Mass Effect

Lately, my urge to go through windows for combat has dwindled. To be honest, I've been getting the urge to play a game where I can just shoot a dude in the head and be happy with it. I really don't play many shooters these days aside from the ancients, so I'm somewhat lacking in options here. This desire I've been dealing with is more than likely going to be quelched by Mass Effect.

I bought Mass Effect the day it came out, hoping that it would fulfill my wRPG quota for a while. It was fun times and I enjoyed what I played for the most part. The only reasons I can come up with for why I've stopped on two seperate occasions are girl issues and other games. It's really too bad though, whenever I hear someone mention it, I feel like I've missed out.

Both times when I tried to play through the game, I ended up stopping right after you get full control of the Normandy. The first time around, without knowing, I accidently went to the much more difficult second planet first and got stuck on the boss. Each time, i would get a little bit further, but my death was assured each and every time. I eventually got to the second phase of the fight, but my will to go on had dwindled.

When I played through the second time, it was right after I had gotten my HDTV and wanted to play something pretty. This time I went to the proper planet first, but it seems I chose an unfortunate time to play the thing. I started playing through about a week before the release of Metal Gear Solid 4, which essentially ate up all my game time for a while between the solo play and Metal Gear Online.

I'm due for another attempt to get through the game, but between school and some other games, I may be waiting for longer than I'm willing

The Cost of Custom Firmware

When the PSP was first unleashed upon the world, I honestly didn't think it looked to hot. I had read all kinds of rumors about how their circuit boards were mounted wrong and would eventually fizzle out, how the 'square' button's trigger was placed under the screen, and how Metal Gear Ac!d wasn't so much of a killer app as it was a money grab. What hooked me on the device was how open it was to homebrew applications and emulators. The prospect of playing Doom on the go was something I just couldn't ignore.

Like I've mentioned a few times in the past, I've never been particularly rich, so it took me just a little bit more to actually take the plunge and buy the handheld. It wasn't until I saw a video of some mysterious hacker running Final Fantasy IX at full speed that I decided that I needed to own Sony's first foray. I bought mine used and proceeded to fill the thing with ports of Jazz Jackrabbit, Doom, Heretic, POWDER, Nethack and about a thousand Tetris clones. The emulation scene was pretty active as well at the time. We had fantastic NES, Genesis, Sega CD, Gameboy, Gameboy Advance and SNES emulators aswell as the official Sony emulator that they wouldn't actually implement until about a year later. Now before you get all up my nose about the woes of piracy and all that jazz, let me just say that while it did open up the warez aspect, the emulators are what made me do it.


Let's fast forward to tomorrow. Shin Megami Tensei: Persona is going to be laying on my doorstep when I wake up and I won't be able to play it without giving up all that I had originally loved about the console. It's true that there have been a lot more newer games in the past few years that merit owning a PSP, I just can't give up the emulators for a few new games. This really hurts me though, I actually really liked the first Persona and I would really like to play it in a readable fashion. The way I see it, I have three options: Upgrade to the official firmware, buy a new PSP, or wait for a new version of Custom Firmware to be released. While the last one seems to be the most logical solution, those in the scene have come to realize that not a single team is working on it right now.

Odds are I'm going to be purchasing a used PSP 3000 tomorrow. While I can honestly say that I'll be doing so out of desperation, I can at least use my broken analog nub sensor as an acceptable excuse.

Just a note

BusterLogic the blog is changing. My goal with the blog is to create some kind of amalgam of writings to use in a portfolio to attain a job in the field of video game journalism. Right now, I don't have many readers, in fact, I only have one and he only reads occasionally. In an effort to get more attention without whoring myself out, I'm broadening the scope of what this blog is. I'm still going to focus on video games, but I'm also going to catalogue my attempts to get into the field and my efforts in school to get a degree. Not much is going to change really, I'll just be posting more.

Aside from that, I applied for a job writing for RPGamer last night. I don't really have a snowballs chance in hell at getting the gig, but I figured that I had more to lose not trying than I did to get rejected. As a part of the application, I had to write three fake news stories to prove my merits as a writer. Out of the six possible choices, I chose Pokemon, Suikoden and Banpresto to write about. In all honesty, these were probably about the three worst choices for me to write about considering my lack of knowledge in the games. I stopped caring about Pokemon after Gold and Silver with a brief relapse for Platinum and I've never really been a Suiko fan nor a fan of Super Robot Wars or Ar Tonelico. I actually typed them out on the blogspot and copy/pasted them over, so I still have saved drafts of them on my list of writings. I'll probably post them tomorrow despite their weaknesses. At least it will be fun for a read, right?

Lastly, I found out that my mini review of Super Metroid Eris was used on the download page and on NeoGAF. It's a real honor actually, I just wish that they would have linked to the blog since mine was the only one that wasn't an actual post on the forum. Oh well, it can be forgiven, Eris was fun.

The most irritating part of Metal Gear Solid 3

Back when Snake Eater came out, I was a broke high school student. My only way of playing the game was borrowing it from my richer friends. I managed to do so and enjoyed it a LOT. I made it up until about 3 screens from the end of the game, when suddenly I had to give it back due to my friend's move out of state. It wasn't until last year that I got the Metal Gear Solid Essential pack as a gift. I had other things that I was playing, so it mostly just sat on my shelf until about two months ago when I decided to replay it and try and beat it.

The first problem for me this playthrough came with my desire to beat the game with no kills. When I played MGS4 last year, I was pretty much Rambo by the game's end. In order to go through with no kills, you had better be good at stealth(which I'm not). If you do manage to get an alert, pacifism is the best way to escape. Wasting tranq darts isn't for the wise and if you use them in firefights, you'll have to rely on CQC and stun grenades for your sneaking.

I managed to breeze through the game to pretty much exactly where I was before I had to give the game back. I took a month break in between The Fury and The Sorrow, but yesterday I was in it for the long haul. In this part, you have to escort Eva through the field while soldiers chase you down. Normally, you'd just leave traps to slow them down like TNT or claymores, but I didn't want to kill anyone. I was forced into a situation where I had to tranq Eva to prevent her from murdering the enemy while I fought thirty grunts by myself without the aid of explosions. I'll say this, Stun grenades never go exactly where you want them to in the middle of a firefight. It actually took me about ten attempts to get through these final areas of the game. I wasn't very happy.

In the end, it's okay. I beat The Boss using the knockout cigarettes, which I guess makes me all hardcore and whatnot. People talk about The Boss like she's the definitive boss fight of the game. I have to disagree about that though, she really isn't all that complex. Mosin Nagant when she's far away and when she runs up to Judo you to death, roll out of the way and use the Cig spray on her. That fight took about 4 tries just because my health was so low throughout.

Monty on the Run

Thoughts about Final Fantasy IV: The After Years

Well, now that I'm finished with the game after 43 hours, I thought I would jot some thoughts about it

♦ Man, that last dungeon was chocked full of fanservice. Most of it was good, but some mistranslations irked. Anyone who has played a Final Fantasy game should know what "Lord Dragon's" name actually is. They translated his name and just made it a generic title, thus going against everything else the series has shown us. If there is one thing I like about modern Final Fantasy games, it's that they're typically consistent with themselves. This was a slap in the face to the fans. Another name that really bothered me was the lord of the flies himself. This one I don't think there is any sort of excuse for, the name I'm referring to is used EVERYWHERE.

♦There are a ton of bands I never got to use. Basically, I just used two. The first was a damage breaking one with Kain and Cecil and the other being one with Kain and Edge which leaves the E-man blinked.

♦The Taunt command is absolutely abusable. If you use Taunt and just keep healing the Taunter, you can use your other three characters to just whack any boss into submission without it so much as killing anyone.

♦For having the dungeon be so long, they really should have upped the item limit. I had to go back to the surface of the dungeon multiple times to restock just because you can't hold more than 99 of any item.

♦It would have sure been nice if there was a newgame+ option. In my opinion, you should have just been able to start the dungeon over with your levels and items intact and try and drudge your way through it with a new team. Having 22 playable characters practically demands it.

I had fun with the game, but it had a multitude of flaws. It was fun while it lasted, but I don't see myself holding any sort of nostalgia for it in the future

Game Swag

A lot of developers have been trying to eliminate piracy and a great multitude of ways. We've seen stuff like DRM and brick making Dragon Quest roms. While I think the brick roms are a fun idea, DRM hurts the consumer moreso than the pirate.

I personally feel that the best way to combat the 'yarhar' syndrome is on the side of the publisher. What I'm referring to is bonus goods and preorder bonuses. These days I don't buy many games due to a lack of interest in where your average videogame is headed, so sometimes the swag is what tips me off the fence on the side of a purchase. As I wear my Scribblenauts hat, I'll assure you this isn't going to be another of those "piracy versus morals" debates. Instead, I'm going to focus more on some of the awesome stuff I've seen or received myself with recent videogames.


When Konami released Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, it was to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the series. To reward longtime fans, they included a menagerie of fabulous goods with a preorder of their most recent DS game. These included a stylus, artbook, cardcase, timeline poster, 40 something page art book and a soundtrack thrown together in a nice box. This one I personally missed out on even though I got the game. Unfortunately, I was unaware of just how awesome the preorder was and finding out about it insured that I would never skip on preordering a game I was interested in.


Fallout 3 was another standout game to me that came with a metric ton of awesome. In this we had a DVD that chronicled Bethesda's development on the game, an artbook rich with Fallout style and a Pipboy bobble head(Unfortunately, mine shipped broken). Now these things are cool, but the topper was the Fallout 3 lunchbox that the ensemble was held in. I don't have a need for a lunchbox really, but I was enamoured by the thing.


Soul Calibur 4 had some pretty jive stuff come with it too. I got a pretty sweet keychain with it(Like my pipboy, I received it broken), a nice comic book, an oversized T-shirt and a tournament poster with dry erase marker intact. Much like Fallout 3, it came with a tin box, but I thought it was rather limited in terms of lunchbox use. Still, I kind of enjoyed it even though I hated the game.


My personal favorite bonus so far has been the Persona 4 Social Link Expansion that Amazon offered with the release of the game. Here we have the second half of the soundtrack, another oversized tee, a calender and a stuffed plushie of the lovable Teddie character from the game. Now, if you stack that on top of the artbook and the first half of the soundtrack that already came with the game, you have some straight up awesomeness.

Atlus is usually pretty great when it comes to giving the buyer an incentive to buy a game they're unsure of. I'm eagerly awaiting my Demon's Souls collectors edition complete with soundtrack and strategy guide.

(As a little aside, last year I took three days off of work for Persona 4 and eagerly awaited the game to reach my doorstep. I actually slept in so I wouldn't have to wait for it to arrive hoping that I could just wake up and play. Well, when I awoke, I found the S-link pack but no game. Needless to say I was fuming for that entire day. "How could they send me the bonuses without the game, especially when I paid extra to have the items shipped together," I thought to myself. It wasn't until around 7PM that the game actually showed up after I had already written a complaint to Amazon for screwing me over. In hindsight, I feel kind of bad because it was really a negligable difference, but I wanted the game sooo! bad.)

Yay, Bonus Monies

Well, after doing some hardcore math and looking at a bank statement, I found out that I had about $750 I didn't know about. I was pretty ecstatic to find it out and I found the best way to Squander my moolah: I preordered game through Gamestop's website. Normally, I despise Gamestop and hate to give them my business, but their online services have never once failed me.

If you're curious, I ordered Scribblenauts, Shin Megami Tensei: Persona, Demon's Souls and Silent Hill Shattered Memories. Scribblenauts has been praised to death, so I'm not going to talk about it... yet.

Persona is a very fun game, I played about 5 hours of a borrowed copy earlier this year and dropped it immediately when I found out the enhanced version was going to be localized. What I enjoyed about it was how cerebral the presentation is (note I didn't say the plot) and the eerie music. I was pretty excited when I found out the my music idol Shoji Meguro was going to be doing the soundtrack, but when I heard the music, I was saddened a little bit. His new music is very good aswell as his remixes, but I don't think they fit the general tone of the game very well. Regardless, the game should be very good and now that they've updated the localization, the plot will actually make sense and they won't mistake the word 'your' for 'you're'.

Demon's Souls was a game that I've heard numerous praises for since it was released in Japan late last year. This thing was pretty much THE import game for the Playstation 3. When it comes to how the game actually plays, it looks like it's an absolutely brutal mix of Monster Hunter and Zelda. I'm pretty psyched for it.

Lastly, Silent Hill. What I've liked about Silent Hill was that it's focus in horror wasn't based on surprises as much as it was on unsettlement. There weren't many trigger scares and the creepy factor was almost based on sexuality mixed with psychological deterioration. My only gripe in ALL of them was the combat, looks like Konami listened to me. There is to be no combat in the game at all and the focus of enemy encounters is to run like hell or hide and hope you don't get caught. That seems a whole lot scarier than fighting a skinned dog with a knife.

Megaten Stockholm Syndrome

Okay, so I've put in about ten more hours into the game since the last post. I'm just guessing here, but I think I'm about half way through the game. So far, I seem to like it when I'm not playing and hate it when I am. I think it's almost the same terms that I dread playing a survival horror game. Limited resources and a lack of save spots makes every step I take a risk and sometimes I don't even know if I'm going to make it out alive.

I've pinpointed the differences in some spells and how they seem to work compared to the other games. Your Agi/fire spells are your damage dealers while your Bufu/ice and Zio/lightning are temporary stuns rather than just the same thing with a different element. There was some of the stun mechanic in the later games, but it was mostly random. In this one, if it hits, it will stop them in their tracks. Marin Karin/confuse is pretty much the same, but Dorminar/sleep hits the whole party and has next to nil expenditure points making it a random battle killer.

I didn't really talk much about the story in the last post about the game, but rest assured, it's pretty neat. Very original for the time the game was made, but I don't think I'll go too into details here.

Terrible Boxart, Decent Game

No one I knew had a Turbografx16 nor the requisite CD attachment, so naturally, I had no idea what Valis even was. Can you blame me though? Just look at this freaking thing.

Remembering the Dreamcast

Well... as I said a few posts back, I didn't get a Dream machine until earlier last year. Ten years ago, all the cool kids were playing this new Sega thing and I had just received an N64. Believe me, I asked my parents for one, as any reasonable eleven year-old would, but they just wouldn't have it.

The thing that made me want the Dreamcast was the return of my buddy Sonic. Sure, we had Sonic R and the teaser hubworld for Sonic Jam, but from what I've gathered, those range from "Boy, I'd rather forget about it." to "It's just a hub". Sonic Adventure was the FIRST TRUE SONIC since Sonic and Knuckles. We waited what seemed like eons for it and it sure delivered. It was pretty damned fun from what little I played.

Let's fast-forward to late last year, I had just found a Dreamcast for only a few shekels and got some decent games along with some crappy sports titles. Naturally, the first game I wanted to try was Sonic Adventure. I'm just going to flat out say it, that game is a fabtastrophy. It has got to be one of the best worst games I've seen in recent years. We got all the neat stuff like the fish jumping out of the water and running at those speeds for the first time, but at the same time, we also had to deal with load times, awful voice acting, a horrendous hub and the general redesign of the characters to try and bring it to modern standards. For it's faults though, I still find it kind of endearing. It's almost like a puppy that chews your shoes to bits but looks cute doing it.

Anyways, aside from that mess up there, I did find some games that are objectively and subjectively good. There were games like Crazy Taxi, Ikaruga, Street Fighter 3 Third Strike, Bangai-o, Skies of Arcadia, Jet Grind Radio, Powerstone, Soul Calibur and many others. The Dreamcast era, although brief, was a fertile time for video games.

Meme

Meme meme meme meme meme meme meme meme meme meme

Let's get this straight guys, memes can be funny stuff. While hilarity can ensue, these memes are often being over used to the point where they're no longer funny.

If you find a meme funny, show it to your friends, don't make webcomics about them.

Let's have a look at three offending comics posted just in the last week.

In today's Ctrl Alt Del comic, this was the third panel. If you've ever been to the dregs of the Internet, 4chan, you'd know this is a subtle reference to the "goatse" pictures. For those who don't know, these are self taken pictures of a man(with the wedding band seen above) stretching the walls of his anus, exposing his colon. It's just another shock picture akin to Tubgirl or Lemonparty, but damn... this joke has been done to death for YEARS.

Dueling Analogs supplied the other two dishonorable mentions here for this weeks and last weeks comics. This one is another Meme that's atleast five years old. Back at e3 2004, four bored journalist dudes were watching Shigeru Miyamoto talk about that years Ninty goodies. The first picture is a reference to a snapshot of the four men during a Pacman game, the second was when the Twilight Princess trailer was shown. It was ridiculous, it was funny, but come on now, we're talking the FIRST Twilight Princess trailer. I've seen some cute Mother 3 mockups that are used to tell each chapters plots, but this may as well be cut/pasting.


Last week's Dueling Analogs was much worse though. Probably the biggest, most popular Internet meme out there is the beloved lolcats. I like lolcats, but that's because I like cats. Bad grammar isn't the only thing that makes those pictures funny. Without the ridiculous pictures of the cats, those hack phrases wouldn't even conjure up a chuckle. Seriously, lolpacs?


meme meme meme meme

Backlogged; Shin Megami Tensei

I completed Digital Devil Saga 2 the other day with relative ease. The final dungeon really wasn't up to the standards that DDS1 and Nocturne has led me to believe was necessary. As far as the final boss gauntlet goes, I only had trouble on Meganada and Brahmin. Meganada was only because I kept forgetting that he liked to charm me and when charmed, my characters would decide to fully heal him. The last boss was tough for me only because I wasn't prepared for it all. Brahmin is essentially the ultimate user of the five elements. I didn't think to set any elemental drain skills nor did I have any elemental walls to take out it's turns. I still won the fight somehow, but I know it would have been so much easier if I had known. I'm talking so easy that at best, it could have been a midpoint boss. Anyways, with the DDS series under my belt, it's time for me to actually finish up the first game under the Shin Megami Tensei title.


Shin Megami Tensei is an incredibly interesting game. In many ways, it lays out the foundation for most of the elements that I found enticing in Nocturne like branching paths, deep fusion systems, demon recruiting, and brutal dungeons and boss fights. At the same time, it's different from what someone who discovered the series with Persona 3 would expect. The dungeons are all in first person, there's next to no customization for the main character and the plot is given to you in via conversations with NPC's rather than just handed out to you.

The three different paths you can take are Law(following order to a tee and tiered society), chaos(complete and utter anarchy for the sake of freedom) and neutral(freewill with balanced laws). There are also two religions feuding for the two major paths, the Mesian Church representing God's lawful society and the Cult of Gaia that breeds complete and pure chaos. Your moral choices affects the story in some interesting ways. Most characters will react to your alignment, some will join you in battle and some will go out of their way to destroy you. Your choice on healing houses is also cut down as the opposing healers will charge astronomical fees for their services. From what I've heard, demon recruiting is heavily impacted on your choices, but at the point I'm at, all they want is money. I'm going for the neutral path so I can fight more of the bosses.

Battles in Shin Megami Tensei don't seem to stray too far away from the Dragon Quest formula. Fast characters act first, slow act last. There are no press turns or anything like that in this game, but as someone who really likes Dragon Quest, I'm okay with it. The scale of the battles is a lot higher in this game than many others I've played. Your team can consist six characters while you can fight up to eight enemies at a time. Things get a little crazier in that enemies more often than not attack in waves. For instance, in one boss battle, I fought four waves of eight making the total number of enemies I had to deal with thirty-two. This cuts down your opportunity to heal, so if you can get a demon like an Angel with Media, you'll be able to survive without too much trouble.


Shin Megami Tensei as a series has always been more of a dungeon crawler than an RPG akin to something like Final Fantasy. The dungeons often take hours to complete and consist of nothing but enemies to fight, puzzles to solve and traps to avoid. Someone who plays the average jRPG may not get why I'm using these points to differentiate SMT from other games; I'll say this, there are no cutscenes nor is there any lengthy story dialogue. These dungeons are dungeons to the core and their length is what will be breaking you, not the hordes of demons you'll be fighting.

Like I said earlier, there is hardly any sort of customization for your characters other than assigning one stat to add to your list. There aren't any skills to juggle for your main character and your human buddies will just learn magic as they level. The Protagonist doesn't even get magic, what he does get is use of the Comp. The comp basically let's you assign demons to your ranks and lets you analyze the demons you'll eventually find yourself to. Their weaknesses won't show up like your modern SMT game, but it will show their alignment which will signal what kind of instant death spells will work. Hama and Mudo spells represent Law and Chaos and actually have a much higher success rate than in their modern incarnations. Hama will instantly kill two chaos demons and mudo will do the opposite.

I'm only about seven hours into the game, so some of these impressions may not hold true and maybe there are some other aspects of the game I'm blind to at the moment. You really can't blame me for not knowing though, there are hardly any guides available. We have Re-miel's guide which has to be one of the most unfortunately designed guides I've ever seen and Infinity Dragon's incomplete guide which is....well, incomplete. What I've been using is a Japanese guide that I used google translations to fumble my way through. I use it mostly for the maps, but it is so full of Engrish that I think everyone should try and take a look at it just for giggles.

(Please note, despite what that screenshot I grabbed from google implies, Jesus isn't a character in the game and I don't think Satan is in this one either. The player just happened to name the lawful hero Jesus and the chaos hero Satan.)

Bad Boxart, Questionable Game

I'll be honest here, I've never heard of Ju-on game before I saw this game cover nor have I seen any of the movies. I'm just not a big horror buff. I think I'll just assume that I don't need to tell you why this is a bad game cover. Let's just say it doesn't tell you anything about the game at all and it would make a better cover to a board game. Famitsu gave it a 22 out of 40, so I'll probably be skipping it regardless of my general disdain towards reviews.

The American cover is much better though, atleast it tries to appeal to modern horror sensiblities.

A Sad Time for Doom

This was a 22 year old man who loved Doom as much as I do. He lost his arm to cancer and still continued to find ways to play a game that meant a lot to him. He created several maps and contributed to Skulltag and posted regularly on Doomworld. This man died from said cancer on 8/29/09.

This really hit me hard despite never playing any of his maps or even talking with him. What I think did it was watching that video and seeing the love of the game. Roger Ebert says video games can't make you cry, but this man and his game moved me.

Rest in Peace Espi

Virtual Memory Card

Every now and then I like to go through my memory card settings and look at the time I spent on various RPGs. I decided to do this again and post the results. Keep in mind that I've over written other saves, so some of these are disingenuous and I've probably but in many more hours than that. I'll only post the ones that actually give the amount of hours.

Virtual Memory Card #1 (PSX)
Final Fantasy Origins, Final Fantasy 1- 20:29
Final Fantasy Chronicles, Final Fantasy IV- 42:16
Final Fantasy Chronicles, Chrono Trigger- 31:30
Final Fantasy Anthology, Final Fantasy VI- 46:34
Final Fantasy VII- 99:59
Final Fantasy VIII- 51:45
Final Fantasy IX- 66:21
Final Fantasy Tactics- 20:42
Dragon Warrior VII- 206:48

Virtual Memory Card #2(PS2)
Final Fantasy X(save 1)- 80:25
Final Fantasy X(save 2)-99:42
Star Ocean Til The End of Time- 29:16
Dragon Quest VIII- 39:01
Kingdom Hearts II- 31:45
Radiata Stories- 26:13
Final Fantasy XII- 19:06

According to this Time Calculator, That's a grand total of 911:52. That's somewhere around 38 days of my life on RPGs. Makes me kind of glad to see that though, before I actually took the time to find that out, World of Warcraft held about 27 days of lifetime.

The funny thing about this is that these times are only the numbers given to me through the memory card manager on my PS3. This doesn't include my playthroughs of the Shin Megami Tensei games, Xenosaga, Disgaea 1 and 2 or any other games that I've spent a considerable amount of time with. Even worse, I have save files on all my other consoles too.

Policenauts Unwrapped

As excited as I was about playing Policenauts in English, when I actually got my discs, I never even bothered to open it up. I still don't have the time to really give it my full attention, but I thought it might be nice to show it off for anyone who's never seen a Japanese Playstation game.

(Beware, awful webcam pictures in store)



I myself don't own many Japanese games and I guess that makes sense; not having a machine capable of playing the games will do that. The only one I've owned in recent times was a copy of Final Fantasy V.



Anyways, I was sort of surprised to see how games are wrapped in Japan. I'm not sure you would call it shrink wrapped, the plastic loosely hangs off the jewel case like an envelope. The back contains a surprising amount of English, rather than you try and strain your eyes to read it off my awful pictures.

"In the year 2010, Mankind made it's first great advance into space with the completion of the first human space colony "Beyond Coast". Three years later, 5 policemen, charged with the responsibility of maintaining the security of these colonists, arrive on the "Beyond Coast". Gatse Becker, Joseph Sadaoki Tokugawa, Salvatore Toscanini, Ed Brown and Jonathan Ingram. These 5 policemen, the Earth's elite, formed a new force of Space Police known as "Policenauts"."

Since the game isn't shrink wrapped, the plastic envelope is sealed with a small strip of tape. I wanted to try and preserve it in it's state, but unfortunately the tape was torn in the process. After opening the jewel, I found something that those who purchased multidisc games back in the day were well acquainted with, loose discs. I could do nothing but sigh a sigh that only discontent can bring among a man.



The game itself was in good condition despite being jumbled around while flying half way around the world. Disc 1 has a picture of Jonathan Ingram holding a gun while smoking a cigarette, not too surprising considering that this game is done by a Hideo Kojima. The art on the disc is of fantastic quality, looks like Japan got a much better deal with Playstation games than we did.



Disc 2 has a contrasting picture of a pale man with long pink hair, the same that is seen on the cover. Since I've only read brief summaries and seen pictures, I'm sort of clueless on who this man is supposed to be. My gamers intuition tells that this guy isn't the nicest of men. Once again, the art on the disc is stunning.



My favorite part of opening new games has always been the first whiff of the printed ink laid upon the pages of the manual. Even though my copy was a brand new one, I wasn't really expecting a heavy scent from it. Maybe it's my lucky day though, the thirteen year old manual still has a faint smell that was heaven as it wafted up my nostrils.

As for the manual itself, understandably, there's lots of Japanese involved, meaning I can't read it. Here's some pictures of it anyways.

Table of Contents


Controls(Yes, the game thankfully has mouse support, making this point and click affair much simpler in an emulator)


The storyline I presume?


The characters, listed are Jonathan Ingram, Ed Brown, Karen Hojyo and Tony Redwood.


More characters, Meryl Silverburgh, Gatse Becker, Joseph Sadaoki Tokugawa.


Lastly, we have some Japanese emblems, I'm not sure how important they'll be to the story, but I can't imagine they'll be too prominent.

That's all then, I still have other things I need to play, but I thought I might as well crack this sucker open. Sorry again for the poor quality photos, hopefully they're better than nothing.

The Return of Sega Relevancy

I was four years of age when the name Sega first appeared in my vocabulary. My father had surprised me with a Sega Genesis after our second NES paid Charon's fare. Like any respectable child of that age, I became very familiar with the Blue Blur and his band of retarded friends. The Genesis was a vast bastion of new games for me, some good (Decap Attack, Quack Shot, World of Illusion, Pacman 2,James Pond 2) and the bad (Chuck Rock, Tazmania, Bubsy).

Despite the great games, I was allured by the Nintendo charm and eventually got myself a SNES. Sadly, my Genesis was retired and shortly found itself shelved and broken. My Sega love was lost and I skipped over the Saturn and the Dreamcast until just last year. As far as system longevity goes, I made the right choice; I did however miss out on a lot of games that I'll never get to play without a heavy degree of system modification and piracy.

Even though I skipped over the late consoles, I was deeply saddened when Sega decided to forsake consoles and go soley into games. At first, I was pretty happy that all console owners would get to play Sega games. As time went to show us, these games were just mere shadows of what they used to be. The Sonic games were deeply broken and Billy Hatcher just flat out didn't interest me. As a sort of sidenote, I've heard Panzer Dragoon Orta is pretty good, but as I'm lacking an original Xbox, I'm left with hearsay. Sega's downfall had completely broken down that deep love that I held as a child.



As with others, I was shocked and awed when screenshots of Valkyria Chronicles had first surfaced -- They were absolutely stunning. Throughout the year, the game kept getting more and more hyped and I saw it as just another way for Sega to fail us. When the game actually came out, I was flabbergasted at it's critical reception. It turns out SEGA CAN STILL MAKE GOOD PRODUCTS! The game itself flipped the strategy RPG popularized by Final Fantasy Tactics on it's metaphorical head. Aiming and controlling your characters was intuitive, simple, fast and undeniably fun. Between the watercolored art style and the revelations in it's gameplay, the game was an absolute favorite and was in many critic's Game of the Year lists.

Unfortunately, Valkyria Chronicles didn't sell all that well and it looked like it was just going to be a fluke. I had already assumed that Sega was wishing that they had just made another Sonic game instead when I heard that they were making a sequel for the PSP. This was pretty good news. Sega had decided to go with GOOD games instead of Sonic and the Lucky Beanstalk or some such garbage.



The news only got better though, they also seemingly developed a fist full of JRPGs when no one was looking. Some of these interest me more than others but I have to say that Resonance of Fate and Sands of Destruction look and sound delicious. Resonance looks to be a turnbased affair with a heavy emphasis on gun play and takes place in a world that in a strange way seems somewhat Steampunkish. Sands of Destruction on the other hands looks to be a game that goes for the JRPG norm as far as setting goes. Two names made me look twice at the game though: Masato Kato and Yasunori Mitsuda. Maybe you've heard of these guys, they're probably best known as the scenario writer and composer for the Chrono series and Xenogears.

I'm still slightly skeptical, but at least Sega is taking some chances for a change.

(Sorry for the overflow of RPG's these days, sometimes I just lose my **** over them)

Battling the Backlog

I've miraculously put in about 17 hours into Digital Devil Saga 2 since I did my backlog post. I keep losing characters and finally had to go look through a FAQ to find out who I was going to keep so I could plan ahead. I kind of spoiled a lot of stuff this way, but hell, I know I would just end up infuriated to spend hours trying to Materadyne on a character and have them stripped from me.

Turns out I'm almost done, I would imagine I only have about five more hours before I finish. There's some super bosses in there that I don't want to deal with, two requiring random ****ing drop items a la FFIV The After and the last boss requiring me to play on hard. It's not that I'm bad at the game and can't play on hard, I just have a lot more fun just playing rather than having to break the game to holy hell just to get past each boss.