Well … I was going to leave the In fact, I found myself comparing and contrasting LucasArts’ “Escape from Monkey Island” against Oddworld and the former (while a great game and extremely funny), didn’t come off too well even though it is a port from PC. Monkey Island has a weird save where you have to begin with a saved game and then only save over it over and over again … and of course there is no way to reload a game except by restarting the PS2 … and those load times! Oh those load times!! Every scene in Monkey Island has to be loaded and you have a delay in between scene changes – as opposed to Oddworld where the loading occurred only when transitioning from game sequences to FMV … and even then, it was pretty fast!
I should also add that I find the hard disk to be a great extra. I didn’t have to buy a memory card and I can save gazillions of games on the hard disk without having to worry about running out of space. Coupled with the fact that it has a built-in ethernet port which would come in extremely handy if online gaming does ever take off, I am beginning to think that XBox is the way to go :p So I guess, I won’t be selling my XBox after all <vbg> Of course, one problem I see with XBox is the fact that it still doesn’t have enough games – and ones that interest me at that – at the moment. Only titles that I know of and am interested in at the moment are “Azurik: Rise of Perathia” and “Ego”, which is not supposed to be out at least till late next year (or is it the year after that?) If they can get a good library of games going (of the same quality as Oddworld), I think Microsoft has a pretty good chance in the console wars …
Speaking of the console wars, as I mentioned earlier, I went over to the local KMart early yesterday and they had a whole stack of GameCubes – must have been at leat 20, if not more. I was half tempted to get one but while “Pikmin” looks interesting, I really don’t find any of the GameCube launch titles all that appealing. And the fact that they had so many consoles at my local KMart – which normally doesn’t have enough of anything <g> – seemed to indicate that there won’t be a shortage and so it didn’t seem to make sense to buy one to put on Ebay :p I went back in the evening and I noticed that they’d sold almost all of their consoles but still had about five or six left … So I guess there are enough GameCubes to handle the demand – though I’m not really sure that is a good marketing tactic considering the demand for PS2 that was created basically due to the shortage of PS2’s last year :p
