I’m usually immune to playing Flash games. For some reason I find them utterly trivial in comparison to the “proper” games I play. However, Desktop Tower Defence has had me hooked for a couple of days, now. I cant seem to score more than around 1200, despite thinking I’ve greated a foolproof strategy – I’m quite content to keep working on my tactics, though.
Having made a spontaneous decision to order a PS2 the week after it launched back in December 2000, I wondered if my resolve would hold this time around with the PS3 looming large. With the European launch a little over three weeks away, and the opportunity to buy one in three installments being offered at work, the temptation is everywhere.
However, when I look at the list of launch games, it helps to steady the itchy credit card finger. Don’t get me wrong – there are games I’d love to play, such as Resistance: Fall of Man, Tony Hawk’s Project 8, Tiger Woods 2007, and Blazing Angels. And that’s not even counting the PlayStation Network titles like Fl0w, Calling All Cars, and the fun-with-ducks title Super Rub a Dub.
As fun as all those would be, there’s a distinct lack of anything I’m absolutely burning to play. You know? Like the stay/rush home from school type games that I enjoyed as a kid.
I thought that maybe it’s the absence of Madden on the release list (not that I’ve been playing that much on the PS2 recently, anyway), or that there isn’t a quality racing game other than F1 Championship Edition, which looks and plays really well, except for the fact I’ve come to hate everything F1 stands for.
So I began to wonder what games there’d need to be to ensure that I had to have one on launch day. Madden, I suppose is a given. If you add to that an Ace Combat title, Grand Theft Auto, Haze (by Free Radical, the TimeSplitters people, which isn’t due out for a while), and an IndyCar racing game, then I’d have ordered them all already and would be lying awake at night in anticipation.
However, knowing that most of the above wont arrive until some point within the next year, it kind of takes the urgency out of the need to have a PS3 immediately. That and the likelihood of seeing an IndyCar game is very small indeed, sadly – a downside of gaming being mass market nowadays.
What I do have is an HD TV – ready and waiting for when the time is right. Until then, current gen will have to do me.
Historically, I haven’t bothered with handheld/portable gaming – and certainly not since my Atari Lynx was in its heyday. I really did like my Lynx, as bulky and retro as it seems now, despite the fact it sucked up battery power and pretty much confirmed my status as an ultra-geek in the early 90’s.
The more popular Nintendo GameBoy, with it’s plethora of versions and abundance of side–scrolling platform games, left me cold. I’d made my mind up pretty early on that; given the choice of driving racing cars or piloting flying machines, against rescuing princesses as a fat Italian plummer, well, I’d be racing or flying every time. The GameBoy didn’t do those type of games. At least, not with any conviction.
Which meant that, hand held gaming wise, it’s been a bit of a barren spell since the power button on my Lynx stopped latching on and I gave up on it. Then, in September 2005 a PSP fell into my lap, so to speak.
Working in the games industry I’d played one before I owned one, admittedly, and it wasn’t love at first sight, despite how pretty the hardware is. Being someone who prefers practical design over aesthetics, I instantly took a dislike to the sheer disregard for ergonomics in the PSP‘s construction. Hence, in the first ten months of ownership, the only two games I thought worth working my hand into a claw over were Wipeout Pure and GTA Liberty City Stories. As you can imagine, with only two games going for it, my PSP spent a great deal of time gathering dust on the shelf. I figured that maybe handheld gaming just wasn’t for me.
That was until the second wave of PSP games started arriving. In the space of a few weeks back in June I had picked up SOCOM Fireteam Bravo, Worms, and Football Manager Handheld. Those three games alone began to change my gaming habits, with play on the PSP taking the place of my lunchtime PS2 gaming sessions. It’s not that they were ridiculously addictive games – just that they were well suited to the PSP, which in turn made them more playable than some of the early ports.