fchinaski

Two things:

1) I couldn't care less about who Phil Fish is as a person as I fully believe that people can be difficult and flawed and still deliver inspiring and interesting games, music, films, books, etc. I'm not interested in moral judgement, I'm interested in good art.

2) The indie scene is here to stay, and it's a good thing. There's a lot of junk, but there's also a lot, I mean, A LOT of junk coming from big developers. Variety is nice. The fact that the little guy can also publish his game in today's gaming environment is also nice. If it's not your cup of tea, don't play it.

But I'm glad that we came to a point where the industry can benefit from a lot of different perspectives when it comes to game development. It helps video games to stay fresh and prevents the medium to grow stale and samey.

@get2sammyb Thanks! I'm in Portugal, but I already import books from Amazon.UK. Vita has so many games that interest me coming right now it's crazy! Between this, Toukiden, Ys, Sorcery Saga, Conception II and Demon Gaze, I'm set for months on end!

Is this digital only on the EU or did we get a physical release also?

As I said before, boy I'm glad I bought the original one last year. I reckon they'll get harder to find new on retail by the minute, and I would be very dissapointed if I only had this one as an option. And frankly, keeping this price tag for an inferior model is Sony being Sony at their worst.

Does anyone know if the unavailability of certain games in some European countries tends to be temporary, or does it mean that some contents will probably never come out in some countries? I was interested on Mystic Chronicles, since I find Kemco's mobile RPGs quite charming and it would nice to play one with a d-pad and actual buttons, but I see that it's not available in Portugal... :/

It will surely be nice to play a Etrian Odyssey-esque dungeon crawler on VITA's gorgeous screen AND with touch controls. I'm pretty hyped for this one!

My money is also on the PSVita slim — and if it is, boy I'm happy to have bought the first model last Christmas, since this will probably mean that the cheapest version will become the norm, rendering that gorgeous OLED screen obsolete.

The first one was good, but it had quite a few flaws. Some of them we already know that they've fixed for this one, such as the fixed camera, but IMHO the first one suffered from:

1) horrid hand-holding at times, while managing to leave you stuck at others due to bad level design.

2) tiresome gameplay broken down in too many chapters/subchapters with way too many cutscenes — I've never had the feeling that I was playing a fluid multilayered game like Castlevania should be, with all those interruptions!

3) Bad music. Yes, bad music, nowhere near the wonderful scores from previous ones and resorting to newer action games soundtrack cliches.

But it was a pretty good and enjoyable game nonetheless, so I'm hoping that LoS2 will be a more refined and polished effort from what I hear.

It seems more fast-paced than Scott Pilgrim, which is good. As much as I loved SP, it was painfully slow-paced at times, especially at the beginning when your levels are low.

@RyoHazuki Oh. GOTY material, I reckon. Well, thanks.

What in God's name is Forest Legends: The Call of Love?

@get2sammyb cool, thanks.

@get2sammyb Does it have trophy support, Sammy?

It's not meant for people how already own the game for the PS3, but for people who skipped it and/or didn't have a PS3 or sold it to buy a non-backwards compatible PS4 I guess.

That would be fun to play while commuting to work

It may not look next-gen, but on the other hand I don't think it is intended to. Seems to me an opportunity to further the developers' original vision, which was probably hindered by 8 year-old hardware.

@Sanquine LBP is included in the Mega Pack bundle — and joke or not, it was by far the best option for the holidays where I live, as I said above. It sold out on every store that I know of. There was also a bundle offering Tearaway + LBP and a 16GB card in the UK and a Tearaway bundle for the rest of Europe. There was also a bundle with Soul Sacrifice by the middle of 2013 on Europe, but it didn't offer a card. That's a lot of bundles, so that's not the problem.

Music Unlimited is well and good but I don't see it as a system seller, I'm guessing people would rather have 3 months of Plus and a 16GB card and play some full games other than have demos, free-to-play titles and MU, but maybe that's just me. Of course, I have no way of knowing what Japanese gamers really want, maybe what sounds unappealing to us drives them nuts.

@get2sammyb I was thinking the same thing, that the European Mega Pack (which I bought for myself as a Christmas present) is far more interesting. The card is 8GB though, not 16GB. But even the 8GB card and LBP alone make it worth it. This bundle flew out of the shelves here in Portugal — mine was the last one I could find during the holidays.

EDIT: This one must be UK-only, as I'm seeing that it says 16GB in the box. The ones that were sold here came with a 8GB card.

This is really an excting time to be a fan of open world games, which sadly is not my case — i tend to lose interest if I don't have a fixed A to B kind of storyline (with unintrusive sidequests) broken down in segments. It has someting to do with beign an old gamer raised on level beating mentality i guess.

Well, the games will probably look good on VITA's gorgeous screen, but frankly I think these games have been rehashed enough already.

EDIT: I still think Sony would do well to reboot the franchise with a VITA exclusive. It may seem like a reckless move, but I'm thinking about how it could establish the VITA as a machine of its own, instead of a sidekick for the PS3/PS4. I'm also remembering how everyone thought it was strange to release numbered iterations of established franchises exclusively on a handheld when Dragon Quest IX came out for the Nintendo DS, and it proved to be a huge success. I can imagine VITA's flying out of the shelves if a VITA exclusive GoW as top-quality as III or Ascension was announced.

I wasn't aware of the restrictions, got a PSP3000 here and a recently purchased VITA (loving it). No plans for a third portable though.

@Bliquid I'm in Europe, and I think now my main option is that juicy UK Tearaway bundle with a 16GB memory card that Amazon says it'll be available from December 10th on

@Bliquid Oh, thanks. I was thinking of grabbing a Vita bundle with the original in a couple of weeks, but now I'm thinking maybe it's better to grab another bundle and wait for SS:Delta then.

Wait. Is this going to be a full-fledged sequel or a re-release with new content, like Dragon Dogma: Dark Arisen?

That fight with Poseidon was the only time that my jaw actually dropped during this generation. It helps to know that it was the first game I've ever played on the PS3.

I love me some trophies, but the best part is knowing that they took the trouble to keep the PS3 in and offer a streamlined experience through all three Sony consoles. It's very thoughtful really and it will be great to have all my trophies combined in one place. Other than PSNProfiles, I mean

@charlesnarles I'll keep my slim (took me ages to get to buy one for various reasons — it's very much treasured), since I've still got my slim PS2 hooked up side by side with it's younger brother. It will be nice to have the PS4 along with them eventually — but that's just me!

As a collector, I never ditch any of my older consoles. In fact, 2014 for me will be the year to complete my personal catalogue of retail games for the PS3. I'm looking forward to complete the set of games that interest me before jumping on the PS4 wagon. The first year of a console cycle tends to be very slow anyway, and I reckon it won't be hard to go through the PS4 backlog from 2015 on.

@banacheck I see what you mean, and I never said the differences weren't there or that they are irrelevant, I was just wondering that maybe what we'll see from some point on (maybe not on this generation transition, but soon) are improvements on things that can already be done in smaller scales. What I really hope to see in the coming years are games that change the ways we play by introducing the improvements that you mention, but also unexpected changes. It will be a very interesting ride, I'm sure.

Interesting. A cross-platform release as faithful as this would be unthinkable during the PS2 to PS3 transition. Maybe we're really coming to a time where the leaps between generations will become increasingly smaller? It will be interesting to see how the big companies will deal with this in the near future. I can almost see power alone not being enough to justify a new console one or two generations from now. But anyway, I digress.

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, in preparation for LoS2. Just finished it today, replaying the stages I need to clear on higher difficulties to get the plat. I'll probably buy the two DLCs since I'm curious about how the hell that Epilogue came to be. Will play LoS: Mirror of Fate (the first release, for the 3DS) aftewards.

I really fail to see why no mp3 playback is an issue when everyone who's got the money to buy a PS4 at launch probably has more than a handful of devices at home that can do it anyway. There are just so many better ways to listen to mp3 nowadays than on your videogame console. Seems like everybody is out to nitpick on unconsequential stuff when it comes to next-gen. As for the delays, I don't get the rush either — I barely have the time to play a fraction of what I'd like to as it is.

No need whatsoever to have PS1 games on PS4. There are several ways to play them if you'd like: on your old PS1, on your old PS2, on the PSP and Vita (some of them), and even on the PS3 (not only the ones that are available on PSN, but also your old discs). It would be very silly to complain that you can't play them on a 2014 machine. And this comes from a guy who's playing Dragon Warrior VII, a PS1 game, on the PS2 right now.

Being a Brazilian, this brings me fond memories of Super Monaco GP for the Mega Drive

I was very disheartened by the bad reviews for Valhalla Knights III. The PSVita surely could use some top quality RPGs at this point. Do you guys plan to review it? It would be nice to see Push Square's take on this one.

As much as I love grid-based RPGs, I resent the lack of exploration. The perfect genre blend for me is traditional RPG + SRPG, but I must be one of the few who thinks that way, since this is a mixture you don't see very often.

I understand the anxiety, but somehow I miss the time when everyone got to discover this kind of thing by themselves. It's so much more fun to explore and get to know what a new system can offer than watch a video about it on You Tube. Nowadays everything is so hyperanalysed before you get your hands on it that some of the magic gets lost in the process, IMHO.

@ShogunRok My bad completely. I don't know why but I seem to have ignored this sentence!: "While you'll still be funneling your messenger through one area to the next..."

@ShogunRok That's good to know. Thanks.

I don't know. As much as I respect what Media Molecule does and the obvious quality of the their games, I'm at a point of my life where I just don't have the time to dedicate to open world, create your own things type of game. I have to have a story driven narrative that gets from A to B (even if I have the liberty to explore other things while I'm at it) and that at some point ends. No place for timesinks in my life.

I really don't understand SE's timing for this game. I find both FFXIII entries quite decent and enjoyable, but by the time this one comes out all eyes will be on the PS4 and it will be hard to play this without thinking "yeah, but I'd rather be playing XV". It seems just so out of place. I would understand a Q4 2013 release, but on February 2014 I don't see it making a big splash, except if it's amazing, but I doubt it.

@ErnisDy Exactly. I don't quite understand all the fear. We've got a bunch of SEGA RPGs localized in Europe, while, in the case of Atlus, we depend solely on Nintendo (when it's the case) and Ghostlight — except for the Persona games, but the Persona series is more popular anyway. I don't know, maybe it's a good thing. Am I missing something here?

@Sanquine Wait, people buy games solely based on other people's scores? Frankly, I use reviews as an in-depth look on games that interest me. A review only detracts me from buying a game that was already on my radar if it proves that it's really flawed and not at all what it seems to be. My personal taste dictates what I'm buying, not reviews. Oh, and I fully appreciate the value of the work of reviewers, especially good ones like the one's here and on Nintendo Life, basically the only ones that I take seriously.

Funny, Nintendo usually don't jump into all this "us against them" thing. The Wii U is a different beast and I believe that we'll see some amazing titles for it in the near future. As much as I love my PS3 and probably will love my PS4, I think Nintendo is an amazing company and it's a privilege for us gamers to have them on the business for so many years and still going strong.

I might be alone in here, but what I want more than anything in this generation is gameplay innovation, not necessarily proximity to other medias such as films. What I would really like to feel is that I'm playing something that gameplay-wise was never done before and was only made possible because of sheer hardware power — game worlds that could not be brought to life before. I hope that there are studios out there willing to think out of the box in this sense.

Sadly, at 32 I don't really have that much hair to pull off any do at all.

@SuperSilverback Yeah, I enjoyed it too. It's a solid game, but I don't find it memorable in any way. IMHO, it doesn't push the series forward or add something that we didn't know about Kratos as a character. But it's not at all a bad game and it is a solid entry in the series.

@SuperSilverback That's okay, Ascension is quite forgetable in comparison.

@rjejr As Iwata himself would say: "Please understand":

http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2013/08/iwata_no_chance_of_nintendos_precious_resources_coming_to_other_platforms