Twitter really is a wonderful thing. Even if you don’t actively participate in it or the crazy “social network” created from it, at least you can enjoy the interesting bits of information (or drama) that come from its 140-character postings.
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Category: Video Games
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BioWare Giving Female Shepard Some Time In The Spotlight
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Final Fantasy Type-0 Still Looks Good
Yes, alright – there’s a lot of reasons we can ridicule Square Enix these days. A lot. One thing you can’t say, however, is that the folks at SE don’t know how to make them some PSP games. Title after title, the publisher continues to release titles for Sony’s handheld that seem able to do things graphically the hardware was never, ever meant to do.
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Atlus Announces Persona 2: Innocent Sin for North America
Over on NeoGAF, member creid noticed something strange about the Atlus Faithful email newsletter he received today: it has a most peculiar date.
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Delicious Catherine Cosplay
Why does it seem like I’m always so drawn to the female characters that Atlus produces?
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The Hotties of Gekkoukan High
There are many interesting aspects of Persona 3 Portable – the PlayStation Portable port of Atlus’s mega-popular JRPG – but one of the ones I’ve noticed so far has to do with the faculty of Gekkoukan High. See, in the original Persona 3, most of the teachers didn’t actually have any portrait art. In the switch to P3P – where most backgrounds are flat and no longer feature polygonal characters – the teachers all received portrait art.
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Shin Megami Tensei: Persona
In 1988, I played a relatively unknown Master System RPG titled Phantasy Star, and it forever changed me as a fan of video games. Then, eight years later, another Japan-born role-playing romp would come along and leave an equally impactful mark on my life; the similarly obscure Atlus release Revelations: Persona.
Phantasy Star taught me that I loved JRPGs; Persona taught me what I wanted from them.
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Love Doesn’t Have to Be a Four-Letter Word
Rachel Shepard–the particular Commander Shepard that inhabits the world of Mass Effect which finds itself brought to life every time my Xbox 360 powers up as of late–seems well on her way in her quest to romance her teammate Garrus Vakarian. I have to admit: her interest in Garrus has come as a bit of a surprise to me.
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Kenka Bancho: Badass Rumble
Yankii (or, depending on how you romanize it, “yankee”): A slang term sometimes used for Americans outside of the States, and people from the Northern U.S. by, well, us Yankees. It has also, however, come to be a nickname for delinquent youth in Japan, specifically those that skip school, get in fights, don’t care about social norms, and do such unspeakable things as dying their hair to a color other than black.
What is it about this lifestyle that is so interesting, and at times almost romanticized, as we might do here in the West with the “greaser” subculture from the 1950’s? Whatever it is, there’s no denying it: the life of a yankii is a whirlwind of adventure and excitement.
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The Wizard of Oz: Beyond the Yellow Brick Road
There were countless reasons why I loved the last great hardware effort from Sega (the Dreamcast, of course), but somewhere at the top of that list was the overall wonder I felt at the system’s game library. It was the console that, for me, made gaming fun again, as it seemed developers Japanese and Western alike took chances on ideas that they might not have attempted elsewhere. It isn’t to say that every Dreamcast project was totally unique and groundbreaking, but there was this overall sense of creativity that seemed to re-assure games that it was okay to try new things and dare to be different. It was the world were Jet Set Radio, Seaman, Napple Tale, and Shenmue were the norm, not the niche; a world that I came to love living in.
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Half-Minute Hero
When 2009 comes to a close and we look back to reflect on the year now behind us, a countless amount of lists will emerge that attempt to run down, in order, the “best” or “worst” of varies things over that past year. This will, of course, also happen in our little video game industry, and while not all of the nominations or winners may yet be clear, it isn’t hard to make an educated guess (or two) at what may be up for awards.
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