What if we don't own one copy of the games? I'm no young turk, but I never got around to buying the first two games (even the PSX rereleases were ridculously overpriced).
You hit the nail on the head without realizing it: True Fantasy Online is a stab at Final Fantasy, since Factor 5 think Final Fantasy is no longer really fantasy (and arguably, it hasn't been since 7).
It's a delibrate stab at Final Fantasy, hence the title.
Are you joking? I found Viewitful Joe and F-Zero pretty difficult. They both look great, but I found Joe somewhat hard as a platformer (my younger brother beat it during a rental - I myself am no spring chicken as far as video games are concerned, but being more into strategy RPGs these days, my platforming skills have rusted away).
F-Zero is nuts. My kid brother is great at games but can't make it through all of F-Zero's story mode challenges, even considering we've both gotten over the crazy initial difficuly of the game. It came out the same time as Mario Kart DD and its difficulty is quite apparent compared to that game.
I love getting carjacked or being attacked by zombies! Those could never make good game experiences! Just because you don't think an experience would make a good video game doesn't mean it won't; I personally have no interest in getting into a sword fight but Way of the Samurai and Soul Caliber are pretty fun.
Who loves the police and the DA? That could never make a show people would want to watch! Wait, Law and Order has been on for 10 years with 2 spin offs...I must be off base.
Don't knock it til you've tried it. My Japanese isn't as great as it should be, but the games are actually kinda fun.
Did either of you actually think this through before making wild guesses or stupid, racist comments? Why would Sammy buy SEGA to gut it of its key franchises? That's ridiculous. I imagine SEGA will continue to have a lot of freedom to do as it pleases, including making Sonic games, will get some much needed cash from pachinko king Sammy, and Sammy will slowly use SEGA to enter the game market. If I'm not mistaken Sammy develops Guilty Gear X; Sammy probably wants to consolidate pachinko style gaming and video games into one business both conceptually and on site (makes sense, especially in a Japanese context) and SEGA is a well known, quality developer who needs some cash.
Again, I ask you, how would it make sense, considering those facts, that Sammy would gut SEGA?
I've read in a couple of different places that Adams himself wrote Humma Kavula in; in every incarnation of H2G2, Adams changes or adds something and this was supposed to be the movie's new aspect.
I cringed when I heard it first, but since it's from Adams, it might not be too bad.
Who modded this interesting? Unlss this guy is completely talking out of his ass, he means the PSX, not the PS3. The PSX is a home entertainment version of the PS2 with a lot of additional bells and whistles (TV recording onto a hard disk, etc). At its gameplaying core, the PSX is nothing but a PS2.
The PS3 hasn't even been fully spec'd yet, let alone in production. Although it will likely be similar in architecture to the PS2, it is NOT the PS2 nor is it the PSX.
Also, if this guy is actually in Japan, how on earth does he believe Sony is the end all, be all of entertainment? They're still selling (and buying!) Dreamcast games over there, let alone the Gamecube, which is doing well in its homeland. My experience has been there has always been plenty of room for the dominant company and other secondary companies (PS2/Gamecube, Gameboy/Wonderswan.
All and all, I call shennigans. As for the mods, don't mod stuff up unless you know what's being discussed.
Actually, there's a lot of pixelation on the PS2, as it's really showing its age on recent games.
In anycase, based on the demo, FM4 is pretty disappointing. Some of the cityscapes look okay, but the mechs themselves are pixelatetd and muddy loooking. As for battling, its not as frenzied and fun as, say, Disgaea, but there's not a lot of strategy either, so it kind of falls apart on both ends (again, this is based off the demo).
Square's trademark production quality is there; the game has full voice acting for example - but like Kingdom Hearts and other titles, it does have some graphical problems. I really wanted to like FM4, and I might end up picking it up when it gets cheap or I find a copy used, but I don't think it's worth full priice.
I did forget it:) I played some of both FM1 and FM3 and I igot the demo for FM4, but I'm a bit underwhelmed. With Pikmin 2 coming out, FM4 is defintely backburner:D
My problem wiith Disgaea was that I bought a copy on Ebgames.com and my brother bought one from EB. The dot com wouldn't take their game back, but EB would, thankfully. In anycase, I had no problem buying Disgaea, but I got it the day it came out too.
In a gaming world filled with (at least Stateside) FPSes, RTSes, and the occasional big name title, Tactical RPGs (RPGs that focus almost solely on the battle aspect of the game, usually on an isometric board - the best known TRPG in the U.S. is probably Final Fantasy Tactics/FFT Advance) are a godsend for more cerebral players. They are something like deliberately paced RTSes (in which you take turns and are not, thus, real time). Instead of twitch action, these games focus more on thinking and strategy (hence the genres other name, strategy RPGs). The player moves a small army of RPG characters across the board, defeating enemies while gaining levels for their characters. The gameplay owes a lot to games like Nethack and D&D, obviously, though they are, more or less, directly descended from Japanese RPGs.
Nippon Ichi has made a niche for themselves with these games (first in Japan and now here) because of some great artwork (Disgaea and Phantom Brave are adorable!) and intriguing anime style plots. Instead of treating the genre as sacred, they've certainly pulled its boundaries, with somewhat silly, but imaginative and fun additions (like being able to throw other characters in Disgaea). More power to them - I hope to see more of their stuff stateside.
TRPGs are some of the most popular games in Japan, but few of them come over stateside. The original Final Fantasy Tactic's successes started a small trickle and Disgaea's popularity seems to be helping a small boon. Maybe we'll see things like Robot Wars over here (which combines the mechs from anime like Gundam, Big O, Evangalion, Mazinger Z, and other, in a semi original TRPG story), but probably not.
If you're all about the FPSes and RTSes, maybe giving one of these games a try will open your eyes to some new gaming experiences.
You assume both that I want a KOTOR style game (which I don't - I just hoped Third Age would be as surprisingly good as KOTOR) and that I have some interesting in PC RPGs (again a no - I have little interest in D&D rulesets).
I much prefer the older Final Fantasy to PC RPGs (VI all around, VII for its junction system). Even more complicated are console Tactical RPGs, which are my most preferred style of game - I promise Disgaea is every bit as complex as KOTOR. I might agree with you that if you don't play Japanese RPGs, than yes, it seems console RPGs are becoming overly simplistic (FFX, for example), but games like Disgaea, Phantom Brave, and other RPGs are "keeping it real" on the console side of things.
Seriously, there are plenty of ways for these guys to screw up, but I'm hoping this game will be as (surprisingly) good as Knights of the Old Republic was. I'm seriously excited and have to figure out way to stretch my budget to include this beauty. A Final Fantasy style LOTR game with character creation...that's the sound of me wetting myself. I know I sound giddy, but this is...huge.
Perhaps this game can reestablish my faith in American gaming?
I doubt it. If you ever hear the tapes of Tolkien reading from LOTR, he relishes playing Golem, he has fun with the voice.
Plus as someone who writes, I'm sure Tolkien understands that the bad guys are necessary to a story. They have to be presented.
Plus, most of Tolkien's baddies started off good or neutral. The whole theme of LOTR is about choice - what makes a person a Gandalf or a Saruman? A Golem or a Bilbo? An Aragorn or Sauron? The game furthers that theme, it seems, by giving you as the player the same choice.
I thought April Fool's was over? Spelling mistakes aside (mascot?), I think this is a really bad move for OO. Isn't the goal of OO to replace Microsoft Office? From a corporate standpoint, as cute as it is, a crazy gull is not what people want. There was reluctance to even use Tux back in the day, if I remember correctly, who is several shades less...crazy than the gull.
What message does this send? Use OO and you'll go nuts (or have a fish purse?). I don't think this was well thought out.
I can't speak for you, but X-wing/TIE Fighter/Alliance were some of the best PC games I've ever played, instead of crappy RTSes and stuff, I'd much rather see additions to that series of games. LucasArts has pretty much crapped up any game with the Star Wars licence since Alliance came out several years ago. I'd much rather see those resources poured into a great flight sim like X-Wing again.
In contrast, a lot of people bemoan and curse Yamauchi, head honcho of Nintendo until a few years ago (indeed, he was known as Mother Brain), but his hamfistedness kept stuff organized and working and was a major aspect of Nintendo's success.
Visual Boy Advance can play eReader saves - the eReader stuff is saved in the SRAM, I believe, and a ROM image of the e-Reader is loaded into the emulator. In short, the eReader cards act as a save file for the eReader rom.
As brash as the parent was, I have to agree. I've read some stuff by Kent in Next Generation magazine (before it sucked - so the early to mid 90s) and I liked it, but he's completely off base here.
The Japanese game industry is big enough to sustain both Nintendo (with a console and handheld) and Sony (even in the states, I have a Gameboy SP, PS2, and Gamecube) and is wide enough *not* to come crashing down if one machine fails in the marketplace or a few games suck. Even if most games are crap there are enough consumers and enough good developers to sustain the industry - completely unlike the American crash in the 80s.
Kojima is nuts; he and the Resident Evil director, who's name I forget, are certainly young turks who shoot their mouths off. If I'm not entirely mistaken both have mde comments saying that they were better than Yuji Naka and/or Shigeru Miyamoto.
The fact is the Japanese don't like American games. Even the South Koreans, who eat, sleep, and breath StarCraft are different (I suspect that, outside a few MMO games, it's because of their lack of an game development industry). The Japanese like Japanese games (as I've mentioned elsewhere on Slashdot, it's a sentiment I share) and as long as Japanese developers keep making those games, Japanese consumers will buy them.
"Quality American games" is rather ridiculious. I'm not Joe American Sixpack, but out of all the games I'm playing right now, I only have 4 Western developed games; Metroid Prime, and the X-Wing/TIE Fighter/Alliance series for the PC. Add to that Total War: Shogun and that rounds out my Western game experience. Instead, I bought Disgea last year, and am planning on buying Nippon Ichi's very Japanese La Pucelle and Phantom Brave titles this summer. I don't like American games for the most part, nor do most Japanese. I remember a Famitsu (the Japanese gaming bible) interview with some Japanese teenage guys when Metal Gear 2 was coming out - their quote was that it looked "American" and they'd probably eat it up stateside.
Finally, gaming is ingrained in Japanese culture. Even my gf, who doesn't like gaming owned machines up to the Nintendo 65 and still plays Gameboy Advance regularly. The American gaming industry has a far better chance of collapsing in on itself (especially if the Xbox becomes the defacto gaming standard here - what's with you/. people? You bash Microsoft on everything from Office to Windows but you guys act like the Xbox is the frickin' second coming) than the Japanese.
Actually, my girlfriend has worked on translating U.S. PC games to Japanese (Deus Ex and Northland). Nearly everything we get comes out there, eventually. It's not lack of quality per se, but Japanese don't like playing those type of games (a sentiment I share).
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Just to dispute your points:
1. Microsoft also now owns Rare which is happily developing for the GBA.
2. I'm the Xbox's exact demographic (well, right age and gender). I have a GBA SP, a PS2, and a Gamecube. I don't have an Xbox.
3. You could play early FPSes with the arrow keys, if I'm not entirely mistaken.
What if we don't own one copy of the games? I'm no young turk, but I never got around to buying the first two games (even the PSX rereleases were ridculously overpriced).
You hit the nail on the head without realizing it: True Fantasy Online is a stab at Final Fantasy, since Factor 5 think Final Fantasy is no longer really fantasy (and arguably, it hasn't been since 7).
It's a delibrate stab at Final Fantasy, hence the title.
Nope, in the states unfortunately.
Are you joking? I found Viewitful Joe and F-Zero pretty difficult. They both look great, but I found Joe somewhat hard as a platformer (my younger brother beat it during a rental - I myself am no spring chicken as far as video games are concerned, but being more into strategy RPGs these days, my platforming skills have rusted away).
F-Zero is nuts. My kid brother is great at games but can't make it through all of F-Zero's story mode challenges, even considering we've both gotten over the crazy initial difficuly of the game. It came out the same time as Mario Kart DD and its difficulty is quite apparent compared to that game.
Otoko in this context is not men but manhood. Which isn't your fault, there's no context to a sig.
It's actually the title of a very long running Japanese movie series about the hardships of being a man.
I love getting carjacked or being attacked by zombies! Those could never make good game experiences! Just because you don't think an experience would make a good video game doesn't mean it won't; I personally have no interest in getting into a sword fight but Way of the Samurai and Soul Caliber are pretty fun.
Who loves the police and the DA? That could never make a show people would want to watch! Wait, Law and Order has been on for 10 years with 2 spin offs...I must be off base.
Don't knock it til you've tried it. My Japanese isn't as great as it should be, but the games are actually kinda fun.
It's WinNY (based off WinMX), not Winny.
Now apologize for the tax hike.
Did either of you actually think this through before making wild guesses or stupid, racist comments? Why would Sammy buy SEGA to gut it of its key franchises? That's ridiculous. I imagine SEGA will continue to have a lot of freedom to do as it pleases, including making Sonic games, will get some much needed cash from pachinko king Sammy, and Sammy will slowly use SEGA to enter the game market. If I'm not mistaken Sammy develops Guilty Gear X; Sammy probably wants to consolidate pachinko style gaming and video games into one business both conceptually and on site (makes sense, especially in a Japanese context) and SEGA is a well known, quality developer who needs some cash.
Again, I ask you, how would it make sense, considering those facts, that Sammy would gut SEGA?
I've read in a couple of different places that Adams himself wrote Humma Kavula in; in every incarnation of H2G2, Adams changes or adds something and this was supposed to be the movie's new aspect.
I cringed when I heard it first, but since it's from Adams, it might not be too bad.
Who modded this interesting? Unlss this guy is completely talking out of his ass, he means the PSX, not the PS3. The PSX is a home entertainment version of the PS2 with a lot of additional bells and whistles (TV recording onto a hard disk, etc). At its gameplaying core, the PSX is nothing but a PS2.
The PS3 hasn't even been fully spec'd yet, let alone in production. Although it will likely be similar in architecture to the PS2, it is NOT the PS2 nor is it the PSX.
Also, if this guy is actually in Japan, how on earth does he believe Sony is the end all, be all of entertainment? They're still selling (and buying!) Dreamcast games over there, let alone the Gamecube, which is doing well in its homeland. My experience has been there has always been plenty of room for the dominant company and other secondary companies (PS2/Gamecube, Gameboy/Wonderswan.
All and all, I call shennigans. As for the mods, don't mod stuff up unless you know what's being discussed.
Actually, there's a lot of pixelation on the PS2, as it's really showing its age on recent games.
In anycase, based on the demo, FM4 is pretty disappointing. Some of the cityscapes look okay, but the mechs themselves are pixelatetd and muddy loooking. As for battling, its not as frenzied and fun as, say, Disgaea, but there's not a lot of strategy either, so it kind of falls apart on both ends (again, this is based off the demo).
Square's trademark production quality is there; the game has full voice acting for example - but like Kingdom Hearts and other titles, it does have some graphical problems. I really wanted to like FM4, and I might end up picking it up when it gets cheap or I find a copy used, but I don't think it's worth full priice.
I did forget it :) I played some of both FM1 and FM3 and I igot the demo for FM4, but I'm a bit underwhelmed. With Pikmin 2 coming out, FM4 is defintely backburner :D
My problem wiith Disgaea was that I bought a copy on Ebgames.com and my brother bought one from EB. The dot com wouldn't take their game back, but EB would, thankfully. In anycase, I had no problem buying Disgaea, but I got it the day it came out too.
In a gaming world filled with (at least Stateside) FPSes, RTSes, and the occasional big name title, Tactical RPGs (RPGs that focus almost solely on the battle aspect of the game, usually on an isometric board - the best known TRPG in the U.S. is probably Final Fantasy Tactics /FFT Advance) are a godsend for more cerebral players. They are something like deliberately paced RTSes (in which you take turns and are not, thus, real time). Instead of twitch action, these games focus more on thinking and strategy (hence the genres other name, strategy RPGs). The player moves a small army of RPG characters across the board, defeating enemies while gaining levels for their characters. The gameplay owes a lot to games like Nethack and D&D, obviously, though they are, more or less, directly descended from Japanese RPGs.
Nippon Ichi has made a niche for themselves with these games (first in Japan and now here) because of some great artwork (Disgaea and Phantom Brave are adorable!) and intriguing anime style plots. Instead of treating the genre as sacred, they've certainly pulled its boundaries, with somewhat silly, but imaginative and fun additions (like being able to throw other characters in Disgaea). More power to them - I hope to see more of their stuff stateside.
TRPGs are some of the most popular games in Japan, but few of them come over stateside. The original Final Fantasy Tactic's successes started a small trickle and Disgaea's popularity seems to be helping a small boon. Maybe we'll see things like Robot Wars over here (which combines the mechs from anime like Gundam, Big O, Evangalion, Mazinger Z, and other, in a semi original TRPG story), but probably not.
If you're all about the FPSes and RTSes, maybe giving one of these games a try will open your eyes to some new gaming experiences.
You assume both that I want a KOTOR style game (which I don't - I just hoped Third Age would be as surprisingly good as KOTOR) and that I have some interesting in PC RPGs (again a no - I have little interest in D&D rulesets).
I much prefer the older Final Fantasy to PC RPGs (VI all around, VII for its junction system). Even more complicated are console Tactical RPGs, which are my most preferred style of game - I promise Disgaea is every bit as complex as KOTOR. I might agree with you that if you don't play Japanese RPGs, than yes, it seems console RPGs are becoming overly simplistic (FFX, for example), but games like Disgaea, Phantom Brave, and other RPGs are "keeping it real" on the console side of things.
Oh. God. Yes.
Seriously, there are plenty of ways for these guys to screw up, but I'm hoping this game will be as (surprisingly) good as Knights of the Old Republic was. I'm seriously excited and have to figure out way to stretch my budget to include this beauty. A Final Fantasy style LOTR game with character creation...that's the sound of me wetting myself. I know I sound giddy, but this is...huge.
Perhaps this game can reestablish my faith in American gaming?
I doubt it. If you ever hear the tapes of Tolkien reading from LOTR, he relishes playing Golem, he has fun with the voice.
Plus as someone who writes, I'm sure Tolkien understands that the bad guys are necessary to a story. They have to be presented.
Plus, most of Tolkien's baddies started off good or neutral. The whole theme of LOTR is about choice - what makes a person a Gandalf or a Saruman? A Golem or a Bilbo? An Aragorn or Sauron? The game furthers that theme, it seems, by giving you as the player the same choice.
I thought April Fool's was over? Spelling mistakes aside (mascot?), I think this is a really bad move for OO. Isn't the goal of OO to replace Microsoft Office? From a corporate standpoint, as cute as it is, a crazy gull is not what people want. There was reluctance to even use Tux back in the day, if I remember correctly, who is several shades less...crazy than the gull.
What message does this send? Use OO and you'll go nuts (or have a fish purse?). I don't think this was well thought out.
I can't speak for you, but X-wing/TIE Fighter/Alliance were some of the best PC games I've ever played, instead of crappy RTSes and stuff, I'd much rather see additions to that series of games. LucasArts has pretty much crapped up any game with the Star Wars licence since Alliance came out several years ago. I'd much rather see those resources poured into a great flight sim like X-Wing again.
In contrast, a lot of people bemoan and curse Yamauchi, head honcho of Nintendo until a few years ago (indeed, he was known as Mother Brain), but his hamfistedness kept stuff organized and working and was a major aspect of Nintendo's success.
Visual Boy Advance can play eReader saves - the eReader stuff is saved in the SRAM, I believe, and a ROM image of the e-Reader is loaded into the emulator. In short, the eReader cards act as a save file for the eReader rom.
As brash as the parent was, I have to agree. I've read some stuff by Kent in Next Generation magazine (before it sucked - so the early to mid 90s) and I liked it, but he's completely off base here.
/. people? You bash Microsoft on everything from Office to Windows but you guys act like the Xbox is the frickin' second coming) than the Japanese.
The Japanese game industry is big enough to sustain both Nintendo (with a console and handheld) and Sony (even in the states, I have a Gameboy SP, PS2, and Gamecube) and is wide enough *not* to come crashing down if one machine fails in the marketplace or a few games suck. Even if most games are crap there are enough consumers and enough good developers to sustain the industry - completely unlike the American crash in the 80s.
Kojima is nuts; he and the Resident Evil director, who's name I forget, are certainly young turks who shoot their mouths off. If I'm not entirely mistaken both have mde comments saying that they were better than Yuji Naka and/or Shigeru Miyamoto.
The fact is the Japanese don't like American games. Even the South Koreans, who eat, sleep, and breath StarCraft are different (I suspect that, outside a few MMO games, it's because of their lack of an game development industry). The Japanese like Japanese games (as I've mentioned elsewhere on Slashdot, it's a sentiment I share) and as long as Japanese developers keep making those games, Japanese consumers will buy them.
"Quality American games" is rather ridiculious. I'm not Joe American Sixpack, but out of all the games I'm playing right now, I only have 4 Western developed games; Metroid Prime, and the X-Wing/TIE Fighter/Alliance series for the PC. Add to that Total War: Shogun and that rounds out my Western game experience. Instead, I bought Disgea last year, and am planning on buying Nippon Ichi's very Japanese La Pucelle and Phantom Brave titles this summer. I don't like American games for the most part, nor do most Japanese. I remember a Famitsu (the Japanese gaming bible) interview with some Japanese teenage guys when Metal Gear 2 was coming out - their quote was that it looked "American" and they'd probably eat it up stateside.
Finally, gaming is ingrained in Japanese culture. Even my gf, who doesn't like gaming owned machines up to the Nintendo 65 and still plays Gameboy Advance regularly. The American gaming industry has a far better chance of collapsing in on itself (especially if the Xbox becomes the defacto gaming standard here - what's with you
Actually, my girlfriend has worked on translating U.S. PC games to Japanese (Deus Ex and Northland). Nearly everything we get comes out there, eventually. It's not lack of quality per se, but Japanese don't like playing those type of games (a sentiment I share).