The girl and I went and picked up her pre-order of Hakuoki on the PSP (a week before the Vita comes out, no less) and then we came home, ordered a pizza and I started Final Fantasy 13-2 while she fell asleep. No way I was going to brave a restaurant...
i thought it was late feb. I might have misread the date, though. Good for them, especially considering it's not a new game and the vita has a small install base as of yet.
Yeah, but do you know if that Vita port is going to come to the States at all? I'd imagine it hasn't been announced either way since it's not even out in Japan, but I was curious if maybe I'd missed a bit of info.
First Tales game that America gets in forever... and it's an exact port (right? I can't find info of any additions) of the one that I'm 2/3 of the way through. Since I don't feel like re-beating it, I'll have to pass on this. If you haven't played it, though, I highly recommend it.

But as for me, I'm saving my money for Tales of Graces F next month. I really hope that does ok, so that I get an english version of Xillia. I bought the Japanese version and am pretty lost (I overestimated my Japanese language ability greatly), but man, does it ever look slick. I can't wait to try the new team-oriented battle system.

I wish they had redone one of the DS Tales games for the 3DS instead. Since those hadn't come to the US, they'd feel new and they could probably have added some improvements because the hardware is improved.

Has anyone heard anything about the Innocence re-release coming out over here? The wikipedia page is pretty silent. I think that might motivate me to buy a Vita.

I was wondering about this... I wasn't aware of a whole lot of 'optional cut scenes' but I feel like I'm so used to silent skits (weren't they silent in the ps2 version? Or was the english voice acting just forgettable?) that this is a little bit par for the course.

And yes, Abyss is a great game. It feels a bit like a dry run at the epicness of Vesperia, but that's not a bad thing, more a product of the time when it was made (I played them in reverse chronological order, so it stood out to me). It might've been a little too cutesy, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

i vaguely remember shatterhand. After reading the wikipedia entry, i have to say it looks pretty decent.
the picture didn't show up! Was it The Adventures of LoLo? Milon's Secret Castle? Adventure Island 2?
Wasn't that Kickpuncher, though? Because his nemesis in the second one, I believe, was Punchkicker...

And that was a great episode where they introduced that.

I'd really like to see Kick Master for the NES show up on a list like this. You had a whole array of moves, all of them kicks of some form or other and whenever you beat an enemy, their drops would fly up into the air and scatter, forcing you to chase them and choosing whether you wanted, say, health vs. experience. Of course there were also traps in that fountain of treasure so you had to be careful. I remember it being a great game, but I don't think anyone I've ever talked to has ever remembered it any way shape or form.
had the opposite issue; bought an import copy of Tales of Xillia and am playing it on my American PS3. As I play the game, X and O are switched for every purpose... X cancels/does arts, O chooses/searches/talks/attacks/etc... fine, no big deal.

However, when you save the game, it gets fun. You save it on the world map normally, but when you're choosing a save file from the list, well, it's via the PS3 OS so the buttons flip back to the Western way. So you have two different button configurations to master while performing a simple task. It is awesome!

but just to play devil's advocate, can't a lot of those copyrights be bought if there's enough funding? I mean, the reason that they're problems is that they're owned by someone, and I seriously doubt most copyright holders are going to pass up a large enough sum of money. Even if there's a tangled web, you could probably pay off all the holders if you had enough $$ (which I admit, could still be prohibitively expensive, but theoretically, couldn't Billionaires for Mother 3 get the project done?)
Activision call today? I wonder if they announced a dividend or anything. With the number of those games those guys sell, they're awfully stingy with the investors. Yes, i know it's not that simple, but I wish it were :)
I have heard anecdotal evidence of this happening, and I think you are right to a degree. But I worry that if they see one Double Fine-sized name up there, are they going to be looking for similarly big names and filtering out small projects?
I also feel like the one of the roles of the major publishers/labels/etc is to absorb risk. If they are abdicating that role by using Kickstarter, especially as they give less and less to creatives, then what purpose do they really serve?

One thing I'll say about Double Fine using this is that it doesn't look like they are using a major publisher like they do with a lot of their big titles. However, on Steam, I don't know that they'd need to.

This is definitely a concern. In comics, having noticed the Womanthology crew try to use Kickstarter, even while they had access to a fairly major publisher, I had similarly mixed feelings.

If this leads to something like EA or Konami (or even, to a lesser degree Atlus) trying to use Kickstarter, I will be a little upset.

I assume we're talking about leaderboards and their ilk, yes? I've always been fascinated by those. I'm not really competing with the rest of the geometry wars players (god, there'd be no point) but I like trying to beat my record and seeing how many people i can leapfrog if I up my score by 100 points or so. I also like viewing the profiles of the people with scores near mine and seeing if their interests match mine at all.

But that's as far as I generally go. I like playing a few games of Mario Kart now and then, or Portal 2 co-op with a friend of mine, but to me online play is something I'd be just as happy without, in general.

I might have to break down and check out burgertime. It's kinda pricey, yeah, but that actually looks relatively good.
considering that I'm still buying PSP games (I just bought my PSP a year or so ago, thanks mostly to ATLUS), and just pre-ordered a game that comes out next week, I can't imagine any reason left to buy a Vita until it hits the $100 mark. I really hope this fails and scares the crap out of Sony.
I was so excited for IX. I actually pirated a copy of the first disc just because I couldn't wait any longer for the american release. And even though I could only understand the tiniest bit of it, I loved it. I wouldn't mind another hybrid like it, bringing the slickness of the XIII's back around with some classic FF tropes.

However, the last few hours or so of FFIX did kind of fall apart a little bit. Also, the blue mage character who carried the fork and spoke in broken english...yeah, i could probably have lived without them.

Hey, Chicago Kokatkuites! Check out this article: [chicagoist.com]

Having been to Brooklyn's Barcade, I'm extremely excited to see how this place turns out. #speakup

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