Things I Would've Posted Saturday...... if people read f13 on weekends.
The voice cast for Yakuza (Rya Ga Gotoku) [PS2] has been announced: Mark Hamill, Rachel Leigh Cook, Eliza Dushku, Michael Madsen, and the most important one - Michael Rosenbaum. I already expected this game to kick ass and now I actually have a little faith in the English language track.
Tomb Raider is getting a 10th anniversary release. I don't know what company celebrates two decent games and 4 shitty ones (was it 4? 5? 3? whatever), but apparently Eidos felt the need to grace us with yet another Lara Croft title. It's coming out later this year. Meh.
Apparently Club.Nintendo (the Japanese trade-in points for objects thing) has some amazing shit up for "purchase." This includes, but is not limited to a Game & Watch collection (with some of the best cover art ever), Mario bookends (for DS games) and a DS case with a rainbow colored assortment of stylii for the DS.
Consider America robbed.
Over at the only .biz people have ever bothered to read, they have a pretty neat post-mortem on the reviews Atlus read of their game Steambot Chronicles. [
link] My opinion? Well, it seems that game reviews and magazines are getting worse and worse. It's not because there's no fresh faces (and when there are, they usually suck) but rather some sort of legit mag epidemic that's sweeping through the industry. It's as if the magazines assign games that don't quite fit a genre to either whoever will take it or the token reviewer for that genre. There's really no win-win situation here. Having read a good ten or twenty reviews of Steambot, I can confidently say that the majority of people who were playing it had no goddamn clue what was going on. I can see how that would be a problem. The game treats you like an adult and expects you to make choices like an adult. Most gamers haven't hit that level of maturity. For the most part it felt looser than the other notable sandboxes (GTA, etc) but felt a little more streamlined. You always knew what you needed to do to advance, but the entire experience was pretty cathartic. It resulted in a sort of lethargic gameplay you don't see very often.
Maybe I should explain that since I never got around to reviewing Steambot Chronicles after I started my new job. Steambot Chronicles is a relaxing game (Atlus, forgive me for that). You have a very obvious set of goals which will advance the storyline and a very obvious set of main characters with whom you interact on a daily basis (as the game does have a sort of day/night system). But at no point does the game say, "OK - you've dicked around enough, it's time to play the damned game already!" It just lets you keep doing what you're doing (with a few necessary exceptions in the first half of the game while the world is still being set up for you).
While Atlus may have been OK with the press coverage received by the game, it obviously wasn't enough. No one really knows what's going on with it. Go ahead, scour the web. Short of the usual suspects, the vast majority of magazines and websites had a preview or two and maybe a video, but none really delved into what the game was about. I'd be more inclined after playing it to classify it with games like Harvest Moon, Lost in Blue, River King and such before I'd classify it with your traditional action RPG.
It's a masterful game, and people will look back on it fondly no matter how the reviewers treated it. But as I've already said:
You Stay Classy, Games Journalism.
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