Spluuurrrge!!!

It all started two days ago, while I was out wandering a mall to kill some time. It'd been a while since I'd had any significant amount of time to kill and a long time since I'd been in a mall, so I gave it a shot. I found myself in a Wal-Mart, watching some guy with a list of games dig through the new batch of $20 video game two-packs. Turned-out he was looking for a specific few that had trade-in values at EBGames of over $20 :) I ended-up stumbling across a copy of The Red Star for PS2 for $20. I've yet to see that game anywhere else for any price, so I'm glad I picked it up. This is a game that almost didn't get made, and it's sad to think so. It's an interesting new twist on the side-scrolling beat-'em-up genre (Final Fight, Streets Of Rage) with graphics and controls that are reminiscent of 2D shooters (R-Type, Ikaruga). The fact that it's based on a popular graphic novel just means there's even more to potentially enjoy. Definitely worth a look.

I found myself back out in the land of rampant consumerism yesterday to check back on a few good deals I'd seen the day before, and ended-up with Ninety-Nine Nights for XBOX 360, Mercenaries and Breakdown for XBOX (both backwards compatible on the 360), and Metal Slug Anthology and Killer 7 for PS2. These are just some titles I'd been meaning to pick-up if I ever saw them cheap, and the really nice thing was that none of them were over $20, save for Metal Slug which was $40 (regularly $45~$50). N3's kind of a boring game to actually play for more than 30 minutes at a time, but it is very pretty and has some beautiful cutscenes :) Mercenaries is just something I'd kept hearing good things about (Grand Theft Auto in a modern warfare setting), and it is a lot of fun. Breakdown, similarly, is another game I'd heard good things about, and they were right; boring graphics, convoluted controls (reminiscent of Trespasser, another game that aimed for realistic first-person immersion), yet wholly endearing gameplay that keeps you coming back for more. Metal Slug means I get to play Metal Slug 6 at home; that's all that really matters :) I'm not sure how I feel about the new backgrounds, but as long as it's better than 4 and at least as good as 5, I'm happy. Finally, Killer 7 is just weird. Very, very weird... And engrossing. I have no idea what's I'm doing or what's going on, and I barely understand the control system, but I get the feeling this is gonna be one of those games that's rewarding in the long run. Oh yeah, if you're on XBOX Live, download Aegis Wing! It's Free!

Ooh, I also picked-up The Fountain on HD DVD, and Firefly on DVD (it was $25; I had to). With the latest XBOX 360 HD DVD update, it's gonna be nice to be able to use my DTS decoder :)

Luckily, I found some work this past week that'll help pay for all of this! ;) I neglected to mention that the system upgrade I did last week only had one IDE controller but four IDE devices, so I picked-up a PCI IDE controller for them. Then I took a job that involved picking-out the best parts from three systems (300MHz Pentium II, 350MHz Pentium II, 500Mhz K6-2) and building the best possible system; he ended-up with the 350MHz PII, an Intel 440BX-based motherboard, 192MB of RAM, and a 32MB AGP TNT M64, all running Windows 2000 Pro. Finally, I did a clean installation of Windows XP on an AMD Athlon 3200+ system (nForce2 Ultra, 1GB DDR400, 128MB AGP8X BFG GeForce 6600GT OC); it was nice to work on a faster system again :)