I always find there’s nothing like a dearth of new games to send you rushing back to the classics, and it always seems to happen in that long drought between Christmas and…well…the next Christmas. You wonder whether or not it’s those damn rose-tinted glasses making you remember your SNES as the paragon of gameplay and see all modern stuff as commercialised shit, and then you remember that, as great as the SNES was, it had its fair share of utter crap, too. Still, we can still look back and remember, right?

Anyway, the fact that there’s little of note to play at the moment (although I might start on Guild Wars if it can bring back those halcyon days of Phantasy Star Online) has driven me back to finish some of the classics that I didn’t complete the first time around and, unusually for me, I’ve been playing traditional RPGs.

The first one to pull me back was Chrono Trigger which I spent much of last week playing having lost interest at the (possible spoiler) first battle with Magus. That annoying thing where you’ll struggle with something and then come back months later and finish it first time happened, and then I found myself pretty much walking through the rest of the game up until you (spoiler) get Crono back from the dead. Now I have to complete side-quests to power myself up for the final battle and I’ve lost interest again, so I’m probably looking at finishing the game around May 2010 when the cycle of disinterest finishes again.

Nonetheless the game has some of the best music and art that I’ve seen in ages, and some of the later locations are beautiful. The character designer of Chrono Trigger, Akira Toriyama, is returning to the RPG fold with Blue Dragon on the Xbox 360, so I’ll be interested to see how his designs transition to such meaty hardware where he won’t be so able to rely on the two-dimensional visuals of Chrono Trigger and arguably his most famous work, Dragonball Z.

The other one that I started on today when I picked up a used US copy was most people’s introduction to the RPG, Final Fantasy VII. I never got off the first disc in this one (I got bored around the introduction of Cid) but I’m hoping that my current RPG ardor and the fact that I plan to actually level up will carry me through. It looks positive when the good memories came flooding back as I replayed the opening moments, but it will have to wait until I buy a memory card tomorrow because my PS2 won’t recognise my crappy old PSX card…

If you ever needed proof that the average person has the attention span of a gnat, look no further than the IGN Readers’ Top 100 Games, where the top ten games of all time are supposed to be the following:

1. Resident Evil 4
2. Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
3. Splinter Cell Chaos Theory
4. Chrono Trigger
5. Half-Life 2
6. God of War
7. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
8. Soul Calibur
9. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
10. Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

All of those are very good games – there’s no doubt about it – but RE4, Chaos Theory, God of War, MGS3, and GTA San Andreas (a close one, but I think GTA3 was the better game) are rated as in the top 10 games of all time!? San Andreas is the oldest and that’s barely six months old, and several of them are less than a month old. Even the perennial favourite of people who’d never played an RPG before 1997, Final Fantasy VII, could only make #29 – obviously too old for people to remember – behind such timeless classics as Devil May Cry 3 (March 2005), Gran Turismo 4 (February 2005), Madden 2005 (August 2004), and Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal (November 2004).

I’d be embarrassed to have even voted on that list, and it’s exactly why any popular thing which is voted for by the public, though lucrative (lots of ad revenue for IGN and those £1/text things on TV are even more so), is utterly worthless. People can’t remember beyond what they had for breakfast.

The number of assessments that I’m supposed to submit for the end of the first year (just over a week) has suddenly caught up with me and I was doing fairly well at staying on top of things, but a pretty big hiccup occured yesterday. We were in the studio working on our radio production assignment on voter apathy in the upcoming General Election, which was basically us interviewing people of certain demographics for two minutes. It was on target to wrap at noon when we’d have to vacate the studio so that we could submit it then or today (due date).

At 11:40 in comes the tutor to check on our progress, who listens to it and tells us that it’s unusable and a guaranteed fail if we submit it in its current form because the assignment can’t just be vox pops.

Shit.

We had to pretty much redo our project in less than 24 hours. Grabbing a MiniDisc recorder, finding an “expert” to interview (the president of our student union – he must know about student apathy, right?), and recording some generic links to patch together what we could use from the old piece and the new one was done in record time. After grabbing the audio from the MD it went onto my USB drive and I bombed it home to edit it.

I use a Mac so I don’t have access to Cool Edit/Adobe Audition which we use in the studeo (hopefully the Adobe purchase means that Audition 2 will get a Mac release) but the developers of Audacity really saved me. It took me four hours to put together something fairly decent so I got to know the program pretty well and it really is a great piece of work. This is why open source is important – I would have been screwed if the only software was the £200 Adobe Audition, but because of enthusiast developers there’s a perfectly good completely free alternative.

Anyway, my copy of Mac OS X Tiger is listed as “out for delivery” on the TNT tracking site so assuming it does arrive today I’ll post some impressions when I have it installed and have had time to play with it.

Well, the consensus seems to be that the final Xbox 360 design is upon us:

That image fits with this one, which clearly shows a removeable 40GB hard drive, and that in turn fits with the latest teaser from Our Colony which would appear to show it standing vertically without the hard drive installed. I still think not including a hard drive as standard will be a mistake but time will tell on that one; I’m sure the hard drive model will outsell the cheaper one by a fair margin.

Assuming that it is actually real, I actually quite like it. We need a console that isn’t some shade of black or grey (purple not included) and, judging by the relative size of the DVD drive, this one will be a bit smaller than the original Xbox. It looks like it has just the one controller port which would support the idea that it has wireless controllers as standard (the wired port being there for those fraught moments when the batteries run out) which I really hope come with rechargeable batteries.

I’m not too sure what the little thing to the right of the memory card ports is or what that shape on the far right is, but it wouldn’t be a leak without a ton of idle speculation. We’ll find out when tell us whether this is real or fake but either way, it’s a nice design.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen so much marketing furore over a product that no one has even seen yet – probably not since the lead up to the PS2 – than what Microsoft has managed to whip up over their new machine with simple tantalising glimpses and “leaked” reports. Few even seem to remember that there is more than one console at E3 this year so I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like when we actually see the damn thing and what it can do.

Through their latest viral marketing portal, Our Colony, they’ve got the Xbox fanboys and gaming media in a frenzy over a rendered car (real-time or prerendered? That is the question) and two pictures that look vaguely hardware-like. Throw in the pictures that are supposedly from the new Madden, the leaked specs, and who-knows-how-many tantalising glimpses of controllers (wireless, of course), concept models, and white plastic, and the planned unveiling on MTV on 12th May and Microsoft seem to have everyone eating out of their hand.

Will Sony’s attempted upstaging steal some of Microsoft’s thunder? Probably, but you have to give Microsoft credit for a really credible attempt to level the playing field for the next generation.

On the subject of E3, how impossible is it going to be to get a ticket for Star Wars on opening night considering that’s the first day of E3? As if it wasn’t going to be unbelieveable huge anyway, they open it on the day that half the geek population of the world is going to be there.