It’s been a pretty slow week (unless you’re a celebrity, holy crap. Stop dying. Seriously.) so I thought I’d poke around at a new platform I promised some review action on, the iPhone.

Besides the thing being a bastion of free entertainment, most of the quality games you have to pay for (and usually for good reason…usually) so I will try to focus on those.

There are two in particular that I purchased recently, and I think they are good candidates for some first impressions, so let’s just dive right in shall we?

Chronicles of Inotia: Legend of Feanor - Com2uS Corp. - $2.99

This is a very korean action rpg that plays kind of like a single-player MMORPG (if that makes any sense). You control a rather one-dimensional warrior who appears in a land inexplicibly and is soon told by nearby townspeople to find and kill things for them, awesome right? The interface is pretty smooth, you are basically on an implicit grid and you move and attack by tapping on spaces.

The good news about this game is that there is a lite version that will allow you to play through the first couple of quests, it was the perfect length because it made me want to buy the game (as any good demo should), but that may also be the game’s most evil element. This game isn’t very good, it gets very boring extremely quickly. The prices for equipment are downright ludicrous in proportion to the amount of gold you get on average per kill; in the first shop expect to see items for 6000g and in the first area, expect 10g or less per kill. The developers just didn’t care enough to scale the shops offerings to the level of the character it seems, they just made it all random.

Also, the drop rates on quest items is downright abysmal. One of the first quests asks you to get 3 magic dusts from monsters. It was a good while before I saw my first one, almost long enough for me to forget I even had the quest. But the other two dusts came in a somewhat timely manner. Later on, I was given a quest to enter a cave (which by the way is an outrageously deadly place in comparison to the difficulty of where you just came from, bad design) and collect 10 snake skins for some guy in the wilderness. It took me an hour to get one.

This is when I stopped playing.

Inotia plays a clever trick on you, making it seem really fun and exciting in the demo, but I would really not recommend falling into the trap and buying this game…it is horribly tedious and very sloppy. Hopefully they update it to make it a little more fun. Try the demo if you must, but know that you’re in for more of the same, and not much else, if you buy.

Underworlds - Pixel Mine - $2.99 (was on sale for $0.99 until recently)

Bad news, no free demo, good news, it’s a freaking dollar. (Price went back up to $2.99) I tried this game because I desperately wanted some kind of mobile Diablo on my phone, and holy wow if this isn’t the closest thing I’ve seen so far.

Underworlds, for the price, is absolutely fantastic. I would have willingly paid three or four times as much if I knew how great it was.

Your interface is very much like Diablo, you tap where you want to go, there is an action button to attack the nearest enemy or interact with nearby objects (or you can tap those too, but it can be sometimes imprecise, hence the action button)

As far as I have played so far, the game follows a pretty linear quest, but you seem to be able to restart with your stats and equipment (just like our favorite hack-and-slash) and there is a neat leaderboard feature that comes in the form of a seperate (but free) app.

I enjoy Underworlds a lot more than Chronicles of Inotia, their prices should be the other way around if you ask me. Underworlds does have some downsides though, comparing two items in your inventory can sometimes be clumsy as you have to select them one at a time. Also your inventory space is very limited. But really, that’s all I have to gripe about. The quests are well written, the gameplay is fun, I am getting everything I expected and much more from a game that only costs a dollar.

I was very impressed.

Have fun this week, if you don’t have an iPhone, these games work on iPod Touch as well, from what I understand. I wonder if Apple will ever formally come out with a proper gaming platform as a home console, they’ve got quite a handheld here in the iPhone/Touch.

If you’re a celebrity, try not to die. Honestly, five this month? I’m going to stop drinking the water.

Nippon Ichi Software has made some fantastic games, the best of which being the Disgaea series. When I heard they were making an action-platformer, starring the lovable Prinnies nonetheless, I was officially stoked.

I finally got around to playing “Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero?” for the PSP last week, in between playing Final Fantasy IV: The After Years and finally finishing the final dungeon Final Fantasy IV DS to see if there was any extra story content in there (there isn’t, but it is still a mighty fine game) and I have to say, I guess, that Prinny is a very good game– but I just don’t like it.

Perhaps that it was because I was expecting some more RPG elements in this game, coming from NIS of all places it wouldn’t be strange to see. But there really aren’t any. It’s just a very basic action platformer. You have a Prinny with 1000 lives (yes, a thousand) and a very simple objective of finding all the ingredients to the Ultra Dessert (which just so happens to contain just a random collection of foodstuffs) for Etna, because she is angry because somebody stole her regular dessert. You are given a time-limit and a scarf with makes you less likely to explode when looked at crossways.

I played through the first world and half of the second before losing interest. There just isn’t anything that exicting here; the story is cute and quite humorous of course (par for Disgaea), but the game itself is just…mundane.

The controls, first of all, feel a little stiff; you are able to double-jump but are otherwise incapable of changing direction in the air. Your attack on the ground (a short range sword) works fine and even though you can’t move and attack at the same time, it is manageable. But, if you try to attack in the air the camera will tilt slightly to the side and your attacks will awkwardly fire a projectle toward the ground while slightly pausing your fall. Apparently you can turn the camera-tilt off but it doesn’t make up for the frustration that can be attempting to attack an airborne enemy. There was really no reason to just make air attacks normal slashes like you would expect and have the character continue to decend to the ground as he performs them. It makes the game more difficult than it needs to be.

There is also a lot of ground-pounding involved which, if done upon a series of enemies in rapid succession, will fill up a combo guage which awards you points-awarding items and sometimes an extra scarf (treated like hearts, I suppose. You get three of them per life in normal mode) it doesn’t feel like it adds anything worthwhile to the game.

This is just a first impression, but really this is the hardest review I’ve really had to do. Most reviews of this game float around the B- to B+ range and I really don’t understand why. I didn’t find it particularly interesting or compelling at all, and it really only made me want to go play Disgaea instead. (Disgaea 2 is apparently coming soon to the PSP, I was happy to discover, however.)

Unless you absolutely, positively are infatuated with unnecessarily difficult platformer games that look modern and use dated gameplay styling but without any good feelings of nostalgia, I say skip this one.

Imagine my surprise, the other day walking through my local supermarket and seeing an Orc on the bottles of soda in the glass-front refridgerator in the checkout aisle.

Of course I bought some, who the hell do you think I am? Time for an unconventional product review! Come along, boys and girls!

Well, to my disappointment, Mtn Dew World of Warcraft Edition Game Fuel is neither Game, nor Fuel. Nor does it Fuel my Games, or play Games with my Fuel, or make any such conversion of Game-to-Fuel or vice-versa.

No, it’s ordinary soda. Very sugary, very caffeinated, very colored, very delicious, ordinary soda. WITH WORLD OF WARCRAFT ON TEH BOX! ZOMG!

ahem.

But it’s actually not that bad. Pretty good actually, I tried both flavors and the Alliance Blue tastes a lot like that Pepsi Blue that they had some five or six years ago, and the Horde Red tastes a bit like a Mountain Dew Code Red that an Orange may have had sex with or perhaps just felt-up a little bit.

My preference is the blue, (as is the Alliance, go figure) but as a gamer I was required to get a couple of bottles to sit atop my totem shelf to keep my vials of Mana and Health Energy Potions company. (The secondary market for these things is going to be sick once it’s gone forever.)

And before you all think I’m getting paid for this plug (I’m not…much to my disappointment. Oh God, I wish I was.) my true motivation is to direct you to the link in the picture above, it will take you to the Mountain Dew Game Fuel site (which contains only Montain Dew and no fuel, just to be clear) where you can sign up to win a lot of great World of Warcraft branded prizes, including gaming peripherals and Alienware computers. As with all sweepstakes in the United States, no purchase is necessary, just sign up and spend your “tokens” to enter. Free stuff, ladies and gents. It’s a pretty sweet deal.

It is to my understanding that the soda itself is a lot easier to find than the Pepsi and Mountain Dew Throwback that they may have hiding in some places (there’s another free plug for you Pepsico bums, pay me!) but run down the Soda aisle next time you’re out, look for the giant freaking orc on the box, it’s difficult to miss. Unless your checkout clerk thinks that it’s Shrek on the box…like mine did… (sigh)

(Of course the Alliance flavor is in a blue box with a Night Elf on it. Not an Orc. That would just be silly.)

Hello everyone, I’m back in town from my trip and it’s time to get back into the swing of things.

I’m sure everyone has been digesting and subsequently pants-shitting over all of the superb E3 announcements recently. I’ve taken a look at what the expo had to offer myself, and I must say I am pretty excited. So, like everyone else, I thought I’d so a little rundown of what we find to be the most exciting, but I’m going to go into a little more detail as to why these particular announcements are exciting, as a gamer; something that a lot of other sites are failing to do.

You may notice that this list does not contain Project Natal. Just to be clear, Natal looks amazing, it is probably the most exciting (and potentially terrifying) thing I have seen emerge from E3 this year. But alas, Natal, at this point, is a technology and not a game. When this tech becomes available, the games they could make for this thing would be pure nutballs, but until then, I have to keep it real and stick to the game announcements, since this isn’t really a tech site…not this week anyhow.

Oh, and as an added bonus, I’ll throw in a #1 turd award at the end, just for giggles.
So here’s G.U.’s top 5 schoolgirl-giggle-inducing announcements from E3!

#5 Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic [Online]
Anyone that knows me at all, or has read the site, ever, knows that I loves my WoW. I’ve tried a number of different MMOs (and heard countless horror stories about others)and nothing has really excited me or kept my attention as much as Warcraft has. But, that might change.
People like to talk about up and coming MMORPGs as potential WoW-killers, and rightfully so; Blizzard, with it’s 11 Million subscribers is the competition. Period. That’s it. But look at this trailer. Obviously it isn’t gameplay footage (so it lost points for that) but lets consider the facts, KotOR and its sequel were both amazing games. Bioware did an outstanding job with those games and from what I understand, the same folks are responsible for this new MMO. But the setting is the best part, the lore in, say, Star Wars Galaxies was painted into such a corner that a fun game was pretty much impossible (as evidenced by the game’s collossal failure) with an inherent shortage of Jedi in the game’s universe, and players who by and large aren’t going to want to be anything else, you need an environment with a reason to have soo many of them running around. Knights of the Old Republic is just that. And if the gameplay is anywhere near as fun as the Xbox games were, and if the other classes were nearly as fun of a diversion from the typical “OMG LETS ALL BE JEDI” mentality, this game is going to be a hit.

Be assured that I will be trying this game; of anything on the horizon, it has the best chance of making me stop playing WoW…at least for a while.

#4 Metroid : Other M
At the risk of being sacriligeous, if Jesus was a Ninja and immaculately impregnated Metroid, this would probably be the resulting child. Team Ninja of Ninja Gaiden fame has teamed up with Nintendo to make the game that Devil May Cry wanted to be.
I’ll be the first to admit that I thought Metroid Prime was pretty cool… Metroid Prime 2 was pretty monotonous, and Metroid Prime 3 had awesome controls but still felt like just another of the same game. I never really felt comfortable with an FPS Metroid, even though the result was cool, I still pined for the 2D platforming action with 3D graphics and elements thrown in. This game looks like it’s going to hit the mark pretty close, with mostly third-person views, the trailer makes it feel like Next-Gen Zelda, Mario, and Metroid all got together at a meeting called by Ninja Gaiden who said “Ok, you three. We’re going to try something new, it’s called ’stop sucking’. We’re going to take some of the best elements from all three of you and make a game out of it that also feels a bit like me. Sexy, sexy me. And if you don’t like it, I will stab you.”

I’m pretty sure that’s how it went down.

#3 Super Mario Galaxy 2
Speaking of Mario and the new “stop sucking” campaign, this is also pretty thrilling. For the first time ever, I feel like Nintendo is actually listening to the fans. We said “Yes. More of this.” and Nintendo replied “Ok. More of this you will have.”
Many fans described Super Mario Galaxy, in looks and feel, as the Next-Gen Super Mario Bros. 3. Super Mario 1 was awesome (So was Mario 64), Super Mario 2 was strange and didn’t really feel like Mario, but looked like Mario (So did Super Mario Bros 2 USA, later did we realize it wasn’t the real deal), and then Super Mario Bros 3 blew your face off with the best Mario game ever (and Super Mario Galaxy definitely did the same thing with the 3D Mario games)

All I can say is, given the previous analogy, Super Mario Galaxy 2 most definitely looks like the 3D era’s Super Mario World. And that’s not just because I see Yoshi in there. It looks good.

#2 New Super Mario Bros. Wii
Ever since New Super Mario Bros. came out of the Nintendo DS, I, and others, have been clamoring for more games like it. It’s a perfect fixture for the platform and gives that perfect satisfying crunch for the classic Mario flair. Although this isn’t New Super Mario Bros. 2 we’ve been wanting, I can confidently say that yes, this is most assuredly the next best thing…perhaps even better. A new 2D platforming Mario game is always welcome, but wait, 4 player simulataneous cooperative action? Consider my mind blown.

I can not wait to play this game.

#1 Left 4 Dead 2
As the numbers dwindle down to number 1 I see the amount of text I require to support the selection is also dwindling. So let’s just take a monent to consider how unbelievably awesome Left 4 Dead still is, and how brilliant it is in it’s simplicity and fun.

Now let’s watch the trailer.

Oh yeah…that’s the stuff. Chainsaws and Axes, as an addition to this game, are hereby endorsed.

And the #1 Turd-in-disguise of E3: Final Fantasy XIV
When I saw the trailer for Final Fantasy XIII I was actually pretty excited, it actually reminded me of Final Fantasy VII and how exciting it was to see the series refreshed in such a great way. After VII, performance began to slip; a little with VIII, a lot with IX, but it came back a bit with X, and then plummeted with X-2 and XI and XII. This series has become so schizophrenic and detached from what it originally was, it’s sickening. (And that’s saying a lot, considering the series’ installments were meant to be loosely connected by design, really only a few gameplay elements are supposed to be tying them together, and even that idea has completely gone to hell)

Okay, let’s hypothetically go back in time; so they want to make a Final Fantasy MMO, great idea, I wanted it myself once. First of all, what do we call it? Final Fantasy X was the last game, so let’s call it Final Fantasy XI right? WRONG. You call it Final Fantasy Online. There’s a reason Final Fantasy Mystic Quest and Crystal Chronicles weren’t numbered installments, the reason was that they were drastically different games. Why would they cock up their entire franchise like that? Which is not even considering that the game itself was cludgy and was a complete abortion in terms of both fun and faithfulness to the source material, especially at release. It feels like they just made it up as they went along. How many versions did it take for Chocobos to appear? That is pretty much the primary staple that connects Final Fantasy games together, how could you possibly give this a number and then add them as an afterthought? It doesn’t make sense and is a complete design failure.

Well, “Time flows like a river, and history repeats.” right, Square?

Their new MMO has been given what looks to be the same treatment, a numbered title which does not belong, and a completely underwhelming game universe.

When given the thought of an MMO, I would have much rather seen something that really stuck to the original SNES-era type games in spirit, not this. Knowing how well they did against World of Warcraft you would think they would try for something a little more along the lines of a quasi-futuristic Final Fantasy VII type world, considering the success of that game it would fit the “financial logic” requirement to the formula. Right?

I can only say that I hope I’m wrong. I literally just buried my face in my hands with shame when I saw this trailer. I was that disappointed.

I hope you’re all enjoying your E3 coverage, which can be found, well, everywhere. I’m not there, so I am going to talk about something different for now! (Yes, I am posting a lot! I will be out of state for five days starting friday so I’m getting lots of stuff out of the way now)

Anyway, I spent some time with Final Fantasy IV: The After Years last night, a good couple of hours actually. And I think it’s enough to write a First Impressions review for all of you.

First of all, if you’ve never played and finished Final Fantasy IV, you should probably do that first. You can get it on the Gameboy Advance or Nintendo DS pretty easily, and it’s worth the time. You can still play The After Years, I suppose. But I think a lot of content would just be lost, or you probably just wouldn’t enjoy it for what it is supposed to be.

That said, I will report that I find this game to be rather satisfying. The art is still largely faithful to the original, with the addition of using larger character sprites for the overworld, that is to say, the same ones used in battle; not unlike Final Fantasy VI’s use of the same spriteset for battles and overworlds. It allows the characters a lot more expression and looks a lot better than compacting  the characters to halfsize just to wander the world, so that’s a plus.

The story so far is also interesting, there is something of a tutorial mission which is rather boring but things get exciting and rather ominous after the first half hour or so. To the game’s discredit, it wastes no time in abusing some classic RPG cliches very early on. Perhaps this was intentional to keep the feeling of a truly classic jRPG experience, I am not sure. But I facepalmed within the first thirty minutes, and that didn’t bode well to me at first, but things got better.

The game adds two very new and distinct features that were not in the orignal game though, the first; called the Band system, works something like the Dual and Triple Techs from Chrono Trigger, you can select a Band command in battle and up to two other characters to try and find Bands with, if the characters have any kind of connection, there will usually be one to be found. If you selected the right commands to search for bands in (like Cecil’s attack and Rosa’s White Magic) you will get a holy strike attack for extra damage. It’s pretty neat and gives you something to do in random encounters to break the tedium.

The other new feature is one that I find to be largely disappointing. Every time you use a Tent or the Inn, the phase of the moon will change. There are four phases, Full, Waning, New, and Waxing. Each phase has an effect on your Melee attacks, White Magic, Black Magic, and or Items(or thrown weapons possibly, the icon used is vague) anyway, during each phase one of those four action categories will have double strength, and another will have half strength. You can check to see what is affected by the current phase from the menu at any time, also the actions themselves are color coded in battles to remind you. But the effects take place on both you and all enemies. So if you’re dealing doublt damage with physical attacks, so are all of the monsters. I wouldn’t be so upset about it, because at first I thought it was kind of neat, but upon further contemplation I found that all it really did was make me not want to use Tents inside dungeons, because I knew the next phase would either eliminate a bonus that I needed, or give the monsters a bonus I didn’t want them to have. So really it just means carry lots of tents so you can use four at once (waste of time) or not use them at all (sometimes dangerous). If they wanted to do something like this, they should have used actual elapsed time instead of Inn/Tent use, it’s just an inconvenience that is exploitable if you have the patience, creates unnecessary breaks in the gameplay, and/or just spoils a lot of the fun.

All in all though, the feeling of Final Fantasy IV is preserved, the music is mostly the same (slightly remixed if my hearing is correct) and much of the game world looks the same in layout as it did on the SNES, and any deviations (at least the ones that I have seen so far) are explained. The experience is just “right”, and if you grew up on these early Final Fantasies (IV was actually my first) then you are in for a treat.

I am still eager to keep playing this game, and will probably do so some more later this evening. Apparently the game is episodic as well, there is an option that I can see to purchase “Rydia’s story”, whatever that is, I am not sure yet. I’m sure I will get into that after I complete this first story.

Final Verdict: If you played FFIV, you really should play this if you enjoyed it. If not, then you probably won’t ‘get’ it. (also, why haven’t you played FFIV yet?)
Good stuff.

In something of an experiment, this week I’m going to do a little rundown of a whole bunch of smaller things that I found out about this week for you all, let me know if it works.

Despite certain misgivings between my own personal feelings and Square Enix, Final Fantasy IV: The After Years goes live today, and I am still excited about the release and will definitely be playing it. Expect a full review when my eyes stop bleeding, because I will be playing it until either it, or I, submits to the will of Zeromus.

On a related note, the aforementioned Chrono Trigger Fan-Sequel that received a most unjust (to put it lightly) Cease and Desist order, has been leaked. Well, kind of.

Reports of an early Beta version have surfaced, for those who are just plain angry about Squeenix quashing this piece of hard work and fine art, it may be worth dealing with all the bugs. The post in the link says that it is the 98% complete, but this is not true, as the author points out in an addendum to their own post… Unfortunate, but not a total loss. Read about that and download the rom patch HERE.

Third on our list of micro-articles, I would like you all to direct your attention to a display of pure awesome, dripping with sexy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiwQtSx6zHw

Go ahead, we’ll wait.

Now to crush your dreams, not unlike my own. What you just saw was apparently not a demo for an actual game, but rather more of a “Concept Video” from an animator as an art project. At least, this is what is largely speculated at this time. Capcom, from what I understand, is pretty chill about fan projects like this, as long as you aren’t completely vulgar and don’t insult Capcom or the source material, they don’t typically have problems with fan projects that remain free.

Knowing this, and the fact that people are going completely nutballs over this video, hopefully means that someone will pick it up and turn it into a game. Ideally, Capcom should contact that guy (his email is right there in the video!!) and strike a deal, fast. That could seriously be the best Mega Man game since 2.

Well, that’s all I have for now, I have a Final Fantasy to play.  I hope you all have a great week.

This year, I wanted to cover Blizzcon 2009 for our readers as our first convention covered as a gaming news site. A few weeks ago, I wrote Blizzard regarding the issue of press passes because of the massive hassle that buying tickets is; for those who don’t know, Blizzard opens up a certain amount available at a certain time, and then a flood of buyers begins, clogging the site, being thrown into a queue where people are allowed to buy up to 5 tickets, for $125 USD a pop.

Truthfully, that is probably the fairest way to do it. There’s really no way to stop the poopsockers that are going to hammer the site and use as many relative’s addresses as possible to resell the tickets on eBay as greedily as the internet allows, but what can I do about it, right?

But after the first wave of tickets, two weeks ago, sold out before Dragonkitty could even get to position 3000 in the queue, I finally got an email back from Blizzard about the possibility of those press passes, which I was willing to buy, for the purpose of event coverage.

The email, from the random rep it was sent to–who shall remain nameless (you’re welcome), basically amounted to “I don’t know. I’ll forward this to somebody who might know. Maybe they’ll do something.” Of course I never heard anything back after that. (Surprise)

But, victory today! We managed to get some tickets the mundane way with the batch that went on sale today. I don’t know if I will be able to negotiate any special reporter priveleges, but we will keep you posted.

We’ll figure out how to make real-time posts from the event, probably using our iPhones. But this is pretty exciting, stay tuned, I guaruntee we’ll be finding things that the others are going to miss. It’s kind of what I do.

Stick around for BlizzCon coverage, 2009!

You know what…I take back the nice things I said yesterday about SquareEnix.

You should read this.

First of all, Happy Memorial Day, I hope everyone has been enjoying their day off (if you got one)

But uh, did you know about this? What the hell? I completely missed this announcement, and if you remember one of my very first reviews you know that Final Fantasy IV is one of my favorite jRPGs of all time.

Out of the blue, it seems, they’ve decided to make a direct sequel to this fantastic game, and release it on WiiWare. Apparently it has already been released in Japan (like everything else that’s cool in gaming, it feels like) on Cell phones, something SquareEnix has been doing more and more lately (also only in Japan, mostly)

This is an excellent announcement and very exciting. I can’t wait to play this, because it is being drawn in the original Super Famicom/SNES pixel style which I love very much.

Rest assured I will be reviewing this game fully as soon as I possibly can.

Read more about the game, affectionately titled The After Years, releasing June 1st, 2009, right here.

After months of being harassed by friends and colleagues alike for desiring more than my terrible MotoQ smartphone, which was the first hardware version, which crashed constantly, and ran almost none of the awesome stuff I expected it to, I was hardpressed to find a device that satisfied my desires, but didn’t make me one of those ‘bandwagon mac fruits’.

I’ve used Apple products before, I have a justifiable preference for the Windows platform as a Gamer, and I have owned iPods previously, so I am aware of the quality that goes into their products, even though they tend to be outlandishly overpriced.

I took a look at a whole lot of phones over last week. Played with a lot that I really, really liked, like the Google phone a.k.a. Android a.k.a. HTC which, in my opinion with it’s touchscreen AND actual slide-out keypad, AND trackball, AND expandable storage, is a superior device from a hardware standpoint.

Yet, I left the mall last week with an iPhone.

Well, in addition to all the free crap the guy threw in for me to buy an iPhone for myself and another for my wife, with a 2 year contract, with AT&T (which I wasn’t originally too thrilled about) what really caught my attention is what everybody is really buzzing about.

The app store.

The sheer amount of FREE you can get in the Apple App Store for these devices is rectum-clinching. A lot of it is garbage, but there’s plenty of solid gold. Lite versions of awesome games like Wolfenstein 3d and Crystal Defenders are just ready to be played.

There are enough great games on this thing to keep me plenty busy and enough for me to really treat this like a platform. I may find the hardware to be disappointing and underutilized (severely) but the software potential is excellent. And I believe I will be writing about it more in the future. I may also look into developing for this platform myself, more on that later.

Full reviews of iPhone software coming soon, right now, this is my favorite 5-minutes-to-waste game: Kingdoms Live, a pseudo-MMORPG that plays like many webgames out on the internet.