The Quickie Verdict™ on yesterday's triptych of games:

Soul Calibur II was predictably perfect; a serious contender for the Best Fighter Ever throne. Tight ("toit!") controls - surprisingly well-suited for the Wavebird (best controller ever) - clean, smooth, and slick visuals; great sound, virtually no loading times...but it's quite amazing how good the Dreamcast progenitor looks compared to its offspring. There really isn't that much of a difference, and some of the ladies (ah, Xianghua, thou hast stolen my heart - my virtual heart, that is; not the real one, that would be just wrong) looked even better in the first one.

Buffy, I didn't play for more than twenty minutes, but it's already obvious that it's not on par with the first game - visually, at least. There's more combat and less adventuring (so far), but on the positive side you do get to play as several of the Scoobies. (Finally, my dream of becoming Xander is realised. Too bad there's no Andrew, though.) And the interviews with Whedon and the cast are fun. But why, why, why not incorporate more adventuring elements into a game that would clearly benefit enormously from them? A free-flowing GTA type structure, with missions all over Sunnydale, would obviously be the best way to go with the next Buffy game: branching quests, vehicles, time-of-day (go patrolling in the cemetery at night; hunt for vampire nests during the day), and more character interaction - and get the real Willow back as Willow; the substitute Willow is just painful to listen to - would make this the Best Game Ever...

...though that's probably hoping for waaay too much. Someone should hand the license over to us...

And finally, briefly, Silent Hill 3 is more or less exactly the same as the last two games, only a bit prettier. The opening freaked me out - it took me a little while to figure out (spoiler!) that it was a dream (ah, too late) - but the game makes the same mistake as the second one: you don't get to spend nearly enough time in the "normal world" before being thrown right into the sick nightmare, and thus the transition doesn't have as much impact as it should have. You expect it. It takes five minutes. You don't even have to wait for it. Everyone who's ever told a good horror story knows that the longer you wait, the more wound up your audience will get, and the more shocked and horrified they will be when you finally unleash...the horror, the horror! Still, it's got a neat setting - the mall - the characters look stunning, the voice acting is more than adequate, the controls can be reconfigured to something that's actually playable, and, hey, it's the new game in the best survival horror series out there (Resident Evil has lost its crown). I can't wait to sit down and play it again.  ¶ 11:07