Tag: 3ds

weekend recap: thrills and pills and headcolds

Not a lot of game-time this weekend; I caught a vicious headcold while in the middle of a double-feature at the movies on Saturday, and so I spent most of Sunday and Monday horizontal, with intermittent breaks for sneezing.

That being said, a few gaming-related items are worth mentioning:

1.  Before the movies on Saturday, I was more or less forced into buying an iPhone 5.  I tried as long as I could to wait until Apple announced the new model, but I couldn’t – not only were my apps struggling to work, but my 4 was missing calls and texts left and right.  (In fact, when my 5 was finally set up with my phone number, a flurry of voicemails appeared that I’d never seen before.)   The 5 has been around awhile, so this is probably old news  for most of you, but WOW – the difference between the 4 and the 5 is staggering.  Apps take almost no time at all to load, and the apps that are optimized for the 5 really show it.  On my 4, Temple Run 2 could barely hold a steady frame rate, but on the 5 it runs as smooth as silk and with lush textures and shadows and details that the 4 only hinted at.  (As I’m a fan of the endless runner genre, it’s very much appreciated to be able to play and know that any deaths are my own fault and not the fault of the phone.)

2.  Picked up The Swapper at some point over the weekend.  My cold kinda kept me from playing anything for more than 10 minutes at a time, but that worked out OK for the Swapper – I’d do a few puzzles and then switch it off.  It has a beautiful aesthetic – it actually reminds me a little bit of Little Big Planet – and the puzzle mechanics are novel and interesting.  Very eager to spend more time with it once my brain is up to the task.

3.  Played a few more missions of Call of Juarez Gunslinger.  As above, I could only really handle one mission at a time, but since most missions are around 10-20 minutes long, that was fine.  I’d stopped paying attention to the story and really just focused on getting through the levels, and that was fun enough.  Giant Bomb’s Patrick Klepek had called it a game for people who were sick of shooters, and I agree with that assessment – it mixes up the shooting formula enough to feel fresh and different.  I think he also mentioned that it reminded him of Bulletstorm, at least in terms of the scoring mechanic, and that’s absolutely spot-on.

4.  I succumbed to the Steam Sale and picked up Devil May Cry for 40% off.  I’d already beaten it on the 360 earlier this year, but I’d been finding myself thinking about it lately, and I was curious to see what it looked like on the PC.  It looks FANTASTIC on the PC, as it turns out, and it’s still as batshit crazy as I thought it was.  I made it to the beginning of the Upside-Down level, which I remember as being one of my favorites.

5.  I played about 10 minutes of Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D for the 3DS, and hated it.  Controls were floaty and imprecise, the difficulty was surprisingly high, and the graphics were a bit jaggy and ugly.  As this was one of the 3DS games I was most looking forward to this year, I’m calling this one a big disappointment.

Behind The Music: review commentary

So one of the reasons why I was so quiet last week was because I was working on a review of Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon for the New York Videogame Critics Circle, which can be found here.

This was my first experience writing a review the way the professionals do it:  with a free download code given out a week before the game’s release.   So not only was I flying somewhat blind (in terms of not knowing how the other gaming outlets were going to score it), but I was also flying without a walkthrough.   This turned out to be not that big a deal, because the places where I was getting stuck were less about not knowing how to solve a puzzle and more about not being able to adjust to the rather sudden difficulty spike in the later levels.   That being said, I would’ve hated to have not been able to finish the game because I couldn’t figure out what to do next!

Still, though, I wrote the review (and the epilogue) without having finished the game.   Still haven’t finished the game.  Haven’t even thought about the game since I turned in the epilogue on Thursday.  Don’t want to think about the game.  I’m so close to the end, but there’s no way that the actual end will be worth all the bullshit it takes to get there.  If I am going to think about the game, I’d rather remember the parts that I liked.  I still may go back and try to find all the stuff I didn’t find in the earlier levels, although I’m still pretty obsessed with Etrian Odyssey IV, and also my copy of Fire Emblem: Awakening just arrived, and that seems pretty awesome, too.

This was also the first time that I’ve written something that ultimately got looked over and edited by a much better writer than myself – and very much for the better, I might add, even if we had to cut out the footnotes.  In any event, I did get to use (and keep) the phrase “core gameplay loop”, which is one of my favorite bits of industry jargon.

It was a pretty neat experience, all things considered.  I hope I get to do it again.

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As for the rest of the weekend, I didn’t really get to play all that much.  I ended up spraining my ankle on Saturday (as part of a story that I’ll feel better telling in a few weeks), and so I was mostly just laid up.  As mentioned above, I’m still pushing along in EO4, and I played the first few levels of Fire Emblem.  Fire Emblem seems pretty great, although I was terrible at the previous game on the DS, and I’m not necessarily all that into turn-based tactical RPGs.  It’s a nice companion to EO4, though; when I get tired of one, the other seems to fill the void quite nicely.

Also, my rental copy of MLB 13: The Show arrived, and I started a Road To The Show career – my pitcher, Jervo McNervo, is 2-1 on the SF Giants Double A team, with 2 complete game shutouts and 34 Ks.  As much as I respect this game franchise – it’s clearly the best in the business – I’ve always been terrible at the hitting part of the game, so being a pitcher makes sense – especially since I’m pretty good at the pitching part.  Normally I tend to rage quit when I do terribly in sports games – if I’m not pitching perfect games and going 6-for-6 with 4 grand slams, then I start over – but I’m trying to keep myself honest this time around.  So, yeah – my first two outings were complete game shutouts, but in my third outing I don’t think I made it out of the fifth inning.  Sometimes your pitches don’t go where you want them to go; such is life.  That being said, the fielding controls for the pitcher are backwards – I fielded a few infield choppers and inadvertently threw to third base each time, not realizing that the pitcher’s controls are inverted.  (That would’ve been nice to tell me, Sony.)

In any event, this will all be moot soon enough; Bioshock Infinite is already preloaded on my PC, and as soon as it goes live, that’s where I’ll be for the rest of the week… unless the baby arrives, of course.

the first dozen hours: Etrian Odyssey 4

I’ve had my 3DS for a few weeks now, and I must say I’ve been pretty happy with the experience overall – even if the 3D does weird things to my eyes after a while.  The Streetpass feature is pretty neat.  I think I’ve mentioned that I don’t often see people using 3DSs on the subway, but clearly people are bringing them along in their bags or something, because almost every day I pick up 3 or 4 Tags, which is neat.

The game I’ve spent the most time with thus far comes as a big surprise (to me, at least) is Etrian Odyssey 4, which I’ve been playing rather obsessively for the last week or so.   I’d figured, since I’d had such a disappointing experience with Ni No Kuni, that I’d lost interest in JRPGs; but as it turns out, all I need was a breath of fresh air and a completely different context.

EO4 is a radically different experience from pretty much every other RPG I’ve ever played, even if it feels bewitchingly familiar.  It’s a first-person grid-based dungeon crawler (similar to something like Legend of Grimrock), with a turn-based random encounter battle system (much like, well, most old-school JRPGs) – but the key difference is that it also features a map-making system that encourages you to be as detailed as possible.  This comes in handy, as you might imagine, since you’ll frequently go through each maze more than once, and things that you might’ve noticed as odd or significant may end up being important on a 2nd visit.

The game also does a terrific job of making grinding as hassle-free as possible, which is something that I very much appreciate.  For one thing, you can create auto-pilot routes through each maze, which speeds things along quite nicely; for another, you can choose to auto-pilot your way through each random encounter, which makes going through easy enemies much quicker and doesn’t deplete your TP reserves (TP being what you use to activate special skills in battle).

The battles that you do choose to pay attention to, though, are a lot of fun to engage in.  It’s not just mindless button presses – that’s what the auto-pilot mode is for, after all.  Tougher enemies require strategic planning, and the variety of skills you can use mean there’s lots of different tactics you can employ.

The graphics are a little weird, I suppose.  The 3D screen makes battles look like active dioramas, with detailed monsters bobbing and weaving against rather dreary backgrounds.  Indeed, the actual 3D mazes you explore are surprisingly drab and ugly as compared to the rather crisp 2D character drawings; I’m not sure if the art style is meant to be consistent with earlier titles in the franchise (as I’ve never played them) but as an EO neophyte I’m not particularly impressed.  Still, I’m not staying with this game for the graphics.

Nor am I sticking with it for the story, although that may very well be because the story is just now – after a dozen hours of playtime – coming into focus.   In the early going, I was simply assembling my crew to go out on little missions for the local town – and that was enough, frankly.  Now – in the dungeon I literally just discovered about an hour ago – there seem to be larger, world-shaking forces at work, and I suppose I’ll need to save the world somewhere down the line.

One word of caution, in case you read this and decide to check it out – the game doesn’t explain itself particularly well in the beginning.  The very first thing you do is assemble a crew as part of a guild, and the types of crewmember are not necessarily self-explanatory.  (For example, the main melee fighter in your party is called a Landsknecht.  This is, in fact, a real thing, but I had to look it up on Wikipedia.)  Once you finish building your guild, you’ll find yourself in another set of menus – which is actually how you interact with the town.  The menus are a bit obtuse at first, but you get used to them with time.

I’d heard that one of the trademarks of this franchise is its punishing difficulty, which is why I’m grateful that there’s a “Casual” mode – which is still plenty difficult, mind you.  You can’t save mid-labyrinth without going back to town and then re-tracing your steps, which is a drag – especially as you have a limited inventory and it gets full very quickly.  (As a matter of fact, I’m about to go up against a boss, and I’m probably not going to make it – I never had a chance to go back to town, and my party has almost no TP left, and I could very much use some refreshment.)

In any event, I’m really enjoying my experience, and I’d highly recommend it if you’re in the mood for this sort of thing.

weekend recap: all tombs raided

Finished Tomb Raider.  Currently at around 93% completion, and I’m not sure I give a shit about finding the last few things there are to find.  Lara is fully leveled up, as are her weapons (not that there are that many people to fight), and the stuff that’s left (mostly GPS caches) doesn’t have much of a payoff.  Usually when I finish one of these kinds of action/adventure games, I feel compelled to go back and replay one of my favorite levels, if only to really take in the scenery and find all the hidden stuff without the pressure of combat.  But you can’t really do that in this edition of Tomb Raider, as there aren’t really any levels to speak of.  There are certainly different geographic locations on the island, but it’s not quite the same thing.

I think, overall, that it’s a very good game; that the developer’s intentions were clear, and that they were largely successful in achieving what they set out to achieve.  But it’s not perfect; there’s still too much killing (and, let me tell you – for a girl who starts out hesitant and apologetic to kill a deer in order to survive, she ends up kneecapping dudes with pickaxes and spearing dudes in the throat with arrows), and the whole 2nd act is basically one long chase sequence where everything is on fire.

There’s also something else that troubles me a little bit, though it’s a bit more subtle; they go through great lengths to make Lara Croft a real, relatable human being this time around, someone grounded in reality (even if she has an incredibly high tolerance for pain).  But without getting too spoilery, the mystery of the island is, in fact, something supernatural.  I was actually hoping for some scientific, grounded-in-reality explanation to what was going on, being that everything else was meant to evoke a real-world feeling.  The ending isn’t necessarily disappointing, but it did feel a bit… hokey.

I’d also add that some of the systems they introduce in the beginning feel unnecessary and undeveloped – like the whole survivalist thing, about needing to hunt game in order to stay alive.  Actually, once you kill that first deer mentioned above, you don’t need to kill any animals (besides the wolves that attack you) ever again; and if you do, the XP you gain is modest, at best.  I’m not saying I wanted them to introduce a hunger system, but it’s just weird that in the beginning of the game it’s presented as something important, and within 30 minutes it’s an afterthought.

Still, problems aside, I had a really good time with it; I’d give it a solid B+.  I’m just not sure if I’ll ever find myself going back to play it again, the way I have with other, similar titles.

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My 3DS experience continues to be hit-or-miss.  I’ve got 2 games on rental right now – Etrian Odyssey 4 and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow – Mirror of Fate, which, if nothing else, wins the “Most Ridiculous Title of 2013” award.  I gave Castlevania about 30 minutes before sending it back; the screens are too dark to really see what’s going on, and the 3D gives me a splitting headache – even with it turned off.  And the first real boss was a bit of a dick.  I generally like Castlevania games – not necessarily for the fiction, but for the action and the map-filling and such.  But this one kinda felt like it was going nowhere, fast.

Etrian Odyssey, on the other hand, is a bit more interesting, and I’m tempted to stick with it – even if a lot of the mechanics seem needlessly convoluted.  It’s a fairly standard dungeon-crawling turn-based RPG, but there’s also this map-making feature that’s kinda fascinating, where you actually chart your progress through each dungeon’s maze.  Some of your quests actually depend on your cartography skills – you need to be able to point to something on the map in order to show your quest-giver where a given object might be.   The party management system is not very intuitive, and so I’m never sure if I’ve arranged my party correctly or if they’re as well-equipped as they need to be.  It’s tempting to think that a lot of this stuff would be familiar to people who’ve played the earlier 3 games, but I haven’t, and I don’t plan to, and so I’m stuck with a level of obtuseness that is a little intimidating.  But the actual exploring and fighting is fun enough, and the map-making aspect is certainly novel and engaging, and so I’m probably going to hang on to it for a little while longer.

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I was going to write a thing here about being conflicted about what to do about Bioshock Infinite, but it’s a very silly problem to have and I’m not sure it’s all that interesting, either.  But I’ll write it anyway.

The gist of it is that I was always planning on playing it on my 360, but there’s a few snags in that plan.  Firstly,  the release date (March 25) is right at the edge of the baby arrival window, and so if I were to pre-order a copy and the baby arrived before the 25th, then my game would be stuck at my office for 2 weeks (as I can’t really get packages delivered to my apartment).  Not that I’d be playing a game instead of taking care of my newborn child, but you understand what I mean, right?  The baby’s gotta sleep at some point, and when I’m in that weird exhausted half-sleep daze that will be as close as I can get to experiencing actual drug use, I’m going to want to unwind with some Bioshock.    Secondly, when the baby is sleeping, I’m sure my wife will want to unwind as well, and if I’m playing Bioshock on the big TV in the living room, she’s relegated to the bedroom with the smaller TV, and I always feel bad about that.

The reason why this is stupid is that the logical answer is for me to simply download the game on Steam, which is how I’ve been playing most of my games lately anyway –  including Tomb Raider, actually.  I have kick-ass PC headphones which will prevent the baby from hearing all the strange noises, and the PC is in the office, which means my wife can relax in the living room.  My only concern, really, is that while my PC can run Bioshock, it can’t necessarily run it as well as it could, and so it may not look as fantastic as I’d hope.  Still, Tomb Raider looked more than OK on my PC, and so I’m sure Bioshock’s performance will suffice.

weekend recap: hello goodbye wtf

Major developments this weekend!

1.  Said goodbye to Ni No Kuni this morning, as I sent it back to Gamefly.  The game is fine, I suppose, but a few things became very apparent during my last few sessions with it, namely:  (i) I was never going to get 60 hours of TV time with it before the baby arrived, and (ii) I didn’t feel particularly compelled to fight for TV time in order to play it.   If I were 13 years old and had all the time in the world, I suppose I’d be madly in love with it.  But as a 37-year-old with limited time on his hands, it feels a little too cutesy, and the combat system is needlessly tedious and cumbersome, and it’s just not what I’m in the mood for right now.

2.  Said hello to a brand-new Nintendo 3DS XL on Saturday.  This after I wrote up a big long thing (that I didn’t end up publishing) about how I was suddenly seized with this irrational desire to get one, and that even though I have a special savings account that is specifically designed to let me me buy expensive toys without feeling guilty about it, I was still feeling guilty about it.  Maybe I’m nervous about fatherhood, and buying a new toy will help distract me.  I don’t know.

In any event, I bought the thing, as well as Super Mario 3D Land, Professor Layton & the Miracle Mask, and Paper Mario Sticker Star.  (I was hoping to also get Ocarina of Time and Fire Emblem, but they were sold out.  And you know what?  I might simply rent Fire Emblem; I played a Fire Emblem title on the original DS and it stressed the hell out of me.  Turn-based tactical strategy games always tend to freak me out.)  When I got home, I also downloaded Pushmo and Crashmo; not sure what else there is to download that’s worth it – thought about Cave Story, but it’s unclear if the one on the eShop is in 3D or not.

The 3D is pretty spectacular, even if it makes looking at everything else a little weird – like this computer monitor, for example.  I suppose I’d like it even better if it had a higher-resolution display, but everything I’ve got for it right now looks pretty grand, and I can deal with it.  I even took it to work with me today, as I’m curious to see if I picked up any Street Pass activity, but it doesn’t look like it.  This doesn’t surprise me, frankly – since it first came out, I’ve maybe only ever seen 1 or 2 on the subway.  I’ve seen more Playstation Vita’s on the subway, actually, which is very surprising.

As for the games?  3D Land is pretty great, reminding me of a smaller-scale Galaxy.  The Prof. Layton game is also pretty great, even if some of the puzzles feel a bit cheap.  Paper Mario is… OK, I guess.  It’s not Mario & Luigi, which is what I’d prefer, but it’s still interesting.

Those of you with 3DSes – what else would you recommend I check out?

random ramblings

1.  As mentioned a few posts back, I’m in something of a spending freeze for the foreseeable future.  That being said, I must admit that I’ve started to notice a subtle but stubborn itch in my brain that’s making me want to maybe get a Nintendo 3DS.  There are a couple reasons for this.  For one thing, the software library isn’t totally terrible anymore, and there are a few games coming up that I really want to play (Paper Mario, Professor Layton, etc.).  For another, I’m finding that I’m having a hard time staying engrossed in my iOS games.  I’ve bought a few RPGs for my iPhone but I almost never play them, and I find that if a game doesn’t let me listen to my own music (or podcasts or Spotify or whatever), I tend to ignore them, too.  Whereas back when my DS was in regular rotation, I’d absolutely plug in my headphones and allow myself to be fully engaged in the whole experience.  (Obviously, puzzle games like Picross don’t really need sound, but you get my point.)  Of course, yesterday’s announcement of the iPhone 5, coupled with my eligibility for a free upgrade in December, means that given my budgetary restraints, I can only choose one, and I am MOST DEFINITELY getting that new iPhone.  (And I’m still not ever getting a Vita.)

1a.  As I was writing the paragraph you just read, Lifehacker came out with a relevant article titled “How To Get Off The Upgrade Treadmill.”  So, there’s that.  (Still getting an iPhone 5, though, so there.)

2.  Speaking of Nintendo (and upgrading technology), I do not give a FUCK about the WiiU.

3.  My wife goes out of town next weekend, and I think I’m going to take that opportunity to move my PC tower into the living room, hook it up to my 40″ HDTV, and give Steam’s Big Picture Mode a workout.  I’m kind of afraid that I’m going to love the shit out of it, because there’s no way I can keep my PC in the living room without making my wife and my dogs very unhappy.

4.  Mark of the Ninja continues to impress.  Last night I figured out whatever the hell it was I was doing wrong and got past the figurative wall I’d run up against, getting a new ability in the process that will MOST DEFINITELY come in handy when I go back and try to ace the previous levels.  Goddamn, that game is great.

5.  Speaking of stealth games, I have a question:  do people actually enjoy the cutscenes in Metal Gear games, or do they enjoy them ironically, like they would with, say, The Room?  I bring this up because the Giant Bomb crew talked about the upcoming Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes on last week’s Bombcast and they all seemed to acknowledge that the franchise as a whole is fucking insane, but enjoyably so, but the key phrase is still:  “fucking insane.”  Which it is.  (Feel free to read my posts about MGS4 which break down that game’s specific insanity in much greater detail.)   And yet I’ve come across plenty of people – fans, journalists, etc. – who take that franchise very seriously, and who get very, very defensive when people point out how ridiculous it is.   Ultimately, I found myself enjoying the gameplay of MGS 4 quite a lot, and was genuinely awed at the graphics and presentation, but I was also in utter disbelief that anybody could take that game’s narrative even remotely seriously.  Kojima is an enigma to me – I have no idea if he has any self-awareness, which is why I don’t know if I’m supposed to enjoy his stories as the camp that they clearly are, or if he’s actually sincere about this craziness.

A quick word or two about the 3DS

I don’t have a lot of friends at my day job.  I’m not complaining, that’s just the way it is.  And it’s partly by design, I suppose, because the job was never meant to be something I actually took seriously, and so I never bothered to socialize.

In any event, I’ve become friendly with one of the mail guys; he’d noticed I was a gamer from all the Gamefly envelopes in my outbox, and recognized me as a kindred spirit, and so whenever there’s a dull moment, we talk games.

Tonight, he asked me what I thought about the 3DS.

I haven’t really given the 3DS all that much thought, to be honest.  Or, rather, I have, and it’s just that I already know that there’s no reason at all for me to get it any time soon.  If at all.  I have not bought into the 3D hype, to be honest – “Avatar” was the only movie that’s ever really gotten the 3D right, but I kept having to move my head around in order for the glasses to work properly, and let’s face it – it was a crap movie.  I’m a self-professed graphics whore, but even I know that it takes a lot more than just snazzy graphics to make a game (or movie) actually good.  (Exhibit A:  Crysis 2.)

But it’s more than just the 3D, is the thing.  For one thing, there’s nothing I want to play on it.  The e-shop doesn’t launch until May, but even then, Nintendo doesn’t really have the greatest track record when it comes to downloadable games.  (Exhibit B:  Giant Bomb’s Jeff Gerstmann has a long-running feature devoted to just how terrible Nintendo’s downloadable content is.)

Furthermore, if the original DS is any indication, Nintendo’s probably going to release a newer, smaller, better 3DS in a year anyway, and maybe by that point there might even be something worth playing on it.

There’s a larger issue, though, and that’s simply that Nintendo apparently doesn’t care about me.  I don’t fit into their target demographic.  I bought a Wii simply to experience Super Mario Galaxy, and while it was an amazing experience, it was also the only experience that wasn’t a complete waste of time.  I ended up giving my Wii to my mother-in-law, and I haven’t thought about it ever since – indeed, I hadn’t thought about it for months except that it was taking up space on my table.

Likewise, I own a DS, but there hasn’t been anything released in at least 6 months that looked even remotely interesting to me.  And it’s not that I’m some sort of snob or something – I mean, I am a snob, sure – but I just can’t get excited about Pokemon or any of the My Little Pony crap that keeps getting shoveled out every other week.  To be honest, there aren’t really any decent puzzle games getting released for it anymore, and those are the kinds of games that I end up spending most of my DS time with in the first place.

Right now, my handheld of choice is my iPod Touch.  It’s got a huge library of quality titles, most of which are under $5, PLUS I can listen to my own music and email and Twitter and Facebook and RSS feeds and all the rest of it.  It’s a much more complete and robust experience, and it clearly has the capability for better graphics, if stuff like Rage HD and Infinity Blade are any indication.

In any event, I told my friend to relax and wait a bit.  The new iPhones will be out in June; the new PSP will be detailed at E3, one would assume; and then it’s just a hop, skip and jump away from next spring, when the inevitable 3DS redesign will be announced, and we can go through this whole sordid business again.

>getting it back

>So it’s been quiet here at SFTC, and for that I apologize.  Things have been pretty quiet on the gaming front since my last post.  There wasn’t anything new to play, and I wasn’t necessarily doing all that much on the backlog, Steam sales be damned. 

But then Little Big Planet 2 came out, and then Dead Space 2 came out, and now the 3DS and the PSP2/NGP have been formally announced/dated, and I find that I’ve got some things to say.

LBP2:  I finished the single-player campaign earlier this week, and started to dabble with some of the community-made levels.  The game is as charming as ever, and the single-player campaign certainly did its best to illustrate what the game is capable of.  And it should be noted that the game’s website, lbp.me, is perhaps the best game-related website ever made – the ability to look at community-made levels on the web, add them to a queue, and then have the game automatically have your queue waiting for you the next time you log in – it’s so elegant and well-made that it seems downright bizarre that it hasn’t been done before.  If I have a problem with the game, then, it’s that I don’t think I’ll ever have the time/patience/imagination to make my own levels, which makes me feel like my experience with the game will be artificially cut in half. 

Dead Space 2:  Finally got this via Gamefly yesterday, and I’m about an hour in.  I never finished the first game, though not for lack of trying, and so my first playthrough of DS2 is being done on the easiest mode, because I’d really like to make it all the way through and see where the story goes.  As the game is apparently very friendly in terms of incorporating previous playthroughs into new ones, I can see myself giving it another go on a higher difficulty level.  I’ll say this – I’m loving the hell out of it.  I do scare pretty easily, when it comes to movies, but games don’t really scare me – sure I’ll get startled (like when the dogs jump through the window in RE2), but there’s a big difference between being startled and actually being creeped out and scared.  So, then, no, I’ve not been scared.  And I wasn’t scared in the first one, either – I never finished it because there were sections that were just too hard, or I didn’t have enough ammunition, and I got frustrated and gave up.  The first hour of DS2 has been thrilling, however, and certainly startling, and there’s been a few times where I’ve said things out loud that I normally wouldn’t say.  I’m very much looking forward to diving back in.

As for the new handhelds…

I’m certainly intrigued by the 3DS, there’s no doubt about it.  But I’m not really all that excited about the games that have been announced, and ultimately that’s the most important factor.  Hell, right now I play my DS maybe once or twice a year, if a good puzzle game comes out, and I can’t justify spending $250 on a snazzy piece of tech that I’m never going to use, especially since I’ll be getting a Verizon iPhone 5 later this year.  And I really don’t want to spend $250 just to play up-rezzed ports of N64 games, no matter how snazzy the ports are. 

Similarly, I’m very intrigued by the new PSP – very snazzy tech, and a more hard-core lineup of titles (I’m especially interested in that new Uncharted title) – but I don’t know that there’s any one must-have title out there that can help me justify the purchase.  And I’m already wary of Sony’s ability to sustain a handheld – I was excited to buy a PSP, sure, but I got bored with it and sold it back within 8 months, and I haven’t missed it at all.  And if the plan is simply to port over 360 and PS3 titles, well, that’s not necessarily what I want out of my handheld experience.

I generally play handheld games either on the subway or in bed.  I never have the sound on, and I’m not really all that interested in narrative.  I want something to do for a few minutes here and there while I’m unable to do anything else.  My iPod Touch has been excellent at filling that void, and the $1 – $6 price point is very appealing.  So, again, it’s hard for me to justify $300 + $50-60 per game, when the games they’re offering are games I’d rather play on my HDTV. 

I still think I’ll end up with a 3DS, eventually.  I think I can wait for the inevitable redesign and price drop, though.  The PSP2, on the other hand… I don’t know.  The PSP2 is the machine I’d rather have, frankly, but I need to know that Sony can maintain a healthy game library for more than 6 months.  Otherwise, I’m just going to stick with the iPhone.