News

*That aren't really sequels.

After all kinds of cheeky proding from Josh, I've decided to finally get my act together and do that news thing!

First off, what is already old news: the Kingdom Hearts 1.5 Remix release last week. The package deal includes a remake of the original KH game, KH: Re: Chain of Memories, and videos from the DS title 358/2 Days.

Next, we've a series of news regarding Bravely Default: Flying Fairy. The game, as you may remember, has been out in Japan for over a year now and selling/reviewing very well; earlier this spring, it was confirmed for a 2014 release stateside. Recently, however, a separate, enhanced version of the game has been announced - Bravely Default: For the Sequel - which will be released in lieu of the original outside of Japan (still in 2014). The enhancements are drawn in large part from a whole heap of player suggestions, making this a bit of a standard of late for Square Enix. Check out those two Siliconera links below if you'd like to see a taste of what the anticipated title will look like via comparisons to its original incarnation.

But here's where things can get confusing if you haven't been keeping up with your Square Enix handheld news lately. Bravely Default: For the Sequel isn't a sequel in itself; it's a version of the original improved in large part for the sake of making the also-recently-announced sequel-proper... about which we know little as of yet!

And now on to that other piece of Square Enix news, FFXIV: A Realm Reborn (all these colons in titles are cramping my style). As of only a few hours ago, digital sales of the game resumed for PC and PS3 after having been closed only a few days after its late-August release due to widespread complaints regarding excessive wait times. Square Enix apologized for what it described as 'unprecedented demand,' and has spent the last month adding new servers in order to increase overall capacity as well as capacity for individual Worlds (as well as refunding some of folks who got in on the party late).

How has the new title been received, you may ask? Places like Metacritic and Gamerankings are giving it scores in the mid-80s (out of a hundred), which isn't too shabby, especially when you consider the scores for the original FFXIV were about half that, and that (I assume) awful load times were taken into those considerations. But no need to trust them! Here's what our members had to say about its Beta phase. I know several of these folks have kept up with the game: what do you think?

Source: Siliconera, Siliconera, CVG

While we fall behind on news, we keep up on CoNcasts, so that's something. Wait... no, we're a week late on this episode of the CoNcast too, aren't we? Well, isn't that fabulous.

This is lucky episode thirteen, and as luck would have it, we couldn't manage to get a full set of four this week. What's going on in the world? Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria! Carrying on, though, Tiddles, lasz and I took it upon ourselves to put out a good show talking about some of the big hardware news that has come out recently, as well as the upcoming Tokyo Game Show. We cover the updated Playstation 4 release date in Japan, the announcement of the Vita TV, and the interestingly-shaped Nintendo 2DS, some of the big games we expect to see out of TGS, and we throw in a lot of silliness about fast food and other random topics.

To wrap up both this news post about the podcast and the recording itself, we announce the opening of the CoNcast mailbag. If you've got something to harass us about specific to the CoNcast, such as an argument against something we said, a topic you want us to cover, or a plea to join us on an upcoming episode, the mailbag is the place to do it. You can yell at us via email using [email protected]; of course, we'll be happy to take your feedback through any of our other points of contact as well, but the email address will be the most direct and noticeable way to make your opinion heard.

If you're feeling lucky yourself, download it now. If you're feeling less than lucky, that's probably all the more reason to hit that link.

Source: The CoNcast Subscription Feed, The CoNcast on iTunes