Metaplanar Babel

Jon has definitely outdone himself this year for my birthday. He has procured the prrrecioussss, along with a few other miscellaneous games (namely these two). I’m so surrounded by gaming goodness that I don’t know where to start.

I knew that the PSP had to be good, since the guys over at Penny Arcade and Woody at GUComics were all raving over the thing, but.. seriously, it’s everything they said and more. It’s the preciousssss. It’s small and cute and sleek.. and oh my god do the graphics on this thing rock! It’s better than the PS2 and the Xbox, and it’s like 3″x 6″ big. Kahrayzah!

Anyway, none of that matters if it doesn’t have any cool games, right? So I tried out Metal Gear Ac!d, which is kinda..different. The graphics are phenomenal, of course, but the game isn’t remotely what I expected. This is not a twitch game. It’s a..card..based strategy game, sort of, where your cards control what Snake’s doing in his missions. Is Snake’s portrait super-awesome or what? Anyway, I haven’t played a whole lot of the game yet, due to gamer overload, but it looks really great. It’s got a female operative that I hope will become more involved (she seems like she might even be as involved as Raiden was in Metal Gear Solid 2, but we’ll see..).

Annd of course I played with the Sims 2. I foresee that this game is going to suck up my life. The only thing I haven’t figured out is if it’s possible to just have the camera follow the active Sim around, rather than having to manually scroll around the house everytime they get up. The game seems strangely fun.. I don’t understand *why* it’s fun to watch my Sim run around in a rage and totally ruin his own party, but damn if it isn’t. Of course, the big draw for me is the Sim builder, which is awesome! I just hope I can find some more hair styles or something, cause those are just a little bit limited (what’s up with no curly-haired guys, huh?). Otherwise, I’m overall pretty impressed with the game, so we’ll see what happens.

The precious: