New pickups

The wife and I braved the sweltering heat over the weekend to go get Taco Bell (hey, it's still a novelty over here in the UK, don't judge us) and have a wander around town.

As always when I go to town, I dropped by our local used game emporium, CEX, to see what they had on offer. And as always when I go to CEX, I came away with a bunch of games.

I've been after a few of these for a while — most notably R-Type Final, Auto Modellista and Burnout 2 — while the others are ones I picked up primarily because they looked interesting and were cheap enough to make an impulse purchase. Link's Crossbow Training didn't come with the Zapper accessory, but I've heard from some people that it's preferable to play with just the remote and Nunchuk anyway, so we'll see how that goes. If not, I'm sure someone on eBay has one.

Burnout 2 is a game I have very fond memories of; I think it might be my favourite installment in the series, and for the longest time I've only had the first and third games on my shelf. I always particularly liked its feeling of "coherence" — it was designed in such a way that you did a bunch of events in an area of the overall map, then had a point-to-point race to move on to the next set of events and so on. It wasn't an open-world game like the later Burnout Paradise, but this aspect of the game made it feel very much like it was taking place in a fully realised world rather than separate tracks.

And I didn't pay more than £4 for any of them! As I've said before, PS2, Wii and PSP are all systems that are great to collect for right now, as the games are still readily available and haven't shot up in value — but they're old enough for places like CEX to want to offload them quickly.

The Wii in particular is a system that has a bunch of really cool games on it, many of which get forgotten about amid the system's reputation as a shovelware machine. Okay, it did have a ton of shovelware, but so did the PS2. And hell, sometimes there's even some value to supposed shovelware…