Football fever!

Well, it's Monday night and I'm glad the NFL football season is here. Monday Night Football is a good show to blog to. Anything that doesn't make me laugh and that I can follow without watching the TV screen is OK I guess.

Anyway, I've been playing up a storm since my last post. Not as much as I used to in my younger days, but still quite alot. Both indoors and out, as I finally got around to buying a DS Lite. Now my old DS is a dedicated alarm clock, and I can play all my single-card multiplayer games with non-DS owners too! I'm not sure two-player math drills will be very popular with the guests, but I'm sure Big Brain Academy can offer some surprisingly fun moments.

I've also been doing some more diving in the discount bins while riding out my PS2 and Gamecube. The game that's taking up most of my gaming time right now is The Warriors. This game scratches me RIGHT where I itch! I've been waiting for a good 3D brawler since the early PS1 days. And I don't know how they do it, but Rockstar has a real knack for making characters that are fun to interact with. The fighting engine is rather simplistic, but offers just enough potential variety to keep me entertained. I like the way the grappling is open-ended enough to make me feel like I'm being creative at times. I think that's a very important feeling to instill in the player.

I knew that game wouldn't disappoint. The Warriors was the carrot dangling on a pole that I used to push myself through Dirge of Cerberus. What a stinker! This is the perfect example of how when you try to do too many things at once, more often than not they'll all suck. You're basically running down a hallway shooting everything that moves. That's the game. Sometimes the hallway looks like rooftops, sometimes the hallway looks like a forest, sometimes the hallway looks like the inside of a house, but that's all it is. That, and a bunch of frequent, long cutscenes that do a better job of showing you all the cool things you CAN'T do in this game. The gameplay was just enticing enough to keep me going. Barely. It DID make me realize something interesting about hand-eye interaction in shooters that ended up helping me on the shooter I'm working on now. So just for that, and the myriad of unlockables I'm glad I own it, but it'll be a while before I play it again. A LONG while.

OK I've ranted enough, so here's a quick list of the other games I'm playing right now:

• Pikmin 2
• Super Monkey Ball 2
• Magnetica
• Advance Wars (felt like breaking it out again)