10/24/2006

A Marvelous Universe

Ah what a glorious universe it is when two highly anticipated releases that threaten to destroy what little social life I have and Jack Thompson may be INCARCERATED! That's right! Take-Two is attempting to have old wacky Jack hauled in for contempt. Granted, a jail term is unrealistic, but if it can shut him up for a long time, props to the developers for finally taking a rel stand. If this doesn't work, Might I suggest a slander & libel suit since every time Jackson has made these outrageous accusations both in writing and interviews they are never proven?

Decisions, Decisions. After beating Disgaea 2, I did end up picking up Tales of The Abyss & Shining Force Neo (I admit it, I can't help myself sometimes, I'm lucky I stopped at just those two). Both are pretty fun in their own ways (Neo is a fun Diablo-style dungeon hack, but it is kind of simplistic yet very punishing, and Abyss features pretty much the same engine from Symphonia & Legendia, but the characters are really well developed and the engine was pretty top notch to begin with. But now, two huge titles are out this week that I wan badly.

First is Marvel Universe, from the same team that brought you The X-Men Legends games. This time you've got a whole variety of characters from Spider-Man to The Hulk. My only worry is that Your A.I. partners were criminally stupid in the X-Men series, so I may at least wait till I hear if the A.I. is a little better here.

And then there's Phantasy Star Universe. The long overdue followup to the epic Phantasy Star Online, which hasn't really had a proper sequel since it came out on the Dreamcast. While the battle system looks roughly the same, but it offers a fully revamped race system and a an offline single-player adventure that's completely seperate from the online experience. The one thing that bothers me is that while Sega has spent plenty of time promoting the sweet-looking online mode, they've been pretty quiet about the offline. I'll probably wait until I can get a consensus before I pick it up.

An update on Sony's controllers-The bad news is that yes, they die eventually, and Sony's still not saying when they might start fizzling out. But they have said if and when they do, that the controllers will be replaced free of charge. That's nice, but do you really want to be without your controller(s) for up to several weeks while you get a replacement? I sure as hell would not, and given Sony's rather shady history with batteries, this may be a common thing.

And Sony may be in a whole new heap of new legal trouble thanks to their "facts" sheet they handed out at their big press day in the Bay Area. Essentially, they claimed several clearly false things like that a 12-month gold subscription is "required" along with the HD-DVD drive & the 20-gig hard drive on the 360 (when while none of that is really required). MS is reportedly looking into legal action because it is most definitely misleading the non-hardcore gaming public who doesn't know any better (and that also may include a lot of dimwitted retail employees who treat Sony's "fact" sheet as a guide when recommending systems to customers).

The ugly side of the Live Marketplace has really started to show and gamers are none too happy about it. One of the few good titles on the PSP, Lumines, was released on Xbox live for a very affordable $15. Sounds great, right? Not when gamers who bought it got what you'd mostly consider a demo version, with only one playable level in the vs. cpu mode and missing promised features like music videos by popular artists playing in the background. MS' solution? To release additional levels & features as packs that they will charge you for in the future. Thanks, Microsoft, for confirming everyone's worst fears that Live marketplace is truly just a way to release unfinished games and force people to keep paying for god only knows how long if they want the "full" version. Kindly go fuck yourself.


And finally, I did see The Prestige over the weekend, and it was an excellent mystery with great performances, proving That Nolan & Bale are no fluke, and Jackman can do more than cheesy big budget films. I highly recommend it.

SCRUBS CLIP OF THE WEEK:

1 comment:

AEW said...

I saw the Prestige last night and I was thoroughly impressed and suprised. I usually figure out the movie in the first 45 min. but this really got me.