Persona 4 review

While visiting the aggregate game review site - Game Rankings, I noticed there was an entry on the front page for Persona 4, signifying someone had reviewed it. Odd, given the site is US-centric, after all and as I mentioned in one of my previous posts, it’s not coming out in America until the 9th of December. After checking the game’s page, it turns out it has been reviewed - not by one of the ‘big banner’ sites, but by RPGFan, who I assume are reviewing an imported Japanese release. All in all, they seemed very pleased with it, giving it a score of 94%. A good sign.

The point of this post isn’t to rah-rah the fact it got a good score (though I’m more than happy to see it) but to mention the review does contain a fair bit of information about the storyline and gameplay of the title. Since a lot of the hits I get are Persona 4 flavoured, I thought I’d point interested parties in the direction of the review (and at the same time apologise for the lack of Persona 4 ‘meat’ on the bones of my own particular pages - sorry if you wasted a ‘trip’). It makes for an interesting read and certainly gets me thinking about that yet unannounced European release. Come on, when are we getting it, guys?

Anyway, have a look if you’re a bit of a fanboy and tend to eat up anything Persona 4 related.

‘The Sims 3′ dated

Another show (this time the 2008 Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany), another ‘The Sim 3‘ snippet. Amongst the other blurb from their press conference, EA announced the release date for their bloated cash cow… a demonic, cthulhian beast sporting a million udders that produce an endless pungent stream of sickly green expansions, each one throttling your wallet until it’s a shrivelled, dried up old husk! Err… where was I? Oh, yes, release date!

No Christmas cash-in on the cards, it seems, as the (global, no less) release date stands at the 20th Feb 2009. As well as hitting the real-world shelves, it’ll also be arriving at online outlets in the shape of a digital download - although I can’t imagine it being a petite chunk of bandwidth you’d need to expend for a title like this. I guess those with internet connections from the stoneage should stick to their local highstreet if they want a Sims fix.

Along with the regular, run-of-the-mill version being sold that day, those of you with money to burn will be able to get your mitts on a Collector’s Edition release. What does the extra moolah buy you? A Plumbob USB Drive with matching Green Carabiner, in-game Italian-style sports car, a tips and hints guide (which I assume will be page after page of hot tips on what to do if your Sims have a tendency to urinate in every room of the house except the bathroom) and Plumbob stickers. Hmm, no artbook or soundtracks? Meh.

In case you’re wondering what the hell a Plumbob is, it’s the little green diamond thing you’ll have stared at for hours on end if you even dare call yourself a The Sims fan. Anyway, all the facts and a healthy dose of ’sales pitch’ can be found in this press release.

Persona 4 storms the charts!

With a huge existing PS2 user base and a great following for the series, I guess Persona 4 (released in Japan on 10th July, hitting US shores 9th December) was always going to do ‘well’ upon release. Now though, we know exactly how well thanks to Media Create’s sales rankings for July 7th-July 13th. It’s kinda surprising in that ‘Yay!’ kinda way .

According to an article on Wired’s Game Life website, Persona 4 tops the charts with 193,000 sales! Even second place, Nintendo’s powerhorse ‘Wii Fit’, is only trundling along steadily (adding to it’s albeit still impressive existing 2,353,000 sales) with a much smaller 30,000 untis. The next ‘new’ release that week comes from ‘Densetsu no Stafy Taiketsu! Dire Kaizokudan’ on the Nintendo DS, clocking in at number 3 with only 29,000 sales. 193,000 sales?! I’m sure Atlus must be feeling all smug right about now (how about a celebratory European release date announcement, eh? No? Okay… maybe another time *bah*).

It makes me happy that the PS2 is still managing to command such a healthy share of the market but should we really be surprised? According to this article from Kotaku covering hardware sales for the same week, the PS2 is only trailing the PS3 by just over 2000 sales. In this age where some console manufacturers are eager to push us all into the next generation of hardware at the earliest opportunity possible, I’m glad to see that the old PS2 can kick ass/take names show the big boys that it’s still far from dead.

By the way, apologies for the link-fest in this post. Got a little carried away.

The Sims 3 E3 trailer

So E3 is upon us again with it’s usual glut of high hopes and crushing disappointments. Maybe I’m just bitter that the best I can manage is watching the various game site feeds showing the announcements and key notes by industry giants instead of being there in person, but it does seem we build E3 up to be some amazing font of new information and sneak peeks. Instead, it’s usually a lot of worthless posturing, statistics massaging and information that we’ve had for weeks.

As much is true of this new trailer for The Sims 3 that EA pimped during their little showcase. Still a long way off (2009 - I guess they’ve got a couple of expansions they want to wring from the stone that is The Sims 2), it’s claim-to-fame is the boast that The Sims 3 opens the doors for your little ‘digital you’ and allows them to explore their surroundings. Given your Sim’s need to ‘go bathroom’ every 14.7 seconds, hopefully the surroundings are full of W.Cs or, at the very least, that the very first store you encounter on your journey sells adult diapers.

I’m still looking at The Sims 3 with some suspicion, though. The open-world feature is basically just taking the training wheels off of the earlier outings - removing the loading screens and allowing you to explore other ‘lots’. Sure, linking them all together into one streamed world would be nice but does it merit a ‘3′? The fact they’re not plugging any other features at this point also makes me worry that they’re simply going to drip-feed them to the public when they inevitably reset the expansions counter back to zero upon launch.

Probably being cynical but after showing their hand twice now, I’d be a fool to expect EA intends anything else - especially when we’ve already proved we’re ready to snap it up and ask for seconds (or even thirds). The new trailer can be found on the official The Sims 3 site.

Another Persona 4 trailer

Hot on the heels of the announcement the other day dating the US release of Persona 4 (official site here), Atlus have put out another trailer, this time showing off some of the characters you’ll be scampering around dungeons with.

Of course. with the game being released in Japan yesterday (lucky sods *cough* sorry), I’m guessing this is one of those final marketing pushes just to keep the game in the public eye but I’m still happy to see new artwork and scenes from the game anyway. Even happier if we got a European confirmation for the game seeing our shores (or even, *gasp*, a date for it’s arrival) but you take what you can.

The characters seem to be matching the standard archetypes introduced with Persona 3 but I guess that’s to be expected and not really a bad thing. School setting, small town environments and what appears to be another holiday locale - great stuff, can’t wait.

The video is only a YouTube affair so fairly blocky but better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, eh? You can find it here…

Persona 4 US dated

Joystiq (and a few other places around the net) are reporting that the continuation of my current favourite JPRG series, Persona 4, should be hitting North American shores on the 9th December 2008. Of course, Japan will be getting their sweaty mitts on the title within mere days (10th July!) and no word of a European release as of yet (think sometime late 2009 knowing the delays we usually face in such matters).

Still, it’s nice to see some firm dates and signs of movement even if it isn’t for my local brethren specifically.

But that’s not all - along with the date there’s also news that “each copy of the game will come bundled with a soundtrack CD featuring “select music” from the title“. The music to Persona 3 really stood out for me, both fitting and strangely infectious. It’s rare I find myself humming music I hear in games but Persona 3 had just such a soundtrack. As Shoji Meguro will be returning to take up the music director reins, hearing Atlus are bunging in a ‘free’ soundtrack taster CD in with the package is great.

And still there’s more. The Joystiq snippet features a nice blurry YouTube English language promotional trailer just to get you wishing it was December already. You can find the article (and the English language trailer) in question here.

Skoardy in the wild

Okay, so Googling (or Egosurfing) yourself is a pretty sad but commonplace activity in the modern world. We can’t help it. The desire for recognition and validation drives us to seek out any mention of our names and internet personae through popular search engines - often with disappointing results.

While I myself have made my mark on the internet, so have a few others who share my name. Good for them, I say. But I’d also like to point out that I do not, contrary to what Google might suggest, enjoy stripping naked and parading around British caravan sites, nor am I a Labour candidate or a Detective Inspector of a police drug unit. I don’t know whether the police man or the politician are the ones who get their jollies waving their bits in the fresh air but I can assure you it isn’t me!

One hit I’ve always meant to mention on my page was a sighting of my “Skoardy” Gameboy Colour homebrew title. Not only am I a (pretty average?) graphic artist, but I can also lay claim to being a decidedly sub-par programmer and ‘back-in-the-day’ I entered an amateur programming competition run by BUNG, an accessories supplier from Hong Kong. I think it was their way of trying to convince everyone that the products they sold weren’t simply the domain of the games pirates. Needless to say, Nintendo didn’t see it that way and they were shut down.

Anyhoo, “Skoardy” was my entry. It was a simple maze game based off of a title I’d created in my school days on the computer department’s BBC Micros. It kept my schoolmates amused but that was probably more to do with the only alternative being school work. So I updated it for the competition and didn’t win. I got a commendation (best thought of as 3rd place) but there was a shed load of entries so I was happy with my prizes.

Back to the self-Googling though. This sighting appears to be for a Gameboy Colour plugin that allows you to play Gameboy titles on an on-screen display for one of those PC Digital TV packages. I’ve seen stuff like this before where on top of providing you functionality to record/timeshift from your TV Tuner and access to scheduling reference, they also add extra features like on-screen Tetris and CD cataloguing. Looks like playing GBC games was this plugin’s aim and “Skoardy” was the title they grabbed for the screenshot. I’m so proud *sniff*

If your German isn’t up to scratch and for some bizarre reason you’re still interested in finding out what the page said, Google also do a good job of translating the site into English and here is that link.

‘The Sims 3′ site live

So the 19th has rolled around and as promised, the ‘The Sims 3′ site has opened it’s doors to a wealth of new… uh, a bounty of… *sigh* okay, okay, I can’t do it. Basically, there’s some screenshots and stuff we either already knew thanks to the exclusive earlier in the month or stuff we could have guessed (more customisation? oh dooooo go on). The site is a bit lumpy at the moment (probably getting hammered from all the attention) so you might get a few time-outs.

I guess I’m a bit miffed because on one hand there’s nothing ground-shaking on the site to really excite me and on the other is the fact I can’t say I’m particularly enthralled with the direction The Sims is heading. The characters are slowly morphing into that ugly kind of generic style you get in Poser renders, with any scrap of The Sims character hard to locate. If you’re going to juice up the poly count, I suppose they’ve got to go somewhere but does it really have to be at the expense of the game’s style? And really? Are we going to rah-rah about being able to make skinny and fat Sims? Sure, The Sims 2 only had two settings but I can’t muster much enthusiasm about there suddenly being a gradient of settings in-between now.

So apart from opening the environment up, there’s nothing really to shout from the rooftops about. I’m probably being a little harsh on the game - after all, earlier today I was praising Persona 4 for being ‘more of the same’. Let’s just hope they’ve got a few surprises up their sleeves to pimp on the site for the run up to the 2009 release of the game.

Persona 4 trailer

One detail I left out of the post yesterday was that the DVD that came with the magazine contained a ‘trailer’ for Persona 4. It hadn’t made a break onto the interwebs at the time and there was no indication if or when it would. Anyhoo, it has.

‘Trailer’ might be the wrong word for it as weighing in at 17 minutes, it’s more like an presentation, or an introduction to the new world and characters of Persona 4. Summary? It’s definitely more of the same. With no way to read the text and a complete lack of understanding of the language, from what I saw it seems our protagonist moves to a rural town, makes new friends and gets drawn into some bizarre occurrences. And, of course, everyone discovers a previously unknown ability.

The long-nosed ‘mentor’ and his entourage is back, riding in what appears to be a limo. School life again seems central as does making social links and discovering back-stories to gain abilities. We see some trotting around a typical looking Persona dungeon, the cards make a re-appearance and so does the disturbing mask-wearing gloop. Of course, now I’m just depressed that it’ll probably be a year or more until I see an English language version of this game (best case scenario - worse case, they don’t bother). *sigh*

Anyway, if YouTube don’t get bullied into taking it down (magazines really don’t like their exclusives plastered all over the interwebs, strangely enough), you can find the ‘trailer’ here.

Persona 4 preview

As I have no ‘Woohoo!’ category on my site, I guess I’ll have to file this under ‘Gaming’ and just repeatedly state how stoked I am to see some Persona 4 details in the latest Famitsu magazine. Unless you can get your mitts on a copy, pop along to Akayuki for some dog-rough ’scans’ (which is apparently code here for ‘ill-framed snaps done with a mobile-phone camera’ as far as I can tell). Despite that I’ll take what you can get and it’s still enough to get me grinning like a fool.

Persona 3 was a great role-playing game for the Playstation 2. It’s the perfect blend of barmy (progression through social networking and dealing with the pressures of high-school life) and dark (John Q. Public transforms into coffins every night at the stroke of midnight and saving the world through placing a ‘gun’ to your temple). Featuring wonderfully stylised graphics and a top notch soundtrack, Persona 3 also wove a compelling storyline with a great cast of misfits.

Anyone who knows me knows I’ve always had a soft spot for Japanese RPGs but Persona 3 was a bit of a double whammy in that it also featured one of my other loves - Roguelike elements. If I was still running my old ‘Roguelike News’ website, I probably would have been raving about Persona 3 back when it came out. Ah, the joy of repeatedly revisiting the same randomly generated level countless times just to spawn that one creature you need… *bliss*

So what does Persona 4 have in store for us? Well, happily, more of the same it sounds like. Bigger, better, a murder/mystery theme in a rural setting where fog spells bad news for someone. Best of all, it’s still on the Playstation 2. Despite Microsoft’s mad-dash to get to the next generation of consoles after they failed set the world alight with the original Xbox, it seems Atlus were quite happy to stick to knocking out classics of the old PS2. Great news for the light-of-wallet among us, with a PS2 sat sulking in the corner.

Persona 4 is due for release in Japan on July 10th. No word on a US or EU release but they’d be mad not to. Fingers crossed and all that.