double the pleasure, double the fun

we shall set aside discussion for the time being of all things iPhone,
for it has been a season of excitement and lost potential with that frustrating App Store launch,
and talk instead of that which brings me most joy in the here and now:
dear, sweet pixeljunk eden and maddening addictive the last guy.
to have one of these land in our gamer lap would be a treat,
to have both within such short time is delirium.
"but why aren't you playing Grand Theft Auto IV?" jMo taunts again & again,
but really. I mean, really. with two lil' PSN perfects like eden and guy, who needs the big stuff?

besides, I'm stuck on the National Mall in level 3 of last guy trying in vain to get my thousand survivors. the agony! (and therefore, the bliss).

more anon.

spring is sprung

A few notes, brief by necessity.

Echochrome (PS3, PSP) is awesome. But is it just me, or does the difficulty level go crazy astonomical a little too quickly here? I find myself giving up on levels more frequently than when the game first arrived. I think the (frankly, amazing) user-generated levels are jaw-dropping in scale and creativity. But they're HARD.

Downstream Panic (PSP) is more of the same. Clever cute lil' game, but damn! I've been stuck on level 16 for a month. Granted, I pick up the game about as frequently as the PSP (i.e., seldom) but it's frustrating to get stuck so early in the game and have no helpful hints or anything to move beyond. This was to be my go-to Airplane Game but instead it's a screw-this also-ran.

GTAIV is everything you've heard. For me, the scale is intimidating to the point that I haven't played much yet. I'm only barely into the missions and taking it veeeeerrrry slowly. Hopefully I will find motivation to devote more significant game time to this over the summer. Then again, Soul Caliber IV and Little Big Planet are coming too, so I am simply screwed, dude.

Next up: time to eBay half my games since I never play 'em. More anon.

and ruxpin comes up for air

Well. So much to play, so little time to write about it. That's a problem I can live with.

At the bare-bones level, let me just note in passing those games gobbling the most time of late. Others on the list have impressed, but the proof is in the pudding, and here pudding equals time spent playing. To whit:

Unreal Tournament 3. There is only one. Even if the recent patch wiped out all my custom mod levels. I'll download them & reinstall a million times if you make me, you beautiful game! Man, I'm a terrible shot though.

Burnout Paradise. I'm surprised at how much I have been playing this. And sucking miserably. But fun, more so than anticipated.

Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds. Fun, but a pain that you have to unlock the six courses through hours and HOURS of tedious replay. For $59 you should be able to play all the courses out of the box. And don't get me started on there only being SIX courses! But the game is slick fun, the new Advanced Shot option is okay after the first curse-filled game. It's not the HD showpiece I expected but it is a pretty, almost Nintendo-esque escape.

Virtua Fighter 5. Because beating the snot out of each other is awesome.

Toy Home. All praise the extra content on PSN. Finally I can pick & play whatever level I want, whenever I want! Now I'm bored.

Time Crisis 4. As I affixed Post-it brand removable cable hooks all over my HDTV, to secure Guncon 3 sensors around the screen so I could calibrate my rifle, I did have a brief fleeting moment of lucid horror at how deeply down the rabbit hole I've gone. Once I read books, went outdoors, experienced sunlight. Now I hunt bad guys in the dark. But then I shot a bunch of terrorists with my machine guns at the TC4 airport and felt MUCH better.

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. I let jMo play this one a bit ahead of me and never got around to really starting this one. This weekend I finally sat down and played about 2 hours. Corny, yes. Raiders of the Lost Ark, Romancing the Stone? Guilty as charged. Lush and jaw-droppingly gorgeous with every frame? Pretty much. This kind of 3rd person perspective shooter is not typically my bag (no Max Payne fans are we) but here it works. The puzzles between firefights keep things interesting, and the transitions to movie interludes are as seamless as I've seen in a video game. It's worth a rental at the very least.

Skate is actually pretty darn impressive. I think I may prefer this interface to Tony Hawk and his legion of games. (BTW, love the hoverboards in UT3. It's approaching my dream game, where you shoot folks from your skateboard and then hop in a car and shoot other cars. with Plinko in the bonus round.)

flOw on the PSP has proven to be a treat, too. I do find it laggy though. I imagine I'll rediscover the PSP more, now that I'll be traveling for work more and separately from the PS3 mothership so frequently.

That is all. For now. More later!

Baby Steps are for Sissies: The ruxpin Launch Library, PS3 edition

All I have to say is that eBay helped keep the costs down a lot. You think I bought all this retail? Puh-lease.

Aquatopia
Assassin's Creed
Blast Factor
Burnout: Paradise
Calling All Cars
Cash Guns Chaos
Devil May Cry 4
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Game of the Year Edition)
Enchanted Arms
Everyday Shooter
EyeCreate
flOw
Full Auto 2: Battlelines
Go! Puzzle
Go! Sports Ski
Go! Sports Skydiving
Godfather, the: the Don's Edition
Grand Turismo HD Concept
GripShift
High Stakes: Poker Edition
High Velocity Bowling
John Woo presents Stranglehold (Collector's Edition)
Lair
Lemmings
LocoRoco Cocoreccho!
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance
Mesmerize: Distort
Mesmerize: Trace
Mortal Kombat II
MotorStorm
MX Vs. ATV Untamed
Ninja Gaiden Sigma
Nucleus
Operation Creature Feature
Orange Box, the
PAIN
PixelJunk Monsters
Piyotama
Q*Bert
Rampage
Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction
Resistance: Fall of Man
Sega Rally Revo
Simpsons Game, the
Skate
Stuntman: Ignition
Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD Remix
Super Rub a Dub
Super Stardust HD
Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection
Tiger Woods PGA Tour '07
Time Crisis 4
Tori-Emaki
Tony Hawk's Project 8
Toy Home
Trials of Topoq
Twisted Metal 2
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune
Unreal Tournament
Virtua Fighter 5
Virtua Tennis 3

...and after about the 6th eBay game arrived in the mail from the list above (The Simpsons Game, to be exact), the damn optical reader in my PS3 busted. (D'oh!) Now the avalanche of games has been arriving in truckloads in the mail daily, taunting me, unplayable, while the PS3 is in Tennessee somewhere being repaired. Tell me the universe has no sense of humor, I dare yah. Ah well, I waited a year to dive in to PS3, what's a few more weeks? Nowhere to go but up, I guess!

Gamer talk has been bleeding into my other blogs of late, and the rather significant financial investment I have made buying this library attests to how deeply down the rabbit hole I've gone with this adventure. So why not sprout another tentacle off the Seat of Our Pants media empire to celebrate this love of mine? A blog about video games...how original! Well, we'll see how this one flies. (Well, we will in earnest once the damn PS3 returns from Sony repair and we can start playing these a bit. Arg!)

In the meantime, a manifesto: Let this be a space, if you will, to pontificate about gaming observations...to review games (and it will take some time to play these all...jeez!)...to giggle with fanboy glee at games on the horizon (yep, there are still more games on my to-get list!)...to geek out, my brothers and sisters...to geek and game and geek the giggledy geek out. Amen.