Tuesday 30 October 2012

The Fate of Chrono Trigger


Chrono Trigger is one of those games that the masses are pretty fanatical about. I've said for a long time now that it's one of the most timeless (no pun intended... much) games ever. I can pick the game up today and it would still be amazing. In fact it's more amazing the more I grow up and the more I understand about game design. It's one of the few oldschool games that, were it released today, I would happily pay full price for. Anyways, the point to all this is the game was released on Android yesterday. As a result I got into an interesting discussion over on Reddit about the fate of Chrono Trigger and the Chrono Franchise as a whole. So since I thought I would share some of my thoughts on the matter here.

Sunday 28 October 2012

Mists of Pandaria and Daily Quests


Today I want to talk a little bit about a topic that has been on my mind a lot of late. See, I'm a big player of World of Warcraft. Or at least, I used to be. Before I got bust with school and such, I was a pretty hardcore player. I was never in a serious raiding guild or anything, but I was always online and always doing whatever I could to be the best in my area. These days however my play is a lot less frequent, closer matching the average player. I still want to play hard when I'm online, but the issue is that I feel like Mists of Pandaria won't let me.


Thursday 25 October 2012

What Hero is Best Hero?

Over the last few days I've bee thinking a lot about what makes a good video game ending. As tends to happen, as a result I have come upon some realizations. I wanted to write an article about all the things I've decided about endings, but no matter how hard I try this article keeps ending up being about what makes a good hero. So screw it, I'm talking about heroes! The two are more connected than you may think, actually. I think my discoveries also speak a lot to the importance of good dialogue. I'll just have to get back to the whole talking about endings thing once I have this other stuff out of my system....

Monday 22 October 2012

The Problem With Kickstarter



So as everyone surely already knows, Kickstarter is a "thing" these days. For a lot of people I know (including myself) it never really came onto the radar until earlier this year. A fellow by the name of Tim Schafer (Monkey Island, day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango, etc) started a Kickstarter to create an adventure game. This lit the industry on fire. Certainly smaller indie games had been funded through kickstarter before, but never had a major title gone that route. I think a lot of people (again, myself included) threw their money at Double Fine Adventure because of what it represented more than a desire to actually play the game. I'm sure a lot of people fall into the second camp as well, but that's sort of the beauty of what Kickstarter represents to the video game community.

Saturday 20 October 2012

Why Final Fantasy IV is Good



So for whatever reason, I recently got to thinking about Final Fantasy IV. Reason being, the game has always been a bit of an enigma to me. That's not to say I Don't like it, by any means, but why I like it is a hard question to answer. If you were to look at the game with a critical eye, chances are you would find that it is pretty lacking in areas, even by 1991 areas. So why is it that the game is so celebrated? I can't speak for everyone, not can I claim to really know the answer, but I figured it was worth some thought anyways.