Now that Spring Break is over and done with, it's time to start cleaning up the pile of shame that you have sitting beside your systems. Like it or not, that pile isn't going to get any smaller with the arrival of Zone of the Enders: The Second Runner, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Pokemon RuSa and the Gameboy Advance SP. And hell, that's just in the next week or so. Let's not forget about titles such as Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo, NBA Street Volume 2, Def Jam Vendetta and a host of others that will invade your living room in the next month. Oh, did I also mention that E3 is right around the corner? Kids, cherish this moment, for this might be the very last time you get a good night's sleep.

Reno - Multiple Titles

Have you ever heard of the term "always a bridesmaid, never a bride" before? Well, that sums up my week of gaming perfectly. It started off innocently enough with the purchase of Zone of the Enders: The Second Runner. While I somewhat... kind of... enjoyed the first game, ZoE2 blew me away with its varied gameplay, awesome graphics and great musical score. Beyond the Bounds is an excellent title, and its various renditions in the game make the experience more epic. But the elusive S ranking is evading me on Hard Mode; instead I have to settle for an A rating. Oh well, I guess that's good enough, right?

The week continued with a tournament at Toronto's York University in (what else?) Soul Calibur 2. This tournament was pretty important not only because it was a tournament but because someone other than myself was running it. It goes to show you how much the community has grown when a group of people that the rest of the community hasn't even met can get a tournament going. While there were some hiccups in the beginning, things settled down and it was a fun time. I must say that York's Cove centre is terrific. Pool tables, arcade games and a PC lounge for some Counter-Strike or Battlefield 1942 is very cool; too bad my university doesn't have a setup like that. As for the tournament itself, yours truly captured second place. Again. For the fourth time in a row. Will Reno ever become the lucky lady once again? I guess you'll just have to wait a couple of weeks for the next tournament to find out.

Andy - Multiple Titles

Online gaming truly is a wonderful thing. These past few weeks have seen me spending a lot of time primarily with one game, and primarily because it is online. Diablo 2 is it's name, and taking up all of your free time is it's game. If it's one thing Blizzard knows how to do, it's how to make an online game mind bendingly addictive. WarCraft, StarCraft, Diablo, they're all perfectly viable home wreckers, and make it their personal goals to make doing anything other than playing them as hard to do as keeping a fat man from the International House of Pancakes.

Over the span of just the past week or so, I've amassed a mighty level seventy-some odd barbarian, and completed the game at least a dozen times. Hacking and slashing, pointing and clicking. Mindless? Yes. More fun than a sorority of drunken college girls? Yes. Well, no. But a whole hell of a lot of fun none the less.

Haohmaru - Multiple Titles

Dynasty Tactics

Finally finished with all three characters (again) - one ending was different than what I previously played so I'm assuming there are multiple endings for each character. Overall, a great hex based strategy game that only suffers from a few tactics being too powerful and being a bit on the easy side.

Eternal Eyes

Long in my pile of shame, I finally unearthed this bad boy after still hankerin' for more strategy/tactics to satiate my appetite after Dynasty Tactics. First impressions include that the game is like Final Fantasy Tactics...Junior. It's missing a host of elements that made that title so impressive but it's not terrible - especially not at its price tag. I've reached level 50 as the main character and am at stage 7 in the game. I'll be reviewing this in the next few weeks so I don't want to say too much.

Ren - Xenosaga (PS2)

I'm still pretty busy with Xenosaga. After about 15 hours of playing, I can't say for sure whether I love it or hate it. The gameplay is the only thing that frustrates me, but at least there isn't very much of it. Some of the boss battles seem ridiculously difficult; I actually fought a boss eleven times before I finally managed to defeat it. The graphics, characters, and storyline, however, are amazing. They're so good that I can easily overlook the few annoying flaws in gameplay. The biggest problem I have is that the difficulty of the game often prevents me from seeing more of the story. It's too bad they couldn't have made this into an anime series or something, since I find myself sighing whenever I actually have to pick up the controller.

Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance - PS2

I've been waiting for this ever since it was announced. I was so excited about it that I even played a bit of the Xbox version, despite the fact that the controls were poorly laid-out. But to tell you the truth, I'm not all that impressed yet with Substance. The new missions and the ability to play as Snake and the ninja are pretty cool, but it got old quickly for me. Maybe I just played MGS2 too much. Either way, it's definitely worthwhile just to see Snake and Raiden skateboarding to a punk remix of the MGS2 Main Theme. I'll take a deeper look into this one once I finish Xenosaga, which will hopefully be sometime in the next decade.

sleeveboy - Multiple Titles

This week I had the rare opportunity to play some games with other human beings. I was in Phoenix this weekend, so I got in touch with some friends of mine from the Shmups board (www.shmups.com) and we organized ourselves a “shmupmeet.” What followed was perhaps one the largest gathering of 2D-based scrolling shooter games the Southwest has ever seen, as each of us brought his favorite shmuppy treasures to share with the group.

First we broke into our host’s PCB collection and played some classic Cave shooters, ESPRaDe and Guwange. Then we settled into some Shikigami no Shiro action on a freshly-chipped Xbox. After a quick snack break we played a little co-op Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven and some casual Guilty Gear X2 competition. On the Sega Saturn we dined on Soukyugurentai and several variants of Parodius, both Chatting (Jikkyo Oshaberi) Original (Da!). But /one of the true highlights for me was playing The Games Paradise. I used to think Star Parodier on PCE was my favorite cute ‘em up of all time, but that was before I got my hands on this beauty. Adorable characters, ridiculously imaginative levels (one is set inside an arcade redemption machine, another inside a traditional Japanese-style console RPG, another inside a karaoke bar, and still another takes place as an 8-bit CPU attempts to wrest control from the 32-bit CPU), and overall fun gameplay make this one a real gem.

sI spent the rest of the week working on Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven, which is getting more challenging (and frustrating) as I go, and perfecting my Baiken skills in Guilty Gear X2. It’s been a good gaming week.

Yoshi - Multiple Titles

Keeping with the theme of my last several WGRs, I discovered yet another new world of PC gaming in the last couple weeks: online multiplayer gaming. I am now hopelessly addicted to the many iterations of Half-Life, as well as StarCraft. It is amazing how many hours can disappear as the Terrans scurry to build nuclear bombs. Once they are complete, a lone Ghost can cloak himself and infiltrate an enemy's base. Once he reaches his target, he can set the location to be hit with the nuclear strike, effectively turning the tide of battle in his species' favor. It is that captivating complexity that really separates PC games from their console and portable cousins. Even the excellent Advance Wars on the GBA never provided the adrenaline rush of being part of a military conflict. RTS games on the PC are able to capture this feeling with amazing success.

While it seems that console releases continue to be the ones that I look forward to the most, the PC games are gaining steadily in the amount of time I actually spend playing them. While I don't see PC gaming replacing the splendor of the next release in the Castlevania series, it is a welcome diversion, especially when multi-player is involved. Speaking of multi-player, tune in in two weeks for this dino's thoughts on Capcom's Auto Modellista.

· · · TNL Staff