Everblue (PS2)

Although i'd never heard of this game before a few days ago, it was apparently popular enough to get a sequel, as well as two spiritual sequels in the Endless Ocean series for Wii (which I also haven't heard of, though I admit the Wii is one of my blind spots).
Anyway, the game's abut diving and looking for treasure on the ocean floor. There's also some plot regarding an ancient civilisation or something, but it doesn't come into things until much later in the game. Other than that, the game's setting is mostly pretty realistic, with only very minor fantasy elements.
For most of the early game, you'll be walking the ocean floor, tapping your sonar button until you get a hit on some treasure, then closing in and taking that treasure. Then you take it back to the surface to evaluate and sell it or give it away to someone who needs/wants it. you should also be careful, as you can sell items needed to complete optional side quests, and even progress in the story. So only sell items that you have more than one of. Eventually you'll start finding shipwrecks, which you explore with full 3D movement, and you'll look for treasure inside those too.
The second shipwreck, the Juno is harder to fin than the first, since you won't be given directions until you beat a guy in an underwater swimming race. This race is the worst part of the game. It's too hard, boring, doesn't fit in with the feel of the rest of the game, and comes accompanied with some awful background music. Luckily, the ship is actually there whether you get the directions or not, and you might even be able to find a handy map on some cool internet blog if you look hard enough.
Although the game itself is actually quite repetitive, it never becomes boring. Finding a bunch of mysterious items and finding out what they all are is pretty cool, and the game has a great atmosphere too. Inbetween dives all your quests, shopping and item appraisals take place in the two small towns on the island. These bits add a lot to the feel of the game: they're always sunny, the people are all friendly, and the whole experience just feels really warm and happy. Interestingly, references to things like romance, alcohol, death and so on, that often get removed in English translations of videogames are left intact here. (And by death, I mean in the sense of an old woman missing her late husband, and so on, rather than the usual kind of videogame deaths that only serve as catalysts for more conflict.)
Another noteworthy aspect of the game is the complete lack of conflict. Even the guy who challenes you to a race does so only out of friendly, time-killing rivalry. There's no enemies or hostile creatures underwater, no evil regime to overthrow on land. It's actually quite refreshing to play a game that's so completely positive!
I thouroughly recommend you play this game if you have the chance.

Street Boyz (PS2)

I was going to make the 100th post something special, but I couldn't actually think of anything special to do. I'll try harder for the 137th post, okay?
This is the first review done with the aid of my new capture device, though! That's kind of special, even if the device is a cheap piece of crap. (Don't buy super-cheap capture devices from ebay.they'll fall apart and need to be re-installed everytime you want to use them and you'll have to trick them into giving you sound.)
Anyway, on to the game itself! It's by Tamsoft, who are one of my favourite developers. They're most well known these days for the archetypal modern B-games, the Oneechanbara/Zombie Hunters series, though in ages past they did also make the Battle Arena Toshinden games, and they're responsible for a lot of other entries into the legendary Simple 2000 series (including this one!). Especially interesting are their entries into the Simple DS series, since they tend to have some of the best 3D graphics on the original DS, despite being budget games.
Street Boyz is a beat em up about banchos, those baggy trousered high school thugs of 70s and 80s Japan, and though the name and boxart of the PAL release might lead you to believe that they'd have been replaced with burberry-clad council estate thugs, the game's original plot, character names and everything else has been left intact! Not that any of it is particularly interesting or original, mind you.

How does it play? It's alright. Not terrible, not spectacular. It carries over one of the worst flaws of the Oneechanbara games (or the other way round, as i think this game might have been made before those), in that you're often only given the vaguest clues as to what to do in an area. For example, being told you need a key, but having no clue where the key might be, or who might be carrying it, and like in the Oneechanbara series, this situation is made worse by the fact that the stages are made up of rooms and corridors that all look exactly alike.

The combat is okay, typical 3D beat em up stuff: a button each for strong and weak attacks, weapons to pick up, a super bar to fill, and so on. There is a major flaw here, though. The camera is probably the worst I've experienced in a 3D game, it often seems to go where it likes, and that always seems to be a place where it's hardest to see what you're doing. There is a button to place the camera behind your character, and another button to lock on to the nearest enemy, but these aren't perfect solutions, and in some areas they're disabled. There are a few parts of each stage where all camera control is taken away, because the game wants to show off a nice "cinematic" viewpoint. Unfortunately, while these views do look nice, they're also very impractical.
Although I've said a lot of bad things about this game (and it does deserve the criticism), I've still managed to get a good few hours of enjoyment out of it, and for the prices it tends to go for these days, I'd say it's definitely worth risking a pound or two on.
This game is also known as Simple 2000 Ultimate Series Vol. 21: First-Class Brawl! Yankee Leader ~Legendary Shouwa 99 Year~

Deadly Strike (PS2)

Deadly Strike is an old fahioned beat em up. Much more old fashioned than other PS2 beat em ups like Godhand or Koei's Warriors series. You could say it's even more old fashioned than the later Streets of Rage and Final Fight games, since they have tons of moves and combos for each character, and each character in Deadly Strike has one regular melee combo, and a rubbish gun attack.
It's far from bad game, though. I'd say it's one of the better Simple 2000 games, definately up there with the likes of Zombie Hunters 2 and Global Defence Force. Like I said earlier, it's a very old fashioned beat em up. You wouldn't think to look at it, though, the pre-rendered backgrounds all look really great, and the 3D character models look pretty good too, and don't look out of place as can happen with pre-rendered back grounds. Gameplay follows a traditional formula for the genre: you arrive in an area, beat some guys up, then go to the next area. You score more points for quickly defeating enemies one after the other, and the points you get while playing can be used to unlock various things like longer health bars, extra costumes, and so on.
Other than the main mode, there's also Survival Mode, which is exactly what it sounds like, but as the ames is really easy, this can go on for ages and ages before you finally die, and Special Mode, which allows you to play through the main game as one of the regular enemies. This one isn't actually as fun as it sounds, since the enemies are just as weak and slow as they are when you fight against them.

The real reason to get this game though, is the 2-player co-op mode, which is as fun as you'd expect from a beat em up's 2-player co-op mode: very.
The plot is a bit of an odd one: both the manual and the back of the case mention some kind of tournament taking place, though neither the game itself or the intro movie contain anything looking remotely tournament-esque. What the game actually seems to be about, is a bunch of people from the modern day, including among others, a cool guy in a leather jacket, a schoolgirl, and a bouncer going to fuedal japan and beating up a load of samurai for some reason. I don't know why this happens, nor do I know how a bunch of people from the modern day are skilled/strong enough to so easily beat up so many samurai. There are endings when you complete the game, though they just consist of a screen full of small text, apparently talking about the same mysterious tournament as the manual.

(this game is also known as "Simple 2000 Series Ultimate Vol. 16: Sengoku vs. Gendai)