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| Random PS2 musings by curst 02/18/2003, 12:39pm PST | ||||
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| First, duuuuuuude. I hated Virtua Fighter 1 and 2 as well. Yet Virtua Fighter 4 is downright FANTASTIC. My biggest beef with the first two games was the physics - characters doing 500-foot-leaps into the air and floating down softly like a feather. It felt like everyone was duelling in a vast sea of molasses. VF4 is so much more fast-paced and in-your-face and badasstastic and so forth, it doesn't even feel like the same game. And while this may be supremely faggy of me in a Sims-ish way, I enjoy the customization you can get with your characters in VF4. You can transform Aoi from some stereotypical Oriental hottie to some lunatical Chinese opera character complete with bizarre kabuki wigs and creepy noh masks and shit.
Tekken 4 and Mortal Kombat 5 are also really cool games that newbies can just pick up and play much more easily, but VF4 is the most rewarding IMO. Soul Calibur 2 will likely look prettier, but not much else. So once you get any sort of console, I say make VF4 one of if not your very first purchase. The other fighters, while good, are mainly for when you have friends over and they don't want to take the time to master one or two of VF4's characters (after all this time I still am only really good with three of them). I didn't enjoy Capcom vs SNK 2 on the default PS2 controllers. I couldn't pull off half the moves properly and wound up jumping way too often. But I'd bet with a classic joystick controller, it'd be pretty good. Indeed, if you get an X-Box instead of a PS2, I've heard nothing but great things about the X-Box version of this game called Evolution Online. Lag-free 2D fighting online probably does equal great fun indeed. Now to turn-based strategy. I don't think Koei has ever made a sequel for Nobunaga's Ambition, but I believe Romance Of The Three Kingdoms is a similar style of game. (Isn't NA turn-based strategy with Oriental flava?) You might really enjoy ROTK7 for the PS2 - I dunno if the eighth version will be released here in the USA or not but that apparently isn't very likely, so I'd say just get 7. I don't like the way combat is handled in it a great deal (it's servicible, but not very good after playing the comparatively *great* combat of Dynasty Tactics), but otherwise it's a really solid game. Speaking of Dynasty Tactics, it makes me wish Koei would find a way to sort of meld it with ROTK (they're both games revolving around the Three Kingdoms legends of ancient China - only the manner in which the game plays is different). The in-between battle stuff in DT sucks, but the actual battles are extremely cool, and vice versa with ROTK. I've taken to relying on FAQs to handle all the in-between-battle crap, and then trying to figure out the strategy for the actual fights myself, and the end result is a very fun game. Other than these two titles, I don't even know if other turn-based games exist for consoles. Final Fantasy X was really cool - at least I enjoyed it much more than 7 or 8. There's still some really annoying things about it, though, so if you despise things like Marlboros or having to spend hours leveling up to take on the final bosses or to complete the secret quests, then you'll despise those things in FFX as well. Dynasty Warriors 3 (have I mentioned that Koei is my favorite game developer right about now?) is probably the game I play the most. It all depends on how much a simplistic old-school beatemup game with stripped-down RPG and RTS elements and head-banging hair-metal music appeals to you - for me the formula has proven to be perfect. What's ridiculous about it is that the lure of all the secret stuff you can find has proven irresistible to me, to the point where I'm using shitty characters I don't enjoy playing simply because I want to see if their uber-weapons and so forth can transform them into instruments of mass-slaughter. The only problem with this game and the XL expansion is that DW4 is right around the corner (supposedly in stores in late March), and it looks like it'll make enough legitimate improvements to render DW3 somewhat pointless. Anyway, DW3 simply *feels* more like a war than probably any RTS I've ever played aside from the Total War series (although I admittedly haven't seen the new C&C yet). The sense of scale is really well done. GTA3 & VC are of course great games. My PC is barely powerful enough to run GTA3 reasonably well, but even then I have massive problems with virtual memory and hard-drive thrashing since I only have 128MB RAM. So even though I wish I could play VC on my PC to enjoy the improved graphics, sound and controls, it's not likely that I could get good performance out of it, so I just got the PS2 version. If your PC is rather outdated like mine, you may be better off getting the PS2 version and dealing with the clumsier controls. Hitman 2 is another game that may be better on a PC that can handle it - it's just that mine can't handle it. Either way, it's really well done, so don't pass it up. Rachet And Clank has been really fun, basically Mario 3D except with a decent sense of humor and great art direction, plus it's at its core a really fun platformer. The problem is that it's the first console game where the lack of save-anywhere has become a real headache. I suck badly enough that after six tries I still haven't beaten the boss of Blarg Station, yet every time I die, I have to redo approximately 95% of the fucking level which is mostly comprised of boring jump puzzles that only serve to slow me down. So it's starting to get irritating. I don't mind replaying SMALL portions of the game if I can't beat a boss, but this is overdoing it. Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 is my favorite racing game to date, and the PS2 version is the one that boasts the most features. NHL 2K3 rocks oh-so-hard. Sadly, apparently the X-Box Live version is obviously even better, so I guess I'm missing out a little bit. NHL Hitz is good if you don't care about how realistic your hockey game is and want over-the-top fun. EA Sports' once unbeatable NHL series has now become too arcade-oriented to match NHL 2K3 for realism, while not being arcade enough to compete with NHL Hitz, then it suffers on top of that by Don Taylor's PAINFULLY inept attempts at turning it into a stand-up comic routine. DVD playback is problematic at best. Only use the PS2 for that as an absolute last resort. |
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