When the DS Lite came out, I was all over that like stink on a monkey due to the various improvements made to the device.   The DSi brings improvements, no doubt, however none of them, on the surface, appear to be as profound as the changes from DS Phat to DS Lite.  Think of this as the DS version of upgrading from DVD to Blu-Ray where the upgrade from Phat to Lite was like going from a VCR to DVD.

Now, I resolved myself to buying a DSi months ago once they were available for preorder as I would like bigger screens, the ability to change the brightness without having to go to the main menu and the ability to go to the main menu without rebooting the thing, but what I’m really excited for is the SD card support and even that feature didn’t get me all hot and bothered until two weeks ago.

What happened two weeks ago?  It’s pretty simple. I started playing Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars.

GTA: Chinatown Wars is set in Liberty City, same as GTA IV and GTA IV: Lost and the Damned.  Chinatown Wars only has two islands (no Alderney here) however all of the popular Liberty City landmarks and boroughs are present.  If you’ve played GTA IV, you’ll recognize what you’re seeing in Chinatown Wars.  At several points you even tussle with The Lost, a biker gang that is an obvious nod to the gang you meet up with in GTA IV and lead in GTA IV: Lost and Damned.  Chinatown Wars is an incredible amount of fun, made even more fun by the ability to recognize places I passed by every day when playing the game’s older brothers.

So I’m playing this fantastic portable version of GTA and I’m straight off the heels of playing Lost and the Damned which was as good a piece of DLC you’re likely to find out there and I thought, man, wouldn’t it be great if you could get DLC for Chinatown Wars the same way you could for GTA IV?  (The fact that I read that new races would be available for all versions of the upcoming Blood Bowl after release except for the DS version didn’t hurt either.)  Then it hit me.  The DSi supports SD cards, which means more storage.  The DSi will be able to play games off of the SD cards, or at least move content off of the cards and into the onboard storage for game access.

Holy crap.  Is DLC now a possibility on the DSi?  Will I be able to buy a Chinatown Wars expansion pack with more characters, more missions and more weapons?  Not knowing what the hardware limitations are in regards to accessing the SD card storage while playing a game, I could just be dreaming here, but if Nintendo was able to enable SD card game play on the Wii with nothing more than a software update, why not have the same thing for the DSi.

Once I got started thinking about this, my mind went to even more glorious places.  Imagine a game like GTA for the Wii and the DSi where you can play all you want, doing whatever in the Wii version, and then, once you’re done, you can save your player, with all of his or her stats to your SD card, slap that card into a DSi and then continue your adventures in the portable version.  Once done in the DSi version, you took the card out, put in the Wii and continued.  Maybe each version has missions or features that are only in that version, as an incentive to buy both versions.   Obviously, there would have to be some concessions made in each version to make up for what the other doesn’t have, but still, even with this, if the game had a big enough hook so that you didn’t want to stop playing it, being able to bring it with you when you leave would mean that you never had to stop playing it.

If the ultimate ending point is a unified console, as some pundits would lead you to believe, then this type of connectivity should be part of it.  I buy two copies of Galactrix, one for my PSWii360 and one for my DSP.  When I’m done earning experience on the console, my save can be loaded up in the handheld.  I don’t have to sacrifice time playing on one version for time spent on another.  All time is towards progress in both versions.  Good Lord.  Can you imagine?

In the mean time, I’m going to try and be happy with what the DSi brings, rather than dream what could happen, only to find that it won’t happen.  Still though, when I unbox the DSi and slide the SD card in, it’ll be hard not to dream of a day when leaving home means you don’t have to leave your games behind.

At this point of time, I think it’s safe to say that I’m done with Gears of War 2.

I’ve fought through the campaign multiple times, finished all 50 levels of Horde mode and ground out every achievement that I can reasonably expect myself to get.  I have no desire to play the game’s multiplayer mode, and if I did, the busted matchmaking would prevent it any way. The only achievement I have left to consider is “Seriously 2.0” with its 100,000 kills, and while I can do it, I probably won’t.  I would love those additional 50 points, but I just can’t justify the time needed to do it.

Now that I’m finished and have had time to reflect a little, I’m somewhat disappointed in the game.  The original Gears of War was one of my favorite games and, at the time, the only game I restarted to play on the highest difficulty level. The co-op was great, the combat was greatand even though the story was pretty slim, when it wasn’t nonexistant, it didn’t matter.  The gameplay made up for it.

Strangely, rather than build on the intensity of the first one, Epic chose to instead throw a lot more variety in to the sequel, and as a result you end up with a very unfocused game.  There are combat sections, platforming sections, parts where you ride on a weapons platform, parts where you drive a tank, parts where you ride Locust beasties.  See what I’m saying?  Sure, there was more of a story, and the new parts helped clear up things from the first time, while at the same time make the overall plot even murkier, but there were so many other new things as well, that the entire experience isn’t as focused as the first one.

If the original Gears of War could be described with one word, it would be “intensity”.  The game simply did not let you breathe, unless you physically stood still.  Clearing out an area and then moving on to the next area, which wasn’t that far along your linear path, would then bring on a new selection of things to kill.  The action never let up, and, when you were behind cover, fighting for your life, your enemies would not let you sit there, contentedly lining up shots.  They were brutally relentless, rushing you in a heartbeat, getting behind you and eviscerating you.  You had to be on your toes constantly and when playing on Insane, having a good partner was essential.

Not so for Gears of War 2.  For one, there are long, and I mean long, sections of walking around with nothing to fight.  An entire chapter takes place in an area where aside from some small critters that are easily dispatched with melee attacks, there’s nothing to fight.  There are environmental hazards to avoid, but it’s fairly easy to do so.  When you did fight the Locust, they stayed put.  Rarely, if ever, are you rushed, with the exception of the Mauler Boomers, who only have a melee weapon, and the Flame Grenadiers with their flamethrowers.  All of the other enemies would just stay behind cover and light you up.  Or, if they did try to rush you, the size of the battlefield was so large, that it would have taken them forever to get to you.  I am the world’s worst video game sniper and I got to be pretty damn good with the Longshot (the game’s sniper rifle) because of the copious opportunities for long range kills.  These two changes, made for a considerably less intense experience.

That’s not to say that GoW2 didn’t have intense fights, because it did, but the intensity of those fights came from the game throwing more enemies or larger enemies at you rather than having more aggressive enemies.  I think that part of this is from the design of the enemies themselves.  The Grinders, basically a Boomer with a chain gun, can light you up from across the map, so he doesn’t need to get close.  The Reavers, a flying beastie, and the Brumaks, a huge, lizard like creature, also pack some pretty heavy armament, so they don’t need to be up close to do damage.  One note about those last two.  At different parts of the game, you and your team ride both the Reavers and the Brumaks, and the end result, for me, was to make me feel guilty about having killed both such creatures earlier in the game.  In the first game, you killed Reavers, but hey, they’re Locust and Locust are bad, so no sweat.  Riding them in this game, made me feel like I had spent a lot of aggression on a very ugly horse, and horses aren’t inherently evil.  They just do what their riders tell them to do.

Getting back to the firefights, when these large beasts show up, you know that you have to kill them, because they pack a real punch, but you also feel like as long as you stay behind cover, you’ll be ok, because they won’t ever rush you. The only real threat from rushing were the Bloodmounts, mini-Brumaks that had no problem getting up on you and tearing you a new one.  The fights with the Bloodmounts were intense, but those were few and far between.  Now, yes, tickers and wretches would come after you, but tickers could be picked off and exploded from a distance and wretches were easily taken out with one melee hit, even on Insane.

Even the boss battles lacked punch.  The boss battles in Gears where you fought Berserkes, the females of the Locust race, also strangely absent from the sequel, were pretty intense fights.  You couldn’t shoot them, well you could, it just didn’t do anything, so you had to lure them to a spot where you could use a satellite laser on them. Luring them places meant pissing them off until they charged at you and you dove out of the way, causing them to bust open a door.  The final confrontation with General Raam required you to whup his ass quickly, or get tore up for your troubles.  In the sequel, one fight is against a giant fish and involved a lot of waiting around, one is against the new baddie Skorge, and involves a lot of you running away from his various ranged attacks while waiting to get in a chainsaw duel and break his weapon, and the third was against a giant mutated Brumak, while safely protected from within a helicoptor.  None were intense, and the fight with Skorge wasn’t even a fight.  You can’t hurt him, so you run away until you break his stuff enough and then he runs away.

Where the intensity of the game comes out is in Horde mode, which is, I think, why fans of the first game were so enamored with it.  In Horde mode, enemies will rush you and you have to be quick and efficient about taking them down. You have to prioritize targets and communicate with your team or you’ll get slaughtered.  As much as I liked the intensity though, once you’ve gone from level 1 to 50 in one sitting, you’re pretty much done with Horde mode.  At least I was.

That’s not to say that Gears of War 2 is a bad game.   It’s a good to very good game.  It certainly looks pretty and runs well and the co-op is as enjoyable as ever.  They even made the achievements easier to get, which the whore in me greatly appreciates.  While there’s more to Gears of War 2, it’s not more of the right things from Gears of War, and that’s the problem.  I wanted more intensity and I got more running. I wanted more brutal fights and I got more vehicles.  I can only hope that for the third one, Epic goes back to what made the first one so great, that two minute loop of crazed intensity, repeated over and over until the inevitable, nail biting conclusion.  A coherent story would be nice too, but I’m not so naive as to expect the impossible.  After all, they make games, they’re not miracle workers.