The great double standard

 Yesterday I noted Sony's lack of humor on the subject of Linux and April 1st, but it looks like they are turning into the abominable machine when it comes to going through with their plans. I don't normally go to this length on a topic, but this one deserves a little more than one post. After speaking with Sony technical support both on the phone and through e-mail, I got nothing more than a canned message saying that yes, they will be going through with it. From the sounds of it, they are even insulting the intelligence of their costumers by citing their own Terms of Service. Basically, Sony doesn't really care how many people comment, they're going to do what they want.

 Why would we argue about a feature no one uses? Well, a lot of people do. Even if 99% of fat PS3 users didn't use the feature, that still leaves thousands of Linux users in the dust. I'm not one of the 1% myself, but I had plans to use that feature in the very near future when I beefed up my PS3's hard drive, so who's to say how many people were going to take advantage of that feature eventually?

 It's like owning a copy of Watchmen. Maybe you bought it the second it came out on DVD, and it just didn't feel like something you were willing to devote 3 hours to. So, months later, you decide to pull it out and watch it again with your friends, only to find out that there's a note where your DVD used to be.

 "You weren't using it, so I went ahead and removed it." - Warner Bros.

 The Playstation 3 was advertised as having many features outside of gaming, something that made the black monolith something a lot different from other consoles. Even when the box was released, a lot of the dreamy expectations that even Sony had for it came true. The thing was decked out with Blu-Ray, SD card readers, HD support, Linux support, Bluetooth, and more USB ports than we would ever need. It came with more than we expected, and we certainly never heard the end of it. Linux support in itself was advertised as the one thing that would make users forget that they ever needed anything else in their entertainment unit. Yellow Dog Linux even sold for about $60, and was Sony supported.

 It wasn't until the Slim came out that this feature would be removed, a move meant to put the PlayStation at the magical price point it needed to be in order to push systems out the door and keep profits in the black. Fans didn't necessarily like the removal of Linux, as there didn't seem to be much of a reason to remove it, but there wasn't much to complain about. We really didn't use the feature all that much, and at least we knew that this specific PS3 was not a computer.

 With the fatty, we knew exactly what we were buying. A PS3, a Blu-Ray player, and a computer all in one. That was the advertising, it was on the box, it's in the manual, and Sony made money off of the claim. That's why people have a right to be a little crazy about the announcement, but just because we don't care about something or don't use this feature doesn't mean that we shouldn't be more crazy about what they are trying to say with this removal. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit

You make a funny joke!

 OK, Sony....we haven't had words in a while. It's about time we had one of "those" talks again.

 As you see here, Sony has announced that they will be removing the Other OS feature found in pre-slim PS3 systems. To be fair, a large amount of people think that this is an April Fool's joke, as the removal will take place on April 1. So let's take a look at this from two perspectives.

 If it's an April Fool's joke, then Sony has somehow managed to figure out what the opposite of "funny" is. It's a terrible joke, and a horrible thing to throw out at your fanbase. You can only do yourself harm by showing the public how willing you are to give them the finger and dance on your mountain of cash. The fact that this news is on the official blog and has been featured on every major gaming website BEFORE April 1 is also not how you set up a joke.

 I'm just indulging at this point, because if you know anything about Sony, you would know that IT'S NOT A JOKE. Sony is the one company that goes out of their way to piss off gamers in the current generation. Their idea of good business is to convince you that the PS3's price will not be dropping under any circumstances, then to drop it anyway after you already bought it while replacing backwards compatibility with Facebook integration. Sony lies to customers all the time as if it's the company policy.

 It all comes down to the company's trust in the consumer, of which they have none. There is no control over the hardware you buy from them. The PSP, for instance, was a terrific piece of hardware that would have benefited from mobile apps. I've seen people rig a GPS to these things, and the ability for gaming outside of what Sony approves is amazing. If there was any ability to make the PSP useful, Sony went out of their way to kill it off, despite having a great product on their hands. I probably would have bought one years ago if I imagined that it would be as useful as the hardware suggested, but instead I waste my money on a PSP-3000 that is basically a brick to me. It's useless except for the two games I wanted for it. All that hardware ended up being wasted, and I have to sit there and wait for the thing to be hacked again just so I can turn it into a tool worthy of my pocket.

 The PS3 has it's Other OS, and given a little bit more control over the hardware, the open-source community would have gone nuts. Want a fully featured computer? Well, that's a two way street. If you're not a serious computer geek that absolutely needs features, you still have a computer on your hands that costs $300, doubles as a Blu-Ray player, has wireless capabilities, and will generally interface with your printers and similar devices. If I were sending a kid to college, then this is a terrific buy for a parent, as it gives their child everything they could possibly need in a gaming system as well as a computer for research and contact. Now, if you actually want to access the good hardware, you're out of luck. Sony has never allowed anyone to access the PS3's most powerful features.

 Throw all that out the window, because it's going away. I was actually wanting to install an Other OS on the box the very second I purchased a bigger hard drive for it. There's a lot of practical use I can get out of it, and given that the PS3 has almost the exact same components in every box, the open source community has the ability to tailor make the best possible Linux for the hardware. Sony, in their infinite wisdom, is now telling me and the fans that this is impossible.

 The thing I wonder is...can there be a lawsuit involved? The company straight-up lied! In competing with Microsoft and Nintendo, one major thing that Sony could hold over their head was that they offered a practical computing solution for their consumers. People were buying these things in clusters for supercomputing. Now, I don't think that Sony is going to leave those people high and dry, but giving a 3-4 day notice for everybody doing real work with the consoles needed to avoid the internet like the plague while they backed up their data is kind of a douche move. Trust me, it's a plague. If you've ever used a PSP or a PS3, you know that there are certain kinds of walls when it comes to updating the system. If you're plugged into the internet, you can't even play some games without being forced to download a patch. The simple trick is to just unplug the cord and be done with it, but I can only imagine how annoying that sort of thing has to be for people with a slow wireless connection.

 Joke or not, I'm actually considering giving my own finger to Sony, not just selling the system, but making a profit off of it. All I'd have to do is avoid updating the system at all and selling it on eBay when the cracking is done, much like the PSP. This is getting beyond stupid. There are some of us that just don't pirate these games and would like the opportunity to use the hardware that we paid for. I don't give a rats ass about annoying people on Facebook every time I switch games. For those who paid the premium to get the first couple of PS3 generations, they should get what they paid for. I understand that Sony can do whatever they want in the XMB because there's nothing forcing them to provide the Other OS option, but this constant downgrading is just plain insulting.

 It only underlines the fact that there is no trust when it comes to Sony. They put out a way overpriced, unnecessary system to begin with, then they remove backwards compatibility, then they made the false claim that their $399 price tag would remain for the distant future, then they lie about keeping the Other OS option, and now this. Really, even if they were joking, Sony is pissing all over the people that bought their hardware. I don't care if I'm using the options or not. I bought the hardware, I was promised certain things from it, and this is no longer the system I paid for. You should have just put out a next-gen gaming/Blu-Ray system, but promising "everything" is turning out to be the real joke here. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit

Shoot me now. I'm about to defend EA.

 EA is no stranger to the wrath of the gaming community. 

 Wait, I'm sorry, I'm just being told that the community doesn't have the balls to make EA sweat one drop. Scratch that last comment.

 There's a world of dislike waiting to be unleashed on EA one of these days, and while it's never going to happen because people won't stop buying the games in order to send a message, the publisher/developer is continuing its experiments to mine their customers for more money in unexpected places. That doesn't mean that gamers have to sleep with their asses to the wall just yet, though, as EA is focusing more on how to expand their digital catalog through DLC and "premium" downloads. 

 It always bothers me when "premium" gets used to describe anything. Premium is a scary, misleading word that seems to imply that the product attached to it isn't going to be utter crap. Just remember that the Nintendo Seal of Approval gave us Friday the 13th, stale Starbucks coffee is marked up all the time due to the label, and when I think of a premium sandwich, I think McDonalds. It's a contrived term used to justify a mark up in prices or somehow make a product more legitimate while still managing to be piss-poor. Premium means expensive, and that is all.

 When EA rolled out its cheap tactic for conning gamers into paying for something they should already own, I rolled my eyes and remembered why I don't buy anything from that company if I can avoid it. The games were crap, I don't like Madden, and any EA Games entry can be purchased on the cheap later on in the year. It used to be that Electronic Arts would try out new things, sign new developers, and break a few molds, but for about a decade they rested on the success of their sports franchises and did little to improve their other IPs. Seriously, after Goldeneye, the company tried its best to run the Bond franchise into the ground, so you know they weren't focused on the customer. That is, until EA's recent push to, gulp, return to innovation. It's slow and you would barely notice, but there are signs that things may change. Unfortunately, this is going to come at a cost to the consumers. If EA wasn't already rolling in dough, they've practically admitted that they are afraid to try anything new because unless a franchise is established they can't make bucketloads. 

 This is where you come in. EA's Mass Effect 2 tactic already pissed me off, but then they rolled out something else. Now, you will be asked to pay for something that's more than a demo, but not quite a game. I'm not sure if I see this as a bad thing, though. 

 Here on IGN, the news from EA is that they will pursue a different sales model that focuses on getting full but feature lacking titles such as Battlefield 1943 onto the marketplace. Right after the initial article that made it sound as if they were going to charge for game demos, they made a quick effort to clarify that this was not the case. Basically, EA is officially in the PSN/XBLA/WiiWare market, now. 

 At least, that's what it sounds like. It's not entirely accurate, and while it's clear that EA has severe ego problems at this point, I'm actually going to defend them on this one. 

 It's one thing if you are asked to pay $15 for 3 original maps in a DLC. That's...hilariously stupid. I sold back Modern Warfare 2 for that insult, Activision, and I thank you for helping me make that decision. It's quite another, however, to package up working game engines as a complete experience minus all the frills you'd find in a retail game. The obvious example would be Battlefield, but take Fat Princess into account as well. The simple, addictive, and minimalistic game was absolutely worth the $15 price tag. It was a complete experience in itself and provided the absolute minimum needed to get a sprawling community of players onto the PSN. If the company decided that it needed to go retail and package it up with extra single-player campaigns, it wouldn't be worth the price tag.

 Think of FPS deathmatch modes, for example. While it's true Halo and Modern Warfare have proven that multiplayer will sell a $60 game, there are some games out there that don't interest us as a complete product. If the Conduit, for instance, allowed a $15 download that was simply an elaborate deathmatch lobby without the single player, even a year after release it would be a rousing success. Some games just don't need a campaign, and if the engine and gameplay is up to spec, the developers shouldn't force themselves to waste time and money just so they can print a full retail game. More development teams could spend time creating small, single purpose games that don't require the $60 price tag, are insanely fun, and will encourage creativity. If development costs are getting so high, it only makes sense that new ideas could be tested out in this way with minimal risk to the developer and the consumer. 

 In reality, this announcement is just a way of making EA's entry into the online marketplace visible. Many people have already taken this the wrong way, and while I'll be the first one to call out EA as uncreative and greedy, I really don't think that this means they will literally try to charge for demos. That doesn't mean I don't have doubts. They say that this can be a great way to beta-test games, and I'm sorry, but that means that they will be asking people to pay for incomplete titles. Hopefully, EA will use this as an opportunity to listen to the fanbase and create good titles worthy of $60 out of this arrangement while keeping the $15 multiplayer cheap and supported. If that isn't the case, then this is absolutely what it sounds like. Wait and see, but at first glance, it's not as bad as it seems. The time may be right to tone back on bigger-budget games until some good concepts make it to our consoles, first.

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Yes, I am your father

 I certainly not one of those people that says, "back in my day...", but this is something way over overdue. I own an HD set. Huge, even, at 52 inches, and I look upon this mammoth sized shiny piece of hugeness, I still bitch and moan that it's not 120hz. I'm that much of a tech geek, and the thing serves not only as a testament to how manly I am, but also how often I have friends playing offline multiplayer games. And at 1080p, the set is finally good enough to serve as a PC monitor, making the terabytes of porn on my computer absolutely worth it.

 It is undeniably awesome, but it is too much?

 It really isn't a question about quality, so you can't flame me for complaining about that. A few films these days have a different look about them, and the future is clear. More details, more realistic special effects, and a much cleaner appearance made the manufactured HDTV symbol a shiny, must-have label for millions of Americans these past couple of years. Watching 300 in that the best quality is a terrific experience, and the Blu-Ray translation of Blade Runner is arguably the best thank-you note to sci-fi fans ever. On the next couple of years, film-making will undergo a massive format change on numerous levels. 3-D will have been noted as a great idea done years too soon (again), the web community will make its first real stab into the studios, and the digital shift will be all but through.

 3-D is a gimmick, another test run for an idea used to for cheap cash as novelty. It's no secret that this is a format that cannot last, no matter how good it looks now, because it's not good enough to stick around and moviegoers are going to see it for what it is. It's not a bad idea, but it's clearly not "done", and the last time the industry gave something this radical a shot was when Jason was only just failing as a cool movie character. The quality in technology has gone up, so 3-D movies as we know it won't die out immediately, but the overall rise in every film will let everyone know how much more 3-D could be giving them. It will die, but only until the cost of the stereoscopic method has been made to cost $15. You think they won't charge you that much? They will. Even by then, a much cheaper method may be conceived that could surpass that or ditch the glasses altogether, and then the 10 year cycle begins again only in the name of ditching the glasses.

 Fans are also getting very creative about content available for cheap, or nothing at all, on the web. IGN put out a fake movie trailer for Zelda. Content like Homestar Runner, Red vs. Blue, Zero Punctuation, The Spoony Experiment, the Nostalgia Critic, Mayne Street, and Hulu exist. Magazined have shifted to reputable websites that emulate their purpose, only much more annotated in the name of convenience. It's all for free. and I've already stumbled across a few websites that I've turned to as weekly rituals, just as Lost is to some people. The eventual replacement is getting closer. Bandwidths are only going to get higher, as well as the ability for the average talented person to try their shot.

 The most important factor, however, is the film format as a prop. A tangible object, the film format is only a step away from being outed as the elephant in the room. If the quality in film needs to be higher, then there's only one place left to go in order to make the transition [possible. Someone else will complain about it later, but I will first. I'm siding with celluloid in the coming war.

 At least, I am going to ask that it be spared. When the Lord of the Rings trilogy came out in theatres, I became a little confused about how I felt about the special effects used to render the gigantic creatures that needed to be in Tolkien's epic. At first, I was struck with how it managed to work without intruding on immersion. Those were good effects by our standards, and Peter Jackson should be lauded as a director that managed to bring believably to a world of fake. Which brings me to my second point. Everything in that movie was obviously CG, and there was something wrong going on. No matter how good the creations were, they contrasted the real actors and objects because they weren't tangible. Watching the DVD, I wanted to record it onto a tape at medium quality and watch it again just so I could see the movie as an old classic. Why? To make it blend.

 So while technology soars forward, should we really be ditching a tangible format that we consider obsolete? No, because it's not. We've all seen what happens when a better "quality" format takes the place of film. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull proves this, as the film "grunge" that made the real trilogy so great just disappeared. There's something about the grainy image we see on screens that turn ideas into art. Would the upgrade have worked for Independence Day? Of course. Now think about Willow, Star Wars, The Princess Bride, and other classics that we saw even before the idea of going digital was first thought up. These films wouldn't look right and an "upgrade" would only serve to disrupt any immersion the audience might have.

 It's not random thought, it's the truth. The prop of actual film is dying out, and it's time to start paying attention to what that medium has to offer before it goes away for good. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit

Final Fantasy XIII Review

 It's been a long week, but the game is finally beaten. I promised that I would stick with it as long as it took to get to the end, since first impressions can be a tricky thing. One could easily walk away from Chrono Trigger without getting too far into it, because that game looked a bit on the childish side and played out a bit innocently in the first several hours. Sometimes sticking with a game is just something you do, especially when it comes to the Final Fantasy series. This is a franchise that earned its respect with incredible games that have historical significance even right now. Final Fantasy VII practically made the PlayStation a brand, justified the CD medium, began the legitimate talk of gaming belonging next to movies in credibility, and blew the JRPG scene wide open to Americans. That was all one game. People are serious about their numbered Final Fantasy games for a reason, and it's for that reason that I always play them through until the end. 

 So was it worth it? 

 Coming off of Final Fantasy XII, it was fairly obvious that Squeenix wanted their flagship series to evolve beyond what we've all come to expect from the brand. That entry streamlined many of the RPG conventions we all recognize today, including character leveling, a reduced need for in-battle menus, and party members that would remain active instead of waiting for your specific orders. Final Fantasy XIII is the direct result of this evolution, and the vast majority of the game is tied to that aspect alone. 

 XIII begins within the floating, moon-like colony of Cocoon, where humanity lives within the confines of a protective shell meant to shield them from the outside world. Pulse, the planet that Cocoon hovers above, is considered to be an evil place, and this belief is hardly ever questioned by the inhabitants. The reason for this is that the fal'Cie, beings that are seen as deities by humanity, have had a hand in influencing the population for as long as anyone really remembers. Fal'Cie make themselves known and achieve their goals by marking individuals and giving them a "focus" to carry out in the name of their appropriate fal'Cie. If the focus is failed, then the bearer of the mark becomes a wandering fiend. If the marked one succeeds, then they turn into a crystal. It's pretty lose-lose when it comes to getting marked. 

 When one particular girl/woman (she looks 16), Sarah, gets the mark, it sets in motion a series of events that brings the main characters together. Snow, a rebel who leads a group called NORA against the governing body of Cocoon, is fighting on behalf of Cocoon's inhabitants who are routinely "purged" from it when all things Pulse related turn up. Lighting is Sarah's sister, and gives up her post as a government soldier in order to face the fal'Cie in person in order to get answers. Sazh, the guy who carries a chocobo in his afro, joins Lighting for a similar reason, only it is his son who has been marked. Hope, a young whiny boy, loses his mother early on in the story when the government troops and NORA clash together on a bridge. Vanille.....I wasn't paying attention when she first showed up. She just walked onto the screen and became really annoying, so I pretty much tuned her out for the first half of the game. 

 All of these characters wind up in front of Anima, a Pulse l'Cie, all looking for some sort of resolution. Soon enough, they are all branded as a Pulse l'Cie. There's a difference between the l'Cie of Cocoon and Pulse, though to be honest, you'll hear the terms being thrown around so much that you may not know that there is one at all. Since all things Pulse must be eliminated, the group finds itself on the run and looking for direction. Of course, since the characters barely know each other, this leads to quite a bit of strife, but that's your intro.

 So now that we've got the story out of the way, the technical details should be the easiest thing to get out of the way. After all, it's Final Fantasy, so we can just give an A+ for the music, presentation, and graphics. Right?

 Not quite. 

 Look, a lot of reviewers out there have been glossing over the game as if it truly had the complete package as far as the technical details are concerned. That's simply not true. One concern that, out of fairness, is addressed quite a bit is the overall setting of the game world. At first, it looks amazing, especially on an HDTV. On the PS3, at least, the game looks fantastic, crisp, smooth, and detailed for what seems to be miles off into the distance in some cases. Unfortunately, that drooling ends when you discover that the first panoramic shot of a given area is all that there is to see. Very few areas in the game seem lively and fresh, and the vast majority of the game is completely uninspired. The setting becomes boring fast, as many areas are recycled and offer nothing more than a major set piece to gawk at followed by a lot of filler. 

 I will admit that there are a few areas that look fantastic. Snowfields have never looked better, horizon shots can be breathtaking (but only in one area of the game), and there are three particular areas during the endgame that caught my eye as being well crafted or well imagined. The character models are done quite well, too, and if you can fight the camera and win, there are some good still shots that compare to something you would see out of Advent Children. There is also little question that the Crystal Tools engine works well, as the in-game scenes are obscenely close in quality to the rendered ones. The menu screens are also a pleasure to look at, with a clean interface and the appropriate, integrated use of "shinies". 

 That said, a couple of hours into the game and the graphics didn't seem all that impressive. There were far too many things that reminded me of an overpolished PS2 game rather than something a PS3 should be putting out. Some area effects felt out of place. Enemy design is extremely limited in scope, didn't impress me, and looked cheap at times. Some spells look terrific when casted, and others are underwhelming. The game camera does a terrific job lining up shots, but only if you're moving in a relatively straight line. Otherwise, it can be a pain to lasso the viewpoint to point to the things you want to look at, and not only that, it's slow and cumbersome. 

 Squeenix did, however, do a terrific job on load times. Except in between major areas of the game, there are rarely, if any, load screens or noticeable wait times. Those hoping for a zero transition field-to-battle style will only be disappointed for a few battles, because even though the transition remains, it's so quick that it doesn't make a difference. 

 I admit, I just heaped a lot of praise amidst the complaints, but I'm not finished yet. 

 Musically, I wouldn't rate Final Fantasy XIII as complete garbage, but it's close considering what we expect from the series. Every single track in this game is forgettable filler music, and that is not an exaggeration. The music is done well for what it is, but no track stands out. The boss music at its most intense it still below the most ho-hum of the Final Fantasy XII boss tracks. In fact, if you were to package together the most boring tracks from the entirety of the series, they would still sound better than anything Final Fantasy XIII has to offer. Music has always been a hallmark of the series, but this title was a serious miscue. Also, there's none of the Final Fantasy fanfares. You can forget the victory theme. If they are in the game, I didn't find them, and I did quite a few sidequests. 

 Finally, the voice acting is really hit and miss. While Sazh, Snow, and Fang are perfectly fine, your other three party members are only given a voice to annoy you. You will want to bitch-slap Hope several times throughout the game, and Lightning is barely passable. Vanille is another story. I always joke that the voice for FFX's Yuna sounded like a sniveling whelp that was, in all probability, "enjoying herself" in the recording booth. Vanille is ten times more suspect of this, and on top of that, she never decides on an accent during the entire game. She also sounds completely psychotic.

 I've already commented about the battle system fully in a previous post if you're looking for the complete rundown, but to sum it up, it's terrible. Some people will love it because it streamlines the entire battle process, and for those players, it may be a great thing that that attracts the non-RPG gamer. It does this by trivializing everything you've ever done in an RPG before this game. Many reviewers claimed that it broke up the monotony of the grind, but I found that it had the opposite effect, encouraging the player to get bored with pressing X repeatedly or switching between the same routine "paradigms" over and over again. Grinding is never fun, but this game sucks the life out of you when you do it. 

 Just to make my point clear, I'll just relay the point my friend made while watching me fight a series of endgame battles. I was walking down a street filled with baddies, and it was clear that I had three unavoidable fights on my hands. I walked into the first fight, then got up and went into the kitchen to make myself some food. In battle, you fight with "paradigms", which are preset party configurations that you choose based on what roles the party members are capable of taking. While in the kitchen, I fought an entire battle without even hearing what was going on by simply going through the laughable routine of pressing the same buttons over and over again and switching paradigms after a set amount of time went by. I turned the corner when I thought the battle would be over, walked into the next battle, and did the same thing again. Then again. When I returned, my friend had decided that something was completely wrong with this battle system, since I wasn't exactly fighting against little peons. It's that bad. 

 Finally, there's the story. For all of those concerns that the game is too linear, then you'll be unhappy to know that no matter what the big boys tell you, all of the concerns are absolutely correct. For the first 20-30 hours of the game, you literally walk a straight and narrow road until you reach a point where the game opens up to you. I use the term "opens up" loosely, because there's nothing for you to explore. What follows is the exact description of what you open up:

 You land in a clearing that connects to a path. That path has one sidepath, but otherwise leads to one giant grassy field that you're expected to do half of your sidequests in. You have three paths you may take from there. One VERY short path leads to a small lake with chocobos. The second path is relatively short, linear path that leads you to the site where you complete whatever sidequests are left over after you've cleared everything else. The third path takes you in, you guessed it, a straight line forward until the end of the game. That's it.

 Once again, I have to write down a reminder that this is not an exaggeration. The game doesn't open up. There are no sidequests, only monster hunts. The lack of towns didn't bother me. The lack of a game world does. There just isn't one. If someone told you that you would be spending half of your game doing windsprints back and forth across Hyrule Field, you probably wouldn't be interested, but that's exactly what happens in Final Fantasy XIII.

 With all of that wasted space in between, you would expect the linear parts to be absolutely epic, worthy of every kind of praise there is. Sadly, the plot is an elaborate, ill written joke. You will hear the lines "I swore that I would....", "I promised that I would...",  and "I made a promise...." a million times. You will hear every cliche in the book. The plot itself doesn't make any sense and the characters say things that make even less sense. Some of the things are downright MST3K material waiting to happen. 

 Tale Lightning, for instance, who after torching dozens of military troopers and monsters with the power of lightning magic, after being branded by a godlike being with a tattoo and superpowers, and after fighting Odin and taming him to fight and cast magic for her....she calls out magic as "mumbo jumbo". 

 That's just one example, but there are at least a hundred more. What's more, the characters are all forced to run away after the opening sequence, and before anybody knows what exactly is going on, they have all decided that they are going to save the world. Together. Only not together, because they immediately argue and split up, and then they continue to have dialogue that explains how have no idea what options they have in the first place or what their ultimate goal is. When you're spouting off lines about saving the world before you even realize that the world actually needs saving, then you have a serious writing problem on your hands. The ending takes all of these problems with the writing and cliches and manages to break the expectations of mediocrity.

 It's actually hard to make a concrete statement about why the story sucks. There's just too many things. This may seem like prattling off....but, the story is the worst in the series, and that's saying something when VIII and X are floating around out there. The ultimate bad guy is the weakest the series has ever had, and actually left me wishing for the days of Judges, Sin, and sorceresses. The cast is arguably the weakest one ever assembled. Motivations for half of the party are very unclear, character development is kept to a minimum, and the exact second each one of them hits their stride they begin to spout nothing but cliches. The "crowning moment of badass" in the game is something I actually laughed out loud about. Every idea in the story seems as if it was literally picked up from a pile of ideas sitting on a desk somewhere and included in the game at random without any rhyme or reason. Also, I looked online to see if I was missing requirements for a second ending, because I simply couldn't believe that the actual ending would be that bad. 

 Overall, the game hits some high points in its presentation and is specifically meant for those looking for a shiny experience for their HDTV's. There are some amazing pictures to be seen and everything is right about this game when it comes to the overall speed and fluidness of the experience, but it's empty, boring, underwhelming, and not very captivating of a place. The music is the worst in the series by a long shot, the story is as bad, and it's hard to like most of the characters. The battle system introduces a great way of approaching fast paced, real time combat that could be emulated in the future provided that someone takes the time to fix the other 90% of this terrible system. It is the opposite of epic, and by the time the game ends, you will wonder why the game bothered to carry the Final Fantasy name in the first place. Maybe I wouldn't be so harsh if it just had a different name, but there are expectations. Squeenix didn't bother to step up and meet any of them outside of updating the menu system and increasing their screen resolution.

 If you're new to the Final Fantasy series, have at it, but realize that this has nothing to do with the games we enjoy. If you're one of those hoping that this game will save the series in any way, sorry, but this will have you reaching for the shovel to bury your nostalgic dreams with. We've gone from three epic games with Kain, Shinra, and Kefka to Tidus' beach paradise, Balamb Garden 90210, and now this. Can we stop putting the series on a pedestal now? It doesn't deserve it anymore. 

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Final Fantasy XIII - Battle system

 If there's one thing that I can rightly comment on about Final Fantasy XIII, it would be the battle system. A lot of talk has gone into how this system has made battles more fast paced, fun, and at the same time breaking down the tedium of random battles. After playing this game for over a day, I can honestly say that I don't agree with any of it. This is, of course, my opinion, and I have to look at it from the viewpoint of two separate gamers that live inside my head. It's important to think about, I think, because this game really marks a strange bit of RPG evolution that may or may not be good in the future.

 The whole idea really seemed to come from the monotony of the grind, and how to make that more accessible to the common gamer. Squeenix was really hoping for newcomers to the series, and you can tell in the way the battles are structured. It really comes across as some mix between Xenogears/Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy X-2, and Final Fantasy : Dissidia. Three characters fight in each battle, and because the action is so heavy and lightning fast, the system put in place was one that charged up the ATB to provide more than one action at a time. Instead of throwing one attack into the air, the character would have a queue of attacks to unleash in a string. You only control the main character, so it's not the most complicated thing in the world. It's not even all that different from a regular RPG, because even though you have this series of attacks, you're still just pressing the auto attack button as one single attack command. Nothing really changed much when you break it all down, but it's so fast paced that the illusion of change is there.

 In order to fight effectively, you need to use your "paradigms" carefully. These are set roles that a party member can play, and there are six to choose from. The Medic is self-explanatory, the Sentinel is basically a defense heavy tank that soaks up damage and draws fire away from the more fragile members of the party, the Saboteur and Synergist are roles that focus on enemy debuffs and ally buffs, and the Commando and Ravager complete the list as offense heavy roles. When going into a boss batttle, for example, you would set your party as a Sentinel/Medic, Synergist, and Saboteur to make sure that you're in no immediate danger while throwing out all of your status buffs while weakening the enemy at the same time. When all of the pieces are in place, you perform a paradigm hotswap towards the offensive side of the spectrum. Each fight needs a different strategy.

 One fight, for example, had me fighting a gunship that all but required me to use a Medic/Sentinel/Commando group with extremely limited offensive output. The reason was that there were about 5 turrents unleashing attacks on me every second, and I needed to make sure that there was a huge amount of defense preventing me from dying. Lightning, my hardest hitting character, needed to take out a couple of guns to take the overwhelming heat off of me by herself. It took time, but as the guns went down I was able to occasionally hotswap a little more firepower for a turn at a time, then immediately switch back to keeping characters alive. There is strategy to it, and each battle remains different, yet completely the same.

 I mention Dissidia as a clear influence on this game because of the "stagger" mechanic that's incorporated into every fight. Your Commando role bases itself off the strength stat, and while your character could have excessively too much strength, running in and stabbing people doesn't do the damage you would expect it to. The role isn't useless at all, but unless you're facing enemy cannon fodder, you won't actually do any damage. This is where the chain system comes into play. By stringing together attacks and keeping up the assault, the chain meter goes up in percentage-like fashion. Hit an enemy with a sword, and the chain meter goes up VERY slowly, but also has the effect on solidifying chain-decay. The chain-gauge is always decaying as time passes in between blows, and only a few things will slow that time down. The two most effective ways of doing it is with a stop spell or getting hit by the commando.

 Trouble is, a commando will never get that meter to go up in any way. The only way to get that meter to go up is with magical attacks, which significantly increases the amount of chain bonuses you get, but also decays in a hurry. So the tactic you're always using is to mix magical and physical attacks to get the meter leaping forward while putting enough of a physical beating on the opponent to make sure that gauge stays slow to decay. Also, I mentioned percentages. If you just slash the opponent, then a meter beginning at 100% will rise anywhere from .0 to .3 with each hit. A magical blast will make that meter rise 3-10%, and maybe more, depending on how effective your magic is. As the percentage rises, so does the damage. A 250 HP strike from your commando will suddenly leap forward to doing over 9000 pretty damn quick, and this is in the first 12 hours of the game. What's more, there's a break point for each enemy that, once reaches, staggers the enemy and immediately doubles your percentage, allowing you to string criticals like mad. What's more is that your magic attackers get a HUGE boost in the percentage points they can deal, so if you persist a little longer on the magic assault, not only will you break the opponent, but you will drastically boost the damage your Commando can do. It sound complicated, but it isn't, and hotswapping the paradigms can lead to laughably huge damage numbers flying everywhere in the screen.

 This is where the criticism really starts to fly. Someone decided that since Final Fantasy is now on the PS3, everything needed to be bigger. I'm commonly causing damage in the 10-20,000 range and I'm not even close to beating this game, which sounds insane on its own, but that kind of damage is usually seen within a string of 20 hits in a mere second, so you can imagine how many numbers are being bounced around at any given time. It's really difficult to make this adjustment. Just think Cloud's meteor rain attack and make that every mundane action in the game. At first, you don't know who's causing the damage or how much damage is even being done to you. The numbers seem practically useless because for the first time, you're really not looking at how much damage is being dealt as much as you are checking every health bar you can see. If your health bar drops in a hurry, then you know you're being hit hard regardless of what the red number says, and it's time to heal. Same with the enemies. If their health bar is going down fast, then you know to keep up the pace. If it's taking too long to drop, then you know you need to hit them with magic spells to cripple them, then assault them until you see results on the bar. The HP numbers just aren't important anymore, and every number in the game is already huge that it would be excessive to do number crunching in this game unless you're a masochist. Does the bar go down? Good. You could be hitting for 50,000 HP a strike, and it would not be impressive in the least unless that bar moves. Even the statistics are exceedingly crazy. My main striker at the moment has 690 for her strength stat, and my main nuker has a magic stat of about 605. Every number in this game is big. The only number I can see staying with convention is the party HP which seems to be set at a maximum of 9,999 as per tradition.

 So how do the battles actually feel? Well, it's a twitch fest. If you don't twitch paradigms as fast as humanely possible, you will die. If you do not take advantage of your 2 seconds of full health to launch a massive attack, you will make no progress and probably die. I fought the exact same battle three times, and the first two times I just spammed magic and crushed everyone in 30 seconds flat. The third time, I didn't open immediately with a flurry and the enemies crushed ME because I have them two seconds to open up their own barrage of hate. Once that happened, and I really don't know how, I could not deal any damage to them like I was in the first two fights and they seemed to be twice as strong, too. I don't really get it, but apparently, the lesson is that twitching is important. You can, and will, switch paradigms so often that 5 seconds can actually mean 5 different setups. The action happens so fast that you absolutely cannot even think about what you should do for strategy. Remember when you would think for a couple of seconds about what spell you should use on an enemy in any other RPG, just to get your head straight about how the battle is going to go down? Well, stutter on the controls ONCE and get yourself off course, and you will think for one single second about what paradigm you should use to turn the tide of battle. Once that second is over, you will find yourself staring at a Game Over screen because you were just gangbanged. I am not kidding.

 In what comes across as the blatant acknowledgement of twitch based button mashing in an RPG, save points are no longer an issue, because you can retry EVERY battle you fight. Even in the middle of battle, you can pause the game and hit a retry button if you think your strategy sucked. Yes, Squeenix knows that you are going to think for a split second and die from it, so in order to make sure that controllers aren't put through TV's everywhere, they made sure that you absolutely cannot lose any progress in your game no matter what mistakes you make. You never had to go far for a save point in the first place, as you can easily walk from a room with a save point, through a door, and into another room with a save point pretty much everywhere in the game. Now, you get to retry battles, too. It's so cheapened, but then again, the battles can be so random at times that it's absolutely necessary.

 To illustrate how dumbed down this battle system is, the prime example would be how you cast magic. Once you learn a spell, a character is able to add it to the attack string without any user configuration. A character will throw out a thunder, blizzard, thunder, blizzard string automatically so long as they are in the role of a magic user. This leads to a HUGE number of complaints. If a character knows cure but is set in the magic user (Ravager) role, then why aren't they able to heal anyone else? Also, the casting requires absolutely no thought process from the user. You don't have to spend any brain power whatsoever on determining what spells to cast, because the computer launches attacks based on the enemies weaknesses on its own. Why even bother having weaknesses to begin with? You're not exploiting anything, you're just throwing out a generic magic spell.

 Even buffs and debuffs work in this way. If there's an enemy that has protect and shell turned on, has just poisoned you, and is hitting you for ungodly amounts of damage, switching your party to a Medic/Synergist/Saboteur will erase all of those problems in 5 seconds flat. Why? Because the Saboteur will immediately string together deprotect, deshell, and everything else in the debuff book in one turn. You don't even have to prioritize, because they do it automatically. Your medic will immediately cast esuna on everyone, effectively giving you the ability to null a marlboro status bomb with the push of a button. And, of course, the Synergist will start flinging out protect spells to everyone, though this takes surprisingly longer to do. Though, if the enemy is a fire breathing bastard, the computer will actually reorder the casting on its own to make sure you have a fire buff, then shell, THEN protect. All of this happens by pressing L1 then X, requiring no thought from you.

 So, all of this makes me extremely torn, and I really have to think of this in two distinct ways.

 One part of me is thinking that all of the BS time wasting has been removed from games, and everything you wanted to do in the first place involves nothing more than deciding that a certain action needs to happen. Do you need to manually select each attack, buff, and spell and then choose what to use it on every single turn?  You're going to figure out the enemies weakness anyway, and when you do, you're just repeating the same thing over and over again. How many times have we wished, as JRPG fans, that you could spend less time micromanaging your fights when you know it's just a rinse-and-repeat process anyway? Well, Final Fantasy XIII achieves this in ways I cannot describe. All you have to do is decide when things need to be done, and it all happens with minimal interaction from the user. Time to heal? Tell them to heal up and you're golden, without picking through menus. Time to just unleash? Well, you can do that by clicking a button, too, and the CPU will automatically determine which attacks you were going to want to use anyway. If you already know that you're going to span thunder because it's the bad guy's weakness, then why bother doing anything else?

 The game does all of that for you, which means that anyone with fingers and average reflexes is capable of getting into a deep RPG, though the depth is highly debatable. It really just automates everything you already planned on doing. Basically there's just a bright blue "kill" button you hit repeatedly. It seems like an evolution, breaking down RPG's to ts most accessible level and streamlining everything possible.

 On the flip side, there is virtually no interaction, no thought process, no experimentation, and no creativity involved in fighting a battle. Essentially, what you're doing is pressing X and L1 a million times and letting the computer play the game for you. You don't have to do any work in discovering weaknesses, and you certainly don't have any time to think about what you're doing at all. It took everything that made RPG's so involved to begin with and dumbed it down to its base level. It sometimes even reminds you that this is what you're doing the whole time in RPG's, just slower. Yet, you still don't feel involved with these characters at all. They don't even have skills that make them unique (yet), so as long as one person can fill a role, then upgrade that person's weapon and you will never have any need for their backup. The game even has a trophy/achievement that is given when you max out everyone's sphere grid, and since you have the ability at a certain point in the game to learn every single role, that sort of says, "here's a reward for making every character the same."

 Even developing your characters outside of battle is linear in itself. Each character already has a set strength at first, so when it comes to getting the most out of your characters you are going to want to make sure that the things they do well, they do VERY well. All that means is that you're going to plunk down your experience points in a straight line down the job path without ever really giving that person any real diversity. Any other RPG would have you mixing abilities so that your tank can revive a downed mage, beefing your mage's HP to the max so that they don't die a lot, or simply finding every possible way to jack up the stats on certain characters to make sure that everything they do does twice the damage that they should ever be doing at a given point in a game. Squeenix even found a way to make that part automated. Now, I'm sure there are players out there who are already finding ways to exploit the system, but right now, I don't see how it would really be exploiting it. If you want Lightning to cause massive damage, then all you need to do is drive a straight line down the Commando path, and she will be absolutely decked....but you were meant to do that! There's nothing about this game that I've had to think about doing, and it's driving me insane. Rather than be exciting and innovative, the game has become bland, boring, and taken all the mental challenge of RPG's and replaced it with button mashing. To whatever idiot said that this system removed the monotony out of fighting, well, you're an idiot. I've found myself tapping X over and over and over while drinking a coke and holding a conversation with someone, not even looking at the screen. Seriously, it's boring, and is actually less entertaining since the battles require no thought outside of boss battles. Of course, buff- heal- rush-repeat is what all RPG boss battles are like, so in cyclical fashion, I wonder if this is evolution.

 Well, Final Fantasy XIII has officially killed off the JRPG for good. They have finally made the entire genre pointless. You're not actually playing a game anymore, and it doesn't even feel like an RPG. You're doing absolutely nothing to shape the game when you play. Everything you do is a straight-lined path in any given direction. The battle system actually made me care less about the already difficult to accept plot, if you could call it that, because I simply look at this game as being all flash and no substance. It caters to the lowest common denominator of fans who just want to see numbers fly and get their rocks off with that and a slick sword-finisher. So really, what is the point of JRPG's anymore? It's all a movie now, and it has done that so well that all you're doing is playing an automated game that occasionally lets you watch a cutscene to tell you why you should be caring.

 So thank you, Squeenix, for taking the fun out of JRPG's for good. You have come out and convinced even the JRPG fans how absolutely pointless the genre is. I was hoping that maybe you would try to return it to its former glory, but you really never cared. All you care about is that the player gets to see numbers fly while taking on shotguns with swords, because that's "cool". It's a complete mockery, and unless something absolutely earth shattering happens to change your direction, this is the absolute last Final Fantasy game I will ever play. You've finally managed to ruin it for me, and I truly feel like playing your games have been a complete waste of my time. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit

Of Metroid and Final Fantasy

 I'm not done with Final Fantasy XIII yet, so I can't leave final impressions out in the open. I'm 30 hours in and am sort of lost as to where I should be going. What I should have done was make sure I went out of my way to find teleport stones, but I only hit two of them and I feel stupid for following the game for this long without telling the story to go sit in a quiet corner somewhere. Something really doesn't sit right with me when it comes to this game's design, and I'm pretty sure I know why, but I did promise myself I would finish it before jotting down my final thoughts. At the very least, I'm actually playing it through and not completely hating it as much as VIII. It's very playable, and it's not going out of its way to tell me that I'm stupid for playing it.

 The way that the series has changed in order to get to this point has to do with evolution, or a the very least, an attempt to see what else the series could become if a few experimental concepts were fleshed out completely. From the sounds of it, this is the way the new Metroid game is going to go, and it doesn't all have to do with Team Ninja. A recent Kotaku post revealed that we may be getting a different side of Metroid entirely, and its even more striking than Samus getting a real storyline.

 Giving Samus more direction doesn't sit right with me, but it's not in the way you would think. I'm just worried that the way good franchises are being handled these days when it comes to writing, something bad is going to happen. We've already seen it in the last Prime entry, but story and Samus don't play well together. There's something outside of the heroine that makes the universe seem...cheap. Metroid, Super Metroid, and Prime established a very dangerous atmosphere that puts Samus on such a rare pedestal. It's not unlike Ellen Ripley. The galaxy is extremely dangerous, and by the time Super Metroid was over, the impression that the gamer leaves with is that of an adult galaxy where unknown things can be terrifying alongside the known and already deadly creatures. Samus stands out where others in the galaxy cannot, and it's for that reason that we're comfortable with her being alone during the ordeals. If anybody else took on what she has, then there would be a lot of dead bodies. Even in the Prime Trilogy, where things sort of lighten up and get a little more personable and colorful, there's still this sense of Pitch Black mythos flying around with the light and dark stuff.

 It's hard to explain, but Metroid is a series that is sort of....bleak. The lack of story sort of goes alongside that, providing the harsh details while never giving the universe a personality outside of wonderful and hostile. When Samus shows up, it means things are screwed beyond repair. I just don't see a cinematic version of Samus being in the best interests of the series because you'd have to write it an awful lot like a cross between Alien and Riddick. Somebody is going to say something really stupid, or somebody is going to want to pull a Kojima and decide that some absolutely random ass version of Samus' background must be included.

 On the other hand, this is something that Metroid also needs. Samus is the hero, and unlike Link, this is the exact same badass we've been following through every adventure. We know very little about her, yet at the same time, we know so much that tying some of it together is only natural. We're expecting to get an action packed blockbuster game that's meant to take advantage of Samus' draw and give her some character at the same time. That's something we need. We need Samus to be a tiny bit more of a character, and then she can go on her way as a silent protagonist once more.

 So long as her character doesn't get trampled in the mud with bad writing, the changes made to the Metroid formula aren't going to kill the series. It can always go backward into the original formula. I read one reader response from the above article that called the idea, basically, frightening. Why? Is it a bad thing to explore what different kinds of action it can bring to the table? Even IF it was an on-rails shooter, as long as the game was a great rail-shooter, I don't see a problem with this. No one said that these changes would be permanent to the series, and trying out something new isn't going to ruin this franchise. It's possible that Team Ninja may try something out that becomes an excellent compliment to the main formula and remains for future games.

 Basically, skip the game if you don't like it. It's one game in a franchise that isn't going to die out anytime soon. No one said anything about Metroid being changed for good, it's certainly a good thing to try a game out that may get newcomers on board with the series, and it looks like it's going to be an entertaining game so far. There are no downsides to this. The same argument was made when the series made it to 3D, and even then, 2D versions still manage to come out. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit

At the six hour mark...

 Screw it. "We'll do it live!"

 I can't believe I just quoted Bill O'Reilly, even if it was in mockery.

10:04 AM - I'm sort of responding to my own post that preceded this, but I figure that it might be best to just go ahead and call it as I see it. I'm all set with the caffeine I need to make it through this. Green tea Amp is awesome, I should mention.

 So we just got finished trampling soldiers with a power loader, bursting through several fences along the way. I've found about 5 save points in 15-20 minutes, which doesn't make any sense considering that you're given the option to retry battles if you mess up. I suppose that Squeenix has determined that the audience must have the same levels of ADD that their characters do. Oh yeah, they all decided to change their minds again. Sure, they've all decided they're going to save the world, but a little bit of resolution and organization might have helped the cause. Just a thought.

10:39 - "Magic and mumbo jumbo"

 Really. You've only been casting magic through pretty much the entirety of the game and you're calling it a bunch of imagination. I bet those troopers you were torching earlier would agree with you that it was all just a dream. And your name is Lightning. And you just fought and captured Odin. And you've been cursed by a god-like being, or whatever the hell those things above are described as. No, really, I'm with you 100%.

 Speaking of Odin, it has finally reached the point where life/progress bars are more important than the damage numbers flying around, which makes absolutely no sense, because it's one giant clusterf*** of numbers after another. If you're not supposed to be paying attention to them, why even bother? It makes no sense.

 Also, I just realized how much XIII's battle system borrows from Dissidia at times.

10:55 - Well that didn't take long. First, it just has to be mentioned that Vanille is beyond the help of rehab. That girl has drugs in her system that would make Keith Richards drool with envy. Also, as if the story wasn't making any sense to begin with, her and Sazh are now discussing the possibility that Hope is on his way home, and they are happy with this thought. Immediately after they say this, they suddenly remember that they would most likely be lynched the second they came within site of "home", but can't seem to piece the two thoughts together.

 "Yes, I hope he made it home. I mean, he'll totally get killed and all, but at least he's home."

11:01 - So I saved my game, watched a cutscene, and what do I find? A save point. This is getting ridiculous.

11:20 - It's been well over a hundred battles into the game, and I still can't figure out exactly what it is that IGN and the rest of them seem to like about this battle system. It seems completely the opposite of what intelligent design would suggest. Let me first say that despite my bias, I'm not actively looking for faults. I just haven't found anything particularly good to talk about. I'm going through a segment of the game with lounge/jazz music playing in the background, and the setting is pretty much the equivalent of a junkyard. I really don't get it. It doesn't make sense, and it doesn't sound good.

 Anyway, back to the battle system.

 So far, it's absolutely terrible. There seems to be this massive focus on micromanagement, but in reality, it all seems very...fake. In fact, I've sort of mulled around about how best to put this, and that's the best I can come up with. If you were to take Xenogears, Dissidia, and XII's battle systems and throw them all together, you get XIII. The reason why I scratch my head is that, yes, this sounds good on paper. In the board meeting, somebody obviously said, "let's take the best of all those battle systems and make a really good, all inclusive, fast paced way of fighting."

 OK, great. Except it's just not that great. So far, I can't think of any part of this system that says, "You know what, this is the way RPG's should be." It's actually quite the opposite. It's not that the system is particularly jarring, even though it takes some getting used to. It's just that it all seems to be needlessly flashy, complicated, and stupidly simple at the same time....none of which are really good qualities in a battle system. I don't see how it is anything but pretentious. Sure, the reviewers don't have a real problem with the it, but I stopped and asked myself, "If this the best way to have gone about it?"

 My answer was a definitive "no." It doesn't feel fun, and I'm sorry IGN, but you're full of shit when you say that this battle system breaks up the monotony of fighting.

12:13 - 8 hours into the game, and already, the love story has gone above and beyond what VIII managed to do with an entire game. So it's got that going for it. Which is nice.

12:44 - In the Whitewood, and just like the last....ok, just like every part of the game, it's just one long road in gauntlet fashion. I'm beginning to realize that this just isn't an RPG anymore.

1:16 - I'm going to catch hell for saying this later, but I'm not exactly sure how a couple things in this game actually work. I just stomped the shit out of a pretty beefy field enemy with some creative uses of my Paradigms, and it was a very efficient battle. I only healed once, and I exploited the enemies "stagger" point a couple of times. I got 3 out of 5 stars for that battle. The very next battle, I made some late decisions in a fight full of weaker enemies, wasn't efficient, had to heal a lot, and didn't own the fight. I got 5 out of 5 stars for it.

 Second, the whole preemptive strike thing. I jumped a field enemy from behind without alerting him, and I don't get a free shot. I walk face first into an enemy that I alerted, and I get the first shot. It just didn't make sense.

 I'm sure there are proper formulas for this, and I'm sure I'll figure out the trick later...so that's why I anticipate someone telling me that I'm just not doing something right. Also, I'm still walking on the exact same road I was walking on 30 minutes ago (granted, I had a couple 4 minute phone calls).

1:47 - Any minute now, Hope is going to turn to the dark side. He's got that teenage Anakin vibe at the moment....

7:19 - Fell asleep. What did you expect, being up for way over a day? Proceeding....

8:07 - So far, the "sphere grid" has been pretty, but useless. It's a manual level up system that, only so far at least, offers no choice. I turned around and "grinded" for all of four extra fights, and by doing that, I've maxed my grid out. It's a disturbing trend that I have to preface every complaint with, "at least in the beginning...". About the only thing that I really feel as if I am directly manipulating is the equipment upgrade system. So far.

8:18 - No, no, you can't be serious. We stumbled across an area filled with dead bad guys, and one of them dropped a recorder or something that we clearly see in the cutscene. The cutscene ends, and the bodies all disappear! Nevermind that the "area" we found them in looks exactly the same as everything else has for the last hour or so, but come on. At least force us to leave the area or something. Don't just show us this little piece of information then make it vanish.

1:19 - Friends visited and watched, and all of them decided that the game sucks. Saved someone from wasting $60 in the process, as he came to check out the game before heading over to Gamestop.

 Really, at this point into the game, there's no way that I can say that things are going to get better. Over a dozen hours, and this battle system had proven itself to be absolutely horrid. Whoever reviewed this over at IGN needs to be fired immediately. It's not fun, and it it gets better later, well, that's still doesn't make a fun game. Whatever you've heard about this battle system is just plain wrong. This doesn't feel like an RPG, it feels like something you need ritalin to get through alive.

  No one had anything good to say about this game, and this is coming from a pretty diverse group of RPG players. No more updates on this post. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit

Final Fantasy XIII - First impressions

 While I didn't buy the game, I was there to support a friend during the midnight launch. It was, at the very least, in my interests to see the first few hours of this game in action. After all, this is research we're talking about here, though I'm ashamed to say that I learned something the very moment I walked into Gamestop.

 You people need to shower. Seriously. Myself and another friend had just finished working and sweating our balls off during a good 7 hour work shift, did not get a chance to shower, and came in through those doors smelling completely unoffensive. In fact, during a random smell check to make sure that we were not being hypocritical, a girl had said we still smelled damn good. Now, if only that sort of natural upkeep could be taught to the completely disgusting folk who spent an hour marinating the Gamestop in funk, then it may have been a pleasant launch. Instead, I felt completely sorry for the Gamestop employees who were forced to simmer in the stink. It was as if these nasty souls had made sure to only wipe themselves with the stale crusts of McDonald's cheeseburgers. I'm pretty sure that these people were doing something a superstitious athlete would do for the entire week before the Super Bowl, except instead of avoiding the razor, these guys avoided the shower stall. I get pretty defensive when people call gamers useless slobs, but in this case, I think I'm with "them" on this one. You people are disgusting. Learn what soap is.

 OK, now that we have that out of the way, let's get to the game...

 ...whiiiiiich is about as disappointing as I feared. I came into this experience a little biased. Not only did I avoid buying the game, but I wasn't exactly thrilled to hear what design decisions were made. There are some plus marks to be given out, so I'm going to shortly focus on that.

 Final Fantasy XIII looks amazing, without a doubt. At times, it's as if you're actually playing an interactive Advent Children movie. Locales are stunning to look at, and if you have an eye for detail, there's a lot of little things to take in. This whole game is absolutely a reward for anyone owning an HD, though I can say that SD users are going to get a pretty nice upgrade from Final Fantasy XII. Even on the latter, it reeks of presentation. Even the status menu jumps out, as each character has a short, second-long video that acts like a moving baseball card. The frame rate is absolutely smooth, and everything has a strong polish to it.

 Voice acting is done well, and I can see why, considering that I spent the majority of the first hour picking out where I had heard each voice actor from. It's a good list of people to have, for the most part. Yes, things go downhill from here.

 When the voice acting is good, is carries the game, but when it's bad, it's REALLY bad. Half of your party spends the good majority of the first five hours doing nothing but moaning as if someone gave them an unwanted emotional reach-around in the recording booth. It's 10 times worse than Yuna EVER was. Also, every character is pretty annoying to begin with. Lightning can be summed up as the PMS'y version of Squall and Cloud wrapped together, complete with ellipses. Yes, you can hear the "..." and it is nothing short of ludicrous. Somebody dropped the ball here. The only character that isn't totally useless in personality is Snow, and maybe I'm only saying that because he's the least annoying of every party member. He just didn't grate at me the way every other person did.

 The music is entirely forgettable, as well. While it sounds epic and intense at first, there is no point in this game, so far, that had me thinking that a music track was anything more than filler. Asking the friend who now owns the game what track she actually remembered, she gave me a blank look and said, "There were harmonicas, right?" I'm hoping that things get better.

 The combat has finally reached the point where things are a bit too much. The battle system takes some time to get used to, but numbers will fly around so often that hit points have now become secondary to the health bar entirely. You're paying attention to so much else on the screen and the battle as a whole that you really only glance at the length and color of your health bar to figure out just which direction the battle is heading. The first couple hours of the game is also spent doing nothing but hitting X repeatedly, which felt as if I was being treated like a complete idiot. It was that insulting. The battle system expands later, but it doesn't feel right. I'm going to continue on and see how much thought I will need to put into things when the bigger bosses come up, but even watching my friend play, all I could think of was "X, X, X, X, X, X, L1 to turn the healer on, X, X, X, X, L1 to switch back to pummeling mode".

 The story, so far, sucks. We actually spent more time making fun of the game in the first 2 hours, so we missed a lot of exposition, but we didn't seem to miss much. Snow hands out guns to children, then promptly gets everyone he's trying to save killed off. Lightning comes in kicking immense amounts of ass, much like Cloud, then ellipses her way out of the rest of the plot. The party goes around fighting anything it can, and naturally we piss off the wrong bad guy and wind up getting sucked into the real plot of the game, which suddenly turns into saving the world. I don't know exactly how we determined that we were saving the world that quickly into the game, but we did, though I think it has something to do with the "world" being not so much a world as a region. I'm sure we'll get to save the world later, because it's a Final Fantasy game, but it was so by the numbers it made an absolute joke of itself. Fight rebellion, begin love story, start saving world. It literally happens that fast, and I'm not entirely sure if the character have any idea if they knew they were going to save the world to begin with. I'm pretty sure they're rattling that off just because it's in the script. The fact that they don't even know which side their on sort of justifies this.

 Look, I won't lie. I'm sure this is a great game, but it doesn't look like it's going to be a good Final Fantasy game, and it may even just turn out to be a basic eye-candy RPG. The game is almost a parody of itself, and that's sad. I've heard that the linearity opens up in the late game, but at this point, I'm almost not caring. This game has a lot of apologizing to do for itself, but I'm going to give it the chance to redeem itself. I'm going to persist and play it through as far as I can, but at this point, I'm guessing that this game is going to be the nail in the coffin for me when it comes to the series.

 I will give it a chance, though, and my second/lasting impression will come soon. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit

Snatcher

  It's been a while since I've actually sat down and finished a game. I'm not the type of person that usually dives into a game nonstop until it's over, and that's something I've been hoping to fix in the near future. Apart from the whole Night Trap fiasco that went on last week, Persona 4 and Uncharted 2 were the only games I've made the effort to complete recently. I don't know if Modern Warfare 2 really counts, since it really had to be done before taking the experience online, but you can throw that in there, too. So yes, that means that despite getting Bayonetta, Demon's Souls, and Heavy Rain on the release dates, I haven't actually beaten them yet.

 It's a lack of focus for me, really. It's not that I don't enjoy these games, but my mind is so ADD when it comes to games that I'm always trying new things, even if those things are completely outdated. So when a game manages to take me in and demand that I finish it, it's sort of eventful, even if there are better games out there. That's not to say I wasted my time with Snatcher, because there is a really good game in there, even if it isn't really a "game" and even if it isn't the end-all adventure you heard it was.

 It all really starts with Hideo Kojima, who is pretty much allowed to do whatever he wants, no matter how ludicrous his ideas may sound on paper. Snatcher was his second major idea after Metal Gear, and plays out in a way that's completely opposite of those games. It's an interactive visual novel that invites the player to explore the cyberpunk future of Neo Kobe. You play as Gillian Seed, a newly assigned "junker" in the city who has amnesia and is really trying to solve two mysteries at once during the course of the game. You visit locales, dig up information, and try to piece together the clues to stop the Snatcher menace and save Neo Kobe. There's your plot and game style in a nutshell.

 So you may have heard that this game is an unmissable classic that draws heavily on the intrigue of Blade Runner while also borrowing from several other classic sci-fi concept such as the Terminator. Well, there's the first problem, and also its greatest strength. The Blade Runner setting is borrowed from so heavily that it's hard not to scream "RIPOFF!" at the screen at times, but you never actually want to. That universe was so well done that it's difficult for anyone to say that they wouldn't like that world to be worked with more, and that's exactly the feeling that you get with Snatcher. For every blatant theft, and there's a million of them, you are left happy with the knowledge that someone creative put those beginnings to great use in an original story. Really, for all that is ripped off, it's more of an homage that happens to be unique and very capable of standing on its own. Kojima even rips himself off numerous times, sort of acknowledging that he's having a bit of fun throwing together concepts created elsewhere into something different. You are a "runner" that rides a spinner to hunt replicants that look like Terminators with your little robotic partner, Metal Gear. Yet, it still feels fresh.

 Where the problems lie really depends on how much you value Kojima's story ideas. I'm all for Kojima getting free reign, but even in this early work of his I can't help but feel a little repulsed as to how much effort goes into a tremendous game-world only to have it trampled on by an extensive, plot-heavy movie sequence that comes across as if someone were playing the plot-dart game again. I can't spoil it for you, but 90% of this game is truly compelling and immersing, and the 10% that ruins it all happens to be the ending that you take no part in for a good fifteen minutes. The entire explanation for what's going on in every plot-line gets thrown on you like a ton of bricks, and the effect is nothing less than jarring. It's jarring because I expected better. Instead, I got another Bond-villain ranting away about his master plan, which logically makes sense, but is so conveniently bad.

 How does this make the borrowing seem like a problem? Well, the ending alone erased anything subtle about the game's plot, and that's something that made Blade Runner great. Sure, that movie was a little slow paced, but even the deadest of moments carried a lot of weight while not shoving the plot down your throat. In Snatcher, you're given a chance to experience that world, but the ending makes the plot seem way too important and doesn't really give you anything to take with you. It really cheapens the whole experience.

 When I finished the game, I went straight to a couple of fan-sites to see if there was anything tucked away in the corners of the game that I may have missed and needed to find. Come to find out, the game was rushed in its original development cycle, so Kojima and his gang had to throw together an ending at the last minute. Well, that made sense! It seemed like they just said, "F*** it! Let's tie up these plot lines on the fly!" and crammed it all into the game overnight. Even better, I read that the intended ending was included in later ports of the game!

 Of course, my Sega CD version WAS one of those later ports, and Kojima meant to do that all along. Great. Really, if you think that the Metal Gear Solid universe can sometimes be a clusterf*** of nonsense, then you can pretty much guess why I didn't like Snatcher's ending.

 The second complaint that I had, which I'm not entirely sure if I forgive, is that the game is kind of short. Snatcher is split up into 3 acts, the first being your introduction to the main plot and your very first case. This leads to Act 2, where you follow up on the major leads you get from your first investigation and go to take a crack at the bigger picture. The third and final act is the climax, half of which is a long ending cutscene. My final time was somewhere around the 9 and a half hour mark, which is about right if you balance bathroom/food breaks in game and time lost due to reloading. I think my A-button is wonky, which got me killed about 5 times in the closing act. For a talkie Sega CD game, that sounds about right, and since the adventure was pretty linear I can't expect for things to keep going to ages. Yet, with all of the times that I was forced to go on what was clearly the wrong path to follow what was clearly a bad lead, I sort of felt forced into wasting time. Sure, it was all entertaining, but when I got to the end of Act 2 I was expecting to at least go on one more broad investigation before things started to come to a close. So, one part of me commends this game for grabbing me by the throat and making me very interested, but another part of me really wanted more out of it before having to put the controller down.

 OK, enough with the bad. As much as I've just harped on Snatcher, there's plenty to like, as well as many good reasons why it should be considered a classic.

 Until the ending, the story and concept are good. Really good. It may sound like a boring text adventure, but it's anything but. Maybe it was the impressive voice acting or the familiar scenery, but everything you touch screams with personality. There's plenty of information to dig up, and while it's not all pertinent to the investigation, it's certainly worth discovering. The menu system is also dynamic in its own right, as simply going down the list won't help you advance the game in the least. Investigating is a puzzle in its own right, as you have to not only pay attention to the information you are given, but put it to use when determining how to act. Looking around a room may reveal a key item, which your characters understandably become drawn to. Looking around the room again after that will reveal something else that your character never got a chance to see. Likewise, talking to someone once will give you the expected natural response of that NPC. Persisting will get the NPC to think a little harder, revealing a minor clue that can be cued up afterwards for you to ask about. It makes perfect sense and never really gets annoying, and sometimes the game's design actually expects you to get a little stumped and try to backtrack a bit before giving you what you need.

 Also, to the credit of the developers, this system works to divide up the glut of information into sections that feel very natural. If you're done with a section of the game, you are not asked to go back to that section again to uncover a key item or clue. The game teaches you early to be thorough and imaginative so that you know how to exhaust your possibilities in any given area, and it also forces you to solve the puzzles in front of you before even letting you move on sometimes. Act 2, for example, begins by cutting you off from certain items you've collected as well as locales you have discovered so that you're not hopping around aimlessly between areas for no reason. It's a very welcome method that keeps the player interested and focused while never really taking away from the exploration.

 I mentioned that Snatcher has a lot of character, and I'm not putting that lightly. Almost everything that you can investigate in the game has a ton of information attached to it. In Gillian's HQ, there is a computer system that allows you to search up information on characters in the game and also an extensive history on Neo Kobe and the rest of the world. It's easy to waste an hour just reading everything article in the computer to learn about the setting. Snatcher isn't just filled with information, either. It's filled with charm, and a fan of any sci-fi work the game is based on will find themselves laughing out loud to many of the little jokes sprinkled within conversation.

 Snatcher may just belong to a distinct handful of games that can call themselves "future-proof". There is no spectacular technology or innovation going on within it. It's just a really good visual novel, and that's the type of game that can be really hard to kill off. It can always remain interesting and fun regardless of the generation you play it in, and charm is something that just doesn't die off. Finally being able to devote more than an hour to it, I found myself engrossed in this world, addicted to the story and wanting to put off sleep to finish the experience. Sure, I wish there was more to do, but that doesn't stop me from recommending it to anyone else. Just ignore the ending. I see so many 9-10/10 reviews on fansites that I start to wonder how many of them actually beat the game. There's no way that I could give that much credit to a game with such a terrible ending, and it honestly ruined most of my impressions. This is a game that's all about story above all else, even if the little things are extremely entertaining. If story is the focus than the climax of that story shouldn't suck. Sorry, but 8/10 is the best I would ever give it. Extend the game a bit and throw out the ending for something a little more subtle, and you'd have your perfect score.





Spoiler below (to explain to Snatcher fans why I think the ending sucks):




It's way too convenient. Yes, clues are riddled throughout the entire game, but come on. Predictability isn't why I was bitching so much as that Bond-explanation in the end. Did all of the people in the game HAVE to be connected like that? This is why FFVIII's plot sucked. Not everything has to tie together perfectly. Sometimes, a character is just a character. It was a man behind the curtain that came out in the last moment and started saying that everyone was everyone's father while at the same time giving a reasonable, yet waaaaay out there explanation about how he did it all for love or wanting to be a God or some combination of the 10 worst cliches you can possibly get out of a bad villain. Really, I'm not apologizing for anything. The ending was terrible. Get over it. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit

Yet another status update...

 Sure, even I get tired of writing them sometimes, but they have to get thrown in here every now and then to either apologize about being on hiatus or to give some reason as to why I will soon disappear. I don't see a disappearance anytime soon, but I have a lot going on right now. Or, I could have a lot going on right now. I haven't exactly found myself lost in any of these projects, yet.

 I'm attempting to hunt down some REALLY old hardware at the moment, and I may or may not have success in actually finding them. I know that I could get on eBay and find exactly what I'm looking for, but these things are so hideously old that I don't think they deserve money until I find myself truly desperate. I'm hoping that a quick tour of my old attic in May could turn up some of the parts that I need. Basically, I'm trying to get MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, and Windows 95/98 running authentically. I have this feeling that I'm going to run into a zillion-and-one problems trying to install any of these things on a computer that I might have lying around, and believe me, I have a lot. It's just that the lowest hardware specs that I have come from the P4 era, and I need to get older. Don't ask me why, this is just something I have to do. Yes, they were painful years...

 Also, I'm possibly going to do one of two things. A) Start a livestream channel. B) Start a video series. C) Start both in conjunction with each other. The trouble is that these aren't projects I can see myself doing alone, and it's going to involve some dedication, as well as some serious motivation. I have an insane amount of tools at my disposal, except for a really good microphone and an HD camcorder, the latter of which I don't particularly need, but could come in handy. I have zero experience in video editing. Funny how I've always wanted to be a movie director, and yet I can't seem to bring myself to learn any reasonably powerful video software. I'm just not that smart when it comes to the stuff. Reading about everything is certainly interesting, but at a certain point I can't actually learn anything unless I'm physically doing it. I never thought I'd say this, but I think I need a tutor.

 Of course, I'm also planning on creating a studio to facilitate these projects. Green screen room, recording studio, filming studio....just an amateur setup dedicated to working on these projects. As I said, this also means that I'm going to have to learn how to actually use most of it... Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit

It's all Robert Kotick's fault

 I don't think I've had nearly as many infuriating days as I have this past month. Surprisingly, the PS3 brick issue wasn't at the top of the list, since I had a nearby friend with a slim-line available and loads of other systems to distract me. No, I still haven't returned to Night Trap. Yes, I will serve my time and finish it soon enough.

 Mainly, it's been Activision. I'm not entirely sure what Robert Kotick's personal beef is with gamers and money, but whoever put him in charge of Activision should be put to sleep right next to the CEO himself. It's sad. One minute, the company is assailing fans who are literally doing work FOR them (King's Quest), and now I'm hearing that he felt like storming to gates at Infinity Ward and firing people left and right. I'll bet you I can figure out why he did it, too. They probably said something along the lines of what I would tell him.

 "No, Mr. Kodick, you're no good at your job and your ideas suck."

 No, I wasn't there, and I certainly don't know the reasoning behind every little detail, but to start firing the same crew that just made you historically massive profits in the span of ONE GAME is ignoring the creative immunity they are allowed to have. Of course, there's a certain amount of balance involved with immunity. Let the guys do whatever they want for years, and you end up with Peter Molyneux types running around spouting off whenever they get a chance. For whatever mistakes Infinity Ward had made with Modern Warfare 2, the game was undeniably massive in popularity and gave Activision a huge cushion to work with on the year's balance sheet. Don't get me wrong, IW made a LOT of mistakes, but to be honest, they put a lot of work into this game and they should be commended at least a little bit for keeping the mistakes tolerable. Let's face if, if they didn't care about this game, then considering the expectations involved, we would have a revolution on our hands. 

 Before all that, we got Ubisoft's DRM for Assassin's Creed 2, and there is no correct response to this except for the universal "WTF are you thinking?" that came immediately after. I love my games, but there is a line of tolerance that I'm not willing to cross when it comes to choosing a game. Ubisoft leaped across that line, which makes it easy for me to discontinue support for that company until they reverse that insult. That was a middle finger to the fans that pay for their games, and even they should have the common sense to know this. 

 It's been pretty hard to get all this anger into text, to be honest. I'm not one for spouting off without doing my homework, but it's clear that these companies are doing an incredible disservice to their fan bases. Most casual players would hardly notice who's the CEO of whatever company, so sometimes I look at my rants and think, "Ya know, nobody really cares in the end."

 I hope that's not true. I'm probably knee deep in a "wishful thinking" scenario, but I thought we all played games because they were fun and brought people together. They should be entertaining people, and here we are facing massive companies that could care less about the fanbase. It's always been that way. Nintendo used to use some really shady market control practices back in the NES days, and nobody really knew about that until years later, even after the antitrust case was over. People still buy these games, and you can't force people not to. These companies may be crossing a number of lines that they shouldn't be allowed to cross, but we're telling them that it's OK to do it. We have the power to stop the DLC craze before it begins. We have the power to enforce our own fair-use rights on companies. We have the power to put Ubisoft out of business by next month. We can get Kotick fired if we wanted to. If he's reading this, he's laughing, because he knows that it will never happen. Companies know that you will pay them to f*** you over.

 So yeah, it's hard to write a substantial article about these guys. It feels delusional in some strange way. It has to be done, though, even if it is just a messy, thrown together critique about business practices. Hopefully, it'll lose them a same here and there. Who knows.

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