released July 2003, purchased July 2003
click here for my review written in August 2003!
This is an underappreciated title. It's easy to pick up, unashamedly silly, and has plenty of replay value. You're sent into various themed worlds looking for errant monkeys, which you catch by stunning them with a light saber and then scooping them up with a net. The gimmick is that all your weapons are controlled off the right analog stick... which will probably be the first time that you've used the right stick for more than camera control.
There's plenty of unlockables, great voice work, lots of variety... and I still would bet that you won't find more than six people in your lifetime that have heard of it, much less actually bought it. I'm not saying it's the greatest game in the world, but if you're still wasting money on Crash Bandicoot and the small army of licensed mascot platformers... well, it is possible to find fun games among all that drek.
I wonder if the Monkey-With-An-Uzi on the cover did them more harm than good.
Memory Score: It's not a franchise I obsess over, but I know a good game when I play one.
released March 2003, received July 2003
This is the sequel to Frequency, and I received it as "payment" for running a banner ad for a couple of weeks. Happily, it's a good little game. Even has online play.
It's a rhythm game where you essentially build popular music songs as you play each level... the goal being to keep the song sounding as complete as possible. For example, the drums are on one track, the bass on another, and the vocals on a third. You have to switch between all three, continuing to hit the beats, to keep each section playing. When you let yourself fall into the groove, it's plain hypnotic. I'm still in love with the song "Cool Baby."
The game only uses three buttons... but it's three weird ones: L1, R1 and R2. I've often thought they should have come up with some funky custom controller for it.
Memory Score: Is it even possible to make a BAD rhythm game?
released November 2002, purchased August 2003
I needed a light gun, and this game comes packaged with Namco's GunCon2 - the best available for the PS2.
The thing is - and I won't lie, I knew this going in - nobody makes decent light gun games anymore. Which is why I didn't pick up this awful awful title when it first came out... even though Rhonda and I loved playing Point Blank and Elemental Gearbolt with our light guns back on the PS1. There just aren't any worthwhile light gun games out there.
I needed one because of Starsky & Hutch, which we'll get to next time.
Oh, about this game? It sucked.
Memory Score: Dude, the ninjas have guns. Nothing is worse than that.
released June 2003, purchased August 2003
But until Starsky & Hutch came out, I took a chance on this bizarre light gun sidestep from Resident Evil.
And I will tell you that I am the only person you know who liked Dead Aim.
This is actually, like, the sixtieth Resident Evil light gun game but the previous 59 were so bad they didn't make it to the States. So we can probably forgive everybody else for not bothering to invest much into Dead Aim.
I went in expecting not much, and came out reasonably satisified. If you're a wacky peripheral fan, you'll similarly dig it. You use the GunCon2's rear-mounted d-pad to navigate the third person portion, and when you run into zombies, you simply aim at the screen to enter a first-person viewpoint. Then, you shoot like crazy.
Killing zombies with a light gun is nicely straight forward; it gets less intuitive during the few scenes where you happen upon faster baddies. There, you just have to get lucky.
The main evil scientist-turned-mutant-experiment guy (a staple for any Resident Evil game) claimed to be the jerk who first released the virus into Raccoon City, but I don't think the light gun sub-franchise actually counts as RE canon.
Memory Score: It's like Resident Evil meets Speed 2 in more ways than one.
Next week: We go peripheral crazy with three plug-and-play PS2 physical challenges... plus one of the best sequels ever made!
