Earlier this year I was thoroughly engrossed in Star Ocean: The Last Hope. Horrible voice acting and cliché characters aside, it was a great game. In the game, you have both save spheres and HP/MP recovery spheres, but you never have them combined into one graphic, they’re always separate. Right before the first boss in the game, I stumbled upon an odd occurrence: there was a save sphere right around the corner from a recovery sphere, with a single enemy between them. This boggled me. Why would they even bother putting them that close to each other and not combining them into the same graphic, or at least just place the graphics right next to each other? In this case, you would recover your health and most likely have to fight through one more battle, possibly losing some HP and MP, then you could save and head down to the boss. What’s the point? The more I thought about it, the more I came to realize that pre-defined save points seem to be an outdated mechanic.
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As if we didn’t have enough time sinks, being gamers and all, now we’ll have another MMO to keep us busy for days, weeks or months on end. NCSoft’s new MMO, which has been out in Korea for a while now, has been certified gold and is all ready for its release date next month. Whenever I load up Steam I see that the pre-order for this title is near the top of the sales charts. That’s a good thing, right? Will it be the next hopeful to challenge World of Warcraft’s supremacy in the MMO market?
Consider this: Quite a few MMOs over the last four years have been labeled “WoW killers”. When I used to read the WoW forums on a daily basis (losing IQ points in the process, I’m sure), it seemed to be the “in” thing for each MMO that comes along to be declared a “WoW killer”. Yet, to date, nothing has toppled the king of the hill.
I’m hopeful that another game will come along that will give Blizzard’s baby a run for its money – competition between MMOs can only be good for the gamers that play them. I’ve quit WoW and don’t plan on going back, but will Aion be the next MMO for me? I’m not a PVP-er, and Aion seems to have a strong PVP aspect, so we’ll see. Since I haven’t been able to get into the beta events, hopefully they’ll have a free trial download once the game launches. All I know is NCSoft games always look absolutely amazing. I guess we’ll see what happens come September 22.
If you’re a fan of Sony’s first installment in their “Play. Create. Share” line of games, you’ll likely be interested in the fact that LittleBigPlanet is receiving a special Game of the Year Edition next month. I’ll explain what is included in that package in a moment, but first off, let me tell you about my experience with LBP. I was fortunate enough to get into the beta, and I absolutely loved it. I played it solid for about two weeks before the beta ended. In the midst of the beta, I went and pre-ordered it. In fact, I didn’t just pre-order it at one location, I did so at both GameStop and Best Buy, only to get the special outfit for my Sackboy, which was different depending on where you pre-order.
Ok, long story short (I know, I know, you think its too long already), I bought it, played for a couple more weeks solid, then stopped dead in my tracks. While the developer-created levels were fun, once that was done…the game lost of bit of its charm. Building your own levels was tedious and took tremendous dedication. Myself, I’m a lazy ass, so that eventually got on my nerves. I had to micromanage and perfect every last piece of my level or else something would undoubtedly not work correctly. Then, I had to test it over and over again. Not my cup of tea. So, I stopped playing.
But, if you’re one of the Sackboy fans who are still chugging along with this innovative title and are willing to throw down $60 come September 8, you’ll be getting a lot of goodies on the disc (unfortunately, some may be content you’ve already purchased from the PSN, but such is the way of GotY edition titles). Hit the jump for details.
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There has been a lot of great downloadable games this summer on both XBLA and the PSN. This title happens to be one of them. Shatter is a modern take on the classic brick-breaker genre, like Arkanoid. The basic concept, of course, is to bounce a ball off a paddle on one end of the screen and break bricks with the ball, not allowing it to leave play by bouncing “out of bounds” behind the paddle. I’m sure you’re all familiar with the basic game play right?
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I’m a huge fan of the Elder Scrolls titles, especially the last two. I probably spent a couple hundred hours with Oblivion alone. I loved the game so much, I sold my PS3 copy and bought the Game of the Year edition for the Xbox 360 so I could download the add-on content for it, which wasn’t available on the PSN (with the exception of the major expansions).
So, its unfortunate too see this news being passed around to various gaming sites. At QuakeCon 2009, Peter Hines from Bethesda was asked by a fan about the future of the Elder Scrolls franchise, and he advised not to expect a new title anytime soon. While this doesn’t confirm a new Elder Scrolls game of some sort isn’t in the works at all – perhaps its in the conceptual stage and will still take years to come to fruition – it is still a blow to those of us who are fans of the franchise.
I do respect their current love-child, Fallout 3, but I just can’t get into that game as much as I could with Oblivion, perhaps because of the setting. I was hoping, now that they’re wrapping up the Fallout 3 DLC they have planned, some news about a new Elder Scrolls title would be just around the corner. Now, this doesn’t seem to be the case. Let’s hope Bethesda at least has some inkling on the direction they’re going to take the franchise and don’t plan to abandon it altogether.
As I was reading through my rather extensive and scary list of site feeds yesterday evening, I stumbled upon this post up over at Scrawl. One of their writers works at GameStop and had a visit from their friendly neighborhood Sony rep recently. I would advise against taking this as fact until we hear something more official, but the Sony rep was reported as pointing out that both a price drop and backwards compatibility for our sleek, sexy PS3s are coming soon.
This really doesn’t strike me as surprising, considering all the talk about Sony patenting Emotion Engine emulation technology (this is what is under the hood of a PS2) for integration into the PS3’s cell processors via a firmware update. Could this be the fruits of Sony’s labor? If this is indeed the case, let’s just hope Sony’s definition of “soon” isn’t the same as Blizzard’s.
Just off the heels of news that Dragon Age: Origins was pushed back a couple weeks for release in November, we get news that EA is offering some pretty substantial bonuses when you purchase the game new instead of buying it used, and this, of course, includes pre-orders. If you buy the game used after release, you’ll have to shell out hard-earned cash for the same DLC. Hit the jump to see the new game and pre-order bonuses.
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Reading about the new site for Muramasa: The Demon Blade yesterday gave me an excuse to talk about this stylish action-RPG from Vanillaware. For those unaware, Vanillaware brought us the niche classics Odin Sphere (published by Atlus) and Grim Grimore (published by Nippon Ichi) a couple years back. This very stylized game carries the name of a famous – yet supposedly insane – swordsmith who lived during the 16th Century in Japan. The game tells the story of a conflict over powerful and dangerous swords, the Demon Blades. These swords are supposedly cursed, and bring about ill occurrences to those who wield them. This story, in a way, parallels the real legend behind the swordsmith I mentioned earlier, Muramasa Sengo. He had a violent and insane mind, and those traits were believed to transfer over to the swords he made, passing them on to whoever wielded them.
Muramasa has over 30 stages that are rendered in an awesome hand-drawn 2D visual style. You can use the Wii-mote or a standard classic controller while fighting as either Kisuke, a ninja with amnesia, or Momohime, a young princess. There’s approximately 108 katanas to find and collect throughout the game as these characters traverse ancient Japan. The games includes three different modes of play, and each sets different parameters for the player. The most insane of these modes is, rightly, called “Insane Death” mode, which sets the player’s HP at 1 throughout the entire game. Do people find something like that enjoyable? I think I’ll pass, thankyouverymuch.
I was a fan of Odin Sphere, the visuals of that title are quite stunning. It’s unfortunate this new Vanillaware title is on the Wii…but only because that’s the one system I don’t own. Needless to say, Wii owners who enjoy 2D action-RPGs are in for quite a treat come September 8, when this title ships in North America.
As those with an Xbox 360 know, yesterday was their bug summer update. Among other things, this added an improved Netflix streaming client to the service, which you’ll download the first time you start up Netflix after the update. Last night I tested out the new client, and it is a huge improvement over what was there before.
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Blizzcon 2009 is fast approaching, but who needs Blizzcon to start spreading rumors of the next World of Warcraft expansion? Apparently not the “source” over at WoW.com, which has it on “good” authority that the next expansion to Blizzard’s cash cow MMO will be World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. This is likely based on the trademark Blizzard filed a while back for that name. Also of note is the rumor of two new races – Goblins for the Horde and Worgen for the Alliance. If this is true, it dashes my past hopes that if the goblins were ever made playable, you would be able to choose which faction they would join after a Death Knight type of introduction story.
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