Grand Theft Auto IV -- Initial Impression.

And we have the big one, Grand Theft Auto IV. I'll be playing the game on the Xbox 360. Why? Because the controller is superior to the DualShock 3 in my opinion. Secondly, no forced install, no matter how small it may be. Third, the exclusive download content that's coming down the road. And fourth, and most importantly, everyone I know who I'd actually want to play the multiplayer with is getting the Xbox 360 version. What am I expecting with Grand Theft Auto IV? In all honesty, I'm expecting Grand Theft Auto and everything that name has come signify. That means all the awesome chaotic fun and the sometimes witty satire. I'm expecting all of the over the top everything that makes the series what it is. I'm also expecting a truly good looking game. I'm expecting great voice work. I'm expecting an entertaining story. But on the other hand, I'm also expecting everything else the series is known for. A mess of glitches and technical issues. Rockstar has always been greatly ambitious. Some would argue overly so. With Rockstar's grand ambition have always come the pains of technical and programming shortcomings. And I don't expect this one to be any different. The question becomes where do you mark the balance? When does the good outweigh the bad or vice versa? We'll see how it all balances out in the end.

Mario Kart Wii -- Initial Impression.

So we're on to another entry in one of Nintendo's more prominent series, Mario Kart Wii. The series got started on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and has seen subsequent iterations on pretty much everything that followed. We've seen it on the Nintendo 64, Game Boy Advance, Gamecube, and the Nintendo DS. Now the Wii gets a turn. Mario Kart Wii comes with the Wii Wheel, a molded plastic steering wheel in which you place the Wii Remote. From what I've played of the game thus far it seems the wheel is actually quite functional. More than I was expecting it to be in fact. I'm expecting some good racing action with the typical item induced chaos. I'm expecting bright and cheerful Nintendo graphics. I'm expecting overly happy Nintendo music. I'm hoping for a decent online experience.

Phantasy Star Universe -- Maximum Attack G.

So Maximum Attack G has hit Phantasy Star Universe. Maximum Attack G is essentially the same classic Maximum Attack event that's been in every iteration of Phantasy Star Online. It's a communal event wherein you'll be tasked with killing as many enemies as possible along the way of collecting weapons badges. The kill counts go toward the communal rewards. The weapons badges can be traded for fabulous individual prizes. During the month long event the experience rate and drop rate have both been boosted to two-hundred and fifty percent of normal. That's going to allow Riddel to catch up in levels from the three months she was absent from the game as Magus and I are both at the level cap of one-hundred and thirty. We've already unlocked the communal rewards at ten and twenty million kills, two weeks of megaholy luck and a ten percent synthesize rate bonus. Maximum Attack G has a few wrinkles to differentiate it from previous Maximum Attack events. The full course of Maximum Attack G has to be unlocked. This event is in celebration of the twentieth anniversary of Phantasy Star and to reflect that the course is made up of revised versions of the Phantasy Star Online four original levels. The forest, caves, and mines are open from the start. The ruins, and the boss battle have to be unlocked based on the kill count. There are also a couple of individual contests based on your best time and the one with the highest kill count. So far Maximum Attack G is proving to be great fun. A lot of that is due to the pure nostalgia of the Phantasy Star Online aspects, the music especially. And the desire to unlock the ruins, just because the forest, caves, and mines have been so cool. It's going to be an interesting balancing act we're going to have to pull off trying to spread our collective online time through Phantasy Star Universe, Mario Kart Wii, and the monstrously looming Grand Theft Auto IV.

The Saga Of the Metal Gear Online Premiere beta.

Konami has been bitch-slapped by the realities of getting online. Probably almost as bad as Nintendo and Smash Bros. Brawl. It's going to be a tough time for a lot of Japanese developers as they attempt to catch up to the rest of the world as far as online gaming is concerned. But the ordeal of the beta actually begins a bit further back in time. It starts with the announcement of the collector's edition of Metal Gear Solid 4 and the announcement of the Metal Gear Online Premiere beta promotion. Simple plan really, walk into any GameStop and put down your money for Metal Gear Solid 4 and get your Metal Gear Saga Vol. 2 disc which contains the access key to the Metal Gear Online Premiere beta. Only Metal Gear fans are rather rabid regarding Metal Gear and Konami is notoriously stingy with their limited editions and promo items. And the first bit of confusion arose and set the gaming section of the Internet on fire. What about those who've already reserved a copy? What about those reserving the standard edition? What about the limited edition? My GameStop hasn't heard of the promo DVD! Oh my god! Oh no! Oh no! What about those who've ordered online? Will someone please think of the children?! People were freaking out left and right on message boards all over the Internet. I personally ordered the game online. So GameStop didn't get around to sending my copy of the DVD until this last Thursday. It arrived today, the day the beta was supposed to begin. Konami being a Japanese company rather new to the whole online thing has sort of gone about things in a decidedly stupid fashion. First of all, everyone with a PlayStation 3 and an Internet connection has a PlayStation Network ID. It's Sony's version of the Gamertag, you know, the overriding single bit of identification so you can play your PlayStation 3 games online and buy things from the PlayStation Store. Well, that's not good enough for Konami as they've decided to ditch that entirely. No, they want to do it all themselves. So in the Metal Gear Saga Vol. 2 case there is an insert with your access code for the beta. Now get this, some of those codes are only nine of the required twelve digits. Yeah, another smooth move from Konami. So people have been having to email Konami with the codes to get working ones. Some people have done this without issue. Other people have found themselves seemingly ignored. Once you've gotten yourcode, you go into the Account Management section of the PS3's Cross Media Bar, or XMB for short. In there you'll find Manage Account Transaction, and within there is the redeem code option. Entering the code allows you to download the Metal Gear Online Premiere beta client. My code was twelve digits, luckily. No problems with the download. Just slow. No big deal. So after the beta is installed on the HDD after the download, you can start it up. Starting the beta will bring you to a screen where you'll be told there is an update available for the beta. Lovely. You're able to actually select to download the update from Konami's HTML source which they discourage with a warning about the more users attempting to download the slower it'll go or from a torrent client. Torrents on the PS3, will wonders never cease? And where are all those morons who were screaming 'it's not a console it's a PC!' over the original Xbox? I went with the torrent option. Mainly because it was promised to be quicker, and because torrents are entirely peer to peer. So I was more than a tad worried after the nightmare of getting Brawl online. It found other users almost instantly after giving you options turning on UPnP and selecting which ports to use and setting a limit to your upload speed if so desired. I just left everything as is. Lucky me. I averaged downloading from fifteen users and uploading to ten. It wasn't exactly fast, but it worked. So after the update patch is installed you're prompted to use the PlayStation button and quit out of the game and reload it. Doing that brings you back to where it'll check for updates, and once it sees you're running version 1.01 you're able to go to the next screen. Now it tells you you'll need to create a Konami ID to be able to play any Konami games online. This has been known for a while now, a bit over a week. So I was able to eventually get my Konami ID created using my PC a few days before. But again Konami dropped the ball. Going to Konami's ID site to create a Konami ID should be a rather simple process, I mean that's not too much to expect, is it? No, of course not. But get this. Upon starting the ID creation process on the slowly crawling site you're prompted to enter your birth date, and your language. No big deal. Only Konami literally gives you like six seconds to get this done. If you're too late you'll get an error message about due to a period of inactivity the form has been reset. So, after racing through page one the next time around and clicking next in time, you're brought to the terms of service page. We've all seen these. Yeah we agree. No we're going to read all this legal mumbo-jumbo. But since the site is crawling along, if you click agree before the terms have fully loaded you've screwed yourself and are sent back to the beginning.  On to page three. This is the heart of the whole thing. This is where you give them your name and email and create your Konami ID and password and what's this? I need to create a Game ID and password for that too? PlayStation Network ID, Konami ID, and Game ID to play this thing? Whatever Konami, jeez. So the IDs have to be all lower case, so many letters long, and the passwords all have to be this specific way. Great. Now I have to create these stupid ID names because none of my regulars fit the silly criteria. So after you get this all done, which would take a normal person a minute or more you'll find yourself getting that same inactivity error if you didn't enter them in like six seconds again. What the hell, Konami? Luckily there is a plug-in for Firefox that essentially lets you automatically fill specific online forms. You just go to some page, enter all the values at your leisure and click save. Next around on that page you'll find those values loaded. Okay, great, we're by the six seconds retardation and we can finally get this done. Now what the hell is this shit? What do you mean my ID name is invalid, how can my email already be in use? Go to hell Konami. So we try again and again and again. And after about the fifth time it goes through for me. And I'm one of the lucky ones. People were trying for hours over days and days of this crap. My confirmation email arrives in mere seconds. A lot of people don't receive a confirmation email at all and have to go through a whole other set of hurdles to get it to arrive. So now I just have to paste this confirmation URL into the browser and one click and I'm done. Except now I'm getting an error message from this. Fuck off Konami, fuck off. After four or five attempts I have success. I'm set up. Now I just need to plug in my Game ID into the client on the PS3 and I'll be playing. Except Konami has delayed the start of the beta because they've admittedly found themselves unprepared for the worldwide traffic for the beta. No fucking kidding Konami.  So now we'll try our luck Friday. All I really wanted was something to kill the time before Maximum Attack G starts, which happens to be Friday. Which would take me into Mario Kart Wii and into Grand Theft Auto IV and into a solid month of gaming. But it's not to be it seems. So I'll be trying to keep myself from climbing the walls as I not start anything as I await the tidal wave of gaming that's about to hit.

Shining Force: The Legacy of Great Intention -- Final Opinion.

The end credits have rolled on Shining Force. The game is as charming and fun today as it originally was fifteen years ago. Climax Entertainment's Shining games all feature the same basic art style, although it might vary from title to title slightly. It's a bright and colorful and an especially distinct art style among Japanese developers. I absolutely adore it. The game features beautiful albeit simple overworld and battle background art. The town graphics are the very definition of simple and clean. The characters animate well in the battle cutscenes. The story is straightforward and simply told, and the game is better off for it. No stupid plot twists or overwrought drama to be found here. The music, especially in the battles, is exceptionally catchy in a dramatic film score kind of way. It's very operatic in nature. I'm giving Shining Force: The Legacy of Great Intention, the second time around, a 9. Now if SEGA and Nintendo would be so kind and get the superior Shining Force 2 up on the Virtual Console, I'd be ever so grateful. By the way, my final Shining Force was composed of Max (the hero), Tao, Gort, Diane, Zylo, Kokichi, Guntz, Domingo, Torasu, Lyle, Hanzou, and Musashi.

Shining Force -- Initial Impression.

After the debacle of Rogue Galaxy and with a mere two weeks before Mario Kart Wii, Grand Theft Auto IV, and Maximum Attack G invades PSU I'm going to be just playing it safe and killing time. I'm going to do that with Shining Force for the Genesis via the Wii's Virtual Console. Shining Force is a true classic strategy RPG. Long before they were all the rage with Final Fantasy Tactics and Fire Emblem and numerous other titles of recent years there was Shining Force. I haven't played this version of the title since it originally hit the Genesis in March of 1993. Speaking of titles, Shining Force has my all-time favorite subtitle for a video game, Shining Force: The Legacy of Great Intention. Shining Force was developed by Climax Entertainment of Shining in the Darkness and Landstalker fame. Like those two titles before it, Shining Force is full of charm and character. As well as rock solid gameplay. This time around, no matter how hard the temptation to do otherwise, I'm going to play through the game using different characters than I did originally.

Rogue Galaxy -- Moot.

It's been a while since I've updated. I've spent roughly twenty hours with Rogue Galaxy and I believe I'm done. I'm not going to be finishing the game. I'm finding it to be the very definition of tedious. The rate of combat is far too high and the dungeons crawl on forever in my opinion. The constant micro management of items and special moves in combat further adds to the tedium. The character progression system and the weapon upgrading and the factory sub-quests are also just too involved for their own good and also fall  under the heading of tedious. The story hasn't really grabbed me either. Jaster Rogue just seems to be along for the ride and the story comes from the characters he meets along the way. Which is how most RPGs work and is fine in and of itself. The problem comes in how the game just seems to barely connect the bits of story. It's almost like an anthology more than a cohesive single story. It also doesn't help that it's all just very weird. From the characters to the art design. It's all a big mismatch of styles and concepts that just don't mesh well in the end. Rogue Galaxy is very much like Level-5's Dark Cloud, in that its ideas are sound and its ambition is grand but it just doesn't have that needed polish to rise above the tediousness. It also shows that Level-5 is like raw talent that just can't seem to get it right without a guiding hand, like that of Yuji Horii. Oh well, you win some, you lose some. What can you do? I'll consider this one a loss and move on to something else.

Rogue's Galaxy -- Initial Impression.

Since I have roughly a month to kill, and that being a lot of time, I'm going to tackle another RPG for my next game. I'll be playing Rogue's Galaxy for the PlayStation 2, as always, via the PlayStation 3. Rogue's Galaxy is an action RPG developed by Level-5. You might know Level-5 from their PlayStation 2 efforts of Dark Cloud, and Dark Cloud 2. And of course Level-5 was handpicked by Yuji Horii to develop the fabulous Dragon Quest VIII under the supervision of his company Armor Project. They've also got their hand in the Professor Layton trilogy, and the upcoming Dragon Quest IX for the Nintendo DS. And they've got White Knight Chronicles in development for the PlayStation 3. Based on my time with Rogue's Galaxy, I'm not entirely sure what to expect. I do know there's an action battle system that pauses for menu navigation and the like. The controls feel a little floaty to me at the moment. But that might just be me being behind the learning curve. So far the game seems pretty enough. Great celshading in the characters. The voice work also seems like it's going to be better than average. Hopefully there is a great tale of adventure waiting to be found with fun gameplay and characters that aren't bogged down in existentialism. Of course time reveals all...

Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime -- Final Opinion.

Fourteen hours later and the credits roll on the adventure that was Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime. The game is a comic lighthearted romp of a kid's game. The graphics are great. They are brightly colored and cleanly drawn in a way fitting of the Dragon Quest world. The controls work flawlessly, as they should with the game only ever using a couple buttons. The sound and music are both befitting the Dragon Quest name. There are a fair amount of new tracks mixed in with the classic Dragon Quest fanfare as well as select tracks from Dragon Quest VIII. The story is minimal at best. I don't think I've ever seen a game with more puns. In fact that's pretty much all you get as far as story goes. Just joke after joke in pun form. And more than a few references to Dragon Quest VIII. It's all about the action and exploration and very mild puzzles. And of course, the real star of the show, the tank battles. I enjoyed the game for what it is. Enjoy the lighthearted fun of it all as a kid again. Just don't expect much more beyond that. I'm giving Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime for the Nintendo DS an 8.