My life tends to go through a set of stages in a cyclical pattern - sometimes I'll have extended periods when I'm in the mood for writing, musicianship or game-building (and you can tell which one I'm in by the relative number of posts I make to this journal or various other forums around the Internet). At the moment, after a brief spurt of activity on CT2, I think I'm slowing down again and am getting into the mood for creating... nothing in particular. But this isn't necessarily a bad thing, because it allows me to have some actual free time instead.

I don't know what all that nonsense was about above, but the point is that Whitney and I were in Gamestop the other day to pick out a couple of PS2 titles after it hasn't had much activity for a while. Now that the next generation of consoles are becoming this generation, it's not uncommon to find at least a couple of gems in the second-hand bin, and on this occasion I found Metal Gear Solid 3 for $10. Meanwhile, Whitney picked up a CSI game, which I promise you is called "Three dimensions of murder", from the other end of the store - a surprisingly quick visit.

America has a slightly ELSPA-like rating system for games (in that it's separate from the film classifications) in the ESRB ratings. And the people in Gamestop ask for my ID whenever I buy anything in the "M" category. Do I still look six years younger than I am? I know I'm short, but I even had a rubbish beard last time it happened. In addition, this time the woman at the till cheerily told us that they had a seven-day return policy, specifically in case we wanted to bring back CSI after playing more than five minutes of it. That's what I call thoughtful service.

When we got home from our other tasks of the day, Whitney's CSI game went on first. And, indeed, first impressions were that it was an abomination. It could be vaguely described as something that might have come out of point and click adventures if anyone did them any more, but with said pointer stuck in the centre of the screen and first-person shooter controls added instead. I have enough difficulty with FPS controls through dual analog sticks, and I think Whitney finds it totally impossible to point in the right direction half the time.

The game consists of going from location to location via a dull overlong control-explaining loading screen that looks like something that would have been stuck on a demo in a hurry, clicking on things and then using appropriate equipment to gather evidence (you're guided by a vague likeness of someone from the TV version during this, so that you don't attempt to do things like pick up blood using tweezers). After floating around bumping into everything and clicking on them, you then go back to the lab, where the 3D engine wheezes and puffs as it strains to show more than ten objects on the screen at once as you spin round looking for the right bit of equipment to piece together, pull apart or compare the things you've grabbed from the crime scene.

It's not fantastic by any means, but it seemed oddly interesting after a while, if only to see what incriminating things you'd find in new locations as you gathered likely addresses. Games based on TV programmes don't tend to work very well (I have difficult imagining how even Knightmare could be done decently) and there's only so much you can do with a format like this. Dull adventuring, then, to sum up, but we're unsure whether to return it just yet, and I think that's just about the highest praise you can give it.

I had a brief go at Metal Gear Solid 3 in the evening - this was something that had completely passed me by when it was released, and I'd only played the demo of it before. And I say I played it "briefly", but the actual game time on my save is two hours in - Hideo Kojima is known for his long cutscenes, but so far this game's been virtually nothing but them. I'm unsure how I feel about the lack of a radar in favour of a camouflage system and ability to look round a bit further than before - it would certainly required a change in tactics if it would let you actually play the game long enough to work anything out.

Even though it's cutscene-saturated, though, you have to admit they're good (when they're not just half-hour-long radio conversations, anyway). I particularly liked the introduction of not-Revolver-yet Ocelot and his Red Dwarf-style automatic pistol ricochet shooting. But I'm not sure if it's just because I'm older now or the token supervillains really are more ridiculous this time, but it really does seem from the introduction section that we're going to be fighting the X-Men (complete with a creepy hornet-summoner, an old man with bulgey eyes and someone who I've chosen to christen General Electric).

So far we've just gone through the start of what I thought was the game, then in true Kojima style it ripped us out of that and put us in a different one, so I don't actually know what it's about yet and will have to update this as soon as something interesting happens.