Has anyone played these yet?

[Nightcrawler]

3 cool PS2 games have recently been released! Has anyone played any of these?

WWE Smackdown: Here Comes the Pain
LOTR: Return of the King
Crash Nitro Kart Racing

[TechMaster]

Nope.  Don't have a ps2. (for your info, I don't have a tv right now either lol)

[honookatana]

I hope you don't mind me putting this here, it is somewhat on topic. Speaking of new games, anyone played Viewtiful Joe? I got Harvest Moon and Fire Emblem, they look good so far.

[Great Red Spirit]

The only one of those that sounds interesting is LoTR, I've never been a big fan of wrestling games and most racing games...

[TechMaster]

Heard someone talking about Viewtiful joe on another forum.  I think the guy addressed it as a good game or something like that. (or a must play, either way)  Don't have a GCN either.

Talking about old games that I've recently just tried out though, Record of the Lodess War (SFC, tried it before, just never got far in it since it crashed a lot) is rather..... how should I put it?  Your character lvl jump like insanely (no joke, I was like lv50+ when I finally get to go into the first dungeon) so whoever hates lvl ups probably would like it.  Also, the first dungeon is like, **** **** is this the last dungeon in the game???  Compared to the "first dungeon" of just about any rpg I've played this has got to be the most annoying first dungeon EVERRRRRRRRRRR created.  Also, this has to be the rpg that I game over on the most within the first hour of gameplay (cough, serious).  I bet NC and a few others have already tried the game out.  How far did you guys get to (with the so called 90% translation which is closer to 90% main dialog translation while all the town text and menu battle text are non-existant) if any played this game?

[KingMike]

ZSNES seems to like to crash Lodoss War alot (especially when opening the save menu). SNES9X seems to work much better. The game looks nice, of how much I've played.
Didn't really play much with the patch. I tried it in Japanese.
Would be nice if somebody were able to finish it someday. Though I noticed that the translation site is gone, replaced by offer to buy many ummm... interesting...   anime.

[Princess]

I look forward to playing
LOTR: Return of the King & Crash Nitro Kart Racing.  Both of these games predecessors were good.

I'm sad that I can't play Mario Kart Double Dash or Mario Party 5 because they were only released on Game Cube.  I like to play fun simple games sometimes.  I'll always love racing games.

[Princess]

I played Crash Nitro Kart and I must say I was disapointed.  It's not as fun as the first one, CTR, for playstation.  It wasn't as great as I thought it would be.

I also played Kingdom Hearts.  I thought it would be a cool game because it is an RPG with Disney characters.  It turned out to be more frustrating than fun.  

Why are disney games always so hard?  You would think they would be easy but they are not.

[Nirok]

I've played LOTR: Return of the King, beat it. Kinda hard! But than and again I beat it on easy! Now I'm going for hard! But if I were you I would get it! Cause once you do beat the game, you get secret characters and stuff and you gotta try and work your way to get the palantir of sauron thingy level. But it has multiplayer so you can connect online or play with a friend! Just read the last sentence off a website.

[Princess]

Congratualations on beating it.  It sound like a really cool game.  I would like to rent it but it seems to be out whenever I go to the store.

Did you play LOTR: Two Towers?  I was wondering how the two games compare.  Two Towers was fun and it seems like they added some good stuff for Return of the King like more characters and the option of multiplayer which should make it more fun.

[Nirok]

I think Return of the King is better since you don't have to just choose Legolas, Aragorn, and Gimli. In this game you also get to choose sam and gandolf as main characters. And once you have beat the game you get Merry, Pippin, Farimir, and Frodo as choices. Pretty cool to though. As you can tell I have played Two Towers... All though if you wanna get the whole collection dont! The fellowship one sucks because the graphics suck! Well look kind of funny anyway!

[Princess]

Thanks for the info.  
I know the first one sucks.  It's based on the book and not the movie and looks pretty awful.  Too bad it would have been cool to have 3 good games.  Two Towers does start with some stuff that would have been in the first one though like the first battle with the Ring Wraths.

The LOTR book(s) is really good.  Have you read it?  The Hobbit is a good book as well.  I don't know how good the new Hobbit game will be.  I haven't looked into it much.

The Return of the King movie opens this month.  I look forward to seeing it.  I'm going to watch the extended edition of the Two Towers first though.  After a years time I don't remember exactly where the story left off and I want to see what cool stuff was added.

[KingMike]

I also played Kingdom Hearts.  I thought it would be a cool game because it is an RPG with Disney characters.  It turned out to be more frustrating than fun.

Supposedly, there were multiple difficulty levels though (setting normal or hard battles, fast/normal/slow leveling-up).
Good game, except when my sister (who played much of the straightforward parts of the game) left me to solve the puzzles and beat the bosses.
Hopefully, Square Enix will include an option to skip the movie scenes (kinda annoying seeing a minute long movie every single attempt at a boss *Riku *).
Luckily, the final boss was relatively easy (compared to previous bosses. I mean, it's mostly a bunch of stationary targets), giving ample chance for you to get away and cast Cura and Aero as needed, combined with the gradual semiauto-recovery of MP.

[Gideon Zhi]

From what I understand, KH's difficulty really lies in your experience progression. At the start of the game, you're prompted to choose a staff, sword, or shield, and "give up" one of the two you don't pick, and that forms Sora's initial statistics and skill progression. Then you're prompted to choose one of three answers in three questions, similar to the beginning of an Ogre Battle game (you know, moral dilemmas and such.) Your answers determine whether you get a lot of experience, an average amount of experience, or a little experience per enemy.

[Nightcrawler]

I'm not really sure I like that kind of system.  Perhaps for initial stats it makes sense, but not for experience progression.  Having it for experience progression just  seems dumb to me.  The way you answer the question acts as a difficulty selection.  If you're going to have difficulty selection, don't be cryptic about it and just add an option in the main menu!