G-pinions

Being out of town with nary a console to enjoy can be torturous at times - Okami and my PS2 sit tragically in my travel bag, silently hating me for not having found the time and place to enjoy them properly. And I silently hate Tom, for getting the obscene pleasure of playing Okami when I cannot.

I'm also sad to hear that Mario Basketball doesn't live up to the relatively decent standards of the Nintendo sports line. Only having my DS with me at the moment, I'm starting to see a fairly large gap in the systems library. As many brilliantly addicting pick-up-and-play games as there are, I find myself thirsting for a more linear, narrative adventure to sink my teeth into and I'm coming up empty.

After preparing every ridiculous dish under the sun and exhausting every game mechanic Cooking Mama had to offer, it was recently relegated to the time-out pocket in my DS bag. I popped in Trace Memory, a long-owned, never-explored budget DS purchase of mine, hoping for some kind of GAME I can actually PLAY through. You know, play a level, get a feel for it, fight a boss character/situation/fire of some regard, and see the end credits before you know it. Instead I'm tasked, as a girl of thirteen, with finding the memories of a ghost boy on an island where my deadbeat father may or may not be. Really, I should have expected at least two of those things looking at the cover, but it doesn't mean I have to like it.

*Begin tangent*
Really, when did fucking adventure games get so damn unmysterious? What happened to the Myst-influenced era of exploring, when you would wander around a creepily quiet locale clicking on anything that looked remotely out of place? Now it's all "The gate looks like it's missing a gear." And then you walk the only way you can walk, a path dead-ending with a nice blatant view of said color-highlighted gear. I'm already wandering why the creepy sea captain is allowing a thirteen year old girl to wander an island (with the word Blood in the name) alone, at least let me find a goddamned gear by myself. Phew.
*End tangent*

These types of experiences are just hard to ingest as a Western gamer, unless they have the wit and originality of a Phoenix Wright. I'm glad to see Bioware getting into the DS racket, but where are our Indigo Prophecys, our Okamis even? There are so many great adventure games with unique game mechanics; now that we've explored back and forth what the DS can do, why not build a special story with that in mind?

I'll buy Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin like every other red-blooded DS owner, but I tired of the last one without the enjoyable replayability of SoTN (collecting a finite dropped soul from each enemy type is not the same as badass random weapon drops, for the record). New Super Mario Bros. is also missing that special spark somehow, and I have little reason to take it out of the Pocket of Relegation these days after having beaten it and grabbing a few extra coins. While the Idiots' Guide to Being a Girl would probably keep me busy for a few hours, it just won't do it for me in the long run. Final Fantasy remakes don't do it for me either, though Contact looks like an RPG I'll actually want to play.

As much as the PSP more and more resembles a slow-motion car wreck, I'm missing it's special brand of games that may as well be on a TV screen - I would kill a man for a Daxter, Syphon Filter, or even Pursuit Force on my DS right now. Maybe the PSP is a better choice when you're on vacation and can only bring one portable system, and the DS has it's place set on the train between home and work/school/fleeing the state?

All that said, I will definitely be buying Clubhouse Games next week. I'm just bitchy.