A couple of factors have seen me disband my Shame Pile this week; The first being my XBox 360 rudely flashing three scarlet beacons of hate at me on Monday morning, and most of the games left on it were 360 games, the other being that I finally gave up holding out and went out and got Batman: Arkham Asylum, thankfully on the PS3.
After blagging some free Dissidia promotional postcards from the nice man behind the counter at GAME, I gleefully skipped home to open the box up (Got the Collector's Edition), and was actually really disappointed. Not only was the Batarang made of cheap plastic, as opposed to the metal one I was told I would get (although in retrospect people would die if it was metal), but it doesn't come off the stand either. The second disappointment came with the 'digipack' cardboard sleeve. If I'd got it on the 360 I wouldn't have been bothered, because the sleeve is DVD case sized, but on the shelf with my PS3 games it looked retarded. One click on eBay later and all was rectified, a PS3 game case was winging it's way across the country to me and plopped into my hand yesterday.
The game is actually really good, the demo does it no justice, and when I got it home I spent about 8 hours straight on it, nearly completing it, which I did a couple of days later, the second time I played it. I have no regrets though, the game was fantastic, with the only exceptions being Poison Ivy's Dual Shock 3 throwingly annoying boss fight and the samey enemies. They sorted out the problem with Batman taking up two thirds of the screen too, it zooms out nicely when you're running or fighting, and The Riddler's... erm... riddles are a nice touch, which will definitely see me returning to it to clear them up.
I also got SoulCalibur: Broken Destiny on PSP, which at first seemed disappointing but with perseverance I got into it heavily. Made a surprisingly good Kain (from Legacy of Kain) on the Character Creator feature (which is a bit watered down from SoulCalibur IV's, but impressive on a handheld none the less), using the move set of Siegfried, and am slowly but surely starting to kick ass on it. The difficulty level is harder than the other SCs though, without the option to lower it.
My initial disappointment was mainly with the long-awaited cameo from God of War's Kratos. He isn't actually that good, his moves aren't as fluid as they are in his home turf, although if they were he'd be unbeatable. And I guess that, because he's in that, we won't see him in a 'proper' SoulCalibur game.
And Burnout Paradise, the third and final game I acquired this week. When I initially tried the demo I hated the game, I have a bit of a stigma with sandbox racing games as one wrong turn can prove costly, but I'm having great fun with it. It's possibly to do with the fact that the Ghostbusters Ecto-1 style car I purchased from the PSN store in Fanboy-fuelled delight has better stats than I should have at that point in the game, it might be due to the fact that Burnout Dominator's soundtrack has made it through pretty much unscathed, including annoying-as-fuck anthem 'Girlfriend' by flappy headed mess Avril Lavigne, which is ironically perfect music to smash up a car to. Either way, it's great.
And the rest of the week briefly: Spent a lot of Tuesday night playing Lego Batman, Burnout Paradise and Wii Sports with my 3 year old nephew, which is always fun. He's really starting to get the hang of games now, it would bring a tear to my eye if I wasn't such a hardened perfect male specimen. TESTOSTERONE!
During the week I watched Street Fighter Alpha: The Animation, which was pretty good. I loved the fact that out of his two fights, Dan Hibiki got cut to ribbons by Vega (That's 'Claw' if you're a pretentious fucktard), and failed to Gadouken Birdie and was pulverised for his troubles. Oh, how I laughed.
And the 'dynamic themes' hit the PSN Store last night. I tried the WipEout one, because it was free, and was indifferent. It was completely overshadowed by the two Arkham standard themes, of which the Batman one is gracing my Home screen as we speak.
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