Land Shlubbing

I've been shlubbing around doing absolutely nothing for the past few days. Skipped the gym. All that business. But I plugged in the ol' PS2 and played some games.

For about six hours I played Kingdom Hearts, which (if you've been living under a video-game-free rock for the past five years or so) is a game that mixes up Final-Fantasy-style characters and gameplay with all of your animated Disney favorites. Characters from things like Alice in Wonderland, Tarzan, Aladdin, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Winnie the Pooh, Hercules, Peter Pan, The Little Mermaid. Well, it probably has most of those. I have to be honest and say that I got bored in the middle of the second world, which was based on Tarzan.

There's a lot of drudgery in this game. Hack-and-slash action, essentially, which is a step-up from the turn-based action of most RPGs, but even this gets old fast. You do some team-making and organization but for the most part you're stuck with Donald Duck and Goofy. The worlds are small, and you pretty much walk down a cattle chute for the extent of what I've played thus far. This is like a Final Fantasy game, except dumbed down and made more accessible.

Despite the new and obvious differences, I had the same problem with Kingdom Hearts that I have with Final Fantasy and most roleplaying games. I was bored. I was yearning for a Legend of Zelda which takes the best parts of roleplaying games, and then incorporates minigames, puzzles, and free-roaming quests. I don't know if I'll be finishing (or even continuing) this game, and if you have the same sentiments about roleplaying games as I do, I can't recommend it.

The other game I've popped in is State of Emergency. This game is instantly accessible and silly and bloody. You're some convict gangmember, and the story mode has you going through riotous environments and causing chaos in order to bring down "The Corporation," a 1984-esque conglomerate that controls the people through fear and chemicals. That's about all I know about the story mode, and I don't really care about it.

What I do care about is smashing things and bludgeoning people with appliances, furniture, assorted weapons, and body parts--heads, limbs, torsos. You can beat somebody with a freaking torso. Worth the $5 clearance cost of this game if you can find it used.

The free-play mode has you causing as much chaos as possible before you either run out of time or get killed. I wouldn't recommend playing State of Emergency for more than maybe an hour at a time, but if you have some afternoon to kill and just want mindless violence, this is a nice change of pace from Grand Theft Auto.