Originally planned as Romancing SaGa 4, SaGa Frontier allowed you to play as seven different characters, each with their own storylines. Because of this, it plays more like its Japan-only predecessor Live-A-Live than its successor.
The game was produced and directed by Akitoshi Kawazu of Square's Production Team 2. His previous works included the Romancing SaGa and Final Fantasy Legend series as well as some game design work on the first two main-line FF games. The music was done by Kenji Ito, who worked on many of the same games.
SaGa Frontier was released in Japan on July 11, 1997 and in the US on March 31, 1998, placing it somewhere between the RPG juggernauts Final Fantasy 7 and Xenogears, which is likely one of the reasons it received so little attention.
Upon starting the game, you are prompted to select one of the seven playable characters. Each character has their own storyline that often entertwines with the storyline of other characters, often through shared NPCs, locations, and events. Each storyline usually lasted somewhere between 10 and 15 hours.
The gameplay in SaGa Frontier is standard RPG fare. You traveled from location to location looking for something to do, people to talk to, or monsters to fight. Nothing particularly ground-breaking there, but it fit in with the standard of the time. Fights were carried out through a quasi-3D battle screen in turn-based combat, also standard for the time, although it did mix things up a bit with twists like mid-combat technique learning and combos. Other notable gameplay features include the ability to save anywhere [even in dungeons] and automatic regeneration of HP and MP after a battle.
Aside from mutiple characters/storylines, SaGa Frontier was set apart from other RPGs by the nature of the storylines. Generally, RPG storylines involve huge, earth-destroying catastrophes that must be avert at all costs by a group of plucky youngsters who are, from some reason, the only ones who can do it. In Saga Frontier you generally were not facing such catastrophies and were generally involved in much more intimate events. At the very least, it was a change of pace.
Also of note are the diverse and intersting worlds. They range from modern-day to near-future to post-apocalyptic. Again, it's a nice change of pace.
Overall, SaGa Frontier has its flaws, which mainly deal with the fact that it's basically seven RPGs crammed into one package. On the other hand, it has some interesting ideas and allowed the creators to do some things that they probably wouldn't have been able to do otherwise.
It's Steven Speilberg Presents Jenga!! Only it's a form of Jenga that's on steriods, or maybe acid. Either way it's some potent stuff and the concotion known as Boom Blox is one of the most exciting and fun gaming experience you're likely to find.
Aside from the basic Jenga-like mode, which is made even more fun by adding in twists like different sized blocks, a special block on the top of the tower that you have to keep from falling [rather than the tower as a whole], and various sized bases which make balancing the tower a bigger focus than ever, you also have several other modes. These other mades have you shooting at point blocks that fly through the air, throwing a bowling ball or baseball at a tower in order to make it fall as much as possible, and trying to make knock point blocks through point multipliers. There's a lot here and it's all fun. Add in multiplayer it's just...magic.
Do yourself a favor and go out and get this as soon as possible.
Also, it was announced that Inon Zur is the composer for the game.
Quote:In addition to scoring a number of best-selling video games, Zur’s music has been featured in many high-profile projects including Hollywood film trailers, network television productions, CGI movies, and symphony concerts. Most recently, Zur has composed music for CBS’ ‘Ghost Whisperer: The Other Side’ TV webisode series as well as the Marvel Kids webisodes for ‘IRON MAN’.
As far as videogames go, he's done work for Crysis, Fallout Tactics, Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Baahl, Syberia II, Icewind Dale II, and a number of other smaller titles.
As for the music itself, it's more...rich?...than the other Fallout games, but I really like what I'm hearing so far. It's definitely a departure from games like Oblivion and Morrowind, and that's a good sign.
Quote:What to do if you absolutely must run WPDOS under Windows Vista
Note: Before performing the steps described here, you may need to disable Vista's User Access Control (UAC) security feature until you have completed making the changes. If Windows will not let you open the relevant files, or bothers you with prompts, download and run TweakUAC and turn off UAC or switch it to "quiet mode"; when you are finished making and testing the changes suggested here, run the utility again to restore UAC.
Follow these steps very carefully before attempting to run WPDOS with Windows Vista:
(1) On your Windows Vista computer, click on the Vista "pearl" where the Start Menu was in earlier versions, and enter the word "COMMAND" (no quotation marks); a DOS prompt should open. Press Alt-Enter, which normally switches between windowed and full-screen mode. If you get an error message saying "This system does not support fullscreen mode", then proceed to step (2), after entering "exit" to close the window. Otherwise, enter "exit" to close the command prompt, and proceed to step (3).
(2) If you want to be able to use WPDOS in its traditional 25-line full-screen mode, and you got an error message when you tried the experiment in step (1), then you must use Vista's "Standard VGA Graphics Adapter" video driver (as described in the next paragraph) instead of whatever driver you or Windows installed for use with your video hardware. (Alternatively, if your hardware makes this possible you may want to install the Windows XP driver for your video hardware as described below).
How to install the Standard VGA Graphics Adapter in Vista: Right-click on the Windows desktop; choose Personalize from the pop-up menu; choose Display Settings from the Personalize dialog; on the Monitor tab, click Advanced Settings...; on the Adapter tab, click Properties; on the Driver tab, click Update Driver...; click on "Browse My Computer for Driver Software"; click on "Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer"; in the "Select a device driver" list, scroll down to Standard VGA Graphics Adapter and highlight (select) it; click Next. If your monitor goes blank, wait five minutes, then power down your computer and restart it normally. If your monitor does not go blank, wait while the driver is installed; click Close; then continue to press Close or OK or otherwise close dialog boxes until you are back to the desktop. If you are prompted to restart your computer, do so. You probably should do so anyway. (If you want to reverse this procedure, follow the same instructions, but let Windows automatically install the appropriate software for your system instead of browsing your computer for driver software.)
(3) If, and only if, you do not use a US-English keyboard layout in WP, you must modify the Autoexec.nt file on your Vista system to that DOS applications such as WPDOS use the keyboard that you need. Download this desktop shortcut EditAutoexec.nt to your Vista desktop or some other convenient location (you may need to right-click on the links and select Save link as...). Double-click on either shortcut to edit the associated file in Windows Notepad; go the foot of the file and add this line (replacing xx with the two-letter abbreviation of your keyboard layout, for example, uk or nl):
kb16 xx
Close and save the file. The change that you made will apply to the next DOS application you launch; you do not need to reboot your computer. Important: If you use any program that uses a special Autoexec.nt file, you must make this change in all such files (as in the examples noted elsewhere on this page under Expanded (EMS) memory under Vista.
(4) Install WPDOS to your Vista computer. Install a desktop shortcut for WPDOS following the advice elsewhere on this site. Note that the shortcut will appear on the desktop as a plain white rectangle, no matter which icon you may select in the shortcut properties sheet. Specify on the Window tab that the program should open in either a window or full-screen, depending on which you prefer.
(5) Run WP. If it seems impossibly slow, install Tame now; otherwise, you may install Tame later. After selecting a printer, use Shift-F1/Display and choose Auto-Select so that WP will chose its IBM VGA 640x480 graphics driver. Now use Shift-F7, 6 (in WPDOS 5.1) or Shift-F7, 7 (in WPDOS 6.x) to switch to print preview; you may have to wait as long as a minute before the preview appears. When it appears, press F7 to return to text mode; you may have to wait as long as a minute. If the wait is intolerable, and you want to avoid it in the future, close WPDOS and rename all the .VRS files in the WPDOS directory (rename them to something like .VR9 so that you can restore them in the future if you need to); if the .VRS files are renamed, WPDOS cannot try to switch to graphics mode, and will display only a brief error message if you attempt to do so.
By following these procedures, WPDOS will be fully usable, but you may prefer to run WPDOS under Windows XP.
You need to switch back to your normal drivers for Windows to work properly, of course. So it's a switch thing -- go to these drivers, run DOS, then go back to normal drivers so you can use Windows normally.
Why not use DOSBox? That'd be far too easy... :D (plus, I like getting the real thing working...)
So here's the question. If the Sound Blaster X-Fi has no DOS support (which it does not), why do I near music (MIDI, I think) in SimCity 2000 for DOS?
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