Developed by Hit Maker and getting published by Nippon Ichi Software, A Witch's Tale is a departure from most of Nippon Ichi titles in that it's not as RPG-centric as you'd think; it's unique in its style similar to how Atlus' Knights in the Nightmare had its own tweaks to an otherwise saturated DS genre. The game has you drawing runic symbols with the stylus to attack enemies and the visual style is reminiscent of Tim Burton films, or if you're looking for a more current example, something like Coraline or 9. Just my thought process, anyway. It may or may not seem that way to you. The game is slated for a US release this Fall. Look forward to it!

Sony just announced today that the sales of Final fantasy VII on the PSN has hit the 100k mark in just two short weeks, something many full retail games can't even accomplish. That means Sony and Square-Enix have just earned what amounts to be 1 million dollars in free revenue. Hrrm, maybe releasing incredibly popular PS1 titles on the PSN does make sense... shame it took Sony two and a half years to figure that bit out.

Regardless, it's great to see PS1 classics getting good traction on the PSN in this day and age -- crazy how a 12-year-old game can still be that popular. The really intriguing thing in my opinion, would be to find out how many people out there are now playing it for the first time ever. I wasted about 100 hours of my youth obsessively playing FFVII when it first came out, so I'm passing on downloading it -- but the idea of a younger person playing one of the biggest classics of yesteryear for the first time is a tantalizing and delicious possibility.

While surfing through Koei's FTP site, I saw they had uploaded a bunch of Mana Khemia 2 material. Koei generally publishes Nippon Ichi titles in Europe, for those who weren't aware, but in the US NISA will publish this Gust game around September (maybe sooner, maybe later... release dates are so up in the air anymore). We've uploaded the images here in a fun gallery for you to peruse. US and Europe can look forward to this game later this year. I like the artwork, and the screenshots are the typical fluffy Gust fare, but really, I think I like the designs for Lily, Raze, and Whim better in Cross Edge. I may change my tune, though!

Gust's latest (and last) PS2 RPG, Mana Khemia 2, coming to the US and Europe 4th quarter 2009

I was doing my usual routine of checking out reviews for games I'm interested in when I came across one of my favorite gaming sites, IGN, and their review for Class of Heroes. What they gave the game isn't important because it's just a measure of the level of enjoyment the "common man" will find in the game. What I did have a problem with, though, is that the review screamed "I barely played this game and quickly typed a review before deadline". I used to work on ps3fanboy and pspfanboy; we got a lot of games to review and often times, had to play games we didn't care about to review. Sometimes there were too many and we skipped on reviewing some - because if we couldn't give it the time it deserved, we wouldn't pretend we could evaluate the game as a whole.

Now, this IGN review fails to go into the gameplay mechanics adequately, sure, and most complaints raised are things you could see within ten minutes of starting the game, but one thing caught my attention more than that. In the review, they state, "...why do you need to pay to rest at the Dormitory? You can recharge your MP for free but recovering HP costs a lot of money. But if you can just use spells to recover HP and then rejuvenate your MP at the dorms, what's the point of charging that gold? The developers just added an extra (and very annoying) step to recovering from battle that I just can't wrap my head around." This is a valid complaint, but it puts a HUGE time stamp on how long the game was played by the reviewer. See, when you leave the school you start in, places DO charge you to recover your MP.

Using a cushion phrase like "in the dorms" several times in the review is writing technique usually used to throw people off and think you meant "only in the dorms" when, between the lines, it was placed there because they never got further than that. How long did it take to get to inns that charge to heal MP, rendering this gripe useless? About two hours. While we'll never know the truth, it seems pretty safe to say that this review is based off of around 2 hours of gameplay in an 80+ hour game.

This isn't just limited to IGN. Tons of gaming sites (the ones I worked for previously included) fail to give games ample playtime before slapping a score on them that, for better or for worse, people will take to heart and choose to buy, rent, or avoid a game. I think this needs to change; this is why our review process at Infinite-Bits seems a little slower than most. We play the games either to completion or until we get a solid grasp of everything the game has to offer. In an ideal world, all sites would follow this system - the gaming magazines of yesteryear used to, as they had a whole month between issues for their staff to check out the upcoming releases. Not 24 hours.

*edit - I added a sentence to strengthen the presented viewpoint. The addition is italicized for ease of... spotting. I won't sneak an edit in there!