Being able to buy a game for about 5 euro instead of 50-60 helps to overlook a lot of its flaws. While it certainly helped, I thought Kameo is a fine platformer/adventure, regardless of the price. It is pretty short, and it has some camera issues at certain places (underwater especially), but collecting monsters is an interesting spin on the "collect upgrades to progress" type of adventure games such as Metroid and Zelda.
 
 I have found most of the elemetal designs pretty good considering the number of times the combination of "element + monster" has been used in games. The large variety of combat options using the monsters gave was pretty fun. My personal favourites were boxing as Pummel Weed for huge combos, raining napalm bombs on enemies with Thermite and using the watercannon and tentacles with Deep Blue. The additional skills that you unlocked with the monsters greatly improved or expanded their capabilities. This allowed for a very free form approach to combat, and I am sure others developed their own favourites. 
 
The puzzles were on the easy side, but I liked how they necessitated the combination of the different elementals especially at later stages (altough this happens a lot in Zelda type games). It is a bit of a dissappointment that the puzzle solving is never as free form as the combat it, but that would have completely broken the linearity of the game which is not always a good thing. Even though I only used it when I forgot a few times what I needed to do after a break from the game, I thought the hint system was a very nice touch. it made sure you were never too frustrated about what to do next. 
 
While it looks very nice, the fact that it is a launch title can be felt: it feels rushed a bit toward the end both in story and gameplay. Some systems such as the large scale battles feel like they could have been expanded a lot more.
 
It is a shame that the sequel is canceled in favour of Natal games. A more polished sequel with expanded large scale combat would have been very welcome. Hope those Natal games will be worth it.

Today, motivated by the bad weather and a craving for action games, I started playing Ninja Gaiden II. I really liked the previous one on the Xbox, and even though the reviews have mentioned the bad camera, I bought it in a "budget-game shopping spree".
 
I have honestly have no idea how the developers could view that camera even as adequate. I usually have a high tolerance for the camera shenanigans in games: I did not have trouble with it in Too Human and even in the Sonic Adventure/Unleashed games I could accept it with gnashed teeth. But seriously here i honestly believe the camera is actively trying to piss the player off. Even with a single enemy/boss it starts spinning around, especially in closed environments and/or near walls.
 
Maybe I missing something here and there is a special "fix the camera" button, but even than this is more ridiculous than the games story. I loved that while the NInja Gaiden ! was hard, it was usually fair. If you screwed up it was most likely your fault. Here there should be a "Wrestling with the Camera" achievement if you could put up with it for more than 10 minutes.