The Weekness for 09/20 – 09/26

This week has been pretty Sony-heavy for me. Before anyone accuses me of being a shill for them, I want to make it clear I do have a 360 and Wii as well . . . I just have not been playing anything on them unfortunately.

I’m still bashing my way through Yakuza 2 for the PS2, my initial thoughts can be found here and I’m hoping to finish up the game over the weekend so I can put together my review for next week. I wrongly guessed that I only had a few hours left while in chapter 13 of 16, but I ended up blowing five more hours before reaching chapter 14. Whoops.

I purchased Wipeout HD and Mega Man 9 through PSN last night and had a chance to spend a little time with both, but Yakuza overrules both for my attention at the moment, I should have more thoughts on those next week as well. Wipeout is quite a handsome game and seems like it will be a good pick-up-and-play to have around. I haven’t spent much time with any of the Wipeouts since the original on the PS1, so if any in the same boat out there is looking for an opinion from someone who isn’t preoccupied crying about the variances between this and the PSP game with many of the same tracks and vehicles, well, then this is the place to watch.

Mega Man 9 is fucking brutal. Awesome.

In the world of DS, I picked up The World Ends with You and finished up Hotel Dusk: Room 215 last weekend. TWEWY hasn’t done anything for me after putting three hours into it. I think the battle mechanics are interesting, but there’s nothing enjoyable about it that I can find. I’m not feeling much love in the story department either, but I hear it gets pretty wild, so I’ll keep my fingers crossed. The game will stay in my DS and I’ll pick it up whenever it’s convenient, but I don’t know . . . doesn’t seem like my cup of tea.

Hotel Dusk was good while it lasted. For $20, I definitely can’t complain. The writing is what really drew me in, appropriate I suppose for a game devoid of any type of action, and the few puzzles that were there were integrated into the story well enough. My favorite thing about the story is that it’s based in the real world. If they had started tossing ghosts and magic at me, the game wouldn’t hold the same gravitas I found it to have. My one complaint is the unlikelihood all the characters staying in the hotel on the particular night the story takes place is a little far fetched. Some characters have a good reason to be there specifically for that night, but others seem to just have happened to be coming through and coincidentally are critical to the mystery at hand. This is kind of a shame, I don’t think it would have been too difficult to give everyone a motive for being there at the same time given the nature of the plotline.

I hope to have more on all these games very soon, stay tuned.