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Story: B-

Vesperia takes place in a world where the population has become dependant on magical stones called blastia left by an ancient civilization, and currently engaged in a power struggle between the Empire and the various Guilds.  Yuri, an ex-Knight of the Empire, encounters princess Estelle as she is trying to escape from the castle to find their mutual friend Flynn as they chase a blastia theft across the lands.  As they gain members, the group comes to realize there is a more sinister plot afoot involving the blastia that could lead to the destruction of the world, and only their group can stop it.

The plot is pretty stereotypical as well as the characters, though there are a few nice elements to it, but it does get convoluted.  Story is told by a lot of voiced and some unvoiced cutscenes as well as skits throughout the game, with a handful of anime shorts.  A major nit with the story is that it leads to a false climax; you’re all geared for a final battle but then the story takes a turn that requires another act to complete; not that this is necessarily bad, but the false finale is so strongly implied that to find there’s more after it feels like a cheap add-on to the game.

Gameplay: A

Vesperia’s core gameplay will come as no surprise to anyone already familar with the series or with JRPGs in general.  As the story progresses, you move between towns, passing through the overworld on foot, by boat, or by airship, and then entering various dungeons to find artifacts and other useful information.  There are, of course, monster encounters but they are all visible, and you can also attempt to link two or more monster encounters for a more difficult fight.   The game features a limited day/night and weather system approach, in that the type of monsters may change depending on these factors, at least in the overworld.

Combat continues the Tales series tradition of a real-time combat system, with a handful more features that start to make this act like a beat-em-up game.  You control one character (though the game seems to push you towards Yuri most of the time), and given the monster you’re aiming for, you can move back and forth in a line with it; however, off the bat, you can also hold down a trigger and run anywhere on the field, allowing you to easily evade certain attacks or position yourself better.  Attacks can be standard melee combat or a variety of “artes”, special attacks or magical spells, which deal more damage but also consume your “mana” tracks as TP points.  While TP regenerates during battle by landing regular hits, you’ll find that wasteful use of artes can lead to some close situations.  In addition, once you’ve learned certain skills, you can block, sidestep attacks, recover while flying in mid-air, and a number of other moves that you’d normally expect to see in a game like Street Fighter, and thus may start to appeal to those that play these types of games.  Of course, it does get repetitive, as is the case with JRPGs, so this is likely not going to tip you all the way.  An Overlimit meter fills up with successful hits from your party, and, once full, you can activate it to string a large number of attacks in a row without pausing for a short while, though your TP will still be consumed.  It’s also possible later in the game to coordinate the Overlimit with party members for a limited time.

Artes come in a number of types, eight of which you can assign to quick thumbstick flips to make their access easier.  Certain artes, once learned enough, will lead you to learning new artes; some also are learned as you gain levels, after certain plot points, or after learning certain skills.  These artes can then be worked into attack combos that lead to you being able to unleash more devesting artes, including each character’s unique “Mystic Arte”.  Fortunately, if you are a terrible button masher like myself, gaining mastery of manipulating artes, attacks, and blocking is not needed to win the game, but only makes it easier to complete.  It does help, however, to know how artes can be learned, which is one of those constants that are part of the series but not well-spelled out in the general documentation.  Most artes also have a special direction of damage that they do (up, to the side, or down).  Pulling off enough artes attack on an enemy with the same damage will cause that enemy to become susceptible to Fatal Strikes; hit the enemy again and for a brief second a special indicator will flash.  While this is up, if you hit the right trigger and the direction indicated, you will immediately finish any non-boss character, while doing damage to boss ones.  Using Fatal Strikes can significantly up the rewards you get from battle.  It took me a while to get use to the Fatal Strike timing, more often then not calling up the in-battle menu instead of the right attack.  However, it does prove to be a useful tactic for later battles.

You aren’t alone in battle; up to 3 of your party will join you. A detailed strategy table can be used to highly customize their actions in battle, as well as having a number of different strategies saved for quick recall as the situation changes.  But, by default, the AI for the characters perform well, though you many need to turn off weaker artes for them as they learn their more powerful artes.  While you can’t switch out during battle, those that don’t participate are still going to be able to gain experience and other benefits from battle.  As each has an area that they can be better at than others (two, for example, are better against aerial enemies, while one is strong with attack magic), you’ll be able to get your party right for the areas you explore.  The only caveat is that they need to be active battle members to learn new artes, but this is not a significant problem to overcome if you swap out and around every so often.

The “twist” in this Tales game is a skill system which works very much like Final Fantasy IX’s abilities.  Each weapon and certain armor has a set of skills that can be learned by characters that can equip it.  You gain that skill with the weapon equiped, but if you use it long enough in battle to earn enough skill points, you’ll be able to learn that skill without equipping the item.  Thus, much of the game’s management is to continually make sure you collect weapons (including via synthesis) and keeping track when each character learns a skill so that you can swap in a new weapon as to get them to develop new skills.  Of course, the number of skills you can get is large, and you only have a limited number of skill points to allocate to these skills (these grow with level, but it is still a limit).  These skills come in a variety of areas; some increase your attributes, some give you new commands while in battle, others can help modify artes, and so on.  These can get difficult to manage, though if you fail to take steps to manage them on the other characters, they usually default to fair settings.  While the system items is not new, it is a good way of adding a bit of extra customizations to the characters.

The usual cooking aspect is here in the; you can learn recipes to restore party health and TP one time after a battle (you can do it either from the battle completion screen or the menus), providing you have the right ingredients.  The game also adds a synthesis element.  All enemies drop loot that can be combined at stores to make basic goods, armor, or help improve your weapons to advanced versions with new skills to be learned.  There’s also special items, some which are more decorative, but others that are quite useful in battle, such as increasing your Overlimit level.  Fortunately, you’re told what materials you need to make each and where they can be found, so that if you’re itching for a particular weapon or item and lack the resources, you’ll have a way of getting them.  That said, there are a lot of synthesized weapons that can be made in the game, and while the game helps to track which skills you’ve extracted weapons from, this only helps when you have your full party; as the game separates you from the others several times, you can’t see what skills they have learned while synthesizing and thus you’ll either have to wait till they rejoin or make your best guesses on what they lack.

From the standpoint of the overall game, it’s decently structured; the first third of the game, you’re pretty much fixed on a linear path with a few small side quests; in the second third you gain a ship and then shortly thereafter an airship, and your freedom to explore the world opens up a lot more sidequests.  Mind you, there is a period in the third third where you are stripped of your airship for a brief while, but the fact you get to taste what it feels like and knowing you’ll get back to it helps.   While this is typical of most JRPGs with the same world structure, the game feels like it opens up earlier than others.  That said, one of the more annoying parts of the game is that there are several points where your party of 7 will be missing one or more members due to the story line.  Normally, not a big problem, but one of these extended periods includes your primary healer; by this point you do have two other characters that can heal via artes, but their effects are not as strong as the healer, and this can make the boss fights during this period rather difficult.  Fortunately, you have the ability to alter the game difficulty before battle for less reward.  However, the number of times characters switched in and out did get a bit frustrating.

Value/Replayability: A-

The game clocked in for me at 45 hours - mostly playing the main story.  My only nit here was that when I was approaching the 40 hr mark with the characters preparing for the “final battle”, there was a twist in the plot that added another 5 hrs of play to it, making it feel like a sluggish ending.  As with most Tales games, throughout the game you earn Grade from battles, and thus when you start a new game after completing one, you have the opportunity to spend Grade prior to the game to unlock “cheats”, such as the ability to retain items, money, skills, artes, etc to the next playthrough, or to earn experience or Grade faster, and several other cheat-like type approaches.  Normally, this can make the next playthrough more interesting, but as the game is intergrated with the Xbox Live, there are now achievements to be earned, some which you get through the normal story line, but most requiring a couple playthroughs to earn.  Of course, as you get more Grade, your playthroughs can start to become incredibly shorter since your characters start more powerful and can wipe out monsters without too much problem.  This seems like a nice combination of the Tales approach and Achievements and thus gives some good replay incentive to the game.

Graphics: A

On the 360, Vesperia’s graphics shine nicely.  The game is given an anime cel-shading approach, similar to Crackdown’s comic book style, and they flow well on the console.  There’s still issues with characters mouths not lip-syncing as well with the text, but we’re getting closer to that.  The background environments are beautifully done, and there’s a grand sense of scale in many areas.  The battle screen is nicely compact to allow you to focus on the battle while still having key HUD elements in view.

Audio: B

Music and voice acting-wise, Vesperia is just fine: the music is of the same mood as past games, maybe not as sweeping as Final Fantasy but still a good element, and all the voice actors are pretty good for their roles (despite the poor lines they’re given).  Skits are finally fully voiced, which helps to make them more interesting to play through.  But, and this is where my grade comes from, a number of in-game conversations are not voiced fully.  Certainly interactions with NPCs are reasonable to not provide this, but there were several scenes, only between the main group of characters, where the previous scene was voiced, the scene following was voiced, but the middle scene, just as important to the plot as either its neighbors, was not.  This inconsistency was rather annoying.  I understand the need to avoid something like Oblivion where having every character voiced ends up making the game seem like only three voice actors are behind it, but Vesperia is nowhere close to this point, and could have used with more fully-voiced scenes.

Overall: A-

Fans of the Tales series will well appreciate the fact that Vesperia is a fine continuation of the series onto the next generation of consoles.  The core elements of the series are still there, with appreciable new gameplay elements to make it still a fresh approach, and the graphical boost from the new hardware helps a lot.  There is a bit of triteness with the stereotypical story and characters, but that’s an aspect to come to expect from the Tales games.  If you haven’t had the opportunity to try one of the games from this series and you lack an aversion to JRPGs, you will do yourself good to pick this title up.

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The final two parts of the six-part mini comic book saga detailing the events prior to Dead Space have been released. If you missed the first four parts, go check them out before watching these two videos.

In chapter five above, people are trying to flee the colony and get away from all of the Necromorphs. Unfortunately for them, it’s far too late. Hit the jump for the final Dead Space animated comic.

Dead Space comes out this coming Tuesday (I already got my copy! Nyah, nyah, nyah) so check out my preview, as well as Jim's preview, on the game to get ready for the gorefest. Be sure to visit No Known Survivors for more of the story to Dead Space while you're at it.  

de Blob, developed by Blue Tongue and distributed by THQ, is an interesting title - there’s similarities to Katamari Damacy throughout, but though it is not as quirky as that title, there’s still little touchs that remind me of why I enjoyed that game.  de Blob is a very good effort for a third party Wii game; it’s fun though can be tedious near the end, but does have a lot of collection items that will interest those types of games.  The presentation is very well done, particularly in the sound department.  It’s definitely the type of game that will appeal to those that like ones that go off the beaten path.

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Story: A-

The game is based on a world of color, Raydia, that has been taken over by Comrade Black and his INKT forces, draining all the color and forcing the Raydian residents into a monocolor servitude.  A small resistance force in Chroma City oppose the forces but are unable to combat them enough to take them down until Blob shows up with the ability to absorb the stolen paint from the INKT forces and use it against them to repaint the city, gradually freeing the Raydians and recoloring their world.  The story is primarily told from between-level pantomime cutscenes which are nicely done and are able to craft the story just by gestures alone.  You also gain insight on the city as you get instructions for missions, brief little snippets but shows some depth to what the developers saw.  It is a bit on the childish side, but that’s reasonable given that it’s rated for all players.

Gameplay: A-

de Blob may bear some passing resemblance to Katamari Damacy at first - the concept of rolling around, working your way to new areas may read like Katamari Damacy but as you start to play it, you realize it’s different… but then come around to the realization that more of the general design approaches used in Katamari Damacy are present here.  It’s not the quirk title that Katamari was, but it sure has the right touches to make it a good game.

You control Blob with expected controls schemes on the Wii; nunchuck to move around, waggle the Wiimote to jump, and a few other buttons. Control-wise the game is quick to get into.  Initially on each level, you face a black and white world.  By running into Paintbots, Blob will adsorb their color.  Once infused with paint, any surface that Blob touches becomes that color; this includes buildings, plants, the residents of the city, you name it.  However, the amount of paint you have is limited so you have to keep finding Paintbots to refill your paint to keep up the process.  Everything you paint is scored; you get more points for painting an object the first time, and if you can paint multiple objects without touching the ground, you can get a score multiplier.  When you get enough points, you have the ability to unlock a gate into the next section of the level, with each level having about 3 or 4 of these.

The paintbots come in the three primary colors: red, yellow and blue.  If Blob is already one of these colors and hits a different color, then he’ll become the mix (orange, green, and purple); if each primary color is hit once, then Blob becomes brown.  Hitting a primary color again after becoming one of these colors resets Blob back to the primary color.  If needed, you can run Blob into any water source to return him to paint-less state until he hits another bot.  Additionally, if Blob is hit by the INKT forces, he needs to be run through a water source to wash off the ink before all his paint is drained, otherwise you will have to restart the level.

Throughout this, you’re fighting a countdown meter, but you can gain time by a number of means.  Most commonly is to take up challenges issued by your fellow revolutionaries in art.  There are four types of challenges that are available; converting INKT buildings back into the colorful forms they were before, facing off against INKT forces, painting buildings to specific colors, and racing via checkpoints through the cities.  Each of these has a time limit and a difficulty rating, though most are pretty easy to complete.  By far, the most difficult ones that may require some planning are the building painting ones.  The early ones of these ask you to color buildings a specific color, which is not a problem, but as you get into the later stages, you’ll have to painting buildings multiple colors, often a mix of primary and secondary colors.  This can be made more difficult by having buildings that need to be painted one color only accessible by jumping from a building that has to be painted a different color.  Since you can’t avoiding painting when you touch a surface, these means you’ll need to backtrack to repaint the launch-point building after you’ve dealt with the more difficult one to access.  These challenges get trickier with game progression, but failure does not reset the world, but instead simply leaves what you have already filled in alone, making it easy to finish off multiple times.  You get the same reward for finishing it (another minute on the clock), but the wasted time of failing the first time can loom on that countdown timer.  In addition to challenges, additional time can be found scattered about the level or by both painting a complete city block and painting the citizens as they come out after you freed them.  I found myself never without a time crunch in the game, but this may be a problem for less experienced gamers.  The game is not hard, but neither a cake walk; there are some challenges that are tricky but challenges are mostly optional; the more difficult ones do feel rewarding to complete.

The INKT enemies come in several forms that require different tactics to approach, and can only by smooshed out with a set amount of paint.  You’ll also encounter INKT forces that can only be harmed when Blob is one specific color, thus making it difficult to progress if you haven’t gotten the hang of the color system yet.  The foes aren’t super intelligent, they are merely deterrents and reminders that you need to keep abreast of your paint levels and where you are in the level, and where the nearest source of water is.  The game does provide a nice one-touch interface that shows where the nearest water source is, as well as paint bots, challenge starting points, and objectives as part of a challenge so that you don’t get lost.  There is one final boss to the game, but it incorporates all the concepts learned previously in the levels, and is not very difficult.

Where the game becomes more Katamari-like is that it is set up for those that are completionists and perfectionists.  Each level does have a fixed number of items to paint, and one possible goal is to achieve that completion.  But even if you don’t go for that, you can aim to paint all of the billboards or plants, rescue all the citizens, collect all the paint styles on a level, and many more mini-objectives.  Of course, there’s also scoring aspects to consider, and using paint-combos to build up a good score can help there.  When you complete a level, besides opening the next level, you’ll gain access to bonus content as well as two additional timed challenges for that level.

There’s also a handful of multiplayer modes for 2 to 4 local players, with modes similar to various Tony Hawk multiplayer matches.  A paint match has you all vying to paint the area with your color before time is up; a king-of-the-hill type mode has only one player that can paint, the others trying to take that away from him before he paints up too much.  A third type is a race to paint specific targets first when they show up on the match.

There is, unfortunately, a small bug that can be reproduced that is annoying, in that you can get stuck between two objects while the game thinks you are falling; you’ll become unable to move at all and the only way out is to restart the level, which means up to a good 30 minutes could be wasted.  I’ve had this happen twice, and while it’s not overall detrimental to the experience, it is surprising to see it there.

Value/Replayability: A-

There are about 10 total levels in the game; if you sit down and pound through them, you could be done in 5 hours, but de Blob is not about rushing through but enjoying what they’ve put forth.  It does get a bit repetative, and I felt there was a point in diminishing returns on the number of levels, but it’s just barely past that point - it’s not too long to become too boring.  But like the original Katamari, its length is just off from what one would consider “perfect”. Of course, having all the completeness goals available does give incentive to replay the game.

Graphics: A

This is a very clean looking game for the Wii, the only nit being that the camera just sometimes doesn’t track fast enough in tight busy streets.  The way the game transitions color as you move from an area devoid of it to one bursting with color is nice, and there is a nice sense of wonder as you watch your efforts pay off.  There are some obvious short drawing distance pop-up effects that are clearly shown, but it really doesn’t ruin the game’s experience.  Even with the city in its default white palette, it’s easy to make out all the different features in the game.

Audio: A+

I love the approach this game took to the soundtrack.  When you start a level, you select a general ambiance mood music out of about 10 different choices (most unlock with level completion), nice little jazzy numbers that fit the game’s theme well.  As you start, the music is very subtle and laid back but as you color in the city, the music gains depth and becomes more pronounced.  Furthermore, the color that Blob has influences this, adding record-scratches when brown, orchestra hits when red, and the like.  When you paint objects, these even add to the music score, again based on color.  It is ultimately very pleasant to listen to and completely suits the mood of this game.  Voice work uses made up noises, but it sounds similar to how speech was done on Okami, in that real voice actors provides voices, then these were heavily computerized to mask the speech; they’re not as annoying as the high-pitched ones in Okami, and help with the personality of the characters.

Overall: A

de Blob is likely not going to be the next Katamari Damacy in terms of cult titles, but there are definitely elements that both games share in their appeal.  The game itself is well put together with great graphics and an outstanding soundtrack, and though the gameplay can get a bit long and tedious, it does allow you to take in as much or as little as you want, with lots of appeal to the completionist.  I can see this game gaining further titles in the series with some additional new features without changing the core gameplay completely.  It may be a renter if you’re curious, but if you do like unconventional games, de Blob fits that bill.

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It's not technically out until Monday, but World of Goo is so awesome that I just plain didn't want to wait to talk about it. I was initially exposed to it during GDC, and though I found it marginally interesting, it wasn't anywhere near the top of my mental "do want" list.

Now that I've actually played the full game, however, I see that it really should have been. 

It hits PC and WiiWare this Monday. You can visit the official site for details, or hit the jump to read my impressions on what, in my opinion, still manages to be one of the coolest indie games of the 2008 despite sharing hard drive space with both Braid and Castle Crashers.

• AFKIM v3.3.6: workaround release for name resolution, bitlbee connection issues
• AFKIM: Instant Messenger for PSP v3.3.5

So, you sit there and let the profanity fly (hopefully in your head) because there's nothing you can do, but wait until you get home. Those sexy Gamerpics, movies and additional levels just sit there and mock you saying, ‘I know you want me, but you’ll have to wait to queue me up for the download.’

Guess what? Not anymore.

Once the New Xbox Experience launches you will be able to browse Xbox LIVE Marketplace on your PC (even using text search) – and if you see something you like, you can add it to your queue and even purchase it right there and then. As soon as you get back home to your Xbox 360 and turn it on, the content will begin to download. Think about it – by the time you finish getting out of your shirt and tie, or skirt, or pajamas, or pink fuzzy bunny outfit, you will have a new Xbox LIVE Arcade game to play or a new TV show to watch.

Check out the screens of Xbox LIVE Marketplace on the Web, coming November 19 when the New Xbox Experience launches.

As always, click on any of the photos for a larger version or visit our flickr set.

Nice to see some people making an effort with Wii graphics, particularly in a game that’s going to be no more than 40Mb in size.

Yep, the above game is a WiiWare title - the zombies-on-a-plane slasher Last Flight. And those visuals are certainly reminiscent of No More Heroes, aren’t they?

With Capcom picking up the slack on the full-price front with the lush-looking Monster Hunter Tri (pic below), not to mention the swoon-worthy 2D of Vanillaware’s Muramasa: The Demon Blade, perhaps developers are finally getting to grips with the Wii hardware. It’d be nice if some of the second and third-generation Wii titles could at least better GameCube quality graphics, as there’s been little so far to genuinely wow Wii owners in that regard.

See, Wii devs? It can be done. Make us proud.

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As PES struggles to establish its current-gen credentials on rival consoles in the face of an ever-improving FIFA (this year’s being probably the best yet), the Wii game is clearly the best the franchise has to offer this generation.

Until now, that is. Because PES 2009 looks set to improve on the Wii original in numerous ways, one of which I particularly like the sound of.

So what do we get? Well, on top of the ‘point and click’ style system used last time around for guiding your current player and his team-mates into space and controlling passes much more accurately, Konami has introduced a more traditional control scheme for those struggling to get their heads round the new mechanics.

More significantly, you’ll now be able to better close down attacking players by holding down the Z button, while ’shake to shoot’ is out, replaced by a targeting system which allows you to position your shots much more accurately. There’s also a wider range of set-pieces, which is good news, while opponent AI is improved, making for a faster-paced game than before.

However, arguably the most exciting addition of the lot is the new co-operative play mode - which sees one player orchestrating tactics with  the new Wii control scheme with a second player adopting more traditional PES control with the remote on its side. Think of the opportunities - you’ll be able to guide your player with the remote while your team-mate runs into space, ready to receive an instant pass when you highlight him with your cursor. It’s highly unusual to have a co-operative mode with two entirely different control schemes and good players will really have to work as a team to play quality football.

It sounds like a terrific idea to me, and it seems that the game’s producer, Akiyoshi ‘Greyhound’ Chosogabe (why do they all need animal nicknames?) has overtaken Seabass as the master of Konami’s footy division.

Unfortunately we’ll have to wait longer for the Wii version than its HD counterparts, with the game not due for release until Spring. But if that’s the price we have to pay for a much better game, then it’ll be worth it.

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A delightful little documentary vid over on GameVideos sees Shigeru Miyamoto demonstrating Wii Music to a group of young Japanese schoolchildren. Predictably, they absolutely love it.

Joined by the man who does the voice of KK Slider in Animal Crossing, Miyamoto revels in showing off his creation to an appreciative audience (he’s probably thinking “finally!”) and it’s difficult not to smile when you see the kids waving the controllers around like crazy, making music that doesn’t actually sound entirely tuneless like the sort of thing you hear when young ‘uns are learning musical instruments. Then Miyamoto and chums perform a decent rendition of the Super Mario Bros. theme and have a laugh with the handbell-ringing minigame.

All good-natured fun, and a bit of a tonic if you’re feeling miserable about Nintendo’s Christmas line-up. Unless you’re a total Scrooge, you’ll surely be pleased that they’re at least making someone happy this Yuletide, eh?

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A vid up on the official Japanese site for Animal Crossing: Let’s Go To The City shows the new boutique owned by Gracie Grace, the giraffe fashionista who used to make you wash her car in the original game. It’s run by Labelle, a well to-do hedgehog who clearly cares not for the poverty of her seamstress sisters Mable and Sable, and who doesn’t balk at charging 80,000 bells for a bed which looks a bit like a cake.

Could raccoon mogul Tom Nook have a serious rival in the moneymaking stakes? Appears so. I guess we’ll all find out more when Animal Crossing arrives this November or December, depending on which part of the world you live in.

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