Loco for Roco

[Originally posted on 1Up.com]

Looks like the PSP's game-library is finally getting some quality titles, and just in time for summer as well! I'm off on three weeks vacation to the Swedish west-coast, specifically the tiny island of Ramsö, on which there are about 25 houses, no cars, roads or stores. So I have of course prepped my 1Gb and my newly-aquired 2Gb Memory Sticks with goodness. And have a bunch of new titles to play, including Field Commander, Exit, Loco Roco and Daxter. I was expecting to mostly be playing my new DS Lite, but with all these PSP-titles it might fall by the wayside. O_o

Those Japanese, they never cease to amaze me! As if plumbers eating mushrooms and jumping on flying-turtles wasn't wacky enough. The last couple of days I've been playing Loco Roco, and yesterday I received my PS2 copy of Gitaroo-Man from Amazon.co.uk (thanks to Akegata, hondana & Raz23 for convincing me to get it). I just can't help but smile, shake my head and sometimes even laugh out-loud while playing these games! ^_^

Loco Roco is really a very polished and addictive title, I'll have a full-review when I'm back and have played it a lot more, but I can tell you right now, that if your PSP has been collecting dust of late, or you want to see if that UMD-drive still works, this is the title to get! NOTE: If you have firmware version 2.0 or earlier, DON'T UPGRADE IT to play Loco Roco! There have been some amazing developments on the PSP-homebrew\hacking front recently, check out PSPUpdates.com for all the latest news, but with DevHook you can load the 2.71 firmware to play newer games like Loco Roco without permanently upgrading you PSP, so check it out! Also, now there's a downgrader for 2.5\2.6 firmware as well! ^_-

I've only had a short while to play Gitaroo Man so far, so I can't say too much about it yet, however it's pretty crazy and fun. I couldn't help myself moving in time with the music as I was playing last night (although that might have been the wine), and the art-style is pretty cool too. My only gripe, is really not the games fault, it's that fuckin' DualShock2, I really don't like those analog-sticks, man what I wouldn't do to be able to play GM with a WaveBird instead! O_ô

Speaking of my favorite controller for my favorite console, I was on a shopping-spree yesterday and besides picking up "The Mark of Kri" which I've read good things about in a Time Extend feature in Edge (which was also published online) for $10 I also bought Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones for the GameCube, so I might actually turn on my GameCube this year! Now there's a system that's been collecting dust! -_-;