Power to the People

Nintendo Power v236 is the final issue for the year of 2008 and what an issue it turned out to be. Picking up a copy of Nintendo Power is always a bit of a gamble for me as there are usually no open issue for me to browse through first. Thankfully Nintendo Wikia provides a preview of each issue content for me to decide whether the issue is worth picking up and they usually don't disappoint. Nintendo Power is one of the few things related to Nintendo that have remained traditionally-hardcore. After all how many publications would feature Ninja Gaiden : Dragon Sword, GTA: Chinatown Wars and Madworld on their covers? I initially got this issue for the Castlevania poster included and the retrospective look at the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I was pleasantly surprised to find a Power Profile feature on Shinji Mikami and also a nice coverage of the recent TGS 2008, complete with an interview with Suda51 on the upcoming No More Heroes 2.

Handsome Devil with the Cigarette

When i first saw the japanese box art of Yakuza 3 revealed, i immediately thought of John Woo's Hard Boiled. Some one on the Yakuza 3 team must be a fan of the John Woo classic as there is a scene in the film where Tony leads his head back lost in his thoughts, the same manner as kazuma does here. Sure it could be a coincidence as i'm sure there are many other similar pose of one smoking but here's another coincident for you, when Hard Boiled was first released on DVD in Japan, it featured the same iconic shot of Tony Leung on the cover of the DVD box art. While i don't have the DVD in my possession to show or any reference for that matter, i certainly remembered it well enough. I also remember watching my Criterion Collection of WKW's In The Mood for Love and inside, Kar-Wai casually referred to Tony Leung as the handsome devil with a cigarette when they first worked together in Days of Being Wild.

Yakuza 3 is scheduled for release in February next year and i haven't even finish playing Yakuza 2 or heard anything of the Kenzan spin-off getting localised. If there is ever a reason to feel proud as a PS3 owner, this is it. Third-party exclusive doesn't get any better than this.

Fearsome Combination

While debating on a local forum on whether multiple-disc games has already become a relic of past generation gaming, i can't help but to reminisce about Fear Effect on the original Playstation. Heavily influenced by the films of Hong Kong cinema which i also happened to be a long-time fan of, Fear Effect was probably my first love affair with cel-shaded games. Long before Suda51 was pushing the envelope on sex and violence portrayed in cel-shaded games, Stan Liu and his team of talented designers at Kronos Digital were already giving it their best shot on Fear Effect.

Aside from the eye-catching cel-shaded graphics they had another ace up their sleeves, pre-rendered backgrounds unlike any you have seen in the 32-bit era. Often critised for looking static, Fear Effect featured a looping-effect on their pre-rendered background where a bunch of effects could be incoporated into the background, making it lively instead of having your character just walking through a painting. That all came at a price of having to put up with four discs to swap through an essentially one disc long game with these looping-backgrounds taking up all the space. Fear effect had a trio of interesting and very likable leads and they would proceed to add another female to the mix in their follow-up prequel, Retro Helix also on the Playstation. With two successful outings on the original Playstation, Fear Effect was set to make the jump to PS2 and indeed, screenshots released indicated that a third title was well in the works however it never saw the light of day.

Apart from a movie adaption being developed with Uwe Boll and Stanley Tong participation very little is known of the fate of the Fear Effect series. However Fear Effect remains as probably the best game to pay homage to HK cinema, a generation before the likes of Jet Li's Rise to Honour and John Woo's Stranglehold. It has all my favourite elements which i still hold dear to me now; survival horror, cel-shaded graphic sand HK cinema so it's little wonder why i still reminisce fondly about Fear Effect.

Jack of All Trades

Dino Crisis 2 is another victim of being a late entry to a system which has already been superseded by its big brother. I vividly remember Dino Crisis 2 because it happened to be one of the very few Capcom games during the 32-bit era which i didn't have to play the PC port first. Capcom were at the top of their game in making 32-bit action-adventure games and each were so successful that they were almost surely ported to the PC platform later. DC2 took a lot of the best ideas from past Capcom successes and gels it all into one finely-crafted action game. It's easy to call DC2 the jack-of-all-trade and master-of-none but that's the beauty of it, it does everything so well that it doesn't need to surpass any of the standards set by it's older brothers, be it the past RE games or the first Dino Crisis. Perhaps that's why it's easily forgotten now but i bet no one forgot the ending of the game.

Series pioneer Shu Takumi has since gone on to work on the Ace Attorney series on the GBA and DS so it's highly likely we will ever see the resolution to that ending. But Dino Crisis 2 remains a fond memory of a time when Capcom could do no wrong and were churning out games like a factory.

Long Story Short

Here's an unusual gaming quirk of mine which is should to puzzle a few; i have a tendency to finish a long game really quick but tend to prolong short games a little bit longer. No other games demonstrate this better then these two which i happened to be playing recently, Product Number 03 and Final Fantasy VII. I took about forty plus hours to reach the end of Final Fantasy VII and despite all that, there were still so many side missions and summons which i failed to gather. I could have spent a bit more time finishing these side missions and leveling up my characters further but i felt forty hours was enough for me.

PN03 on the other hand is reportedly only a five hour game and sure enough i did finish it under six hours on my first try. However i immediately went back to playing it soon after that, this time trying to clear all the side missions as well as the main story mode. I'm only about two-thirds into finishing the game and if factor in the earlier five plus hours i spent on my first run, i would have spent about 20 plus hours on PN03 already. There is barely any story or cutscene in PN03 but yet the burning desire to master Vanessa moves and score professional rank on every mission have me obsessively playing the game non-stop for the past week. Perhaps it's the difference in genre that led to such different playing styles, now i'm starting to wonder should i even bother with Final Fantasy XIII when it ships.

The Great Repeater

There i was, just moments from finishing FF VII and i felt the urge to cheat my way through the last three boss fights. You see at the start of disc 3, you are given the option of proceeding onto the last stage or continue to level up your characters through the side-missions. Having clocked just slighty over 40 hours of play, i felt that i spend well enough time on the game and bravely proceed onto the final stage. But most of my characters were not really up to task as i rarely spend any time leveling up my two strongest members, Cid and Vincent, they just happen to be powerful right from when i recruit them.

To make things worse you only get one save point troughout the final stage and far too many random battles before you even reach the final boss. When i did get to the final boss, i was overwhelmed by how powerful it and each time that i had to replay it, i had to endure the same pointless random battle before i get another chance at it again. By then I was convinced my characters were not up to the task that i consider cheating my way through. Again, just like i did with FFX a few years back.Unfortunately (or fortunately) I didn't have any cheat disc in my possession that would work with the game and left with no other options, i gave it one last try. I'm absolutely convinced that sometimes in RPG battle, a little luck is required. Luckily for me, the final sephiroth was not as violent as usual so with a little luck i managed to scrape through and finish my third RPG, the second for this year.