It's 2007 - that's just super.
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It's 2007 - that's just super.
I was planning on doing a "2006 in review" post much like I had done for the previous year, but as it turns out I've barely blogged anything over the past 12 months. Except perhaps games, which you can read on my Glog page. Instead, here are some items that fell through the cracks:
The Next New Generation of Consoles
I usually reserve my commentary on such things anymore, since it is obvious to anyone reading my stuff that I eat, breathe and bleed Nintendo fandom. I will state that I think the Wii was probably rushed out the door a bit too soon, as certain features are still substantially lacking. I will also say that I think the only thing worse than the Xbox 360's launch (and subsequent 12-month mourning period) was the PS3's launch. Nevertheless, there is a 360 title and a PS3 title in development that I am intellectually interested in.
Blue Dragon
Not very long ago, Microsoft realized that its strategy of being an American company was not winning many fans in Japan. The land of the rising sun still being a fairly powerful video game market, someone decided that what Microsoft needed was its very own Japanese-style RPG (this, classically (read "pre-DS"), being the most popular kind of game in Japan). Enter Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of the Final Fantasy series; Nobuo Uematsu, soundtrack composer for the entire Final Fantasy series; and Akira Toriyama, notorious artistic designer for Dragonball; and, at least by the designing cast, it appears to shape up like a revival of Chrono Trigger. The use of color and trumpety soundtrack are also very reminiscent of Dragon Quest 8, and I doubt this is a coincidence. Blue Dragon was released on December 7th in Japan, and quite easily became the Xbox 360's best selling game of all time in that region.
At this point, I should state that I know virtually nothing about how the game works; currently my interest is piqued purely by knowing who is involved in it, and having heard the soundtrack. At least for now, this item is to be continued.
White Knight Story
There's still a lot unknown about this one, but the trailer is, I would say, fairly intriguing. The preview starts out simple enough - it's story and dialog driven, which is to be expected; the action-based battle system appears complex but with great benefits; and then the main character turns into a mecha-style giant armored knight. That's just cool.
Upcoming DS Games
Since anticipating games on the Glog doesn't work quite how I want it to yet, I don't really use the feature. Nevertheless there are some upcoming DS games I am already all but sold on.
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Justice for All (Jan. 16th)
OBJECTION! I replayed the first Phoenix Wright for DS a little while back, but my appetite for more cases to solve and try continues to grow.
Dragon Quest IX (Nov. 20th)
A far-off release date, but it already looks awesome. I watched a roommate play DQ8, and while it's visually engaging and has some good character customization, the battles were just super boring. A large part of Japan is understandably upset with the decision to change the Dragon Quest format so drastically, but I welcome it with open arms; a multiplayer action-RPG is almost always a good decision.
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates (Q2 '07)
The Gamecube FFCC was an interesting concept, but hard to flesh out with the Gamecube+GBA hardware scheme. And since the DS, boasting wireless multiplayer and a built-in second screen, came out shortly afterward it wasn't hard to imagine a Crystal Chronicles for it being a runaway success. Apparently it's taken them forever but they're finally doing it, and it looks pretty good. Anyway, it could still be the same old game as far as I'm concerned, because when you could actually get all the required materials together to play it FFCC was great fun.
Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings (??, likely 2007)
Probably involving a lot of crosstalk between the DS Crystal Chronicles project and the real-time battle system development for FF12, Revenant Wings also looks pretty cool. While watching my CE roommate play the actual FF12, I was extremely skeptical of the "Final Fantasy XI Offline" at first, but the way they develop the fights in the game actually makes the system pretty exciting, and recreating that in a multiplayer fashion should be superb.
Glog Development
Last I worked on the Glog project, I was trying to make a more intelligent search box, and got hung up on something with stopwords in SQL fulltext searches (it's a lengthy trick to explain, but you can click here to see an erroneous search result). There's probably a not-too-hard workaround for it, but I have so many games waiting at the gates right now that it will take a while for me to get around to it.
Basically everyone who has commented on or tried to help me with Glog development has noted that the lack of color and styling is a huge failing that, if corrected, would likely make people actually desire to use the website. I agree with this prospect, however, there are still enough backend issues that I must make sure the site is technologically solid before approaching this. I've barely even mentioned efficiency/running time concerns, which I'm ... very concerned about.
Moving On
Every time I return to the Pennsylvania homestead, I am reminded - visually, not literally - of how much useless crap I accumulated in my youth. Eventually I suppose I will have to do something with this massive pile of Star Wars memorabilia, but that is for another time.
This break I have made some progress in organizing my old video games. Since I've barely touched my N64 and SNES in the past few years, and can either emulate or wait for Wii Virtual Console releases to catch up if I want to play their games, I have rounded up all the associated hardware, accessories, and game cartridges and plan to release them into the economy at my next convenience. If for whatever reason you are interested in used vintage SNES or N64 goods, contact me and perhaps we can work something out.
Conclusively
Most of 2006 wasn't anything special as far as I can recall. Politicians are still scumbags. The Internet is still a cesspool of buzzwords. Jack Thompson is still hilarious. The end of the year of course heralds new gaming bounties, both with the new systems and with an absolute bumper crop of DS titles. 2007 should be an interesting one.
Comments? Dump them here.