A couple days ago, I soldiered on down to Union Square and snagged a copy of the brand-spanking new God of War 2. I was a huge fan of the first installment and consider it one of the best games ever put out for the Playstation 2. It’s combination of strong storyline based off the Greek myths that’s actually interesting, mature themes, extreme violence and gore and one of the most effective and balls-out awesome combat systems I’ve ever seen in a video game. It was not a game your mother would let you play and I really appreciated that fact. Love, love God of War. Everyone does. Go get it now, it’s only fifteen bucks at this point. You’ll thank me.

God of War 2 hasn’t broken and new bounderies. In fact, in plot and in gameplay, it basically takes you to right where the first one left off and just gives you more of the same. If its predecessor was a mediocre game, you’d be disappointed, but GoW 1 was the game you stayed up till four in the morning to beat and was bummed when it was over, so there’s nothing to complain about in this sequel. You want to mutilate entire armies of the undead? Eviscerate? Bash someone repeatedly till all that’s left is red mush? All that’s still there along with a new plot, building off the first and an array of new abilities, weapons, villains and seriously fucked up bosses. I’m totally psyched with this game. Fire, destruction and war!

Don’t get me wrong, I still love my Wii, really. But I still have a PS2 and it’s always don;t right by me, so I’m still getting the odd game here and there for it. It’s a damn good console and deserves dome love. PS3…not so sure.

Yesterday, I popped into a GameStop and picked up a couple of used games. I have one of those memberships that gives me a discount on used shit, so I tend to check out what they’ve got whenever I go to one. Anyway, I picked up a copy of the game, Okami and I’m just fucking blown away.

Using cell-shading with a strong emphasis on a ink and brush style, reminiscent at times of Ukiyo-e, anime and classical Japanese brush-and-paper art, the style, look and mood of Okami is equal parts cute, hypnotic and beautiful, evoking a dreamy, fairytale-like atmosphere, entirely different in style but (to me) reminiscent of the game Shadow of the Colossus in its ability to evoke a full-fleshed and mysterious world through atmosphere and art.

The game makes light-hearted use of Shinto legends—the main protagonist being an incarnation of Amaterasu O-Mi Kami in the form of a white wolf. You’re running around, fighting weird demons and interacting with talking animals and your sidekick is a temper-challenged, sword-wielding flea. It’s a fun, but strange game. Fighting is especially interesting with an ability to make special moves by pausing the action and using a brush to paint ink in certain patterns to activate attacks.

Okami has got to be one of the 10 best games I’ve ever played—at least on the PS2. I’ve heard there won’t be a sequel, which is damn unfortunate.

This weekend, I picked up a copy of Elebits for my much-beloved Wii and have become thoroughly addicted to its weird format of running around, creating a huge mess and zapping these little Pikachu-like bastards.

The game’s reminiscent of Katamari Damacy, with it’s cartoonish, basic style, crammed full of random household objects. Plot-wise, you’re some kid, living in a world where all electricity is powered by these little imps called Elebits. Some form of accident has occurred and the Elebits have revolted and all power is out, so armed with this ray-shooter that’s very similar to the gravity gun in Half Life 2, you run around your house looking for and zapping all the little bastards as they hide, sleep, sing, cry and generally act very kawaii and strange. The more you capture, the higher level of watts you have to light your home and accomplish other things relevant to completing stages.

The fun comes in two forms. First being the scavenger hunt-like aspect of trying to find these little weasels. At times, certain tasks must be performed to further the mission with different Elebits having certain properties like charging you gun. You also need to take care in how you interact with the Elebits as their moods or state affects the amount of power they supply you upon capture.

The other fun aspect is the sheer chaos you can visit upon a neatly ordered room. There’s a certain Godzilla-like glee (also reminiscent of Katamari) of being able to completely trash your house. Breaking vases, sending bookcases flying—no home furnishing or appliance is spared the brutal hand of your ray gun.

I haven’t checked it out yet, but there’s a pretty cool sounding level builder in the game, letting you create, stock and customize your own levels. I’ve read that at some point in the foreseeable future, the Wii’s WiiConnect24 will let you upload and share your custom levels with your WiiFriends (of which I have zero. Somebody fricken’ WiiFriend me already! I don’t know anyone else in my network that has one of these consoles!).

I like the fact that this game actually makes real usage of the Wii-remote. I’m finding that many of the Wii titles (mainly ports available on other platforms) really murder the possibilities of use. Granted this is likely because the game was made with the traditional controllers in mind and ports to Wii were just mainly quick-fix jobs. Elebits makes love to the Wii-remote. From twisting the remote to turn a doorknob, to pulling it back to open a drawer—the controls are instantly intuitive and easy to use.

After much blood, sweat and feces, I finally managed to score a Wii system. It involved daily multi-borough trips to stores, a lot of walking and finally after getting a tip from a guy that a store I’d just left had received a shipment a few minutes ago, I jogged 8 blocks, got in line and nabbed the second to last one in stock. People were yelling, pleading and waving cash around, trying to buy a spot in line. Ugly, but it paid off.

I am now the proud parent of the much coveted Wii console. I can safely say that it’s the coolest and most innovative gadget I’ve had since I was a kid and the first home video game console came out. The Wii Remote is the best game controller I’ve ever used and after two days of owning one, I now have a a good case of Wii-arm from swinging it all over the place.

The Wii Sports games are retarded fun and the new Zelda is crazy addictive. I haven’t downloaded any of the virtual console games yet, but likely will at some point.

If you’re one of the lucky few with a Wii, feel free to add me to your Wii Friends. I’m kind of curious to see how it works and at this point, don’t know of anyone else that has a console. Here’s my Wii number: 4691 1553 9342 4896.

I’ve spent this past weekend scouring websites, trudging into stores and trying to find a Nintendo Wii with zero fucking results. Every website I check is sold out. Every half-wit store clerk I ask gives me a sullen mumble that I’m told means no.

The prospect of waiting for what could be possibly months has got me nearly despondent. My hands twitch in desperate need of wireless nunchaku gaming joy. I need it. I must have it! I would slaughter my non-existent first-born child for a Wii. For a few extra games thrown in, I’d not only slaughter the kid but cook him up and make lovely tea sandwiches out of him.

I have some standards. I refuse to pay over-bloated prices on Ebay so some enterprising dick-face can make a profit. Whoring (totally NSFW) for it is out and I’m not of the temperament to wake at down and wait in line at the Nintendo World store in the hopes the get a console in.

So I wait.

This South Park episode about World of Warcraft has to be my most favorite episode ever.

This past weekend, I bit the bed-rail and picked up a copy of World of WarCraft. Having been a moderate EverQuest and EQ2 junkie, I’d thought I quit the MMORPG habit cold, but after seeing some statistics stating that over fifty percent of the MMORPG players worldwide are on WoW, I decided to give it a try. It seems the numerous weekends spent chained to a computer, fingers nervously twitching from an overdose of caffeine, nicotine and sleep deprivation while farming beasts to improve my leather-working skills was just not enough for me.

As with EQ, the install and initial update took well over an hour to finish and the monthly account fee is the same fifteen bucks I could be donating to save some village of crippled, blind children in Africa, but hey…I’m already going to Hell anyway.

In EQ, my main was a Wood-Elf Druid and I really got to liking the soloing capabilities of that class, so in keeping with tradition, I chose a Night-Elf Druid to be my first character. The huge Minotaur-like Tauren, Trolls, Orcs and Undead were really appealing since I generally like to keep it evil, but I decided to stick with what I know, at least for now. I’ve played Druids for about two years and I know that class’s place, alone or in groups pretty down-pat. Tree-hugger, I am not, but I know what I know.

I was very surprised to see how very similar WoW is to EQ2. The gameplay and mechanics are in many ways nearly the same. You’d think someone at Sony would’ve sued by now. Maybe they have or perhaps Sony ripped off someone else first—I’ve no idea, but the similarities had me up and running right away, killing and running all over the place.

The only real differences I see—aside from the basic stuff like graphics, races and zones is that questing seems to be better set up in WoW. I rarely finished any quests in EQ, but over the course of the weekend, I’d managed to get something over twenty complete quests under my belt in WoW. In a matter of a few hours (I did get some sleep), I managed to work my way up to level 12.

I missed MMORPGs. There’s a reason EQ was dubbed EverCrack. I’m not sure what the slang for WoW would be…”WarCrack”? I’m not sure how long I’m willing to invest in playing WoW, but for now, I’m all about it. If you’re in the neighborhood, drop me a /tell. My main’s name is Abbath (ripped straight from the Norwegian Black Metal gods, Immortal) on the Anvilmar server.

I bought a brand-spanking-fresh-copy of the FPS game, Prey, after waiting for it for almost a year. All the videos, screengrabs and rants I’d seen had me thinking it was going to be the coolest shit since duct tape.

After installing to my desktop’s XP partition (and subsequently spending 40 minutes running updates and patches since I never boot Windows anymore), I gave it a whirl and was greeted with a jerky, shitty looking game with the lowest frame-rate I’ve ever seen. A little deeper digging and I found that my NVidia GeForce 5200 wasn’t supported and closest I could get to smooth gameplay was by running at the lowest graphical settings, which were horrible. I wasn’t happy.

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A few days ago, after spending a wretched day renewing my ID at the hell that is the Brooklyn DMV, I picked up a copy of “Shadow of the Colossus” for the PS2 to brighten my day. I had no idea what it was about, but chose it because somewhere at some point I’d glanced at a review that raved about it. This is basically how I buy all games as I’ve a decided lack of patience to read gamer sites and magazines. I usually will subscribe to an RSS feed and scan the photos and titles. Games that get a bunch of posts, stick in my memory and usually end up getting purchased in moments of consumer weakness, which is often.

The format of your run-of-the-mill action game is: fight, fight, fight…boss scene. Fight the boss and then it’s back to fight, fight, fight til the next boss scene and the game eventually ends. Nothing wrong with it, I suppose but the boss fights have historically always been my least favorite parts. Give me a room with twenty little baddies that I have to kill á la God of War and I am one happy fucking camper. Games that are boss-heavy usually begin to collect dust shortly after purchase.

SotC is all bosses. There’s nothing else to the game, unless you count running from point A to B. There’s not baddies in between to slay. You go from one boss monster to another and while normally this would have me hating this game, I find myself hooked. SotC doesn’t have just any old bosses. These bastards are HUGE, gorgeously rendered behemoths that combine action, puzzle-solving and strategy to beat. The graphics, scenery and feel are hot shit. Strange, mysterious and moody. There’s little or no dialog in the game so the huge dream-like world sprawled out before you, unoccupied but for the mountainous beasts reminiscent of something out of HP Lovecraft is simply there to wonder about.

The hero of the game is this dinky little fucker, armed with only a sword and bow and a horse to ride. Pitted against giants literally fifty times larger, the little dude has to expose and attack the monster’s weak points. This is accomplished by figuring out how and managing to climb the boss, get to his weak spots and stab the fuck out of them before you lose your grip and fall. Tense shit.

There’s something to be said about a game revolving around my least enjoyed facet of the action genre that manages to completely entertain me. SotC is a great game on so many levels, from the concept to the anime-like look. It’s a short game, there being only sixteen bosses to battle, which sucks since this is a game that keeps you wanting to see more. More bosses, more areas, more everything.

For the past month and a half, I’ve been spending a good chunk of my free time in Second Life. Stripped from the official website, Second Life is described as “a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents.” Since it’s user-run, it’s hard to peg, since everyone generally moves to groups and cliques they identify with and do or create whatever the hell they want. In short, from pervert to programmer and from gamer to shut-in—there’s something for everyone. Second Life is definitely some pretty whacked out shit, worth at least a quick look.

Touring about the territories of Second Life, you see seemingly endless 3D creations. Houses, vehicles, stores, giant purple dildos, whatever you could possibly imagine seems to be represented there in one form or another. Users are given the use of a 3D modeling program while having the benefit of still being in-game, allowing you to create objects while playing or possibly as a form of play. Some objects are incredibly beautiful and painstakingly crafted to be as aesthetic or realistic as possible, while others are mediocre or downright lame. Being a self-created reality, there’s quite a varying amount of quality out there.

Everything made in Second Life can be sold to other players, using game dollars known as Lindens. In turn, this virtual money can actually be exchanged for real hard currency. The last time I checked the exchange rate, twenty US dollars made the equivalent of around four hundred Linden dollars. Some people—prolific and talented ones, actually make a tidy chunk of cash of this virtual business. I’ve met one individual who nets about twenty thousand dollars annually from in-game sales of items, scripts and real estate, nicely supplementing his teacher’s salary.

While I’m impressed with Second Life, I don’t really know what to make of it. There’s some really smart people, very talented artists and professionals and a huge mass of idiots, perverts and all-around trashy people. There seems to be bondage shit everywhere you look and everyone seems to be trying to make up for their shortcomings through their avatars. Everyone’s got big muscles, huge boobs and all the trappings. It’s pretty seedy and more than a little bit gross. Where are all the fat, bald people? Personally speaking, blindingly beautiful person that I am, I spent a good chunk of time getting my avatar to look about as close to the real-life me as I could. I just don’t understand why so many people need to look like rejects from a Florida nightclub. Who wants to see that shit?

A good defense of this good, bad and ugly is the fact that it is truly user-run. All this crap is from the great masses. While a kind of exhilarating example of digital democracy, it doesn’t do much in changing my belief that the majority of the human race would be better served as food to the smarter individuals. Brains, it’s what’s for dinner, but I digress.

I don’t know how long I’ll stick with Second Life. My PlayStation is much more inviting and requires much less actual work, but if you find yourself in-game, stop by. My game-name is David Sleestak. I’ll show you my house and we’ll kill a few beers and bong-hits. In-game, of course.