It's Started Again!

No, not my buying habit, but the inability to concentrate on one thing at a time. To be fair, I blame Gearbox. If they hadn't have made Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 so god-damn hard or if they'd have incorporated a "load from last checkpoint" that didn't involve having to wait 2 minutes just to get back into the same bit of the game you passed 90 seconds ago then I wouldn't be currently working my way through Project Gotham Racing 2 and instead would be continuing my ongoing mission to clear out various French villages and help the Allies.

BIA:RtH30 truly is a great infantry game. I've hinted at the similarities between it and Full Spectrum Warrior before but in truth it goes much much further. Being able to actually aim the crosshair yourself that will take down the last bit of resistance in an area, ensuring your reinforcements will be able to have a comfortable landing, is a massive step up from merely commanding your squads via a floating camera. The graphics are widescreen, the sound is incredible but the game's just too darn tricky. I'm currently bogged down in a section where random artillery drops are taking me out every third retry. I know there's a way round it but I'll be buggered if I can see it. :-/

PGR2, as you probably know, is a completely different kettle of fish. This was released to tremendous applause in 2003 and makes for one of the outright best racers going. Somtimes very pretty, sometimes unbelievably ugly but pretty much always nice to play. Sega fanbois berated the removal of the Kudos gambling system but seeing as Bizarre did such a good job at setting the platinum targets (which are always so tangible yet so far out of reach), I can't say I had any problem with that whatsoever. I originally turned it on one evening last week to play a bit of Geometry Wars by way of a breather from getting shelled to bits in BIA and it's barely been out of the Xbox since.

I'd played the game through in full to Gold levels when it was first released whilst reviewing it for Racesimcentral. A nasty incident involving Microsoft wiping my hard drive meant my game save was lost and I barely played it again. Consequently I'm working through as if it were my first time, yet the fact that I've been here before isn't detracting from my enjoyment one little bit. Some races are annoying, sure (you don't enjoy the American Muscle series, you ENDURE it), but most of the time PGR2 is about as good as it gets when looking at racers coded for fun over realism. Something that really hits you is just how much there is to do. There's (from memory) 14 or so challenge series, then 3 rounds of 120 challenges and 113 cars to collect. That's not including the weekly and monthly challenges set down by Bizarre and the possibility of playing online any time day or night. Fantastic stuff.

As you may have gathered from all the above, I'm really not having much of a problem with the "ban". It's actually been quite liberating as I'm fully free to enjoy what I already have and it's totally taken my mind off anything that's coming up. Having said that, we're only in January ;-)

It's not going to be long before my next update as I need to let you know why I sold my DS :-D