Monday, August 30, 2010

Now Playing - "Its time to churn!"


Ok, I would have posted this yesterday but I ended up going out for drinks with some friends. We went to Hive which had a metal/rock/punk kind of night on. I don't think I've been on Sunday before, can't really remember. It was pretty dead and I only had limited money to spend on stuff. Drinks were £1 each though, so not too bad a night. 

Looks like we won't be playing Super Street Fighter IV at Daves for a while, Aaron got annoyed, chucked the controller across the room only for it to land on the xbox and dislodge the disc and scratch it to fuck. Joe got so pissed off...

Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked..

I was aiming to finish off Ys Seven (PSP) story last week (Sun-Sun) and did so, its a fairly short game for an RPG, and seemed to have to drag itself out a little bit,  but its an enjoyable game. It was a good positive introduction to the series for me I thought. It has really frantic fast paced button mashy combat which is pretty fun. Its on the verge of being an action game as opposed to an RPG if you look at some aspects of it, like combat. 

Omg...blogger signed me out so I lost half of what I was going to say..

Well, I had some fun with the game even though the story is pretty generic and predictable. One or two twists in there keep it interesting though. Some of the cutscenes and fact that you have to go to dungeon after dungeon getting each of the shrines unsealed and then the sanctums one after the other-I didn't especially like that slightly lazy game design. Still, its a pretty cool introduction to the Ys series, at least for me. I'll probably pick some more titles up when Xseed localises them, or I might track down the existing game on the ps2/psp. I think thats about it that we got over in europe, but not sure.

I only picked up a PS3 relatively recently so I am playing catch up on a lot of the big exclusive titles, and at least for fans of the RPG genre, this is one of them. It has its cult following, but a lot of things about it will probably not appeal to the mainstream market, but I am going to try and recommend it to as many people as I can. So what game am I talking about? Valkyria Chronicles (PS3) - I started this up the other day and I've been enjoying it apart from some ridiculous frustrating battles. There are some gameplay balance issues which means you can either abuse them or see the enemy do the same (occassionally, depending on what units the AI has and whether they use them right.) 

It has absolutely gorgeous cel-shaded presentation, I'm really liking that side of it. The character designs and the way everything looks, sound effects popping up like in a comic, textures, effects, backgrounds, environments, graphically I can't fault it. In fact so far I'm finding this game hard to fault. Perhaps difficulty might put some people off, for me I haven't minded too much yet. I kept going on a sort of trial and error basis, slowly learning from my mistakes on where to position, what troops to use, etc. Some of the controls for actually positioning where you want to go don't feel as tight as they could be perhaps though.

Still, I'm definitely liking this game so far. I'm aiming to finish it by Friday, but I seriously doubt that I'll make that. I won't have as much time to play it during the weekend as my friends are coming over if everything goes to plan, and we are going to do stuff from Friday to Monday. Shortly after that I'll be off to uni... *nervous* 


The sequel(second in series, I'm not sure if it is a prequel/sequel) is actually coming out fairly soon for the psp. In fact, a lot of trailers are up, along with a demo on psn at the moment. That didn't really factor into it when I chose to play it, but it makes sense as I wanted to see what all the fuss is about for this game, and as a big srpg/trpg fan(listen to RPGcast#142 and Active Time Babble#21 and you'll understand this pointless semantic differentiation-imo they are one and the same.) I wanted to experience this before I go back to uni and might not have access to my ps3. 

There are some trailers for you to see what I mean, and one about the sequel if you are interested. I've not watched more than the first second or two of the 2nd one as I don't want to spoil it, but I think its the recent English trailer, its from Machinima.

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