I got a $25 GameStop gift card.

[TheRyno]

So my roommate was nice enough to get me a $25 gift card to GameStop for my birthday. But the thing is, I don't know what to get with it. As much as I love video games, I don't play that many. I only have a PS2 and a Game Boy Micro (I have other older systems back at my parents' house). I'd like to get a DS Lite but I'm kinda jobless at the moment. My tastes don't vary that well. Mainly, all I really play are the GTA, Tony Hawk and Smackdown series with a few random action, racing and fighting games thrown in. Unlike almost all of my friends, I dislike RPGs as they seem repetitious and time-consuming to me. And I suck at sports games. I haven't been good at a sports game since NBA Jam or Ken Griffey Jr with computer fielding.

So, considering that criteria, what should I get? Game Boy Micro/Advance games are seemingly out of the question as wherever I go, all I can find are games for cartoon/toy/movie tie-ins. I actually went to GameStop yesterday with one of my friends and the few GBA games that I did want were still for about $25...used. So that pretty much leaves PS2 games. For a while, I've been wanting to get either SvR07, Tony Hawk Project 8 and/or Yakuza when they dropped in price enough. Thing is I hear so much stuff about the changed control schemes in SvR so that's steered me away toward it. Plus they're practically done with Yakuza 2 in Japan already so, with my luck, it'll come out stateside the moment I decide to buy the first one. So that leaves me with Project 8. Does anyone else have any other ideas?

By the way, when I went to GameStop yesterday, I found a sweet game I've only read about in a game magazine a while back called Castle Shikigami 2. From what I read before, it was basically your standard top-down space shooter but with cut-scenes that were not only written with horrible Engrish (meaning bad Japanese-to-English translation for those not in the know) but it was voiced as well. Badly, might I add. When I started playing it, I realized that it was so much more than your average top-down space shooter. You don't fight in a spaceship or plane or anything. Instead, your character's body flies around the screen as millions of enemies, bullets (or "shot" as in "Press Square To Shot" as it says in the "Option") and whatever the hell your special attack is. I can't really describe it beyond that. But like the article said, it's pretty much only found in GameStop bargain bins so, lo and behold, yesterday I found two used copies for $8. And as I've been looking up stuff online for it, everyone says its only $10 new. So either way, its a bargain.

[thuganomic]

Buy a DVD

[Cactus Drags]

How can you be steered away towards something?

And why would a new control scheme, that from pretty much all accounts is a massive improvement over the old one, convince you not to buy Smackdown?

Edited July 22, 2007 by Dragsy 7-0

[TheRyno]

I've just heard that SvR07, the PS2 version in particular, is glitchy as all hell.

[Summers]

Buy a DVD

[TheRyno]

Actually, my hometown GameStop had a decent amount of used Japanese movies, which is strange because my hometown is as small, midwestern and whitebread as you can get. Unfortunately, most of the print was in Japanese so I couldn't tell if they'd be playable on a Region 1 player. I was so close to picking up a copy of Battlefield Baseball once.