For making a fine game.

I speak of course of Beyond Good and Evil, which seems to be one of the top games on anyone’s “If you haven’t played xxx you’re not a real yyy” list.

Not that I’m, you know, succumbing to peer pressure and following the crowd and all that. Because I totally am. Sometimes, the crowd is right.

When I say “the crowd” of course I mean a fairly small crowd. After all, this thing was released and marked down to 20 bucks within the first month. It’s no platinum selling system mover must have title.

This one was only on my shelf for three years or so, played up to the first save point and abandoned. I think I put it in the Xbox when we had some friends over and realized very quickly that (a) it wasn’t really a play-with-others game and (b) the pig was annoying.

3 years later, the pig is still annoying. That aside…

The game itself is a very enjoyable hybrid. You’ve got your Zelda-inspired combat, your stealthy bits, a little bit of hovercraft racing, you’ve got some collecting of items to do and you’ve got an oddly addictive secondary goal of keeping up a photographer job while you try to save the world. How Peter Parkeresque. Should I admit that I died in one of the early boss fights because I was trying to get a picture of the boss in order to get paid for it?

The game is also forklift-free, which is important to me. You do bump some boxes around with a hovercraft, but no forks are used in the lifting of any crates.
Well worth the twenty bucks, or whatever it costs now.

After letting those credits scroll and being fairly surprised by the last little plot twist, I dove, maybe a little quickly, into ICO for the PS2. So far I’m loving the atmosphere and hating the camera angles. I’ve played up through the bit with the windmill and it’s driven me to look things up online twice already, which is something I do only when it comes down to that or I put a controller through the window. You may infer from that that it’s a little frustrating.

In other news, I continue to count down to a “healthy” BMI, clocking in at 193.6 this morning. That’s 13 pounds since March 3rd… I should be at goal by mid-May if this keeps up.