First up is Gamepro, who in this review, give Persona 4 a 5 out of 5. The reviewer is an old hand when it comes to the series and brings up (and lays to rest) the worry that P4 is merely P3 but with a minor dust and polish. While he acknowledges that the gameplay will feel familiar to fans of the series, it appears that everything Persona 3 already did well has been tweaked and fine tuned to perfection in the new game.

The game scores a lower, but still commendable, 8.7 out of 10 in this review from GameZone. Despite some odd reaching to link the game’s inspirations to other sources (wait, pyramidhead from Silent Hill?), the reviewer still admits the game is one of the best RPGs on the PS2 in recent history. A fair review, if not a little focussed on that fact the game is ‘old gen’ rather than a PS3 or Xbox360 title.

Next comes another top mark with 10 out of 10 in this review from Gamervision. Another review from a devoted fan who wasn’t expecting Persona 3 to be improved on. Like the Gamepro article, this gamer appears to have come away very pleased with the results.

This review from Hardcore Gamer Magazine gives Persona 4 a healthy 4.75 out of 5 (an average taken from the 5 out 5 of the reviewer and a 4.5 out of 5 from another writer). This time the reviewer enjoys the new storyline from the series as well as all the improvements made to the game mechanics. They also note the increase in activities to fill the protagonist’s days leading to fewer ‘what now?’ moments and the improved social link development.

Finally, 1UP gives Persona 4 a shining A+ mark in their review. This reviewer appreciates the bite-sized chunks of dungeon Persona 4 serves up in comparison to the sometimes daunting colossal tower of Tartarus. They also feel that the characters are better placed in this title than the previous one.

Overall, the theme that runs through all these reviews is that everything we love from the Persona series makes a happy return with a new lick of paint and some minor niggles (such a lacking team control or no fast travel) have been exorcised. It all adds up to a game I’m really looking forward to having eat up a considerable amount of my free time.

…when it finally hits Europe, of course. Bah, I’d almost convinced myself I was a US citizen and Persona 4 was only a week away. No such luck!

The first item and probably the most important, personally, is a hint… rumour… vague indication that Persona 4 will be hitting European shores before too long. According to French gaming website ‘Jeuxpo.com‘, the German classification organisation, USK (*deep breath* the Unterhaltungssoftware Selbstkontrolle) have rated Persona 4 (for ages 12 and over). It also mentions that it’ll be released in Europe by SquareEnix and that it should be expected early next year - though from the translated text of the article (original here), I’m not sure the entry actually says that. Oh well, fingers crossed whatever.

As, previously mentioned, the US gets Persona 4 in just over a week on the 9th of December and Japan is already enjoying the game. At least it’s nice to know that we haven’t been forgotten and plans are afoot to get the title in our grubby European mitts.

If you’re still jonesing for whatever Persona 4 information you can get, you might want to pop over to this Persona 4 Hands-On article from Gamespot posted earlier in the month. Obviously, avoid like the plague if you want to go into the game fresh and without having any of the gameplay elements spoiled for you but if you’re fine with a little preview (and let’s face it - we all know the gameplay isn’t going to be a million miles from Persona 3, anyway), then have at it.

The same can be said for this article from the Siliconera website covering the part that the protagonist’s home plays in the development of your social links and stats. It’s a bit more in-depth than the previously mentioned preview, focussing as it does on one specific area of the game so if you prefer to uncover details like that for yourself, you probably should stay away.

All in all, ‘early next year’ just can’t come quickly enough.

]]> http://www.skoardy.com/2008/11/30/more-persona-4-previews-and-info/feed/ http://www.skoardy.com/2008/10/28/the-albino-drake-is-mine/ http://www.skoardy.com/2008/10/28/the-albino-drake-is-mine/#comments Tue, 28 Oct 2008 01:03:25 +0000 Skoardy http://www.skoardy.com/?p=109 Following on from last week’s ‘Achievapalooza 2008!‘ post, where I basically admitted defeat and realised that Blizzard had added yet another hook in my gullet with their Achievements system (not that they really needed more hooks in there - I’m considering starting my own tackle shop with the collection they’ve bestowed on me already), I thought it was worth rah-rah’ing about a recent and more ‘tangible’ reward I’ve collected.

Since the patch went live, I’ve quickly racked up the achievements related to various daily quests, a bunch of the event themed achievements (this last week or so being ‘Hallow’s End‘, WoW’s Halloween-esque celebration of the Forsaken breaking free of the Lich King) and the rather easy fishing and cooking achievements. Being an all-rounder pays off as one of the cooking profession quests (’The Cake Is Not A Lie‘ - a cute reference to Valve’s excellent game, Portal) requires you to prepare a Delicious Chocolate Cake, the recipe for which is a random drop reward from a Fishing daily quest in Outland.

The new ability to track low-level quests on the mini-map means that my pre-TBC character now has ‘exalted’ reputation with all the old Azerothian home factions and sports the impressive sounding Ambassador title displayed in front of his name. Post-TBC chars pretty much get free rep for sneezing so it was a little more work than new characters would be expected to do but I wanted the title and sailing through level 10-20 quests while you’re a level 70 character isn’t exactly what you’d call brain surgery.

The achievement I’m happiest with is the one called ‘Leading the Cavalry‘ and requires the player to obtain 50 unique mounts (ground based or flying). It really should be called ‘How much gold can you spare?’ as it’s basically an exercise in purchasing power, visiting various vendors and snapping up their entire range of mounts. Of course, one of the first things you need to do is make sure you can purchase other race’s mounts - which is where being exalted with their faction pays off.

Long story short, I’m now riding about on a huge albino drake… behold!

To fill out the impressive effect, my character is also sporting the latest in Hallow’s End couture… the ninja costume courtesy of trick of treating an inn keeper.

Featuring a few extra scenes shuffled amongst the ones from the previous trailer, this new preview certainly helps cement my faith that the finished product will be a definite step up from previous translations of Alan Moore’s work to the big screen. Sure, the tank scene looks like it might have been sponsered by Airfix but the new footage featuring Rorschach is excellent. You actually get to see his mask close enough to notice it changing patterns, something I hoped they wouldn’t mess up. And they haven’t.

So roll on March 2009, as I for one can’t wait to be watching the Watchmen.

One of the things that I was rather looking forward to and something I’d talked about in the past, was the achievements. Well, a few weeks (months?) ago they announced that they were rolling some things previously assumed to be part of WotLK forward (such as pet revamps/class revamps, vanity pet/mount interface shuffle and the incription profession). Well, in the Tue/Wed 3.0.2 patch last week, they all arrived along with the new achievements feature.

Achievements boil the game down to it’s most basic of tick-box orientated gameplay. Visited all the areas in Durotar? Well done, you earn some points. Beaten seven shades of shinola out of Edwin VanCleef? More points for you! These are just some of the easy-peasy achievements. They also combine into sets so your Durotar wanderings add to your overall Explorer achievement for East Kingdoms, Kalimdor, Outland and Northrend. Your dungeon boss killing spree counts towards your various ‘Dungeonmaster‘ achievements. Some of these achievements will even earn you some lightweight rewards like titles, tabards and vanity pets. There’s tougher achievements in the mix, some that require long-term commitments and some that acknowledge bouts of luck such as rare kills/drops. All in all, that’s one helluva list (750 achievements… currently) of boxes to tick.

Me, I’m going all OCD on the easy ones. I’ve decided that the rest are going to have to be happy accidents if I get them or I’ll end up driving myself batty like the dopes on the forums. I have to admit, it’s kinda nice going about your business, playing the game as usual then seeing the whoosh of an achievement occur. Even reviewing your ‘progress’ on some of the others tempts you into focusing your gameplay a little more.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to infiltrate an enemy faction city and spend countless hours trying to catch a rare fish, all the while getting my ass handed to me by players trying to earn that bizarre “kill-then-/hug-emote-the-corpse” achievement…

The ‘official’ version? Not a fan. I’m a bit old school when it comes to Bond tunes. They need to be big, brassy and if possible, mention the name of the film at least every other sentence. I don’t care how difficult it is to crowbar that mother in there, you do it! This Alicia Keys and Jack White track (”Another Way To Die”) is just a bit too vacant and generic for my tastes and suggests less a big Bond event and more a Saturday afternoon chart run-down on the radio. Sure, it’ll go over great guns as a mere pop song but it’s not a Bond theme song.

Which brings us to Joe Cornish’s masterful offering. Joe, one half of the classic ‘Adam and Joe Show‘, a writer, presenter, director, radio personality, oh heck, he does everything and he’s a damn sight funnier than any one person deserves to be… has created what surely is the definitive Quantum Of Solace theme song. It’ll probably be what I’m humming to myself, fingers in ears, when I sit down to the opening credits of QoS.

You can find the vastly superior Joe Cornish submission (courtesy of Youtube), here. Enjoy.

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.

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.

Pretty sure this is my first ‘rant‘ on the updated site. Quite surprising really. I used to do quite a few of them on the old design. I guess I generally had a lots of insignificant things to spend far too much time losing my rag over than would ever sanely be considered necessary than I do these days. Going to have to change that. There’s plenty of non-events to blow out of all proportions and I’m just the man to do it!

The reason for today’s diatribe-lite is the comms chat on Team Fortress 2. I’ve been playing the game a fair bit recently. I’m still shockingly bad and I seem to have the ‘Wanted‘ effect on sniper bullets - as in they will bend around walls, rock formations and even other team-mates to find their way to my skull. To say I’m a bullet magnet would be unfair to the shot, flame, grenades, bombs, bats and axeheads I also manage to attract with alarming regularity. If I’m anywhere higher than mid-table on the team leaderboard, you know I’m stuck with a bunch of hopeless players sailing on the good ship Sure Loss.

But it’s the people who use the voice comms system to chat to team-mates that I want to talk about. Basically, I’ve boiled it down to a simple rule of thumb for spotting people really who shouldn’t use voice comms. It’s ‘Do you have voice comms?‘. If you answered ‘Yes!‘ (or most probably ‘Why, yes I do, I’m often regaling my team-mates with a highly amusing running commentary!”), then it’s fairly certain that you damn well shouldn’t be using voice comms because it’d be a miracle if you’re actually one of those one-in-a-million players who makes good use of it in-game.

There’s a pretty limited number of phrases you’ll hear over voice comms, it seems…

• “Spy!” - my personal favourite. Do they give you any indication of his location? Or what class it might be parading as? Do they bugger like. Pointing out there’s a spy is like pointing out every other damn thing you’ve passed as you’re running along to the capture point as it’s always a safe bet there’s a spy playing on the opposition. I fully expect to hear “Steps!”, “Barn!”, “Resupply Locker!” any one of these days.
• “Go! Go! Go!” or “Get ‘em!” or “Capture the point!”. I call these the ’stating the bloody obvious’ selection. The worse thing about the chuckleheads usually spouting these lines is they just love the sound of their own voice and they’re most probably tin-pot generals with it. I know hearing isn’t particularly finite but I always feel I’m wasting my ears just having to suffer these idiots.
• “Mmfghmuuhhgaafurrmt!”. Yeah, I’ve no idea what these fools are saying but if they’re trying to pull off the perfect impression of the Pyro, they’re almost perfect. Seriously, if you’re going to pollute the game with your voice, at least make sure you’ve got the mic set up properly and all the volume levels checked. If you’re too quiet, mumble like you’ve been kicked in the mouth by a mule or just sound like you’re playing through a flash flood that’s submerged your room, shut the fuck up, you’re not helping anyone.
• “Spy! To your left!”. Probably worse than the first case as these people believe everyone else playing the game possesses special psychic powers that allows them to divine who the hell they’re talking about. End result, the fifteen other players on the team are suddenly distracted checking to their left and take a bullet. Sorry… fourteen players take a bullet, one takes a knife to the back as the damn spy has circled around him already.

And this is before you’ve even got on to the morons who think they’re at an open-mic night at the comedy club and are providing lacklustre improv entertainment to their team-mates. No, you’re not funny. You never were. Go back to applying homophobic spray images to the base walls.

Sometimes, you come across a real gem of a player. They provide useful information on opposition movements with reference to actual locations in the map. They offer up strategy and advice (not in that “Do this… NOW!” way that makes you just want to do the opposite right off the bat, either). And mostly, they’re speaking clearly while they do it. But these people are soooo few and far between.

So if you’re one of the clueless listed above, stand. Stand up from your computer desk and slowly turn in a circle. Keep turning. Hopefully you’ll not notice the cable of your voice comms headset tightening around your neck as you turn and with any luck, we’ll be short one moron with a mic before too long.

I thought the hook was already buried deep within my cheek in regards to announced features for the expansion. Extensive new content? Yay! I want me some of that. Raise the level cap? Mmm-mmm! Loving that progression. Then they did it… They appealed to the brainless grinder in me. They announced their Achievements system.

Basically they’re borrowing the system Microsoft have made popular with their XBox Live ‘experience’, and bolting it into the perfect casing for such a devious set of enticements - a Massively Multiplayer Online game. With it they’ll be awarding points for completing various chores and attaining specific conditions (from the bizarre; getting your hair cut in a new WotLK barbershop… to the obsessive; raising your reputation with 40 factions to ‘Exalted’).

And what do points make? Prizes! (sorry, Brucie). And by prizes, I mean some fairly innocuous little rewards in the shape of titles, vanity pets and tabards. “More pets?” I hear you scream, “But I’ve got pets coming out of my ears! I can’t possibly devote yet more bank space to all these cute little critters!”. Worry not, that’s where Blizzard’s announcement comes in (you did click the link before, right?).

Blizzard CM, Wryxian, revealed that in WotLK, players won’t need to forever juggle bag & bank space due to their insane need to collect each and every mount and vanity pet in the game. You’ll simply ‘learn’ the pet/mount as you would a spell and it’ll appear in a new tab in your character info window to be called up whenever desired. Cool huh? Yeah. That’s me tied up until the expansion after WotLK comes out desperately trying to catch ‘em all, too.

Oh, crapcakes!

ps. Almost forgot to mention - if you are planning on expanding your critter collection to near-legendary status, the website with all the information you could ever want is ‘WarcraftPets.com’. Consider it a to-do list as well as a how-to guide.