Brendan Doms

I have a difficult purchasing choice to make this month. There are two new games are coming out for the current generation consoles that I want to buy, but, being a poor college student, I generally limit myself to one new game per semester. This means that this can be a pretty big decision.

This time around, the competition is between Tales of Legendria - an RPG for the PS2 - and BLACK - an FPS I would get on the XBox. Now, both games have been given fairly positive previews, but that aside, there are some simple stereotypes that I want to take into consideration.

Genre

First, RPGs will always get you more gameplay hours per dollar (unless we're talking about an FPS with insanely good multiplayer, like Halo, or Counter-Strike: Source). And, as it looks, BLACK is going to clock in at the typical FPS rate of 8 - 10 hours. My guess is that Tales of Legendria will follow the recent RPG trend of being more in the 30 - 35 hour range. The real question is whether or not those hours will be good. Based on everything I've seen so far, the answer is yes for both games.

Advice

Next, one of my good friends, and really one of the only ones without any semblance of a web presence or blog, John Shaeffer, once said to me, "A good FPS is always better than any other kind of good game," or something close to it. And, in some ways, I agree. A really good FPS experience is an amazing thing to go through. But, games capable of that effect on me are very rare.

Publisher

Finally, Namco is making Tales of Legendria while EA is making BLACK. Now, Namco has constantly been a source of good surprises - like Xenosaga - for me, while EA has constantly been the place I go for disappointment and crappy sequels - they made at least four Bond games for the XBox and I bet you couldn't name them all. If I had to put my money down on what the better game would be, regardless of genre, I would go with Namco every time.

So, the answer is sadly anti-climactic. I'm going to wait until Tales of Legendria comes out on Tuesday and then read the harshest review I can find. If it still seems like a good buy, then I'll go for it. Otherwise, I'll wait another three weeks and then read all the BLACK reviews. My instinct is that Tales of Legendria is going to win out by the end of the month, especially considering BLACK's total lack of multiplayer, which is usually an FPS killer if I ever saw one.