Tag Archives: RPG

Games, Movies & TV, Nintendo, PC games, PlayStation, Sega, Xbox

This is Getting Silly

06/10/2006 Olly 6 Comments

I make no bones about how annoying I find the tendency of the games industry to pile all their big releases into the Christmas period and leave an incredibly lean summer. I understand why they do it but for those of us to whom picking up the latest releases is an obsession – part of the growing Xbox Live mentality where you have to play what all your friends are, I suppose – it’s tantamount to torture.

I went through various release lists and worked out all the games and hardware that I intend to buy before the end of the year. Take a look:

October

Contact (US DS)
Final Fantasy XII (US PS2)
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories (US PSP)
Power Stone Collection (US PSP)
Pro Evolution Soccer 6 (UK 360)
Splinter Cell: Double Agent (UK 360)
Tony Hawk’s Project 8 (UK 360)

November

Call of Duty 3 (UK 360)
Elite Beat Agents (US DS)
F.E.A.R. (UK 360)
Guitar Hero II (US PS2)
Football Manager 2007 (Mac)
Final Fantasy III (US DS)
Final Fantasy V Advance (US GBA)
Gears of War (UK 360)
HD DVD drive (UK 360)
Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (US Wii)
Lumines II (US PSP)
Rainbow Six Vegas (UK 360)
Wii (US)
World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade (Mac)
Yoshi’s Island 2 (US DS)

December

Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin (US DS)

Throw in a few HD DVDs and all the summer movies that are hitting DVD and you have some serious wallet rape going on here. The average person isn’t going to be able to afford to spend a tenth of that on games alone so surely this practice of all saturating the market at the same time can’t be beneficial.

I’ll bet that there’s more than a couple of European gamers out there who are silently thankful that the PS3 was delayed.

Editorials, Games, Impressions, Nintendo, PC games, PlayStation, Sega, Xbox

E3 Thoughts

13/05/2006 Olly 2 Comments

Nothing mind-blowing from any of the big three, then. Some impressive stuff, to be sure, and some things better than others, but no clear advantages for this console war. My biggest thought so far has been “OMG!”:

This is probably going to be a long post…

First the conferences. I stayed up late to watch the Sony one live and, like most people seemed to, came away disappointed after all the hyperbole. Only three games really struck me – Final Fantasy XIII, Metal Gear Solid 4, and Virtua Fighter 5 – and the rest seemed spectacularly unspectacular. Tekken 6 didn’t even look as good as DOA4, and Resistance looked like a browner Call of Duty, for example. I was impressed with the very cool Eye of Judgement demo and the aforementioned three games, but then…$600. It’s not even a generation ahead of the 360 but is $200 more? No thanks.

There is a $500 unit, but who wants that? You lose the HDMI (so none of the advertised 1080p, ever), memory card slots, and wi-fi. At least if you buy a Core 360 you can buy the things to take it up to the premium one at a later date, but with the PS3 you’re stuck with the crippled one. I’m not going to get started on the “amazing innovation” (their words) of the motion sensitive controller but suffice to say that Nintendo must have been pissed.

What made me laugh was listening to Radio 1 the next day which is usually the home of PlayStation fanboy chavs and the opinions that were called in were universally negative. They even said that the consensus seemed to be that they’d “copied Microsoft and Nintendo and slapped a massive price tag on it.” Continue reading E3 Thoughts →

Games, PC games, Xbox

Hot Potion of Healing

04/05/2006 Olly Leave a comment

I’ve just seen the news that Oblivion has been re-rated by the ESRB to change the rating from its previous T to the more adult M. I’m surprised because although the game does have violence, there’s little in the way of excessive gore and I’ve seen far worse in T-rated games as most enemies in this game just fall down and die. The more interesting factor in the decision to rescind the T rating is this one:

partial nudity in the PC version of the game can be created by modders

Besides the fact that I have no problem with a 15-year-old seeing a “partially nude (topless) female” (how many of them haven’t?), I’d hoped that the ESRB had learnt something after the backlash surrounding Hot Coffee. Apparently not. I think I’m right in saying that almost any game can have its art assets hacked by a modder and made nude (or anything else) but that’s besides the point. As with San Andreas, this content wasn’t intended to be seen. Can you really hold them to blame when someone else modifies their code from its original state?

The assertion that they should is absurd, especially when they took steps to make it inaccessible in the first place. It’s funny to me that many of those who decry mod content and blame the developer for it are often the same ones who bang the drum of not holding gun manufacturers responsible when someone decides to play a “murder simulator” for real. I’m not saying that they should (the ethics of the gun industry is something that I’m not touching here), but that double standards such as that completely undermine the argument.

DVD & Blu-ray, Games, Impressions, Movies & TV, PlayStation

Advent Children

02/05/2006 Olly Leave a comment

It took its sweet time, but Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children – the CGI film arm of the new Final Fantasy VII triptych – is finally out (legally) in the West. I last saw it when I was in Japan seven months ago and can’t imagine why an English dub would take that long to record, but at least it’s here and I don’t have to rely on a typo-ridden fansub to understand most of it.

My impressions of the movie itself haven’t changed, even with the slightly better translation. I enjoyed it but it remains quite esoteric, assuming prior knowledge of the games by, for example, not even naming most of the original protagonists. The DVD addresses this slightly with the 25-minute ‘Reminiscence of Final Fantasy VII’ feature which gives an abridged history, but even that is hard to follow and more useful for those like me who played a lot of the game but never finished it. Obviously it contains major spoilers for those who plan to finish it and somehow don’t know how it ends.

What will draw many people to this is the spectacular CGI. While characters fall short of looking completely lifelike as they did in the previous Final Fantasy movie, The Spirits Within, for my money they’re the best “realistic” CG humans on film so far, and since the whole thing is styled like an anime (no real hair can be that spiky) the occasional flaky animation doesn’t tend to detract. How does a person look when they’re backflipping off a skyscraper, anyway?

Either way, Advent Children remains an action-packed movie with some of the best high-flying combat scenes since The Matrix. It’s enjoyable as a purely visceral experience, which is probably why most exposition scenes are brushed aside in a few minutes to make room for another motorcycle chase. Not exactly deep, obviously, but good fun. Fanboy pornography, basically, and entertaining despite its vapid nature.

Games, Impressions, Xbox

Oblivion First Impressions

24/03/2006 Olly 4 Comments

I couldn’t let a 360 game as big as this go by without giving some impressions now, could I? Just as The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind hit the Xbox a few months after launch, the sequel does the same thing to the 360 in an infinitely bigger way. Bigger in every way, in fact. So big that I’m just giving some first impressions since I can’t hope to capture it with only a few hours of play.

The first thing I need to say is that I didn’t like Morrowind at all. I tried it, but after a couple of hours I could tell that it wasn’t the sort of thing I was up for pouring hour upon hour into. I honestly can’t remember why since it was so long ago, but whatever it was Oblivion hasn’t suffered from the same thing so far. It’s much the same in that it opens slightly slowly – this time with a slog through a dungeon – but once you get into the spectacular overworld the sense of awe is up there with when I first played Shenmue.

It’s kind of strange in that it’s a very deep and customisable RPG that plays somewhat like an FPS crossed with an MMORPG, but it works in making the combat feel involved and allowing the player to feel a part of the adventure. I’m sure everyone reading this is familiar with that feeling in any RPG of finding a new and bustling town to explore, and I spent most of the time in Oblivion experiencing that. I don’t want to spoil the early story, but suffice it to say that there’s a fairly early moment which goes up there with that infamous scene of Sephiroth in Nibelheim for me, and overall I’m certainly enjoying it as much as can be hoped with a swords and sorcery RPG. As much as I like Lord of the Rings I’m not often too big on playing it.

I’m going to be writing something slightly more in-depth for a first impressions feature over on Pro-G early next week, so keep an eye out for that.

General

Work Experience: Day 2

02/08/2005 Olly Leave a comment

Things are improving already. I don’t know if I was just in a bad mood yesterday (very possible) but even by animosity towards Mac OS 9.2 seems to have cooled, thanks in part to the fact that it didn’t crash. I withdraw my statement that I’d prefer Windows 95 – I’d put it more on the level of Windows 98 – but maintain that Internet Explorer is a shitty piece of shit.

The first half of the day was spent choosing the best nine news stories that I found yesterday and writing them into little 100 word stories to fill in the gaps around the big ones in the magazine. I spent about three hours doing that (should have taken less time, but I had to fill a morning with it and kept checking various websites for news as I went along), and then about an hour or so just procrastinating until lunch. I was fairly happy with the stories so hopefully at least some of them will make the cut.

After lunch I was sat down in the games room with a debug PS2 and a PAL copy of Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga which it looks like I’m going to be reviewing. I played about four hours of it and my first impressions are very good. I liked the story and the demon designs are suitably odd (breasts with teeth?), the battle system is good, and the characters are likeable. I do have complaints – the music is sometimes cheesy, the voice acting isn’t brilliant, the settings are generic (the map is invaluable because so much looks alike), and I have a horrible feeling that the difficulty is about to spike – but it seems like a high seven or low eight at this point.

Much of tomorrow is probably going to be spent playing onwards with it because apparently you have to play “fucking loads” of an RPG before you even think about reviewing it.