Month: May 2006

A new physics engine + modern processing power + way too much time on someone’s hands = this.

Tourist Trophy (PS2) – It’s basically Gran Turismo 4, just with motorcycles instead of cars. Same tracks, same basic goals, and even pretty much the same user interface. It’s a bit less meaty though, with fewer vehicles, slightly fewer tracks, and fewer total race events. It’s still fun though, and handling a motorcycle is different enough from the cars in GT4 to be interesting.

Brain Age (DS) – Some simple puzzles and challenges that are supposed to help ‘exercise’ your brain. The actual benefit of doing so is dubious, but it’s still kinda fun in small doses, so it makes a good diversion in the morning before heading to work. Its handwriting recognition is a bit lacking though.

New Super Mario Bros. (DS) – It’s a throwback to the original 2D Super Mario games, blending elements of them together, adding a few new ones, and giving it modern graphics. As a fan of those originals, that’s just fine with me, and it’s been great fun so far. Looks like it might be short though, and it hasn’t been very tough yet.

ToCA Race Driver 3 (PC) – It’s great for the sheer wide variety of different types of racing it has, with everything from dirt track sprinters to F1 to stock cars to shifter karts. It doesn’t feel nearly as realistic as other games though, and you don’t really get to keep and upgrade cars as you go along, which is half the fun of these “carpgs”.

Taking a quick look at what we know of the “next-gen” consoles now:

XBox 360: The hardware seems fine, but there’s still not enough titles out for it that appeal to me to get my interest high enough yet. MS is now just being boring instead of evil…

PlayStation 3: A number of important things were just revealed at the E3 conference: 1) They’ve ditched the ‘boomerang’ and the controller’s back to the old PS2 form, but the rumble has been replaced with gyroscopes, 2) it’ll be split into two separate versions like the 360, with the cheaper one being rather pointless and non-upgradeable (no HDMI video, wireless, or memory cards) and 3) the price is obscene, with the upper end model probably ending up around $650-700 CDN. It’s all somewhat underwhelming, so far.

Revolution: Well, it’s not the Revolution anymore. Now Nintendo is calling it the Wii, and I don’t think I’ve stopped snickering since the announcement. A stupid name won’t affect its capabilities or how fun the games are, but it’s still slightly embarrassing. The hardware is still much weaker compared to the others, but speculation is that it’ll probably at least be far cheaper. It’s also unclear if it’ll have enough interesting titles, since my DS already satisfies my Daily Recommended Allowance of Mario, but it’s supposed to be backwards compatible with the Gamecube and emulate even older systems, for a bigger library at least.