September 30th, 2007
Running through a castle by the sea
It’s no small secret that I have a considerable game backlog to get through, mainly a score of unfinished RPGs. For some, this is deserving, but others, it borders or sacrilege.
After getting home from the annual company review and workshop, I was pretty tired and was craving a little light media before an early bedtime. But my laptop wasn’t connected, and I didn’t feel like screwing with wires so I decided to play a game. At first I tried Star Ocean 3, but unfortunately with successive titles Tri-Ace seems to improve only on pissing me off more. The things that were frustrating in Star Ocean 2 are only more so with Till the End of Time. The dialogue is sickening, the voice acting an insult, and the mildly satisfying battle system is drowned out in a deluge of pointless cutscenes that just drag on and on and on. If the game ends up taking seventy hours to clear, it’s only because over 40% of it is spent waiting for the next poorly textured character to deliver a delayed response to some vapid one-liner. I don’t like quitting on games, but Tri-Ace has pushed me too far, and SO3 is now on moratorium for being unbearable.
Still, I decided I had too much time on my hands in cold, gloomy weather. So next I tried Code Veronica for another hour or two before realizing I was wasting my life playing a B game for the third time. Then I started fussing with Midnight Club 2 (which I helped develop), since I still haven’t cleared it. However, the difficulty and the frothy nostalgia from playing through the Paris level were too much. I guess I wanted a game that was mildly challenging and devoid of sentimental attachment, but most of all one which didn’t require a lot of patience.
So ultimately I decided to give Ico another try; despite having gotten stuck at in the first room of the game when last I tried it two years ago. Fortunately, this time was a lot smoother, and now I’m about four hours on, climbing through the middle of a very nice surrealist painting. Ico was on the ETC “suggested games list” six years ago, but I’m very slow to adopt new technology. I got the PS2 in 2004, and now three years later am just catching up to all those dust-collecting DVDs.
Ico has stirred up a lot of soft, pastel fantasy and I’m having a hard time putting it down. But I don’t think I can stay on the couch all weekend; autumn weather grows its own kind of spongy idealism that’s hard to ignore.
