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by Mischief Shai-hulud 01/24/2005, 8:56am PST

R-Type Final (PS2):

Zillions of actually really cool unlockables like new ships to fly! How ya like me now in my FLAMETHROWER R-Type??? Too bad no one thought to make actual fun levels to fly them in. Boss fights are 100% pattern memorization.

Gradius V (PS2):

Same old gradius, fun, well-designed levels. Probably the prettiest shooter I've seen to date. Every move by the enemies or bosses is telegraphed, so it's possible to beat the game on your first go without dying from insufficient pattern memorization. If anything I'd say the game suffers from being too authentic to the old Gradius traditions as every boss fight will involve shooting the itty-bitty core nestled inside an invincible boss machine and the powerup system is still strategy-free (double shot still halves your forward firing rate and missiles are still a cracker jack prize of a weapon.)

Einhander (PS1):

For a brief time on the Playstation, Square decided to branch outside their usual genre and experiment with making games that didn't suck. From this we got the likes of FF: tactics, Bushido Blade, and now Einhander. It's a side scrolling shooter from back when 3D anything was amazing, and its levels start out stupidly easy before ratcheting up the difficulty exponentially at later levels. But the coolest thing about this game are its bosses and midbosses. They're fucking huge, they move quickly, you can blast any individual part you want off them (sometimes revealing powerups in the process) and they REACT to your movements. Fun fun fun, if you can find a copy.

Halo 2 (Xbox):

Complete improvement over everything from Halo 1. Not that that means they removed all the part that sucked from Halo 1. The plot's a bit of a letdown, though. I was expecting sko bitter struggle on earth with huge pitched street fights and beachheads. Instead I got ANOTHER Halo ring full of slow moving trams that enemies jump onto. And more of the flood. Did anybody like the flood? Did the game designers really mean for the flood's hive-mind to look just like Audrey 2 from Little Shot of Horrors? Still, they added more tanks and that can't be a bad thing.

Final Fantasies 1 & 2 (GBA):

FF1 with the graphics of FF2 and a less clunky combat system and Magic Points instead of D&D spell memorization. Wow did that game fly by in a blur without crappy mechanics to drag out the experience. Plus the improved translation makes the plot less mysterious (Why did Garland become Chaos???) and more "Oh, just more anime bullshit." The extra dungeons are just a randon collection of crap levels that unfold in random order and their whole purpose to the plot it nebulous at best. Don't heed the siren call of nostalgia with this one.

Mechwarrior 4 (PC):

Oh great. A Mechwarrior game that doesn't allow you to customize your mechs. What's next, save points?

Armored Core Nexus (PS2):

Controls like a 3rd person shooter that requires you to get a lock before firing. Most levels are over in 2-5 minutes, but there's like 150 of them. You also get some 400+ parts to play around with. The one big glaring fault with the game is that there's no way to compare part stats onscreen. Almost as if they're trying to force you to get the strategy guide. If you LURV building custom spaceships and robots like I do, it's the best game of its kind. Otherwise give it a pass.