I was pretty excited when I first saw the announcement for Def Jam Vendetta. I like EA Big (although Freekstyle was underwhelming), and I like most of the rappers in the game, and it just looked like a generally fun concept. Despite this, I didn’t pick it up when it first came out. I was (and still am) in the middle of a pile of other games, and I wanted to make sure I really liked it before dropping fifty bucks on it.

motivation

work

a cold

i am not dead

I used to play a lot of top-down shooters. When I was a kid, there was a little smokey room in the back of 7-11, and it always had three or four cabinet games. I remember a lot of them, especially a few that I really liked. One of those was 1941. I guess it isn’t fair to say this, but I’ll say it anyway: all top-down shooters are basically the same. There are some simple variations – bombs, power-ups, even elevation – but basically they were all the same game. This made it pretty easy to go from one to the other, especially if you hadn’t bothered doing crazy things like memorizing enemy attack patterns.

Tomorrow, Halo goes back to Hollywood Video, and I don’t plan to play it again. Maybe it’s great for multiplayer. I may never know. It’s a cool game, and I really want to like it, but its flaws are too deep and too many.

So, for a long time I thought of Steel Battalion as “that expensive game.” Slowly, though, ever so slowly, it wormed its way into the gottahaveit center of my brain. Steel Battalion was one of the big reasons I wanted an XBX, in the end. Less than a week after my wife gave me the XBX, I gave myself Steel Battalion.

Well, it was inevitable, right? I got an XBX, I would try Halo. I waited five whole days, and then I rented it.

So, I got an XBX. I won’t get into the details. Largely, I wanted it to play JSRF. I really liked JSR on my Dreamcast, and I figured the sequel would be extra awesome.