mrburger

Dude. 999 is another masterpiece I cannot recommend forcibly enough. Absolutely play it, and get every single ending. And then once it's out of the way (it only takes like a weekend to 100%) go and play Radiant Historia. The combat is its own game within a game, and it's an amazingly fun thing in its own right; plus, the game it happens to be inside of, the one with all the crazy interlaced timelines, that game's pretty great, too. Atlus went balls to the wall with this one.

It makes good business sense not to promote it quite yet. Just watch and wait a few months. I predict a cinematic trailer in mid-late summer teasing an ambiguous 2013 release.

Been playing kind of non-stop for the past few days (even bought ME3, but only played for a couple hours before coming back to SFxT). This Cross roster is to me both interesting and puzzling. Street Fighter without Blanka? Tekken without Jack? Still, the characters they did bring in are tight, dynamic fits for the hyperactive SF style of play, and balance-wise some of them seem like they shouldn't succeed half as well as they do. Kuma, for instance, was always for me kind of an off-puttingly cumbersome character to use back in my Tekken days, and plus beyond being a bear he had no real personality to set him apart; but here in SFxT he's got some great new speedy moves, and this hilarious combination of mania and sass that gives him a thousand times more charm than he's ever had before. Ten years from now I think this whole locked on-disc content, DLC-heavy business trend will have evolved so dramatically that what SFxT is doing right now will seem like small potatoes. And if there's any justice in the gaming world, this title will instead be remembered for doing one really difficult thing well: merging the fighting styles of two stylistically different fighting games into a brightly polished, deeply engaging, and purely likable package.

The game rewards being played with a walkthrough. That's probably why you didn't get far. Also, the combat system doesn't blossom wide open until about 15 hours in.

Radiant Historia came out with a whisper sometime during the empty, headlineless Winter leading up to Pokemon Black & White's Spring Twenty-Eleven North America release. What sold Radiant Historia was not any kin or kind of advertising or public presence, none at all beyond youtubable trailers and gameplay footage, but rather its anomalously high scores on aggregate review sites. What was this late 90s-looking RPG, with its review scores in the 80s and 90s despite its sort of uninteresting-looking cast and gimmicky time travel gimmick, what were its intentions, and, well, was it actually, like, anything? Could a game so seemingly identity-less at first glance actually do anything worth looking at or reading through, or, as it would so happen, playing and replaying through in small chunks over and over again throughout the course of the game probably a total of like 20 or 30 times per chunk?

Yes, it could.

Radiant Historia, despite inflicting on its players one of the most punishing gameplay mechanics in recent memory, and doing this often, is a home run, a game with objective goodness, a rewarding experience. Its intentions are innocent and ambitious and happy and smart. It's a gorgeous, albeit flawed, masterpiece of fun. The time travel stuff is beefed by weirdly tight writing and ingenious storytelling tricks, but encumbered with too many hours' just holding the fast-forward button throughout the same dozen or so text-heavy cut-scenes. So many ten minute scenes smooshed down into minute-and-a-half-long fully-automatic flurries of sifty-sounding dialog-go-by noises, visited and revisited and revisited and revisited. But goddamn if that battle system doesn' t just completely absolve the game of whatever gameplay diseases from which it may suffer. Such intense variety in the way characters handle, and such gratifying results for those who master them all. Such challenges, at certain points. Such a good battle system.

Had it come out at a better time, back in '07 or '08 when the DS was still hot and momentous, Radiant Historia probably would have gotten more of the widespread affection it deserved. Instead, it remains just a beautiful little secret told to a handful of lucky passersby. 2011, you were a banner year for the console, an exciting year for games overall, but a quiet, dust-collecting year for the Nintendo DS, Pokemon B&W notwithstanding. No, Radiant Historia probably isn't quite good enough to be anybody's GOTY, not against the inimitable console competition of 2011, but those of us who've played it, who've warmed our hands by its small fire, out there in the middle of nowhere, who've known that puzzle-flavored battle system and its thousand joys, we know what I mean when I say we should at least just mention Radiant Historia, now, with a sorry, distracted nod, it being GOTY season and there being still the issue of deciding whether Portal 2 or Arkham City was the greater sequel and whatnot and so on to attend to, and Radiant Historia being just one more small, good game worth noting amid no one knows how many.

http://twitter.com/#!/mrleeperry

Nothing too interesting yet, but there it is.

It looks a little stale, especially given the current (amazing) 2D fighter climate.

" YES! That means Sony and Microsoft will be forced to launch new consoles as well! Then I can get one of those instead of whatever Nintendo is making! "

The Grammys have been irrelevant for ... well since pretty much their inception.  The music scene has always been too diverse, the Grammys too narrowminded (and $$$-oriented), and the politics of it all so convoluted as to render each year's picks just completely disinteresting.

My roommate and I were totally psyched for Torchlight 2.  But it only just now dawned on us that it won't be on XBLA until, well, ... probably a good long while after it's PC/Mac release.