Here's another blog post! Yayyy!

GAME OF THE DAY: 999 9 HOURS 9 PERSONS 9 DOORS

Do you like things that are good? Do you own a DS or 3DS? If so, I suggest purchasing 999 and completing it in it's entirety. That is all.

Ok, but seriously, this game is fantastic. However, it's really not much in the way of a game, that is, a thing that you "play". The gameplay consists primarily of "escape the room" style puzzles, where you are presented with a room, and must examine objects and solve smaller riddles and puzzles in order to find your way out. The puzzles are in the style of games like "The Crimson Room" one of the most famous escape games, but the puzzles in 999 as a whole involve a lot less moon logic. (Moon logic refers to puzzles in video games that dismiss standard logical progression in favor of things just being weird, it's generally considered poor game design unless cleverly done).

Really, though, 999 is about the story, and the characters. There are 9 of them, obviously, and what determines which of the...6 endings you get is the various decisions you make about which door to go though, as well as some character conversation stuff. I'm not going to spoil any of the details of the plot, but it has some fantastic twists and is extremely well written. Askys Games developed the game, and their previous game was a visual novel like Katawa Shoujo, so that probably says a lot about why this game is the way it is. You're going to spending a lot more time reading than doing much of anything gameplay wise as a result. I think this is totally ok. You may not, and if that's the case, then you will probably grow tired of this game quickly. For everyone else, I cannot recommend this game highly enough.

One more note, this game does a great job of handling the fact that you need to replay the game in it's entirety in order to get the other endings. It includes a skip feature that automatically skips all text that you've already read, and it shows you decisions you already made in previous playthroughs. In fact, one of the endings is required before you can get the true ending. (Otherwise you get an incredibly disappointing half-ending that simply tells you that you're not ready to see the true ending yet.) While this seems pretty cruel, the chances of you stumbling on the true ending first I think are pretty slim, and you would be really confused without the required prerequisite ending. The only thing I suggest is after playing through the first time blind, you consult a spolier-free flowchart in order to get the other endings. Otherwise, it's very easy to end up getting the same bad-endings over and over, which is annoying. The path to the true ending does make sense, but it's difficult to see without hindsight.

OTHER GAMES I'VE BEEN PLAYING AND OTHER STUFF

I played the Diablo 3 beta the other day, and I'm pretty excited for that game to come out right now. I have my pre-load all ready to go. I wasn't sure what to think of the changes they were making to the game at first. I own Diablo 2, but I didn't really play all that much of it due to the fact that it's pretty impenetrable without reading up on a lot of builds and what not, and I got discouraged at the fact that if I wanted to build a character that had multiple abilities, it would be essentially useless in the long run. So my perspective on Diablo 3 was from the big internet stink about the "dumbing down" of it. After reading some fantastic posts on r/diablo and the Battlenet forums, and playing the game for myself, I no longer have any doubts as to the customization and quality of what is going to be an amazing game. If you don't agree, please read this: http://www.d3sanc.com/news/blue-posts-the-customizability-story-wasd-movement-waypoints-more/ before saying anything.

The Guild Wars 2 Beta starts tomorrow! I have this client all preloaded too. I won't be able to play though, at least, not till Sunday night or something. Maybe. I'm off to a Catholic Teen Retreat that I'm staffing, something I've been looking forward to for months. So I'm a little bummed the first open beta is this weekend, but really, whatever. There'll be another in a month I'm sure, and I'll have lot's of footage to watch in the coming week.

The other game I've been spending a lot of time with is Xenoblade Chronicles. I'll probably do a blog post about it in the coming week. Long story short, it's as RPG as you can get, and that's excellent.

WILL LISTEN TO MOST ANYTHING ESPECIALLY IF VIDEO GAMES

It's a bad sign when I need to double check the wording of my extraordinarily shitty title.

Hey guess what! 999 has awesome music to go with it's general level of awesome! Try to count how many times I've used awesome on this blog! I assure you it's too many!

I'm not sure what it is about this song that's so great, it's quite rhythmic for a theme that plays as you're trying to escape from a room, but it fairly lighthearted. Probably because it's one of the early themes, unlike

this one is quite a bit more forbiding, and as the word "Senary" betrays, occurs much later. This song is no less excellent though.

And as a preview of the quality of next week's offering, I offer you it's Unique Enemy theme:

If that's not a sweet battle theme, than I guess we just differ in opinion :)

Thanks for reading!

-mattscout007