I got my copy today, as well. Call me one of the lucky ones. There were 2 at the store I went to, in Owings Mills mall. I'm not sure if the guy working there decided to pick it up or not.
Not a bad game, at all. Sure the voice-work is bad, but it plays a nice game. (Given how many times I'm starting to see 3rd party companies mentioning Sony of America demanding English only, in their U.S. releases. I'm guessing this is the punishment we get for such a demand. Oh well. I guess if the Xbox version still comes to the U.S. we may get a dual language version.) The difficulty settings are very well tweaked for nearly all levels of shooter play. Easy is easy and hard is hard. Oddly enough, you'd think that wouldn't be a surprise, but it's funny how many shooters lean only towards 1 type of player or the other, but not for both. You either have a hardcore shooter or a simpleton. This one, so far, seems to have it balanced for everybody (difficulty depending).
However, this game also pointed me in the direction of another PS2 gem. If you like music games, especially ones that are original, you have to pick up Technic Beat. It's released by Mastiff (the ones who put out the U.S. localization of La Pucelle). It has a good load of songs in it (only topped in number by DDR Ultramix 2 with song downloads), but a good many of them are special remixes of Namco game titles. Stuff from the pacman/rally-x era to Ridge Racer, etc. Needless to say, there's a lot of good music in there and plenty of great nostalgia remixed to dancing pleasure. It's not necessarily a dance game, but it is a rhythm game. It's also the most original Rhythm game since Cool Cool Toon. However, the original version of this game is old(no more than a year or two younger than CCT/CCJ). It was released in Japan years ago, and surprisingly took this long to come out here. The good thing that came out of it, is this nice fat song selection we have, in this package. But it did mark the world's 2nd Analogue Music/Rhythm game (the first was Cool Cool Toon). It plays extremely well, especially once you figure out how to make combo notes, and I definitely recommend it to anybody into music games. From the way it allows a little bit of freedom to alter the music, spell out different chords or melody patterns than the original; I dare you to not get addicted by the time you grab up a note circle, intersect it with a bunch of others, and start a *perfect scoring* chain reaction.
Anyway, back to gaming.
