I tend to do a lot of preparatory game buying. As soon as I heard of Nintendo's plans for GameCube games with multiple connected GBAs (Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles most notably, followed by however they intend to release those Zelda and Pac-Man mini-games), I immediately picked up a second GC/GBA cable. I already have several GBAs, but what good are they without several cables to connect them to the jet black Mother Box? Cable #2 is still in its blister package. Crystal Chronicles is due Feb 2004.
And since the Cube doesn't have those cutsey Game Boy controller paks like the N64 did, I can only imagine that Pokemon Colosseum will operate the same way. 2(Sapphire/Ruby + GBA + cable) + Cube + Colosseum.
So after reading about the upcoming Starsky & Hutch PS2 game, I bought a light gun. S&H will reportedly allow a 2P mode where one player drives while the second shoots using a light gun. On the home arena, that has never been done before and it is sorely needed. A Lucky & Wild in your living room, with the eponymous Lucky and Wild dismissed in favor of the equally eponymous Starsky and Hutch. I've been wanting to use "eponymous" in a sentence for a while now.
My light gun - Namco's GunCon2 - came with some horrid ninja game whose name I won't even mention. I would have bought the Time Crisis bundle pack, but the ninja game was a full $20 cheaper... exact same gun, just attached to a different game. Since I really didn't care about the game, I went for the cheap title over the good title. Well, the $20 quality difference between Time Crisis and this nasty ninja gun game is staggering. This game combines primitive PS1-era graphics with a jacked-up arcade difficulty that frustrates rather than challenges. Not that I consider Time Crisis to be the End All of light gun games - in fact, that position is still held by Elemental Gearbolt and the Point Blank series - but it would have to be better than this bizarre conjoining of ninjas and laser guns. Feeling abused by all the lousy ninja stuff, I embarked on a local search for Resident Evil: Dead Aim, a light gun title that most reviewers give grudging nods of approval. Neither of my local Toys R Us stores had the game, and I really didn't feel like giving EB my business, so I went home disappointed.
Even more disappointing is that the GunCon2 requires an RCA video input, and my PS2 has been pushing s-video since late 2000. When I saw that modern generation light guns actually utilized a USB connection over the traditional PlayStation controller input, I was thrilled... but that excitement waned when I noticed the same old lousy RCA passthrough cable. So to use my light gun, I need to switch the PS2 video output from s-video to RCA, which is as inconvenient as having to switch my iPod off of the iMac when it needs to charge since my firewire bus has trouble supporting both it and the iSight.
I guess my point is that I like being prepared. I have multiple GC/GBA cables but no supported games, and I have a bright orange light gun with some stinky ninja thing. When the day comes that Starsky & Hutch is released, or Pokemon Whosiswhatsis, I will be first in line for cavorting. But for the moment I'm just outta lines and hangin' out.
