Home Sick and Trying to Catch up on a Post or Two: Part One

Come on, you know you've played video games in bed while sick! Our generation was raised on video games and what better way to spend a sick day in bed than by blowing up Bowser or seriously leveling your party in that epic RPG. I have been struck with an unfortunate stomach bug and found myself pretty much just lying in bed playing video games for the past two days. This post isn't just about what I've been up to, though, it's about all the cool, shiny things I haven't had time to write about for the past two weeks!

One: E3!!! Did you watch it? Well if not here's the most important stuff of note:
E3 actually didn’t disappoint me this year. Yeah, I’m just as surprised as you are. Usually I watch and only get excited about one or two games, but this year I am SOOO pumped for several titles. The biggest of the to-be-released titles is of course Star Wars “Old Republic.”



Are you ready to become one with the force? Would you like to slice open a bounty like a true Mandalorian? Then you are going to be SOOOO pumped about Old Republic. In my opinion this will be the next great MMO, and they’re not going to screw up like they did with Galaxies. Not only will you have the complexity you always desired with class building, but you will also be pulled into a fully interactive environment complete with a ton of awesome-but-not-too-long cinema and ALL the characters are voiced by voice actors. This innovation makes the game the largest voice acting project in gaming to date. I have to say that Darci and I watched the E3 exclusive preview for this game and we were seriously awe-struck.
See the Trailer here: http://www.swtor.com/media/trailers/deceived-cinematic-trailer

Assassin’s Creed 2: It isn’t broken, and they’re not trying to “fix: it. They’re going to be adding things and not taking away from the original, because let’s face it, it was pretty good.

Left 4 Dead2: more zombies, more blood, and you’re in the south. This time you make your way from Savannah, Georgia to New Orleans and along the way the mechanic, football coach, gambler, etc, are a mis-matched team that are going to bust through as many zombies as possible (hopefully without dying….a lot…if you’re lucky). Melee weapons will be widely available so that you don’t have to machine gun your friends. There’s even a frying pan for you to whack zombies in the old fashioned kitchen-utilitarian way.



Hideo Kojima is bringing the Metal Gear Franchise to X Box which either makes you happy or furious, and he also announced a new title surrounding Raiden that MAY be a 360 exclusive depending on the money (meaning PS3 has to sell more consoles or it might lose the dual-rights to this game).



Lastly, Final Fantasy XIII. I was lucky enough to get a demo of this for my birthday that came with the Japanese version of Advent Children Complete. Yes, commence with the jealousy...this game won't be available in the US until AT LEAST January of 2010. The demo was admittedly quite expensive to pick up but Advent Children complete came with an English dub (and it's blue ray) so it's really worth it. Also, if you're wondering about the merit of picking up Advent Children Complete, DO IT because it's totally worth it. You get another 30 minutes of store that makes the movie make SOOO much more sense. This is especially true for the stories of the orphans.



As for Final Fantasy XIII, I am betting this is going to be one of the best Final Fantasy titles to come out in A LONG TIME. The story looks fantastic and seems to have some serious depth (sorry no spoilers I don't want to ruin it for you!!!). The characters are well-designed and for once there is a strong, female heroine supported by some seriously cool characters. My personal favorite so far has a baby chocobo living in his hair and that is just nine levels of adorable. The battle system is a sweet, real-time challenge that allows you to program up to three commands at a time in succession utilizing a time-meter (in bar form above your character's command menu). You can line up a command that takes three blocks of your time-meter or your line up three commands that each take up one segment of your meter. Really the combinations are endless and full of promise as you can create special moves by putting together the right combinations of attacks, techniques, or magic. I was seriously impressed by the gameplay AND the graphics which are intense levels of blu-ray awesome. The game is so impressive looking that I played the demo TWO times in two days (btw, the demo is TWO HOURS LONG). Yeah, that's serious, because I usually HATE demos because that's all they are...DEMOS.
Seriously folks. I'll be picking up the omega-utlra-shiny collectors editions of both Old Republic and FFXIII. This is the first time I've been super excited about not one, but TWO games E3 had to offer.
Amazingly Youtube is down for maintenance right now (probably because google video is flubbing it all up) so I can't link you to gameplay footage for FFXIII, but I assure you it's there.

In other news, I'll probably end up picking up the new Rayman Raving Rabbids because my soul has been sucked into their addictive wii-mote, party-game ridiculousness. It's a sad, sad addiction.

Signing out,
Lady Lara Jones