And now for two very quick and depressing PS2 game reviews:
First up is Prince of Persia, recommended as a good game for people who like Ico. I gotta tell ya, it looks great. But the playability rapidly went to zero when I discovered that every time a cinematic comes on, my controller stops working and has to be unplugged and replugged. This, combined with the fact that there is a cinematic about every 10 seconds during the first part of the game, made it basically unplayable.
I think there may actually be a problem with my controllers (I tried both of them and got the same results). Once upon a time, my PS2 controller delivered a giant shock to me out of nowhere. Ever since that time, the DVD remote control would not work as long as the controller was plugged in. Unplugging the controller allowed the remote to work again. I tried switching to my backup controller and everything was fine again... until a few months later when it too delivered me a giant shock and then stopped working in tandem with the remote receiver.
Up until now, this has been the only problem - and the fact that I rarely use the PS2 for games meant that I could just leave the remote receiver plugged in all the time and only swap it out for the game controller when I was actually playing a game. Basically the controller worked fine for all the games, so no worries.
The Prince of Persia thing is pretty weird. I'll have to borrow someone else's controller and test my hypothesis. Until then: unplayable.
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Next is Jak II, recommended as a "Sci-Fi GTA3." And that description is spot-on. You walk around a city and are free to carjack people's hovercraft and punch out random people that walk by. There are cops who get pissed off and chase you, etc. It is mission based, just like GTA3, and the difficulty early-on seems to be about the same.
Where Jak II diverges from GTA3 is in the fact that you are constantly paired up with the single most irritating videogame character of all time - Daxter. The game is aimed at a somewhat younger audience than GTA3, and the dialogue suffers greatly as a result. In fact, after about five missions, Daxter's slapstick humor and annoying attitude caused me to put the controller down and step away, lest I grab his scrawny orange neck and do something horrible. The gameplay outside of the cinematics and Daxter's "helpful" spoken clues is great, but every time he speaks up, all enjoyment I had previously disappears. Daxter is a turd in my drink. There should be a Daxter MUTE function.
Alas, unplayable.
