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• Question of the Day: Valkyrie Profile and the Need for Voiced Dialogue

  My backlog is becoming untenable. There are games, games that I started months ago, sitting in a pile that appears to be growing of its own volition. Where the hell did that copy of Pro Evolution Soccer even come from and why is it sitting in the “to play” pile? No one in my home even likes soccer! The worst of the lot is Persona 4. Rather than hide myself away like some horrid realization of gamer stereotype, refusing to venture into the sun until the game is complete, I’ve been working through Persona since early December, taking it a bit at a time. It’s starting to drive me crazy. A few days ago, I fired it up for the first time since mid-February and was treated to one of its scarce animated cutscenes. Turns out that bear suit made a dude! Yeah, not a dude wearing a bear suit. The bear suit formed a dude inside of it. More startling than spontaneous dude generation was hearing the characters’ voices. I had forgotten they could talk you see. This is because, with very rare exceptions, I always turn off the voice acting in RPGs. Why? Because the voice acting is almost always terrible. Dragon Quest VIII’s British cast and Final Fantasy XII’s gang of breathy stoics are exceptions to the rule. Most of the time, you have to deal with screeching whiners who insist on naming every single thing they do and I’ll have none of it. Honestly though, I wonder why voice is considered a necessity in modern design. Read More... Posted Mar 19 2009, 07:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: legend of zelda, twilight princess, square-enix, dragon quest, persona, atlus, final fantasy xii, question of the day, persona 4, dragon quest viii, valkyrie profile, eiji aonumal john Constantine, covenant of the plume

• Deal of the Day: Persona 4 Only $25 on Amazon.com

  Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. Longtime 61FPS readers may remember my personal Persona 4 problem I wrote about way back in December when the game was released; as much as I wanted to play the game, the 100-plus hours I spent with Persona 3: FES told me that P4 had the potential to ruin my life. So, I decided to live a normal, Persona-less life, all while ignoring the existence of a certain game with the number 4 at the end of its title. But, as with all ticking time bombs, this one was bound to explode sooner or later. While doing my normal morning routine of browsing the Something Awful Forums, a thread title nearly made my heart stop: "Persona 4: $25 bucks new, today only." And as much as I didn't want to believe it, checking the Amazon.com link for the game proved both the existence of the sale, and what could be the end of my life as we know it. Let's hope I remember to feed and bathe myself in the upcoming months. Thanks to E Honda Civic of the SA Forums for destroying me utterly as human being. Related Links: Whatcha Not Playing: Persona 4 Persona 4: Harrowing, True Pre-Order Tales! With Prizes, Prizes, Priz-izes! Why Do You Keep Doing This to Me, Atlus: Persona Comes to PSP Read More... Posted Feb 23 2009, 01:00 PM by Bob Mackey with | with no comments Filed under: persona 3 fes, persona, bob mackey, sales, persona 4, deals, amazon

• Why Do You Keep Doing This to Me, Atlus: Persona Comes to PSP

  I’m currently in month two of my prolonged incarceration. Atlus says that I should buck up. Persona 4 is, apparently, some fifteen hours shorter than its predecessor. Atlus says I’ll be able to go outside again soon. Possibly by this spring! I have hope that Atlus will release from my bonds, loose me from this level grinding, this wandering through randomly generated dungeon after randomly made dungeon. Atlus says I’ll be able to talk to real live people again, and not the pleasant digital avatars it demands I form emotional bonds with. I look forward to that day. … Now Atlus tells me it’s remaking the original Persona for PSP. Atlus says that with the game’s new graphics, it can watch me anywhere. At any time. And always keep me close. Read More... Posted Feb 06 2009, 06:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, psp, persona, atlus, dear god help me

• Home: Your Virtual World Sucks

  So it looks like Sony's Home is having a few problems, though I could have told you this was going to happen a year ago--and smugly, too, because I'm a jerk.  But rest assured; I'm not the only one on the Internet who thinks he knows everything. The general consensus with Home since its initial announcement has been "Really? They're still doing that? Well, good for them, I guess."  In this case, I think the poor developers can be excused; you have to really feel for them on this project, what with its monstrous scope and need for indefinite maintenance as a permanent beta.  What's blameworthy in the whole Home fiasco is the fundamentally flawed idea of a virtual world, which seemed like the coolest idea in the world until we all got computers and discovered all the things we wanted them to do were completely asinine.  As a society, we shared a day of lament for ever liking Lawnmower Man. Read More... Posted Jan 02 2009, 04:00 PM by Bob Mackey with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: home, persona, ps3, virtual reality, virtual spaces

• And Now Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Love: Atlus Reprints Persona 2

  I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: I’ve got issues with Japanese role-playing games. I tend to, well, disappear into them. And as much as they make our own Bob Mackey OCD within the confines of their battle systems, item management, and quaint townships, they tend to make me OCD in my waking life. When I start one that really gets its hooks into me, I don’t do much else with life until it’s done. Much like the troubles I had with Dragon Quest VIII back in 2005, Persona 3 ruined me for September 2007. Eighty-nine hours of level grinding, managing completely fictional friendships (whilst ignoring real ones,) and bouncing J-pop that nearly drove my roommates to murder me. It was my first time with the Shin Megami Tensei franchise and I couldn’t have been more impressed, or obsessed, with it. Needless to say, I’ve been dreading Persona 4. Not because I think it won’t live up to Persona 3. No, I’m afraid of what it’s going to do my brain. And now, for seemingly no other reason than they are awesome, Atlus is making everything worse. The publisher sent out an email today announcing that they are reprinting Persona 2: Eternal Punishment, a Playstation 1 game, “to commemorate the upcoming release of Persona 4 and to thank you for your interest, dedication, and support of the SMT series.” Who does that?! Who reprints an eight year-old game for a long-dead console? Someone who loves you, that’s who. Read More... Posted Nov 13 2008, 07:15 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, shin megami tensei, love, dragon quest, persona, atlus, persona 2 eternal punishment, persona 4, persona 3, dragon quest viii

• Going There: Persona 4 and Feeling the World

  Cable television, on the whole, baffles me. Twenty years ago, the joke went that there’s fifty channels and nothing good’s ever on. Now it’s one-thousand channels. You do stumble on something great here and there, though. For example, I watched three episodes of Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern this past weekend. The deal is that chef Zimmern travels all over the earth and eats every bizarre local delicacy he can get his hands on. It is awesome. In one episode, he went to Iceland, and dined on puffin. I was fascinated. Not by the unusual choice of fowl, but by the process and ritual behind how puffins are hunted. Puffin hunting is apparently an old, Icelandic father-son bonding tradition. The men go out to one of the insanely remote islands where puffins nest and they catch them with small nets on the end of giant poles. It’s all they eat for days. They hunt on the edge of huge cliffs beside the ocean. Naturally, this got me thinking about videogames. Read More... Posted Jul 08 2008, 02:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 4 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, persona, atlus

• The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial, Part 3

  Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! We cite Punch-Out!! here not for starring Mike Tyson (a controversial figure, even before his rape conviction), but for the degree to which it epitomizes a trend that would dominate gaming in the late-'80s and early-'90s: the "beat up stereotypes from around the world" gameplay model. Granted, most of Punch-Out!!'s characters are too ludicrous to really offend; it's hard to imagine Pacific Islanders getting all up in arms about King Hippo being kind of a jackass. That said, the sight of cross-eyed Piston Honda babbling "Sushi, Kamikaze, Fujiyama, Nipponichi!" as a mid-match battle cry is a little unsettling. — PS Read More... Posted Jun 20 2008, 01:13 PM by John Constantine with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, peter smith, metroid, nintendo, derrick sanskrit, xbox 360, final fantasy, top ten, call of duty, pokemon, Playstation, tomb raider, punch out, mcdonalds, heavenly sword, fable, mike Tyson, narc, dead or alive, persona

• The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial, Part 2

  Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Call of Duty 4 is a game obsessed with realism, its depiction of combat situations and the tools of war meticulous to an almost terrifying degree. Early in the game, you are placed in the gunner’s seat of an AC-130 Spectre over a Ukrainian field, the night vision view of an aerial assault looking no different than an Iraq war newscast, the radio confirmation of kills unsettlingly casual; a game so realistic that it mimics a soldier’s detachment from killing. It’s strange then that the game, for all its incessant specificity, sends the player to kill Arab soldiers in “the Middle East”, and not an actual nation. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare has sold over seven million copies in a war-weary United States in under a year. Am I the only one who finds this sort of depersonalization unsettling? — JC Read More... Posted Jun 20 2008, 01:12 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, peter smith, metroid, nintendo, derrick sanskrit, xbox 360, final fantasy, top ten, call of duty, pokemon, Playstation, tomb raider, punch out, mcdonalds, heavenly sword, fable, mike Tyson, narc, dead or alive, persona

• The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial, Part 1

  Games have been raising hackles since their inception. Howell Ivy kick-started gaming and controversy’s relationship when he designed Death Race in 1976, a simple black and white game that was, well, about running people over for points. That was enough to get America riled up, prompting 60 Minutes to run the first of many, many televised news stories about the psychological effects of gaming. But public outrage is unpredictable. Politicians and parent groups have been shocked by d-list titles like Manhunt and Night Trap while more popular, widely played games with far more inflammatory content have passed by unnoted. Today, 61 Frames Per Second presents The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial. A number of these are games that we are surprised did not cause uproar in a number of communities. The rest are games that we ourselves find seriously questionable in content. How do you feel about these videogames? Indifferent? Appalled? Leave a comment and let us know. — John Constantine NARC I don't know about you, but I have at least a couple of friends who have occasionally sold drugs. They're pretty lucky they grew up in the relatively permissive '90s, and not in the merciless, Reaganite '80s presented in NARC. Sure, NARC gives you bonus points for arresting dealers instead of killing them, but that's because it's almost impossible to do. Far easier is just perforating them on the spot. As my fellow blogger Cole notes, "I guess dismembering hundreds is okay if they're pushin'." In fact, there was some parental outrage over NARC's unprecedented level of gore, but its moral assumptions went pretty much unchallenged. — Peter Smith Read More... Posted Jun 20 2008, 01:11 PM by John Constantine with | with 7 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, peter smith, metroid, nintendo, derrick sanskrit, xbox 360, final fantasy, top ten, call of duty, pokemon, Playstation, tomb raider, punch out, mcdonalds, heavenly sword, fable, mike Tyson, narc, dead or alive, persona