/playing
Shadow Hearts: From the New World (ps2)
Black (ps2)
We Love Katamari (ps2)
Meteos (DS)

/listening
Podcasts…

/watching
Lost in Translation

Yes, again a complete different list from last week, except the podcasts and Meteos. This week was dust-collecting week for the 360 and a new life for the Playstation2!

Black wasn’t all that. It’s pretty for last-gen, but it gets boring already after one hour of play. You just keep on shooting, shooting and shooting enemies. Rambo style. So it’s good fun, but just for a while. We Love Katamari is a blast again though. I loved the first, although it was a bit short, being just two evenings for the main story.

I guess what really surprised me, was Shadow Hearts: From the New World, a Japanese RPG with a North American 1930s setting. You play a sixteen year old detective, who gets accompanied by two Indians. One of them is Shania, who can transform into wonderful Aeon-like creatures, borrowing the powers of Indian spirits. With its beautiful animation and strange twist on American history, this game has had me in its grasp for over 7 hours. A turn-based battle system, in the likes of the Final Fantasy series, lets you choose your moves which only execute after timing your button presses on the correct areas of some rotating ring. Succeed and you might be able to combo your way through all of your enemies. Fail and you lose your go, allowing the monsters to ass-whoop you silly at will.

Weekends are great for gaming, but work is really wearing me out lately. Yesterday evening, turning on a console was even too much of a hassle. So I decided to watch Lost in Translation again, one of my favourite movies of late. As you might have read in a few posts ago, I’m very intrigued by Japland, as I like to call it, and this movie emphasizes nicely how different we really are.