Show Posts
This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.
And in the weeks ahead you can look forward to:
BIO MIRACLE BOKUTTE UPA – NES
DIG DUG – NES
DoReMi Fantasy: Milon’s DokiDoki Adventure – Super Nintendo
Spelunker – NES
Following on from the release of Space Invaders Extreme for Nintendo DS, Space Invaders Get Even further commemorates the 30th anniversary of the arcade classic by putting gamers on the other side of the storied conflict. Players take command of the Space Invader hordes in Get Even, controlling UFOs and marshalling the iconic extra-terrestrial creatures to combat tanks, fighter planes, and bosses drawn from Earth's defence forces.
Commanding the invasion will involve choosing between five different attack modes for your forces, and battles will rage across seven different environments. Also, players' high scores will be measured against the best the world has to offer via the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection.
There are currently no details on a price point for the PAL release of Space Invaders Get Even, nor has there been any suggestion of additional downloadable content being made available. In Japan, Space Invaders Get Even has been set for an August release at a price of 500 Wii Points, with further content to be released later on.
SPACE INVADERS GET EVEN
Beaming Down on WiiWare this October
London (20th August 2008) – Square Enix Ltd., the publisher of Square Enix® interactive entertainment products in Europe and other PAL territories, today announces the TAITO® game SPACE INVADERS GET EVEN™ will be available, to download exclusively from the Nintendo WiiWare™ service, across Europe in October 2008.
30 years after the original SPACE INVADERS® ignited an entire entertainment medium and founded a gaming generation; players can now prepare for role reversal in this brand new action-invasion, where the fate of the Earth is in their alien hands.
Players will control mysterious UFOs and give orders to hordes of Space Invader underlings in an attempt to overrun Earth and battle Earthlings' attacking human weaponry.
John Yamamoto, president and chief executive officer of Square Enix Ltd. comments, "SPACE INVADERS EXTREME launched earlier this year recaptured the hearts of many gamers, and launched the SPACE INVADERS series to a new generation of younger fans. SPACE INVADERS GET EVEN promises to be a great follow-up release for this the 30th anniversary of the series."
SPACE INVADERS GET EVEN features
Any chance the new podcast will be up tomorrow Crimm?You should listen to the latest Radio Trivia, then! He's on it!I just got a tooth pulled and need Greg's voice to ease away the pain.
Just so you guys can get your suggestions in before next week, this week we introduce a new segment:
"James' Crazy Rants."
I'm not sure what the local conventions are with regard to mixing quotations and reply, but the format is suited to establishing the problem at hand. I apologize if anyone finds this irritating.
Greg, is this your alt account?
Also, I wasn't aware politeness was something to be ridiculed.
Your single-player quest begins with the selection of a difficulty level corresponding to the size of your ship (the greater the size, the lesser the difficulty). The ship's controls are executed exclusively with buttons; the D-pad steers, while the shoulder buttons propel the vessel either forwards (R) or backwards (L). Weapons are fired using the face buttons, with the port and starboard cannons being activated by A, while consumable pick-up secondary weapons (such as rockets and mines) are triggered using B. With just a little practice, this scheme proves more than adequate for manoeuvring your vessel in between obstacles and around enemies.
Pirates: Duels on the High Seas employs 3D graphics to present the game's action on the upper screen, and the results are quite effective, if rather lacking in appreciable textural and architectural variety across the different environments. I noticed some slowdown affecting a few situations involving a particularly large number of enemy ships on-screen at once, but otherwise the game runs fairly smoothly. On the lower screen, a simple map displays a bird's-eye view of the area around your ship, indicating the presence of enemy vessels or weapon installations with skull icons. These can assist in the formulation of a little advance planning, if necessary.
The sound design on show here is very sparse. Without music to accompany the action during a level, just a few basic weapon fire sound effects and seagull noises are left to carry the audio load. There is some music used in tandem with the brief static story scenes between levels, and a quick fanfare for clearing an area, but otherwise there is nothing to speak of for a soundtrack. What little music is present is thematically suitable, if rather uninspired.
Though the presence of a top-down perspective and a ship capable of picking up various weapons may evoke thoughts of a vertically scrolling shooter, Pirates: Duels on the High Seas is structurally more similar to a side-scrolling fighting game, such as the Subspace Emissary component of Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Typically, you navigate through levels on a linear path, often at liberty to simply bypass enemies rather than face them down. Combat is only necessary when a locked gate prevents you from progressing until, for example, you have destroyed all the ships in that particular area. There can be rewards for destroying enemy ships along your way, such as gold or new crew members that enhance your ship's abilities, but these inducements appear seldom enough to provide scant encouragement to methodically destroy every enemy that crosses your path.
When engaging in combat does become imperative, the intention is clearly for you to manoeuvre your vessel such that it can deliver devastating broadsides to your opponents while evading enemy fire. However, the enemy AI and balance of the game's statistics mean that such dexterity is seldom necessary to progress through the next gate. When dealing with smaller vessels, it is quite safe to remain stationary while pumping out cannon fire until they sink. Also, the collectible sub-weapons can make quick work out of larger ships and cannon placements, but in their absence the process simply becomes something of an exercise in tedium rather than tension.
Fighting the game's biggest enemies, such as a colossal battleship or a sea dragon, can require greater care and attention, but this is mitigated by the inclusion of an ability to continually replenish your ship's health. Selectable from an icon on the touch screen after you find a shipwright to become part of your crew, this option can make your ship near-invulnerable at the cost of a quite trivial amount of gold (which is relatively ubiquitous in itself). Combined with the fact that (most of the time) your ship is in little danger from the standard enemy boats, this low price for such a useful ability makes it all too easy to get out of a tight spot in one of the bigger battles. It also renders the other selectable crew-based ship abilities, such as greater range for your weaponry or a wider field of vision on the lower screen, practically irrelevant due to their comparatively meagre usefulness.
Overall, Pirates: Duels on the High Seas has some quite solid foundations in terms of controls and graphics, but some curious design choices mean that these are not being fully exploited. Also, it remains to be seen whether there is sufficient variety in the tasks and level designs to maintain players' interest throughout the course of the game. In addition to the quite substantial single-player campaign, Pirates: Duels on the High Seas will feature multiplayer modes for up to four people to participate, with or without extra game cards. Unfortunately, these options could not be utilised in this preview build of the game. UK DS owners will have the opportunity to discover how multiplayer Pirate-duelling will shape up, along with the rest of the game, when the final version goes on sale on August 22.
The DS version promises to be extremely faithful to the original 16-bit time-travelling RPG epic that was denied to PAL gamers in the mid-1990s, maintaining the same audio-visual presentation while adding some new features such as touch screen functionality, a new dungeon, and an as yet unspecified wireless play mode.
SQUARE ENIX ANNOUNCE CHRONO TRIGGER THE CLASSIC ADVENTURE AVAILABLE IN EUROPE AND PAL TERRITORIES FOR THE FIRST TIME
London (6th August 2008) – Square Enix Ltd., the publisher of Square Enix® interactive entertainment products in Europe and other PAL territories, today announces that CHRONO TRIGGER® will be released across PAL territories in early 2009 exclusively on the Nintendo DS™ handheld system.
They say that "time is money" but for our hero, Crono it is much more than that! Get ready to travel through time to avoid the destruction of the world as we know it. With CHRONO TRIGGER, your notion of time will be turned upside down as you race against it like you've never done before, while all the decisions you make along the way will affect past, present and future!
Originally released in 1995 for the Super NES® CHRONO TRIGGER is regarded as a classic that was sadly never released in the PAL territories. We may not have a time machine to rectify the past, but thankfully CHRONO TRIGGER is about to change history. This all-new edition of CHRONO TRIGGER contains all the classic essence of the original while introducing the portability, dual-screen presentation and Touch-Screen functionality of the Nintendo DS.
John Yamamoto, president and chief executive officer of Square Enix Ltd. comments, "It gives me great pleasure to see CHRONO TRIGGER being released in Europe and the PAL territories. With its ground breaking story and gameplay, this epic RPG with multiple endings has already won the hearts of many fans and I hope it delights a whole new audience of players into revisiting the CHRONO TRIGGER world time and again."
About CHRONO TRIGGER
Story When a newly developed teleportation device malfunctions at the Millennial Fair, young Crono must travel through time to rescue his misfortunate companion from an intricate web of past and present perils. The swashbuckling adventure that ensues soon unveils an evil force set to destroy the world, triggering Crono's race against time to change the course of history and bring about a brighter future.
Features
Greg is the Chocobo-raising one. You'll see (or hear) what I mean next podcast...
It should be noted as a necessary preface to this review that this writer has no prior experience with tactical RPGs or the Final Fantasy franchise itself. Thus, the perspective contained herein is one largely unfamiliar with the heritage and conventions that come with the title.
Final Fantasy Tactics A2 opens with a young schoolboy named Luso being magically transported away from our world into Ivalice, the setting for a number of recent Final Fantasy games including Final Fantasy XII. The relatively straightforward story sets Luso on a path back to his homeland, as he joins a clan of adventurers questing for loot and status across the fantastical landscape. This quest provides a satisfactory backdrop to the growth and development of Luso and his companions throughout the course of the game.
While not technically groundbreaking, the two-dimensional graphics employed to bring Ivalice to life are detailed and beautiful, while special effects during battles add some dazzling moments to the proceedings. Luso and the other characters are represented with portraits during dialogue scenes, and appear as quite basic sprites with limited animation during battle, but these portrayals are never less than appropriately functional. The soundtrack also exudes the same sense of polish that has become expected of Square-Enix's output on DS, providing suitably grandiose-sounding instrumentation for the epic fantasy setting.
Ivalice cannot be openly explored as in a typical RPG, but is instead split up into a number of locations that are selected from a world map as Luso's clan takes on various quests. These quests include such tasks as defeating all foes, holding a particular location, or protecting a non-player character, but almost exclusively consist of participating in a turn-based battle, so the variety to be found is very definitely constrained. Main quests advance the story with some reasonably effective text dialogue scenes playing out before and afterwards, while numerous side quests can be selected in order to simply accumulate experience, items, money, and more.
With turn-based strategy at its heart, Final Fantasy Tactics A2 has much more in common with Fire Emblem and Tactics Ogre than its Final Fantasy stablemates. Battles are fought on isometric maps between your clan and various adversaries drawn from the Final Fantasy mythos. All actions are performed by selecting from menus and then specifying areas on the grid, which can be executed with the stylus as well as with buttons. The dual screen display proves more useful than touch screen functionality for improving ease of use, as it makes it possible to readily view information without repeatedly switching between numerous menu screens.
Much of the strategic potential contained within the game's battles depends on the layout of the environments themselves; the terrain affects the ability of your characters to move around the grid, while elevation can sometimes protect against attacks coming from below. The orientation of your warriors is also a consideration, as attacks to the rear can deal considerably more damage than those to the front or sides, encouraging players to use the perimeter of the battlefield to their advantage, and to position characters back-to-back for mutual protection.
Attacks vary by range, area of effect, and elemental category. In tandem with the importance of the environments, these attack types open up an array of strategic possibilities. For example, tight formations protect your clan from close-up physical attacks, but can be swiftly decimated by a long-range magical attack that affects multiple grid spaces, so paying attention to what your opponents are capable of is highly advisable. However, the intuitive tradeoffs in the game's design, such as that between attack range and attack power, are oftentimes insufficiently pronounced to make their strategic exploitation integral to victory. Quite blunt exercise of your characters' abilities is frequently adequate to progress through the game, and this can prove somewhat unsatisfying.
The abilities of your clan members are determined by a number of factors, and this is where Final Fantasy Tactics' RPG elements can be found. Firstly, characters accumulate experience points from participating in battles, raising their statistical attributes as they ascend in level. However, this is only a very basic part of how your clan members develop throughout the course of the game. Each character has a job that comes with specific abilities, such as healing spells for a White Mage. These abilities become "mastered" over time such that a character can then be assigned a different job with new abilities to use, but retain abilities from their previous occupation. Furthermore, equipping clan members with rare armaments (procured by trading specific combinations of items at the Bazaar) can bestow further abilities upon them, eventually opening up new job types for selection by that character.
The net result is enormous scope to customise your characters along branching paths of jobs and abilities, injecting something of a personal touch into the development of a clan and its subsequent use on the battlefield. However, this great breadth of opportunity to character-build works to remove some of the hard edge from the strategy component of Final Fantasy Tactics A2. With a wealth of optional quests to exploit for experience points and items, those finding themselves frustrated with the latest quest in the storyline can take the time to build up their clan such that it can overwhelm its foes rather than being forced to carefully out-manoeuvre them.
The ease with which one can substitute strategy with brute force is magnified by the aforementioned weakness of the tradeoffs between attack types, and as such many of the battle scenarios do not feel meticulously crafted to create tactical problems in the same way as those found in out-and-out strategy games. The Law system, which places restrictions on what actions can be performed in battle in exchange for certain clan privileges, sometimes inserts an interesting tactical wrinkle into a battle scenario, but its effects far more frequently seem arbitrary or entirely trivial. Nevertheless, the game design does reward care and attention to detail, and those that have little desire to play through side quests can fall back on their cunning to circumvent grinding to some extent.
Overall, Final Fantasy Tactics A2 is a quite uncommon (if not flawless) coupling of remarkable depth with relative accessibility, although it will not take players by the hand through all of its intricacies. The open-ended structure and accommodating difficulty curve encourage experimentation, and give players ample opportunity to approach the game in their own way with regards to strategy and party management. A keen interest in custom character-building may well be required to get the most from the game, as this element provides the greatest depth for players to explore. However, as a gracefully presented package that includes a lengthy main quest and numerous hours of supplementary content, Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift is a very worthy purchase for an audience much wider than only genre and/or franchise devotees.
Pros:
Lastability: 9.0
With an extensive story-driven quest to complete, in addition to many side quests and the capacity to customise your clan in great detail, there is clearly the potential to sink an enormous amount of time into Final Fantasy Tactics A2. However, this is somewhat limited by the uniformity of the gameplay, and the absence of multiplayer options beyond item trading.
Final: 8.0
Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift incorporates sophisticated customisation into a solid turn-based strategy foundation to create a slick, high quality game that won't deter genre neophytes from discovering its intricacies. However, this process is not without its tensions, and the exercise of tactical discretion seems to have been left weaker in the mix than would have been ideal, making an otherwise highly substantive experience somewhat less rewarding than it could have been.
I think the scan bar is a worthwhile addition in certain places in the game. During some bosses, you had to put yourself in harms way to get the scan data and that's cool. If it was instant, the novelty of getting the scan would be gone. Otherwise I agree, lose it; it really just wastes my time in parts where I don't have to weigh out the possible consequences.
Also, Greg your new avatar scares the crap out of me.
Hello all. This is my first post here. I'm Zyrtsuryu, and you might recognize me from a certain Metroid website's Fan Fiction area. I won't mention the URL, because that would be shameless plugging.
Lest Greg worry that his maidenhood is at risk, rest assured that I'm happily married, safely ensconced on another continent, and quite certain that the closest I'll come to buggery is a rousing game of Bugdom 2 on the Mac.
