( The HBP observation of the update. With no mention of Phineas Nigellus! Apart from this one. )Anyway, apart from that, it's a videogame-rambling update! Haven't done that in a while.
At the moment, I'm playing
Dark Chronicle (Dark Cloud 2), and it is officially one of my favourite games.
You get chased by knife-weilding clowns. There's a car/train-chase sequence with a clown throwing bombs at your train. As I think I've already mentioned, a gorilla-man says the memorable line, "The Holy One is a great fish that has brought happiness to this forest". Said fish is enormous, violently purple and must be fished up using poisonous apples (after which he complains about having a hook stuck in his 'beautiful lips'), and hearts fly out of his eyes when he blinks.
Okay, it's completely insane and the voices are terribly annoying, but it's great fun. You get a camera! You can photograph all sorts of startlingly beautiful places in the game! There are nonsensical minigames (I never, never got the hang of Spheda)! You have to do all manner of convoluted tasks in order to persuade people to travel on your ridiculously flashy train! I am overusing exclamation points! You can build places yourself! The gameplay and upgrade system rock!
Play the game. Play it now.I'm also playing
Spyro 2: Gateway to Glimmer. SPYRO WAS MY FIRST VIDEOGAME LOVE. SHUT UP.
The original Spyro games were great, but if you're going to buy an Insomniac game, you might want to go for the
Ratchet and Clank series. I love Insomniac both for the sheer enjoyability of its games and for its bizarre sense of humour, and nowhere is that more evident than in
Ratchet and Clank 3. I've
talked about the Qwack-O-Ray before, and nothing will ever top that. Also, what other game companies include a robotic version of Britney Spears singing cheerfully about exterminating all organic life? Fighting with a huge robot on a film set, while in the background the director yells 'cue the giant ninjas!'? A spaceship bridge where you can stand for ages just to listen to the crew arguing with each other? The line "...I don't suppose there's any chance that
he's the evil Clank?"
Robotic pirate ghosts? Some of it is worthy of eyerolling, but some is sheer brilliance, and they're fantastic games even without the general silliness and parodying pop songs, comics, arcade games, films and pretty much everything else.