About a month ago I wrote about the 3rd Space FPS Gaming Vest, a really awesome tool in the gamer’s toolbox. This month I have another for you out of Hong Kong; the G-Mate Mag Gun.

Designed to put you much more firmly into the action by feeling like you’re part of it, the Mag Gun has built into it all of the controls you’d find on a standard console controller.

(Please read the rest of this story at GeekBeat.TV!)

It’s been forever and an age since I posted anything significant, and that’s because my gaming world seems to have exploded. I’ve got so much stuff to play I don’t even know where to start writing about it all – and so I’ve decided to post a written thumbnail gallery of what I’m going through right now.

Games I’m Still Playing

Star Ocean: The Last Hope, XBox 360

A Kingdom for Keflings, XBox 360 Live

Games I’m Playing But Haven’t (Yet) Written About

Fantastic Contraption, http://www.fantasticcontraption.com

Amazing little web physics game along the lines of The Incredible Machine. You must get an object from one place to another by building fantastic contraptions out of various types of wheels and rods. Free to play with extra content if you’re willing to pay a little. It’s well worth it.

Little Big Planet, PS3.

I haven’t dug too much into this one yet; I just picked it up a couple of days ago. I’m late to join this party and it’s a shame, it’s a pretty mind-blowing gaming experience. At it’s core, LBP is a fairly typical platform game, but they expose that core in an unprecedented way by giving you all the tools you need to create a rediculous variety of worlds of your own to play in, alone or with friends.

Persona 4, PS2

I caved into temptation and started playing Persona 4, and was hugely impressed. As fantastic as Persona 3 is, Persona 4 takes a small step beyond it in nearly every respect. The steps may be small but the number of them adds up to a great difference; Persona 4 is one of the best RPGs I’ve played, so far. I’ll be writing it up soon.

Valkyria Chronicles, PS3

This game really blew my mind, even more so than Little Big Planet. When I got myself a PS3, I got it for two reasons – it was the cheapest BluRay player available on the market at the time, and because I want to get Final Fantasy XIII for the PS3 when it’s released. If I’d known about it, Valkyria Chronicles would have been more than enough justification. It’s a strategy roleplaying game, not a genre I’ve ever tried before, but now I think I’ve been missing out. I’m not going to rave about this one too much, it’s my #1 priority for an Impression post; I’ll save it for that, coming up soon.

Pain, PS3 Store

This is a pretty small game I was introduced to just last week. The idea is to flick a living crash test dummy of a character around a scene, causing as much destruction as you can. It sounds kind of brainless and silly, which it is, but it’s amazingly addictive and satisfying to play. The base game comes with one scene and a couple of characters to throw around. Two additional scenes and a large number of extra characters are available for purchase on the Sony Online Store.

Games I Am No Longer Playing

Persona 3 FES, PS2.

• I’m still sucked in by the story on this one, but sadly I reached a point where I could not defeat a boss encounter and don’t have enough saved games to go back and level up to try again. I will start a new game in the future, manage the early game days better, and possibly play at Easy level just so I can get through the story more effectively.

Harvest Moon – Tree of Tranquility, Wii.

• A good game, one I enjoy, but I’m too far off the target audience for it to hold my attention against the likes of Star Ocean, Persona 4 and Valkyria Chronicles.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Three new DLC packs revealed for Valkyria Chronicles (destructoid.com)
• Fallout 3 and Little Big Planet big winners at E3 awards (canada.com)
• New Japanese “Final Fantasy XIII” Video is Here (amazon.com)

As of this writing, I’m about 30 hours into Star Ocean – The Last Hope (SO-TLH) for the XBox 360 and I’m enjoying it. I had wished, when I started writing this, that I’d be able to say I was thoroughly enjoying it, but there are a few concerns I’ve got that prevent me from saying that.

The Last Hope is a fantastic Square-Enix RPG, no doubt. Anyone who likes Final Fantasy style Japanese RPGs will be into this. The title comes from the core of the story, which is that humanity has been up to it’s old tricks and taken warfare to such an extreme that World War III has occurred and left the Earth unable to sustain life, at least on the surface. Humanity has taken refuge under ground, but they can’t remain there indefinitely. The human race’s titular last hope is the search for a new world to call it’s own, hopefully one they’ll take care of a bit better than they did the Earth.

The characters are decent, if a little generic-seeming at the start. They do begin to come into their own as you get further into the game, which is a bit of a relief. Your primary characters are Edge Maverick and Reimi Saionji, humans from Earth’s underground who are determined to find humanity’s new home. They’re fairly typical anime/RPG character archetypes, the idealized everyman that you can identify with comfortably while a part of you wishes you secretly wishes that you could identify with them a little more closely. This makes it easy to slip into their shoes so to speak, but also makes them feel a little bland at the outset. As the game progresses they start to come into their own a little bit more with story events tugging on their personas and moulding them into something a bit more unique.

The combat is enjoyable, resembling other Square-Enix games in the broad strokes but with some twists that are new to this title. It took me a long time to get into the game’s Blindsiding system because I found it largely unnecessary, but now that I do know how to pull them off, I find I do them a lot more often. Blindsiding is a way your characters have of slipping past an enemy’s defenses to strike from their “blind spot” which always results in a critical hit for much more damage than a typical hit would do.

If I had any complaint about the combat, it’s the same one I have with all Square-Enix games – it’s often necessary to go “grinding”, or fighting endlessly for the sake of fighting to build experience up when you discover that you’re not strong enough to get past a particular encounter. This is not always a bad thing. In this game in particular I’ve found it less irritating than I have in other games, because it has led me to exploring the various planets I can travel to in more depth, and I’ve completed a large number of smaller side quests as a result. These side quests make for an effective alternative to grinding, in fact, because you can earn a fair amount of experience doing them,which levels your characters up just as effectively as the fighting.

Another nice side effect of the side quests is that many of them are crafting quests. People or shops will often ask you to find or make special items for them. The game contains a vast number of resources you can acquire in various ways. You can then take these resources back to your ship’s lab, where you can launch the crafting interface and create a dizzying array of items that range from weapons and armor upgrades to ship upgrades to useless bits of arts and craft that can be sold for more than the cost of the components you made them from. Like blindsides in combat, this was not something I jumped into right away, but once I did start messing around with it, it quickly became a fun passtime in it’s own right – and the more combat oriented items are yet another way you can reduce the need for grinding, as they can make those extra-tough encounters a lot easier to manage.

Visually… well, it’s a breathtaking game that often inspires me to just sit still and pan the camera around the world to take it in. I won’t go on too much about how great the game looks, because honestly, it’s not often you find A-list games these days that don’t look spectacular.

I have had some problems with SO-TLH that have driven me absolutely crazy. The game seems to be unusually crash-prone. I’ve had more problems with crashing games on the XBox 360 than on any other console, but this game in particular crashes more than any other 360 title I’ve played in recent memory. I’m not sure whether this is because the game is buggy, the console lacks stability, or because  my console is one of the earlier 360 releases, but no matter the cause, it’s frustrating to lose progress due to lockups.

It does say something about the compelling quality of the game that I keep going back to it though. I’m anxious to see where the story is leading; what more is going to happen with these characters? What more will they go through, fight through, endure through? It’s good enough to be worth a little frustration to see where things are headed.

Overall impression: I’d rank it a bit below Final Fantasy XII or Persona 3 FES, but still definitely worth a look for fans of this style of gaming.

Related articles by Zemanta

• New Japanese “Final Fantasy XIII” Video is Here (amazon.com)
• Star Ocean: The Last Hope gets earlier release date (joystiq.com)
• Destructoid review: Star Ocean: The Last Hope (destructoid.com)
• Stale News: Star Ocean 4′s Battle System Has A Ridiculous Name [Exaltation] (kotaku.com)

Right off the bat I’ll admit this is not the most timely impression. The game has been out for a couple of years, but I thought I’d write about Tree of Tranquility because I’ve recently had cause to start looking into what makes the Harvest Moon series tick and get familiar with it’s mechanics.

I’m not a complete stranger to the series. I do have and enjoy a related game, Rune Factory,  for the Nintendo DS. Rune Factory involves a heavy dose of fantasy swords and sorcery though, which puts me much closer to it’s target audience. The Harvest Moon series is all about building the biggest, most successful ranch possible by farming, raising animals, courting a potential spouse, getting married, and having children.

So what does Tree of Tranquility have to offer me, a guy who likes Half-Life 2, Burn Out Revenge, and Mario Kart? Well I also like The Sims series, so there’s some common ground there. Harvest Moon is a similar life simulation game, just more stylized and specialized.

As the title suggests, Tree of Tranquility is a very tranquil, relaxing sort of game. You’re a young rancher just moved to a new island, ready to begin a life for yourself. You start with your choice of 3 plots of land to work, and can buy more land later when you’ve gotten your feet under you.

Your early days on the island will be spent preparing your first fields for planting, a grueling process that will drain your character’s endurance pretty severely. Eventually you’ll have enough land cleared of rocks, weeds and other impediments to plant some proper crops and start earning some money. The longer you play though, the more experience your character gains with each tool that he (or she) uses. You’ll level up your tools individually; spend a lot of time watering crops and your ability to use the watering can increases. Plow a lot of land, and your plow skill increases. Use a scythe to clear weeds, harvest grasses and other produce, and your scythe skill increases. Fish a lot and your fishing rod skill increases, etc.

Leveling your skills in these and other tools is critical. The higher your skill, the more you can do with the same amount of stamina. Controlling the amount of stamina you use is central to the game, so anything you can do to cut down the stamina required to earn money will get you ahead. In addition to building your skill at using the tools, the tools themselves are upgradable either by paying for better types, or upgrading existing tools at lower cost, but with the requirement of supplying the increasingly rare ores needed for the work.

Once your skills have leveled up a bit you’ll be able to finish most of your chores pretty quickly in each day, leaving you time to explore other elements of the game play. One of the chief elements you’ll want to investigate is the ‘courting a wife/husband’ story line. Getting married and having kid(s) is one of the big criteria for the eventual success of your ranch, and one that’ll take a long time to complete. I’m only a couple of seasons into my game at the time of this writing, so I haven’t gotten very far in any individual story line, but I have learned that courting someone involves visiting them frequently and giving them a lot of gifts after you learn what they like and what they don’t.

As I get further into the game, I’ll post more about it. For now though, my impression is that it’s an interesting “relax time” game with elements taken from RPGs, time management, and resource management games. Unlike most time management games though, you get the experience without the stress of any actual time pressure. It’s a good way to spend a lazy couple of hours.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Rune Factory 2: A Fantasy Harvest Moon Out Now (lockergnome.com)
• RPGs for Gamer Moms: The World Ends with You (role-playing-video-games.suite101.com)
• ‘Working for the Man’: Models of Play [Game Design] (kotaku.com)

I found myself eventually using it pretty much exclusively for the space ship builder rather than actually playing the game; there was very little left to discover in the game play. It is with a mix of hope and dread that I’ve been following the news of the first full-scale expansion pack for Spore, entitled Spore Galactic Adventures.

News of what it will contain is a bit thin at the moment, but it does sound like it contains at least some of what it’s going to need to make the game really playable again. It will ship with some planet-based adventures in the box, and provide another editor that puts adventure creation in the hands of the players. Like other player-generated content, adventures will be shared online so there should be no shortage of missions your intrepid galactic explorers can take part in.

My main concern is with the potential depth of these adventures, and what news I’ve seen hasn’t given me a lot of information to make guesses about. It is pretty cool that you’ll be able to beam down on planets to explore as your creature & crew, and it sounds like outfits will have practical uses at last, but will the adventures themselves last 5 minutes? Half an hour? More? Or will it be up to the designer of the adventure?

If done well, this could be a pretty compelling reason to get back into the game. Spore itself was a pretty big letdown though, so I’m going to stay a bit cautious in my optimism, at least until a lot more is known.

Related articles by Zemanta

• First Spore Expansion, “Galactic Adventures” Due In Spring [Spore] (kotaku.com)
• More Spore: ‘Galactic Adventures’ expansion coming this spring (joystiq.com)
• Spore: Galactic Adventures expansion announced (macworld.com)
• Spore gets its first (superfluous) expansion pack (macworld.com)

A quick note to begin with. This blog documents my impressions of Persona 3 FES, as opposed to Persona 3. The two are not entirely the same game;  Persona 3 FES contains extra content not available in the original Persona 3. However, for the sake of my aching fingers, I’m going to just call it Persona 3 or even P3.

Yes, the name of the game really is Shin Megami Tensei Persona 3 FES. What a mouth full! With a name like that, you just have to guess that it’s a  Japanese role playing game, and you’d be very correct. This is no Final Fantasy though, and that’s a good thing.

I love the Final Fantasy series, don’t get me wrong. But sometimes I need a break from that style of play, and Persona 3 has given it to me. This is not  a game of physical exploration, wandering from place to place in a vast fantasy/sci-if environment, meeting strange creatures and killing them.

No, this is a game that takes place largely within a few specific locations in one small town. The physical exploration takes place within a vast secret tower in the town, while the bulk of the exploration is more social – exploring relationships between your protagonist and the various friends you make in  and out of school during the course of a full calendar year.

You do your explorations in the role of the Main Character, or MC as he’s often referred to online. In the game, he’s referred to by whatever name you  choose to give him.

MC is a fairly typical high school student, or at least he seems to be at first. His life can take any number of turns depending on how you play the  game. Is he going to be a straight-A student with incomparable academics? A social butterfly that can charm the socks off the ladies? Maybe someone very brave in the face of danger and dating? Manage your time well and you can make him any or all of these, or not, as you prefer.

It all depends on how you want to play him, and the game as a whole. Your socialization with other characters and groups that you meet will have a strong effect on your combat performance in the dungeon parts of the game, thanks to an interesting experience system based on the concept of “Social Links” that power the various personas you control. The stronger your social ties, the more experience a related persona gains when you create it.

Social links are only one method of improvement, however. The charm, academics and courage stats that I alluded to earlier are another form of social advance; your progress on those three stats determines how strong your relationships can get with three particular characters that are of critical importance to your game, and may have other effects as well. I’m not quite at the halfway point in the game yet, so I can’t really say authoritatively what those possible other effects would be.

Like most RPGs, your main character has hitpoints and spirit (magic) points, but lacks most other common stat types; strength, endurance, magical potency and the other “vital” stats are not associated with MC himself. Instead, they are associated with the various personas MC can make use of. This means switching personas in the middle of a battle has a much greater impact that just changing your selection of special abilities; the fundamental traits of your character change as well. You might switch from an exceptionally high strength with one persona to one that’s very physically weak, and find yourself doing far less melee damage as a result. The tradeoff may be that your magic potential is hugely boosted. This is a pretty fascinating system that makes the choice of personas all the more strategically important.

Not having finished the game yet, this isn’t a full review, but just an impression. I’ll leave off at this before I get into anything too spoilerish, but I’ll invite anyone who’s interested to comment or write to me with questions. If I can answer them, I certainly will.

My impression so far: This is a beautiful gem of a game, not to be missed if you can handle going back to the last generation of console games and picking up something for the PS2 ninstead of the shiny and new PS3.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Persona 4 webepisodes reveal scrumptious details
• Persona 4 Review: Getting Away With Murder [Review]
• Destructoid review: Persona 4
• Pesona 4 Playstation 2 Review

Jesse’s been in the industry a while so I always enjoy talking with him about what he’s working on, projects we’ve done in the past, etc. His site has been up for a couple of years now, so there’s plenty to dig into; I know I will be.

My celebration of the crash-free computer was a bit premature. I’ve had two of the worst crashes yet today, but at least it conclusively identified the problem for me – my computer just got around to informing me that the CPU fan is running too slow and failing. This is disappointing, but at the same time, as bad hardware goes it’s just about as cheap to replace as it’s possible to get, so I’m VERY relieved. I was afraid for a while I might have to get a new video card, motherboard or processor, none of which I can afford at the moment.

So it seems for the time being I won’t be able to play any serious computer games. No Half-Life 2, no Portal, no Sims 2, at least until I can get a new fan installed. The system seems to run fine as long as I avoid taxing it with games.

Related articles by Zemanta

• 8 Things You Need to Know Before Buying a Graphics Card
• Don’t Skimp on the Motherboard
• Parts of a Computer
• Five Important Tips on Building a PC

When I last wrote about my Windows 7 adventures last weekend, my system was in a mostly usable state but with several big question marks hanging over it.

1) I had no sound, since I could not convince my X-Fi sound card to work with Win7.
2) My system was initially crashing, something I’d been experiencing for a couple of months in Vista as well.

I’m happy to report that issue 1 is now resolved; it was a relatively simple matter to fix. I simply installed the Windows Vista X-Fi drivers using compatibility mode, and much to my surprise, they worked fine; I can look forward to some testing of various games over the weekend. (My hit list of choice: Half-Life 2 and it’s various episodes, Portal, and Fallout 3. I’d try The Sims 2 as well, but there aren’t enough hours in the weekend.)

As far as issue 2 goes, the system has been rock solid since I blasted years’ worth of dust out of the fans. Funny how that works, huh? I can’t say for sure yet that it’s fixed. The machine did run for a good 2 weeks straight over the holidays under Vista. But at this point, I’m pretty confident in saying Windows 7 is very stable and my machine is definitely liking things as they stand. Stay tuned for my post-gaming report sometime early in the week.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Best of Lifehacker’s Windows 7 Coverage So Far [Roundups]
• Will Windows 7 be Worth the Wait?

Week 2 back at the gym with a new trainer. My original trainer was great; maybe a little too great. She got herself promoted. Dan, my new trainer, is really cool too, but man do I ache for days after each workout! My body feels like it’s made of rubber bands tonight. But that’s a good thing I guess, it means I’m doing something right.

I’m working on an impression post about Persona 3 FES. I’m hoping to have that up tomorrow night or certainly by the weekend. It’s an incredibly compelling Japanese RPG that plays like a dating sim game combined with a dungeon crawler. That description really doesn’t do it any justice at all, so I hope you’ll check back here this weekend and get a better picture of what it’s like.

That’s about it for tonight. Stay tuned for more soon!