The Last Super Street Fighter 4 Character Revealed
Sorry Makoto, someone else has a slippery grasp on my heart.
Brad
Final Fantasy XIII at First Glance
…. Damn. She is my favorite.
Anyways, Immediate first thoughts. I want to assure everyone that these thoughts aren’t on the game as, for I have only reached the end of chapter three. I do believe, however, I have seen enough to give a general impression.
First thought? Thank God this isn’t XII all over again. They brought back turn based encounters while remaining with visible enemies before encounters. So fear not those who thought the fighting in XII was trash, for the quick paced, exciting and super neato fighting system Square Enix attempted to create in XII has been thoroughly thought through this time around (Awesome alliteration for the win!).
This fighting system includes simple, yet necessary roles and strategies which require quick thinking on the part of the player, or in my case, pure awesome. Leveling up is similar to X though it gets rid of those items used to assist your leveling and focuses more on a variation of Exp rather than movement points. The grid system is basically still in place, though this time you are not able to grind your way to fill it seeing as how Square Enix has put a level cap on each chapter. Whether or not that was a good idea is debatable, but honestly I have had no problems with enemies yet… Then again, I’m awesome.
Some other noted, the voice acting is not bad, it’s actually kind of good. Dialogue is cleverly written, especially with Sazh Katzroy being a hilarious comic relief who, as a matter of fact, has a Chocobo living in his Afro.
The only problem that I can see right away is the lack of background story, they all talk as if you know whats going on.
Luckily for me, that’s not a problem seeing as how they put in the datalog this time around. Not only does the datalog inform you al about the past, present and future, it is also able to recap you on all the events which you have taken a part of. That is nice for me when I pick this game up two years from now and forgot what the hell I was doing. I assume I won’t have to restart my save AGAIN like I do with every other Final Fantasy.
Anyways, I am enjoying it greatly. It is a change from the precedent, but it is a good change and remains tied to its roots….
Except the bastards got rid of the traditional victory song.
Bastards,
-Travis
Steam coming to MAC?
So news hit recently that valve is about ready to release Steam/Source, and something called Steam Play, to the MAC. The latter being a utility which allows the player to seemingly switch between MAC and PC versions of the game if you own both types of computers (Portal 2 will be the first game getting a simultaneous PC/MAC release).
Fancy stuff, for sure, but honestly I’m not entirely convinced that this is a viable use of resources. Especially since Valves development for the PS3 has been woefully ignored in comparison to other platforms.
Valve/PC development and the xbox 360 are, of course, a perfect fit…at least in terms of development for similar architectures. But is the Macintosh really such a viable gaming platform that it’s development precludes that of the PS3? Is the Macintosh install market for gaming really that huge? And considering the dire truth that PC gaming in general has been waining over the years I’m not so sure that gamers should take these current announcements with any type of real levity.
We cannot doubt that MAC usage has grown recently. Quanticast, a web analytics firm, as recently released numbers showing 10.9 percent of online users in North America signed on using MAC OS X ( a 30% increase over the past year). But I’m not completely convinced that the majority of these users are not signing on at a coffee shop to read the newest NPR news and are, instead, booting up World of Warcraft.
The only thing I can think of here is that Valve see’s the MAC as some possibly fertile land that can be tilled. They might have seen the World of Warcraft MAC users number and want a piece of that pie. Personally, I don’t see it happening. PC gaming is a slowly dying adventure and MAC gaming hardly ever existed in the first place. As consoles become more and more popular, and the PS3 install base grows thanks to the pre-holiday price cut, Valve is going to have to seriously look at giving more love to the console market.
Missions 1 Valve: Work with XBLA, and eventually PSN, to deliver to the console market the handiwork of the robust modding community that gave so much more life to your games in the first place.
-Joseph-
As I Wait for SC II to Download…
I come baring presents…
The first Tower Defense game I played, and assume many else played, were the ones created by Warcraft III players. Simple yet challenging. I think I can speak for us all when I say that the simplicity of a TD game is not only addictive, yet rewarding. Once reaching the highest point of skill in such games you are instantly rewarded with the ability to yell at anyone who is sub-par. This includes, but is not limited to screaming explicits to younger children, forcing the idea of supreme noobiness down the throats of those inferior to your TD might.
If any of this sounds exciting, Travis wants you to Read more
Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands first gameplay footage
I’m not the biggest fan of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The lack of puzzles, crappy combat coupled with seemingly endless waves of enemies, and the part where most of the game is spent protecting some of the most god awful (and mortal) companion AI I’ve ever seen provided for a somewhat frustrating experience.
The only new feature that I see in the trailer for Forgotten Sands is the ability to freeze and unfreeze water. And while I thought this sounded cool when hearing journalists’ first impressions of the footage, after seeing it for myself, I’m left a bit underwhelmed. It appears all the freeze mechanic allows for is the creation of more objects for the Prince to climb on and jump off of; and his animations when climbing on these frozen walls and poles are even the exact same. I would have preferred a more dynamic approach to playing with the various states of water — it just seems like wasted potential that would have been explored more fully in a less budgety non-movie tie-in game.
While I do think Forgotten Sands has a pretty cheap look to it, if it fixes the core problems I had with Sands of Time, I’m more than willing to give this game a chance.
Really though, we should all rest easy that it will be literally impossible for this game to be any worse than Prince of Persia 2008.
Brad
