn in one direction and screws me up regardless. Oh well, maybe the Classic Controller will be better, will try that next.

Some of the old retro tracks really stand out like an eyesore. The SNES tracks are the worst offenders, particularly the Ghost House one. However, the GC tracks stand out too. I played them on Double Dash right after playing them in Wii, and they actually look worse on the Wii. Whoever said that the Wii is two GameCubes taped together obviously overestimated the number of GameCubes. And that's the problem with Nintendo being in the lead - they tend to get arrogant and stop caring when the money is rolling in. They're feeding us tracks that looked better on the last generation system, and no one seems to care. Then again, no one seems to care about Mario Kart since they're releasing it the same week as GTA4, so there's that too.

The World Ends With You is a Square-Enix game that is going to bomb because it doesn't have Final Fantasy in its title and it's releasing in a rather busy month. And it's too bad, because while Square has been known for churning out rehashes and unimaginative games lately, they finally find something that's unique and a breath of fresh air. It's set in modern day Tokyo, has a lot of style, and is perhaps the best use of the DS hardware available. Maybe not in the technical sense, but the whole fighting with two characters separately on two separate screens in realtime is crazy hectic and unlike anything you've seen before. One is controlled with the stylus and the other with the D-pad. I'm still relatively early in, starting the fourth day, but I really like what I see.

Finished Crash Bandicoot a week ago, the original from PSN. Worst. Save system. Ever. Bar none. Otherwise, it's challenging in places without being too frustrating, and getting the gems on perfect runs can take a good bit of effort. Not bad for the $6 or whatever I paid for it. Having the option of playing it on the PS3 or the PSP is a nice advantage that the VC doesn't have.

The delays and other issues with Metal Gear Online Beta has really hampered my excitment for it. All that jumping through hoops to sign up for multiple ID's and all the bad servers, not fun. Konami seems hellbent on bringing the PS2 online to the PS3. Managing different ID's and friend lists for each game is almost as bad as friend codes. Almost. But not quite. I only got to play around with MGO a little bit, and I don't know what to think. It almost seems too slow, and it essentially requires headshots since it takes multiple clips to kill someone using the useless autoaim feature (what a waste of a face button). And even with headshots being virtually required, we need to press two buttons in succession just to enter first person mode to aim? I guess it has its place, but IMO with the limited online gaming I do, I can spend my time better with CoD4, Warhawk, TF2, etc.

And in other older games to sum up in a sentence or two: Suikoden Tactics was a good game. Nothing special, but its elemental system was neat and it was a decent SRPG set in the Suikoden universe. Crisis Core ended up being surprisingly addictive for a game where you just bash X, and do 300 side missions on the same dozen maps over and over. Still, like the other FF7 projects, their focus is fan service first, gameplay second, and everyone seems to enjoy that.

I'm playing through Majora's Mask now as my primary game. It's the only console Zelda that I haven't played (no, the CD-i doesn't count because it sucks ass), which is a little surprising considering how much I love the series. As was stated by many, this game is so different from the other Zeldas. Some game mechanics make it perhaps the best Zelda. Those very same mechanics, however, can be incredibly frustrating and tedious. I'm not sure where I stand on the love it/hate it scale yet.

For those that haven't played it yet, Majora's Mask was originally more of a Gaiden than a main story Zelda, which explains why it isn't in Hyrule, there's no Ganon, and no Zelda, and no Triforce. It's nice for a change. Here, a giant moon is going to crash into the world in 72 hours. Screwed! But he still has his Ocarina, so he can rewind to the start of the 72 hours, and is the only permanent save.

This leads to some really neat interactions. People go about their days, so they may be one place during the evening of the first day, and somewhere else entirely on the morning of the final day. They may get mugged at one point, or too distressed to interact with you right before the moon hits. If you stop the mugging, then the thief won't be selling you the thing he stole days earlier. It's neat, but annoying at times to keep track of the people, and specifically to start certain events. One, for example, starts at 2:30 AM. You're just going to have to wait until that time comes, so you'll just be standing around waiting for a while. Exciting!

There's only four dungeons. Yeah, four, that's it. You can probably get through it pretty fast if you go for the minimal stuff, which I never do with Zeldas. With four dungeons you only get four heart containers, which means that there's like 50 pieces of heart to collect in various side quests and minigames, so there's a lot of other stuff to keep you occupied. While mostly enjoyable, you'll still need to aggressively hit the optional content to get the full experience.

Now, here's the annoying part. Say you complete the first temple. The water from it is no longer corrupted, so the swamp near it is no longer filled with poison water. Joy! Except now when you rewind again... hey, everything is poisoned again. You'll need to go and beat the temple boss again to purify the water again, which may be needed for some side quests. This is especially true of the second temple from my experiences (I finished the first three as of right now). Makes sense, but boy is it annoying.

Since you only make a true save when you reset to the 72 hours, a lot of your progress is "lost" if you don't make it to certain milestones. There are some owls you can hit to make a temp save right there, but sometimes you're far away from them to return to where you were, or are in the middle of a dungeon, so returning there is enough of a hassle that you'll want to complete these segments in one shot. You'll essentially need to get a temple done in one go. Well, not NEED, but you're certainly encouraged to. And this is the one thing holding me back from going through the game like crazy (it IS addictive, like any other Zelda game) - I'm not often sure I'll certainly have two hours of free time to make a good shot at progress. It often turns out that I do in actuality, but that uncertainness has caused me to not start some days. Compare this to the side missions in Crisis Core, where I can get one done every 5 minutes and save.

Items are just weird too. You lose everything - arrows, bombs, etc. Again, makes sense. But you keep other items - the bottle you put the fairy in but not the fairy itself, the bow but not the arrows itself, and so forth. I know you have to keep items like that because otherwise you'll never finish the game - it's done out of design necessity. But it just feels so out of place to arbitrarily strip you of some items you gained due it it making sense, but leaving you others out of necessity. Weirdness.

Side quests galore. Some feel like busy work, like one that has you beat one temple's boss and beat minibosses in two other temples, among other things. Still, not bad. And still far far better than the absolute stupidity at the end of Wind Waker, where they had me go on this huge fetch quest (8 maps + 8 items + farming an assload of rupees) just to add hours to the game's "official" length. While there's some annoying side quests here, you can simply skip them, and do the ones you enjoy. So much better. And since there's like 50 pieces of heart (I think 52 is the official total), skipping out on 8 such quests will have no real impact on you. Not to mention there's some masks to collect with very little real purpose. Oh yeah, the mask system is neat, specifically the three main ones that transform you into a deku, goron, and zora, each giving you unique abilities. Nice feature there, I think.

So... I'm sure I explained details that most of you already knew. What did you think about the overall game, and the save system specifically?

Continued from Part 1.

Genre awards can be rather hard to do, as so many games overlap. Zack & Wiki is perhaps the only true adventure game I played, but isn't it also a puzzle game? And it's probably the closest category for the Phoenix Wright series. Also games like Uncharted have an adventure feel, but are also shooter heavy. Is Ratchet a shooter or a platformer? Is Super Paper Mario an RPG or a platformer? Who knows. I'll try to assign them to something and keep a game listed once.

Best Racing Game - MotorStorm. Sure I didn't play much this year, or any other previous year. If a game doesn't let me shoot red shells and banana peels at other racers, I tend to get very bored with the game. Something is different about MotorStorm. It was the first racer without weapons that I enjoyed since, oh, the SNES. It just had that special something. It was released too early, resulting in few tracks and poor single player options. However, the core gameplay was good (until the vicious AI played to keep you from winning instead of trying to win themselves in the late levels), and most importantly the track design makes it very difficult to go back to any standard track design. The sequel is definitely something I'll be looking forward to.

Best Adventure Game - Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations. After a disappointing second game, the third game is perhaps the best of the series, with a great final case. Honorable mention goes to Zack & Wiki, which is a charming point and click brain teaser that released at a nice price and used some neat motion controls in their puzzles.

Best Action Adventure Game - Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. Great presentation, wonderful characters, and some good gameplay. The AI is particularly noteworthy especially at the higher difficulty levels, where enemies will try to pin you down, flank you, and flush you out with grenades. An enemy running from one cover to another will turn around and scurry back if a bullet buzzes by his head. And there's my personal favorite, shooting an enemy's hand when he's about to toss a grenade your way. A retro nod goes to Twilight Princess.

Best Action Game - Heavenly Sword. Sure it had its flaws and didn't quite meet its potential. Still, its entertaining while it lasts, had a wonderful atmosphere to it, and some great characters. Being able to jump into just about any point in the game is also a nice feature in my eyes. Honorable mention goes to Ninja Gaiden Sigma, which isn't entirely a 2007 game but who cares. It may be a little too difficult for its own good at times and some of the environments weren't very inspired, and the story was rather lame. However, it let you violently kick the ass of everything in your path, which certainly earns it a bunch of points.

Best Platformer - Super Mario Galaxy. Galaxy certainly made up for the relative disappointment that was Super Mario Sunshine. Well crafted with a wide variety of environments, suits, and crazy ways to collect all the stars. There's simply a lot of variety crammed into this package, and the linear paths to certain stars helps make it feel like some of Mario's greatest 2D games with a nice new presentation. Honorable mention goes to Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, which might be more shooter than platformer but who cares. As always the game features crazy weapons and a wide variety of worlds to traverse. Retro nods go to the first three Ratchet games, and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.

Best Shooter - Warhawk. I'm reluctant to award The Orange Box since big chunks of it aren't really 2007 games, so I'll award it the honorable mention instead. Again, while I didn't really play much of CoD4 or Halo 3, I still think that Warhawk is underrated and remains a blast to play whenever I jump in thanks to its variety and balance.

Best Puzzle Game - Crush. Naturally most people will think I'm crazy for not saying Portal here. And I agree, it's a great game and finishes a very close second. However, Crush was a PSP exclusive with pretty much no effort at marketing by Sega so a lot of people have never heard of it. What if Crush was made by a company like Valve? People would be all over it, I think. I just love the whole mechanic of switching from 2D to 3D to solve puzzles.

Best RPG - Persona 3. In an era where RPG's can be rather derivative (like Mass Effect, which was KotOR without lightsabers), Persona 3 had a unique mix of new ideas. It's part dungeon crawler, with ways to manipulate elemental weaknesses to a real advantage as opposed to just a little bit of extra damage like in other games. It's also part high school sim, where your relationships with friends help boost your power in battle from the Persona bonuses they give. Toss in some great characters and you'll have a game that will consume a lot of your time. Honorable mention goes to Odin Sphere, which was a unique 2D sidescrolling brawler and RPG hybrid. Retro nods go to Lunar 1, Lunar 2, and Suikoden II.

Best PS2 Game - God of War II. This narrowly edged out Persona 3 for the title. God of War II took everything that made the original awesome and upped the ante, and certainly compensated for the lack of the original's boss fights. Not only that, but the opening level totally trashes even the best level on other games.

Best DS Game - Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations. The second game was a minor letdown, but the third was perhaps the most refined game and though it may not have had as compelling cases as the original had, this game's was still strong, especially the ending case, and wrapped the series up nicely.

Best PSP Game - Crush. One of the most unique games from the past number of years was sadly overlooked by most. Switching between 2D and 3D gameplay from the correct viewpoints is key to solving some of the complex puzzles.

Best PS3 Game - Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. While it certainly didn't bring too many new ideas to the table, it did refine some of the better features from some other good games. Combine the great presentation, the very likable characters, the good gunplay and the occasional vehicle sequence, and you have a good game. While it can go on a bit long in parts, when this game is on, it's on. Honorable mention goes to Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, which brings the ****c Ratchet gameplay and platforming back after focusing more on combat in the previous games.

Best Xbox 360 Game - The Orange Box. Normally I'd be against a package being listed like this, instead preferring to name Portal or Team Fortress 2, which are both among the best games of the year. But eh, why not list the package anyway. Admittedly it's only competition was Mass Effect, which had its issues, so it pretty much won by default. Hopefully next year I'll have a wider selection to choose from.

Best Wii Game - Super Mario Galaxy. And it's not even close, Galaxy won in a total landslide. It's only real competition could be Metroid Prime 3, a series I have yet to get into, and even then I can't see any game really competing with Galaxy. Why?

Game of the Year - Super Mario Galaxy. I have rarely been this certain about a Game of the Year pick before, and this year had stronger than average competition. It's my early pick for Game of the Generation, and it will take a very strong effor to surpass it. Honorable mentions go to the Orange Box, God of War II, and Uncharted.

I know this is, oh, about two months later than what most normal people do. But I'm not normal. No, I'm lazy. Well, I'll give the excuse that I was catching up on some 2007 titles to rank them on my list, but I'm busy with 2008 titles now and won't get back to them until a couple months from now. But, yeah, just lazy. But whatever.

2007 is key to me in that I ended up getting all three new consoles. On the last day of January I picked up a Wii, and since I never got a GameCube that opened up the few good titles in that library as well. A month later I got a PS3, which was soon after it was annonced that Europe would only be getting software backwards compatibility. I sensed that PS3's with all the PS2 hardware weren't going to survive the year, and I was correct. And on the final week of December, I got a 360. Note that this is why I was missing some 360 titles on my awards - just not enough time. I got a couple in (the only real exclusive of note is Mass Effect). While I did play many of the key releases from 2007, there are a few I didn't get around to, mostly 360 exclusives. In addition to Call of Duty 4 (which I did get for the PS3), I also didn't get to play some 360 games like BioShock and Halo 3. Also, I never got into the music games, so no Guitar Hero or Rock Band thougts from me.

Also big for 2007 is the genres I played. I usually was a heavy Japanese RPG player, but very few were released this past year. I started to dip into the best of other genres to give it a go during some of the slower months, most of which I enjoyed (RE4 is a modern classic with great controls? Seriously?). I played my first FPS since, oh, Quake 3 back in college, dove into franchises like Prince of Persia and Ratchet & Clank, and Phoenix Wright, and started giving online multiplayer like Warhawk a try.

The list of 2007 titles that I played in 2007 (or very early 2008), most of them being beaten and the few others enough to get a good feel of them:

Ar tonelico: Meledy of Elemia, Assassin's Creed, Calling All Cars!, Crush, Everyday Shooter, fl0w, Folklore, God of War II, Heavenly Sword, The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, Mass Effect, MotorStorm, Ninja Gaiden Sigma, Odin Sphere, The Orange Box, PAIN, Phoenix Wright: Justice For All, Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations, Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters, Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, Rogue Galaxy, Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3, Sid Meier's Pirates!, Stranglehold, Super Mario Galaxy, Super Paper Mario, Super Stardust HD, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Warhawk, Zack & Wiki: The Quest for Barbaros' Treasure

And games from prior to 2007 that I played last year (with VC releases counting as when they first debuted):

Field Commander, ICO, Kirby's Adventure, The Legend of Dragoon, The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete, Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete, Mario Kart: Double Dash, Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops, Paper Mario, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Ratchet & Clank, Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando, Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal, Ratchet: Deadlocked, Rayman Raving Rabbids, Resistance: Fall of Man, Sin and Punishment, Suikoden, Suikoden II, Suikoden III, Super Mario Sunshine, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Wii Sports

Yeah, I played a lot of games this past year. And that's not even including some titles I forgot whether I played in 2007 or 2006, like Advance Wars and FF3. Whatever. I think I got a good enough sample to pick favorites from, no? Awards will be limited to 2007 titles unless specifically noted.

Longest Elevator Rides - Mass Effect. No competitor even comes close.

Worst Slowdown During Difficult Boss Fights - Odin Sphere. A single boss fight is not only hard enough, but kills the frame rate. In a late-game encounter, they have you fight two bosses at the same time. When they said that this game looks like a wonderfully illustrated fantasy book, I think they were talking about the framerate instead of the art style. Well, maybe both.

Worst Collector's Edition - Ninja Gaiden Sigma. The promise of a behind the scenes DVD of Team Ninja drew me in. Said DVD is 20 minutes long and they say very early on that it's Team Ninja's policy to not reveal any behind the scenes footage of game development. Excuse me? So it's really a 20 minute video of the director singing karaoke? At least it had Itagaki making silly statements, so it wasn't a total loss. Oh! This also had five bonus missions not found in the standard edition. Oh wait, did I say five bonus missions? I meant a CODE for five bonus missions. A CODE that works on ANY version of the game. A CODE that was posted on the internet before the game even hit stores. A CODE that I couldn't even FIND, forcing me to resort to said internet to unlock the content I paid for. I want my $10 back. Now.

Best Collector's Edition - Stranglehold (PS3). Most special editions charge $10 extra for a lot of extra crap (see previous entry). The PS3 version of Stranglehold is different. Stranglehold itself is essentially the sequel to the movie Hard Boiled. So hey, the game is on Blu-Ray, which is also used for movies, so why not include the HD version of the movie itself on the disc? Simple, yet brilliant.

Best Collector's Edition That Isn't Even A Collector's Edition - God of War II. The behind the scenes DVD that comes with every game at no extra cost totally blows the other special edition discs out of the water. Anyone interested in game development should check this disc out, they bring in cameras during key days of development right from the start of the project. Honorable Mention goes to Persona 3, which included a partial soundtrack and a nice art book with every game sold. In fact manufacturing problems with the art book actually caused the game to be delayed.

Most Foes That Randomly Spawn Under You To Instantly Kill You With Nothing You Can Do To Prevent It - Mass Effect. Again, no competition even comes close.

Best Value - The Orange Box. Any explanation is unnecessary and will just be that much harder to fit all this under the character limit.

Best Soundtrack - Ar tonelico: Melody of Elemia. I always liked the stuff that the composers did in their previous work, but Ar tonelico was a rather pleasant surprise in how well it turned out. One of the composers came up with the story concept, with songstresses using song as magic and singing special hymns to cause key story events. The vocals in said special songs are very unique and memorable. Honorable mention goes to Sakimoto's orchestric music in Odin Sphere.

Most Innuendo - Ar tonelico: Melody of Elemia. Again, not even close. Lots of reviewers nailed this game for this. While there is a lot, it's really contained to a few story segments where they really lay it on.

Best Story - Folklore. It was between this and Mass Effect, but I probably went with Folklore because everyone expected Mass Effect to have a good story, plus the fact that Mass Effect wasn't as well-rounded as Folklore. While some of the odd comic-like presentation probably didn't help it, it brought interesting characters into the middle of a murder mystery in a small Irish village with rather interesting twists near the end. It's definitely a story where you wonder if what you did was the better of the two choices, which I love, and it asks if humanity would be better off if we knew there was definitely a happy afterlife. Honorable mention goes towards the interesting timeline that intertwines the five characters in Odin Sphere.

Best Characters - Persona 3. A lot of them are just so believable, with many of them reminding you of people you knew in high school. Everyone knows Junpei, there was one in every class, and they captured him perfectly, as did the voice actor. Honorable mention goes to Uncharted; Nathan and Elena just seem so natural and believable. They're not former military people on a mission, they're just normal people. There was also a lot of good development of the Reyvateils in Ar tonelico using the Dive system. Retro honorable mention goes to Lunar 1 and Lunar 2.

Best Robotic Space Pirates - Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction. The Pirates of the Carribean-inspired music while fighting on pirate planets was just great.

Best Online Experience - Warhawk. Sure games like Halo 3 and CoD4 may have fine tuned the FPS experience, but it's all the same gameplay (more or less). What if you're not good at shooting as a troop? Warhawk is great in how they balanced a lot of different gameplay - flying in Warhawks, blasting in tanks, fighting in the trenches, or even manning turrets. Even if you're weak at one or more of these, you'll still find someway to contribute to your team. Not to mention the draw distance on the huge maps make fighting in the skies rather entertaining. Honorable mention goes to Team Fortress 2; the various classes are all unique and played differently, again letting you play to your strengths and contribute.

Best Technical Graphics - Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. From the shadows of clouds to the breeze blowing the plants, to even only the parts of clothes that touch the water getting wet, there's an awful lot of detail that is paid attention to in Uncharted. All this with virtually no load times and no install file. Honorable mention goes to MotorStorm, which makes you really feel like you're in Monument Valley thanks to a careful attention to detail of the landscape.

Best Artistic Graphics - Super Mario Galaxy. The Wii certainly lacks the horsepower of its competitors, but it managed to hide this fact thanks to its colorful style. Honorable mention goes to Odin Sphere, which used beautiful and large hand drawn sprites on varied high-detailed backgrounds.

Worst Load Times - MotorStorm. While it looks great when it finally loads up, it certainly takes its sweet time to load up each course. Not only that but there's a good delay picking each vehicle on the selection screen before the race. If there was one game in need of an install file to speed things up, this game is it.

Biggest Disappointment - The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. The game itself was good, with most of the touch screen controls being good (rolling being the notable exception). Most new dungeons were fun to go through. But dear god, the Temple of the Ocean King will drive some (like me) to commit homicide. Perhaps multiple time. You go through the same dungeon like six times, and it's a timed stealth dungeon, not the normal Zelda gameplay. Stealth? And for about half the game? Really? It took me months to complete because everytime I would make progress, I'd have to go back to the Temple of the Ocean King and my enthusiasm would just die right there. A retro honorable mention goes to The Legend of Dragoon. I played this game because so many people said it was one of the best RPG's ever. These people are telling you HORRIBLE LIES. The game has so many issues that I simply couldn't list them all here. Are all of these people that list it as their top three games ever suffering from a form of mass hallucination? Given that fact that a good chunk of them worship FF7, I'm not sure if I even want to try to understand their thought process. Another honorable mention goes to Rogue Galaxy. Their intention was to create the biggest game world, but they did so by simply repeating the same junk over and over again, making it feel like a randomly generated dungeon like Dark Cloud games were but they in fact weren't. Also, anytime you find the need to put FOURTEEN save points in a dungeon, it's probably a tad too long. Combine repetitive gameplay, cliche characters, and a predictable story, and it may cause you to question Level 5.

Most Addictive Game - Sid Meier's Pirates! Normally I don't include ports of games released in previous years, but this is certainly an exception. Not only is it a Sid Meier game, but it's also on a handheld (the PSP), so you'll have addicting goodness no matter where you go. You have been warned. Honorable mention goes to Super Mario Galaxy, a game that I put down to get work done but would always load it up again within ten minutes. Another honorable mention is Persona 3, which clocked in at over 100 hours by the time I finished and I still wanted more.

Weirdest Character - Kai, Heavenly Sword. "Tell me the password or I'll hit your weakpoint for MASSIVE DAMAGE!"

The Game That Super Paper Mario Should Have Been - Crush. The concept of Super Paper Mario sounded great, having to switch between 2D and 3D to progress. Unfortunately, the game just missed being included in the Biggest Disappointment category. All you did was play for most of the game in 2D until you hit a dead end, at which point you flip to 3D and either hit a switch or take a hidden passage then quickly go back to 2D. Yawn. Crush lets you use your camera to look at a 3D world in various angles, then crushes what it sees to 2D. Each level is a puzzle, with the later ones requiring a lot of thought. SPM was a gimmick, Crush is the entire gameplay experience.

Best Downloadable Game - Super Stardust HD. While XBLA certainly had quantity, the few top PSN games probably topped even the top of XBLA's offerings. Super Stardust HD wasn't just pretty, but took the revived dual-analog shooter genre into a spherical world. Honorable mention goes to another shooter, Everyday Shooter. The way the acoustic guitar is blended into the gameplay simply has to be experienced.

Best Experience That Was A Mediocre Game - Assassin's Creed. Running around ancient Jerusalem, hopping over rooftops, exploring markets, scaling towers and diving into carts of hay below, it's just a fun world to run around in. Too bad it's not a fun world to play in, as some of the information gathering missions were very simple and felt like there wasn't much thought put into it. One has you go to an icon on the map and sit on the bench. That's it. Battle features abusing the counter system over and over. You'll always remember the experience, but the missions could use some work in the inevitable sequel. Also, the ending could use some work too. As in, actually including one.

Worst Trend - Downloadable content that should have been included on the disc. Games are getting shorter and shorter these days. Publishers blame the higher costs and the size of the files. However, within a month you can spend $10 to get content that probably should have been included there in the first place, and probably would have been last generation. Publishers now have no reason to push out a game before it's finished - not only do they get to meet their quarterly financial goals, but they can simply charge for the content that will "finish" the game for even more money in a month or two. A $50 game last generation probably costs an equivalent of upwards of $80 today.

Best Use of Motion Controls - Folklore. It's really only used for magically yanking the soul out of defeated fairies, but it's done well. Most normal enemies just require a simple yank. Tougher ones require you to wrestle with them, either bashing them from side to side or holding them in the center while they struggle to escape. It doesn't cram waggle down your throat like other games do, and the motion makes sense. The motions are sensed pretty well too. Most other games make it feel like a gimmick or even tacked on. A game like Super Mario Galaxy, which is Nintendo's major title on their new console based around motion controls, had pretty poor motion controls for the core gameplay. Shaking the nunchuk has Mario spin, skate, toss fireballs, swing around vines, and a whole mess of other things that really made no sense to tie it to shaking the nunchuk. Another button press would have sufficed, if they bothered to actually include one. It's a good thing the rest of the game was so good, but the whole game (minus the pointer) could have easily been done on the GameCube.

Most Insane Rabbits - Rayman Raving Rabbids. OK, so this is a 2006 game. Who cares. I needed to make this category, so I made it. DAAAAAAA!

Continued in Part 2.

I was on the fence originally about Folklore, but ended up picking it up due to the setting, concept, and the style of gameplay. Overall, despite a few flaws, I'm rather happy I picked it up.

First of all, those that know me know that a good story and presentation can cause me to forgive a lot of faults. In the story department, I must say it's probably the best I played all year, and likely will be the best I play. No, I didn't play BioShock (but heard mixed things about how it starts strong and whimpers out near the end), and I won't be picking up Mass Effect this year. But those two are probably the only ones that, in my mind, can give Folklore a run for it's money. What makes it so good? It's a murder mystery with a lot of plot advancements and twists, especially near the end, despite how relatively shor the main quest is and you play a chunk of the game twice through two different viewpoints. The characters are certainly a nice change from what you find out of Japanese companies these days, as are the whole settings of a small Irish village and the Netherworld. The question is raised that if it is 100% certain that there is a happy afterlife, would that knowledge positively or negatively affect humanity? I just liked how the characters didn't fit your standard molds, and the weird creature design in the Netherworlds.

The graphics aren't the technically most impressive around, but the art style is certainly nice. Lots of the Netherworld realms have a lot of life to it, from the lush Faery realm to the rocks and waterfalls in Hellrealm, and the submerged city in the Underwater Palace. Just vibrant use of colors, and a lot of odd and memorable enemy designs. The few actual cutscenes are also done rather well. However, most cutscenes are done in a graphic novel/comic book style which is just odd - no voice acting, the background music doesn't always match the mood of the scene, you can't always tell which character is saying what. Thankfully, the interesting story helped temper some of the disappointment in this - a good story itself can help mitigate some of the flaws in the way it is told.

Speaking of the way it is told, the story is divided into seven chapters. In most of them, you actually play them twice, once with each of the two main characters. They go to the same realms with the same layout, so there's a bit of repetition here. Similarly, you run into the other character at story points since you're going to the same place, so some of the cutscenes are either fully or partially repeated. Still, while going through it the second time is less interesting, there are a few new story points that are revealed, though not as much as the first time through. You can play through in any order, even going through multiple chapters with one character then going back to the other, but it's definitely better to alternate characters and play the same chapter back to back as it answers a few grey areas in the story from the first character and clarifies other things. In retrospect, it probably would have been best overall if they just had you do this automatically, as I think the story would have been lessened a bit if you go all for one character first.

As for battle, the character doesn't directly attack, but summons Folk for a very brief time to unleash the attack before fading. Folk are the inhabitants of the Netherworld, and you gain them by absorbing their Id. Usually just beat them until they're near death and their spirit is hovering above them, then use the motion controls to yank them out and absorb them, at which point you can use their attack for yourself. Most characters you simply flick the controller and it's done, but some minibosses and major bosses require a lot more effort in that you'll need to shake, tug, and bash the id out. This can get physically tiring, but thankfully it's only on a fraction of the enemies in a level. While both characters play similarly, they're not totally identical. Some enemies only appear for a certain character, and some Folk have different attacks for the two characters. One character isn't too good offensively, but their summoned Folk are fully summoned and can thus absorb enemy attacks, allowing Ellen not to get hit. The other character, Keats, only summons a phantom Folk of sorts, so enemy attacks will go right through them and hit him. However, his offensive Folks are notably better. Folk attacks can be upgraded by absorbing more of them, killing a number of either any or certain enemies, using collected items, and so forth. Also while later Folk are different they're not necessarily better than the previous ones. They all balance out pretty well, allowing you to use whatever suits your play style. In fact, on the last boss I used the first most basic Folk for a chunk of the fight rather effectively. Some Folk are immune to physical attacks and are vulnerable to elements like wind and water, so you'll definitely be shifting among your Folks to tackle certain enemies. Chapter bosses tend to need a good three or so Folks to attack them under different situations, and the hints for this come in the form of picture book pages found in a level. While it doesn't specifically say what Folks to use, you can generally tell from the picture and a little trial and error.

The whole game took me 20 hours, and that includes the side quests, most of which have relatively minor rewards and no story connection. There are a few, however, that expand upon the story a little bit. Toss in the fact that you're playing most levels twice, and it's relatively short. However, it's still good, and a short game like this keeps the story moving along, particularly with all that's going on and the various twists. For most people, it's probably not worth $60. But if you like the demo, you should certainly look into picking it up after a price drop. Based on the sales numbers, that shouldn't take too long. Too bad too, it's definitely got cult potential.

I finished ToD today, and I loved the game. Like any other Ratchet game, I always felt a burning need to just go for one more planet, and the next thing I know it's 4AM. Overall, the game didn't do anything sweeping and new that brought the series into some different new direction. They simply took what worked, made a few tweaks, and to any Ratchet fan that isn't exactly a bad thing.

I didn't find the story that bad. Seriously, in previous Ratchet games the story was there simply to give you an excuse to go to a new planet, and to deliver a few laughs. The difference is that it wasn't just to be used as a vehicle for the jokes, they instead are trying for some consistent story arc that wasn't possible under the old formula. Not great, but not bad.

I'm not sure that I totally agree with the variety complaint. The gyrocycle or whatever it's called just seemed unnecessary and a weak point, but the rest was all good. The motion controls were all pretty good too actually. I liked the tilting table hacking minigame, moreso than the ones in previous games. The laser was OK, but a little unnecessary too, but it wasn't used much. The flying was decent. I thought the tornado weapon controlled great - difficult if you run around, but if you strafe keeping it under control was an easy process and simply tore up groups of enemies early in the game with its high power.

Planets were simply bigger than before. The key difference I noticed after it was all said and done was that in previous games (especially the first), there were three paths from the start in like every world, relatively short. One will unlock the next planet, one will get a device that you'll need in an upcoming planet, and so forth. There were only a couple of planets like that here. Still, though most planets were relatively linear, they were as long as if not longer than all the paths put together in the planets in previous games. Toss in planets like Sargasso, where there were large land masses surrounded by swamp water, and you could use Clank to fly around from area to area to hunt some firespitting dinosaurs.

I loved the weapon progression system. The new effects of the weapons at level 5 plus the unlockable effect in the upgrading system made for some serious firepower. As usual, the weapons were fun. My only complaint about the gadgets was that I just don't use items as much as other do. I loved the morphing guns in previous games, now I have to pay 8000 for a single use of the penguin transformer. Not that turning enemies into penguins in scarves and top hats isn't good. The skill points were a blast too. I turned a mess of enemies into penguins (the South Pole point), got them all dancing (Happy Feat for dancing penguins, Chorus Line for just getting so many of anything to dance), broke out the flamethrower to burn the dancing penguins (Disco Inferno), then shooting the remaining penguins with a remote-controlled attack helicopter (Roflcopter). How could doing skill points like that not be fun? Also, having you pick up a schematic piece on each planet for the ultimate weapon makes it a lot more fun to obtain than mindlessly farming a billion bolts. Though I ran through a couple of planets again to get said pieces and other skill points, I didn't find upgrading my weapons hard at all. Discounting the RYNO I got right at the end, only one weapon wasn't maxxed level (and it was halfway through 4), and only one weapon wasn't fully upgraded.

The easy thing was... well, the game itself was the exact same as previous games I feel. The big change that really killed the difficulty is that anytime you go to a weapon vendor (and there are often a few of them on each planet), you would fully be healed. There were two areas where you did an arena-style assault on a planet, like in Up Your Arsenal. Fighting through the waves of enemies without being killed, relying on the occasionally respawning weapons crates, was balanced really well. But oh hey, they decide to put a weapon vendor right in the battlefield. Shoot all rockets, buy more, repeat, you're invincible. A healing mechanic right before a boss fight or after a scripted arena-style fight is fine and all, but in the middle of a battle? And being able to run back to the last vendor to recharge? Meh.

Still, it's the same refined Ratchet gameplay that the series is known for. While they only touch upon a couple of mechanics briefly, how is that different from the previous games? If you liked the first three Ratchet games you'll like this just the same, if you didn't like them then again just the same.

My favorite planets had to be the ones dealing with the robotic space pirates. The music was like a mix of PotC and Ratchet and was just great, especially with all the things the pirates said. The asteroid was up there too. But really, if you can use a holographic disguise to become a robotic space pirate and dance to disco as a way to prove your worth to the mechanical door locks, what's not to love?

As it probably evident, I lost a lot of the drive to write full formal reviews of games, and I'm falling further and further behind in my reviewing backlog. Granted, drifting away from JRPG's in favor of action games a dozen hours long really just compounds the problem. In the meantime, I'll give some quick informal thoughts a try and see how that goes.

I got the first game, Sands of Time, alone based on the comments from a few I know. While I'm normally someone who just has to play a whole series in order, I planned going into this just playing Sands of Time, as the later games according to a few I know take such a drastic turn in tone that it sours the memories you have of the first game. The first game was great, too. The acrobatic stunts and puzzles and timed challenges were all fun. I also loved the whole storybook atmosphere. The story, while minimalistic, was also very good. That's a bit odd, as you can literally go halfway through the game without the story advancing one bit (you're just trying to get to a tower, searching for a path and getting sidetracked). However, the little back and forth comments between the Prince and Farah keeps things entertaining and makes it feel like you're accomplishing something. Though I haven't played it yet, a lot of people compared this to ICO, which I really need to get around to playing eventually. The two complaints is the length (I think I finished it in 6.5 hours, but on the plus side there was no random filler, fetch quests, or other silly artificial ways to extend playtime so it was all well spent), and the battle system. If an enemy wore red, vault over him and stab him with the dagger. If the enemy wrote blue, vault off a wall and stab him with the dagger. If you could complete the battle 10% of the way through the game, then you could 80% of the way through since it was all essentially the same exact thing. Obviously combat wasn't a focus of the game, as it was always about the platforming, but still.

I enjoyed the game enough that I went out and got the other two. I figured that even if I didn't care for them, they still wouldn't be too long. My initial impressions of Warrior Within is exactly what I thought it would be - pretty poor. The Prince went from being likable to being egotistical. They threw him into an assassination mission in a gloomy ruined palace. The Middle Eastern inspired music was replaced with Godsmack and other heavy rock music. We had to put in tons of decapitations and blood as it's popular with the kids these days. Obviously the focus was the combat system, which certainly was improved. Being able to pick up a second weapon, throw said weapon, grab and toss enemies off cliffs, spinning around columns as an attack or doing wall-running jump attacks, there was a lot more ways to tackle enemies. Passing back and forth through time was a neat mechanic too, as what you do in the lively past would affect the ruined present. Still, I just didn't get into the game until a good 40% or so of the way through the game. Then, while it didn't quite recapture what Sands of Time possessed, it did begin to draw me in. A lot of the acrobatic stuff was actually better this time around, hidden in between all the fights. The garden section was something that I just really liked. Though your simple task to kill the Empress of Time started out simple enough, twists halfway through were really interesting and handled in a neat way. Late in the game you gained, uh, an ability that totally changed the way you went about things, which was pretty neat. There was a little bit too much backtracking though, as I've seen a couple rooms just a little too many times. It's still unfortunate that they turned the Prince into a brooding killing machine, though, but it still turned out being more enjoyable than I thought it would. Hooray for low expectations!

I'm in the first half of The Two Thrones right now, right after finishing the fight against that massive enemy in the arena, and I'm liking things overall. First, the start of the story was probably incredibally confusing as it rendered the standard ending of Warrior Within, which pretty much everyone got, as if it never happened. There was a second ending to Warrior Within, one that required you to find all nine hidden health upgrades, a task that is very difficult to accomplish without a guide. Said ending actually totally changed your final boss fight, which was great, but I just wonder how many people wondered what was going on at the start. Also, Kaileena's voice actor was a lot worse this time around. In the last game she was great, with an actress with a lot of film credits to her name. This time around it seems they were forced to pick up an inexperienced actress and it really showed. I guess that the Dark Prince was a way to keep the aggressive Prince while still being able to bring the original Prince "back" for the final game. I actually like the way they handled this, though, as a lot of the internal monologue between the Prince and his cursed self is actually rather funny. I just ran into a familiar face too... Speed kills are fun to try to accomplish too, as are a couple of new acrobatic tricks.

I've rather enjoyed the series thus far. I wanted to get at least one game in before Assassin's Creed comes out so I can get an idea of how it will handle and what new ideas they bring to the table, as it seems to have many similarities with Prince of Persia. I still hope they delay it until early 2008 to fix a number of the reported kinks they're encountering, but that's another topic for another day...