Mano-a-mano

I finished Assassin's Creed II with most of the achievements, and it was great! Right up there with Brütal Legend as a serious game-of-the-year contender, as far as I'm concerned. I have a few complaints, but don't let them dissuade you from checking this game out. First, teaching the player a relatively tricky new technique during a timed mission that cannot be restarted while surrounded by numerous platforms that are likely to interfere with that technique is bad design; thankfully, that mission is optional. Second (and this one contains some big spoilers), whoever wrote the dialogue for the scenes surrounding your fistfight with the Pope (yes, a fistfight with the Pope!) should be fired. We went from intriguing and beautiful science fiction/history/conspiracy story to big dumb action movie for one of this epic game's pivotal scenes, and it just felt so very wrong; it didn't completely ruin the experience for me, but it certainly was disappointing.

I've started playing Eternal Darkness, and after the first two chapters, I'm wondering what all of the hype is about. The dialogue is painful, the story is barely cohesive so far, and combat is pretty frustrating... Maybe it gets better later.

I've been on a bit of a Klonoa binge lately. Since picking-up the Wii remake of the original PlayStation game, I've tracked-down the PS2 sequel, as well as the two Game Boy Advance releases. These are beautiful games, and reminiscent of Ristar in terms of gameplay.

Ooh, and I got to play with a PSX DVR the other day! A local shop got one in, but wants $500 for it :(

I'd love to see something like Broadcom's Crystal HD chip as an add-in card for older computers (especially my Power Mac G4). The ability to play HD Flash videos would make just about every computer from 2000 on capable of functioning as a solid day-to-day workstation.

Speaking of old computers, I got Soul Reaver running on Windows 7, but it stutters so badly that it's pretty much unplayable. Now I'm debating whether I should shell-out for the Dreamcast version instead of having to hook-up my Windows 98 SE machine to play it...