G-pinions

Personally, I dig it. Simple, ridiculous, pure Katamari. Not as good as the first game, but better than the Japanese cover. It seems to be getting a lot of hate, but it could have been infinitely worse. Oh, and obviously ignore the Gamefly watermark (it's the only big pic I could find).

So I finally own a DS, and it's sleek and it's sexy and it's blue. Good thing too, as I was starting to accumulate a decent library of GBA and DS games with nothing to play them on. Now I just have to import my very own copy of Electroplankton, and I'll be in a state of uninterruptible joy for the next year or so.

I've been playing quite a bit of Pirates! for Xbox, despite feeling very torn about it. It's fun, and more or less what I expected it to be, but it just doesn't have the same enormously adventurous feel as the original. For all it's different gameplay styles and supposed open-endedness it actually feels fairly linear, which is really counterintuitive to the true Pirates! experience. I don't know why they had to dumb it down for console gamers and make the map smaller and such; you'd think that anyone willing to drop $40 on a game about Pirates expects a modicum of sailing. My full column about the game will be up later this week.

In fairly awesome news, they're apparently doing their best to make sure RE5 runs at 60fps. They're also acknowledging that it could lead to previously impossible gameplay situations, and I'm quite thrilled about this being a framerate whore. I really hope Rare doesn't drop the ball with PDZ and take their usual "we don't give a crap about framerate" stance; though Conker L&R was fine, so maybe they've finally learned that it really does contribute a lot to the visuals. Speaking of PDZ, Microsoft really needs to give up some solid release information about the 'ol three sixty. It's getting fairly ridiculous at this point - no price, no date, no more than a couple of games confirmed for launch. My biggest questions are whether the multiplatform 360 games are going to make launch, such as King Kong and Gun, because I'm a lot more interested in them than most of the exclusive games (unincluding Oblivion and perhaps Dead Rising). In theory the launch could be three months from yesterday, and gamers still have no idea how much food they need to not be eating to afford this thing. Also (and this is almost worth it's own post), an idea struck me the other day - why would Microsoft not just release the system at an incredible price point, such as $250? I know they're already taking a big loss on each system sold, and probably will throughout it's lifespan, but they're a company that can afford such things. They would sell significantly more systems, and it would look like a lot better to consumers than a theoretically very expensive PS3. The only way they're going to have a shot at the gold this generation is to get as many 360s into people's homes as quickly as possible. Maybe they could even have an early adopter program, then raise the price after the new year? Would it not be worth a loss now to have a much wider audience when all the big guns actually come out? I suppose I don't know any more about business than the average schmuck off the street, but it seems like a solid idea to me. But hey, we still don't how much it will be at launch, so I guess anything is possible.

Besides that? Tom and I still need to finish Cookies & Cream, I'll be writing up Samurai Western and Makai Kingdom soon enough, and later this month, Hulk! Good times indeed.