The USS Quad Damage

The very reason I bought the gamecube was to get Animal crossing, PN03, and of course, Ikaruga. I recently purchased PN03 and Ikaruga which, coupled with my initial purchasing of Animal Crossing, completed my "collection" for the 'cube. In short, they're all great games, and meet my (rather high) expectations. Considering I'm not the kind of guy who shells out upto $100 bucks on video games, I think these particular games are worth it.

Those of you who've been to my house have seen at least a little bit of Animal Crossing. It's not really a video game, as such. It actually seems like a great game for little kids to play. It's quite fun to play because it's... um... I'm not quite sure why. There's nothing to actually do in the game. You can collect insects, catch fish, cut down and plant trees, dig up fossils, etc... if you want to. Or not. You can write letters that no one really reads... or not. Who really knows, but it's quite a nice serene game where you don't do much of anything. Either way, there's always plenty to do. I don't want to give away any specifics of the particular game I'm playing, mainly because I intend to share that around... my bizzle.

(see? I was doing the animal crossing thing where you talk like a little kid with a very small attention span! Joyous.)

Animal crossing's a very "wide" game. Its got a lot of stuff you can do, but there's little point to actually doing it. However, to get the "goodness" of the game across I'll tell a little story. I was playing the game on Mother's day. I went up to Tortimer (the mayor) and he asked me whether I'd called my mother. Clearly, I hadn't. He gave me a phone to put in my house so I wouldn't forget to call her. That's the kind of game Animal Crossing is.

Ikaruga is a game me and my brother played 2 player (I still haven't had a chance to play it 1P yet, since my bro keeps wanting to join in). It was quite difficult. The kick is, it's exactly the same in single player. I'm not even thinking about chaining, it's freaking hard enough staying alive. Having said that, under easy and 2 player, we made it to level 3 (out of 4) already. In any case, it's almost exactly like I thought it'd be. That's kind of the thing with a great game. You think about how you'd like it to be, and it's like that. Lots of problem solving, so your brain is always engaged. Lots of fun.

PN03 has a big fat load of style. The first thing that disappointed me was that Vanessa doesn't dance to the beat. That was one thing I was really looking forward to, that she would tap along to the song as she kicked ass. Instead, it seems the tapping is merely an animation. It's still quite cool (and quite hot), but it would really add a lot of punch if she did it to the beat. The music is also very cool. The second thing I noticed was the lack of colours. It's distinctly 16-bit. Considering how much of it is grey, you'd think the designers would've biased the colours somewhat to have more shades of grey, because the colour banding can be distracting.

Anyway, the gameplay in pn03 is kind of as expected. The only issue is that in the reviews, I got the impression that it was a shooter(which it is). Indeed, the reviews warned against expecting it to be like Max Payne, which it most definitely was not. Upon actually playing the game with this in mind, however, it actually seems a tad too much like max payne. You get the "push a button to turn 180 degrees", but quick 90 degree turns would also have been handy. Anyway, it's a small issue, and the game's still great.

This is why I'm not a games reviewer. Anyway, back to playing...