Game reviews and articles from an independent video game journalist
In the last couple of days, I have been absolutely overjoyed with the news coming from the GDC 2013, the Metal Gear Solid V reveal, to be precise. Like everyone assumed, Moby Dick’s The Phantom Pain was just a glorious publicity stunt by Kojima for the inevitable reveal of the next game in the Metal Gear saga. And so, we got the following trailer (with Garbage’s “Not Your Kind of People” playing in the background):
In an extremely anticipated event on February 20th, Sony finally revealed the PlayStation 4 to the public, along with some upcoming games for the system. The system is coming out for the 2013 holiday season, and sports impressive technical specifications and a modified DualShock 4 controller with extra features like a touchpad and a built-in speaker.
As I did for last year’s E3 conferences, I have prepared a comfortable bullet-point summary of the major announcements during the conference, in order of appearance.
In the recent days, I was extremely excited to find out that Tales of Game’s, the creators of the magnificent PC RPG Barkley: Shut Up and Jam Gaiden, Chapter 1 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa wanted to work on a sequel. For this purpose, they set up a Kickstarter page, and it’s not only underway, but it exceeded its initial goal of $35,000 in under a day! I must shamefully admit that I haven’t even beaten the first game… I’ve played like an hour of it and postponed it until later times that are apparently yet to come. But it is such a fun concept, the story setting is absolutely brilliant, and it stars the likes of Barkley and Jordan in a cyberpunk world! I highly recommend it, furthermore, it’s free! Visit the above link to download it.
And, if you’ve got some money to support the Kickstarter for the sequel, please do so. It has reached its initial goal, but the developers said that the more money they raise, the more time they’ll put into the project and the more ideas they’ll be able to realise. I’m sure that even just reading the Kickstarter page will assure you that we’re talking guys with very good sense of humour here. 
Barkley: Shut Up and Jam Gaiden 2 Kickstarter page: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/talesofgames/barkley-2-an-rpg-sequel-to-barkley-shut-up-and-jam
I know I am almost 2 weeks late with my comments on this, but it only became available to the public after I had gone on vacation. On the event celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the best series in gaming – the Metal Gear series, Kojima showed a breath-taking trailer of the new and upcoming game in the saga – Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes. In the off-chance that you haven’t seen it, here it is:
The most important story bits, with my short comments:
Other details:
As a whole, I am impressed… Very impressed, and very excited. I’d like to learn more about Big Boss, about his motives, about how Outer Heaven came to be. This game seems like it will offer a lot, maybe all those details. I am also pleased that Kojima is keeping his word regarding Metal Gear Solid 4 being the end of the saga, chronologically. That way, Metal Gear is keeping its artistic integrity, while still releasing games filling the gap between Solid 3 and the original Metal Gear.
Square Enix have finally put the new Final Fantasy VII PC version up for sale. Sadly, the rumour that it would be up on Steam didn’t hold true. What we do know is that this new version has improved graphics and music compared to the original PC release, though, naturally, it’s far from the full-blown modern-technology remake fans want so much. For a limited time, the game costs just 10 Euros to download, so I highly recommend it to anyone that has not played this masterpiece yet!
Official website: http://finalfantasyviipc.com/
A most interesting news appeared today on Twitter, and it’s already shaking the video game world. A new, cheap console named OUYA is being planned. It will be powered by Android, it will cost just $99 and it will be open for hackers to do as they please. Being an Android platform, it will support everything Android devices support today (gaming, web browsing, video streaming, photos, etc.). It will, of course, have a controller, so gaming will not be limited to the mostly touch screen-reliant Android games of today. Developers will have a lot of freedom.
Here are the specifications:
Source: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-video-game-console
The Kickstarter funding has already reached 25% of the $950,000 goal within a couple of hours… We can safely say the project will be funded.
Provided it is implemented, can OUYA shake the very foundations of the console industry? Could Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft suddenly face a dangerous competitor? It seems unlikely, but I am certainly excited about the possibilities. The latest trends in gaming clearly indicate that an “open” model is the way to go.
SEGA have announced that the release of the highly anticipated Phantasy Star Online 2 in Europe and North America will happen in 2013.
The game is already out in Japan and is accessible to everyone, including people living in the rest of the world, but those of us who do not want to bother with translation guides will have to wait a while for the English release Nevertheless, I am happy that the game was confirmed for the West at all, as there were some rumours floating around that it would remain Japanese-only.
As discussed earlier on “Between Life and Games”, unlike Phantasy Star Online: Blue Burst, the second installment of the PSO series will be free-to-play!
Some of the Phantasy Star Online 2 features:
Source: http://www.sega.com/news/?n=5722
I am happy with this news and cannot wait to recreate my FOnewearl and start her new adventure in PSO2!
This year’s E3 was spectacularly mediocre, what with many people expecting PS4/Xbox 720 to be unveiled, and they weren’t. Not even Nintendo managed to hype its upcoming Wii U console that well. Nevertheless, a lot of stuff still happened, many new games were shown, and a lot of new information regarding already announced games was revealed. Even if it didn’t meet our expectations, it was still E3… If you’re a gamer, it’s bound to excite you at least a little bit.
Here’s a summary of the happenings at the five major conferences (Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft, Sony, Nintendo), along with my comments. The items in bold are the biggest announcements each company made in the respective conference.
Some very interesting facts regarding Final Fantasy VII’s development process came up recently in the Japanese Weekly Famitsu magazine, as part of Final Fantasy VII’s 15th anniversary feature. Here’s the gist (beware of spoilers):
Source: http://andriasang.com/con11g/ffvii15/
These are all quite interesting. The sprites vs. polygons argument is visible in what Xenogears, the other big Square game developed in the same period, eventually became – visually, the opposite of FFVII – with sprites for the characters and 3D polygonal environments, as opposed to the polygonal characters in pre-rendered 2D environments seen in FFVII. Square obviously wanted to try the different styles and see which came out better. I’d say both were quite impressive in their own way.
An open beta of the highly anticipated third part of the Diablo series is coming up this weekend. People will be able to play with each of the five classes, with a level cap of 13. All you need for playing is a Battle.net account, and you can already download the client ahead of time here: https://us.battle.net/account/download/index.xml. The open beta will last From Friday, April 20th, at 21:01 CEST, until Monday, April 23rd, at 19:00 CEST.
Source: http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/blog/4105609/Diablo_III_Open_Beta_Weekend_-20_04_2012
I will probably give it a try, even though Saturday happens to be a workday here. It’s nice of Blizzard to give everyone a taste of the game before release. I had a reasonable amount of fun with Diablo II (though I never really got into the multiplayer), so I’m looking forward to the third installment.