Another long weekend is upon us, that is if you happen to work in Queensland anyway. It’s great having an extra day, just to savor those games you really want to spend some quality time with, and what better games than Initial D: Special Stage and Beatmania IIDX9. I really have to say that Play-Asia fucking rock when it comes to delivering the goods, I only ordered those two games last Thursday and they arrived midday yesterday. They really are the guys for any import needs, and the shipping is cheap as well. I was only $6 to get those two games shipped in a small cardboard box with the games also wrapped in bubble wrap.
I didn’t get to play a great deal of each game last night as I spent a fair bit of time fiddling with the goddamn PS2 just to get it to read the Initial D disc. But once it did I finally got to experience the goodness that is Initial D Special Stage. Since I’ve never played the arcade version it’s all new to me, but I instantly fell in love with the game. I can really see why people are always on about it, it’s just feels so solid. The only thing that pissed me off was that there is no optical out put for the game, it’s been disabled. I read that it was to stop people from ripping the soundtrack, but you can just rip the goddamn CD’s so it makes no sense. So apart from not having surround sound for this game everything else is great. I’ll write some further impressions later.
Also with Beatmania, it’s been so long since I’ve played the series that I’m really out of practice. Plus I’m starting to think that you really need the IIDX controller to play this game, because at the moment with 7 keys it’s really difficult with the standard dualshock 2 controller. I’ll give it a few more goes, and see if I get any better. Using the controller with 5 keys used to be easy, but with 7 it just get confusing as hell.
