Yeah, Joe, I mean, I wouldn't tear the game to SHREDS -- it's not that it's awful, just wholly average. Also, yeah, it has a cult following, but so does every little game that most people don't know or care about, even Haunting Ground and Rule of Rose. As it stands, I'd rather play it than the latest Halo shitfest. "Where are you finding this so damn cheap? " There's this store that is LITERALLY 2 minutes from my house (and I live 20 minutes away from EVERYTHING) called Granny Beas. People from all over the midwest come to it. No joke. It is the greatest used gaming/movie/etc store ever. Also, in greenwood -- about 40 minutes from me -- there's a disc replay, and it has so many awesome deals. I got Tomba! there for $5 (it goes for like $80), Persona 2 for $20 (sold it later for $70), Ikaruga for $15 (and it goes for like $80 I think, or it did). There are seriously 20 pawn shops in my town, or around them, and I live in a super small town and am surrounded by smaller towns... so, yeah, who knows, guess I'm just lucky, but my game collection has always been pretty fucking awesome (till I kinda stopped caring and tradedeverything last year for a $1500 laptop.. though I still use my windows me computer most of the time!) and I haven't paid shit for any of them. My favorite deal was Castlevania: Dracula X for the SNES. Bought it for $3, sold it later for $92. And it was an AWFUL game, easily the worst in the series next to the Game Boy one starring a chick. Also, the Wario games are badass, those are the only games I even really like on the GameBoy, and the Virtual Boy Wario game is awesome. I really like the Virtual Boy actually, they just should've made it where it didn't hurt your fucking eyes after staring at it so long. ANYWAY, Treasure made a Wario game for the GameCube that's fun and has no depth and can be beaten in like an hour (it has the Strider 2 thing, where if you die, you continue, and you start right back where you were -- btw, Strider 2 is one of the most fun and awesome games ever made, HIGHLY reccomended, even if it's short, just download it and burn it, even if you don't like the first strider, this game is AMAZING, you're flying around and cutting robots heads off and jumping from building to building and riding on mechanical dragons throughout the city while people shoot lasers at you; seriously the most fun and action packed game, with awesome hand drawn graphics, just fucking awesome.... Capcom, again!). Also, the WarioWare games are SO fucking fun. Wario just rules, period. I hate Perfect Dark, it was so overrated, after the first level it gets boring quickly. It's one of those games that people remember liking a lot in 1999 but playing today, they're like "ugh, what garbage." Trust me on this one -- do not cloud your memories of the game by playing it again, haha. I played it recently and me and my friend both went "UGH." and put in Goldeneye. I saw an auction on Ebay last year where someone was selling 10 Perfect Dark cartridges for $1 -- $1 for 10 cartridges! I almost bought it, instead I bought 25 shitty N64 games for $2.99 (free shipping too!), just awful forgettable shit like that Konami game HYBRID HEAVEN -- I turned around and traded them, haha.. at Granny Beas, you can trade 2 games on one system for one game.. so I traded in those shitty games and got 12 new games.. I got the Ogre Battle game for the N64, probably the best game on the system, and it goes for like $60, haha. Forgot to mention that I got Chrono Trigger -- with the manual -- at Granny Beas, too, for $6. Haha. Sold it earlier this year for $74. And yeah TimeSplitters 2 is pretty fun at times. I played it a lot with Norton. I just am not into FPS's. But, I think Halo is by far the worst FPS I've ever played. So clunky and dull. And I'm with Joe: I played the first Halo before I knew the popularity of the series, and just never understood the deal.
And, yeah, my favorite GameCube shoot em up besides Ikaruga is actually Radio Allergy, which was re-released on the Wii, with Chaos Field and another game, I think the package is called Ultimate Shooter Collection, and it's totally worth getting, if anyone has a Wii, again I'm sure you can get it for $10 easily. The best shooter of last generation was Treasure's Gradius V.. or perhaps R-Type Final... both on the PS2. Actually, I'm
sure Thunderforce 6 was, but I haven't played it... I just know that Thunderforce 5 was awesome. I have around 40 shoot em ups for the ps1 and 2 and other systems. CAVE is my favorite developer. I'm actually thinking of designing a bullet hell game for the next video game I design (though game design is something I'm really lazy with -- I made Adam Cooley's Funhouse a year ago, a first person bump-into-walls game, and I still haven't bothered with version 2, cuz I'm so lazy).
Anyway, I'm now playing Vib Ribbon:
Kinda fun, highly inspiring graphically brilliant PSX side scrolling adventure that builds levels based upon the CD's you put in. So, like, if it's a loud scary Merzbow album maybe it'll have tons of villians. It measures frequencies and volume shifts and shit to create the terrains and enmies and what have you. It honestly
sounds a lot cooler than it is, but just to be able to put in a Scissor Shock cd and play levels "based" on it is nice. I mean, they made, what, 15 Monster Rancher games based around putting cd's into your psx.. (anyone remember how they used to release those "master lists", haha? In the back of magazines, they'd have, like, 1000 different cd's listed and would list the monster it'd create... PUT IN THE GREAT MILENKO TO CREATE A CHAT-ER-NOOK!)
jUST downloaded this:
Bishi Bashi Special (PS1)... a game which comprises of several minigames begging such instructions as 'shake the can of soda' or 'fire the man onto the plate'. It's fun to play but doesn't make a lot of sense....
Might play caveman simulator Tales of the Sun later.