Man oh man I have no idea where to start … To be honest I didn’t expect to see it on shelves today but fate brought us ‘together’. I ended up walking away with a fresh copy of Street Fighter IV for the Xbox 360. Last copy too.

I quickly hurried home, fired up the Xbox 360 and loaded the game.  My hands were actually shaking while the game starts … way too excited. Some call this ‘Joygasm’?

This is just a quick impression post. I only spend about 30 minutes on the game before going off. A full review will come as I proceed further.

Intro : The same opening as the ones posted on the internet with the opening song sang in english.  The singers sounded pretty similar to its Japanese counterpart. Overall it sounded good.

Graphics : The graphics looked better than the one I saw in arcades. Better in the sense that its sharper and less pixelated. Guess Capcom did some touch-ups before pushing them to home consoles.

Controls : I was shocked to find out that the game actually perform pretty well on the default Xbox 360 controller. I had no difficulty pulling off fireballs, dragon punches,  and super combos. My expection was to be totally flunked with the controls. Guess this will last me until I get my hands on Mad Catz Fightpad.

LIVE : If you play Street Fighter IV, you will DEFINITELY want to be on LIVE. Capcom has implemented a system where if you are connected on LIVE, you can enable a setting that allows anyone to battle with you when you are on Arcade Mode, just like in the real arcades.  I had two players engaged me in battle during my 30 minutes play-off. Overall it’s smooth and almost lag free.

Bottom line … this is the epic game of the year.

*goes back to playing Street Fighter IV*

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.

Neko recently purchased Wipeout HD from PlayStation Store and we gave it a spin last Monday. First impression? Wow!

The game is everything I would expect of a Wipeout game and more.  Having played on a 4 : 3 ratio using component cables, I didn’t expect much from the graphics. Man, was I wrong. The graphics were absolutely fantastic, mesmerizing. I can’t imagine how good the game will look like if we ran it on full HD 1080p resolution.

Music from the game is top-notched, although I’m sure it will be promptly replaced by your own. Like Pulse, Wipeout HD also supports external music (mp3 format) which is placed inside the HDD. Changing the music is a bit tedious as you have to access the ‘Audio’ option each time. Bad implementation if you ask me. They should just allow you to change the music the moment you hit the pause button instead of navigating through menus. A ‘rotation of songs’ options would be a big welcome as well.

Overall the game plays exactly the same as its PSP counterpart, with the exception of Zone races. Not much in terms of gameplay but I like the way how the tracks turn different colors as you hit different zone levels. At the side you see a ‘speedo meter’ lookalike that shows which zone you are at now, along with the help of an announcer. Simple yet interesting touches.

Here are some of the minor bad parts about Wipeout HD. Apart from the music problem mentioned above, it was sad to see that Elimination type races has been omitted from HD. It was great fun playing it on Pulse, so kinda wonder why they took it out. AI and the learning curve could have ease up a little. Normally things start to get nasty after the 4th grid. For HD, 2nd grid was enough to make you replay the same race over and over again to hit gold medal (Skilled setting).

Get past these minor setbacks and its all good.

Final comment : A must have for any PlayStation 3 owners who is in need of a good racing game. Then again racing enthusiast would probably have gotten the game aeons ago.

A few of days ago, a team of independent game developers contacted me via email to announce their free 3D game called Picture For Truth. You play as a foreign journalist who is out to save his friend who was “silenced” from reporting and publishing articles about China’s human rights violation. This is what I call a serious game tackling real life sensitive issues.

Upon running the game, the first thing that caught me by surprise is the 3D environment. I was expecting the usual 3D graphics from today’s games but it was interesting to see it in cel-shaded style. The artwork is pretty good and has an original feel in it. It’s just a bit of a disappointment to see the game in just black and white. Some colors combined with the cool artwork would definitely spice things up.

Your primary role as a journalist here is to walk around, interact with the characters, take some photos and publish the articles for the world to see. The game is pretty short so I wouldn’t go too much into elaborating them. You just have to try it out yourself. It has some pretty interesting concepts which sparked my interest as a future game developer (hopefully haha). First and foremost, I definitely want to try and implement a photo snapshot mechanism, where the camera is able to detect certain things in the environment (Fatal Frame anyone?).

As I go through the game, I noticed some minor flaws within. Due to its black and white environment, it is hard to distinguish the areas that are considered contaminated (it looks pretty clean to me). Taking photos containing key areas (e.g prisoner) will earn you points, which will unlock some small upgrades. At times, some of the photos you take will show a key area (marked with a circle), yet all you see is a blank wall. There is also a bug present in the game, where it hangs the controls once you select the memory stick upgrade.

The aim of Picture for Truth is to expose to the general public bout the issues of human rights in China. If you kept up with the news, you will understand how heat up the issue is, especially with the Beijing Olympics coming close. The game does a good job tackling key matters which some of us might not have noticed is happening. As you might ask, all the areas and characters present are fictional.

It’s good to see a game that is fun to play yet brings about real world issues that needs to be addressed.

You can download the game free from their official website.

Everyone of any importance is in this image. And I mean everyone.

Everything Nomura touches seems to turn into gold and The World Ends With You is no exception. Excellent character design (although Neku looks a hell lot like Sora), intuitive gameplay, plenty of mini-games and side quests to keep yourself busy and an unpredictable plot. If I were to explain the plot, you will find it extremely confusing since the plot appears to be contradicting itself at every turn. It’s so full of twist that even a pretzel looks straight in comparison. Finish the game, think about it and get back to me. You will know I’m right.

You would think he’s yawning. I know otherwise

Here’s an example: The game lasts for 7 days. Your partner, Shiki, stays with you for the entire 7 days duration of the game, from start to finish. But she will only be with you for less than half the game. Confusing? This is just the tip of the iceberg, and is the only example I can think of right now without spoiling any other parts of the game. Everything will make perfect sense once you’ve played the game.

While the main plot is quite linear and there’s really no way for you to get lost, there are actually a few alternatives on how you want to take the side story on. There are plenty of side stories where you can choose to help others out and help them make decisions on what they should do. These usually have less restrictions and have more open ended results based on the choices you made.

You’re controlling BOTH screens at once. Kool, eh?

The gameplay itself is fresh and something new. Like Phantom Hourglass and Ninja Gaiden, The World Ends With You relies very heavily on stylus. But the twist here is, you can actually make use of the D-Pad and buttons to take control of the battle that’s happening on the upper screen simultaneously. Talk about multitasking – it’s no easy feat for sure and most of the time you’re forced to concentrate on either one while blindly spamming buttons or sliding your stylus around like mad.

Another unique feature of this game is you can adjust the difficulty level on the fly. Some items can only be dropped from noises (enemies in TWEWY are called noise) with specific difficulty level. You can also set handicap on yourself by lowering your level and stats in order to get better drops.

Everything in the game revolves around pins. Your attacks and abilities mostly comes from the pin you are wearing. Different pin have different ways to activate, such as the Pyrokinses pin (the first attack pin you receive) which allows you to create fire along the path drawn by your stylus.

Other pins requires you to drag obstacles, tap on enemies, slashing enemies and a variety of other ways to activate the pins using just your stylus. It might sound confusing at first, but it’s very intuitive and you will be able to pick it up in no time. Fortunately, you will be given practice battles if the game requires you to learn more complicated moves or combos, so you can take your time to test and play around before you face an actual battle.

This would be the perfect image if Shiki were in it…

The light sounding BGM’s doesn’t really stand out during the game and blends in perfectly with the mood and situation that you might not even realize it’s there. It’s really not a bad thing since it just results in a better flow of the game. That’s not to say the BGM is poor and forgettable, since it’s really quite good. It’s just that the game itself seems to have the music volume down lower than the voice and special effects audio in order to allow players to absorb all the small details you would normally miss due to noise (pun intended).

The in-game graphics is nothing to shout about since all the characters are rendered with sprites and look extremely pixelated when brought up close to the front of the screen. But Shibuya itself and during character interactions where “pop-out” art is being used, they look great. I used the word “pop-out” because the characters seems to be static, cut-out images that needs to be swapped out every time they someone’s expression changed. Not to mention the use of speech bubbles that overlaps each other feels a lot like reading a comic or manga.

Before playing the game, I’ve read countless good reviews about TWEWY about it being “refreshing”. While I didn’t doubt that the game wouldn’t be anything short than awesome, I’ve played a bit of the Japanese version before and didn’t find it all that refreshing. Sure, the game play is something new, but still it wasn’t that different from the likes of Phantom Hourglass or Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword. It wasn’t until I’ve finished the game the first time that I thought, “Ah, that was a very refreshing game…” I mean, where else can you cross-dress the main character into skirts and high heels for some of the BEST STATS in the game?

That said, you must definitely check out The World Ends With You! Btw, The World Begins With You