BitSnark

Square-Enix have today confirmed that the long awaited Uk PSP debut for the Kingdom Hearts series, will happen on Sepetmeber 10th.

Acting as a prequel to the first PS2 title, the title boasts up to six player support for various multiplayer modes and has some of the finest graphics seen on the platform.

Get your Mickey on 🙂

Hollywood hasn’t been particularly kind to Street Fighter. Their 1994 effort with Jean Claude van Damme was a laughable joke. Their 2008 effort, The Legend Of Chun Li, was just a joke.

Luckily there are talented folks out there who feel the same frustration as we do and so now we have Street Fighter Legacy, a short fan-made film that does more justice to the franchise in its three and a half minute running time than Hollywood managed over a combined three hour running time.

Directed and co-written by Joey Ansah, who may recognise as martial arts baddie ‘Desh’ from The Bourne Ultimatum Movie, this short film looks and sounds the part as Ryu and Ken duke it out in an extremely well-choreographed battle. Everything from the costumes, casting (Ken is spookily close to his pixelated counterpart) and moves is a labour of love and looks extremely authentic.

Someone give this guy more money to make more of this!

Links are below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2ZXSzaUIBQ (Short film)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_iwoR6WOw8 (Costume design)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9z8kLc99fVU (Hair and make up)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsFLVUHrJdo (Designing the fights)

Oh and as a little bit of trivia, the chap who plays Ryu also plays Jin Kazama in the forthcoming Tekken live action movie.

Loves his martial art videogame adaptations doesn’t he? 🙂

Final Fantasy XIII (PS3) Review

Thinking about who Square-Enix were trying to cater for with this newest instalment in their evergreen Final Fantasy franchise makes my head hurt. This isn’t our game. It isn’t. By ‘our’, I mean us. Folks like you and me who play (J)RPG’s because we like our freedom to do what we want in somebody else’s fantastical guise; to develop those alter-egos as we see fit, to explore and do what we want, when we want. Coming on the heels of the most divisive and non-casual friendly Final Fantasy title ever, it seems as if Square-Enix trying to make up for a game that was so unapologetically deep with a title that is so simplified, linear and restrictive that it appears to lose a lot of what we loved about Final Fantasy in the first place.

Their reasoning for the lack of hub towns, world map and the need for a linear approach was down to budgetary concerns; it would have simply been too costly and took too much time to render these with same sort of fidelity as seen in the final product. While such claims may possess questionable merit, especially off of the back of information pointing to the fact that it’s sequel, Final Fantasy Versus XIII has reinstated a non-linear approach and a world map, we’re here to look at the final product and by all accounts it isn’t the unbridled travesty that most would have you believe.

In stark contrast to previous Final Fantasy titles, Final Fantasy XIII’s pacing has perhaps more in common with the similarly cinematic Metal Gear Solid 4 with the battle, cut-scene, battle, cut-scene rhythm feeling a little tired ten hours or so in. The game does switches gears though at around the Chapter Eleven mark, where the relentless assault of cut-scenes give way to a medium sized sandbox hub which can be explored to take on various side-missions and high level encounters.

The open world sections themselves evoke a Monster Hunter feel as you tackle progressively stronger monsters in the hope of achieving higher item giving grades, yet as one would imagine with a game so cautious and conservative in its design, it does little else to merit a serious comparison to Capcom’s open world epic franchise.

With the tremendous art and staggering visuals (on PS3 at least) comes the feeling that you are being led by the hand through a beautiful prison, one with walls that you cannot always see but one that like any other, cruelly hints and prods at what other great beauty lies outside. Constantly held by the hand and shoved down a particular route, it truly feels like there is no sense of freedom here and antiquated invisible walls do little to assuage the player. In almost every way this appears to be an ‘RPG-lite’ title and is the polar opposite of the hardcore MMO-esque trappings that were seen in the series PS2 swansong outing, Final Fantasy XII.

Certainly, if we’re looking at it from an aesthetical perspective, Final Fantasy XIII shines brighter than most this console generation. Characters faces are highly emotive and the level of detail is very impressive with all manner of skin aspects such as freckles, veins and fine muscular detail all vibrantly illustrated and apparent.

The worlds themselves are a heady mixture of lush sci-fi cityscapes and staggering naturalistic landscape vistas, with their jaw-dropping visuals and dramatic flair matched only be the disappointment that you can go only where you’re told to. Whichever way you cut it, Final Fantasy XIII is one hugely beautiful looking game and is all the more impressive for being able to shift such staggering detail around the screen at a retina pleasing smooth 30 Frames Per Second.

On a related note, Square-Enix’s reliably stellar CG team again bring the goods with pre-rendered cut scenes that are as beautiful as they are frantic, fully leveraging all of the definition, colour and smoothness of contemporary HD displays and technology. The fruits of their labour really are a sight to behold here.

Our story is concerned with Lightning, a grim-faced female soldier tasked with stopping the ‘Purge’, a wide sweeping measure by the overlords of her world, Cocoon, to eliminate anybody who may have been in contact with the l’cie; human puppets of a supreme intelligence known as the Fal’cie.

The Fal’cie, and by proxy their l’cie human thrall are apparently hell bent on destroying Cocoon, hence the paranoia of the Cocoon folk to get rid of any l’cie and their potential collaborators wherever they may be. As one might guess, nothing is really as it seems and there are twists and turns throughout, but the story nonetheless remains largely forgettable fare. The characters, for better or worse are more memorable than the plotlines that they partake in.

The main protagonist, Lightning, cuts a serious po-faced, cynically minded figure. In many ways she is evocative of Cloud from FFVII, but with a very dry, sardonic edge to her humour. Perhaps more entertaining in the first half of the game than the second, Lightning nevertheless is a compelling personality. Next up is the easy going Sazh, a former pilot with an afro that a chocobo chick has made into its mobile nest. Often a source of comic relief and an always entertaining counterpoint to Lightning’s acerbic demeanour, Sazh is easily my favourite character. Transcending his goofy sidekick comic roots early on, Sazh has a real depth of personality to him and is perhaps the most likeable, and human, of all the characters in FFXIII.

From here on however, the quality of characters take a groan inducing dip into bog standard JRPG archetypes with the emo pretty boy Hope being nothing less than outright annoying with his incessant whining and dunderheaded optimism. In the later stages of the game, he does become marginally more tolerable, by which point you have no emotional investment in such a miserable cardboard cut-out of a character anyway.

The over sexualised Vanille almost constantly annoys, with her relentlessly cheerful conversations horribly mired in wince inducing sugary delivery. Additionally, when she is not speaking she is making high pitch groans and making silly noises that make you want to stab a rusty spoon in your ear.

And Snow… well, let’s just say that if I was Lightning I would be dumping him on his rear end at every opportunity too. His consistent need to be the ‘hero’ and the centrepiece of every scene, makes him come across as a big dumb jock that needs to be reigned the heck in. Finally, the forceful Fang is perhaps the best of the rest, with a headstrong personality and a similar indomitable will to Lightning. The main problem with her however, is the scenario writers often make her motives confusing, with her changing sides and motives so many times during the course of the game, that you just become bewildered at whose side she is on and what her motivations actually are.

Plot and characters aside, the meat of the game is the rhythm of fight, cut-scene, fight, cut-scene and while the audio-visual presentation is superb, it falls to the combat and character development mechanics to truly satisfy; which for the most part it does.

The Crystarium is the hub of character advancement in Final Fantasy XIII and in many ways is not unlike the character dress sphere grid from Square-Enix’s earlier Final Fantasy franchise effort, Final Fantasy X-2. The multi-layered circular hub, besides looking very pretty, allows characters to develop in the roles available to them with Crystarium Points which are earned from battle. The more ‘CP’ you have accumulated, the further around your Crystarium ring you can go, unlocking spheres on the way that might provide extra magic, strength or HP to each party member. Using CP on the Crystarium, also allows you to unlock abilities for your role such as a higher level spell for Ravagers , a more devastating physical attack for Commandos or extra accessory slots for additional equipment.

While it possesses a nice addictive hook to upgrade your characters as much as you can, the stat and ability distribution for the Crystarium is imperfect.

One instance of this is the Medic role has the ‘Stopaga’ ability in their Crystarium, an ability typically associated with the debuff happy Saboteur role; so why not just have an additional relevant medic ability instead of an ability that would more suited to the correct role? Another example is there are also a silly amount of strength spheres in the magic user Crystariums that are just a waste of CP as users of those roles would logically speaking, never be involved in physical combat. It’s like Harry Potter going to Hogwarts and being told to hit the weights every day; it just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Levelling up any of the non-starting roles when they become available, is largely a pointless endeavour unless you are planning to return to the game to finish everything off, since the stat increases are extremely small and the skills that you unlock cost a great deal of Crystarium points that would be better used on one of the primary roles.

The design theme of restrictiveness and linearity permeates here also, as even though your Crystarium for all roles may be filled out, you cannot unlock the next Crystarium level until you reach specific points in the story. Experienced RPG players will rightfully bulk at this, as this is yet again another layer of traditional freedom that has been stripped away; no longer allowing players to develop their characters on their own terms. Additionally, some characters appear to be pre-made for higher performance in some roles too, with Vanille specifically making the best use out of medic role due to her naturally higher magic stats and magic based attuned gear, and Fang being a more suitable Commando candidate due to her natural higher strength and larger strength Crystarium spheres.

The Crystarium system in turn feeds into the combat system, which on a despairing initial impression, appears to be almost completely automated, taking away any kind of meaningful interaction from the player outside of just mashing the same button over and over to win. You would be forgiven for thinking that this would be the case throughout, but after a staggered five hour or so tutorial, you begin to appreciate the hidden depths of this initially over-simplified seeming system.

Defeating enemies largely revolves around the new Stagger system. The stagger system is based on the principle that the more magical damage you do to an enemy, the closer you are to getting them to stagger. Once they are in a staggered state, they will take a great deal more damage and thusly, will be vanquished quicker too. The trick with the system however, is that not only do some enemies take far longer to stagger than others, but to maintain a successful staggered state, a decent amount of physical based damage needs to be dealt out by at least one member of your group. Should this not be done, the enemy will no longer be staggered and will revert back to their normal state, requiring you to force them to their stagger threshold once more if you want all that extra damage goodness.

Seemingly taking further strides in the direction of blanket accessibility, the combat system no longer permits individual commands to be assigned to individual party members. Instead you only have control of the party leader and can defer commands to ‘auto’, with the CPU deciding which abilities are best to use, or you may manually queue up the commands yourself. The auto command is a blessing and a curse, but is perhaps more of the latter than the former as it essentially forms the catalyst for the ‘button bashing’ that you can do to plough through the game.

Additional special abilities are also available for use in combat and can be spent using a variable amount of renewable Technical Points or ‘TP’, with the cost varying depending on the potency of the ability. Unfortunately a great deal of abilities on offer are without use and you’ll generally find that the only thing that you use TP for is for the ‘Renew’ ability which resurrects any dead party members and heals the party, or possibly for the ‘Summon’ ability which, like previous titles in the series, summons a big beastie to fight for you.
Ah yes, the summons.

A hallmark of the Final Fantasy series, they have been terribly mishandled here, both in appearance and execution. The summons, or ‘eidolons’ as they are known here, are nothing more than pretty set pieces, whose low damage and high TP cost restricts the manner in which they can be used meaningfully in battle. They truly are a far cry from the epic, devastating boss crushing GF summons seen in the earlier PS1 instalments of the franchise. The added silliness of our heroes using the Eidolons are bikes, cars, and all other manner of transformable vehicles just comes across as laughable and pointlessly goofy with the vehicle based attacks looking stunted, ineffective and dealing little damage.

Another piece of the combat puzzle are Paradigms. Paradigms are party-wide strategies which can be pre-configured before battle to allow a number of different roles to work in synergy. For example, you could have a mixture of physical damage roles(Commandos) and magical damage roles (Ravagers) to facilitate the quick takedown of an enemy after a successful stagger, but you may also want a tank to soak damage (Sentinel) and a healer to resurrect or heal folks too (Medic).

Certainly, assuming you have the right Paradigms in place at the right time (something that I will touch on in a bit), you can pretty much defer everything to the CPU and win most battles, with only the trickiest side-mission bosses requiring your own manual tweaking to defeat.

The key to success in battles largely hinges on using the right paradigm in the right circumstances, using a Triple Ravager setup might be great for getting the bad guys to the stagger for example, but when the damage starts pouring in you’ll need to switch to a paradigm that at the very least has a medic role encompassed within it.

It’s largely a satisfying system and by setting these roles to specific characters beforehand, you can initiate a ‘Paradigm Shift’ mid-fight to adapt to your enemy. Indeed, your mastery of the paradigm system and how quickly you can down your foes results in a star rating being assigned post-combat, which potentially can reward the party with better loot so the scope for mastery is both plentiful and worthwhile.

That said, the mastery of the combat system is mostly satisfying but failure in combat is too easily forgiven with the fear of dying being heavily diluted by the over-compensating restart and checkpoint system. More specifically, the save points in question seem to be no more than five minutes away from each other and death to an enemy merely puts your party in front of the enemy before the fight began.

Outside of the combat though, there is very little else to do in Final Fantasy XIII. Gone are the free-roaming cities, additional distractions and world maps of previous FF titles, instead they are replaced by all-in-one save points that have all of the shops in one menu and a game world that has a degree of linearity that would sadly entirely exclude the requirement for a world map in the first place.

There is at least some cause for replayability once the game has been completed, primarily a battle with a post-game boss and the need to get each characters crystariums and ultimate weapons maxed out, but aside from this FFXIII is not a terribly compelling proposition for revisiting.

The RPG genre is perhaps the last bastion of non-casual gaming. It is a genre that demands many hours from its players, emotional involvement in its narrative and characters and the twenty-two year strong Final Fantasy franchise has demonstrated this as much as any other.

Yet with Final Fantasy XIII, Square-Enix have taken a beautiful RPG and brutally dumbed it down in every sense of the word. The end result is a game that while enjoyable in short doses as its linear mandate allows, is an alien proposition to the RPG faithful that has placed the franchise on the pedestal that it currently enjoys.

Oh, and that casual RPG market? Don’t count on it.

Overall Score: 6.2

In what appears to be standard these days for big games releases, Bethesda today have announced the details of their forthcoming Fallout: Vegas collectors edition.

The 360, PS3 and PC editions will all boast the same content which includes:

– Seven “Lucky 7” poker chips, which in the game represent the major casinos found in the wasteland

– A special “Lucky 38” platinum chip will also be included which seemingly represents an in-game item of sorts.

– A custom deck of New Vegas cards, with its own characters.

– A hardcover graphic novel from Dark Horse comics

– A documentary DVD with making-of features.

Pete Hines, Marketing VP at Bethesda had this to say regarding the collectors edition: “We’re offering this very cool collector’s edition to give fans the opportunity to own some of the items that they’ll discover while playing Fallout: New Vegas. We are also expanding their experience with the game by including a top-notch graphic novel worthy of the Fallout name and a DVD that gives them a behind-the-scenes look at how the game was created”.

Enticing, but yet another money sink for me i’m afraid.

*Sigh*

As of this writing, the collectors edition are not yet available for pre-order.

According to a Saudi Microsoft company executive, Microsoft’s forthcoming motion control system is down to launch sometime in October; putting it directly head-to-head with Sony’s Playstation Move motion controller system.

Syed Bilal Tari, marketing manager of the entertainment & devices division at Microsoft Saudi said “We will be in the position to confirm the date after E3, which is in June, but definitely [Natal] is going to be October 2010,” (Taken from IGN.com)

At next month’s E3 in L.A, Microsoft will be holding a Natal specific world premiere conference on Sunday 13th June, followed by an additional formal unveiling of first and third party support for the perihiperal in their media briefing which takes place the following day.

Well, now we have a release window, the biggest and most important pieces of the puzzle still remain; what titles are going to be available for it and to what degree have they managed to reduce the lag of the system that was spotted in the previous hands-on session?

E3 holds the answer it seems.

Warcraft + Funnies = A good way to troll and giggle uncontrollably like an idiot whilst at work.

So here, I shall share the source of my amusement with you:

http://www.wowbash.com/top100.html

Enjoy.

After the tremendous leakage that occured yesterday from the press embargo for LittleBigPlanet 2, comes the official announcement from Mr. Sony himself that LittleBig Planet 2 is going to unleash a silly amount of creative awesomeness on our collective asses’ later this year.

PR Blurb is below:

Announcing LittleBigPlanet™2 for PlayStation®3: Sackboy is back!
Have brand new adventures, explore the imaginations of millions – and Play, Create and Share not just levels, but whole games…

London, 10th May:

Sony Computer Entertainment Europe has announced the return of the world-conquering, award-collecting Sackboy in LittleBigPlanet™2 for PlayStation®3 (PS3™) – a game that will let your creativity run riot in ways you never imagined. Developed by the visionary team at Media Molecule, LittleBigPlanet 2 will provide fans a new means to PLAY, CREATE, and SHARE, including a revamped graphics engine supplying stunning visuals, a fresh storyline, added accessories and equipment for SackBoy, and revolutionary gameplay mechanics providing players a level of control and customization. This time, the game in the box really is just the start.

The multi-million unit selling LittleBigPlanet had the critics raving when it arrived in 2008. The game, where players meet on a colourful, patchwork planet to play as the charming, fully-customisable Sackboy, and create new levels for others to play via PlayStation®Network, heralded a new age of creative gaming, where players are constrained only by their imagination. Since launch, more than 2 million levels have been created by LittleBigPlanet fans, and uploaded to share with the rest of the community. Now, LittleBigPlanet 2 will explode the concept of Creative Gaming, offering exciting and unprecedented new possibilities – as well as backwards-compatibility with all of the existing LittleBigPlanet community levels and content.

LittleBigPlanet 2 begins with a brand-new, epic story adventure, where your quest is to save the LittleBigPlanet itself. On your journey you visit amazing places and meet wonderful characters as you run, bounce, swing and even grapple-hook your way to success. And then it gets really imaginative – in LittleBigPlanet 2, you can create not just levels, but whole new games.

Racing games, shooters, platform challenges… cookery simulators even; if you can imagine it, you’ll be able to make it. Sackboy’s new set of simple but wonderfully powerful tools lets you create contraptions whose behaviour you can control, and populate new landscapes with Sackbots – automated characters who can help or hinder players. You can make intelligent machines, vehicles and puzzles, create cinematic cutscenes, and reassign the game’s controls to control any element of what you’ve made. Then, when you’re all out of imagination, you can take a break from creating to go and play what gamers around the world have been busy creating. Right now, no one knows what that will look like. If last time was anything to go by, though, it’s going to be amazing.

In 2010, the only limit to what you play is going to be the world’s imagination. Prepare for a revolution that’s truly going to blur the lines between gamers and games creators, breaking all the moulds and giving free rein to the creativity of millions… prepare for LittleBigPlanet 2. Find out more at http://www.littlebigplanet.com/2

Backwards compatability with the old LBP1 maps is nice touch too, meaning that all those hours of making those BAFTA winning Mario ‘inspired’ levels hasn’t gone completely to waste.

Trailerage can be found below:

Oh, and while we’re at it, those folks over at vg247.com have a huuuge amount of info on the title with five interviews, hi-res pics and much more.

Take a look:

http://www.vg247.com/2010/05/10/littlebigplanet-2-five-interviews-from-london-reveal/

Multiple sources have leaked what appears to be detail and screenies from the sequel to one of the most original games of 2008 – Little Big Planet.

The biggest difference appears to be that rather than just creating platforming levels you can create whole genres such as racing and RTS style games.

The screenies can be found at the littlebigland fansite below:

http://www.littlebigland.com/15-new-high-res-littlebigplanet-2-shots/

Looking promising.

At long last I have finally put foot to my own ass and finished Final Fantasy XIII on the PS3.

57 hours isn’t bad going for an RPG with a tunnel vision complex, but i’ll leave it there whilst I attempt in vain to segregate all the thoughts in my head and notes on my pad into some kind of readable review.

Bring on Final Fantasy Versus XIII.

I think.

Yes, yes and yes!

Nope, this is not a transcript of a sex scene from a straight laced English porno but instead my own personal nerdgasm at the sheer coolness of another God Of War game on PSP.

After the all-encompassing awesomeness that was God Of War: Chains Of Olympus on PSP back in 2006, fans have been clamouring for a portable return for the Greek bad boy Kratos and his violent escapades.

That wait is nearly over, as Sony have announced that God Of War: Ghost Of Sparta will mark the second God Of War title for the portable platform and like it’s predecessor, it shall be a prequel to the current trilogy developed by the immensely talented folks at Ready at Dawn.

Supposedly dealing with his climb up the ranks to the badass that we see in the home console titles, the game will also detail the history regarding his family, tattoos and the obsession he has with threesomes.

Okay, maybe not the last one; but still, we’ll be given a chance to see just what galvanized Kratos into the unrelenting badass that he is today.

Pushing the boundaries of what portable gaming should be capable of back in 2006, God Of War: Chains of Olympus was every bit a worthy counterpart to the PS2 titles that were around at the same time, with superb graphics, epic boss battles and compelling level design.

More of that please.

God Of War: Ghost of Sparta gets it’s full unveiling at next month’s E3.

Y’know, all proper like.