Ys: The Oath in Felghana is a great import

BTW, just wanted to give a shout-out to Ys: The Oath in Felghana. This is a great PC import from Japan that runs just fine on a North American PC, although you might have to do a little scavenger work on the web to find the English subtitle mod that translates the text.

Great PC game, and the packaging is second to none. The game comes in a small, DVD cardboard collector’s style box which contains the DVD case for the game and a lavishly illustrated manual. It’s not even a collector’s edition release, but I guess it’s the normal thing for Falcom to do. I’m thinking about ordering up Ys: Origins next as an English translation is close to being completed for that, too.

Ys ever-present hero, Adol Christin, continues his adventures in this remake of Ys III. Ys fans should find a lot to be excited about with this game.

The chibi-styled anime aesthetic make the lavish graphics uniquely Japanese, but the simple-to-grasp hack 'n slash gameplay is all around fun.

If you want to order your own copy, you can send an e-mail request to Nihon Falcom directly and they will ask for your order information. The address is: order_h19 at falcom.co.jp

The body of your message should read:

Hello,

I am a fan of the Ys series and would like to order Ys: The Oath in Felghana from you and have it shipped to the United States. Please let me know what I should follow in order to place my request. Thank you!

Remember, do not assume that everyone in Japan is proficient in English so keep your inquiry simple. After sending this, Falcom got back to me and requested the following information:

The information which is necessary for the order is the following.

*Shipping
recipient name:
shipping address:
telephone number:

*Credit card information
credit card kind:[ JCB.UC.VISA.Master.AMEX.NICOS.DC ]
credit card owner's name:
credit card owner's address:[ if different from shipping address ]
credit card number(sixteens digits):
credit card term of validity(year/month):

Now I know what you are probably thinking…credit card information via e-mail? But in this case, it was a legitimate e-mail request from an established business (and it was verified to work by others that have done the same thing). Even so, I wasn’t too comfortable in sending my card information this way, but there are alternatives available to you. Several card companies allow you to generate a temporary credit card number with a set limit for particular transactions. The numbers are backed by your card, but can be used in lieu of it either as a one-shot or with a specific allowance for security minded customers. I had one set up like this, so I sent a temporary credit card number over and it worked just fine.

Oh, and they’ll send you the pricing in yen, so be sure to have a currency converter handy if you decide to set a specific limit on the card you generate. Yahoo! Finance has one that has worked for me in the past. In Felghana’s case, the game cost about $60 with shipping and handling and arrived in about two weeks. But it was worth every penny.

Throw away your consoles and PCs…OnLive is coming

OnLive's concept sounds awesome, but it has a lot of unanswered questions

One of the more daring announcements to come out of this year’s GDC was the unveiling of OnLive, a game delivery system promising to replace the need for upgrades with a service that will do it all for you instead. All the player will need is a controller, or a set top box for their television, a PC, and the need to believe that they can accomplish the impossible.

Now let me first say that I would love to see something like this take off. Its very concept spits in the face of the entire upgrade model that the consoles are committed to and which PC players have long used to keeping up with as the market demands bigger, better, and prettier looking games. Imagine not having to save up for a PS9, or the Xbox 1080, or that Nvidia ExaByte GFX card. Sounds like a lovely idea, doesn’t it?

Eurogamer makes a solid case as to why this might not be as rosy as its evangelists have made it out to be, not the least of which are the network latency questions that should concern everyone. If you’ve had trouble viewing video on YouTube, CNN, or any other popular destination when a story breaks, you know what I’m talking about. But the service promises that this will soon go the way of the dinosaur which is an amazing statement to make.

Even that aside, the service takes the novel approach in generating the content on their end through a “state-of-the-art OnLive game server center” while pushing the pixels to your screen. In other words, you’ll be playing the game remotely. To put this in perspective, the client for a game is usually sitting on local hardware…your PC or console…whether it’s loaded on the hard drive or read off of a disc.

By putting the client on their servers instead and pushing the video to you, the PC player in me is wondering just how they will be able to process a different instance (which usually entails different geometry, physics, etc..) for the million or so people logging in to play, say, GTA V with that much overhead. Instead of doing all of the grunt work on a local box, the server is apparently capable of rendering a unique instance for every participant. Unless the servers are powered by SkyNet, I’m not sure how well this will work out.

Perhaps I’m just being overly pessimistic about the whole thing, but I would actually feel ecstatic if they can pull it off. It’s also not the only idea. Apparently, Dave Perry of Shiny fame has also been working on a similar solution called Gaikai which seems squarely aimed at PC users and browser based gaming.

Life after the Pitt

I finished the Pitt earlier this week, but…what happened to the quality control?

There were more than just one or two ways in which players could easily break some of the logic in the game, whether it’s taking a path less traveled or simply running away from your enemies. None of the DLC for Oblivion gave me nearly as many issues as the Pitt did. I’m not even going to touch the problems that Xbox 360 owners have experienced already, requiring Bethesda to pull the DLC and then re-upload it.

That said, when it works, there’s a pretty decent story and some nice loot found within it. Modders should be able to have a field day in populating their own ideas of what the rest of post-apocalyptic Pittsburgh should look like since what is available feels like one tiny block. But I hope that Broken Steel, the last DLC and the one that changes the ending, raises the level cap, and delivers one whallop of an adventure in clearing out the Enclave from the DC area, won’t have as many bizarre problems as this one did.

I do have a bit more faith in that it will be a bit more solid, though. Bethesda’s Jeff Gardiner has noted that they had started working on Broken Steel shortly before Christmas last year, after they wrapped up work on Fallout 3, meaning that it may have gotten a much longer lead time in development than the other two had. With the high level concepts that they’ve been juggling around for this last piece of DLC, I’m hoping that’s the case.

It's not a bad place to visit as long as you can overlook the problems that go beyond the new tenants

The pitt does it again

So I’ve downloaded the Pitt, whipped out my rad-away and packed some extra ammo, and once again, Windows Live screws up.

Yes, it doesn’t work. Again. So I did what I had to do with Operation: Anchorage and copy the files into the game directory for it to work right. Wish me luck.

blacklight blitzkrieg infects fox studios

As you might have already heard, Blacklight has been announced by Zombie Studios…yes, the same studios that were supposedly working on Rogue Warrior, Bethesda’s behind-the-lines third person action thriller that would have taken players behind the curtain of North Korea on a mission gone wrong. Now, Bethesda’s pretty much said that it’s still in production, but it’s safe to assume that new hands have it.

Now Zombie has come up with the mysterious Blacklight, an action game taking place “25 years” in the future concerning covert military action…stuff…whatever it might be. From the concept art on the teaser site for the game, it looks like it’s going to be ultra violent with plenty of bullets. Movie site Firstshowing.net has more of the gritty details concerning the film (by Fox Atomic) and comic series that will assault media channels with the IP.

It sounds like a good strategy…gather mindshare across three media-focused venues in order to excite the market to prepare it for something new. It sure beats simply having a game appear on the shelf and leave it to the reviews to decide for you whether it should be worth the trouble of playing when you have no real idea if it has anything interesting to say outside of the box. With a comic and a movie to get people excited about this, it has a lot of potential behind it to do just that.

Then again, the comic could suck and the movie might blow chunks…not to mention what might happen if the game fails to meet whatever expectations they hope to saturate the audience with especially when Gears of War III is just waiting in the wings to come out when its ready. This also isn’t the first time that a game has tried to reach as many people across different mediums, although hitting theaters as a film at the same time is something that’s considerably a step above most other efforts. The film is being written by newcomer Jason Dean Hall, the same guy behind the film, Spread. Whether he can translate his talent for writing sexual comedy into the kind of gritty world that Blacklight demands remains to be seen.

The cynical gamer in me thinks that this is spreading a lot of resources thin across too many fronts, but it might be the beginning of how best to market a new IP in the increasingly competitive world of entertainment starting right out from the gate instead of waiting to have each medium approach the IP. We’ll have to wait and see if this strategy pans out. If anything, gamers, comic mavens, and movie lovers have something else to look forward to.

(from Firstshowing.net) The first screenshot of Blacklight, showing off a third person view and a huge blue reticle. For some reason, I want to say this is Prague...of the FUTURE!

Mob Ties Tokyo Demo

Indie developer, Electronic Visual Elements, has released a demo of their shooter, “Mob Ties Tokyo” which casts the player as a hitman helping his boss, Takuma Ishikawa, go legit. Unfortunately, it seems that the dirty underside of Tokyo isn’t quite ready to let him go and have gone to great lengths to remind him of his obligations…i.e. moving in on his territory and using them to continue plying their trade despite his decision to leave it all behind. The only solution? To wipe them out.

E.V.E. and its first game are actually the product of Chance Miller and Jillian Fontaine, two Hollywood alums that have turned their experience into creating a game as their next big thing. It a wholly owned IP and is being sold as a downloadable game via the web in two flavors: a rated “T” version at $14.95 with the usual blood and gore, and a rated “M” version at $19.95 that is supposed to show a little skin along with the blood and gore via Paypal.

I’m all for independent development and watching what comes out from their secret workshops is always exciting…but not everything independent is necessarily great. The game hearkens back to the nineties…the very early nineties…with its gameplay and the visual aesthetic which graphic obsessed players in today’s market have left behind almost twenty years ago. As an FPS, it’s under additional pressure to distinguish itself from the vast number of those already out there, past and present, commercial or freeware. The voice acting doesn’t sound awful, the concept is neat, I’m not a graphics whore (Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection has a home on my 360 and my classic consoles are still hooked up to my flat TV), but everything else such as the gameplay have serious issues that should have been addressed…not the least of which is the AI which can often be found doing nothing, or the the fact that enemies can be punched with brass knuckles and continue to get up as if they were made of titanium.

It certainly earns points for the hard work that the two have put into it as well as getting the word out, but it also doesn’t seem as if they had done their homework on what is going on in gaming today especially from the modding community with its budding crop of future talent, or have seen what has been coming out from events such as the Independent Games Festival. Then there are the re-released, DRM free classics at bargain basement prices available at Good Old Games which will also entice players looking to get into older titles that they may have missed out on. Mob Ties isn’t exactly priced at a bargain considering what a quick price check on Steam or Gametap can get you at the same rate.

I understand that one of the reasons that E.V.E. went in this direction was to get their concept out into the wild, but perhaps they should have started with something  a little less ambitious. Perhaps release a free mod that does the same thing, but based off off Source or UE3? Modders have gotten their foot in the door by doing this, or at the very least, have opened the door to a much larger audience with their choice of engine/toolset.

You can download the demo for yourself and check it out, or take a look at some of the screens below.

As for me, I’ll have to give this one a pass.

In the demo, the in-game instructions are literally in the game

Some of the graphics, such as this face, are actually not bad

The guns look okay...

...the rest of the game, not so much. Even by 1990's standards. And see that guy at the end of the corridor? He completely ignores you as he's riddled with bullets.

This makes it hard to recommend to anyone. Then again, I've still seen things like this happen with other games from the big development houses.

A stroke of fate, cyberpunk Russian style, and a walking tank

I was busy checking out Akella’s site for “A Stroke of Fate”, an adventure game that takes place in WW2 but instead of parachuting back into Germany or assaulting the beaches of Normandy for the thousandth time, it puts the players into the shoes of a German officer in charge of investigating a possible assassination attempt against the Fuhrer. The thing is, he’s also thinking of the best way to decapitate the Nazi war machine by doing the same thing. It has a pretty interesting premise and I’ve been waiting for it for some time just to see how they pull this one off. The last adventure title that took place during WW2, Operation Wintersun, left me hoping that later efforts would do better.

But while poking around Akella for any new news, I’ve also found out about one or two games that sound interesting enough to check out.

Scorpion takes place in 2028 and is an FPS that makes the player out to be a special operative sent to infiltrate a corporation suspected of supplying terrorists with equipment in a cyberpunkish world. Seeing the one gameplay video they have at the site made me think that it could be like No Remorse, only in first person.

Scorpion is the name of the secret agent that is going to blow this unsuspecting guy away

What is with the future and bizarre medical gear? If it isn't trodes sticking out of someone's head, it has to be something like this.

You can check out the official site here which also has a short, and bloody, gameplay video.

The other game is called 2025: Battle for the Fatherland. The badly translated premise makes it sound as if world order has broken down, an oppressive government has taken control, and it’s up to you and your walking tank to take back the Fatherland…which I’m guessing has to be Germany. There’s not much else about this game aside from the screenshots which show a four legged tank blowing up lots of stuff which could be fun, but the developer seems to have disappeared along with their website. If this is still in production, I have no idea, but I wouldn’t mind playing a demo of this.

Little did Robocop know that ED-209's big brother was off saving the Fatherland

New Wolfenstein Trailer reveals weapons and hapless Nazis

The new Wolfenstein trailer came out on Gametrailers and it looks like it’s shaping up to be just as fun as RTCW was. Occult Nazis, weird weapons, and I’m hoping a more coherent story this time around than in simply summoning a giant boss monster at the end for the climax. Raven looks as if it has really taken out all of the stops with iD’s Tech 4, the same engine used in Doom III to resurrect hellish evils, with plenty of wall busting, reality shifting, and flesh disintegrating effects that help make B.J. Blazkowicz the consummate Nazi Killing Machine. I’m really looking forward to seeing how this turns out.

From what I can tell, it has a release date on July 28 as a multiplatform release (PS3, 360, and the PC), so be sure to mark it on your calendar. As to whether they’ll actually keep to that date is still the big question, but it’s better than nothing.

And to whet your appetite, here are a few captures from the trailer:

All dressed up with nowhere to run

You can't have Wolfenstain without Nazi flambe

We all know what happens when you cross the streams, but I'm guessing this is what happens when you get hit with one

I'm not sure what weapon did this, but it looks like it hurts

BJ suddenly realizes that a leather jacket isn't a very good disguise

Nazi thugs, giant armored mutants, face or no face, BJ will mow down anything in his way and freak out later

Not quite as intimidating as a Big Daddy, but then again, they're powered by...THE SUPERNATURAL

Xbox 360 review: Halo Wars

I had a lot of fun playing through Halo Wars. Pitting the armies of the UNSC and pumping out Scorpion tanks, Warthogs, hapless marines, and having SPARTAN soldiers on my side was a blast, especially when I was doing the blasting. Seeing the war between humanity and the Covenant play out from this perspective is something that I hope Microsoft will continue to pursue, not just as a sequel but as another approach to the Halo. I’m not saying that it should also be an adventure game a la Grim Fandango, but an RPG might not be such a bad thing to see, either.

It’s not hugely difficult to get a grasp on (and it doesn’t allow for too much creativity on a tactical level) as it keeps most everything as simple as the easily accessible controls, but it’s still a different, and very welcome, approach to Halo tailor made by Ensemble as their last project. If you have a sci-fi itch for tactical war that Sega’s Universe at War couldn’t scratch or simply love Halo and want to try something new, Halo Wars might be what you are looking for. Whether or not you’ll want to pay the high price for a short single-player campaign is another question, but there’s always multiplayer.

As usual, my field report has most of the juicy details.

It's time to step out from behind the helmet and into the boots of a general as you lead the UNSC against the Covenant.

Xbox 360 demo: Ninja Blade

I like QTEs, I really do, but From Software’s Ninja Blade for the Xbox 360 overdoses on these in nearly every scene from the demo.

The demo had been out in Japan for awhile and the English version just came out a few days ago on Live so I pulled it down to see what it was like. It definitely has some style to the main character and the visuals look great, but something about its over-the-top approach feels decidedly “me too” at this point following all of the zap-bang awesomeness that DMC4 and Ninja Gaiden II have delivered. The melee combat was pretty straightforward, button mashing stuff, but it was unexciting in seeing my character slash away with what seemed to be generic moves against enemy monsters whose only surprise was that they sometimes get back up. It comes with everything you’d expect a game like this to have: flashy hero, ninja swords, running down the side of a building (that was actually pretty neat), and little else. The awful dialogue didn’t help, either, and I can guess that the obnoxious ninja that jumped out of the plane first is going to get into the hero’s face at some point. It’s just that certain.

From the start, you’re introduced to some heavy QTE action…something that doesn’t let up. Every time the main character does something cinematic, the player has to punch in a series of button presses and stick motions in order for him to succeed. If you fail, it rewinds to a preset start for you to try again. Now, it’s not that hard to get through, but it already feels repetitive enough to be annoying. It felt as if the game were 20% player-driven action and 80% Simon Says. Even the boss wasn’t that exciting, a giant spider whose predictable attacks gave it a less than impressive debut.

My verdict after the demo? Not buying it. I like From Software’s stuff, but this just feels as if they were told to push out a ninja game because Dante and Ryu made stylish ass kickery seem so easy.

Running down the side of a building killing everything in your way? Awesome. QTE overload? Not so much.