| FFCC: My Life as a King Impressions |
The WiiWare game with a long title finally hits Europe.
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles My Life as a King, then. First off, let's make a few things clear. Firstly, this is not a standard Final Fantasy. You won't find an epic story padded with gorgeous FMVs and menu-driven combat over 40 hours. If you're coming to this game with that mindset then you will be horrible dissapointed. Secondly, it isn't even a stand Crystal Chronicles game. There is no dungeon crawling realtime combat gameplay here. Well, not for you anyway...
At the most basic level, My Life as a King could be compared to the likes of Sim City, Harvest Moon and Theme Park. The story begins with the young king finding a new land and being given the power of Arkitekt. This mysterious sounding magic actually allows you to construct buildings around this empty land. Initially you can only build houses, but the memories of others will help you to expand your options. Within ten minutes of play I had been given the ability to build a bakery.
So why build? Well, it gets quite clever. As families move in to the various houses, the potential to create Adventurers opens up. These are the people that will be doing the fighting, not you. As you discover more areas around your kingdom, you can send these adventurers off to the dungeons to look for treasure, level up, defeat bosses and so on. If they return your resources will increase, and with more resources comes more buildings. Certain dungeons will require specialist Adventurers, such as mages or thieves, but these can all be trained through the course of the game as you learn more building blueprints.
So although it seems to initially have the same gameplay as Sim City, it only ends up being about as deep as Theme Park. You get to wander around town and make friends too, so that's where the Harvest Moon comparison comes in.
For 1500 points for the base pack, this is quite a little bargain. If you end up loving the game, the option is there to spend a few more points on extra races, classes, dungeons and buildings. Not too shabby for the Wii. Right now I'm loving it. Very innocent, great fun, but do remember that it's not another Crystal Chronicles game.
A little warning, though, and not really this game's fault; I had to delete Mario Kart 64, Kirby 64, Solomon's Key, The Legend of Zelda and Sonic the Hedgehog to make room for this. Woops. |
Finally. Nintendo have noticed just how much money that Nintendogs made and have designed a sequel.
Aimed at "all boys with pubes", Nintengirls aims to make the DS cool again. Pretty soon, everyone will be talking about Nintengirls instead of football, cars and guns.
Supposedly, the game can link to the Wii and make full use of the Wii Remote. What functionality this could possibly be is still a mystery, but I'll keep my eye out for future updates on this matter! |
Major Nelson posted this on his blog:
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The PR folks just kicked out a press release with some impressive new information:
- The Xbox 360 is the first current generation gaming system to reach 10 million in U.S. console sales. That brings the total to 19 million worldwide
-Xbox LIVE now tops 12 million members globally
Thanks to everyone for your support!
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Wait, what? Because the Wii isn't hi-def and couldn't run GTAIV, it's suddenly not "current generation"? Call me silly, but I'm pretty the sure the Wii is Nintendo's current "in the shops now" console. Big deal that it can't do some things the 360 thing, the opposite is also true.
Arrogant cunts. |
| How To: Write a Console Update |
With the recent update going around for the Xbox 360, I figured I would offer some insight if you wanted to create your own! It's really quite simple.
Firstly, be sure to include recent rumours. Don't make them the standout "top of the list" feature though or people will get suspicious.
Secondly, look at what other consoles already have and think about how the manufacturer of the console you are writing for would implement it.
Thirdly, be sure to add something in there that nobody expects and that nobody will really care about. Pad it out with features which boil down to "stability".
With that in mind, here's how an update for the Nintendo Wii would look:
1) Photo Channel updated to 1.2. Support for MP3s has been enabled once more.
2) Added support for external USB storage devices. Now the Channel Selection screens will populate themselves based on content found on your storage device.
3) Settings for Voice Chat can now be found in the Wii Preferences. Note: This will not function outside of specific games until the "Star Road" voice service goes live in the Fall.
4) Numbers of Miis that can be stored on the Wii has been doubled.
5) Fixed a bug where pressing the power button whilst a message was sending would cause the recipient to recieve the message twice.
See? It's simple. |
 | Categories: Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony
Posted on 14 May 2008 by Mime | 0 Comments |
| Completely Fake Xbox Update |
Refusing to let the "Waggle Controller" for Xbox 360 rumour just die, a list of updates for a new 360 dashboard has surfaced on the internet.
One of the updates listed is thus: "Calibration options for motion sensor devices."
Right, yeah. This is the same waggle controller that's going to be used in Banjo Kazooie, right?
Also, it has the following: "Support for titles to store installation data on Storage Device for faster loading."
Just like FFXI. Which is already out.
If you want to see the whole list, head over to the wonderful Kotaku. Just avoid the comments section if you value your sanity. |
Game Informer is now out in America with details of the new Banjo Kazooie and already the internet seems to know what it's talking about. Crying about "too many vehicles" and "not enough platforming", the internet must of course be right.
Are they? Well here are some exclusive screenshots of the new Banjo Kazooie, unseen anywhere else. Let's analyse them!
In the above shot, we can see Banjo coming in to land on Humba Wumba's island. I can't see any Jiggies on the island, but let's put that down to popup.
A slightly smaller shot and for that I aplogise. However, we can still make out Banjo's monster truck (the yellow one, to match his shorts). He is trying to stop Klungo (the green one) from getting away. Not sure who the other two are, though. Perhaps they are from an online co-op feature that this game must have. In fact, this shot confirms that it does!
In this final exclusive shot, we can see Banjo has his filthy paws on a spaceship. Presumably the final battle with Gruntilda will be in SPACE. It's obvious why there is no platforming here; Banjo would die.
GRUNTY. IN. SPAAAAAAACE. |
Happy Mother’s Day! Do your Mum a favor and enjoy a nice and happy game session together huddled around your Nintendo GameCube with something nice like Animal Crossing, Super Mario Sunshine, or Resident Evil 4. The last one, you say? If you’re interested, I’ve got a nice review for you, Stranger… Heh, heh, heh… 
(Mime: Zenek is American, remember? Apparently it's Mother's Day there! Crazy shenanigans.) |
| Raccoon Mario Windup Toy! |
Cutlack was right, eBay does make for easy updates.
Today I found a wonderful Mario toy made in Japan in 1984 up for sale. Everyone knows Mario 3 is the best Mario game ever, and so to have a rare toy based on that game would be a dream. And what better toy to have than Raccoon Mario?
Here it is then.
It actually looks really cool! I want one. Actually, the current bidding for this isn't that much yet... Tempting.
The seller mentions that it's a windup toy, though, but where do we wind it up? Maybe on the back?
Looks to me like there is only a hole there. Do we get a special device to penetrate the hole with in a loving but firm manner? Maybe we have to turn the tail, that would be excellent. Especially if the tail wagged as it unwound itself. If I purchase it, I will update with that news.
[Vintage Nintendo Super Mario Wind-Up Figure 1984 Rare] |
| Virtual Console for 09/05/08 |
Today's releases on Nintendo's Virtual Console service for the Wii are:
Break In, a pool game
Cho Aniki, a shoot 'em up
Metal Slug, classic hardcore platform shooter
And Puyo Puyo 2, slightly good puzzler
Personally, I'd pick Metal Slug from that bunch. |
| Article: The Short Interview with Rare |
Rare's George Kelion sits down with us for a cup of tea and short natter here.
Hey, come on, this is vaguely news. At least we're not just posting pictures of newer and more globular Pokemon over and over today. |
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