The Hidden Lyrics to the Megaman 3 theme
I never knew that the Megaman 3 theme had lyrics, but it seems like an observant user has uncovered them. They seem a little bit… self promotional…
“Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood” Pre-release rundown
I’m not sure what to think about BioWare and Segas new attempt to refresh the long suffering Sonic franchise. The two companies are responsible for some quality games. BioWares Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic is not only the best Star Wars game made to date (I’m expecting Force Unleashed to knock KOTOR off its throne) but one of the best American Role Playing Games in recent years. But can they do the same with Sonic?
Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood begins while our hero is on vacation after defeating Eggman (Dr. Robotnik for those stubborn readers who grew up with Sonic) when he hears from Tails that Knunkles has been kidnapped and the Chaos Emeralds are disappearing. The game is divided into two parts. The first half happening in Sonics world and the second happening in a different dimension where Sonic must take on a mysterious alien race.
The gameplay is standard RPG fair with enemies appearing on the world map and turn based encounters are activated by walking into them. Special moves are activated my giving special touch combinations with the stylus. Some of these special moves will require certain characters in your party, one such move is called “Blue Bomber” and requires Sonic and Tails in the active party.
The premise and the game itself seem to be fairly solid at this point, of course we won’t really know what to expect until someone plays it. But at this point in the development stage, only a few weeks from going gold, we’re looking at a fun adventure RPG featuring the Sonic characters. Probably nothing that will revolutionize the genre or redeem Sonics past few years of mediocrity, but a solid game none-the-less.
The points I’m worried about is use of Sonic in a turn based game. Sonic games have always been about speed. Not about killing enemies, not about collecting rings, and not about how many wacky side characters Sega can introduce. The games were about speed. How fast you can think while zooming though the levels was the element in the original games. Adding a turn based RPG into this franchise will probably not work for the fans who enjoyed the gameplay of the classics.
The other factor that has me worried about this game are the use of all the Sonic side characters in the game. These side characters have never really been embraced by the fans of Sonic games and were never counted as a strong point in the series. The last Sonic game I played, Sonic Rush for the DS, had some many characters that I didn’t know of it just left me bewildered and confused. Sticking with the dream team of Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles might have been a much better choice in order to craft a solid story. But we have yet to find out if for once these characters add something to a Sonic game instead of taking away. They haven’t worked in Sonics favor so far, I don’t know how Sega plans on changing that.
I’m excited and worried at the same time. The combination of BioWare and Sega is either going to be a stunning success of fall into the muck of gaming history with the rest of the Sonic games that came out in the past fifteen years. I hope it succeeds, and I hope it will be good enough to take it’s place among the classic Sonic games. Mario RPG managed to do it, why not Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood?
Some interesting links and video about this upcoming game:
Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood Wikipedia entry
E3 2008 Director Interview via Gametrailers
The Mario Scarf, level one
There are very few things in this world that would get me interested in Knitting, but one of them is video games! Cassie started a blog dedicated to her goal of knitting all of the first level of Mario into a single scarf.
Check out her blog to follow the progress up to the scarfs completion: The Mario Scarf Blog
E3 is officially dead
Two weeks out of E3 I feel like I need to say something. Years ago E3 was the big event for gamers. I remember fondly back to E3 2005 where the PlayStation 3 became official, Spore was announced, the glamour was at it’s high, and Epics new graphics engine was demonstrated. Now that E3 has been hacked to bits and turned from the industry’s largest trade show into a giant press conference where absolutely nothing is exciting anymore. It is possible that this year is a bit of a transition year. The seventh generation consoles starting to seriously establish themselves as opposed to being new. But that is only one thing that lowers the impact that a large Video Game trade show. This is the year that software should be coming out to impress the fanboys and convince those of us who have held back from picking between Microsoft and Sony to finally decide. What we got was a mess.
This year almost no new game was announced at E3, no game changing announcements were made, and nothing was really accomplished that couldn’t have been done if each of the big three simply hosted their own small press conferences instead of having to drag all of their staff and equipment to this so called “trade show”.
Nintendo announced Animal Crossing, Sony Announced DC Universe Online, Microsoft announced nothing… who cares? The show was mainly made up of companies showing off new footage or featuring playable demos of games that were announced months (or in the case of Spore years) ago. There is no reason to treat E3 2008 as a special event, it’s just a mess of small updates to a couple dozen upcoming games.
One of the most insane examples is from the latest installment of the Total War series, Empire: Total War. It has been one of my favorite franchises for years now. Total War games have had the same basic game since Rome: Total War. The new edition sets the game in the age where Europe was building Empires across the world. Navel battles have been expanded to be as in depth and complex as land battles. At E3 they showed off… a navel battle. A feature we already knew was going to be in the game. Things got a little more detailed on the way the navel battles were going to look but nothing substantial was gained that Total War couldn’t have done in a press release, or in a new trailer. This is the kind of silly announcements that plagued E3, to the point where I just stopped caring after day two.
E3 used to be important. But if it continues to be anything like this year than it will stop being important. It’ll just become a hassle. The industry is going to have to take a step back and look really hard at this years E3 and made a decision if next year will even be worth anyone’s time. Maybe 2008 was just a stale year for announcements. Maybe because of the constant blog coverage these announcements just fell flat for me but would have been exciting for someone who doesn’t constantly watch gaming blogs. I’m underwhelmed, I’m frustrated. E3 used to be something special, not an excuse to show off games we already know were coming.
I’m not the only one who feels this way, nor are any of my comments original when you look at the great sigh of disappointment that happened after the dust settled on E3. If I was there I’m sure it would have been exciting. The stars of The Totally Rad Show seemed like they had a blast. But as a lonely second rate Blogger I don’t have any hope of gaining a ticket to the show. There is no reason why anyone who wasn’t there to play with these long awaited titles to be excited about E3. It’s an excuse to allow the press access to games that won’t be seen any time soon. An insider trade show where consumers no longer wanted.
The Wii Laser Sword add-on nobody wants
Unfortunately the malefactors of useless wii-mote add-ons aren’t getting the hint that nobody wants to add more bulk to their controller. The entire point of the Wii’s controller is that it can be used on anything, completely adapting to any game. These cheap pieces of plastic only cheapen that experience.
The Wii Laser Sword has two modes, continuous light or motion detection. Making Subsonic the first company that has not only has succeeded in creating a useless Wii add-on, but has found a way for the Wii to suck down more batteries in any given afternoon.
Cryptic Studios announce Star Trek Online
An on going countdown timer on Cryptic Studios website ran down this morning and in it’s place was the official announcement of Star Trek Online, the long awaited MMO. Star Trek Online has been passed between several developers and many fans have given up hope that the concept would ever see the light of day.
Although there have been several leaks of the announcement thanks to the Las Vegas Star Trek convention and Cryptic’s own job posting, speculation is over and we can now await without fear for our turn on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.
CRYPTIC STUDIOS LICENSES RIGHTS TO PRODUCE STAR TREK ONLINE
Trek Fans Worldwide Are Invited to MMO Gamplay Reveal at Annual Star Trek Convention August 10, 2008 or Via Live Webcast at http://www.startrekonline.com/
Los Gatos, Calif. – Cryptic Studios™, a leading developer and publisher of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), announced today that it has secured the global rights to develop and publish Star Trek® Online, a massively multiplayer online game based on the legendary Star Trek franchise, from CBS Consumer Products.
Cryptic will unveil the first Star Trek Online gameplay footage as well as details about this highly anticipated MMO at the annual Star Trek Convention in Las Vegas on Sunday, August 10, 2008. Trek fans from around the globe can also view the event live via webcast at http://www.startrekonline.com/.
Interested participants can register today for the Star Trek Online webcast and to sign up for the STO community by visiting http://www.startrekonline.com/.
The exciting part is that I will be at the Star Trek Convention in Las Vegas in August 10th, 2008. Look forward to a blog post live from the big reveal.
Penny Arcade + Fallout 3 = Post-Apocalyptic hilarity
Fallout 3, the long anticipated post-apocalyptic role-playing game (I love putting those words together) by Bethesda is only months away and in order to generate even more hype (if there were possible) they have contracted Gabe and Tycho of Penny Arcade to write a series of comics. What is the series of comics about? They are about a man locked in a fault… with a crate full of puppets.
Final Fantasy 13 Trailer
A long awaited trailer for the next game in the legendary Final Fantasy series has arrived at E3. Although most of the trailer is prerendered the gameplay footage soon looks very good. The most impressive being the detailed backgrounds shown at the end. Water has traditionally been used to show off the power of a graphics engine and the waterfalls here give just a hint a hint at the power of Crystal Tools.
Let’s avoid the ugliness of Square deciding to port the game to the xBox360. I’ll handle that in a later post if I stop frothing at the mouth.
DVD playing Wii delayed again
Since the release of Nintendo’s popular console, the Wii, one of the chief complaints has been lack of DVD playback. The first console to support DVD playback was the Playstation 2 back when it was released in 2000 and many gamers believe that it’s unacceptable that Nintendo doesn’t include the ability to play back DVD movies in their new on. Well, those waiting for DVD playback will have to wait a bit longer. Satoru Iwata told stockholders that they will continue to focus on the current model of the console since they are still having problems keeping up with demand. Why spend time and money to develop and produce a new model when they can’t even produce enough of the old one? Nintendo won’t be losing sleep over complaints of DVD playback.
DragonBall Z: Burst Limit recreates internet meme….. poorly
Everyone who was an anime fan in the early 2000s was a Dragon Ball Z fan. It was unavoidable. We really didn’t have anything better from Japan to watch on TV. About two years ago Kajetokun became “internet famous” by turning a 15 second clip from the show into an internet meme that now has over 3,675,855…. way over 9000.
Original Meme
Dragonball Z: Burst Limit is a new fighting game that has a story mode which attempts to recreate the long tedious scenes from Dragonball Z. Now instead of waiting three episodes before you watch a fight, you need to wait three episodes before playing out the fight in the video game. They failed to get the original, or even second voice actors from the DragonBall Z Anime. Which ends up ruining the already butchered English dialogue that we all know and love. It just lacks the passion that the original actors put into it!
Dragonball Z: Burst Limit scene
Thanks to Destructoid for the video
