It's the return of Mortal Kombat 2 (and no kidding)!

It's been a while since I've blogged about games, and I don't really want to spend much time on that now either. So, here's just a brief side-note:

Mortal Kombat 9 is basically a Mortal Kombat for friends of Mortal Kombat 1-3, as it depicts the fighters and story of those parts. 3D graphics are used as means to create great visuals, but are completely left off the gameplay plate - that hasn't worked out so well since MK4, if you ask me.

Instead of inventing an abundance of new fighting feats, the developers have built on the solid base of those used in the early parts of the series. Creating MK3-Style juggle combos using exact timing of jump kicks and punches is just plain fun.

Story Mode is great fun, and you'll have to play characters that are not your faves every once in a while. All gaps left open in the story of MK I - III are quite neatly closed. Unlike other MK games released in the last decade, you have no free world to traverse or stages to clear, just a long sequence of fights sewn together by some storytelling.

To my mind, a large portion of the blood-gushing and bone-shattering violence that I see myself confronted with could have been left out and we'd (still) end up with quite a unique (but no so perverted) game, but it's either sex or brutality that sells, and the game has an strong accent on the latter.

What you get here is a visually perfect 2D beat 'em up and a nice treat for nostalgic MK game fans like me - I remember standing in front of the MKII Koin-Op when playing this...For all those new to the series it's still a good game, although most of them will probably just want to check out the gore.

Long-awaited 'Final Fantasy XIII' kills my PS3...

...and I'm sad to say I'm not kidding.

Ever since Thursday I banned Modern Warfare 2 from my PS3 to make room for FF13, but after 2 hours of gameplay on each thursday and friday my playstation won't read any blurays anymore. How can this happen?

Since Sony won't see themselves responsible for this, I guess I'll have to contact Square Enix to cover the damage their software has caused me. The internet is full of reports of the same problem!

F**K!!!!

Final Fantasy XIII

just a short notice : there will be a FFXIII Demo for PS3 along with the Bluray of Advent Children. More info here.

hapless turns at Sony's

Probably you've already heard it: Sony needs a lot of red ink for writing the records of their gaming branch since the release of the PS3.

Sony has - up to PS3 - had a very strong pillar in Games, while other business areas are usully rather unexciting (No pioneers' work in most of them). Thus, the damages caused by this bad streak might cost Sony a lot of their overall stability.

But what went wrong?

To my mind, Sony went very very wrong in the concept phase. Taking a pride in the long-lasting PS2-sales, they threw their new machine on the market without caring about demographical or, on a peoples-scale, economical changes. Consumers want to spend less money on games, PS3 games get more expensive without offering extra benefits to the gamers. You still finish cheap-ass jump'n'runs in a few hours or lose interest before that happens, but pay 1.5 times the price. Or, as Terry pratchett has put economy : "It's very much like dairy farming. The goal is to get a maximum amount of milk with a minimum amount of moo, and I'm afraid all I get these days is moo". Sure, we must pay for entertainment. But if it hurts more than it pleases, it's a habit to kick.

PS2 was, in the end, budget gaming, which kept people buying. The prospect of testing games before buying (using a modchip) also tickled some of their fancies.
Right now, PS3 is still only interesting for enthusiasts, consumers will wait until it gets cheaper (and moddable!).

I consider myself a model gamer citizen : I love playing, I spend a lot of time on it, and I even play a lot of crap. PS2 was a great platform for that, cut out for gaming. It sold very well, because of all consoles it was, while being more pricey, still the best. It was, powerful enough, quite easily moddable and most of all affordable. Recently I prefer Crysis on my PC to what my PS3 has to offer...

While microsoft didn't achieve too much with XBOX on the gaming side, it offered great MediaCenter and Modding potential. Which is why I owned one. Most of the games really sucked, but XBMC had a strong appeal to keep it for a long time.

One more admonition goes to Sony for their policy towards the European consumers. Ever since the PSX, we have stood in queue behind all other markets, finally getting a modified and less interesting product. For more money. Dear Sony, a market consists of people (who might add up to numbers, but each and every one of them considers him/herself a person rather than a digit) who have emotions. Emotions play a very big role in a market, which is how stock trade works. If you treat us like the car's fifth wheel, there will be an according echo.

Have it your way, but if you want people to buy your stuff, it's give and take!

And yes, I can judge this. I am a gamer. I own a PS3. I am very happy about the console and very unhappy about the games available right now. It's like winning a Ferrari in a lottery and having no gas station around. The Sony Store is a good idea, but filled with junk, whoever wants to pay money for crappy B- or C-games they have to download when each and every harmful firmware upgrade (my brother's console was bricked by a regular update) might make you lose the game?

I sincerely hope the modding community will squeeze some pleasure out of the console pretty soon, otherwise it will be a final stop at ebay for mine...

Eye Of Judgment - big time!

A few years ago, I used to play Wizards of the coast's Trading Card Game "Duel Masters". It was something that really got me by the conkers, since I like card games, I am easily convinced to collect stuff (you should see my Elton John collection...), and I really like fantasy-monster-stuff. So, there was this new hobby, but lack of time I dismissed it after spending somewhere around 250USD on import cards.

Now WOTC and sony have finally combined their efforts to put up something really grand : The Eye Of Judgment for PS3. The cards are played on a gameplan that is watched by a USB Cam (PS Eye). The software identifies the card and brings it into play, be it a spell, creature or an action card. A nice 3d-representation of the cast entity is then shown on-screen and battles with its adversaries.

Your opponent can be either remote or locally present, It doesn't matter. Just, if you want to play ladder games, you gotta go online.

If you like TCGs, try finding some cool videos on youtube - there's many - and get yourself this freakin' hot game.

Or, if you already have it, why not challenge me? My PSN ID is fopsi. I am also in the german playstation league with this nickname.

Cheers!

What January brought so far...

G'Day ;)

January is a very great month as far as I'm concerned:

Family
My family is in good shape, my daughters have their toothing and coughing troubles, but develop so well...I can't even imagine that a mere 3 years ago there was none of that in my life, they're absolutely the best thing that ever happened in my whole life...

...Gaming
After Metal Gear Snake Eater, which seemed the one and only extremely great game on PS2 I sold my black and blue console more than a year ago. Now "FF12" and "FF7 - dirge of cerberus" made me curious. So i went out (alone on horseback) to collect me a ps2, all used and torn, to try those games.
Not a bit of a disappointment, both games rock. I never would have thought that real time battle (like FF12) or an action-shooter concept(D.O.C.) would work that well for me, but i was wrong. I guess I will have to invent a spare-time-multiplier to get everything i want to do done in what little time i have. Final Fantasy 12 is so much better than it's soundtrack, far better than it's predecessors (talking leagues here, friend!), so I give it a lot of my time. Square is the best. Final Fantasy X and X-2 were notches in their otherwise perfect portfolio. Bring back Uematsu and you'll have me until FF-M!

Audio
my first audio-track, 'Old Iron' (a birthday song for sixty-years-on.com) is as far as finished by 99%. This week i will add another few keyboards and revise all that's in there already, then do some remixing and send it to Stephan Heimbecher.
Writing and mixing the song was such a great exercise to get to know the software...As usual, real-life usage turns out to be the only useful exercise. In February I will start other tracks, some of which have been named here...

I hope your January was as fine as mine.

Cheeeeeeers!

PS3 is rocking it to the fattest

I just watched another few videos and reports and have come, once more, to the conclusion, that the ps3 will be worth a penny.
the graphics may be a bit below what x360 offers, but the capabilities are endless. nearly, that is.
I really see forward to the EU release of this mighty machine and hope that I will be able to get my hands on one of those.

Metal Gear Portable Ops

Really good.

Nearly as good as METAL GEAR AWESOME, which can be admired here

Xbox Media Center 2.0 : awesome

After my xbox has gathered a lot of dust, i wanted to check out the latest XBOX Media Center (XBMC) . Once you have a nicely modded box, setup is easy:
Download archive, unpack, FTP to the partition where your secondary dashboard is. done.
From this point on, it's pleasure all the time. One of the best features is the capability of running custom python scripts...so that you can watch youtube clips on tv now.

FFXII OST fails to impress

Yo, folks.

Being a fan of the games Final Fantasy 7,8 & 9 was easy for me. Great music, great storylines, fantastic athmosphere...Well, talk about music in this place.

Honestly, after Part 9, which had a pretty chacteristic setting and an enourmously adequate soundtrack, Nobuo Uematsu seems to have become less inventive. It seems he lost the love for the subject, with only a few really appealing tracks to occur in FFX ("to zanarkand",ending theme and a tiny amount of others). Also, a big part of the tracks has been handed over to other artists, similar as happened later in FFXI OST and "FFXI - vision of zilat" OST. In these two albums, I liked only one track ("recollection").

Part 12 has been given to Hitoshi Sakimoto, never heard of, and reflects the tendency already visible in parts 10 and 11: The attempts to sound perfectly symphonic overrule the ambition to write memorable melodies, simple tunes like "terra".

FFVII Advent children featured some of the piano collection's songs, but also didn't bring any new amiable stuff.Nobody exepts Aerith's Theme Part II, but this (p.12) is the first FF OST I'm not gonna keep...Really, really disappointing, same development as shines through with the FF game series...

gamedevelopment made its way to my hometown

after five years of taking a great interest in game development, but being limited by my own unwillingness to move away, i have found out that there's 2 local game-programming crews.

> www.silentfuture.de
> www.silentdreams.de

i'm happy to see things developing this way. i hope to be able to resume graphical work soon (after moving to my new appartment of choice), so that i can offer myself as freelance helper.