I had the opportunity to rent a free game at BlockBuster and I grabed this. At first it was a little hard to get into, but this game is addictive.

You play Sir Daniel Fortesque, a profesional soldier in real life (though his duties were mainly ceremonial).

Your skeleton rather is brought back to life to fight the evil Zarok. It’s fun, it’s witty and the game play is reasonable. The puzzles aren’t all that difficult, but some of the levels are, it’s a blast. The game is full of Monty Pythonesque humor and one liners.

The game is very well done with great background music and commentary to go along with it.

I think this is a keeper.

The game has a great site here MediEvil Resurrection

I’m a First Person Shooter fan, as long as the game in question uses the WASD keys and mouse to move around, I’m in and can usually jump in and start blasting away like nobody’s business. I have a few keyboard quirks, but I can usually hit F1 and update the controls in a few seconds.

But Poohbah has been telling me that PC gaming is dead, now I don’t much like the sound of that, but I’m game to give console gaming a try.

So this weekend, over at my wife’s family, an XBox with Halo 2 is brought along and we decide to give it a try. Basically I’m giving the whole experience a big thumbs down.

For me it’s all about the controls and the screen real estate. I’m not paying $300 for an xbox 360 so that I can have non-accurate controls for a first person shooter and have half of a tv screen to see what the heck I’m doing.

I sucked because basically you can’t shoot anyone on the move with the dual joystick method of controlling your guy. Now I’m sure if you’ve started off with Console FPS’s that you think this is natural. But it’s far inferior to a keyboard and mouse, and you just don’t know any better.

Now maybe if we had had a big screen, the split tv wouldn’t have been so bad, and an xbox 360 with the newest graphics and a game like the forthcoming Halo 3, but we’re talking a lot of coin to solve problems that don’t exist with PC gaming.

Other supposed advantages of console gaming:

PC’s crash, consoles don’t.
Well there’s this now, but in general I’ll give the consoles that they’re pretty stable, but so is a PC if it’s taken care of. A console is just a dumbed down PC, and if you could install apps and get email on it, it would crash too. Windows XP is a good stable platform for gaming, and Mac OSX is even more bullet proof.

Sometimes a game doesn’t work on a PC, this never happens with consoles.
Heck just meet the System Requirements on the side of the box. How hard is it to read? The last game that I had trouble with was Tribes 2, and they screwed it up by releasing too early (among other things, but I’m not going there). Since then I’ve played lots of title games you’ve heard of, all work fine if they meet the spec.

It’s cheaper to develop on the console.
I’lll absolutely give you this one. But that doesn’t help me, it helps the game company. This is really the biggest advantage, A popular game and game system can be a cash cow for the company and the developers can target to one or a few stable systems, rather than trying to debug which application they’re game might be interfering with on a PC.

I’m not greedy, I just want a console with controls that don’t suck for FPS gaming. The answer may be coming.

They stressed it was just a test, quickly thrown together in just a few weeks. For this, the analog control stick peripheral was used. We held it in our left hand to control the forwards, backwards, and side-strafing motions, as well as having access to triggers in back for scanning; meanwhile, the right hand used the main Revolution remote control to behave just like a mouse on a personal computer. It was a very natural application and felt pretty smooth, but since it wasn’t a polished game it did feel a bit awkward at times, making us wonder what kind of things a developer could do to calibrate these kinds of controls for users. Nonetheless, the potential is absolutely huge for the FPS genre. If Nintendo can execute on that potential, Revolution could easily become the ultimate platform for shooters.

I guess it really is about innovation.

Last week the fine folks at insomniac games release the 4th game in the Ratchet & Clank series, Ratchet Deadlocked.

We grabbed a copy tonight and in traditional Ratchet & Clank fashion it’s a keeper. Each game it clearly getting more complicated.

If you haven’t played the R&C games prior, I wouldn’t suggest this game a the first place to start. You’ll miss out on a lot. Besides the 3 previous games are all classics so you can pick them up for a song.

This game picks up where the 3rd game left off. If you enjoyed the battle arena in Up your Arsenal, this game a boat load more of that. There is a single player game mode, but the point of this game is “Blowing $#% up online”, more importantly, using the ubber cool R&C weapons we all know and love to blow other people up.

Now I just need to get my PS2 online wirelessly because it’s not in the same room as my Internet connection.

Grab a copy of this excellent game! You won’t be disappointed.

Wow, just when I was about to give up on the PSP, I played with Virtua Tennis on a buddies PSP today for a few minutes.

WOW addictive. This game is a sure addition to anyones PSP game collection. Fast loading, amazing graphics, amazingly easy to control game play. Without any instructions I was easily able to pickup on the basics. Wasn’t able to beat anyone, but was able to volley quite a bit.

This is a definite keeper game. A more complete review can be found here on gamespot