Easily one of my top five PS2 games. Maybe even top three.

At first glance, I thought FF2 was a little too similar to the first Fatal Frame: lost and confused female adrift in a phantom reality of gruesome traditions designed to keep the gates of hell closed at all costs. But that's sort of the series' baseline, like how Sonic's baseline is to reach the end of the level. How the game presents that concept, and how you survive the telling of it, is where it has a chance to differentiate itself. Crimson Butterfly, with its one-twin-must-kill-the-other strangulation ritual, manages to even out-creep FF1's infamous Blinding Mask.

The storyline of FF2 is horrifying but satisfying. It hits on family, on tradition, on duty, on suffering, on sacrifice. This game will make your soul hurt.

Like no other survival horror series, Fatal Frame has mastered actually being scary. I don't mean shocking or surprising or gory... I mean scary.

Memory Score: To this day, I'm still slightly afraid of a quiet jingly bell noise.

Does a bad game get better if you play it alongside others who know it's a bad game?

It does, but there's a definite curve to it. Unlike MST3K - which is funny in two hours - a bad video game has potentially hours upon hours of agonizing gameplay... so if you want to play a bad game on purpose, you need to watch for the inevitable late-night burnout and schedule a follow-up night to keep the sarcastic excitement high.

You know, who has time for this. If you're going to get together with pals and play stuff, you want to get right to the good games. Especially once everybody moves off the dorm floor and you need a third party arbitrator to all make it to the same party again. So you stick with your Smash Bros and Soul Caliburs and Mario Parties and Halos and you play what you know will be a hit. Even Mike and I - and we're together quite a bit - rarely get into something that we fully expect to be hilariously awful. Aside from all-night jags into mediocre-yet-pleasantly-thoughtless games like Trapt or the last two LOTR button mashers, the closest we've come to playing a genuinely ridiculous game was when I finished Disaster Report and then told him he had to play it too.

Last year, the PS3 stole the show from the Xbox 360. This year, the PS3 stole our wallets. $600? Really? There is now no freaking way that I'm there for a Day One PS3 purchase. Not at that price.

There is also a $500 version planned - so we'll have two PS3s to choose from, just like the dual Xbox 360s - but even that is out of control. The $500 has a smaller hard drive (which already makes it better than the gimped 360), no WiFi (which sucks) and no HDMI output. I would much rather trade out the stinking blu-ray. Give me a PS3 with the 60gig HD, the WiFi, and everything else, take out the blu-ray, and I'll give you $300. Then I'll pick up three launch titles and an extra controller, which will almost get me to $500 anyway. This was the deal we struck six years ago on the PS2, Sony.

This is probably the coolest thing I've yet seen from this year's E3: Solid Snake will be in the new Super Smash Bros.

I've been kinda quiet lately, mainly due to the ailing iMac issue. I've used Rhonda's iBook for some general fourhman.com stuff in the meantime, but I'm not really very accustomed to laptops. So, almost a month later, my home office is finally back in business with the acquisition of a brand new iMac.

The transfer from old, awesome lamp iMac to new, less-interesting big flat media center iMac was smoother than expected. If you'll recall, the Apple Store jerks told me that my old iMac was beyond repair and they did not suggest doing a data transfer with it. And even though I repeatedly said that it still booted up in firewire mode every time, I was lectured about not keeping backups and was handed the business cards of several reputable data recovery services. Well, New iMac slurped up everything I needed from Old iMac. I even did the transfer in the middle of a thunderstorm. So suck it.

I wrapped up Metal Gear Solid 3 a couple weekends ago, and it was just as pleasant as expected. It is much more action movie-esque than Sons of Liberty, and it features Snake all the way through. So if you're one of those dogmatic trolls who is still pissed about the big Raiden switch, I suggest you go fetch MGS3 right away.

Here's my endgame stats for MGS3:

Fair enough. A bit harsh for my tastes, not as cute as best befits an Animal Crossing character. Perhaps Gaily of Rivendal has had a vision of the Next Gen Animal Crossing?

Background: this discussion was held when the specs were released for the PSP, and we all found out about the ill-fated UMD disk media. Any stupid bolding was used by the original poster.

Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence is the 2005 re-release of 2004's Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. This collection consisted of three discs, "Subsistence" being a slightly re-worked Snake Eater, the "Persistence" disc has the first ever online Metal Gear game plus tons of bonus features, and "Existence," which presents most of the cutscenes from Snake Eater re-edited into a 3.5 hour movie. I picked up the Limited Edition, which adds a fourth disc, a half-hour DVD documentary on the entire Metal Gear saga to date.

It's incredible and you should already have it. If you need to know more than that, read on.

Picked this up during a personal PS2 drought, based on the glowing recommendations of everyone in the world.

And I just could not take it.

Partially, it was the old school graphics. Visually, this is a PS1 game, and that is no exaggeration. But I could have easily gotten past that - I'll play GBA games on my TV, for crying out loud - if the gameplay itself had gripped me. But I found it painfully and unnecessarily opaque. This is not a game for attracting new fans to the style (it's a tactics game, did I mention that?), it's a deep and muddy reward for people who already like this sort of thing. It just seemed like at every point where they could have made the game fun, they took the fast train to Tedium. Population: a million palette-shifted 2D sprites.

Just not my thing. Could have worked for me as a GBA title, but I felt like such a chump sitting there in front of my giant TV arranging cardboard characters on a grid map and clicking through menus.

I liked the concept - young renegade demon prince battles his way across Hell to be the next Lord of the Underworld. I liked the characters - exploding anime penguins! I liked some story elements - you have to petition the demonic Senate, and if they deny your request you can battle them for it. I just didn't like the gameplay.

Memory Score: And then you level up weapons by going inside them? WTF?

Checkmate #1 This book isn't going anywhere. I may keep getting it just because I'm that sure it is going to be dropped from print in a year.

The thing is, this isn't S.H.I.E.L.D. This is an attempt to give the DCU its own S.H.I.E.L.D. and it just rings false. S.H.I.E.L.D. is always everywhere in the Marvel Universe. They're in every book, they're in every alternate universe reboot. They're important. Checkmate is not important. When was the last time you saw Checkmate in the DCU? They just sort of popped up to front that whole awful Max Lord storyline last year. They're simply not a major presence in the DCU and to magically pretend that they are is ridiculous.

Fire: Completely out of place and out of character. Alan Scott: Where the hell did that eyepatch come from? Sasha: I guess DC didn't think a book called "Batman's Girlfriend, Sasha Bordeaux" would sell.

Background: this discussion was held just before Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures came out and everybody was all uptight about GameCube games that required a GBA to play. The eReader was also a big bash-Nintendo topic at the time, being a device that used trading cards to unlock content or add content to GBA games. Complete original discussion here. My favorite part is the anonymous third-party posting after my reply.

Now that we've all had the bad news - the PS3 costing as much as a used car - I am forced to do what no doubt many unhappy gamers are doing right now: come up with an alternate plan for the fall.

See, back when we assumed the damn thing might cost $400 at the most, it was quite a different story. With E3 behind us, we'd all be picking our favorite games from the launch lineup... checking out what awesome stuff will hit 1Q '07... groping for info on the online plan, new peripherals, accessories. We'd start THE COUNTDOWN.

But at $600? Forget all that.

I'm sitting here watching my youngest sister graduate from college, and it suddenly occurs to me that ten years ago, I was graduating from college.

And I have almost no memory of it.

I don't mean that I was so blitzed by the party the night before (there wasn't and I wasn't). I just don't remember it. It was indoors, that's all I got.

However, I do recall the feeling of it. I remember being swept up in the hurricane of the graduation process. The annoying rehearsals, the final classes, and getting your real diploma only after the school was certain all your bills were paid up.

This game is a lot nicer than people will tell you.

The biggest Nintendo marquee name to show up for the GameCube launch... and it was only Luigi. That right there pushed it into the realm of unnecessary oddity. Furthermore, most early reviews of the game described it as a tech demo, implying that it doesn't have the chops to stand against other games. There was also a camp that suggested Nintendo was simply trying to "mature up" their normal franchise game with a horror feel. Also recall that the PS2 was entering its second year about this time and had the expected infusion of mega-awesome: GTA3 and MGS2 had just showed up.

So a new Nintendo kiddie title wasn't going to break anybody's fingerbones, no matter how pretty it was.

And it is pretty, even compared to games five years later. Luigi, the translucent ghosts, the cartoony mansion architecture... it looks damn good. When you pulled up this game - and millions did, it was a launch title - you saw a vision of the Nintendo universe that was far and away above Super Mario 64. It looked next-gen.

It falls short in length... the game is called "Luigi's Mansion," not "Super Luigi World," after all. It also suffers from a desparate need to assign actions to every conceivable button just so we could all get used to the fancy new GameCube controller. But jump into that skin and this is a happy, fun little game.

Memory Score: Nintendo does Resident Evil. Brilliant.

I'm only about ten minutes into the first level when the thought occurs: "This is a pretty crappy game."

That's never a joyous realization - especially when $50 was tossed like so much salt over the shoulder - but it is particularly grating when the game in question is something you've been anticipating for months.

Odama is exactly the kind of offbeat, undefinable game that pulls me in. Games that offer up more than just various degrees of running / jumping / shooting / driving. I live for the thrill of locating games like this. They're underappreciated, underplayed... and in Odama's case, underbaked.

Created by Yoot Saito, the madman behind Seaman and the architect of SimTower, Odama defies all attempts at categorization. The closest you can get in "real-time pinball strategy." WTF. Instant intrigue, if only the game measured up. As it happens, the strategy part is minimal (and unapproachably frustrating) and the pinball part - the part that should have been a slam dunk - is slow and lousy.

Background: Here's a fun comment jam on one of Senator Joe Leiberman's ill-informed, insulting tirades against video games. He is quoted as saying "Video games have gotten better over time", but continues: "There's a couple out there that are horrendous... You ought to see one called Grand Theft Auto. The player is rewarded for attacking a woman, pushing her to the ground, kicking her repeatedly and then ultimately killing her, shooting her over and over again." Complete original discussion here.

I just added an "online videos" section to fourhman.com, and I'm still not at all sure it's the right thing to do.

I've always hated these sorts of un-funny viral videos that everybody passes along via email and weblog. But on the other hand, sometimes you do actually find stuff that is funny, that is clever, that is worth watching.

So in an effort to NOT throw out the baby with the bathwater, I'm going to start collecting links to the videos that I enjoy. As with most things here on fourhman.com, it's really more of a service for me than for you.

While we're on the subject of hypocritical bandwidth theft, here's some fun from the other side of the fence.

A long time ago - 2003 to be exact - I noticed that images from fourhman.com were popping up as avatars on various forums around the internet. Not really a big deal, except that it artificially inflates my monthly pageview stats and could potentially cost me money in bandwidth costs. So I starting switching out innocent graphics with less-than-innocent graphics, but that really doesn't solve the problem.

Sometime after that, I put in an htaccess file that blocks anybody and everybody from hot-linking to images that live on fourhman.com. It's easy to do and a million other people could explain it to you better, so if you're interested in it, go check it out someplace else.

And now, my LIVE as-it-happens weblog of X3!

9:18pm
In the theater for 9:30 showing of X3: Dramatic Subtitle. I'm alone, which, locally, is referred to as "pulling a Matt." Less than 10 people in the room. Over the Hedge ad just ran, part of the pre-show crap that replaced "The 20." One thing I'l say about Over the Hedge, at least the characters are doing cartoony takes, unlike most Popular CG Films.

Now we're on to a featurette on the third Fast and the Furious movie, "Initial D." So far, there's been exactly one Asian person interviewed. Nice. Boy, I'm convinced they researched it fully.

Monster House. Seriously, could they not just make it with real people? It's CG masturbation for profit.

There is exactly one reason why I bought this game: EyeToy. This game contains one of the best uses of the EyeToy that anybody ever bothered to make.

Things have improved slightly since that amazing Fall of 2004, but back then there was just about nothing worthwhile on the EyeToy. Interesting gimmick, lousy games. And it had been out for almost a year!

This Harry Potter game - which came with a free ticket to the movie, assuming you cashed it in before the end of July! - managed to out-do every EyeToy-dedicated title to date and in the foreseeable future. How did it achieve this goal: by framing the wacky camera games with a tournament-style scoring system. It's that simple, folks, and yet the makers of EyeToy: Play and the upcoming Sega Superstars managed to miss it.

Fire up the EyeToy portion of the disc and your first act is to get sorted. Yeah, it's random, and yeah, four players are going to get four different Houses... but you can't beat the geeky fanboy awe of seeing yourself standing there with the goddamn Sorting Hat chewing on your hair and spouting Potter poetry. Then you all take turns in a series of mini-games events, scoring points for the big finish. And unlike EyeToy: Play or Sega Superstars, all of these games are fun.

There's a scoring structure; there's a definite end with a crowned champion. That's all we want from any party game, so why did it take a year before somebody got it right? And it was done as an extra feature inside a movie game that wasn't even strictly an EyeToy title. For shame, Sony.

Oh right, the regular game. I actually went back and beat the movie portion during a PS2 dry spell in the summer of '05. It was pretty bad.

Memory Score: Best EyeToy experience ever; the Potter window dressing is a happy bonus.