Katsura Hashino of Atlus, director of Persona 3 and producer of Persona 4, has announced that work is now under way on the fifth game in the popular RPG series. Virtually nothing else is known at this point; even the system it's being made for is still a mystery. Atlus USA has been doing a nice job making the various Shin Megami Tensei-related games available in America, and Persona 3 and 4 were two of my favorite games on the PS2, so confirmation that there will be a Persona 5 is great news for me.
I'm curious to see where they take it. One of the interesting things about parts 3 and 4 was that, despite sharing a setting and having the same basic mechanics, the tone of the games was strikingly different. This extended from the plot and characters into subtle things like the color of the in-game menus (dark and somber-looking in 3, lots of cheery yellow and orange for 4) and whether the majority of the game's important events too place at night (Persona 3) or during the day (Persona 4). It was quite a shift.
Which made sense, given that the dominant theme of Persona 4 was the pursuit of truth, self-understanding and acceptance, and the overcoming of illusions and ignorance, whereas the theme of Persona 3 was DEATH IS INEVITABLE AND INESCAPABLE, ESPECIALLY FOR YOU. (I hasten to add that the game is much more fun than that probably makes it sound.) I thought that they did both styles extremely well, so I look forward to seeing what's next.
The release is just a few days away, so I wanted to put in a good word for Just Cause 2. I downloaded the PS3 version of the demo, and it blew me away like nothing else has in years. The demo has a half-hour time limit in which you can run around a small portion of the game world, and I have played it at least eight times; that's how addicted to it I am. I'm incredibly cheap and usually have a decent-sized backlog of games to play through, so I rarely buy games as soon as they come out; Just Cause 2 is the first game released by a company not named Atlus that I've ever been excited enough about to actually preorder.
It's a third-person open world action game game where you roam around the fictional island nation of Panau, destroying facilities, assassinating enemy leaders, and doing missions for various factions to overthrow the tyrannical government of the island. In addition to the various weapons you can wield and vehicles you can commandeer, you have a grappling hook and reloadable parachute you can use to rapidly travel across the terrain, zip to advantageous positions to attack, escape from pursuing enemies, and destroy things in various creative ways. It's sort of like Mercenaries meets Red Faction: Guerrilla meets Bionic Commando meets gleefully over-the-top action movies like The Transporter.
Based on my experiences with the demo, I would enthusiastically recommend this game if you are interested in any of the following:
Zipping from building to building and vehicle to vehicle with a grappling hook while your enemies are in hot pursuit, sort of like Spider-Man if Spider-Man spent more time killing people in Third World countries.
Blowing lots of things up.
Advancing beyond mundane forms of transport acquisition like running up to vehicles and carjacking them at intersections, and having the option of alternative methods such as parachuting off a cliff that overlooks a busy road, landing on the roof of a moving car, forcing your way in through the window, and seizing the wheel, all while the car continues barreling down the highway at fifty miles an hour.
An open-world game where you run around kicking ass, wreaking havoc, and fleeing from the pursuing authorities with a main character who's not a sociopathic hooker-killing gangster.
Leaping off the roof of a four-story building, firing a grappling hook at an attacking enemy helicopter in mid-air, reeling yourself in, spraying submachine gun fire at the crew while hanging on to the outside of the cockpit, hauling the pilot out of his seat and hurling him to his doom, seizing control of the helicopter in mid air, and unleashing a torrent of rockets and gatling gun fire at the enemy troops gathered below.
If you own a PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, or PC, try out the demo if you haven't already. The full game is coming out on March 23rd. Amazon.com has a nice deal where you get $15 credit towards the next game you buy from them if you preorder Just Cause 2, so if you do any new game shopping there you can essentially get it for $45. I'm definitely looking forward to this one.
(Note: This ought to go without saying, but I receive no compensation from either Square Enix or Eidos for this post. Sadly, despite the boundless potential for niche marketing offered by the internet, the "video game fans who like jokes about particle physics and Oliver Cromwell" demographic is not large enough to make corrupting me worthwhile. I do get a small percentage through if anyone buys the game via the Amazon link in this post, but be assured that the emotional and spiritual satisfaction I would gain from the knowledge that I helped someone find a game they enjoyed would vastly overshadow any merely material gain that... Hell, I can't even type that sentence with a straight face.)
Microsoft is going to try to market the Xbox360's motion control system, Project Natal, through celebrity endorsements in women's fashion/relationship/celebrity magazines such as Vogue and Glamour, presumedly in the hope of using motion-controlled games to reach beyond the existing gamer market in the same way the Nintendo Wii has done. It really is quite remarkable, when you think about it. The idea of stuff about video games in something like Vogue really drives home how much things have changed since I was a kid. I grew up in a time and place where a significant interest in gaming was extremely uncool, and where female gamers were like alien civilizations or tachyons- we didn't rule out the theoretical possibility of such a thing, but the idea had no empirical support and the actual sighting of one would have been a major discovery.
It does seem like an interesting idea- if it works, it would give Microsoft an untapped new market that the more family-focused Wii doesn't already dominate. I'm really not sure how many different games you can make in the Top 14 Positions to Make Your Man A Groveling Sex Slave/Summer Outfits to Conceal Your Colossal Buttocks/Yet Another Goddamn Article About Anne Hathaway's Hair genre before the market is oversaturated, so hopefully Microsoft will show a little more imagination than we've seen in past attempts to market games to women.
“I get that people want to feel a sense of risk when they’re fighting in battles, but if the only emotion you feel when you’re playing a game is fear that you’re going to lose some time due to an arbitrary gameplay mechanic, we’re probably not doing something right, ” he said.
Originally, I was going to suggest that Cryptic buy the rights to Star Trek: Insurrection and force players to sit through a brief clip of it while their characters respawn. Then I remembered that he said he wanted to create a “sense of loss,” not a “sense of dismay, nausea, and revulsion, coupled with indignation that Paramount tried to pass off a really bad rejected script from the TV show as a feature film.” So, back to the drawing board.
You know, the first time I glanced at the source article, I immediately thought, “Wait, the Federation doesn't have the death penalty anymore. It's one of those things they've somehow 'evolved beyond,' like greed and racism and dignified military uniforms that don't look like something from the Men's Sleepwear section at Sears.” I hate it when I get my wires crossed like that.
(Yes, I'm aware of General Order 7. Don't imagine you can outgeek me on this, poindexter.)
Today marks the debut of Sony's new reality series on PlayStation Network, The Tester. The Tester will feature, in the words of the show's official site, “11 avid gamers competing in a series of physical and mental elimination challenges to win an actual job as an official PlayStation game tester along with a $5000 signing bonus.” If you have any knowledge of what being a game tester actually entails, the problem with this premise is obvious.
A tedious, poorly-paid, mind-numbingly repetitive job is not a prize. It is an anti-prize. If it ever made direct contact with an actual prize, both would be utterly annihilated in a cataclysmic burst of gamma radiation that would reduce everything within a five-mile radius to molten slag. Hell, just having it within proximity of that $5,000 dollars is risking disaster. The word "prize" implies something of value. This is why game shows and reality usually offer the chance to win things like new cars and large sums of money. This is why the Showcases on The Price Is Right usually involve things like luxurious home furnishings or exciting vacations, rather than 10-year prison term in a Federal Supermax facility or home foreclosures or syphilis. This is why there was never a smash hit game show called Who Wants Regis Philbin to Beat the Shit of Them With a Rattan Cane. (Rege's terrifying prowess in the deadly art of eskrima is one of the best-kept secrets in show business.)
The show itself didn't really catch my interest, though your mileage may vary depending on how much you enjoy American Gladiators-esque sporting events with people in giant plastic spheres, people using cliched game terminology to express their anguish during personal crises, and watching the producer of PlayStation Home berating someone until they cry. If that's your thing, the first episode is available for free download on PSN.
Jonathon Knight, producer of Dante's Inferno, says that for years he's also had the idea of doing a game based on Macbeth. Based on what he did with Dante's Divine Comedy, his hypothetical Shakespeare adaptation would probably portray Macbeth as a wisecracking American secret agent in an alternate-history steampunk version of the 1870s, charged by President Ulysses S. Grant with defending America from the machinations of the diabolical King Duncan, or somesuch.
To discover the horrifying secret behind the mysterious Scottish military research program known only as “Project Untimely Ripp'd,” Macbeth will have to infiltrate the very heart of the tyrannical Scottish Empire and confront the monstrous Thane Macduff, prototype for an army of genetically engineered supersoldiers that Duncan intends to mass-produce in artificial wombs and conquer the world. Faced with a power-mad tyrant, an army of cloned superhumans not of woman born, and three mysterious women who keep showing up in cutscenes to deliver cryptic dialogue that won't make any sense until the sequel, Macbeth will be pushed to his limits to survive. Rated M.
You know what's frustrating? Every time I try to mock Dante's Inferno by coming up with a ludicrous game premise vaguely related to classic literature, I end up with something I'd actually like to play. Now I'm going to end up spending the rest of the day depressed by the fact that Macbeth: Fury of Glamis (and it's smash hit sequel, Macbeth II: The Rise of Banquo) will never actually be made.
Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi and his company Mistwalker will be making a new RPG for the Nintendo Wii called Last Story. It's nice to see the Wii getting more RPGs, given how sparse the system's RPG selection has been so far. (Though the same could be said of every console so far this generation, sadly.)
I know I'm taking the low road and going for the obvious joke, but... With all due respect to a talented man responsible for some of my all-time favorite games, it's a shame his otherwise boundless creativity apparently doesn't extend to names. We've gone from “Final Fantasy” to “The Last Story?” It's as if a group of former Epic Games employees made a game called Clockwork of Strife or Fraudulent Playoffs. I hope the game does well enough to result in more Mistwalker games for the Wii, so that players can enjoy the epic adventure to be had in The Concluding Tale and The Ultimate Confabulation and The Last Weepy, Drunken, Rambling Anecdote Before Falling Off the Bar Stool and Sliding Into an Alcoholic Coma.
