Νέο DLC για το Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Dark Lord | Game 2.0

H Square Enix εδώ και λίγες μέρες έχει κάνει διαθέσιμα τρία πακέτα DLC για το Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Dark Lord, το οποίο μπορείτε να βρείτε στο WiiWare.[next]

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• Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life As A Dark Lord Trailer Is Not Dark [Wiiware] (kotaku.com)
• NintendoWare Weekly: My Life as a Darklord (joystiq.com)
• My Life as a Darklord hits WiiWare this Friday (destructoid.com)
• Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Dark Lord Available Today (wii.ign.com)

When it comes to video games I’m some-what a purest; meaning I only buy games that come in a box (or a Gamefly envelope). Before, I thought all those console ‘download service’ games weren’t worth the time or the carnie based points to buy them. However when I saw Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King as a preview on Game Informer, I knew this was going to be something good. Admittedly I forgot about it for a time, but it only took one review of the game to jog my memory (and excitement). So were my good vibes justified; in a word yes. So much of a yes that I might have to change my opinion on such games from being just rewritten, reworked games from the past to something more credible. Before I move into the game, I confess that I’ve never played the Crystal Chronicles series of Final Fantasy. I thought it was stupid. So my take on the story is a little fragmented, but in the beginning of the game three characters find themselves a castle town, minus the town. They been on the run since their old home was destroyed by a force called ‘miasma’ (A force that has been taking care of in the first Crystal Chronicles, I’m assuming anyway). These three: one old knight, one chancellor/court magician, and one little aire apparent (the main character) of the bygone kingdom must now rebuild what they lost in this new land. Simple, right? Well in final Fantasy nothing is as simple as it appears, especially for a king – which is you.

This is not a RPG or action game, it’s more a like a micromanaging simulator with a little strategy added. If non-twitching isn’t your thing then stop reading this and go play Halo, however if you give this game a good hour you may be pleasantly surprised. Now the king has a power called ‘Architek’ which allows players to build building instantly; a useful skill but not a free one. Players need to get ‘elementite’ to use the power and the only places to get the stuff is where the monsters live (of course). Normally player would just gear up with the big, baddest weapons, armor and magic available and go tearing into the wild; bring back enough treasures to choke a moogle. However… Kings don’t do that sort of thing; they delegate jobs like to more expendable ‘heroes’ of the realm and My Life as a King is no different. Check the adventurer’s stats, tell them where to go and sit back while they do all the hard work of grinding monsters for you. Next day they bring back any elementite, treasure, and funds for you to use at your leisure, sweet deal. Where players come in though is pimping out your kingdom, and while it is busy work it’s also exciting create your own kingdom from the ground up. Each structure players choose (or not to choose) to build will affect your home and the people around it. For example; later on in the game, you’ll have the ability to build mage academies. In which will not only give your adventures the option to become mages, and make future defenders of the realm near the academies more intelligent (thus better mages), but they will provide a scenic bell tower chime every morning, afternoon and evening in the kingdom (which does nothing really, but sounds nice). Academies are only one of many building the king can form; but it’s up to the player to decide ‘what’ go’s ‘where’ and ‘how many’. There is only so much room in your kingdom and in order for you to survive and prosper you must keep both your citizens safe and your soldiers happy. Heavy is the head that holds the crown.

This game is simple looking, but very beautiful. Which has always been Nintendo’s greatest visual strength; (in my opinion) they can’t compete with PS3 and 360’s realistic graphics. The Wii was built for colorful, expressive art style; the sooner more 3^rd party developers figure this out, the better Wii games will become (visually anyway). The game’s tutorials are also very simple to understand, clearly explaining the less than pulse-pounding functions of the game.

I have to say though my favorite thing about the game is the charm of it. Not once was I bored doing practically the same thing in the 7-10 minute intervals that counted as the in-game days. I always wanted to hear what the villagers had to say, even though they tend to repeat themselves. And when the adventurers head out to their latest dungeon I’m always excited to see the results (being good or bad). Of coarse that’s just me, to another gamer all this may just seem to be a striped down final fantasy tactics mixed with Sims element. Which it is, but it doesn’t making any less fun and at a cheap price, it’s a great find for Wii owners. Players can even invest more money into the game by buying new avatar skins, useable races, high level dungeons and upgraded buildings. Totally optional, but they do keep things interesting. If more downloadable games are like this (creative & fun) then I have nothing to worry about for future titles. However despite how enjoyable this title is to me personally, I can only give it a Sliver rating because at the end of the day this game will only appeal to a certain crowd, not the majority of gamers. The features that make it great are also what holds’ it back.

WiiWare seems like a good idea, since all Nintendo has had to compete with Microsoft and Sony as far as small-scale games bought online was the Virtual Console (I’ll get to that in a moment) up against XBox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Store, but it has some obvious faults that any logical thinking would have been directed to fixing beforehand, but following Nintendo’s typical turning-a-blind-eye strategy, will probably never be recognized and continue to hinder the service’s potential until the next console generation.

Let me explain. To start with, the obvious pro of WiiWare is that it offers up Nintendo’s version of smaller scale and budget games to be downloaded for a smaller cost than most games do today, which has the potential to allow for some very creative concepts that can, theoretically, be cheaper to make and easier to release. Significantly outweighing this, on the other hand, is a number of crippling cons. Looking at the first batch of games themselves, the vast majority of the launch titles seem to offer little more than your average flash game one would normally play on the internet… for free. Defend Your Castle actually was a flash game at one point in time, and I’m pretty sure I’ve already played some variation of Pop on addictinggames years ago. The deeper launch titles, such as Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King and LostWinds, look more promising depending on whether or not you’re okay with less game for less price (which sounds okay to me, and should make sense to a lot of people, since Madden manages to sell how many copies every year? and that’s with the price going up!), but are marred by a bigger issue: space. Final Fantasy takes up over half of the Wii’s flash memory alone, and that’s without any of its expansion packs. So basically, if you want to buy two WiiWare games, you could quite possibly be out of luck, and that may not even take playing actual games (the kinds you have to go to the store to get) into consideration.

What’s more frustrating is that we already knew this was an issue since we’ve had Virtual Console games since the Wii was released. The Wii has an incredibly limited amount of storage space, and the only official solution is to transfer data onto SD cards, which as it turns out erases any saved data you may have had, rendering the fix rather pointless. Knowing Nintendo’s typical strategy, a real solution will probably never see the light of day, as Nintendo has a habit of just ignoring problems and hoping they’ll go away on their own. So it doesn’t really matter how much potential WiiWare games themselves have, because any progress made there is immediately lost by this obvious problem that should have been taken care of first in order to garner any credibility.

And as long as I’m almost on the topic, Virtual Console is a great idea, but would be even better if Nintendo would actually release indisputably classic games like they claimed they would.

Its already been three days and if you are still wondering which title to buy, good for you, don’t take the plunge just yet.

Wii Ware on paper looks pretty good. The games range from 5 USD and the priciest sits at 15 USD and after playing Lost Winds and Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles (which will be known as FFCC for sanity’s sake) to completion, I’m not exactly sold especially if you are able to blow past the games as fast as I am.

WALL OF TEXT INCOMING

True to the nature of the Wii, the games offered by the service is no doubt meant for the casual crowd who spends 2-3 hours in the evenings playing games for recreation. The get-up-and-go nature of the two games I played does not require you to sacrifice your sleep time just to complete an achievement or make it to the next save point. Take your time with them and they will put a smile on your face.

It’s Caesar without the obnoxious city building. It’s Populous with lesser God powers. It’s Civilization without the multiple city micro-management. It’s Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre without the depth. Harvest Moon without the crops and animals. Roll them all together and you get Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King.

At 15USD, this game is worth its weight in terms of gameplay for, maybe, the first few hours before you find yourself reaching for the credit card to buy additional content packs for your kingdom. My initial investment suddenly has almost doubled after I plonked down an additional 13USD to get myself three new races and eleven additional dungeons only to find out that the bakery I wanted to get a 100% completion rate was not among the 2 content packs. Oh well, I will save the 300 points for another time. I then find myself a happy gamer with a lighter wallet.

Translation: Talking to me costs you 3 bucks, honey.

Don’t get me wrong if it appears that I’m whining over the DLC because I certainly am not. The 3 additional races does add a much needed spark to an otherwise boring town in which every female/male human NPC looks like they are all inbred relations with the only distinction being their hair. EVERYONE looks alike. The dungeon pack would easily add an additional 3-5 hours of gameplay considering their difficulty level surpasses that of the final boss. The good thing about these packs is that they help fill up the barren spaces of your kingdom. Before you know it, all buildable land has been filled out. Demolish existing structures to make way for new shops for your adventurers? The choice is yours.

As mentioned earlier, FFCC is a game that takes on many parts of other games, so there’s nothing really fresh if that’s what you are looking for. The game towards the middle tends to drag especially when your adventurers lack the finances and levels to tackle the higher difficulty dungeons. I found myself issuing my daily orders to adventurers then going to bed. This built in cap system artificially prolongs the time needed to complete the game. Take your time and you will certainly find a rich treasure trove of content to wade through at your own leisure. Thankfully, if you plan to bulldoze through the game like I did, Square plans to release additional dungeon packs in the near future, with the next one being priced at 300 points. Working it out, if these packs were released at, maybe, two per month it still would be cheaper than your monthly subscription to WoW.

Lost Winds, is a side scrolling environmental puzzle game that can be played with ‘two’ players. Why the inverted commas? Because the game can be played with one player using the nunchuck for movement while the other controls the wind with the remote and eventually your nunchuck player would just fall asleep then it becomes single player. Marketing trickery at its finest. This game is single player. Period. Really.

For people who have played Okami, stay away from this. For those who have not, the concept is pretty exciting to be honest. The cartoonish look of the game makes the game shine even brighter and how the environment reacts to the direction in which you blow the wind at, never ceases to bring a smile to my face. Sadly, I was able to complete this game in a short span of 3 hours according to my game save. Its not a particularly hard game to start off with but I had expected a lengthier game with more puzzles. I could describe this game in less than 10 words.

Pretty? Yes. Fun? Maybe. Long? No. See, I did it in 6 and just like Lost Winds, it lacks the extra 4 words to fully justify the cost.

Overall, I’ve clocked in 22 hours for FFCC and 3 for Lost Winds and my investment for each works out to $1.18 and $3.33 respectively. It is actually quite hard to justify which is the better of the two considering the additional investment one has pay to gain the most out of FFCC. On the most basic level, I would have to say go with Lost Winds but if you are willing to go the extra mile, go with FFCC, it would cost less than your typical AAA Wii title even after all the extras.

Somehow, going with the tradition of multiplayer and lighthearted tradition of the Wii, Defend Your Castle gives the most bang for your buck, anyone care to share?

I’d been hearing some good things about Boom Blox, enough so that I decided to look up when it would release.  When I did, I found that it hit retail last week!  I headed over to Gamestop after work to pick up a copy and brought it home. 

This is the first game in a while that really executes the Wiimote well.  I don’t think I could imagine playing Boom Blox on any other system, and that’s the first time that’s happened since Wii Sports.   The premise is a series of puzzles or story mode challenges in which you must knock over towers of blocks by throwing balls or bombs at them via the wiimote.  Strength of throw is determined by the speed of your swing.  There are all kind of little tricks and special blocks that I won’t detail in full, but regardless, there’s a ton of variety in gameplay.  Sometimes you’re even pulling blocks out pseudo Jenga style. 

There’s puzzle like challenges in the single player mode, as well as co-op and competitive modes in multiplayer.  In multiplayer there are a ton of various games, from being in opposing castles and trying to bowl over the competition’s structures, to a air hockey/curling mockup game, and pretty much anything else you could imagine.  I had a ton of fun playing it with Rachel last night, and I can’t wait to try it with four players.  She even woke up this morning and started playing it again.

On the news side of things, a poster on the NeoGAF forumsclaims to have gotten their copy of Game Informer early and scooped out all the detail on Gutiar Hero 4.

Guitar Hero 4 (PS3, 360, Wii, PS2)
- Create a song. Although these exclude vocals due to storage and possible copyright issues.
- You’ll be able to name your song as well as creating album art. After you’ve done all that you can upload it to GH Tunes where anyone can download it.
- You’ll be limited to 5 songs at first. But depending on the ratings you get you’ll possibly be able to upload 10 or more.
- The song sharing mode will be in the Wii and PS2 versions also, but GI says it’s unlikely that it’ll be as robust as the PS3 and 360 versions.
- Drums, bass, vocals guitar
- Create a rocker
- Create a guitar and drums
- All songs will be master tracks
- They don’t want to discuss specifics on track listing out of fear of being scooped by the competition. However they confirmed 4 bands: Van Halen, The Eagles, Linkin Park and Sublime.
- A new guitar designed by Red Octane that includes a new input mechanic that’ll “impact the way you play GH in the future”.
- GI saw see through notes while playing that Neversoft said was the new input mechanic and that they were trying to patent.

I’ve been pretty down on Guitar Hero 3, but the ability to create music is something the community has been looking for for a long time.  The thing that could put Guitar Hero back in the limelight is that fact that they have been releasing a new game every year. 

If Guitar Hero 4 launches this Christmas Season with all those features, exclusive band deals, and create-a-song (and it’s executed well), then suddenly there’s a product out there that trumps Rock Band.  And it doesn’t seem like Harmonix wants to do the yearly release–they’d rather keep releasing tracks once a week.  Which has been absolutely awesome and I love them for it, but could cause problems should GH4 come to fruition in this manner. 

All of that should be taken with a big grain of salt though.  Until GI hits newsstands this is all just a rumor.

Finally, Wiiware has arrived in the U.S., and with it the first couple of games for release on the download service.  The most anticipated of these is Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King, a Sim City meets Actraiser meets final fantasy spin off.  I’d really like to try it, but the 15 dollar price point is stopping me.  Add to this that you only get one race and the others are DLC for 8 additional dollars and it just starts to leave a bad taste in my mouth.

–WG

Ayer comenzó el servicio en EEUU, y los europeos como casi siempre tienen que esperar un poco más.

Recordamos que lo que ofrece son descargas de juegos originales (no juegos antiguos, para eso ya está la consola virtual) de poco peso y reducido precio para Wii.

El catálogo inicial estará compuesto por ocho juegos que son:

• Dr. Mario & Germ Buster (Nintendo) – 1000 Wii Points
• Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King (Square Enix) – 1500 Wii Points
• LostWinds (Frontier) – 1000 Wii Points
• Star Soldier R (Hudson) – 800 Wii Points
• TV Show King (Gameloft) – 1000 Wii Points
• Pop (Nnooo) – 700 Wii Points
• Pirates: The Key of Dreams (Oxygen)
• Toki Tori (Two Tribes)

Recordar que al cambio 1€ equivalen a 100 Wii Points, lo que quiere decir que por 15 € podéis disfrutar de un nuevo FF Crystal Chronicles.

Ayer comenzó el servicio en EEUU, y los europeos como casi siempre tienen que esperar un poco más.

Recordamos que lo que ofrece son descargas de juegos originales (no juegos antiguos, para eso ya está la consola virtual) de poco peso y reducido precio para Wii.

El catálogo inicial estará compuesto por ocho juegos que son:

• Dr. Mario & Germ Buster (Nintendo) – 1000 Wii Points
• Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King (Square Enix) – 1500 Wii Points
• LostWinds (Frontier) – 1000 Wii Points
• Star Soldier R (Hudson) – 800 Wii Points
• TV Show King (Gameloft) – 1000 Wii Points
• Pop (Nnooo) – 700 Wii Points
• Pirates: The Key of Dreams (Oxygen)
• Toki Tori (Two Tribes)

Recordar que al cambio 1€ equivalen a 100 Wii Points, lo que quiere decir que por 15 € podéis disfrutar de un nuevo FF Crystal Chronicles.

Today WiiWare games were released on the Wii’s Shop Channel for the first time. The opening lineup is strong, and it seems that Nintendo wants to release new titles on a regular basis. The launch games are:

LostWinds

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life As a King

Defend Your Castle

Pop

TV Show King

V.I.P. Casino: Blackjack

IGN.com is reviewing all of them quickly, most earning a score around 6 or 7, but so far with LostWinds in the lead with an 8.2 out of 10. Now I kind of wish I saved those 500 points I had on Sunday for Defend Your Castle (the only 500 point game of the bunch), but Super Mario Bros. 3 probably is a much better game…

By the way, Final Fantasy up there has downloadable content features… nice. Nintendo’s finally starting to understand.

And as a final note, the Nintendo Channel was also given an update with new videos (mostly of the WiiWare titles) and DS demos. While it’s a bit disappointing to see Ninja Gaiden gone from the lineup, new demos like Apollo Justice and Iron Man have caught my eye. If the Nintendo Channel keeps getting awesome updates like this every week, I’ll be one happy gamer.

By Josh60502