[Gironika]

So! A train is leaving from Point A at 05.30 pm and is travelling with a constant speed of 98.7 km/h.
Its destination is Point M. What will you do when you arrive?



You can TELL that
a.) something's wrong with this video! The loveless advert can be seen WAY TOO LATE and that should be a MOTORBIKE that crosses the street from left to right, not a CAR!!!111!1!1!!
b.) it's this time of the year again!







Welcome to Midgard


You are an EX-soldier and you have a pointy hairdo. Your sword is suspiciously long, kinda like you need to … compensate for something? …… Anyway, it is time to offer your SOUL to the one-and-only company that manages to get such a devotion (and, foremost, your money). Join Shinra or hang out in the gold saucer, leave Aeris for Zack or get some hot datin' action going w/ Gackt a Vampire. Go and be BOLD (and blocky)!



For those who are new (seriously, is there someone <that> new around here?), in the last episode

• we talked about how FFX was Bioshock before Bioshock happened
  
• some of us watched a RadRacer longplay
  
• we had some excellent 8bit Tile-Talk from Takashi
  
• I kicked asses in sleeping dogz
  
• and we guessed why the yet-to-be-announced FFXIII Accent Core Agito Hyper TURBO Championship RR++ International Zodiac Edition didn't materialize
  

In the mean time, FFXIII Agito became FFXV all of a sudden, FFXIII-3 was released and a lot of people (bravely) defaulted on their loans. Ah, Kingdom Hearts HD and FFX HD remakes were released, almost forgot about these! And due to two nice chaps, I now have Star Ocean 2,3 and VP on my SQEX-Stack/Backlog. Thanks alot again from here!

Sooo~~~
get your makopads, Hairspray Queens and Chocobo-Jackets in place and play to your hearts content. Post, share, think about a Square, Enix, SQEX, Eidos or Taito game. Celebrate the best seven days of the year together with like-minded fools that just cannot stop believing in MAKO™ - Shinraenix wants you do that, too.
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[Gironika]

What did the Killer most likely come here for? … uh, idk, to kill someone?
And if you are looking for lead, watch your back, maa~aan …



Looks like it'll be fun - even if it might end up being more comedy-ish than it should be.
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[chevluh]

[cake]

This is probably the first squenix week in which i'm actually playing something by Square-Enix. Only it's Just Cause 2, so i don't think that really counts. I wouldn't like this game at all if you described it to me, as i'm spending my time killing soldiers, destroying infrastructure and finding not-that-hidden packages. None of those things are particularly fun but moving about is, in part due to the grappling hook/parachute combo. You always have that available, so you never get stuck having to walk anywhere. Some of the vehicles are fun to use as well - the fastest bike is keen to throw you off and tends to explode easily, so it's somewhat rewarding to ride at speed, and a few of the planes have enough agility at slow speeds to make low flying fairly easy.

Every settlement has it's own completion percentage, so it's easy for me to play for 20 minutes and feel like i've made progress (even if i'm being fooled by aimless numbers-go-up). I got the game cheap for the (somewhat over-hyped) multiplayer mod but i think i've had more fun playing on my own.

[CubaLibre]

Every time I hear about Final Fantasy I wonder when they're going to make a game out of that crazy half-FF half-CoD engine demo video they made for that one E3 a couple years back.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[Gironika]

[Gironika]

in other news, Tomb Raider.





still on the fence whether it is a glorious or shameful trainwreck, but a trainwreck it will be.
It ticks all the boxes you need in order to pay homage to Indy Jones or trashy action adventure flicks.
[x] Stormy-Night-on-Boat-scene
[x] cheap foreshadowing here and there
[x] "i'm the professor and I know what I'm doing!" character that has no idea what he's doing
[x] searching for giant enemy crab battles which took actually took place in ancient japan lost civilization
[x] oh no! emergency landfall on island!
[x] WW2-plane hanging 'round in trees for about 60 years
[x] yaddayadda i don't wanna be the star of this game! No i don't kill!
[x] anti-heroine headshots next four wolves spawning out of nowhere around a cursed(?) bridge, or why would it spawn a pair of doggies?
[x] burning village? russians? cannibals? hello????
………… and I haven't spent more than five-ish hours in the game, I think? This game goes places, and it does so quickly.


One of the few things that annoy me to the end so far is the fucking useless usage of QTEs.
Oh, and its oh-so-clever subtle hand-holding by showing you what you <could> do, yet the game is forcing you to do exactly the one thing the developers wanted you to do, because … they can! e.g.: Kill some guys w/ silent-kill-mode in a small house ……… but if you want to headshot your way out? Well, these four guys can suddenly make the whole place burn in 20ish seconds with a handful arrows. Or they kill you with two or three shots. Go and f···* yourself, yeah.











*: find
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[chevluh]

[| BLUE | BLACK | PURPLE |]

Groan i should probably finally play one of the Batman games and Modern Warfare 2, just to, you know... I don't know

I can't play Dog Days anymore because this graphics card can't handle it

I would love to play more than the first two levels of Guardian of Light! I think that will still run and I'd be down for co-op! However, this week is the worst possible one for that... Next week I could do it though so if anybody is thinking of playing this game: don't you dare play it alone!

I'd really like to watch an hour of a Dragon Quest X let's play from someone who speaks English and Japanese

I might emulate Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2 and fool around with that for old times sake

[parker]

relay this message to square enix




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[Brooks]

Christ that game had the best PR hustle I can recall

[CubaLibre]

A great game with even greater marketing. I don't know that I can say that about any other game.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[Dark Age Iron Savior]

[Gironika]

So is the SS-wishbone a japanese joke or did they shorten "Suspension System wishbone" by chance?






In other (Lara Croft-related) news, now I am trying to rescue a backpack from wolves.
This game makes things sound so wonderful b-movie-esque … if only it would go for it all the way and be a trashy Indiana Jones b-ripoff.
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[CONSUME_PRODUCTS]

i've been playing an hour or two a night of ffx hd this past week or so

and uh

yeah, worse than xiii i reckon, how did it avoid the same ire?

[CubaLibre]

People actually like FF10. That fact has always been completely incomprehensible to me. People say they like seeing the order of people in battle, which is like, fair enough I guess, but it's such a tiny evolution relative to how much of an ugly screaming mess the whole thing is that I can't see that tree for the forest.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[Broco]

The other thing about FFX is just how graphically impressive it was in 2001. It delivered this huge bombastic graphical experience and that smoothed over a lot of flaws. Like FFVII it towered over the competition in technical achievement, whereas FFXIII failed to do so.

[Iacus]

The battle system in FFX is pretty ok, without all the insultingly nonsensical plot and dialogue that XIII has.

People DO hate FFX-2, though for reasons I fail to comprehend, as the battle system is, ostensibly, superior and more fun than FFX, and it's not bogged down with having to be a mainline FF title and touch al the post-7 Final Fantasy staples. I guess it's because it's percieved to be "too girlish"?
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Guayaba 2600

[Loki Laufeyson]

my friend actually said to me the other day that he bought ffx2 just to play more blitzball and hated it because it was so girly
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http://lunaticobscurity.blogspot.com/ - newest post: Snezhaja Koroleva (Arcade)
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[Iacus]

I think the only blitzball I ever played in the entirety of X was that one mandatory sequence.
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Guayaba 2600

[shnozlak]

Does FF10 ever explain why the blitz ballers are able to swim like dolphins?
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Mixtapes galore ~ VG MUSIC
ᕦ(ò_óˇ)ᕤ http://phantom-photon.tumblr.com/

[Iacus]

To me they look like they just swim like people trained to swim fast.
The more puzzling question is how they can hold their breath underwater for a whole match.

It's possible that some NPC explains that blitzball fields don't actually use water, but some sort of lower density fluid or similar technobabble. It's been a while.
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Guayaba 2600

[rye]

[tacotaskforce]

[BenoitRen]

[Broco]

[Loki Laufeyson]

i'm no fan of ffvii, but you can't deny that the backgrounds still look great (i know pre-rendered is cheating, but still), and who doesn't love a bit of gouraud shading?
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[BenoitRen]

Here are some games that looked better in 1997:

• Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
  
• Panzer Dragoon
  
• Panzer Dragoon Zwei
  
• Soul Blade
  
• Tekken 2
  
• Thunder Force V (Saturn version was released in 1997)
  
• Tomb Raider II
  
• Wipeout 2097

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Get Xenoblade Chronicles!

[Broco]

For the fighters, racers and plane simulators in that list, none of those genres have to render as many things as an RPG, so they naturally have higher fidelity. SotN is 2d and because of the general excitement around 3d in that era, most people at the time thought it looked lame (only in hindsight does it look great). Panzer Dragoon was only released on Saturn which seems to be somewhat more powerful than the PS1, and that system flopped so few people made the comparison. Finally, Tomb Raider II looks about the same quality as FFVII to me if not worse, and it's certainly lacking in whizbang magic attacks and so forth.

[shnozlak]

[Dark Age Iron Savior]

the most important thing re:FF7's graphics was that they allowed for characters to have more elaborate animations and movement routines than the wagging finger from FF6. Most people saying the graphics were bad just remember little blocky people waving their stump arms up by their head, completely forgetting how much the storytelling was aided by the effort put into each scene.

A classic example of this is the scene where Don Corneo picks a character, from Cloud's head turn to the party members putting their feet on the bed one-by-one.
In retrospect, there really wasn't anything else like it at the time, I'm pretty sure...

[diplo]

[CONSUME_PRODUCTS]

the straight-line map & awful minigames you're forced to engage with (for tens of hours if you want to do the postgame, i gather) are most offensive

the newly translated ffx-2 roguelike is pretty nice at least

[parker]

I liked the straight line map
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[diplo]

Surely in the minority here, but I never had a burning desire to explore in FF games. Movement was robotic, geography was mostly uninteresting, and I usually wasn't in the mood for putting myself in the face of more random battles. I just wanted some semblance of place with shortly diverging or looping routes here and there for treasure, and that's basically what FF10 is.

I dunno what minigames you're referring to.

The puzzle temples are dumb.

Wait -- are you talking about 10 or 13?

[Loki Laufeyson]

[Gironika]

re FFX: one shouldn't forget that it did a lot of things - GFX-wise - that other RPGs didn't do at the time, albeit a typical sign of a launch game, namely showing off technical proficiency (re new hardware). It does some unusual/interesting things with light, camera angles and space - you can tell that the devs were trying all the things you could now do.

If they <should> have done these things - well, that is an entirely different question.






in other SQEX-news, I'll wrap my recap up when I'm back home.
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[tacotaskforce]

[Loki Laufeyson]

aw, it's not available seperately? that's a shame
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[Gironika]

soo ~~~ back at home, time to wrap up #7.

So!
I have been back at my parents place for the last three days of the week, and no access to TRaider. Nevertheless, I progressed to the bit where you can see the communication tower. After saving the bagpack, I burned down a village, killed lots of people and started collecting junk to magically improve my weapons. So far, this game has been … let's just say …… fun. This picture created by a resident SB poster sums up this game perfectly. Much obliged!

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