The PS2

Currently Reading: Day Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko

Here's a sure sign my wife has been playing Gran Turismo a little too much (it's a racing game). Last week we added yet another little toy to our PS2 which is growing larger all the time. We've only had it a few weeks and we already have 12 games, 2 guitar controllers, a taiko drum controller and now a steering wheel. Oh yes, it's true, my wife picked up the steering wheel last week and we've both really been enjoying the racing game. Personally, I drive better when I'm using the joystick because that's how I learned to play the game in the first place. Plus, I tend to over-correct when I'm using the steering wheel so the car keeps going back and forth and fishtailing and spinning out when I mess up the turns.

Anyway, as I was saying, sure sign CC's been playing the game too much. She was looking at used cars the other day over on the Car Max site, just browsing, seeing what's out there, that sort of thing. She's got 5 cars pulled up, looking at the specs and she's showing them to me and she points out that this one model in particular has more horsepower than the others. My first thought was "uh, we're not looking for a street racer here." :-)

We're certainly enjoying the PS2 though. Yeah, it's not the latest and greatest video game machine on the market today but you know, it's affordable, it's reliable, and there are a LOT of games out there for it, both new and used. Yes, I'm fully aware that just by saying such a thing I sound REALLY old right now. It's supposed to be about the graphics or the sound or whatever. And here I am grading it like it's a used car. For CC and I it really only comes down to one thing: entertainment value. We're having fun with it and that's all that matters.

So, what kind of games have we been playing besides the above mentioned racer? Well, we've been sort of bouncing around from game to game, at least I have anyway. CC, until recently, was hooked on a game called Katamari Damacy. It's most definitely an original game, that's for sure. You play a prince of the cosmos and your job is to help rebuild the stars that the king sort of wiped out. You do this by gathering stuff from Earth. But you don't just run around gathering stuff. Oh no, you have a ball and you roll that ball around and it's sticky so it picks things up. The more things you pick up, the bigger the ball gets. The bigger the ball gets, the bigger the things you can pick up.

When you first start out you're rolling the ball around picking up little things like cherries and thumbtacks and maybe sticks of gum. As the game progresses, you move outside gathering up balls and small animals, even dogs and cats. Then later you're grabbing people, cows and bears, then cars and boats, then trees and buildings, then supertankers and small islands and clouds and giant squid and, well you get the idea. In between the normal missions which entail getting the ball to a certain size within a certain amount of time, you also do a few special missions like trying to gather as many crabs as possible to build the constellation Cancer, or maybe the largest bear you can find for Ursa Major.

What else do we have? Let's see here, we've got Guitar Hero of course. That's what prompted us to get the PS2 in the first place. We've got a couple of adventure games, one based on Full Metal Alchemist and the otehr about a spirit wolf. We've also got a couple of shooter's, Ghost in the Shell and Destroy All Humans.

About the only thing the games in our collection have in common is that we seem to be aiming at the odder end of the batch. Yes, we do have the one racing game and we've also got one of the Tekken games (which CC beats my butt badly at) but otherwise we tend to go more for games with originality or based on something we already liked.

Don't worry, I'm not going to start doing video game reviews. I don't do book reviews either and rarely do movie reviews so this won't ever become a video game guide. It's just what CC and I have been doing this past week :-)