http://www.fourhman.com/blog/ Semi daily fourhman.com newspost. en-us joe@fourhman.com 2008-01-20T19:19:24-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://www.fourhman.com/blog/archive/2008/01/ps2.html 24: The Gamereleased February 2006, received May 2006 This was sent to the office one day, so the bright idea was hatched that we should all get together and play it. Taking turns, we made it through Hour Nine and then gave up when none of us could "LOSE THE TAIL!" Although we put in a second evening's effort a few weeks later - and did in fact LOSE THE TAIL - our opinion of the game being slightly better than good dog shit did not change. I mean, it tries. The story is original (but is it canon?)... the actors were all super excited to be involved, judging from the PR-alicious commentary videos. There is a nice variety of levels, from regular ol' third-person shooting to regular ol' third person stealth to regular ol' third person driving to regular ol' psycho interrogating, but none of it is particularly well done. The best you can say is that the game's stinkiness largely does not interfere with your ability to complete it. Even though we never did because we got bored. Memory Score: LOSE THE TAIL. 2668@http://www.fourhman.com/blog/ Farewell to the PS2 2008-01-20T19:19:24-05:00 http://www.fourhman.com/blog/archive/2007/09/karaokami-lip-r.html Karaoke Revolution Presents American Idolreleased January 2007, received February 2007 Hard to believe it took this long for an American Idol-branded karaoke game to show up. And, being over three years after the first Karaoke Revolution game, this means we're up to some very full-featured titles. Good song list, a microphone instead of a headset (duh!), plenty of unlockables, and an eerie face-mapping application that puts your head in the game. The American Idol aspect is a nice fit; judges Randy and Simon critique your performance. The Idol scheme really helps this feel like a real event, even if the judges' comments are only tangentially related to your singing. It's even more fun in multiplayer where you can actually stage your own American Idol sing-off (just without voting from the audience at home). This is a fine capper to the series... albeit for a franchise that is likely DOA these days thanks to Sony's own SingStar and the upcoming karaoke+music monster Rock Band. Memory Score: Laura? 1550@http://www.fourhman.com/blog/ Farewell to the PS2 2007-09-20T21:01:37-05:00 http://www.fourhman.com/blog/archive/2007/06/star-drum-bully-1.html LEGO Star Wars 2released September 2006, purchased September 2006 LEGO Star Wars 2 was just as good as LEGO Star Wars 1. But also just as bad. I mean, they didn't fix a damn thing. The co-op camera still actively works against you, often stranding players in infinite-falls or forcing unexpected dropouts. Plus, one player can "push" the camera along, dragging the other player whether they want to move or not. It's a mess, and after all the generous buzz the Crappy Trilogy Version received, it sucks bantha poodoo that nobody bothered to polish up the Awesome Trilogy Version... because they knew it would sell anyway. (I wish I'd've snapped a picture of it, but during one level the Minikit counter went nuts and it showed a final tally of 11 out of 10.) It's even more annoying that the bugs weren't fixed because the game is, otherwise, superb. The conflation of the chibi-LEGO worldview and the Star Wars mythos is unavoidably compelling... and not that nobody tried to make Cute Star Wars happen before (**Super Bombad Racing**), but this particular package works because both licenses work. Somebody somewhere sure deserves a cookie for this, but they don't get another one until they get it 100% right. Memory Score: Two player racing in the first scene of New Hope, using hidden cars found during a convoluted sidequest. AWESOME. 1329@http://www.fourhman.com/blog/ Farewell to the PS2 2007-06-12T23:30:04-05:00 http://www.fourhman.com/blog/archive/2007/03/siren-hearts-hero.html Kingdom Hearts 2released March 2006, purchased May 2006 I can't recall for the life of me why I waited two months before buying KH2. Must have still been busy playing Trapt. Kingdom Hearts 2 upgraded the series by streamlining the gameplay, phoning in the plot, and adding a handful of really oddball movie choices (Pirates of the Caribbean? Tron?) Obviously I was really chuffed by the former, intrigued by the latter, and disappointed by the bit in the middle. It's great to get better gameplay. The item and ability management was much smoother, and the Gummi Ship portions rocked the freakin' casbah. After the drubbing the Gummi Ship got in the first game, it's clear the KH team took that as a challenge. It's a worthwhile game in its own right. More disappointing was the story. Initially, it's a cumbersome extension of the first game and the GBA sequel, Chains of Memories... so it feels very deep and RPG-like. Once Sora and his pals really get into it, the story takes a backseat as they just trot from world to world declaring to solve everybody's problems, be they related to the encroaching Heartless or not. It's repetitive and silly. And by the time you pick up the main thread later on, you've forgotten everything you probably didn't understand in the first place, so the revelations in the endgame fall flat. And, of course, Kingdom Hearts 2 is another one of those games that packs in tons of sidequests and exploration but demands that you fit it all in before triggering the final boss battle. I'll never understand that line of thinking. As far as the new worlds go, adding Lion King, Mulan, and Steamboat Willie was pure gold. Tron was interesting, definitely visually cool, but all other attempts at reviving the movie have been met with failure, so it reeks of mis-managed corporate synergy. Pirates of the Caribbean may be the most brutally obvious marketing choice... shoehorned into the game based solely on contemporary whims, regardless of how odd it feels compared to the rest of the game. Imagine if Eddie Murphy's Haunted Mansion movie had been a Hollywood blockbuster; you can bet it would have ended up in Kingdom Hearts. Disney is that shameless. Memory Score: Don't miss the great secret stuff after the credits. 1279@http://www.fourhman.com/blog/ Farewell to the PS2 2007-03-16T18:28:41-05:00 http://www.fourhman.com/blog/archive/2007/02/trapt-tormented-subsistence.html Traptreleased November 2005, purchased November 2005click here for my review written in March 2006! I loved the Deception series back on the PS1. Brilliant stuff. The series consisted of three PS1 games released over a relatively short span of time, so as the PS2 era plodded to a natural denuemont, I was increasingly surprised that the franchise seemed to be dead. After a five year absence, Deception returned in 2005, reinvented in name - if not in gameplay - as Trapt. Silly name. Probably would have been okay with it if it had been "Trapt" from the start, but "Deception" is soooo much cooler. I'm positive we can blame marketing for that one. But who to blame for the fact that Trapt is little more than an expansion pack for the PS1 versions? They did absolutely nothing to bring this wonderful series into the next generation. Same artificial limitations on trap inventory. Same no-effort movies and death-scene-cutaways. Same ugly castle interiors. After so long of a wait, Trapt just barely manages to avoid insulting existing fans. It's still ridiculously fun, in a PS1-nostalgia kind of way. Can you ever get tired of launching jerks into spiked platforms? And since it has been a good long time since I enjoyed a Deception game, I can almost give it a pass for looking and acting like a PS2 launch title. But it remains a letdown. It seems clear that Trapt did not spend much time in development, and was probably just done on weekends while the same team was doing their real work on the Fatal Frame games. Memory Score: Where are the TMD? 1251@http://www.fourhman.com/blog/ Farewell to the PS2 2007-02-06T23:01:20-05:00 http://www.fourhman.com/blog/archive/2006/12/we-love-god-of-star-wars.html LEGO Star Warsreleased March 2005, purchased March 2005click here for my review written in May 2005! After years of the LEGO games being pretty much edutainment garbage and the Star Wars games showing up with far more misses than hits, somehow a combination of the two became the year's sleeper hit. The power of positive buzz. This game hits on a lot of important notes: simple controls, great chibi look, easy drop-in/drop-out multiplayer, and a fantastic use of license (TWO licenses, incredibly). This is the kind of thing I'll fall for every time, particularly when it comes to co-op games, which are blindingly rare. You have to hope that LEGO Star Wars' sales opened the doors for other clever and accessible multiplayer titles... you know, where it isn't just frag this and explode that. Great little game. The flip side is that LEGO Star Wars has some serious flaws, all of which were overlooked by critics. If the game had not delivered such an overall fun and silly experience, it would have been slammed facefirst in somebody's empty cement in-ground pool for the floaty camera and confusing multiplayer glitches. Memory Score: Best use of the Prequel Trilogy ever 1218@http://www.fourhman.com/blog/ Farewell to the PS2 2006-12-29T00:21:07-05:00 http://www.fourhman.com/blog/archive/2006/11/up-your-poker-stars.html Sega Superstarsreleased November 2004, purchased November 2004 From the Justify Your Accessory Department. One year after the EyeToy's release, I don't think anybody had yet figured out what to do with it. This is another Play-style minigame collection, but again lacks any kind of tournament feature. How can a half-assed EA movie tie-in title figure this out, but two (and more!) EyeToy-focused games miss the obvious point. The way these dopey games handle multiplayer is the modern day equivalent of playing two man Mario Bros by handing the controller back and forth. Terrible. On the positive side, the year between Play and Sega Superstars shows off in polish... not to mention the incredible Sega fan-service. Each game is based on a classic Sega title, from Virtua Fighter to Sonic to NiGHTS to Space Channel 5 to Crazy Taxi to Monkey Ball to Samab de Amigo. Even freaking Billy hatcher is in there. None of them are very good, but the company reverence is fun. Just in case there's any Sega fans still out there. Memory Score: Best one: Puyo Pop 1177@http://www.fourhman.com/blog/ Farewell to the PS2 2006-11-13T20:57:46-05:00 http://www.fourhman.com/blog/archive/2006/08/grand-silent-auto-the-karaoke-room.html Grand Theft Auto: San Andreasreleased 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. 1099@http://www.fourhman.com/blog/ Farewell to the PS2 2006-08-10T23:16:38-05:00 http://www.fourhman.com/blog/archive/2006/07/extreme-sly-damacy.html DDR Extremereleased September 2004, purchased September 2004 I have only played this game twice. And not even at home. And not really me. You see, we've been going to an adoptive families party for the last two years, and we volunteer to bring a PS2 as one of the kids game stations. (WTF? Ninty is 4 teh kiddies!?!/111?!?!1) So far, the top games to set up are the Harry Potter EyeToy stuff and this version of DDR, because it also uses the EyeToy for a bunch of silly minigames. There's nothing quite like having ten kids all jumping on a dance pad while they watch themselves shaking virtual coconuts off a tree. It's a riot. Adding the EyeToy stuff to DDR is the biggest addition I've seen in years of DDR games. Unfortunately, at its peak, DDR turned into the Bemani Madden... yearly releases with new songs and not much else. This title was a nice upgrade. Extreme, even. Memory Score: Everybody always likes the game where you have to feed animals. 1074@http://www.fourhman.com/blog/ Farewell to the PS2 2006-07-07T19:58:35-05:00 http://www.fourhman.com/blog/archive/2006/05/prisoner-of-espn-burnout.html Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkabanreleased June 2004, purchased August 2004 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. 1050@http://www.fourhman.com/blog/ Farewell to the PS2 2006-05-31T23:00:17-05:00 http://www.fourhman.com/blog/archive/2006/05/revolver-of-darkness-outbreak.html Disgaea: Hour of Darknessreleased August 2003, purchased March 2004 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? 1031@http://www.fourhman.com/blog/ Farewell to the PS2 2006-05-15T23:59:41-05:00 http://www.fourhman.com/blog/archive/2006/05/treasure-of-the-crimson-butterfly-revolution.html Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterflyreleased December 2003, purchased December 2003 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. 1021@http://www.fourhman.com/blog/ Farewell to the PS2 2006-05-01T19:27:32-05:00 http://www.fourhman.com/blog/archive/2006/04/return-of-the-nemo-channel.html Space Channel 5: Special Editionreleased November 2003, purchased November 2003 Back during those four months when the Dreamcast was popular, I wanted this game. Space Channel 5 was the kind of oddball title that seemed to represent Gaming In The New Century. Even though I never owned a Dreamcast - and never played this game - I had some Space Channel 5 magnets on our fridge for years. So I was pretty excited when this PS2 Special Edition came out, compiling the original game and the never-released-in-the-US sequel. I knew going in that the graphics would be crappy, but I still wanted to pay homage to a brief envy of years past. Turns out, it's not that great a game. Almost every other rhythm music game out there is better than Space Channel 5, including the PaRappa / UmJammer PS1 games that preceded it. I'll agree that the style is fun - sort of an Austin Powers meets Star Trek on the Laugh-In set vibe - and that the characters are cool... but the gameplay itself is weak. I played it, but I never really enjoyed it. Memory Score: Space Michael! 1011@http://www.fourhman.com/blog/ Farewell to the PS2 2006-04-10T22:55:00-05:00 http://www.fourhman.com/blog/archive/2006/03/ddrsky-hutch-play-commando-2.html In light of the theoretical PS3 launch date, I'm going to artificially extend the regular Farewell to the PS2 feature. Starting next time, we're going to switch to bimonthly and only cover three games an entry. This should get us into August or later! DDRMAX2released September 2003, purchased September 2003 We enjoyed several DDRs back on the PS1, but I'm not sure why I waited for MAX2 to get one for the PS2. It's not like there is a great deal of change between versions. This game sparked a serious DDR-as-exercise phase, to the point that I set up a permanent DDR area in the basement. This series will kick your ass, even on the "low impact" exercise setting. The game tracks your burned calories and such, which looks pretty impressive in rather short order. You might recall the media suddenly realizing that DDR exists about this time, and half-assed stories slugged "a video game that IMPROVES your HEALTH?!?!?1//1/1/!??!?1" all over the place. I'm looking forward to DDR morphing into more of a lifestyle thing, where you can use your own music and regularly download new songs and dances. It could become a huge exercise tool if they would evolve it outside of pure video games. Favorite track: "Love at First Sight" by Kylie Minogue. Yes, it's in iTunes. Memory Score: You have to get two dance mats. It's a given. 1000@http://www.fourhman.com/blog/ Farewell to the PS2 2006-03-22T22:21:36-05:00 http://www.fourhman.com/blog/archive/2006/03/ninja-ape-assault-2-dead-amp.html Ape Escape 2released July 2003, purchased July 2003click 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 aren't just using the right stick for 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. 989@http://www.fourhman.com/blog/ Farewell to the PS2 2006-03-06T21:35:53-05:00