Caffeine is a helluva drug.
The best thing about new consoles are their new games, and as near as I can tell Pursuit Force has never come out anywhere else before. Of course a lot of the aspects look familiar, but hopefully it will be derivative in good ways.
I like that the star villains are called “Killer 66.” They must have kicked out the craziest twenty-two members.
Kheldar suggested to me that the PSP’s breakout puzzle hit Lumines was based upon an open-source game. I’ll be damned if I can find any open Lumines, but I did happen across this entertaining knockoff for Mac and PC [possibly being ported elsewhere]. Be sure to go to page three of the thread and download the update [it drops into the original folder and replaces lumines.exe], which fixes some timing issues and ups the difficulty a bit but sadly does not include a pause button.
It’s a throwback to the glory days of the PS 1. I abandoned Sweet Tooth and Calypso for Vigilante 8 and V8:Second Offense, so I can’t really compare this to Twisted Metal 3, 4, or Black. What I can observe is that the environments are expansive and detailed, if a bit dark. The cars seem to control all right. All the favorites are there from the git-go, although the thug who used to drive Thumper seems to have sold it to a Fergie lookalike, and it fires a series of fireballs instead of the hood-mount flamethrower. I don’t remember Roadkill trading in his steel girder for a boomerang, either, but it’s time for progress.
I haven’t taken time yet to play this in network mode, but it has to be more fun than trying to beat the latest iteration of Sweet Tooth, whose hook I will not reveal here.
Longtime readers of this rag know that I hate when a company releases a bunch of rehashes for every new console that minces down the pike. However, I just received a PSP and I am wanting — nay, needing — some gristle for the mill. So far, all I have is Twisted Metal: Head-On, which I rented from Blockbuster GameRush near home [the regular Blockbusters have not yet hop't 'pon the PSP gravy train]. What I was thinking, as I perused reviews of the launch titles, is that this thing really needed a Syphon Filter game. Preferably a new game.
Jake 8-Bit came through for me today — I come home to find this post in my NNW. New Syphon Filter game next month! And GTA mid-month! Nice!
As for the PSP itself — the screen is beautiful. The unit’s a bit heavy compared to, say, the wife’s Game Boy Advance, but nothing I can’t hold comfortably for a couple-three rounds of Twisted. Holding off on the Memory Stick Duo purchase for a bit yet. Would really like to hitch my cart to at least a two-gig horse. On the other hand, I may have to start looking at Sony Cyber-Shot cameras now, just to maintain consistency in this household’s flash media.
Apparently a bastardisation of “Samhog Day.”
While at the site, I also recommend reading up on a couple of games you might have missed last year.
So, Denis came over and worked his elfin magic and put XBMC on my well-out-of-warranty Xbox. A little bit of faq-scanning, trial and error, and a lot of bugging Denis on the instant messenger later, and the fun is finally beginning.
Last night, I forgot to tape Lost. Well, actually, I set the VCR to timer record while out eating 50cent legs at BW3, but I forgot to turn the VCR off so it would start recording. I have often offered to grab a missed episode off the ‘net and screen it for the wife, but have always had to find a VCD version, burn it to a disc, and hook up Abbey’s DVD player, which is one of the remarkably accomodating kinds that will play pretty much any kind of disc, to the TV, so we could watch an extra-grainy version of, say, the Big Brother 4 finale. But today, I pulled down a copy of last night’s “Lost” while out of the house at work, and tonight followed these fairly simple instructions [but not to the letter] to make a couple of directories available to the Xbox. A few minutes later we were watching it! Like a jerry rigged Video-On-Demand.
The picture quality was great, if just a smidge blocky in the dark scenes, and the 50-foot ethernet cable doesn’t really fit with the decor in either my den or the living room. So this won’t exactly replace the VCR for us, but it’s nice to catch the shows that occasionally slip through the cracks.
I think work had begun on this comical D3 mod before the proper game had hit shelves.
The new screenshots of “WWE Smackdown vs. Raw” for the PlayStation are amazing if a little creepy. The detail is incredible in all the screenshots, but the shot of Booker T is nearly photogenic. I think.
Still having major fun with Samurai Warriors, but man, Nobunaga’s missions are tough. I can’t understand why, in everyone else’s scenarios, he rolls around unleashing hell on all his hapless rivals, but when you get to his missions, he’s a weak little schmuck. It never took him twelve hits to defeat the average grunt when I was playing against him, thasferdamnsure.
We have two characters left to unlock if the FAQs can be believed. It figures, too, that they refused to confirm an Xbox port until literally days after we purchased the PS2 version. Though I can’t say for sure whether the Xbox version would have better graphics [i.e. less slowdown and flicker — the PS2 version’s players look fantastic, and boy does it pay the price].
I have also recently purchased Max Payne 2, GTA 3 for Xbox [gotta love the Blockbuster pre-played sales], and WWE RAW 2 [this one on clearance for $10 at Target], but haven’t had appreciable time to play them what with Samurai Warriors continuing to give and give, and getting Abbey the new Harry Potter game for her birthday. Speaking of that game, the PS2 version plays like a clockwork smurf [i.e. good]. I haven’t heard any further reviews or reports that corroborate our terrible experience with our Xbox copy, so maybe I just got “a bad disc” or something.
