One of the nice things about games is that, unlike in real life, you can usually pretend that the world revolves around you.  I mean, I have tried on occasion in real life to take the view that I am the most important person in the world, but damn if the world doesn’t agree with me.

In games, however, there is no question as to who is in charge.  Mother Brain will patiently wait deep underground in Zebes for me to show up, those zombies will linger calmly outside the window for me to pass by before crashing through, and the Combine wouldn’t even think about attacking the rocket site until I am fully prepared. 

Continue Reading…

I remember the day Master of Orion III came out. After heading off to the mall during lunch, I returned to work, bag in hand, and ripped open the package in the car. Tucking the game itself safely under the seat, I stealthily smuggled the manual into my office where I proceeded to read it, a few pages at a time, as soon as the opportunity arose.

While I would eventually learn that the game itself left a lot to be desired, the manual was, on its own, a delight:  Long passages about the history of the Master of Orion universe, plenty of shots of all of the game’s interfaces, and discussions of strategy as you made your way through the game. I read the manual twice that afternoon, and as soon as I got home, it found a place on my bookshelf, among a collection of others.

For a lot of people, the moment they get a new game in their possession, they race home, tear off the shrink wrap, and pop it into their systems to get playing.  For me, however, there is always that one critical step in between: reading the manual.

Continue Reading…

“If you love RPGs, as I do, you’ve likely played quite a few of them in your time. Even fans of the genre know that it suffers from a lot of cliche and repetition — finding one with a decent story, characters that you haven’t seen a hundred times before and a truly fun experience to offer can seem really daunting sometimes. For some reason, it didn’t seem that way ten years ago to me. Has the RPG truly evolved thanks to technological advancements, or is it actually just stagnating?”

Colette Bennett at Destructoid takes a quick look at some of the most common problems that seem to crop up with modern JRPGs.  As someone who just purchased Suikoden Tierkreis over the weekend, #4 is painfully relevant.   One very pertinent item she touches on is the over-complication of battle systems in recent JRPGs, and that is something I think deserves some more critical analysis.