As far as gaming goes, I just beat both I-Ninja and Ratchet & Clank 2. I-Ninja is actually a pretty incredible game. Although it's mainly a platformer, there are several departure levels/scenes to vary it up... where you control missiles, roll a giant ball, box with giant robots, mid-air DBZ battles, etc. What sold me on the game in the first place is the Sonic-esque bits where you run through big swooping loops and you have to use your chain to keep you from running off the tight corners (just like how the Batmobile cornered in the first Batman movie, incidentally.) There's a couple bonus levels where you do nothing but zip around corner tracks like that, and those made me very happy. Somewhere around 75% done, I realized that the baddie variety is terribly low. There's only about three enemy types, but somehow you never notice. The environments are the true enemies here, and the little evil ninja men are largely just to delay for time.

R&C2 is a joy. To be fair, they haven't done too much to advance the series since the first one (it's kind of eerie how similar the levels look between 1 and 2)... but they did nothing to wreck it either. The new upgradeable weapon thing is nice, and it equates closely enough to collecting pokemon to hold my interest. One thing R&C2 gets right that a lot of games totally miss (Diablo 2, here comes a Screw You) is this upgrading system. R&C2 lets you buy new weapons and armor, making you gradually stronger. Now, you need to upgrade to tackle the heavy enemies of the last few levels (and especially the higher arena battles), but you can also upgrade well beyond that. And the enemies don't scale up along with you. Once you're fully tricked out, you are an unstoppable killing machine, cutting through enemies like crazy. See, that's fun. It's the reward for playing so much to gather enough money to afford the big weaponry.

Two additional cool features to R&C2. First: if you have a saved game from the original R&C, R&C2 will find it and give you some weapons from the first game for free. One of which is the kickass visibomb. Sadly, the visibomb doesn't pack the punch it used to, but it's still fun to personally steer a missile into someone's head. Second: once you beat the final boss (which is much, much easier this time), you can start a second quest with all your existing weapons and money... only now there's tougher enemies and you can combo your kills to collect more money than normal. So you can actually afford all those nuts-ass million dollar weapons! (Me, I'm saving up for the armor that absorbs up to 90% of all incoming damage. And it makes you look like a Cylon.)