God of Mario

I've recently been playing the PS2 game, God of War. All in all it's a great game that balances fighting with puzzle solving fairly well.

The fighting is mostly button mashing, but has some nice pay offs with certain combos and finishing moves. Here the game adds a twist. With certain foes a mini-game is required to get the big finish, which gains you more experience or magic. The puzzles are fairly easy, but still entertaining and give a nice alternative to the action.

My big complaint is that some of the areas require a ton of platform jumping. Let me state for the record, I hate, hate, HATE platform jumping. I hate it with the burning passion of a thousand dying stars. IMHO, making a player jump between moving platforms while dodging spinning blades is just game designer laziness. Stages that have ridiculously hard platform jumping is just a way to add challenge to a game without using any originality.

While the vast majority of the game rocks, there are definitely moments of controller-smashing frustration (a first time for me, as I have a trip to Wal-Mart in my near future). These moments don't ruin the overall experience though (as it has in other games - ), so it gets a high recommendation.
Maybe my hatred of platform jumping simply stems from my lack of 12 year old hand-eye coordination...

Wolf goddess + Calligraphy = FUN

A while back I picked up a little PS2 game called "Okami". I had heard good things about it and it received pretty good reviews too. Still, I was a tad apprehensive, since the concept is a bit strange (a requirement for a game from Japan).

You play the sun goddess Amaterasu, who has come to earth in the form of a white wolf to defend Japan from the demon Orochi. To mix things up a bit, you can apply your divine powers to the world by way of a paintbrush. At any time in the game, you can turn the world into a canvas and apply various paint techniques to affect the world in different ways.

After playing it for more hours than I care to admit, I LOVE this game. It has definitely become one of my favorites. Visually, the game is stunning - although I've always been a fan of cell shading. At the risk of being cliche, the colors pop out of the screen, the characters are well done and enemies are creatively rendered.

The game play is a bit simplistic - this is not a hard game. Enemies fall fairly easily and the puzzles don't take too much effort. However, this didn't change my enjoyment of the game in the least.

The true charm of this game comes from the magic paint techniques. As the game progresses your brush can make the wind blow, cause plants to bloom, repair bridges or cut things in half. Each of these techniques are used to fight and solve the many puzzles.

The game is incredibly long too, I'm at about 19 hours and haven't glimpsed the end yet (from reports out there it looks like the game may take as much as 30 hours to complete). 30 hours of entertainment for less than $40.

It's good to see that game makers are stepping up and still making quality games for the Playstation2. Hopefully they continue this trend, since there's not a chance in hell of me getting a Playstation3 - but that's an issue for another blog...