8-bit invasion of NYC

In case you’ve not seen it yet:
PIXELS by PATRICK JEAN [dailymotion.com]

An Excellent Diversion

Take a few minutes of your time today to enjoy this music video from, of all things, a game soundtrack [youtube.com]. There’s just so much life in these cute little robots. I love how this is put together, the zooms to the beat, the understated visual effects, the short depth of focus. If I ever shot a music video, it would likely be something similar to this.

Western vs. Eastern

This is a sobering look into the minds of Japanese game developers. [kotaku.com]

So. Broken.

Important Information Regarding Your Enjoyment of FFXIII

If you’re playing through Final Fantasy XIII [finalfantasy13game.com], make sure that you go into the Datalog option on the menu screen after every cutscene and look for new/changed entries about events, places, characters, and lore. Unlike other RPGs with some form of journal (Mass Effect [masseffect.bioware.com] immediately springs to mind), the Datalog in FFXIII is not optional if you want to understand/enjoy the story. Trying to follow everything and understand character’s motivations by ‘just’ playing the game leaves a lot of holes and WTF moments. As a result I wasn’t really enjoying it until I discovered that the datalog wasn’t just extraneous and/or redundant information.

I think this was a bad design decision, but that’s a discussion for another day. The point I want to make is that the game can be made a lot more enjoyable if you read the datalog after every cutscene. I wish someone had told me that this was the ‘right’ way to play the game earlier, so now I’m trying to spread the word as much as I can.

OnLive? More like OnDead.

Via Dubious Quality [dubiousquality.blogspot.com]:

“Details of the OnLive launch were released today, and I have a hard time understanding why anyone would still be interested.

What does it not get you access to? Games.”

Go read more there. Suffice to say I have no remaining interest in this product.

Blessing Your Ears, for Charity

If you’re still looking for a way to contribute to my favorite charity [childsplaycharity.org], head on over to 8 Bit Christmas [8bitchristmas.com]. If you were ever an NES/Famicom gamer, chances are good that you will love it, and the proceeds go to giving sick kids something to make their day a bit brighter.

Some Arguments are Worth Having

Charles J. Pratt finally takes the Modern Warfare 2 ‘No Russian’ argument and uses it to make a point I find interesting [gamedesignadvance.com].