New Port Town Screen Shot

So I'm just about done with the outside of my port town. Here's two screens of it. hopefully it's matched up well. Tell me what you think! I was going for a tropical kind of look. I think it turned up well ^^. Thanks!

Lunar and My Game Update

So it's been a few days since I've played Lunar, but I intend to play an hour or so before bed tonight! Recently I've become obsessed with my game. Designing, customizing it, etc. I haven't done too much it the design department, but here's the workings of a port town. Check it out.

There's not much too it but I saw a custom map and have a vision in my head. When it's done it should look awesome! Anyways yeah been combing the web to find any and every way to make my game unique and fun. Found a few cool battle systems I intend to put in, apparently similar to FF7's materia or FF13's paradigm system? We'll see how that goes. 

Anyways sorry for the shorter post but I'll try to be updating more and hopefully have more to say about Lunar. Anyways hope you're all having a great day. Later gamers!

Preview: First Screenshots of My Game

Okay so this is the first town I've created as well as a few interiors and a nearby mountain (I think a went a little overboard). The game has no title yet but I'm working on it. Check these screens out and tell me what you think. All comments welcome. Later Gamers!

The Game's Starting Town: Breive(Working Title)

The Main Character's House

The Local Pub

The Town Church

The Town's Inn: 1st and 2nd floors

A Nearby Mountain...Obviously a bit bigger than the town haha!

RPG Maker: One of the best game concepts ever

Okay so technically it's not really a game, more like software to make a game. But none the less when I saw a preview for this game I went crazy! It was set to be released in America in 2000, while already released in Japan in 1997. Sure the graphics were nothing more than a bad SNES game, but hey it was MY bad SNES game. It was so fun just to play around with tile sets to make towns, characters, monsters, and special attacks. This franchise became so popular that it would eventually produce (to my knowledge) 5 more titles with the same name. Each one including upgrades form the previous game that included better graphics, battle system, and event editor. There was 1 on the PS1, 2 on the PS2, 2 on the PC, and apparently one for the PSP.

Now I will admit I've played and/or owned every single title with the exclusion of the PSP game. You know what the saddest thing about all of this? I never completed a single game I started! I think my problem was that my imagination was bigger than the effort I was willing to put into making these games. I did get pretty far in a few of them and wrote outlines of stories. However, I never finished them. It was either due to boredom, interest in other things, or just plain forgetting about it at some point. Although I may not have completed a game this "game" created countless hours of entertainment and great memories with friends. We still talk about small projects we started but never finished.

So with all this renewed interest in  RPGs lately I decided to give it another go. I will say that I have the basic story idea and how long I think it will last. I have a bad feeling that once again I'll get in over my head and never finish it. But here's hoping I'll do it and make a good one! I'm planing on making it with VX version for the PC. It seems to be the most crisp, least amount of lag, plus the easy ability to upload custom titles and characters. There is a cool forum I found that hosts plenty of resources if you want to add them to your game. People also post their game for you to demo and play. I've only just modeled the exterior of the starting town and the main character, so don't expect anything soon. But I will keep updates going here and let you know if and when it's finished.

Me and a friend decided to make a game for each other to play when I get home in August. I'm hoping mine will be around 5 hours, while he's saying his will be 30mins-2 hours. Who knows! Anyways I'm excited and if I can figure out how to take screen shots I'll show you some towns I make. Here is a link to the forum if you wanna know more about it and also a link to the official site if you want to try the 30 day trial and make a game of your own!:

RPG Maker VX Forum

RPG Maker VX Official Site

Until next time thanks for reading.  Later gamers!

Lunar Harmony Update

So I've finally been able to put some serious time into Lunar the last few days. It's been getting pretty exciting. The plot's moving at a good, pace, new characters are being introduced, and I'm loving every minute of it! Funny story....

So last night (2:30am)I'm playing a boss fight at a semi-critical point in the game it seems. So I wake up and the boss fight is complete and my PSP is still on. I was so confused. Did I beat the fight, because I don't remember doing that haha. The game has an AI feature, maybe it beat itself? I dunno either way I added an 6 or so hours to the game that never happened,lol.

So one thing I've noticed so far is that Lunar is better than Grandia, in pretty much every area. Now this is interesting because Lunar came out before Grandia on the Sega Saturn(although I'm playing the PSP remake) and Grandia came out on the PlayStation. You would think that it was the other way around that Grandia came first, they saw what needed to be fixed, and then made Lunar. I guess they may have been experimenting with Grandia. There are quite a few things different, but a lot of the same as well. Maybe they just couldn't top their original masterpiece? Not too sure.

One thing I've also noticed is there is quite a heavy emphasis on music in the story. Luna heals people with her magical songs, Alex plays the Ocarina, and another character in the game named Ghaleon plays what I assume is a Lute. Looking back when I first saw this game at a friends house I thought it was weird that there was a four disk special addition that you could buy with all kinds of extras. But there a lot of songs sung in the game that are memorable and I guess it would be nice to get a sound track with loads of extras.

I'm still enjoying everything about this game from the graphics, hand drawn style animated cut scenes, the story, and the battle system. I will say that I really get sick of fighting enemies in dungeons. It's fun to kill things for a bit, the after awhile it gets tedious because if you back track the enemies respawn. The enemies are actually seen on the map and you run into them to initiate a battle. I wouldn't mind it for a bit, but it makes the dungeons more of a chore at times and I'm just begging to get to whatever is at the end. 

Im anxious to see what happens next in the story because there is so many questions to be answered! I'd give the plot away but I don't wanna ruin it for those who haven't played it. Thanks for reading. Later gamers!

Final Fantasy 7:Either Remake it or Don't!

So I want to start off by saying thanks to Shana for reading the blog and RSSing it! Good to know that I'm writing something worth while! It's all for fun but you know!

So there have been rumors flying around for years that Final Fantasy 7 might be remade on the PlayStation 3. I blame all this hype and ridiculousness on two parties: 1.) Sony. Yeah that's right I'm giving a lot of blame to Sony, why? Well it's for a very simple reason...they could have chosen any other game to show off the graphics. A new racing game coming out, an FPS anything but a graphic face lift for arguably the most popular title Sony has released yet. I know they were thinking "Hey why not make a tech demo for our new system with our most popular game?" But they had to know there would be an outcry for a remake. It looked so good and rabid fan boys went crazy after seeing an updated version of the opening scene of one of the most beloved games ever. And more of the blame gets thrown on to to my second party: EGM(Electronic Gaming Monthly).

They basically took this PS3 tech demo and automatically assumed it was a trailer for a remake even though it clearly said on the video "Technical demo for the PlayStation 3". They couldn't rush to release a comment in their May 2006 issue fast enough that said it was a remake. I'm sure at this point they feel like idiots, but this mistake caused so much hype it was unreal. People were all excited, contemplating what new features would be part of the game, etc.And then to further the hype even more, what did Square Enix do? They released a slew of Final Fantasy 7 spin-offs that included: Before Crisis(A Mobile Phone Game), Dirge of Cerberus(A 3rd Person shooter staring FF7's Vincent Valentine), Crisis Core(An action RPG for the PSP staring Zach Fair from FF7), Last Order: Final Fantasy VII(A short anime-style film retelling the events of Zach and Cloud before the game FF7), and lastly Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children(A feature length film that takes place 2 years after the events of the game.)

So the hype surrounding this game was astronomical. With all these spin-offs of the game, the tech demo, and the hype building surely there would be some sort of announcement of a remake right? No. Unless the developers are living under a rock, which to be fair they might, they have to know that fans want a remake and would be down right ignorant to think that not only would it sell well but also would increase PS3 hardware sales as well. Hell, I know I'd be the first to go out and buy a PS3 if this game ever came to fruition. So why don't they cut the bull crap and make the damn game? Well FF7 Director Yoshinori Kitase said, "We'd have to hire 300 people and it would take about 5 years." Fair enough...but I think that investment would be worth it. Final Fantasy 7 is the franchises top selling game (nearly 10 Mil. units sold) and has a large fan following. Wanna know what makes the hype even worse? Square Enix refuses to deny nor confirm the remake.

 I realize maybe they are thinking about it and that there are many factors involved in remaking this game, but throw us a bone, anything! As recently as March 22 of this year Square Enix continues to play with the idea and CEO Yoichi Wada has said,
"Right now we don't have a clear direction, but many fans have requested we remake Final Fantasy VII...We're going to explore the possibility - whether or not we're going to do it, if we're going to do it, and the platform." 

The Platform? Oh God I hope he's referring to the PS4,Im sure it'll come someday, and not the PSP. Also, last month Final Fantasy XIII producer Yoshinori Kitase said: 

"If it were possible that we had all the right facilities and the right environment to be able to make and prepare a Final Fantasy VII remake within a year, we'd very much like a go at it!"


Thanks for yankin' our chains SE...so either until this game gets made or the world ends fans will continue to demand a remake. It's personally my favorite RPG and game of all time. I haven't made it through all the RPGs yet so that may change. But for now it stands as the biggest title demanding a remake,and a definitive response from the RPG juggernaut would be nice too :). Until then I'll leave with you with a fan made interpretation of what the FF7 remake's intro and start menu might look like. Later gamers!

Moved blog, Lunar Update, and FF7 Music Video

Hey everyone, and by everyone I mean Nick and Bryan, I moved the blog for a few reasons. 1.) The blog.com interface was super slow and glitchy, as Bryan mentioned before, and 2.) since Blogger is affiliated with Google I can put ads on the blog! Not that I'll be rolling the dough, but one can dream!

So Lunar Update! I'm only 5 hours or into the game but I'm freakin' loving it! It's weird considering the original Lunar came out after Grandia, but it feels like it fixed and improved upon everything that made Gradia great. The graphics, are charming, the music is addicting, the battles are fun, and every part of the story seems like its there for a reason rather than just extended the game pointlessly.

Overall I'm really enjoying it and recommend it to ANYONE who has a PSP or loves RPGs. I'm not too sure what the original game is like because I've never played it, but with the new updates I'm sure the old fans will still love it along with the new ones.

That's about it for Lunar for now, I'll have to post more when the time comes. Anyways I just wanted to leave you with the awesome video I found on youtube. It's an acoustic remix of the classic FF7 Theme. I hope you enjoy it and let me know what you think. Later gamers!

Grandia: A cool little adventure game.

So recently I completed the Game Arts PS1 classic Grandia. I didn't really know much about the game before starting it. I know that it was for the PS1 and I bought it for my friend Bryan for his 14th(?) birthday. It was on the PlayStation network for only $5.99. I thought heck why not! I'm playing through 2 RPGs I've beaten before (FF7,8) so why not try something new that has some popularity? For a game that boasts having "Over 80 hours of game play" I figured I would at least get my money's worth out of it!

So as soon as started the game the graphics and overall way it played was very reminiscent of Xeno Gears. The towns and backgrounds were designed decently well, but the characters themselves had this weird sprite feel to it that wasn't quite super Nintendo and not quite up to what the PS1 could do. Also the way you way you rotate the camera around with shoulder buttons in towns and dungeons. It has its own charm, doesn't take anything away from the game, and is still playable considering I still play a game like Final Fantasy Tactics. It's weird to pinpoint what era this game is supposed to take place in. It has a semi-modern feel to it with the way the towns are designed and the presence of airships and tanks. However, you spend most of the game in forests, villages, and rural type towns. Anyways I don't want to sit here and review the game per say, but rather talk about my experience as I played through the game and the impression it left on me. 

So as I start to go through the beginning stages of the game I'm loving for one big reason: the game isn't taking itself too seriously. It isn't trying to be the super over the top epic. It's just about a boy who wants to go on adventures and one day decides to live out his dream. I can also relate to the characters and story more this way. There are a lot of scenes where your having dialogue with the town bully, your younger friend who looks up to you, and your mom who hassles you about being late for dinner. None of this is done with cliche dialogue, but done tastefully and with voice acting so you can really feel the emotion behind the dialogue.

 

It feels like a coming of age story in a way. This kid Justin is a reckless energetic boy who experiences everything from leaving home, love, loss, growing up, standing up for what you believe, amongst many other areas you grow as a person in your life. I loved every second of this story and was sad when it was finished, for more reasons than one.


This is exactly the type of game that I miss and that isn't made these days. Sure the graphics are nothing to call home about, but the voice acting is good and gets you into the story more, the animated cut scenes are cool and add to the overall experience, but more than anything it's an engaging and relate-able story. It's easy to follow, you want to keep going to see what happens next, and is an overall satisfying experience. It brought me back to that golden age of RPGs and is basically the inspiration for this blog. Let's keep it real though; it ain't no Final Fantasy, but it is an awesome game overall and is well worth checking out. 

Games these days aren't made like this for one reason or another. There seems to be a bigger emphasis on innovation; whether it's the battle system, the graphics, or the level up system. I think developers sometimes forget that RPGs are story driven. Way back in the day, RPGs were text based and relied heavily on the story. Now a days the rely too much on graphics while the story takes a back seat. I think the PS1 RPG days were the perfect transition period when stories were still the focal point and the graphics complemented the story well with out over-shadowing it.


I may or may not do a video retrospective/ review on this game so you can get a better feel for what I'm talking about. I'll just wrap this up by saying that it was fun to play an old style RPG that I've never played before and still find it entertaining. Sometimes games like these don't age well and going back to play them can be difficult (especially when the graphics aren't up to par). However, there was nothing that I would really change about this game. For $5.99 on the PSN it's TOTALLY worth the price and your time. Go check it out if you haven't already. 

Right now I'm in the middle of Lunar Silver Star Story Harmony (The PSP Remake) and only being a few hours in I'm falling in love with it. The music, characters, graphics, just everything! It's made by the same company that made Grandia, Game Arts, so I'm expecting a similar experience! Thanks for reading this, if anyone's actually reading it haha, and keep playing! Later gamers.

This post was originally going post this on the intro blog, but it got long so here is a longer opinion based blog about why I started this...

See I haven't bought a "Next Gen" console because frankly there's no game that seems worth buying any system for. I'm expected to pay $600+ just because there's a new gaming system? I literally have bought 4 PS2's in my lifetime (sad I know :P). One when it was BIG and new, one slim one, one to replace the broken slim one, and then a final brand new slim one from the store to replace them all.

I would rather do that then buy a new expensive system, a new library of games, and also make some games obsolete (PS2 games aren't backwards compatible on the PS3).

So if I'm not playing new games what am I playing? Old PS1 RPG's, mostly. Sure I'll pick up a Resident Evil or Madden now and again but nothing has captured my imagination or created so many fond memories as RPG's have. In my opinion games are the best median to tell a story. Not only is there a visual aspect to where you can see what's happening, a text aspect to a certain extent, but the biggest feature is the immersion aspect. What other median of story telling allows you to literally control the story and be the characters?

That being said I think that the PS1 has the best RPG's of any console or PC gaming system. It was that period where 3-D was new and improved the graphics, but not quite at the point where graphics superseded the story. The story was always the main focus and the stories in these games are better than most books I've read or movies I've seen.

But ever since then this genre has taken a downturn I feel. This is no clearer than the PS2 abomination know as Final Fantasy 10, See Final Fantasy revolutionized the RPG genre as a whole and made it more mainstream. Although this is up for debate, Square Enix put out 3 of the best RPGs of the PS1: Final Fantasy 7, 8, and 9. With the improved graphics of the PS2 there was no doubt that Final Fantasy 10 was going to blow our damn minds! The graphics were amazing and it had a lot of hype. Too bad all that hype fell flat on its face...

See the biggest problem with Final Fantasy 10 was that the way you traveled around the world was extremely linear in comparison to the recent games. There wasn't really a "world map" or any vehicles to a certain extent. It also felt very cooker cutter. Walk around, puzzle, boss fight, cut scene. Rise and repeat. I know the old games did that too, but with this one it was SO OBVIOUS! It was just boring and to be honest I just couldn't finish it and I haven't to this day.

Okay so maybe 10 was just an experiment and we should give the series another shot right? Well here comes Final Fantasy 11 an MMORPG. What a disappointment! We had to wait even longer for another game. Then came Final Fantasy 12. Honestly this might have been even more hyped than 10, but for different reasons. See this was supposed to take place in the world of Ivalice, the world in the legendary game Final Fantasy Tactics. The teasers and screen shots all looked promising and amazing. But again it just plain failed...The characters were boring, the leveling up system was weird, it was boring, and my personal biggest disappointment was no Nobuo Uematsu (the music composer for all the previous games)! So all the charm was out. The only interesting character was Balthier but he didn't have nearly the game time he should have.

So this is about the point I gave up on any new console RPGs being good. I gave it the old college try but they just didn't entertain me and were more of a chore than anything. I played a few random games here and there like Tales of the Abyss and Kingdom Hearts (which is actually pretty amazing). But nothing grabbed me like the games of old...Final Fantasy 7...Chrono Cross...Xeno Gears...Tales of Destiny. I was pretty much convinced that good RPGs were dead.

But then the nail in the freakin' coffin came only as of late. Now I much preface this by saying that I haven't even played one second of this game, but only heard resounding negative reviews from it, outside of possibly being the best looking game of all time. Final Fantasy 13...the game that killed RPGs? We'll see. The complaints seem to go something like this 1: LINEARITY. The game seems to be a flurry of straight corridors with almost no towns. This takes out the exploration aspect of the game that made so many older games fun. 2:Only being able to control one character in battle. People are kind of on the fence with this one. 3: The data log. Why do you need a data log of definitions and explanations to tell a story? I shouldn't have to read cliff notes before reading a story. 4: It feels more like an interactive movie than game. There seems to be an overwhelming amount of cutscenes with a limited amount of puzzles which leads people to think this game would be a better movie than game.

So with all the recent flops with RPGs and the advent of the PS1 classics on the Playstation Network I've been getting into old RPGs that I never played and have been playing them on my PSP. This has inspired me to also start a collection of every PS1 RPG. This will be an expensive hobby but it's like having a library of books. RPGs are just another median to tell a good story. And PS1 RPGs seem to be the best. Currently I own these titles: Final Fantasty 7, Tactics, Xeno Gears, Chrono Cross, Legend of Dragoon, and Harvest Moon. My collection is small but it'll grow fast. I recently also beat Grandia and am in the middle of playing the remake of Lunar: Silver Star Story.

So look forward to a blog about Grandia soon and thanks for checking out the blog. Later gamers!

I started a gaming blog...why?

Welcome gamers, friends, or random people who are here to make fun of my nerdiness...mostly people I'm sure to make fun of my nerdiness =).

Anyways I decided to make a blog recently, why may you ask? Allow me to explain...

I think in general people have a tendency to compare things from their childhood to recent times. Nothing can compare to what was great in our childhood right? Was there a better show than Family Matter Is? They just don't make characters like Urkel anymore do they?

Well I'm doing the same thing only with games...sort of.In this blog I'll be talking about PS1 games, mostly RPGs, why they're better than most other library of RPGs, my thoughts as play through all these games, and my personal journey to collect every PS1 RPG ever made. What a long Road Ahead...