Now, last year, I had to make a post that basically said that Spring (and technically Summer, but we're just focusing on Spring for now) is my arch-nemesis as the presence of an overabundance of electricity (lightning) generally makes all the other electricity unusable. Like computers. Also game consoles (but not handhelds). Granted, I'd hoped to have had a Laptop by this point to make this all a moot point, but best laid plans and all that. So really, what was said last year stands for this one as well. Now would be the time to start getting yourself acquainted with the lovely twitter side bar as, thanks to LiveTweet on the Vita, I have the best access to that as possible, and will be using it to say when it's storming, when I'm sick (because I'm gonna be sick a lot this Spring, I'm sure) and the like. Just basically when you should expect little to no content.
I figured it was about time to say this as, as you might have noticed, the last couple of days have been kind of taxing on me because I'm getting adjusted to the heat and the sudden shift to it. Also there was a threat of Tornadoes today which are no good. Thankfully, everything's fine and the storm pushed me back into Uncharted: Golden Abyss to get a little further into my Hard playthrough which will in turn lead me to my Crushing playthrough. Random side-note about all this, by the by: Why can't I transfer all my Clues and such to a new game? C'mon, I've had to deal with the lack of unlockable 'cheats' since the last Uncharted, now I have to find everything over and over again? Story/path-related things I can see. The early charcoal rubbings, the things you pick up when you're going the way you're supposed to go, etc. But there's no reason why I can't carry over my pieces of Turquoise and such. Angryface.
Anyways, just so I can have something approaching content, I did also want to say that I tried the Shinobido 2 Demo and it was pretty great. I was a bit surprised by that, actually, since I figured I would be terrible at it. Granted, it was just tutorial missions and then one singular actual mission (which means the demo was way too short) so it was easy enough and was meant to be as such, I'm sure. But moreso than that, I'm pretty happy with how it controlled. It's not amazing, but it's not overly tanky. The grappling hook makes for some pretty righteous movement, though the lack of a double jump was something that I consistently forgot about which bothers me for several reasons. Still, the lack of the different animations for kills (at least, I performed three stealth kills in a row that were the exact same thing, not too happy about that) was kind of a downer. All in all though, a pretty good demo, in the same way that the Katamari demo was a good one; it gave me a tiny, tiny chunk of the main game that was fun enough to make me want the whole thing.
So, yeah. With any luck, Mother Nature will stop deciding to be such a bitch about stuff and I won't have to worry so much. Because I worry so much, you guys. You don't even know. Still, I guess it's good that I'm concerned since it helps me prevent disasters rather than find myself stuck in them. Hopefully I'll get stuff sorted out this Spring so it won't be so much of an issue; I'll try to do things to give me material for personal pieces rather than parroting off news all the time since that is almost impossible to rely on. With a steady stream of content like that, any bumps in the road will barely be noticeable, or at least that's what I think I've learned about this for being at it a year and all.
The wait for the Playstation Vita, of course. As you might have already seen, Chance got one after paying a small fortune and despite that, I am so jealous. Every time I get a moment to just sit here and think, I think about how awesome it would be if I had mine and could just....sit here and fiddle with it, changing the backgrounds and stuff. And then I think about the fact that he's already done all this and I would honestly hate him for this if he weren't so awesome. My time will come, however and when it does, it will be glorious, and it just can't come fast enough, in all honesty. But in my waiting, I've decided it's a good idea to take a look at the Vita's early offerings via other people who actually have a Vita and these games - Namely the fine chaps at Giant Bomb who have a whole host of "Quick Looks" for the Vita Launch games. I figure I might as well share a few of these as well as my impressions of them.
First up is the first one of these I watched, actually. I've been talking with my buddy Kaseius who has been debating, almost endlessly it seems, between grabbing a 3DS and a couple games, as it seems to be ever-so-conveniently inexpensive at the moment or a Vita. I'm fairly confident he will own both at some point in time (and in fact already owned a 3DS before, but sold it a week prior to the announcement of the price-cut/free games. He was not happy.) so it's more a matter of the -now-. While my purchases have been solidly put in place since the beginning, his are a little more nebulous and, when handed the prospect of a potential Buy 2 Get 1 Free sale at Target for Vita games, he decided it would be prudent to look through the launch games in the event that he went with the Vita. All this ended up in my confession that I haven't actually played Lumines in any form and, in fact, have no idea what it is. To which, I was directed to the above video.
After watching it, I'm still not quite sure I know what it is, but I don't believe that's a bad thing. It seems like it's just meant to be a game that, if you've had a rough day or what-not and have to find something to chill you out over the course of half an hour or so, you just sink that time into Lumines and walk away refreshed. At least, that's the impression I got from Joystiq's JC Fletcher (who I agree with..maybe 60% of the time lately it seems) who reviewed it, saying, "My time playing Lumines has been the only time in the last week during which I wasn't panicking. I come out of a 45-minute session feeling rested and kind of euphoric.". 'How's that for an endorsement' indeed. I find that I'm strangely attracted to the idea of buying it now with only this minimal bit of exposure, but I will likely wait a bit, as I'm not quite sure it's my type of game, which is to say that I will likely enjoy it, but not in a way that makes me keep going back to it. Maybe some day I'll have to eat those words, but we'll see.
Part of my apprehension might come from the fact that I've never been a fan of Tetris and, let's be honest, that seems to be where Lumines has drawn its inspiration from. In Lumines favor, however, they've clearly carved out their own niche, found a way to make it a different game from Tetris, and that way involves some groovin' tunes and funky visuals, of which I expect I might be a fan of. All the extra stuff that seems to be new for this version, like the avatars that change how you might think of playing by adding certain bonuses or the like helps with this as well, and while I don't understand it all, it's interesting at the least. The soundtrack for this version has me a little intrigued as, even though I haven't heard of 90% of the people in it, it still manages to have The Chemical Brothers, Benny Benassi and Amon Tobin whom I've all heard of at minimum. I'm sure it's absolutely lovely while playing the game.
Now, it's obvious that I'm getting Dynasty Warriors Next because, as I've stated several times before, I am just a whore for Warriors games. And even though I'm (rightly) pissed at KOEI for the latest announcement that Warriors Orochi 3 is PSN-Only for PS3 (In North America at least for stupid reasons that I am not even about to claim are all Sony's, considering the fact that there have been games for PS3 on disk with no English dub before. Not even counting Yakuza! Way of the Samurai 3 didn't have any english vocals.....but to be fair, I don't think it had -any- vocals. Still.) I'm planning on grabbing this, provided the GameStop I go to has a copy. And in all honesty, nothing in the video was going to sway me on that purchase. In fact, a few key things have almost assuredly pushed me more fully into it.
Despite the obvious blase attitude and snark held by the Giant Bomb cast, as that is the only attitude they are contractually allowed to have about a Warriors game, being games journalists and all, they offered valuable insight into the game to spot a few crucial things. First off is the apparent inclusion of "Empires Mode" elements, insofar as having the map of China divided into territories that you can invade and conquer, as in the previous Empires games. It appears to be the 'main' portion of the game, titled as the "Campaign Mode" and is, in fact, the first billing in the menu, but Conquest Mode is there as well which I imagine will be much like its PS3 counterpart. Especially given that there's Create-a-Warrior in the game, meaning you can, in theory, make your own character that will cut a swath across China and wrest victory from Wei's grasp. Or, I guess Jin's grasp is more appropriate. Regardless.
It has to be said that I physically cringed at hearing him try to pronounce the names. "Cao Cao" as "Cow cow" is understandable as KOEI's localization crew thought that's how you pronounced it for five main games, but "Jee-how dune" is where I draw the line, okay? And "Jee-how YAHN" isn't any better either. Play the game, listen to it, and learn to pronounce, alright? Awesome. Something else that is greatly appreciated is the inclusion of Item Slots finally finally finally. As shown in the video, it seems there's a spot for a Mount, an Orb, and five Items/Accessories as in previous games that will no doubt assist in making the game more customizable to your tastes and play style, as well as giving you extra incentive to play, if just to find all these things. In the past, getting the mounts has been an arduous process, almost in line with being a 'secret unlockable' at times, so here's hoping that tradition comes back as well, as I would like to feel like I have a 'quest' in which the reward is Red Hare, personally.
Something I'm not at all thrilled about with, however, is the duel system as it's shown off in the video. While I imagine it's a lot easier than he made it look, given that he clearly doesn't care about the game, it still looks clunky and annoying at best. While I get that they wanted to bring something new to it, I can't imagine it'll be much fun after the first five duels or so, after which it'll just be a chore - especially against better duelists like Lu Bu or Guan Yu. Still, I'll have to play with it myself before I can really pass judgment on it, and aside from that, it looks just fine. Given that I haven't played a Warriors game in a while (though I have been tempted to throw in Ken's Rage, oh so tempted), I'll likely be ready to jump right into it when I grab it, and I'm eagerly awaiting that time.
The last game is something I've been on the fence about since it was first announced because while I love me some Ninja Stealth games, Tenchu has taught me that I am, in fact, not good at them. So Shinobido 2: Revenge of Zen's mission was basically to convince me that I could get it, play it and not be terrible....but I'm not quite sure it's done that. Based solely on the fact that, as the Giant Bomb guys were quick to point out, the game looks a lot like Tenchu. That's understandable, of course, considering it's the same team and/or dev that made the old Tenchu games (or so I'm told), but in that same vein, I know I am bad at Tenchu games, as I said, so I'm wondering about that. It seems to default back to the "Stealth is so crucial that you're punished for being bad at it" with the less-than-stellar combat system which isn't a good sign.
By that same measure, the guy playing this seems to have been showing just as much thought and care in playing this as in playing Dynasty Warriors Next (read: not much) so it might be a rewarding game if you play it right and might, in fact, not be too difficult to play correctly. And in another play to the game's favor, it does look measurably better than it has in promotional materials so far, though that might also be in part to only seeing it through a camera, rather than seeing it on the screen itself. It doesn't look -amazing-, nor like it's taking advantage of any 'next-gen' graphics or animations, but it's not as 'early-PS2' as it looked before. To me, at least. It also looks like there are a few things to the game beyond "Tenchu, but on Vita" as well in the Alchemy portion (which also includes Near functionality which I can't -wait- to mess around with....hoping that it works out in the middle of nowhere where I am) which means that there will be material collecting which always adds -time- to a game, even if it feels like a grind sometimes.
Only a few more days until I can have a Vita in my hands and, with any luck, there'll be some demos for a few of these games so I can try them out. I'm not too optimistic for this stuff right off the bat, but I can have some lofty hopes for it, at least.
It's rare, or at least fairly uncommon, when I find that there's actually a few things I can talk about in any one night, and less so when they all concern the same general subject. So when that happens, I really have to jump on it, and when it's about the PSP and/or the Vita, I'm certainly more than happy to do so. Because with every day that passes, I love my PSP more and more, and my excitement for the Vita grows and grows. I just hope that the memory sticks for it won't be super expensive, since I'm likely going to need a few. (I know I have at least three 4 gig sticks for my PSP floating around.)
Which, as a quick side note, I'm actually kind of amazed at how much 4 Gigs can actually hold whenever I load up my PSP as of late. I usually always have a UMD in (Lately, Valkyria Chronicles 2, clearly), and then on the stick, I have: Three Minis (Young Thor, Monsters (Probably) Stole My Princess, and Dracula - Undead Awakening), A PSN Game (Patchwork Heroes), Two PSOne Classics (Front Mission 3 and Alundra), Two Demos (No Heroes Allowed! and Yakuza: Black Panther or whatever it got translated as. Japanese-Only Demo I got from some Japanese website (legit) a while ago) and a full PSP game (Phantasy Star Portable 2). On top of that, I have save data for all the aforementioned, plus other games, and quite a bit of downloaded content for LittleBigPlanet PSP. (Free costumes and a couple handfuls of downloaded levels). On top of that, some videos (a couple of them being ~30 Minutes long), and some Music that's likely uncompressed. And I still have 198 MB left. If I got rid of my videos, I'm sure I'd be able to download Xenogears, which I need to do at some point. (Y'know, after I buy it.)
Anyways, first up for the PSP news is something rather unfortunate, of course. I can't ever start these things on good notes, apparently. In a Playstation Blog post about White Knight Chronicles 2, "Miki", someone working for D3 who's publishing White Knight Chronicles 2 here in the states let it be known in a comment that there are "Currently no plans to release White Knight Chronicles: Origins for the PSP" in the west. Which isn't surprising, nor is it particularly damning, but it's not pleasant, either. The possibility is there, of course, for someone else to publish it, but it's hard to figure out who would. I guess, if nothing else, I can always look into importing from Europe (since it, you know, won't be in Moonspeak then), but I'm not sure how Online would work then, if at all.
I'll just go ahead and state it here, rather than wait til the end to bring it up: I honestly have no idea why all these developers don't just go PSN-Only release for some of these games they're worried won't sell. If you only do digital (which, I prefer physical copies, but I'll take what I can get at this point) you save a lot in costs from not having to produce the physical components (manuals, disks, etc.), and in this case, your game won't just be selling to the PSP audience, but the future Vita audience. You can't say that in the first few months of the Vita's launch, people won't be heavily using the Vita's PSP Backwards Compatibility with PSN titles. I guess there's a chance everybody's waiting for the Vita to get closer in launch so it's 'fresher' in everyone's minds, but there seems to be very little point in that. Get your shit up early and wait for the adopters to come your way.
Moving on to stay within the PSP spectrum for now, let's touch on Final Fantasy Type-O. I'm not going to lie, until today, I gave less than a shit about the game, simply because it's a Squeenix product and, well, I haven't been up on those too much lately. Between the fact that Final Fantasy Versus XIII is still in Pre-Production despite being, y'know, six years old, Final Fantasy XIII having absolutely no draw on me to buy it yet (even though I've seen it at my impulse price - $20), and Final Fantasy XIV tanking, Squeenix has pretty much fallen off my radar. Well, except for one other thing, which I'll point out next. However, a post at Siliconera detailing a few aspects of Type-O has taken it from "Meh" to "Holy shit, what" in four videos that only amount to a minute and a half of footage. I won't bother linking them; they're all embedded in the Siliconera post. I will, however, speak on my reactions to them.
The first video shows off a fairly impressive battle system that serves by showing that you'll be able (be forced?) to have a party of three that you can switch dynamically between, infusing a bit of strategy into the game as, of course, all three characters have their own strengths and weaknesses. It's not an original concept by any stretch, and has fairly recently been utilized in the Tecmo-KOEI developed Trinity: Souls of Zill O'll. Still, always a fairly neat little thing. The second is neat in its own right as well, showing off the "Kill Sights" mechanic that will allow most enemies to be OHK'd if you attack at the exact right moment, which will assuredly be useful. The third is a bit confusing to me because of the language barrier, but it's mostly just showing off getting mini-missions every now and then. But the fourth is likely the one that instills the most "WANT" in me of them all.
I don't know what it is about Overworld maps, be it the general lack of them in recent years, a nostalgic feel from it since they were in all the older games, or what, but for whatever reason, that's what really amped me up. Three methods of travel are provided in the video: On Foot, Chocobo and Airship. It's hard to say if there's going to be others (perhaps a boat or something for the bodies of water) but that alone is quite enough really; just enough to get us all (or at least me) thinking about Final Fantasy VII when similar travel methods were included. Hopefully Squeenix figures out how/when they're going to localize this one, since I'll likely be buying it early; something I never thought I'd express for the game until now.
Moving on to Vita news, recently, Hiromichi Tanaka who is involved with Final Fantasy XI (you know, the Squeenix MMO that isn't hemorrhaging money) recently said they're investigating a Straight-Port of FFXI to Vita. Wait, what? That's about all that was said about it, honestly, which, my taking of "Straight-Port" means "Let's reuse as many assets as we can" before they have to, inevitably rewrite and reconfigure a good portion of things to get it running. Which isn't a bad idea and, provided there's cross-play with PC/Vita, would probably be pretty fun for the ones playing. Of course, if Vita owners could only play with other Vita owners, it's hard to say if they could make it worth a subscription, which hopefully means there wouldn't be one! Hahaha, right, right. It's not even a 'project' yet, as far as we can tell, so maybe it's not even worth touching on. But hey, it could be cool.
Shinobido 2 has been mentioned a couple times recently, getting a brief mention at Andraisang for the rename of the game in Japan. The Japanese title will simply be Shinobido 2: Sange, which is all the information they mentioned. Siliconera, however, has a bit more news namely that the game's taking a page from the other "Way of the" game series (Way of the Samurai, of course; Shinobido 1 was subtitled Way of the Ninja) and will feature a branching storyline that can end in a multitude of ways, depending on the player's actions. Which, given how much replayability that adds to Way of the Samurai games (granted, most of it is repetition), it's likely that you'll get quite a bit of bang for your buck with Shinobido 2. (Interested more or less, Chance?)
Ahh. That was a satisfying post. Now to kick back with Valkyria Chronicles 2, grind on Killer Assault some more to unlock the last two Classmate Missions, and see how willing I am to grind on the map that is recommended for post-game grinding. Grind, grind, grind. But still fun!
