Resident Evil 5 being so short means I have time to play other games.

I mean, I like finished it and everything about a week ago. I have one infinite ammo weapon (the starter popgun, naturally) but I'm pretty close to being able to afford one or two of the other infinite-ized weapons. I'm looking forward to banging through the first few levels on the next difficulty without having to conserve ammo.

RE5 also lets you replay any level at any time, so that's cool. I get the feeling that Capcom intended for us to play and re-play RE5 over and over again, and that's why it's so short and fluffy ("only you can save the world, Chris!"). I'd much rather have a thirty hour game with one huge-ass story to follow, than a ten hour story that you play through three times. But that's just me.

Anyway, here's some other quick thoughts on the games I've been into lately.

I've already recently talked about Bonsai Barber (Wii), so I'll spare you that one. It's still cute. It's nothing super-huge-gotta-buy-it, but what it does it does well. Tonight we noticed a little thundercloud floating over the patrons, dropping rain that made their hair grow, screwing up the cut! Adorable. It is what it is.

Got back into Rock Band 2 (PS3) tonight, thanks to the new release of "Don't Stop Believing" and the SpongeBob pack. The SpongeBob songs were actually more challenging on medium that I expected. Don't assume these are dialed down in difficulty to appease children.

The next Rock Band should be entirely downloadable. No more disk to insert.

GTA: Chinatown Wars (DS) is way harder than GTAIV. And unfortunately, I think it's mainly due to the nature of the smallscreen DS beast. I keep dying in missions because it's just plain harder to watch your life meter... since it's on a different screen.

But I tell you, I will be supremely pissed if the interface enhancements in GTA:CW do not make their way to the next console GTA game. The in-game PDA tracks everything, giving you an easy map to find stuff that you would otherwise never locate again. Like, you can map a path to the nearest Stunt Jump. Rockstar was really smart about keeping this GTA from dragging, since it's portable and in theory you can only play for a brief time. With the GPS, mission select, and Trip Skip, you can jump in and out of any mission right away. Smart stuff, and I hope Huang's PDA makes it to my TV someday.

This is a stunning piece of DS work, with a lot of fresh ideas for the GTA franchise, but in no way is it more fun than GTAIV.

I started building another LittleBigPlanet (PS3) level, this one based on the notion of locked room mysteries. I'm making a series rooms that shut you in, and then you have to puzzle your way out.

Last week I found some cool Namco homage levels that do a bang-up job with including the original arcade music (and even the modern remixes of the old tunes). User nano_rino has made them for Dig-Dug, Space Invaders and Xevious. Rather than just play the music (which was really impressive six months ago, but dead boring now), these levels work the music into a simple platformer, all in the game's theme. The Dig-Dug board has you digging through dirt while dodging pixel-perfect recreations of the Pooka and Fygar sprites. Great work.

I posted a comment begging for a Mappy level. nano_rino appears to be Japanese (well duh, name another country that cares about Xevious!), but "Mappy" is a universal language.

Madworld (Wii) is happening. It makes my arms hurt. Although in this case the waggle is actually responsive, so the motion controls do not seem as onerous as in Deadly Creatures (which was great anyway, I feel I have to say). I hear this game is short too, sadly. The boss fights are hellaciously difficult compared to the rest of the level.

I got to the second-to-last boss in LIT (Wii), and it is complete bullshit. You're in the gym and the gym teacher is throwing kickballs at you. You instantly die when you get touched by a ball. Even if the ball hits the floor and rolls over to your ankle.

I think there is a very strict sequence to follow to kill the gym teacher, and I can't even describe to you how painful it is. It is horrible. The slightest wrong move wrecks everything, forcing you to restart even if you managed to avoid the killer kickballs.

I played Animal Crossing: City Folk (Wii) long enough in the past week to get my Nookington's rebuilt and score the cool rare April Fool's holiday item. I have not been back in Rule of Rose (PS2) for a while now, because I am still stuck at the ceiling mermaid girl boss.

And finally, I have another game to review for Aeropause, Lux-Pain for DS. It is really, really awful. And not even in the charmingly awful way that allows me to enjoy a lot of other bad games. This is just one messed-up confusing title. As I'm playing it, I often feel like I'm playing an imported Japanese game, even though everything is in English with voice acting and text and everything. I have no idea how I'm going to write a review for it, because I am so bewildered by it. I may just lorem ipsum the entire review and see if anyone notices.