I got a PlayStation 2 after I came back from Sri Lanka – I’d been waiting for the prices to drop but I got tired of waiting and decided to go for it :p Maybe I should have waited since I discovered after I bought it that the new Sony DVD remote doesn’t work umm … exactly right with the model I have <g> Don’t get me wrong – the remote is great! I first tried the Mad Catz remote and that was a piece of crap compared to the Sony remote which works like a charm except for a little problem … it needs a newer version of the DVD player software (than what’s on the internal ROM I assume) and so the DVD player needs to be copied onto a memory card and the memory card needs to be always plugged in … bummer! I hear that there is a different PS2 model out there – I believe SCPH-3001R) which is supposed to not need a memory card plugged in – probably because the ROM has the updated DVD player) but I don’t have that … so I have to have a memory card always plugged in and for some reason I don’t like that 🙂
Anyway, I’d got “Dark Cloud” with my PS2 but after playing it for about a week, I found myself extremely unsatisfied <vbg> I had expected more from the game after all the hype about it being “the game to get for PS2” but I found little quirks in the graphics (like the characters in some of the cut scenes moving like puppets – you know, their feet hardly touching the ground) that I didn’t really care for. Plus, I had thought that this would be a classic RPG and was disappointed to realize that it was not – it was an Action RPG with lots of button mashing and I’m not particularly fond of that. The good news is that a lot of great classic RPG’s (like Grandia II, Grandia Xtreme and Wild Arms 3) are coming to the PS2 but the bad news is that they’re not here yet :p
In order to while away the time till all the classic RPG’s come out, I went out and got “Ico” and “Escape from Monkey Island” yesterday and I must say that I’m pretty impressed with both the titles. “Ico” has this brooding, eerie feel to it which is almost palpable and the world of “Ico” just seems to come alive as you play the game and the puzzle aspects of the game are pretty interesting – not your usual, get this key, pull this lever, open this door kind of thing. I have only played through the first level (and I hear that the game is pretty short – only about 20 to 30 hours of game play …) but so far it looks very promising. To fans of LucasArts games, it is not even necessary to say that “Escape from Moneky Island” is a great game 🙂 The humour, the characters and the settings are all back and except for the frequent stops while new scenes are loaded (and that gets to be really irritating after a while – this is where I’d like to have the built-in hard drive from the XBox :p), the game is really neat … I do wonder though, are the puzzles in this incarnation of Monkey Island easier, or is it just me?