Deep from the trenches, it’s time for your Monday video feature: Embedded Reporter.
I know it’s a day late, but yesterday was a holiday…and I totally forgot it was also a Monday…
So here we have more promotional material for Nintendo’s recent release Rhythm Heaven. There might be a little something different about it when you watch it.
EDIT: The embed code was giving me trouble, so I’m linking it above for now. I know that kind of kills the whole “embedded” part of this feature, but until I can figure it out, I don’t want this looking terrible.
That’s right, it’s catered to the womenfolk. Now, I have no problem with Nintendo’s strong push for catering to female gamers. These commercials with Beyoncé (for Rhythm Heaven), Lisa Kudrow, Nicole Kidman, or America Ferrera are genius in that they don’t pander to women and don’t try and talk down. This commercial is geared more toward teenage girls, I’d say, and it shows. I don’t think it’s sexist, I just don’t know how well it will play. Do you think it talks down in any way? Is it’s message sexist in nature? I don’t really think so, but I can’t help but feel a little uncomfortable watching it when I think about the stance that any actual gaming girl I know would have toward it. For others, it seems about right. I guess you can’t please everyone, right?
Insert another credit, because it’s time for your weekly video game news and you’ve just hit the Game Overview screen.
King of Fighters XII, yeah that’s still coming out. I’m having a hard time caring without Mai :hint hint: See the episode below to catch the trailer.
Explosive
Remember last week when I told you all about that Giant Bomb achievements feature? Seems I’m not doing that well. I’ve only got ‘A’s in Mass Effect, Castle Crashers, and Lost Odyssey and a good chunk of my rare achievements are World of Warcraft achievements available only to those who were playing the game way back in the day. That being said, I do have a lot of Lost Odyssey and Mass Effect rare achievements and I think I’m going to ignore the DoA 4 rare since it’s probably the anti-achievement I got for losing tons of matches.
If nothing, this has inspired me to start hitting up those achievements harder. The easy targets would be more Mass Effect, Rock Band 2, and Lost Odyssey for the S-Rank. but I think that I will be playing Fallout 3 once I finish Persona 4 next, so it might have to wait a while. That’s a respectable endeavor too, since I only have a C in the game.
It’s raining, but is it heavy?
The oddly named Heavy Rain promises to bring mature, serious gaming to the PS3. I’ve heard much about the game’s merits, mostly from Shane Bettenhousen back when he was on the 1UP crew, but I’d yet to see any footage of the game in action. Lucky for me, GTTV, or Gametrailers TV, is featuring Heavy Rain in their latest episode:
(Sorry about some of the stupidity of the interview, I don’t write the immature questions)
As the episode mentions, Heavy Rain is developed by the same folks who brought us Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophesy back in the day. That game had a narrative that quickly fell apart near the end, but was an otherwise solid piece of storytelling. Heavy Rain has serious promise not to fall into that trap.
How cool is it that if one of your characters dies it becomes part of the story. You lose control of that person and the game continues. Seriously, all they have to do is not get stupid ridiculous like the end of Indigo Prophesy and they already have me as a customer.
Wii Secrets
Guess what? You can export Miis to the DS!
The previously hidden feature doesn’t do much for games that don’t support it, but it’s crazy to learn this little secret. Pressing A, B, 1, and then holding 2 will bring up the export dialog. Useless, but cool for the future.
Do me a Solid, will ya?
New Metal Gear game announcement at E3? Seems likely. The teaser site is apparently flashing 5@E3…Seems pretty self-evident there.
The Pigs are keeping us down!
First Capcom, then Koei, and now Square Enix have restricted all Japanese travel to E3 this year citing the H1N1, or swine flu, pandemic as the reason they are limiting their travel. Considering that Japan is actually facing quite the problem on its shores, you’d think that the execs would want to get out of the country sometime soon, but then again, I guess it’s the ethically responsible thing to do not to have them travel around. That being said, I’m sure the last thing Japan is doing in this case is worrying about US safety. All jokes aside, hopefully this swine flu pandemic slows down and goes away soon.
[Thanks to Kotaku and Gametrailers for the links]
Not as much Fat Princess news as I would have liked so far, but we’ve had a lot of Nintendo news hit the wire. First we’ve got the announcement that the SD card slot has finally been unlocked on the Wii, despite Nintendo’s initial, strong reluctance to do so. This will definitely help with storage woes on the system.
They also announced a new Zelda game: The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks. It revolves around trains and appears to be using the Phantom Hourglass engine. Also announced were some DSWare games and a balance board game which interests me so little, I won’t even drop its title.
Hideo Kojima came up to announce that he will be making an announcement at E3 ([sarcasm]thanks Kojima…[/sarcasm]) and dropped hints that he’d like to make a comedy game.
That’s about it, unless you care about God of War III’s frame rate (60 fps, unless they need it to be 30 fps…yawn), so enjoy this Fat Princess trailer and hope for a release date.
Went to the nearest Toys “R” Us today to finally get my hands on the Regigigas that I mentioned in an earlier blog post. The process was quick and easy and I was only slightly embarrassed to complete it. Probably the funniest part of it was that, since I had two copies of the game, I received double the reward pictured below:
That’s right, I got TWO Pokemon movie posters, TWO Regigigas and his assorted buddies sticker sheets, and TWO $5 coupons for Pokemon games at Toys “R” Us. Too bad I already pre-ordered Platinum at Amazon.com.
For those of you wondering about my Regigigas’ stats, here’s the breakdown:
lvl 100
Ability: Slow Start
Moveset: Iron Head Rock Slide Icy Wind Crush Grip
According to Kotaku, from 8 March to 21 March you’ll be able to download Regigigas to your Pokemon cards by heading over to your local Toys R’ Us. It’s super embarrassing, but I know I’m gonna have to head over at some point to get myself the legendary Pokemon.
With every Final Fantasy game there exists great (and not so great) teams of heroes bent on saving the world from some sort of evil force. While we could take a look at those heroes, let’s instead take a look at the evils that motivate these heroes to do what they do.
It should be noted that this feature will be full of spoilers.
Week 1 – Garland Week 2 – Emperor Mateus of Palamecia Week 3 – The Cloud of Darkness
Final Fantasy IV was a masterpiece of soap operatic storytelling. Characters joined, left, fell in love, died, were amnesiacs, and were under mind control. It was a mess, but it was an entertaining tale of redemption for an evil man and his love for his woman.
Unfortunately we still had this very strange story anomaly where you’d play through about 90% of the game thinking one guy was your enemy (Golbez, in this case) only to find out that the real culprit was some other bloke (Zemus/Zeromus, in this case). While we can forgive the weak characterization in these early games, FF IV started to reach the saturation point for this nonsense. Sure, we love fighting evil, but wouldn’t it be nice to not just have a quick “Oh, this guy was mind controlling everyone” kind of thing be pulled on us?
So Zemus/Zeromus happens to be a Lunarian, or a dude from the moon, who’s decided that living on the moon blows. To fix this problem, he’s decided to kill everyone on the planet and take the planet for the Lunarians to live on. The other Lunarians are, surprisingly, not on board, so it’s up to the crew to take this sucker down.
Evil Rating:
He’s evil, but not evil enough to want to get his own hands dirty. 99% of the evil he causes is realized through his mind controlled puppets. I’ll give him points for wanting to kill everyone on the planet, but he’s gotta lose some for laziness. That and he totally gets owned by the heroes and has to let the embodiment of his hatred be the final boss.
7/10 (mostly because his evil intentions raze an entire town, kill multiple player characters, and are cool, but he loses points for the totally lame mind control plot)
Cool Rating:
Well he gets cool points for being from the moon. He’s also too cool for school, preferring to make others do his dirty work while he chills out on the moon. It doesn’t get much cooler than that, except that he gets owned pretty easily and has to unleash his hatred upon the world to actually be formidable.
7/10
Images:
Zemus (DS) Zeromus (Amano Artwork)
Video:
Week 1 – Garland Week 2 – Emperor Mateus of Palamecia
Final Fantasy III spearheaded the amazingly innovative, and often imitated, job system that sneaked its way into every other Final Fantasy game starting with III, was enhanced in V, and up until Final Fantasy VII (I claim that materia is a modified job-system). It was also utilized in Final Fantasy X-2 via dress spheres. Unfortunately for us, it had yet to refine its villain characterization, resulting in a final boss who you basically don’t see or even know about for the vast majority of the game.
The actual final boss of Final Fantasy III is about as nebulous as they come (sorry in advance for this terrible pun). The Cloud of Darkness is a chaotic force that seeks to end the world after it was thrown out of balance by the light and dark warriors and crystals. She (it has female appearance) actually kills the light warriors at one point (the player characters) and it takes the sacrifice of the dark warriors to allow the light ones to even have a chance to kill her.
It’s a tough battle, being an old school FF game and all, but good job composition will allow the team to take her down and save the world.
She’s a force of nature hell-bent on ending existence. That being said, what Final Fantasy villain isn’t? You don’t see her until the end of the game and most of the evil situations going on in the world are not even close to her or her minion Xande’s responsibility.
1/10 (remember, wanting to end the universe is not that evil in FF games)
She’s an amorphous, naked, green cloud of evil. Lame. She does kill the Light Warriors though, so kudos for that.
3/10
Image:
DS Remake Model
It’s probably too early to start calling me Nostradamus (we’ll have to wait until the regular season of baseball ends to know just how good I am), but if you remember this post I mentioned that Mario RPG’s launch on the VC in PAL territories would spearhead a US release. Lo and behold, Mario RPG, one of the greatest Mario games, SNES games, and RPGs in gaming history.
It’s too bad that Square Enix won’t be releasing any of its other landmark SNES RPGs on VC, preferring to milk tons of money out of players with remakes (which we like) and ports (which we find a bit annoying, but kind of like anyway). Go out and buy Mario RPG and let’s hope that Earthbound hits the system soon.
As you all know by now, I love Chrono Trigger. The prospect of this new port of the SNES classic to the DS has me positively salivating at the thought. It all sounds super cool that I’ll be able to own another cart of this fantastic game and that it will have those nifty little improvements made to it.
Then I look at the new Final Fantasy IV remake released on the DS. It’s not just a port like Chrono Trigger is, it’s a full-blown reworking of the game adding 3D, cutscenes, and even voice acting and I can’t help but feel just a wee bit cheated. FF IV DS launched this past Tuesday for $39.99, since Square Enix knows that they’re the only company that can get away with such exorbitantly priced DS games, but I can more or less justify paying that much for a game that is significantly improved over its SNES iteration. The new version has a retooled difficulty level and added content as well, so, while pricey, it’s still a fully-featured new game of sorts.
How can I justify paying for a straight port of the best SNES game out there when I know that the company is capable of putting some effort into coming out with an improved version? Chrono Trigger may be an absolute classic, but it would definitely be served by improved graphics or even a more significant modification like with Persona 3: FES. In that game Atlus actually added on an epilogue of extensive length and substance.
It’s not exactly out of the question to have rereleases of this nature in Japan. Nintendo as been releasing updated versions of its NES Mario games since the days of the SNES with Super Mario All-Stars. I suppose it brings with it a chance to give a new generation an opportunity to play games which are far beyond what is playable without the Virtual Console or similar service, but I just can’t help but feel cheated knowing that I will inevitably pay quite a large sum of money for yet another marginally improved version of Chrono Trigger, despite my intense love for the game.
I guess there may be a silver lining to the rather lackluster effort involved in this DS rerelease: the hopeful high sales of the rerelease may lead to a proper sequel to Chrono Trigger.
It seems that one of my favorite PC games from way back when is about to make a return with The Humans: Meet the Ancestors. A Lemmings-style game in which you guide a tribe of cavemen to the goal, trying to have them not die, The Humans provided hours of fun for me back on our junky Packard Bell until we lost the anti-piracy copy card.
I can’t say that I like the new Humans art style. Here’s a peek at the way the old game looked from some foreign TV station:
The new style is similar, but lacks some of the character of the old style. Oh well, I just might pick up the game anyway when it comes out.
DS Trailer:
PC Trailer (very similar, but spiffier in graphics and with concept art at the end):
