News

We all love a good incentive to pre-order a game, don't we? Making-of DVDs, Beta Test Passes, Dog Tags, Figurines of the Characters, and so on. It's with that sort of mentality in mind that Square Enix have generously elected to give Gamestop and Amazon.com customers pre-ordering Kingdom Hearts Re: coded the lovely incentive of... A stick!

Oh, sorry, I misread that, Stickers. Yes, stickers. Perhaps you can put them on your DS or something. If you're a sucker for stickers, you canalways use AmaCoN for your pre-ordering needs in both the US and the UK stores for those of us in the relevant catchment areas with a desire for a pre-ordered Kingdom Hearts game. It should be noted that the bonus stickers may not apply to the UK pre-orders, but just in case you're still interested the link is there.

In a semi-related fashion that nicely leads onto a following item, there's some other Kingdom Hearts related news. Aya Brea, star of the Parasite Eve games and the upcoming PSP title The 3rd Birthday, has popped up as a Kingdom Hearts Mobile Avatar. Quite adorable when she's not knee deep in entrails it seems.

And speaking of knee-deep in entrails and Parasite Eve, a tie-in Manga is to debut next month in Square Enix's Monthly Shounen GanGan magazine. And yes, I have no idea what that means. I do know these things are generally in black and white so those of a nervous/psychotic disposition will be pleased/dismayed to learn there may not be much detail to the entrails.

Moving onwards and stretching a metaphor out just to link the stories up, as you all probably know, Final Fantasy XIV hasn't been having a good time lately, and has been having some problems that can be politely described as stomach trouble, or more accurately described as being a laughing stock with largely negative reviews. The higher-ups and designers at Squenix have been surprisingly candid on admitting that the game is not quite up to scratch, and have pledged to fix it. To that end, they have announced their plans to do so. Various overhauls and tweaks to the game are on the table, and it seems Square-Enix hope this tactic will help reduce and repair the damage the bad press has caused before the Playstation 3 launch next year.

And finally, speaking of tactics, Tactics Ogre: Let us Cling Together, recently released for PSP in Japan, has downloadable content in the form of new scenarios planned. The three planned scenarios add new stories into the game once certain conditions have been met, and though no release dates are confirmed in North America or Europe as yet, those interested in the game will be pleased to learn that Square-Enix is embracing the concept of DLC for more than just fixing mistakes in already released content.







Source: Kotaku, AndriaSang

Mario Sports Mix, a Nintendo game set to come out for the Wii next year, will feature several characters familiar to the Final Fantasy universe.

The game, which includes basketball, volleyball, dodgeball and hockey, is being produced by Square Enix. As a result of this, Cactuar, Moogle, Ninja, White Mage and Black Mage will all appear as playable characters in the game. The Dragon Quest copyright is also included, it's likely that there'll also be a character from that game in the mix.

I suddenly want more than anything to see Cactuar spike a volleyball.

Source: IGN, Mario Sports Mix

You may have noticed the addition of a new forum at the Caves of Narshe forums this afternoon - we have just introduced a new type of Final Fantasy Music CoNtest at the site. We're going to be taking submissions of your favorite Final Fantasy songs and sticking them in one giant bracket to determine which song is the ultimate favorite of our community.

Of course, it wouldn't be a contest without prizes, so make sure that you check out the introduction post for discussion and for full details of what's going on!

Source: Music Contest Introduction, Music Contest Forum

Square Enix has recently taken the elements of the Final Fantasy series and applied them to a new Facebook game: Knights of the Crystals.

This game has the player completing quests to earn action points, leveling up along the way. Players can earn money from these quests as well, which can be spent on purchasing equipment. The game also features a class system, complete with magic and special moves, and boss battles, where you can gather your friends and/or NPC friend-alternatives to take on your typical boss. There's also an option to fight against other humans. Yay social interaction!

The company has released a second Facebook game as well, called Chocobo Crystal Tower. This application appears to be considerably more light-hearted than the first one, consisting of breeding and training chocobos for battle.

I usually avoid Facebook applications as a general principle (simply because I end up wasting enough time on the internet the way it is), but I'm sure that one or both of these will receive a bit of attention from a half-awake DP during a weeknight/early morning in the near future.

Source: Kotaku

Just wanted to let you all know that Tiddles and I performed a bit of minor surgery on the forums today. It's really no big deal, it was just something that needed to be done to work out a long-standing kink on the news submission system. In fact, you lot won't even notice it, I don't think - however, part of the fix is that links that you put in your posts will no longer open a new window. Since everyone with half a brain now use a browser that has tabs, this is really no big deal: just middle click links like most people have been doing for years already.

This will impact only posts made from now on. Thanks for understanding the changes we needed to improve the site as a whole!

Depending on which source you trust, Sony is either working on some kind of Playstation Phone or isn't involved in a project whatsoever. Engadget has released images of a leaked prototype of the phone, which looks like a typical slideout-keyboard phone, except instead of a keyboard, there's the makings of a Playstation controller. Along with the typical Sony makeup, it also includes a long touchpad in the middle that reportedly supports Multitouch. The machine would use MicroSD cards.

However, according to Gama Sutra, the initial response from Sony said that this was "definitely fake" and didn't offer any further comment. They changed their stance later from "definitely fake" to "no comment" and saying that it was just "rumor and speculation".

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For me, this is interesting on many levels. First off, from the screenshots and the articles, the phone would be running the Android phone OS - potentially 3.0. As a current user (and lover) of the Android system, this would be a big win for both Google and Sony. Second, despite the title of the Gama Sutra article, this does NOT appear to be some sort of PSP - some commenters are speculating that this could be the PSP2, but it definitely will not have any sort of backwards compatibility with the current PSP system, judging entirely on the MicroSD technology. However, and most importantly, the system specs are much more powerful than the current PSP ("...runs on a 1GHz Qualcomm MSM8655 chip supported by 512MB of RAM. The current PSP, by way of comparison, has a 333MHz processor with 32MB of RAM..."), so it could be the next wave of portable gaming for Sony.

I didn't realize until last week the popularity of the current PSP - I had written it off as an unimpressive and unsupported console, but was completely floored when I wandered into the PSP section at Fry's and saw a ridiculous selection of quality games. It would be an incredible risk to ask gamers to switch their phone to enjoy the next generation of games - especially when the people most likely to enjoy this sort of gaming are probably the same people who are already owners of SmartPhones. They certainly wouldn't convert people over from the iPhone, and current users of the Android system would have to be persuaded to switch over to the new hardware simply for the addition of the gaming functionality.

I kinda hope this isn't true.

Source: Engadget, Gama Sutra