The week began with a few nights of soothing WarioWare: Smooth Moves to take the edge off post-work nerves. Nearly all the microgames are unlocked now, but there’s still a lot of Pose Cards to collect – and that, I reckon, is WW:SM‘s great failing: all the unlockables are dished out randomly. While I reckon that’s a massive pain in the arse, I also understand that the game wasn’t pitched to people like me… and, as fun as it is in small doses (an hour a day, tops), I doubt I’ll be booting Wario again when the stragglers have been obtained.
Here in The Moobaarn, the pangs of being GTA4-free hit – as expected – as the gaming world settled in for their 100-hours-of-content earlier in the week. I almost wavered, considered that I may purchase the game after all… until I saw the (lauded!) “Girls of GTA4” video on IGN. To say that I was offended would be wrong; it takes a bit to offend me. But I did find it distasteful, and it quelled any desire that might have been rising (fnarr, fnarr) to blow my wad (hoot hoot) on GTA4. As a young colleague said when I struggled to articulate my thoughts: “You’re not fourteen. It’s not for you.”
Instead, Psychonauts blasted its way into my life, courtesy of a mate in the UK snaffling it from a second-hand bin. After being completely overwhelmed – in a good way – by Tim Schafer‘s Grim Fandango, Psychonauts has long been on the To Buy section of The List; even though it’s available on Xbox Live’s Originals section, I snaffled it for the original Xbox – hey, I thought, I’ll just dump it to the hard-drive and play it on the TV by the couch, rather than in my office (where the 360’s set up).
Except the bloody game won’t dump to the HDD properly, will it! It fails to copy all the FMVs, which appear to be on a separate section of the DVD. Sigh… at least the load times aren’t too bad.
Anyway…
Psychonauts is brilliant. Truly, truly wonderful. Not without its faults, to be sure (some of the platforming antics are… ummm… a little testing. Of patience, not skill). But in terms of a wonderfully realised, beautifully presented world – and its inhabitants – it is beyond reproach. How ironic I should find something so wonderful in a four-year-old game the week the new high-water mark is set.
The thing is, I’d be happy with more games like Psychonauts. I’m about a third through, and it’s feeling like it’s going to be a perfectly weighted, two-play-through game. That’s all I want, and I’m going to have fun doing it.
Ahem.
This week’s a quiet one – in Perth on business. The DS might see some lovin’ for the first time in months.