Opinion – Final Fantasy 13

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For weeks, I have been trying to write something, anything, about Final Fantasy 13, but the task has proven difficult.  One reason is that anything worth saying about the game has been stated already, and by better writers.  Another is that I continue to suffer from the longest period of writer’s block I have ever encountered.  Recently, I came to a third conclusion about my struggles; you can’t say much about a game that itself has no point. That’s the best way I can describe FF13.  It exists as multiple pieces and components, none of which work together to create a unified experience.

This problem runs throughout the entire product.  Take the environments, for example.  They serve no purpose beyond offering the player a new color palette every few hours.  →  Can you read me now?

Extra Lives Review

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Tom Bissell’s latest work, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, doesn’t include much discussion on the subject of why video games matter. This has very little weight on the text itself, but I think every reader should be aware of that fact before opening a copy. Extra Lives is about Bissell’s fascination with videogames and videogame developers, and about his own experiences playing games. The basic point of the book is, well, I can’t really say. Any central thesis has gone far over my head because as far as my reading comprehension extends I couldn’t find any real point to the book. Each chapter is tied to the others by the fact that it’s about videogames. Videogames: that’s basically the point of the book. →  An article approaches.
- Read
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Review – Burger Island

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I recently [not recently – Ed.] spent a good portion of my Memorial Day weekend remembering our fallen soldiers by playing Burger Island with my daughter.

“Do you want a turn making milkshakes, daddy?” she asked in a cute manner.

“I will do it! I will do it for those that died at Normandy!” I cried.

And thus began my nightmarish decent into the maddening world of Burger Island.

Burger Island, I learned the hard way while simultaneously paying tribute to the ultimate sacrifice of others, is a lie.

The island in the title is not a gigantic delicious hamburger. It is not a Burger Island. The point of the game is not to gorge your stranded survivor on the island itself in the name of survival, slowly eating the very piece of juicy, flame-broiled land that also keeps you safe. →  Shadow of Read

Review: Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers

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Presumably, there is a design doc at Square Enix that defines what defines a Crystal Chronicles game.  A character called Cid, cactuars, marlboros, flans, chocobos, airships, trains and magical jewelery are all borrowed from the main series. What makes a Crystal Chronicles game seems to be an obsession with talking about crystals, carrying things above your head, real time combat and a world populated by four different races. What I didn’t know until I hit the Final Fantasy Wiki is that all of the Crystal Chronicles games are set in the same universe but thousands of years apart. Which is nice and explains the obsession with crystals.

In my little world at least, Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles titles are always released with little in the way of fanfare, especially when compared to the main series of games, and often received a mixed reception. →  Prince of Postia: Article Within

Review – SSX Tricky

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In the early days of the GameCube one of the first games I made sure to get was SSX Tricky. It was awesome and I played it endlessly until I had mastered every single trick of every single character on every single course. Eventually I got bored of it because, well, it stopped being fun after doing the same “über trick” for the umptillionth time. It burned out my brain and I couldn’t take it any longer. From whatever was left of those brain cells lingered a memory of an incredible experience. Sometimes SSX Tricky would wander back into my daydreams and I would reminisce about how much fun I had. So you know what I did? I decided that nine years later it was time to play it again. →  2 h4rdc0r3 4 U.

Runegate – When Sales Beats Common Sense

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Riot Games finally released a feature for League of Legends that has been begged for since the game’s inception: additional rune pages. For those of you who aren’t familiar, runes are one of the metagame features in League of Legends that allows you to customize your gameplay. You get a series of different slots, and can purchase runes that buff various attributes of your character: movespeed, damage, mana, health, etc. This enables additional strategy for the game, and runes can only be purchased via “Influence Points,” a currency that is only earned by playing the game (win or loss), as opposed to “Riot Points” which are only gained through real money transactions.

Up until yesterday, players only got two pre-set rune pages to choose from in a match. →  Disaster Readport

Review – League of Legends: Season One

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Following many months of “live,” but not “ranked” gameplay, League of Legends, published by Riot Games, has gone pro, launching their competitive Season One. Featuring several ranked ladder modes: “solo” (actually solo or duo play) 5v5, full premade 5v5 and full premade 3v3, the ladders will culminate with tournament play and $100,000 of cash and prizes. Although Riot will not release simultaneous usage numbers, they have confirmed through various online sources they have over 3 million registered accounts. With the DOTA community estimated at 7-9 million players built over a decade, Riot should be proud of how quickly their game has caught on and distinguished itself in broad field of incumbents and competitors.

Unsurprisingly, Season One is mostly more of the same. →  I’m readin’ here!

The Passion of Tetris

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Back in the day, a passion for video games meant a healthy interest in video games as part of a normal, balanced diet. These days, anything than less than full retard could see you harshly labeled as a newbie on some internet forums. But unlike wine or film it is hard to be a connoisseur of the whole of gaming-kind. There are so many games that humans cannot tell you how many there are any more. Thousands? Certainly. Millions? Maybe. It depends. Is every slight mod a separate game? Is every two second flash game a ‘game’? Do not seek the answer to those questions young one, to seek to answer them is to look into the void. By far the best thing to do if you want to really make it in the video game sector is to hyper focus on one tiny tiny tiny bit of gaming. →  A reader is you.

Sounds

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I may have already mentioned ALREADY JESUS CHRIST ALREADY GET OFF MY BACK MOM ALREADY! That I am a big fan of video game soundtracks. Be it the official tunes, an inspired remix and very occasionally I even allow songs which have merely sampled an OT to creep onto the MP3 player. PRO TIP: Never ever, ever be tempted to listen to a video game related song which has been filed under the ‘comedy’ or ‘humorous’ genres. They are almost exclusively 11 year old boys who sound like girls on helium doing the first season Pokemon theme tune. Tetris remixes aside, of which team videolamer are veritable connoisseurs, I do like hard copy soundtracks. They are often objects of beauty as well as magically trapping the music onto a disk.

 →  Who is that standing behind you?

The New Xbox 360

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The release of the newest version of the Xbox 360 came right before I prepared to move to my own apartment, where my roomate’s console would be unavailable for the first time in several years.  Perfect timing I guess, though there are always caveats with console hardware revisions, ones which make all the new features a little less exciting. Rather than research what these might be, I decided to buy the new 360 blind.  Here is what I have found:

– Microsoft continues to rip off their pals at Sony and Nintendo when convenient.   The new hardware has a touch sensor for the power button and disc eject, and it makes beeps when turned on and off.  That makes it work pretty much like a PS3, and when placed next to one, it kind of looks like a cancerous growth with a radioactive green glow to it. →  Postlanser: Heritage of Read