Will be away for a week plus. Originally I planned to have some auto-posts up but The Last Remnant decided that it deserves more attention … so yea …

Hopefully this vacation can get more gaming out of the way (like the ever hanging Gears of War 2). This is going to be the 3rd time I’m restarting the game from scratch, since the previous two session I played were on different Xbox 360s.

I pre-ordered the Street Fighter IV Fightpad before it goes out of stock. Better not risk having the game on launch day but no gamepad. We all know how sucky those official Xbox controllers are for games like these.

Checkout this post to find out more about the Fightpads and Fightsticks from Mad Catz.

You probably have read reviews or heard from others about how bad this game ran on the Xbox 360. No doubt the technical issues surrounding The Last Remnant makes you wonder … how did it manage to pass Square-Enix’s QC? (Quality Control). When I was battling against a monster that does an area effect damage, the frame-rate barely made it beyond the 10 figure. Texture pop-ins are another obvious issue.

Can we safely conclude that this game sucks and toss it in the trash? Nope.

Despite all the technical hoo hahs about this game, I actually enjoyed playing it. It was far better than what I have expected, especially after reading online reviews. At the time of posting I nearly reached the end of 1st disc, completing about half of the sidequests.

So what aspect of this game did I find interesting / good?

Battle System / Gameplay
Huge battles consisting of 20 (or more) characters on screen. Instead of commanding one-to-one like in other JRPGs, you get to control a Union, which is literally an army up to 5 people. Each Union share one lifebar and the same commands. In other words, everyone in that union will execute the same command given and wipes out if its lifebar is depleted.

Music
The music is just spectacular and memorable. Nothing short of what I would expect from Square-Enix.

Graphics
Putting the technical flaws aside, The Last Remnant actually looked pretty good on the Unreal 3 engine. Plenty of details on both the characters and environments.

That’s about it for the good points.
Now for the low blows …

Lag and Texture Pop-Ins
This is the main problem that hinders the gameplay from the very start. Installing the game on the Xbox360 hard disk minimizes the issues but not entirely.

Customization
Only Rush’s equipment can be customized and that is also on a fairly low level; just weapons and two accessories. They could at least allow us to customize the general’s equipements. Too restricted.

Animation
Some parts of the game the animation looked good (e.g. Emma’s battle cutscene) but most of the time, the character’s animation seemed robotic and unnatural.

Lack of Hot Looking Babes

Overall I would give The Last Remnant the green light. Like everyone else, I was disgusted to see how bad the game ran when I started playing, but now it’s almost non-existence (in other words I gotten used to it). However whether or not its tolerable to others is beyond my judgement.

Your call.

Street Fighter IV is coming to the consoles a lot sooner than I thought. Having just released on the arcades last year, I was expecting more of a mid 2009 release date.

With just one month to go, quite a number of Street Fighter IV gamepads and arcade joysticks surfaced, especially from Mad Catz. Let’s check out these gears.

The Street Fighter IV FightStick Tournament Edition for both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3

This is one joystick to drool over, and the one to buy if you are thinking of going serious with Street Fighter IV. It is the first to use the same japanese style ball-handled joystick and 30 mm action buttons, similar to the ones found on the official arcade cabinet of Street Fighter IV. Coupled with the exact layout, you can’t get any more serious than this.

For more casual gamers, there are also basic FightSticks as well as Fightpads for both consoles. I myself would probably pick up the latter as I sucked so bad with joysticks. Available Fightpads are Chun-Li, Ryu, Ken, Akuma and Blanka. Pretty awesome looking.

Hori will also be releasing their own Street Fighter IV arcade joysticks for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

With all the available peripherals, we are definitely ready to take on Street Fighter IV.

Time to get those quarter circle moves in motion folks!

Just finished one game of Street Fighter IV at the arcades. Damn can’t wait for the console releases. Not too long from now.