That guy's a Maniac...

I like my Vita. Millions don't, hell even Sony Don't. But I have has a shit-ton of fun with it. It's hard to justify Investment in a system that wont be supported, but there is a lot of greatness on that system (if you like 100 hour long RPGS). Straight off the bat you have: Tales of Hearts Hyperdimension Neptunia  and its may sequels and spin-offs Akiba sTrip But Most importantly I am revisiting FFX-2 HD Remake, yeah that's right, not FFX, but FFX-2. Yeah that's right the one with the dresspheres! For the FFX remake, all Squeenix did was pretty it up a bit. But for FFX-2 they added new Dresspheres! They added a whole new Monster Arena thing, which I have spent far to many hours thoroughly enjoying. The whole thing is wrapped up in a touch of catharsisism for me the first time I played through FFX-2 I fucking loved it, I mean it's hella girly, however,,, I never hot 100% to unlock the final dressphere (Mascot), I fucking missed it by...

Alright troops! ohmygotlookapostaboutagamethatisnota3DStitle. Its back, FFXIII in its final (ha) form. Dropping the party based shenanigans, the game is all about controlling just Lightning, who is getting down, dirty and quite sexy with the badguys/monsters/Chocobos at the end of time. So this is the third installment of the FFXIII "Trilogy"... And well in my opinion a welcome addition the FFXIII mechanics have been refined, reinvented and remain familiar yet different. It strikes a wonderful balance and achieves something very few games sequels can do: it doesn't feel like you are starting off from scratch again, especially since you have over leveled your teams from the previous games. Lightning returns is odd, it a beautiful game and in this iteration you have a million costume options and all of them can be customized. I swear I have spent more of my time in-game pissing about in menus than running about in the over-world! The story has the usual ...

This is singlehandedly the best thing I have seen in at lease the past 4-5 hours! It's so beautiful, I cant help myself! Best use of Square artist's time Love and is singlehandedly a word? Richie X

So its back again a special Remuxed HD version on Steam. This will be the 3rd time I have "Bought" the game: Way back in the heady days of 1999 I went into a Virgin Megastore, I walked past the new fangled DVD's, muttered under my breath, "As if these will catch on". I carried on through the Videos, the VHS's the plethora of massive series Box Sets. I made my way to the escalator and Up to the CD's, rows upon rows of CD's, determining what area was what genre by the clothing of the figures flicking through them. Again another escalator, walking through the "Specialist" music section, folk, classical and Pan Pipes. To the darkened corner of the "Games Area" The most acne ridden of all the Virgin Megastore's clerks, reside here, disgruntled yet proud, with the word Virgin aptly stamped across their chest. There I saw FFVIII for the PC. Yes PC, and I genuinely bought it for the PC. My beloved PS1 had packed in no more than a f...

MCV reports that Nintendo will be shutting down several Wii online services . Our heart skipped a beat for a second thinking that maybe the plug had been pulled on Monster Hunter Tri or Mario Kart Wii and our hunter might be trapped in subexcellent armour or our online ranking on MK might be forever frozen at a measly 8500 points. Fortunately, for the meantime, these games aren't affected but come the 28th of June Nintendo, News, Weather, Everybody Votes and Mii Contest Channels will be mothballed forever. Also going is the ability to send messages on the Wii Message Board This illustrates something that really pisses us off about modern consoles; increasingly the console and games you buy are really just a license to use services until such time as the servers are unplugged.  Now most people probably won't mourn the loss of these services but as this series has shown we thought they were pretty great albeit underused service. We've had some hands on time with New Su...

So I just thousanded FFXIII-2. I had been apprehensive about this title as FFXIII was a little too long winded, especially at endgame, specifically because the final few achievements required 100+ hours and creating a spreadsheet to complete. FFXIII-2 however was a bit more fun to play. I took the plunge over the holidays as it was £9 brand new. The Good: A really fun storyline, jumping through different time periods, seeing how the events of FFXIII turned out and where they went.  An oddly pokemon type mechanic where you recruit and level monsters throughout time. Though some of the areas are reused from FFXIII it doesnt feel like it, as they have been redone with different time-period themes. Feels like a classic Sqeenix game, A touch of final fantasy mixed with Chrono trigger but with a sleek new façade.  The multiple "paradox" endings, where you can replay certain events and change their outcome. The Bad: An overly teenage angsty theme; the...

This time of year our better half will go into a torpor and if left uninterrupted will sleep forever. A physiology we took advantage of, not like that, to get a couple of hours of gaming in and finally saw the credits of The Last Story . Looking at the Nintendo Channel stats for this game our playtime of just under 41 hours was almost double the time that the 1753 other players (who have allowed Nintendo to publish their data) spent on this game.  Other lesser sites also reported a playtime of 20 hours. So what kept us? Well this is a head scratcher because unlike other RPGs, The Last Story does an excellent job of cutting out the obligatory filler content. There are only a dozen or so different dungeons. Armour comes in six different flavours and is easily upgraded without epic or repetitive quests for rare materials. We honestly just spent all that extra time taking in Lazulis City, a hub city, that's probably up there with the best game places to just spend time soaking...

More chatter about the Final Fantasy VII re-release. A few days ago some intrepids spotted squeenix had written a menu for what seemed like a FF7 remake, this however turned out to be simply a re-release, most likely a digital download for iPad or the like Now a few months back I mentioned bootleg from qhimm.com, it simply takes your original install of FF7 and updates music, graphics to make it much prettier to play (also you can add silly, but well thought out, mods like Aeris resurrection). Squeenix sa y: Optimized for PC – FINAL FANTASY VII has been updated to support the latest hardware and Windows Operating Systems. But will it be prettier, like will they optimise it for widescreen? will the models be updated? will it still have the terrible midi music when it can be replaced so easily with MP3s? That's the information, for some reason, I care about. Meh, I bet it doesn't. But then I suppose there is always the argument that it wouldn't be a "pure" re-...

We've only been playing Xenoblade Chronicles pretty much exclusively recently. Life gets in the way and the game that is perhaps best served in a long glass and supped over the course of a long evening is instead consumed like downing a can of red bull on the tube in the morning whilst tyring to read a newspaper with some sweaty office twat with his elbow in your balls. We also happen to be completionists so instead of skipping most of the optional quests that realistically wouldn't impact our game bar the loss of some EXP and the odd bit off gear, we literally can't skip a single one. WE PAID GOOD MONEY FOR THIS GAME WE'LL EXPERIENCE ALL OF IT. So with this background to consumption, we're finding playing Xenoblade Chronicles slipping from a fun game to a bit of a grind. Desperate to progress the story we keep spotting new NPC quests. You see the game has a day night cycle and the NPCs don't stand around like WoW pricks just giving you out quests. This ...

The other character is supposed to be Lightning from FFXIII but is pretty poor The Dragonborn looks the part though! And I love the arrow in the knee! Love and There should be a word to describe being bored and trawling though YouTube, Richie X

You know saying things are "like Marmite", is like Marmite you either love it or hate it. That's right there's no middle ground its black or white no shades of gray, no 6 out of 10's, its either 0 out of 10, or 10 out of 10! They are opposite ends of the spectrum, Violet and Red. missing out all the greens, blues, oranges and yellows in between. And Squaresoft are apparently the same, their games are either "teh SuXXorZ" or "Epic wins". After a slew of Epic wins: VII, VIII, IX, X, everything just seemed to go wrong for them, they made a very girly sequel to FFX, an expensive niche MMO (for PC AND consoles), a single player MMO at the end of a consoles lifecycle, and then XIII finally! After nearly 10 years since FFX, Square made an actual RPG where you level up your dudes and you know chocobos and stuff. But something was wrong... there was grumblings in the internet there was horrible talk of a 30 hour training section, but still we ...

I mentioned earlier in the year playing Ocarina Of Time in HD  And I have been, And also enjoying it! But over the holiday's I have been dabbling with other HD projects. Firstly after completing Skyrim at level 72 *Bragging rights* I had a been bitten by the Elder Scrolls bug and decided to have a looksee at Morrowind and the improvement Mods: As you can see it's very pretty, on top of this though there were mods to enhance the models, and the clothing and such, it was comparable, if not better than Oblivion Graphics. However the controls and interface were dire, I was hoping to approach it with the same controls as Oblivion/Skyrim. but it is really optimised for Keyboard and Mouse. Secondly, while playing Ocarina of Time I found myself feeling nostalgic, and remembered playing FF7 around the same time. So I decided to have a look into HD mods for FF7 (skip the intro): as you can see the silly models on the world have gone, in general most graph...

Well we've spent about 20 hours with Xenoblade Chronicles and overall we're enjoying it. First up is that you can download twelve tracks for free when you register the game with Nintendo which is nice. Something for nothing (well, for £40 but hey). Is it one of the best jRPGs or even RPGs of this generation as many reviews have been claiming? Possibly, but there are a few gripes even very early in. 1) Sound Bites. The noises that your party makes during battle get repetitive very quickly. They start repeating after about one battle. I'm sure that as the party expands you'll get to hear some more lines but how did nobody spot that it is irritating to hear the same phrases over and over again? It is grating and somewhat undermines the fiction of the game unless your characters are supposed to have short term memory loss or a total lack of imagination when it comes to battle cries. 2) TITS. Currently, the best armour for the female in the party seems to be a pair ...

I have had a recent campaign to "thousand" quite a few of the games on my 360 list. I have completed Dragon Age: Awakenings and the Expansions (1550 GP), along with a couple of other titles too (Nothing cheaty like Avatar or King Kong though). Rather dauntingly I decided to start up Final Fantasy XIII with intent of thousanding it, I've invested serious amounts time into previous Final fantasy games, why not do it with this one? Because endgame sucks... I have pretty much run out of things to do except grind... I have spend 60 hours on the game I have completed 62/64 missions ( I have decided to leave the remaining 2 missions until I fill out the crystarium AKA get to the maximum level) and well, if I complete mission 64 it makes the grinding process slower. So I'm sitting on 720 gamerpoints:  I'm missing 6 achievements *SPOILERS* Adamant will: Killed an Enemy that spawns after mission 64 Masters Seal: Maxed everyone's roles. Treasure H...