my initiation into gamefly involved the acquisition ("rental") of two playstation 2 games, Parappa the Rapper 2 and Futurama. thus far, i'm pretty disappointed with both.

the original parappa was a genius game with an involving plot (i wanna rap!), catchy songs (press buttons on the beats wheee) and a nearly retardedly easy (but fun!) level of play. and 2-D floppy animations of various animals, plants, and humans. in parappa 2, the 2-D has remained, but the quality tunes have disappeared. even with the recognized contribution of de la soul, the characters that parappa interacts with throughout the game fail to entertain, and at points, begin to annoy (yes, you, mr growing/shrinking/growing/shrinking ant). the game also suffers from a poor animation-sequence-to-actual-play ratio. explanatory scenes between levels (all SEVEN of them) take longer to load and run than to beat. and the standardized load animation, a quickly moving side-to-side scroll over a dj's turntable, is enough to make you dizzy.

in short, this game involves a very very brief (and easy...too easy) quest to stop the mysterious transformation of a town's food into noodles. i'm inferring that the target audience has been lowered a few decades, *cough* er, years.

futurama is a slow start. and thus i have not spent much time with it yet. but parappa 2 is getting kicked out of my apt immediately. out in the mail on the morrow, send me something playable gamefly!