I’ve never played Day of the Tentacle, or Full Throttle, or… well, I’ve never played any of Tim Schafer’s games, even though he’s one of those “name” developers that has a massive and vocal following.

On the other hand, I did buy his “Pyschonauts” a couple of years ago. It was one of those games that launched to massive critical acclaim and then wound up on the clearance racks inside of a couple of months… kind of like Beyond Good and Evil.

So, I had the Xbox version, which set me back all of 10 bucks, and I played it once. Started the game, sat through the intro movie, ran straight up the ramp into the “Basic Braining” training mission, completed that, and saved.

It did not really hook me, and I never got back to it. I am bad like that.

Just recently, I spent another four dollars to buy the PC version of Psychonauts when I found it in a Big Lots. Not a bad use of four bucks, by the way – playing it in 1680 x 1050 with all the graphical bells & whistles cranked really puts the Xbox version to shame, and it has pretty decent joypad support.

(I have noticed that I have to keep two different joypads around – one Logitech 10-button dual-shock style controller, and one Xbox 360 controller. Games tend to have a default button mapping that caters to one or the other. Psychonauts, being a couple of years old, prefers the dual-shock style controller.)

After I finished Tomb Raider Anniversary, I decided I’d give it another try. This time, I didn’t rush things. I started the game, ran around the camp as best I could, talked to all my fellow campmates, dug up some arrowheads, did some random thingy collecting… my opinion of the game increased greatly, and it has continued to do so with each new level.

So I’ve got that as the top game in the queue right now, and I was thinking about putting Armed and Dangerous on the stack next, but I hear that Armed and Dangerous has lots of things in it that are much more fun (and it’s already a damned funny game) if you’ve played Giants : Citizen Kabuto first, and I got a copy of Giants : Citizen Kabuto bundled with a motherboard a while back… so my queue looks like this:

Psychonauts

Giants: Citizen Kabuto

Armed and Dangerous

I also have “Kingdom of Paradise” spinning in the PSP whenever I get a few minutes when I’m out and about. I haven’t progressed very far, but I’m liking everything about it except for the voice acting. It’s bad enough it got dubbed and there doesn’t seem to be any way to turn the Japanese voices back on; they went that one step further and made sure that, whenever a Japanese word is left intact in the English script, it’s pronounced as poorly as possible.