News

With E3 dead and gone, there was a little bit of slowdown in Square Enix news. We'll be back to things trickling through until Tokyo Game Show, I'm sure, in which we'll probably get fresh deluges of news about Final Fantasy Versus XIII and XIV Online. For now, though, the trickle is on.

First news is that Xbox 360 might not get a hold of the new Online entry. The director of XIV, Hiromichi Tanaka, is saying that the game won't be on 360 because Xbox Live is too closed of a system. It appears that the "business scheme" Microsoft puts forth just doesn't do what Square Enix wants for the game, as put forth by Yoichi Wada in a separate interview. Eggboxers shouldn't give up hope, though, I don't think - it's not as if Final Fantasy XI didn't make the port eventually, and we don't know what might be in the cards for the future.

On the Versus front, the first new media since last year's TGS came out this week, with a bit of detail behind it. The screens are scans from Famitsu, and have an interesting look to them, with one in particular showing a player character outside of a somewhat "modern" gas station, with "modern" here representing something like 1950s America. The rest of the details came from Nomura, and aren't exactly groundbreaking - there are some destructible environments, and a large open world, and enemies will by and large be visible before combat but some will sneak up. Given what I see in the screenshots and the descriptions above, it actually sounds a bit like a more sandboxy Parasite Eve so far. No complaints here if that's the case.

What might be the most interesting thing of the week, at least for the Square Enix Naysayers Club, is that Wada has also said this week in Forbes magazine that all future Square Enix games will have a level of multiplayer or social networking capability. I understand, I understand - this could go really badly. It could result in all Squenix games being driven by microtransactions, as seems to be the growing trend in social gaming. It could even result in games where you have to harass your friends on Facebook in order to progress. Or, it could be something cool. Maybe it shares selected progress items or achievements to your Twitter or Facebook wall. Maybe it opens up some true multiplayer as in the beloved SNES entries from the Mana series. The only thing we do know so far is that this new business plan is meant to impact all games, up to and including the core Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, and Kingdom Hearts franchises.

Until next time, I'll be sharing all my gaming exploits with you until Square makes it automatic!

Source: Eurogamer, Final Fantasy XIII Net, Kotaku

I don't even know where to start this. There were some interesting bits and pieces here and there, but in almost two hours, there were very few things that caught the attention of #narshe. A few of the things that did were general fails on Sony's part - for example, ranting about exclusives and then showing Medal of Honor and talking about Metal Gear Solid: Rising, also out on PC and Xbox 360 respectively. Anyway.

What seemed like most of the conference was demonstrations of the Playstation Move, and the Playstation 3 in 3D. The videos of the latter were a little lost on everyone who wasn't there. You know, because my monitor isn't 3D, and I don't have those super-cool sunglasses. Hopefully this will be rectified next year where a select few of the staffers here at CoN will be getting invites to E3... we wish. The Playstation Move was a bit more visible, and although it did have some good footage, I didn't see much in the way of brand-new innovations.

There was little in the way of Square-Enix news, unfortunately. Obviously, they had a trailer for Final Fantasy XIV, but pretty much no information was released other than "ooooh, pretty". A short shot of a Kingdom Hearts game was also shown, for the PSP I believe, but nothing was given on that, either. The surprise announcement was easily the most exciting part, and that was Portal 2 to be released on PS3, with a short trailer. I want this so much, though my want will have nothing to do with the PS3. PC all the way, baby.

Other things that stood out include LittleBigPlanet 2, a virtual Sony E3 Booth on Playstation Home for you to explore, an-OH GOD WHY ARE THERE CREEPY CLOWNS GET THEM AWAY FROM ME NO I HATE YOU AAAAAA-

Quote of the conference goes to Kevin Butler for:
"If you have an awesome girlfriend, and someone else gets an awesome girlfriend, who wins? EVERYBODY."

CoN Twitter has asked for #welovepit to become a trending topic. Start by retweeting us!

Nintendo put on one heckuva show today. It honestly blew Microsoft's out of the water, in my opinion, and it even gave some real CoN news to post. The games looked solid - there was no Wii Music to be found this year. They led with the new Zelda, which looked pretty solid, despite some significant technological problems in the live demo with Miyamoto. Mario's new sports game had dodgeball in it, therefore it wins by default. The not-exactly-news Wiimake of Goldeneye starring Daniel Craig looked like everything it should be. Epic Mickey was one of the best looking games I have seen ever for the Wii, but the new Donkey Kong Country and Kirby, each with their unique styles, give Mickey a run on style alone.

And did you see the 3DS? Did you? Kid Icarus launch title. Remember, kids, #welovepit. It's got a larger upper screen than the DS, an analog nub, variable levels of 3D for titles that support it, and even a stereoscopic camera on the shell that will let you take stereoscopic 3D photos to view on the 3D screen.

But more than that, there's some Square Enix news tied in: Square Enix is one of the twenty third-party developers who are already working on 3DS titles, and Nintendo showed a Kingdom Hearts logo on screen during the presentation. We have no other details as yet - will it be a remixed version of an existing KH game? A brand new game in the continuum? Maybe Squenix will dribble out some details this week.

Wasn't the only RPG news that Nintendo covered, though, and from a CoN perspective, that alone blows away anything Microsoft had to offer. Dragon Quest IX is coming in 26 days, and while Reggie Fils-Aime didn't throw out any real information that we didn't already know, but to see the release get as much love as it did was impressive on Nintendo's part for a Squenix fan. The other RPG that got good face time was the Golden Sun sequel, also on DS. There was a good, solid minute of staged gameplay video on hand there.


Quote of the session, since I can't use one of my own, has to go to Gabe, who said "I hope [the G4 anchors] ask Reggie why there's not Mother 3 in America." Good question, no? It should be noted that Gabe also continued with a string of profanity about Reggie that we shouldn't reprint here.

And here's a tweet from the CoN Twitter to wrap up, why not?

Yeah, there was a lot of stuff at the Microsoft E3 press conference that will appeal to a LOT of people. I know this. Gears 3, Halo: Reach, Metal Gear, Crytek's new game... those are going to move a lot of copies. More power to all of you who want those games. For the core CoN audience, though, well, there wasn't all that much. The things I saw that were closest to RPGs were Fable III and possibly the Star Wars Kinect game if they include some good Knights of the Old Republic bits in there. (Don't forget, it was announced last night that Kinect is the real name for Natal.)

Other than that, though, not much for the Square-Enix fan to get excited over, I don't think. I think the best we could have hoped for was that Final Fantasy Versus XIII would break exclusivity the way that Final Fantasy XIII did, but there was no hide nor hair of Squenix anywhere to be seen. Not shocking, but still disappointing, no?

So, that said, feel free to discuss your favorite and least favorite bits of that conference. I'll circle back with mine in a moment since that's hardly front page news.

Nearly forgot, the best CoN user quote from this press conference has to go to Olly from chat. I had to clean it up a bit, because after all, it was from chat, but here's the paraphrase: "It's only a matter of time before there's an achievement for fondling yourself on Kinect for five or more people." Kudos, Olly, I guess.

As you've no doubt seen me mention for the past couple weeks, it's E3 time next week. The big show starts on Monday, 14 June, with some preliminary exhibitions and stuff, little one-off things and parties, in the days before. Last year, we talked about big chunks of the show by covering Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft at E3 2009 in our General Gaming forum. This year, though, I'd like to do things a bit differently, and that's where audience participation will come in.

We're still going to cover the big hitters, just like always, probably with our news posts at the end of each day. I know of a lot of you can't get the news right away live, though, and hate waiting for the end of the day. Because of that, we want to share cool stuff with you throughout the day. I know I'll be watching most of the events as they unfold, as will some of your fellow members either in chat, on Facebook or on Twitter. So, let's try something different. If you see something cool that you want to talk about right away, post it on one of those media. You can find us on chat, as always, at irc.darkmyst.org, where we'll probably be discussing things in a pretty freeform manner. Additionally, you can share your thoughts with us in real time on Facebook, by putting @Caves of Narshe in your status updates (if you're a fan) or posting on our wall, or you can do the same at Twitter by including @cavesofnarshe in your tweets. And, of course, you can always comment on our news threads as we post them, just like you have forever.

We know that some folks like to post at the forums, some like to chat, some like to tweet, or some combination of the aforementioned, et cetera. So this year, we're going to get our analysis of E3 not just from our own watching, but from yours. We'll include the best comments from all media into our news posts each day, and everyone can debate them at the forums as much as they like. If you're interested in commenting live with us, stop into chat, follow us on Twitter, or +Like the CoN fan page on Facebook now and get ready for the hot gaming news next week.

Here's some news that seems to be all over the internet already, but happily won't impact, well, probably any of our regular readers. However, for those of you with ties to South Korea, note that the next time you visit you might not be able to play some games in the wee hours of the day.

The Korea Herald reports that the government is going to shut down various online games for six hour windows every night, with the windows being selected from three choices by each household. Apparently, homes in Korea have unique identifiers that are used for any sort of online registration, and this will allow the central government to shutter access as the central clock ticks over to the start of the selected window.

The government in South Korea is testing the system out now on four games, with another fifteen to be included in a few months. The entire list is unclear to me at the moment, though with the nineteen total games inclusive of "79 percent of the online gaming market," it would not surprise me to find that at some point Square Enix' online entries might soon find themselves under the restriction.

Source: Korea Herald