Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

Dragon Quest VIII is making me hate my Wii.

I kind of missed the party when the PS2 was big, so I made sure to grab myself a launch-model PS3 when it was announced they were being discontinued. Since then, I’ve picked up a number of great PS2 games in an attempt to get a grip on just what everyone who had that system last generation was enjoying.

Once such game I’ve snapped up recently is the critically acclaimed Dragon Quest VIII. As a long-time fan of the series, I’ve been through a lot of the games. I played I and II to completion on the NES, III on the Game Boy Color until I got hopelessly frustrated, and IV to completion on DS. IV was great, and it made me decide to pick up VIII.

Now, I’m about four and a half hours into what I can already tell is a very lengthy game, and overall, I’m very happy with what’s been fixed. The slow, redundant blow-by-blow that takes place with every menu action in and out of battle has been tidied up, most notably when you hit multiple enemies at once. Battles, in fact, are much faster than they were before, and very exciting. The music is phenomenal. The graphics… well, let’s talk about that.

Somebody needs to tell me why there are only a couple of games on Wii that look better than Dragon Quest VIII, which is a freaking PS2 game. I can even name those games: Super Mario Galaxy and Metroid Prime 3. This is ridiculous. This game looks amazing. I’ve spent the past two weeks immersed in another fantastic game, Prince of Persia on PS3, picking up all the light seeds and trophy whoring, and I accept that it’s a game that is going to out and out flatten anything we will ever see on Wii, and perhaps even whatever Nintendo tosses onto store shelves next generation. But Dragon Quest VIII? On PS2?

The other thing that’s driving me crazy is that with all the advancements made in Dragon Quest VIII, we still can’t read the signs from any angle but straight-on. That is just crap. Again, I expect this garbage from Zelda games, but not Square-Enix.

I should have sent this one to Sad Chao.