A week away from home should yield opportunities galore for DS-abuse, right?
Wrong. The only thing that got abused during my travels was my liver, haemochromatosis be damned. Although I did fire up the DS to check out Colors!, and awesome little homebrew paint program. If you’ve got a modded DS (or an appropriate passcard), I highly recommend checking it out – the use of the touch screen (with support for variable pressures) is sublime.
Returning home, I launched straight back into Psychonauts. After having poked around the Web and finding that it posed about ten hours of play for most players, I figured I was getting pretty near the end – but some ambling levels (the Napoleonic board game had me bemused for at least two hours alone), coupled with the onset of a few Frustrating Levels, saw me racking northwards of fifteen hours up so far. I’m still loving the writing, but I’m now engaged in levels that are approaching Annoying… bugger-your-progress-start-from-the-beginning-again types of gameplay had me drawing a deep breath, carefully placing the controller on the floor, and turning the Xbox off. It can wait.
No matter, because my copy of the US version of No More Heroes arrived from Play-Asia (along with the NMH Soundtrack and a luscious white Gamecube controller to match the Wii). The main difference between the PAL (European) version of NMH and the US version is blood. Oceans of blood. And dismemberments. After getting used to the dissolution into black ash that accompanies all deaths in the PAL version, the overt showers of blood, decapitated heads, and cleaved torsos certainly are… ummm… eye-catching. At times, there’s almost too much onscreen – plumes of blood from exploding bodies and spurts from the newly severed add up to frames which are mostly red. Dark Side mode is gorgeous now: the darkened screen providing a muted backdrop to brilliant red blood fountains. And the post-boss cut-scenes… Gore-a-rama! YouTube has plenty of comparison videos, but they’re very spoilerific, so I’ll not link to them here.
Of course, I’ve decided to play through the whole game (on every skill level, natch) again. And I’m loving it, even if I’d clearly forgotten how tedious t-shirt collecting is. But all the collecting has been done, and I’m onto my second playthrough; it feels mostly the same, but the red additions shift the tongue in the cheek a little.
(And yes, those links above are affiliate links into Play-Asia. If you click through to those items and purchase (or use this generic link to Play-Asia), I’ll get pennies – pennies! – and a warm glowing feeling. Thanks :)
Next week: …more of the same.