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Uh oh, looks like I might have to fork out some extra pennies for the multi-cd Final Fantasy XIII Original Sound Track. As usual, the ones who got their hands on some copies have jacked up the price for the Limited edition on ebay for USD $100ish PLUS shipping.

I searched a bit and found Amazon Japan has it for pre-order for roughly USD $50ish + shipping or the regular version for roughly USD $40ish. If it’s only 10 dollars difference, I would certainly get the Limited Edition for sure. Provided I could get my hands on a copy.

I didn’t have time to check what was new on PSN on the usual Thursday. But when I logged in on Saturday I found two demo games that brought tears to my eyes. One was the violent, funny and bloody as hell Fairytale Fights and the other was another one of the most hyped up action game Bayonetta. The second demo really surprised me as I didn’t expect one in the first place (it is coming out in early January of 2010).

If you have not heard of Bayonetta, something is wrong with you or you are not into games in the action genre. First thing you will notice is the similarity of Bayonetta and the Devil May Cry series since they are both directed by Hideki Kamiya, who also directed Viewtiful Joe, another action game. After playing the demo I personally think Bayonetta beats Devil May Cry in every way.

First of all, you are not only wielding one gun, you are wielding 2 in both hands and 2 more as part of Bayonetta’s sexy heels (though you can customize your weapons to your liking). The 4 enchanted guns are called Scarborough Fair, . How cool is having guns as part of the heels? Each weapon has its own attacks and because there are so many different weapons to choose from, you won’t be seeing the same moves over and over again as often as in Devil May Cry or any other button mashing action games, Heavenly Sword is one.

Big Bosses! I’m a sucker for big and epic looking bosses. There were two of such bosses in the demo, they were relatively easy to handle. You get to finish them off by summoning “Beasts from Hell”, from her hair and skin-tight suit (where the Partial Nudity in the rating comes from), in bloody ways. Speaking of finishing moves, you can also activate “Torture Attacks” if you have collected enough magic orbs (forgot the proper term). Getting hit will erase some of the magic orbs though so you have to be careful not to get hit.

Overall the game is VERY fast paced, the demo lasted roughly 15 minutes. I actually played again after finishing it the first time. It was that good!

Graphics are gorgeous, specially the environment. I occasionally paused, used the right analog stick to just look around and appreciate the sceneries. With such a fast paced game, I did not notice any framerate issue at all.

Music (produced by piano) is also another strong asset for Bayonetta, simply elegant.

I could go on and on with this game but I will leave the rest for you guys to discover. If my girlfriend, who isn’t that into games, actually likes the game as much as I do. Then it is safe to say we have a winner here. Bayonetta isn’t just a looker, but a real deal. With stylish game play, beautiful graphics and backed by elegant music in the background. Bayonetta is a first day must buy, at least for me. If you haven’t played the demo, please do so, chances are you won’t be disappointed!

So I finally gave in, purchased and downloaded Fat Princess off PSN because I’ve been eyeing on this game since it was released. I was excited now that I finally got the game but was it worth it? I have mixed reactions about this game. Definitely not as good as I expected though!

So immediately after downloading and installing Fat Princess, which is basically an action strategy game where there are two sides (red and blue). You can customize your character with different looks and more are unlocked as you progress in the game. The objectives are capturing the princess (capture the flag), death match. There is also a soccer x death match for online as well, this mode is pretty straight forward based on the name. You have 5 classes to choose from – warrior, ranger, healer, dark magician who can drain enemy health and the worker. The workers are necessary, in order to gather wood and minerals to upgrade the different classes’ buildings in order to unlock their upgraded classes. They also responsible for building castle doors and catapults which can launch a group of people to the enemy castle.

I wanted to get a hang of the game first being playing online so I jumped into the single player game and played its rather short storyline which consists of 7 chapters. It was enjoyable most of the time, specially the death matches. There was one chapter that I thought was frustrating, at least playing with the AIs, the ones which you have to rescue your princess.

I guess for now AIs are still dumb and cannot act/play like humans. Most of the time I was alone inside enemy castle trying to rescue the princess even though you are allowed to have up to 3 AIs to help you on your side. And most of the time I got killed right on the spot because either the enemy AIs just swamped me or they cake-fed the princess so much I was basically not moving at all, and then swamped by the enemies!

In terms of graphics, its not Killzone 2 graphics obviously, it is pleasing to the eyes, cartoonish with vibrant colors. I think the blood and gory part is one of the major plus for this game. Whenever there is a battle you know there will be blood and body parts every where which is insanely fun to watch as you chop your way to your enemies!

Without going into every single detail of the game, I’m sure this game is worth the $16 (+tax) I paid. I think its a pretty good casual game where you want to jump in when you have 30 minutes to spare. Its not perfectly for sure and hopefully we will see some expansions/add-ons in the near future, free download would be nice!

Check out Gametrailers.com’s review:

I still haven’t bought Fat Princess because I’ve been way too busy to buy new games. Well the real reason is probably because its not a first-day-buy for me. I know its fun, hella fun, but it just isn’t enough to convince me to get it right away. Anyway enough of that. Fairytale Fights might just be good enough to convince me to get this.

Fairytale Fights, you can partially guess, its about fairytale. There ARE fairytale characters in there, but with a twist. Fairytale Fights, not only does it involve violent action, but we are talking about ULTRA violent and bloody action where your fairytale character are literally chop the enemies into pieces. End result? Blood everywhere on the ground, what makes this even funnier is you can “skate” on the blood! Now that is funny!

This also feels like a party game, like the Wii kind. Which is a bonus because PS3 and Xbox are both missing some good party games. I’m also putting my bets on this being a downloadable instead of a full $60 game.

Fairytale Fights will be released on October 27, 2009.

Video Games | Fairytale Fights | Preview

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

I haven’t played a single bad game for a while, well probably because I’m either too busy that I don’t have time to play or I am too busy with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare still (Yeah after two years, still going strong!). So yesterday was Thursday, and we all know PSN gets updated with fresh new video trailers, demos and other downloadables. So I downloaded the demo for The Punisher: No Mercy because I thought the trailer that I saw was…”ok” ?

How wrong was I?

This multiplayer-only demo gives you the option to play as Punisher or Jigsaw, the rest are locked. You are also given one assault rifle. That is fine since its a demo. Then it took me 2 tries to succesfully connect AND join a game, first time I joined the game got dropped, for whatever reason. It also has a counter similiar to Call of Duty or any other online shooter. There is also a status beside each player’s name to show whether they are ready or not which I find completely pointless because the game won’t start or will start regardless of everyone’s status.

The controls, in my opinion, are slow and sluggish. It might have something to the fact that I’m used to the feel of Call of Duty? Basically in the demo, all you do is free for all death match and shoot anything that moves. Eventually after a few kills, I got bored of the game already but I still managed to end the match after getting 25 kills (the game finishes whenever someone gets that number of kills). I still don’t know why I lasted the whole match. Weird.

In the graphics department, well for a lack of a better word, MEH! That is all I can say about The Punisher: No Mercy. This game just feels too yester-year. I don’t even think diehard Punisher fans will appreciate this game, let alone the non fans.

Then again, this is what demos are for. Try it out yourself! I certainly didn’t like it.

Took me a while to get my hands on the demo for Batman: Arkham Asylum on PSN as I kept on getting error when trying to download it. So I finally managed to get it and I was excited, because this game might actually be a comic-movie-cartoon video game that will not disappoint, unlike the rest of the movie games (ahem….G.I. Joe anyone?). So is Batman: Arkham Asylum worth buying?

I have mix reactions actually because the demo is rather short, you can easily finish it within 15-20 minutes, if not shorter. Then again it is not a race and you are suppose to appreciate the game by walking around, flying around with your trusty grapple hook. And due to the length of the demo, I’m not sure if I will get bored of some of the features of this game or not. For one the combat system is….ok, animations are smooth but nothing amazing, in my opinion. You basically throw punches, counter your enemies and try to knock them down for good. While hanging upside down or using the glide kick to take out your enemies is fun, I have a feeling its just one of those “its fun while it lasts” kind of thing. On the rather positive side, I do like the fact that you have different choices to choose from for taking out your enemies.

The detective mode looks interesting as well, you get to check what weapon each person (friends and enemies) is carrying, their status, be it calm or nervous, check where you can fly up using the grapple hook or weak walls where you can blow it up using explosives. Again the demo is rather short so that’s all I got to see and experiment.

The graphics look amazingly detailed, from the textures of the asylum to the characters that you play and/or interact with, specially the main characters like Batman, Joker and Harley Quinn (her outfit is pretty detailed!) for example.

Honestly after playing the demo, although I’ve always been a Batman fan, I am really not sure if I should get this right at the release date. And there isn’t a multiplayer mode, which is understandable, this game is at best, a rental for me. Unless you are a fanatic and/or you absolutely loved the demo, I don’t think you should buy it right away, wait for a price drop in about 6 months time or look for a second hand on ebay. I wish the demo was longer, then I would have a better idea. Right now it feels like I’m one of those crooks and left hanging upside down by Batman.

I’ve been eyeing on this game for a long time, the English version is finally available. Holy Invasion Of Privacy Badman is a JRPG style strategy game with 2D sprites. The heavily pixelated characters certainly bring back a lot of old school memories.

The “main” objective of the game is pretty simple, all you have to do is defeat the hero or heroes in every stage that venture into your dungeon. That sounds pretty simple right? But things are as straight forward as we progress to more difficult levels. This game really puts heavy emphasis on “food chain”. Basically the monsters you create needs something called nutrients in order to grow stronger and stay alive (as their health diminshes as time goes by). Another way of growing stronger and staying alive is to devour weaker monsters. This is where the game gets a bit more complex to manage because you cannot just create a huge army and think you can beat the levels, you also have to manage your nutrients and monsters.

Some monsters are better suit for physical attacks, while on the other hand some are for magical attacks. So obviously when you are up against heroes that have strong physical resistence, you will want to create monsters that are strong in magic attacks. I am still trying to get a hang of this “monster-nutrient” managment. You can also create “runes” out of undug blocks which you can summon demos upon. They are relatively more powerful, the more spirit type monster (more below) they consume the more powerful they get. They also give defense bonus to all other monsters as long as they are within the dungeon.

So that’s your objective(s), how do you fail the level? If your overlord gets captured by the heroes and successfully and literally, in a funny way, dragged out of the dungeon then its game over. But you don’t have to give up right away when the heroes found your overlord because you can still kill the heroes as long as they are still in the dungeon. Another obvious tip/hint to prevent your overlord from being dragged away is to position your overlord as deep down the dungeon as possible, again pretty common sense.

You are given a number of digs that you can do to build your dungeon, you can only dig blocks that are adjacent to blocks that have already been dug. There are also blocks that have greenish things in them, those are the nutrients. You can dig up these blocks and get your most basic slime monster will absorb and release nutrients as they navigate through the dungeon. So which brings yet another point, you really have to plan ahead and dig paths that can maximize the number of times these slimes visit each of these blocks with nutrients in them. As these blocks absorb back more nutrients, they will allow you to dig up stronger monsters. These slimies will also turn into flowers and when they blossom, they will pop out more slimies, a good way to mulitiply!

Slimes are for nutrients, there is also mana in this game and the corresponding monster type is the spirit. They pretty much act the same except its for storing/releasing mana. You get to dig these “spirit” blocks after wizard class heroes have cast spells inside your dungeon and these spells get absorbed back into the earth, or the undug blocks.

After finishing each level, you have the option to invest your “dig power” to upgrade your monsters and/or you can choose to keep them and carry them over to your next level. There are also treasure chests lying inside undug blocks as well and so far I’ve got a few skeletons to help out.

In terms of graphics, I can’t stop loving its 2D style graphics. Nothing fancy but suits this type of games. Music is pretty good as well, again nothing fancy but good enough. If you are into managing dungons, into JRPG (or just RPG) and you like to be evil for once, then I highly recommend Holy Invasion Of Privacy Badman to you!

8.5/10

So I was reading an article on BusinessWeek, it wasn’t directly related to gaming but it got me thinking about how it could apply to gaming. Motion-sensing isn’t new, not even in gaming since the Nintendo Wii has been out for some time now. The article talked about how TVs and PCs will soon work like the Wii, basically they will behave based on user input, in this case, improved built-in cameras track body gestures like nods, head shakes or a hand wave.

Again, such technology isn’t new but it just hasn’t been widely used yet, except the Wii.

It got me thinking, what would the future of gaming like if motion-sensing technology were more widely used? I was thinking as far as playing Call of Duty 4 without controllers where camera coming out of my PlayStation 3 would track all my body and hand movements and reflect that on the game. Like tilting your head forward would mean forward movement, tilt a bit more would be running, tilt back would, obviously mean moving backwards. These should be easy to do but I was also thinking about tracking my finger movement to the point where the game would know I was trying to fire a shot, where I would aim at and when I wanted to reload, I think the latter one is harder.

Will my thinking/dreaming become reality? I think so personally, its just a matter of time. Before we can fully immerse ourselves to video games.