Big, huge, gigantic news! The great Dark_AleX, responsible for all the custom firmwares available for the PSP who claimed to have gone into retirement, is back under the name of M33 releasing a brand new custom firmware for both PSP Fat and Slim! The new firmware is barely out of the gate and is already fully hacked.
Lucky Star on the surface isn’t really about anything per se. It’s the day to day happenings of 4 school girls with somewhat average lives. What makes Lucky Star great though is not the plot on the surface, but rather; all the obscure references to older anime and parts of Japanese pop-culture. If you haven’t watched a good majority of anime considered to be classic, most if the humor will be over your head. There is references all over the place–it’s like the Family Guy of Japan.
Podcast: Download (32.2MB)
Stranglehold is John Woo’s video game sequel to his cult-hit action movie, Hard-Boiled. The game just reeks of epic John Woo project–if this game doesn’t put up a strong fight with Bioshock for game-of-the-year I will be beyond shocked. Every thing about this game is truly deserving of being called next-gen. Inspector Tequila is most certainly the most awesome action game lead in years. He has so much style and personality to him. After a cop goes missing he goes to track him down only to find out he’s already dead. The investigation turns into an all out war between crime syndicates and Tequila is stuck right in the middle with only one thing on his mind; revenge. Somebody has got his old girlfriend captive–he’s going to get her back and nothing is going to stop him.
Podcast: Download (39.4MB)
Gurren Lagann–oh, how I love thee. With gigantic robots powered by ‘fighting spirit” and an enemy force often named as ‘furries’, I can only imagine either the internet or hardcore drugs had some influence in your conception.
Podcast: Download (6.7MB)
Bioshock, in my mind deserves Game Of The Year. Heck, it might even deserve Game Of The Decade! I found very unexpected bliss in this stylized golden-era/futuristic shooter. I’m not usually one to be all that interested in shooters, but thisn’t isn’t your everyday point-and-shoot rampage through alien invaders. This game has a deep and complex story with plot twists and actual storywriting techniques. For some odd reason those things aren’t too common in modern shooters.
Some may have already heard of them, some may not have. Monkey Majik consists of Takuya “tax” Kikuchi (èŠæ± 拓哉 Kikuchi Takuya) on drums, DICK on bass and rather oddly Maynard Plant and Blaise Plant; two Canadian brothers who sing in both Japanese and English and play guitar. It is very unusual for a band with foreign members and foreign languages to attain such a level of popularity in Japan as they have.
Blaise had moved from Ottawa to Aomori in 1998 to work as an English teacher on the JET program and formed a band there to play a one-time gig at an international festival. Two of the members left Japan, so Blaise decided to contact his brother Maynard who had a moderate solo career already in Canada. He decided to move from Ottawa to Sendai where Blaise soon followed. Their first EP called TIRED, only had 1,000 copies available at Tower Records in Sendai. But their first single, “fly”, in 2006 was a great success and was quickly followed by their next single, “Around the World”, which reached number 4 in the Japanese Oricon top 200 singles chart. Pretty impressive for Gaijins, eh?
Anyway, the whole reason I’m making this post is so you can all watch this really awesome video–a collaboration of Monkey Majik and the ever-so-amazing Yoshida Brothers; Change.
Their music can be purchased at Play-Asia.
Podcast: Download (0.0KB)
I was really looking forward to this game to see what my hero, good old Sakaguchi, could do starting from scratch. Sadly, I was put off by the poor presentation and lack of balance to the dungeon crawling. Don’t get me wrong; I enjoy a good dungeon crawl, but when you can see the same rock on your screen for going on 40 minutes and you’ve only been in 3 battles with the only 3 monsters you are going to encounter for the next couple hours it starts to lose it’s charm.
The game lacks variety. But not only that; it lacks appeal to the small bit of variety it actually has. The characters’ personalities are flat and drab–The main character, Shu, reminded me of Naruto with his constant repetition of the phrase, “I won’t give upâ€. The metaphorical intentions of the characters’ personality styles are beaten to death and then beaten a little more just for good measure. It’s not a good sign when you despise every character you’ve encountered before you’ve even made it an hour into the game.
I found that the graphics were very lacking for a next-gen game. Maybe I’m just spoiled by Bioshock–but’s that’s a topic for another post. The maps all felt so barren and empty aside from over 9000 of the same 3 monsters wandering around off in the distance. When you happened to catch the attention of one of these odd creatures, you would swear to your name was an acid trip hallucination, you are hurled into a battle of not-so-epic proportions as you use the exact same move over and over again with every character. You can earn skills from every class, so no need to specialize; every character can have the exact same menu options. It kind of defeats the concept of strategy when you don’t need to wait for your healer to cast Cure on the party. I also was somewhat turned off by the blatant overuse of distance blurring; there was so much distance blurring in that game I felt like they were trying to hide the fact that there actually wasn’t anything at all of interest in the background–apparently it didn’t work.
I tried normal mode expecting a bit of challenge here and there but not nearly to the extent of hard mode…yeah, wrong choice. I took nearly 2 hours to reach the first sign of civilization after being dragged away from my town at the beginning of the game. I thought that was plenty enough training to advance to the next area, but alas; I was wrong. 20 seconds into the first battle past the Sheep Tribe camp I had my precious behind handed to me by some goofy looking lizard that looked like he just broke out of Disneyland. I trained for another hour and managed to get through the next area alive, albeit out of any sort of healing items, to find myself all alone in a big desert on the world map.
I wandered around for a short while and was fortunate enough to find some odd looking drill…vehicle…thing…I thought perhaps I was saved and could take a nice leisurely short cut home, maybe get some more healing items. No, I guess that was too much to ask; I’m now trapped on a runaway drilling watchamacallit–can’t go back because I’m somewhere underground where the escape hatch is no doubt blocked by a boulder and I can’t go forward because, who would’ve guessed, I have a boss fight to do now…a boss fight with a boss that wipes out my entire party in 3 hits…and he gets 3 turns before I do. Yup, odds are ever so much in my favour.
Perhaps I should reload my game and go train some more before getting on this drill of death. But wait–there was a save point I saved at after I boarded this obnoxious vessel…there is not enough facepalm image macros on the entire internet to properly express my realization at this point. But lucky me! I’m smart enough to keep ten different saves in case something unforeseen happens to occur. If you give this game a try be sure to keep several saves to save you the trouble of having to start the entire game over again 4 hours into the game. As much as it is good practice to keep multiple saves it shouldn’t be necessary in a properly play-tested game.
I feel this game is really only suited to children with way too much time on their hands and too shallow an understanding of life to properly enjoy many of the more complex modern RPGs. The game just feels far too simple-minded and mediocre to be at all engaging–I’d almost rather play Beyond The Beyond…almost.
If you really insist, you can order Blue Dragon online at Play-Asia. You could, perhaps get the soundtrack to the game; it’s actually quite good. Too bad it didn’t save the rest of the game from disaster.
Podcast: Download (7.0MB)
Final Fantasy: Spirits Within bombed pretty bad at the box office and I understand why, but it deserved better. Yes, I know that it wasn’t anything like the video games or anything from Square Enix really. However, in it’s own it is a very good movie. I think that if they had not included the Final Fantasy title at all and just called it The Spirits Within it would have been much more successful. It would have been viewed as it’s own stand-alone entity in the Square Enix lineup rather than constantly being compared with all the Final Fantasy video games.
Oh, why is Cid a bad guy? Why is there no Chocobos? Why is there no swords? It’s nothing like Final Fantasy at all. The only similarities are a few passing references in names and such. I’d say it more so resembles Halo; the story has a rather dystopian warzone atmosphere to it but it is very engaging and truly epic.
I found that the dream sequences were a clever way of creating suspense while at the same time building an attachment to the Phantoms. I also liked how the characters spirits were visible and still ‘alive’ in a sense after they were pulled from their bodies. It gave me the impression that they weren’t killed by the spirits, but rather; they joined with the spirits to create a stronger energy. Hironobu Sakaguchi’s flare for bringing out characters’ strengths and weaknesses certainly shined through in this movie; Aki was the hot-headed hero–always getting in trouble but never giving up, while General Hein was the coward–hiding behind his big gun out in space where the “invaders” couldn’t reach him and Gray is the level-headed knight–protecting his princess from the many perils of the world.
If you have avoided seeing this movie because of all the bad press and fanboys whining “ZOMG WHARZ TEH CHOCOBOS?!?!?!” I would very much sugegst you see it for yourself. Atleast give it a rent; if you don’t like it you don’t have to ever watch it again, but atleast you will have formed your own opinion on it. Everyone has different tastes, don’t let someone else tell you what to like and what not to.
Spirits Within likely isn’t available at Play-Asia, as it is somewhat old now–it might be out of print–but you can check if you like.
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