For the first time since summer 07, I'm not taking any classes and I don't have a job. So I've got a lot of time to clear out my backlog. I'm gonna focus on old-ass games that I'll probably dump on eBay after I'm done with them. Right now, that's:

Amplitude
Burnout 3
Culdcept
Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Director's Cut
Jet Set Radio Future
Mark of Kri
Onimusha 3
Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal
Yakuza

Yeah, I said old-ass. I'm gonna start with Burnout 3.

Seriously.

I picked up Psychonauts again today to try and finish it. I was about 6 hours into it when I stopped a while back, and figured now was as good a time as any to finish. The game was very much acclaimed, after all, with some hailing it as one of the best platformers of last gen.

After almost finishing the game today, I question those people's mental capacity.

Psychonauts's core gameplay is incredibly generic platforming collect-a-thon. There's nothing really special outside of the psi powers, but most of them are just different names given to basically the same effect we've seen before. Nothing about the gameplay feels like it was done after the Nintendo 64 platformers. It doesn't even seem to integrate any of the refinements introduced by Jak and Daxter or Ratchet and Clank.

Not only is the gameplay average, the controls and camera seem ripped out of 1998. Seriously, I know this game is from 2005, but dealing with the camera...

There are certain deals that people talk about well after they're over. TRU's B2G1, RB1's insane trade-in price at BBV, and TRU's awesome year end sale of 2005 all come to mind. But the one that I think people will be talking about forever will be Pepsi Stuff 2008.

For those that aren't familiar with the promotion, I'll give ya a run down. For a long time, Pepsi has had promotions where you could redeem caps or codes on caps to get stuff. Oftentimes the stuff was pretty basic Pepsi-branded crap, like towels or wallets. Recently, they've allowed users to trade in codes for mp3 downloads. This year, however, you could redeem codes for select products at Amazon. These included CDs, DVDs, electronic accessories (earbuds and what not), and mp3 downloads. The selection was limited, but there was still some good stuff there, including full seasons of Voltron and King of the Hill and albums by LCD Soundsystem, The White Stripes, and Justice.

In early May, the Pepsi Stuff...

So I recently started getting into Bioshock again, and I'm mildly disappointed.

- The Big Daddy fights aren't fun at all, especially early on. There's no real strategy to them; just throw the best ammo you have at them and hope for the best.

- The basic enemies kinda fall flat and are a little too repetitive.

- I feel no real incentive to use plasmid powers in any sort of creative way and find myself using the same ones over and over.

- There's not enough ammo to make gunfights worthwhile. The wrench is also so powerful that it becomes my go-to weapon in most situations.

- The Big Daddy fights, in addition to not being any fun, force me to conserve ammo as much as possible, only exasperating the aforementioned problems.

- The fact that I can only use a limited number of plasmids and tonics at a time and have to hunt down gene banks to change them is ing stupid. It encourages the use of a guide so I don't...

In my continuing series of blog posts talking about old-ass games I got for cheap, it's time to show a little love for The Darkness. I suck at non-technical writing, so here goes nothin'. There also may be spoilers.


IIRC, The Darkness was one of the earlier announced/previewed next-gen games. And like almost every other game shown early on in or right before a new console generation, it was delayed for forever (Dark Sector, I'm also looking at you), so the game didn't come out until last year. It met with generally positive reviews, but being released in July didn't seem to help, and the game has been a constant fixture in clearance sales.

Now, I can see why someone wouldn't want to shell out $60 for this game. It's short. Very short. Like beat-it-over-a-weekend short. And the multiplayer is apparently full of epic amounts of fail. There also aren't many reasons to play the game again after you've beaten it outside the achievements.
...

Even though we have 2 months to go, I'm gonna put together a list of my favorite deals from 2008, anyway. There won't be restricted to vidya games, and I may update it as I remember what I got.

Pepsi Stuff
About 60 CDs, 4 DVDs, and a 2 GB flash drive, almost entirely free. I really don't think you can get much better than that, especially since albums by Joanna Newsome, LCD Soundsystem, and Okkervil River were included in the promotion. Of course, I should have gotten in on it a week earlier, as the big red button went bye-bye literally a day or two after I started. I would have liked to get in on the King of the Hill and Voltron DVDs, but it was still great.

I'm still kinda bummed about not snagging Paramore's Riot before it was pulled.

$32 for Rock Band 1 from Blockbuster
Whoever was controlling BB's trade-in prices is ing retarded. Seriously. Everyone in the world was going to be dumping their copies of RB1 as soon as RB2...

I got King Kong for the 360 from that Best Buy sale for $5.28, and I'm having a pretty fun time with it. Sure, there are graphical glitches and what not, but the core experience is very enjoyable. There is just something inherently awesome in running around a jungle throwing spears at velociraptors. Seriously, it's almost like a Jurassic Park game (which I would love to see, BTW).

Anyone else?

There are a couple of things in modern games which seem to be holdovers from the past that really shouldn't be around anymore.

Awful Save Systems
I remember back in the 90s and earl 2000s being able to save anytime, anywhere in many of the PC I played. This obviously wasn't really feasible on the consoles then, but now with hard drives becoming the standard, why the hell do I still have to deal with checkpoints or crappy autosave points? Why can't I save anytime I ing want in Grand Theft Auto 4, Halo 3, or Call of Duty 4? Sometimes, I can get X% of the way through a level, but then get my ass handed to me by some insanely large group of enemies and have to start all the way back at the last checkpoint. This isn't ing fun, it's frustrating and discourages me from playing the game. A save-anywhere feature would make the retread through the level a one-time occurrence (assuming I didn't save along the way, in the case it would be a shorter retread) and would encourage...