I love how when Japan wants to sound epic, they start appending all manner of invented prefixes and suffixes to either end of english words, and it works in BOTH countries.
Anyway, what I've been reading lately is that all the Final Fantasy XIII games will be utterly unrelated in story and gameplay to each other, except for a "vague crystal theme", which is what bound previous Final Fantasy games anyway. If that's the case, why bother calling them all XIII?
Anyway, that Kingdom Hearts guy is working on XIII "Versus", which he calls "the darkest Final Fantasy yet".
I picked up this game recently. Just so you know, it is basically single player. There is a co-op mode of sorts but all it does is allow the second player to cast your spells and select your ammo for you.
However, whatever your opinion of Children of Mana (it's co-op mode actually existed, but for some reason they just can't seem to recapture Secret of Mana's awesome co-op mode, namely you can't SAVE YOUR GAME when that one is played in co-op, defeating the purpose), this game is great. It's basically Kingdom Hearts style gameplay with the Havoc physics system put into the game. It's not just a nice but meaningless addition though. You'll need to use this physics system to play the game. From knocking over a pillar to smash through the floor to stacking things, it's all standard fare there. What's unique is how well the physics are used in battle. For example, you can basically hit all sorts of things into enemies, and it's surprisingly easy to aim it all. Further, if you see some large round object, you can probably roll around on or in it while fighting, Jack Sparrow style. However, the funnest thing is using magic in conjunction with these physics. There is a slingshot you get and one of the ammo types is "magnet seed". Fire it at anything and it draws everything around it towards it. I fired one at an enemy, and all manner of rocks and broken pillars and other enemies, basically the entire room, got pulled right on top of the guy, killing it and a few other enemies. Only problem was now I had to make my way through the stack of garbage I just made by destroying it all. There's also a cyclone seed for sucking everything up into a tornado, and when it ends it all crashes back down. It's also used during boss battles to great effect, for example the giant crab that sounded like the Overmind (awaken my child and embrace the glory that is your birthright) got flipped on it's back more than a few times by my whirlwinds.
All in all, I'm having a great time playing through this game. As for tone, it's on the lighthearted side, in fact between this and Kingdom Hearts, KINGDOM HEARTS is the darker themed one! You'll figure that out when your adorable fairy friend decides to become sickeningly sweet in making VERY sure you remember it's name (it's Faye, Faye... Faaaaye!). In fact the only way to get rid of that bit of knowledge after that scene is to remove it with a bullet. Also I'm loving every minute of this.
Gunpei Yokoi won't let a little thing like DEATH get in the way of making new games, apparently.
I just picked up a game called "Gunpey" in a bargain bin for $10, and honestly I don't see how this didn't become a hit. According to the back of the game's box (and the reason I decided to pony up for it) not only is this game made by legendary puzzle game company Q?, it is essentially a remake of an old game that never left the drawing board made by Gunpei himself back when he still roamed the earth. Honestly it's one of the most unique puzzle games I've played in a while.
Anyway, as for the game, it's really cool. Basically you have a big grid of dots and your goal is to connect lines across the screen. That's it, but it's awesome! More details: basically your cursor covers two boxes and you switch the square above with the square below. You can also press a button to "scroll" the screen up one level, as the lines keep coming from below. You can use this to connect all kinds of line segments together and it doesn't need to be straight across. Doubling back to connect lots of line segments together is almost a needed strategy.
Edit: Never mind, turns out it WAS released for the DS.
You may already know that China's government is still an overbearing dictatorship and has taken it upon itself to block all manner of websites that may speak ill of the Chinese government (the most positive thing we can say is with the whole world looking, they can't execute people for "crimes against the state" as much as they'd like to). What you may not know is what sites are blocked and what sites are allowed.
Our's is blocked. My guess is China bans entire IP ranges, OR they don't so much blacklist sites as whitelist ones they approve personally, blocking everything else.
This here thread should involve boring minutia that only like one person thinks would be cool. Post away, maybe.
Anyway, my main thought is this. I've been watching technology for some time now and if there's one thing I've realized, the end product of a "line" of products tends to keep the name it started with, but barely maintains the same function. We are surrounded by things with inaccurate names or names that only highlight ONE feature of a vastly more capable device.
They need to start doing that in sci-fi, that's what I'm saying. For example, we still call our phones "phones" even though that's only one thing it does. 100 years from now, they should have some vastly comlicated thing that also can be used for communication just called a "phone" and most people really don't even know why, until they watch something on the history channel about when they were primarily just used to talk to people, and phone came from "phono" or sound.
Gametap used to suck as far as I was concerned. Basically, the main issue is I will NEVER pay a monthly fee to access a single player game (and as for multiplayer, I have limits as to how much I'll spend but basically I'll only pay for online components, and then not that much, for example Xbox Live). I'd much rather own.
So basically, these Gametap guys with their annoying commercials and sickly green art style finally just copied steam and now I can just buy games outright from their little library. Now I'm interested.
Fun, but really hard. I got to floor 2 (late last week after getting it) then went and played Children of Mana for three hours, because I wanted to play something where I'd actually make progress... sure, Children of Mana is a far worse game and gets boring quickly, but 'easy' is fun sometimes. :D
... erm, right, Etrian Odyssey is cool... the mapping thing is the best feature of course. It's like Wizardry 6 without the graph paper... :)
This is an interesting story and everyone's quick to call the guy a hero for trying to save the day and catching a bullet, but in all likelyhood if the guy had called the cops instead, no one would have been hurt. I mean the muggers still got away so he really didn't accomplish anything. Generally speaking police frown on this sort of behavior unless there is a clear and present danger to someone else at the time. Money's not worth getting shot over.
