| Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas |
released October 2004, purchased October 2004
All the games in today's entry were picked up during a Buy 2 / Get 1 Free sale at Toys R Us. Guess which one was the impulse free game.
I'm pretty much going to agree with X-Play and call San Andreas the Best PS2 Game Ever (and remember, I'm calling this with God of War 2 sight unseen, sarcasm.) It's not the best in graphics. It's not the best in story. It's not the best in innovation or art direction or music. But it is the best in overall gameplay. This is a game to get lost within.
With the previous GTA games, I've already mentioned the easy addiction of the free-world sandbox, the multitude of sidebar games, and the effortless combination of driving and on-ground action. San Andreas takes everything prior and doubles it... with a genuinely gigantic environment that somehow remains detailed and alive without a single loading pause. You can't think of this game without marveling at the diversity of locale, from mean streets to redwood forest to casino-bloated deserts. Not to mention the absurd levels of character customization. Or the undocumented two-player modes.
Sure, you can quibble about the low-poly models, the subjective music soundtracks, the still-wonked aiming controls... but nothing on the racks brings as much game - with as much variety - for your money as San Andreas. This series comes with a lot of crushing hype and unfavorable media, but it has f'ing earned it.
After playing GTA3, back when the series was just one awesome game, my only request was more of everything. San Andreas delivered.
Memory Score: Flying still sucks.
released September 2004, purchased October 2004
I liked the first Silent Hill, but I skipped on the second and third installments. What I saw from the previews and demos was a series bent on descending into self-parody. It wasn't horror any longer, it was just goofy. There's a difference between something being actually scary (cough, *Fatal Frame*) and something just going for special effects visual shock value, and that's where I saw Silent Hill heading. Maybe I'm misjudging messrs. 2 and 3, but if I did, it's only due to what the official trailers showed me.
So I wasn't expecting much when I fired up the Silent Hill 4 demo. Probably more bloody rusted metal and bad-high-school-art stitched-flesh zombies.
And then the demo stuck me in an apartment where you could look out the window and watch a fairly convincing street animate on for hours.
Sold.
What SH4: The Room accomplished was offer an unbeatable horror game hook: why am I stuck inside a non-descript bachelor apartment and how in the hell are they making a game out of this. The answer lies in having the game play out inside your character's dreams, but it gets far more complicated than that.
Rather than becoming mired in ancient death cults and enigmatic oracle witches and some of the more usual trappings of the genre, SH4 is largely about your reluctant efforts at retracing the steps of a local serial killer thought long dead. Between each dreamscape, you are indeed locked inside your single-bedroom apartment... which is handled in an appropriately claustrophobic first-person view. One of the game's themes is voyeurism, and The Room does an excellent job of turning that into an interactive gameplay mechanic.
Classic Resident Evil is cheesy B-movie fun. Modern Resident Evil is fast FPS-styled action. Fatal Frame is subtle atmosphere and well-told story. But what Silent Hill does best is awful. Some truly awful stuff happens in this game, like the audio-only scene at the pet store. Or the circular prison built for housing children. Or the all-too-real personalities of the apartment complex.
It's still a Silent Hill game - so there's the requisite assortment of slimy, pulpy maggot monsters, and the accompanying clumsy controls and camera, sigh. But this is a game that I wish would have been played by more than just franchise fanboys, because it reached out beyond being simply Game #4. I'll always take psychological horror over straight gore horror, and The Room runs nicely on about 60-40.
Memory Score: My god, the pet store.
released July 2004, purchased October 2004
We really enjoyed the original Karaoke Revolution and wished they had developed the expansion disk concept. But I'm sure some study told Konami that stamping out complete $40 games would sell better than multiple $15 song upgrade disks. I'm thinking this is a line best suited for an online delivery system.
This was the "Why Not" third wheel in the TRU sale.
And it is, unfortunately, nearly the exact same game with new songs. Which I consider unfair at the full price. The singing gameplay is still cool, but it sucks to see the same character models doing the same motion capture over the same backgrounds.
To make matters worse, the song list is far worse than the original. So, in the end, we barely played this one. The timing of the purchase sucked as well, because I had like a million new games to play between September and December 2004, so a lackluster rehash title wasn't going to get much action.
Memory Score: It's time to get real artists involved with this thing and drop the pathetic soundalikes.
Next time: Another uneven EyeToy release, a major sequel that I hated on, and the one PS2 game I've played online more than any other.
