Hammerin' Hero Hands-On

We smash the living daylights out of pretty much anything that moves in this wacky side-scroller.

As a title for a game in which you can unlock a variety of new occupations, Hammerin' Hero isn't entirely accurate. Yes, you'll begin this action-heavy side-scroller as a hammer-wielding carpenter on a quest to literally smash corporate greed, but the game's main draw is that you'll soon be crushing evil industrialists under such guises as a sushi chef, a professional baseball player, and a deep-sea diver. If that all sounds a little strange, it's because Hammerin' Hero is precisely that. But fear not: We've been spending some time with Hammerin' Hero in an effort to clear things up a bit before this PSP game's April 7 release.

The eccentric storyline goes like this: You play as a carpenter named Gen, a young man whose trade allows him to craft buildings with a ludicrously huge hammer. But when an evil corporation led by a man named Kuromoku comes rolling into town threatening to smash Gen's residential neighborhood in order to build more profitable structures, Gen takes justice into his own hands--by running and jumping from left to right smashing every bad guy he can. The Japanese neighborhoods that make up the game's environments are filled with all manner of evil construction workers, evil bulldozers, evil corporate helicopters, and so on. And your job is to smash them using a simple control scheme that allows you to jump, light attack, and heavy attack.
Every few levels, you'll unlock a new occupation that lets you do that job in a slightly different way. As a deep-sea diver, you can take out enemies from afar using an anchor on a chain, for example, while a DJ can toss records at people. More up-close-and-personal options include taking a full home-run swing with a baseball bat as a ballplayer or slapping enemies with a giant fish as a sushi chef. You commit to one occupation before the level starts, but you can visit your girlfriend and have her make you a magical bento box that gives you the ability to transform into another occupation midlevel, but only if you've picked up the necessary ingredients (for example, a tuna or a salmon) throughout previous levels.
The action in Hammerin' Hero is quick and challenging. The levels are short but are packed with a number of bosses for you to take on. And the environments are delightfully absurd, too. They start out ordinary enough, with levels taking place in Japanese residential neighborhoods and amusement parks, but eventually you'll get to a place like a live baseball game that requires you to fight your way through a demonic pitching machine and a spike-covered catcher who shoots missiles from his chest. Making things even more hectic is that you'll almost always see frantic civilians attempting to run from harm's way. The overall look of the game is chaotic, quirky, and thoroughly Japanese.
Hammerin' Hero is being brought to North America by Atlus. It may not fall into the strategic role-playing genre most people know the publisher for, but it's every bit as eccentric as their previous work. You can expect to see Hammerin' Hero released for the PSP on April 7.

By Shaun McInnis, GameSpot

New York Comic-Con: Unbound Saga First Impressions

Dark Horse Comics gave us a first look at its upcoming PSP game, Unbound Saga a sidescrolling beat 'em up developed by Vogster Entertainment. The game takes the tried and true beat 'em gameplay and marries them to a self referential story rooted in comics. We got a look at a work in progress version of the game in the Dark Horse booth and were impressed by the game's Comix Zone flavor.You'll play as Rick Ajax, a self aware comic character who's resigned himself to a life of dealing with whatever "The Maker" throws at him. Rick's unique outlook on his life gets him branded crazy by those around him which prompts him to set out and confront "The Maker". The trip takes him through Toxopolis, a crime filled run down city that looks like it sounds. Along the way he teams up with Lori Machete, an equally surly lady who's big on kicking and stabbing, that you'll eventually be able to play as well.

The game may sound a little high concept but the bottom line is Unbound Saga is basically the closest we've ever seen to a Comix Zone update. You'll fight your way through levels broken up into comic panel stages. As you clear out enemies you'll advance to the next panel by jumping up or down. The action is complicated by The Maker, whose hand you see popping up onscreen and drawing in new enemies. The combat system lets you mix punches, kicks, throws, and grabs into a painful beat down for your enemies. You'll also be able to pick up a fair amount of the objects in the level and use them to beat your enemies senseless. The beat downs pay off as downed enemies give up health power ups and experience points you can use to upgrade Rick and Lori's special moves. The basic control is pretty solid although not as responsive as we'd like it to be. You can move up, down, left and right in the fighting plane which is useful, but not as fast as we'd like. Moving forward and backward is also a little sluggish, which makes double tapping forward to run a little tricky. Running at enemies is useful since you can lead into flying kicks and punches. The comic theme is helped along by artwork from comic artist Cliff Richards who supplies the animated cutscene images that set up the story. While the hand drawn art looks sharp in the cutscenes, Vogster is using 3D graphics for the game. Rick and Lori look big on the PSP screen and show a lot of detail. The environments are really detailed as well and have a nice distressed look to them. The enemies have all that detail plus the added flourish of dissolving into a flurry of paper when they're smacked down. We have to say we liked Unbound Saga quite a bit. The Comix Zone feel definitely won us over. The combat system is a little simplistic but there's a good amount of variety to the combos and how differently Rick and Lori play. There's also a survival mode to add some replayablility to the whole package too. From the look of things so far Unbound Saga should be a welcome addition to the PSP library this year. The game's price is likely to be more welcome as, given that it's going to a PSN only release with no physical disc, Dark Horse should be able to keep the price pretty reasonable.

Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce Hands-On

We team up and face new multiplayer challenges in Koei's upcoming Dynasty Warriors game.

A series that sticks to what it knows best, Dynasty Warriors has games on virtually every platform and continues to provide a venue for those who enjoy epic battles based loosely on the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Koei does take a step in a new direction with its latest, Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce, a PlayStation Portable game that lets you play with up to three friends via ad hoc to take on a variety of strategic but brief missions and challenges. This marks the first time that you can play a Dynasty Warriors game with a friend on the PSP instead of fighting legions of enemies by yourself. We were able to play an early demo of the game at the Tokyo Game Show, but Koei stopped by to give us another build to check out before the Japanese release in February.

Instead of the massive, large-scale battles that you are used to, the game is focused more on tactics and playing together as a team. We didn't learn too much about the story, but we know that there will be three storylines based on each of the Three Kingdoms. There will be 30 characters taken from the series that you can play as, even though our demo let us play only as Zhao Yun, Xiahou Dun, and Sun Shang Xiang. Instead of button-mashing mindlessly through the mission, you need to pay attention to your friends and find the best way to approach each challenge. In the two missions we've played, the Battle at Hu Lao Gate and Yellow Turban Rebellions, you take on well-protected strongholds filled with enemies, cannons, and other bothersome obstacles that need to be destroyed.
You will still fight against what seems like an endless wave of enemies, but you'll also have to take down challenging bosses in each of these missions to progress and build up your character. The strategy involves how you approach the final portion. In our experience, we had to have at least one or two people take out turrets and cannons so that we weren't constantly bombarded from all directions. You're also on a timer, which will put some pressure on you to figure out what the best approach is.
Even though each character has his or her weapon specialty, you can choose to wield any weapon that you like in the game and switch between your primary and secondary weapon. As you level, so will your village, which acts as a hub where you can purchase items, weapons, and accessories. You can customize your weapon by using orbs, which will beef up your current weapon of choice with an element. Another way to improve your character is to gather chi, which can improve your fighting skills and let you perform special moves, such as super jumps and teleportation.
Using the X button, you can hover in the air to attack enemies, and the square and triangle buttons are used for normal and strong attacks. The L button is used to lock on to enemies, and the R button lets you dash. It's unfortunate that you have no control over the camera, though the L button does reset the view. As you're fighting, you're building up a fury gauge, rather than a Musou gauge, at the bottom left corner of the screen. Once it's full, you can hit the triangle and circle buttons at the same time to enter into a fury mode, in which your character becomes stronger for a limited period or time. Or you can use up your entire gauge and hit the triangle and circle buttons again to do a more devastating attack, which came in handy when we were destroying surrounding cannons.

As much fun as it is to button-mash your way through a hoard of well-dressed foes, Strikeforce heads in a more interesting direction by letting you play cooperatively and in a more strategic manner. Although it looks and sounds similar to previous games, it's worth looking into if you have friends with PSPs. We were told that there will be downloadable content available as well, including new items and additional quests. Stay tuned for more Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce updates as they become available. The game is set to be released in early Q2 in North America.

By Sophia Tong, GameSpot

Dissidia: Final Fantasy Hands-On

Who wins in a fist fight between Final Fantasy legends?

TOKYO--It's been a little over a year since Square Enix announced its all-star game featuring the heroes and villains of the Final Fantasy universe. While we've only seem CG trailers and very few in-game scenes up until now, we were finally able to get our hands on the game at Square Enix's DK Sigma 3713 Event.
To recap what's known so far, Dissidia is an all-star brawl game where you get to fight one-on-one with characters from the Final Fantasy series. The character designs are by Tetsuya Nomura who's been working on the series since FFVII, but the game includes many older characters starting from the first installment back in 1987. Though the complete roster hasn't been announced yet, it seems so far that the developers are releasing characters from almost every game. Here's a quick list of all the characters we could confirm at Square Enix's event:


FFI: Warrior of Light, Garland
FFII: Firion, The Emperor
FFIII: Onion Knight, Cloud of Darkness
FFVI: Kefka
FFVII: Cloud, Sephiroth
FFVIII: Squall, Ultimecia
FFIX: Zidane, Kuja
FFX: Tidus, Jecht


With Final Fantasy being Square Enix's most famous franchise, the developers are obviously paying a lot of attention to giving an authentic feel to the characters. In the new trailer, Squall and Sephiroth were quite calm even in battle, whereas Tidus seemed pretty heated up when he met his father Jecht for battle. Kefka was shown for the first time, and he's kept his infamous twisted personality from FFVI. While the Cloud of Darkness preferred to kill off her adversaries on the spot, Kefka stopped her so he could have "fun" with them.
The demo that we played allowed us to pick from four characters: Warrior of Light, Tidus, Onion Knight, and Garland. As you'd expect, each of them fights in different styles. For instance, Tidus from FFX is a well-rounded fighter who uses his sword and also fights with blitzballs; in fact, one of his moves is the Jecht shot. Garland, an armored antagonist from FFI, is bigger and more of a heavy-weighted fighter who's slow but powerful. The Onion Knight from FFIII may look dinky compared to the other fighters, but looks can be deceiving. Aside of being able to use magic, his sword attack hits multiple times in a brief second, very much like it did in FFIII. The game only uses two buttons for attacking, which we'll explain later, but you can perform different kinds of attacks by holding onto a direction when you press an attack button. The attacks also change depending on whether you're in the air or on the ground. We're told that you can gain new moves as you progress through the game and power up.
As is usual for a Square Enix game, you can grow your characters and make them stronger. Though the details weren't explained at today's sessions, we did see that our character would level up after battles and also gain ability points. We also saw that we earned a knife after beating one of the characters with Tidus, though we couldn't confirm if it was actually an equitable item because the menus were disabled.
Dissidia is essentially a head-to-head fighting game, but it's quite different from the traditional type, such as Tekken or Virtua Fighter. A better comparison would be Capcom's Power Stone; especially the way that you're constantly moving around in a 3D battlefield. However, the map is bigger and the characters are much more versatile when it comes to moving around. In fact, the way that you can float while in midair melee combat or run on walls and perform extremely high jumps or air dashes, feels like you're controlling the superhuman-like Cloud from the FFVII:AC movie.
Dissidia's battle system is pretty simple, albeit a bit unique. Each player has a life bar, and there's a number displayed on top of the bar called brave points that signify the player's attacking power. Similar to most fighting games, you win when you deplete all of your opponent's life. There are two buttons you can use for attacking, and they're both essential for winning. The square button (called the HP attack) does damage to your opponent's life and is based on your number of brave points. The circle button (called the subattack) does damage to your opponent's brave points and allows you to acquire your opponent's points.
The key to winning in Dissidia is to keep hitting your opponent with the circle button because that'll power you up and make your opponent's attacks weaker at the same time. What's more, there's a big bonus if you happen to drain all of your opponent's brave points. The game goes into "brave break" time, which is where your opponent's brave points don't recover for a short while. During the brave break, you get a massive bonus of additional brave points, which allows you to strike your opponent with a powerful hit.
When we played the demo, we were constantly trading brave points with our opponent in a seesaw fashion using the circle button. Once we got the upper hand, we'd attack with the square button to inflict damage. The battle was basically a repeat of that process because your brave points reset to default once you get a clean hit on your opponent with the square button (you don't lose any if you miss). However, the game is more than just simple button smashing. Some moves require precise timing to pull off, and you also have a number of methods to dodge them, such as guarding or quick evade.
Attacking your opponent also raises a meter on the side of the life bar called the EX gauge. While the EX gauge only builds up gradually when you attack, it can be accumulated faster by collecting items called the EX force, or even better, a huge item called the EX core that sometimes appears onscreen. When the EX gauge maxes, you can go into EX mode by pressing the R and square button together, which will make you more powerful. With the Onion Warrior, for instance, you can turn into a ninja, which powers up your sword attacks, or a sage, which makes your magic attacks more powerful. In the case of Garland, he'll become tougher and won't get knocked back by attacks while he's transformed.

What's more, if you make a clean hit with the square button while in EX mode, you can follow up with another move called the EX burst by pressing the square button again. The camera zooms in on your character, and you can execute a devastating special attack. In the case of Tidus (who didn't seem to change his looks during his transformation), his EX burst was an overdrive attack from FFX. Similar to FFX, the camera zoomed in on him and a timing meter was displayed onscreen, requiring a precise button input to have the move succeed.
The demo only featured about two stages, but we saw that they're going to be themed after the FF titles. One was a beautiful crystal-like plane with streaks of light flowing all around, which was somewhat reminiscent of the crystal rooms in FFIII. The streaks of light could be used for gliding from one area of the map to another. Another stage was based on the last area of FFX and featured a lava pit with rocky platforms. Given how easy it is to avoid falling because you can double-jump and run on walls, the lava pits felt more like an aesthetic than a penalty zone. But if you fell, you'd be brought back to safety in Final Fantasy style: Warp (Dejon) magic.
Dissidia: Final Fantasy already seemed pretty solid in its current state. The graphics were top-notch as you'd expect from Square Enix and up to par with Crisis Core or perhaps even better. The game is slated for release in December in Japan, so it won't be long before we can get our hands on the final product. Square Enix has also announced that there's going to be a PSP bundle for the game. Square Enix is also collaborating with beverage maker Suntory to release another lineup of Final Fantasy potions for Dissidia.

By Hirohiko Niizumi, GameSpot

Neverland Card Battles Review

Neverland Card Battles gets off to a poor start and goes downhill from there.

Turn-based strategy and collectible-card gaming collide in Neverland Card Battles, the latest release in the little-known Cardinal Arc franchise from Japan. And when we say "collide," we mean it, because this strategy-card hybrid is awfully close to a train wreck. Breaking out a regular deck of cards for some 52 Pick-Up is a better use of your spare time than firing up this exercise in frustration, which is afflicted with an obtuse tutorial, brutal difficulty, tedious gameplay, and eight-bit visuals.

Even with all those negatives, Neverland Card Battles could have been a contender. Developer Idea Factory certainly starts from an interesting place. The single-player campaign's backstory (there is also a storyless ad-hoc multiplayer mode) is based on tales told in the Japanese anime-influenced Neverland universe, which gives the game something of an exotic vibe from the very beginning. You play Galahad, a human gambler blessed with the ownership of a pack of magical Spectral Cards, shards of a gate that imprisons the evil god Hellgaia, who wants to destroy humanity. Given that this gate is in the process of breaking down, you are summoned to do battle by Egma, the leprechaun-like teen guardian of the gods, with the survival of the entire world of Neverland at stake. Or so it seems. Making sense of the story developed here relies on you already knowing something about the world on which everything is based, and we don't, so some of the finer details may be a bit off-kilter.
Game mechanics are also mildly innovative. Play is based on an oddly fitting mishmash of the classic board game Othello and traditional collectible-card gaming in the style of Magic: The Gathering. Instead of building decks and throwing down cards in straightforward duels, you earn the points needed to play cards by taking control of spaces in checkerboard battle arenas. In each turn, you move both your hero Galahad and any summoned allies to change the color of the board and thereby gain more card-playing power. The idea is of course to take control of more boxes than your opponent and use the points earned to play and maintain the most formidable card army on the board. Combat itself plays out in a fairly conventional fashion for a collectible-card game, with each card representing warriors, mages, monsters, and spell effects. All have various special attributes: stats such as hit points and attack damage, costs for use and maintenance, and so forth. As with every other card-based game out there, battles involve a mix of strategy and luck. You need good fortune when drawing cards and solid tactical thinking when it comes to determining the right time to play them.

Sound simple? It sort of is, although Neverland Card Battles sure doesn't take it easy on you. The tutorial is more of a sample battle than an actual primer on how to play the game. Your supposed teacher, Egma, tosses off a couple of brief comments about the fundamentals of play, but then simply settles in to a duel that is awfully tough for a novice to win. No actual tips are provided regarding card selection, movement strategy, when to play specific cards, or even how to move. You're just stranded in the middle of a match and have to figure out what to do by watching your opponent's moves. Expect to lose this opening "tutorial" battle a couple of times while figuring things out. You can't skip this fight, either, because the campaign isn't unlocked until you emerge from it with a victory. Even a draw isn't good enough.
Things don't get any easier when you progress to the actual campaign. Battles are extremely tough, considering that you have to face a computer-controlled opponent that not only knows the deck inside and out, but also seems to get some incredibly favorable draws while you get stuck with underpowered crap that you don't want to play or overpowered crap that you can't afford to play. The learning curve levels off somewhat as you move through the dozen or so matches, but it still takes many hours before you learn the deck well enough to feel like you're on a level playing field. The game's checkerboard battlefields tend to be huge, too, which drags out the frustration early on because it takes so long to stumble through each match. Even after you've mostly sussed everything out, the big maps still put too much territory between you and your enemies when duels begin. Limiting you to drawing just a single card per turn throughout games, even when you're down to holding one card in your hand, also slows everything to a crawl. Almost all of these irritants would have been avoided with a more thorough and comprehensive tutorial, which could have at least explained the card limitation and the strategy that you might employ when starting at such a long distance from your opponent. It's hard to imagine why the developers didn't make more of an effort here. A proper walkthrough of the deck and the strategic concepts behind play is sorely needed, especially for those without collectible-cardgame experience.

You don't need to have any experience with other collectible-card games to know that this one is ugly. Aside from the close-ups of the oft-beautiful card art displayed when you go into battle or pull up a card to check its numbers, everything here is blurry. The battle visuals are so rough and indistinct that it is just about impossible to tell one summoned creature from another; they're all little more than colored blobs on a checkerboard. Dueling screens are even worse, with slightly larger blobs duking it out via simplistic animations that you would normally need a time machine to see in this day and age. Audio is similarly old-timey. The soundtrack is the same old triumphal ode that has been featured in games going back to the Sega Genesis, and the voice acting is the standard sub-Saturday-morning-cartoon junk depressingly common to anything inspired by anime. Vocals are at least unintentionally hilarious at times, especially when characters start yelling in the middle of sentences for no reason whatsoever.
A sense of promise wasted is what lingers after giving up on Neverland Card Battles. Combining turn-based strategy with card-based combat is certainly an intriguing concept, but a series of terrible design decisions blows any opportunity of blending these concepts into a successful game.

By Brett Todd, GameSpot

Midnight Club: LA Remix Review

Almost as much an RPG as it is a racer, Midnight Club: LA Remix would be a very good addition to any patient car nut's portable library.

The last PSP version of Midnight Club, Dub Edition, was plagued with frame rate problems, insanely long load times, and hammy acting during its crummy story bits. The only issue that remains in its newly released sequel, LA Remix, is the duration of the loading screens. Actually, there are still some over-the-top trash-talking and too-extreme-for-you characters, but the thin story serves its purpose to motivate you to demolish the competition. With its big list of varied vehicles, a substantially sized city, and great visuals, Midnight Club: LA Remix is a surprisingly dense PSP game. Remix is packed to the brim with hours of intensely fast racing as well as addictive aesthetic and performance upgrades, making for a well-rounded racing experience. Its crushing difficulty will have you agonizingly restarting races during anything tougher than the easy-rank challenges as you arduously advance through a slow career--but even that won't deter you from having a good time behind the portable wheel.

Intricate shortcuts litter the metropolitan playground and you'll be forced to find and exploit them to get ahead of the overly talented competition. Whether you're sprinting to reach a goal or doing laps around the city center you'll immediately notice that the AI competitors are a tough crowd. Opposition suddenly becomes violently aggressive when you graduate beyond the easy-class matches, forcing you to restart races at a constant and aggravating rate. Though you can easily be smashed off course and into a wall by the annoying trash-talkers that burn past you, they will barely budge when nudged, slammed, or grinded against. It's almost as if they are immovable on a preset course. Blasting by the competition at almost 200 miles per hour after a turbo boost or drafting an opponent's rear-end slipstream to finish first is an immensely satisfying feeling, though it rarely happens without you limping through the city in a dozen tries as you attempt to figure out the critical path to the finish line.
In spite of this punishing career challenge, Midnight Club: LA Remix is ridiculously fun. Tearing across cities, launching over freeways, and drifting through tightly woven Los Angeles traffic is surprisingly exhilarating on a portable screen. The sense of speed, heightened by a subtle screen shake, makes for intense and exaggerated driving with surprisingly tight vehicle controls on the PSP's analog nub. And whether you're rotating in midair or dipping between lanes on two wheels, you'll find that you're almost always able to navigate your ride exactly as you intend.
When you're not in the middle of one of the high-octane races you'll be navigating the shrunken version of Los Angeles in a free-roaming mode in search of new events or rival racers. When you approach one of them, flashing your headlights with the D pad initiates the race, or a minigame-like race to the starting line that can earn you a little bit of reputation before the real deal kicks off. The reputation, or rep, is very similar to a role-playing game's experience system. Each win earns you a certain amount of experience with increased difficulty yielding more rep as you build up your name as one of LA's finest racers. Once you've earned a ridiculous amount of rep, you can take a trip to Tokyo for an entirely new layout with all the same fun and frustrations. Since you're earning so few rep points at a time, however, you might start to feel like LA Remix is a little too like an RPG at times. Though it never stops being fun, the repetition of driving the same routes in the city's racetracks begins to irk as you grind your way to a better rep with repeated matches. It's a slow burn, but you'll feel the reward when you unlock delivery or payback missions to break up the standard competition.
Vehicular customization is also a rewarding process, and it's where Midnight Club shines. Pining over which hood would look best with your brand-new Camaro concept car is something you wouldn't expect to have such a profound effect on you, but detailing your vehicle with personalized parts and paint jobs allows for incredible aesthetic tailoring. While it's not quite as deep, performance customization offers an incentive to save some of your earned scratch to drop on better engines or exhaust instead of patterned paint jobs and side skirts with boosts in acceleration and handling to help you in your rep-race to the top.
You'll definitely see advancement in your own skill as you progress, but it seems to do little against the previously mentioned crushing AI. You'll find yourself relying on your vehicle's special abilities and power-ups when you're in a tight squeeze: slowing down time with the Zone ability allows you to focus on sharp turns or slaloming between pedestrian traffic, while Roar sees you blasting traffic out of the way with a deep pound and Agro allows you to simply smash through it without consequence. More special abilities like the vehicle-launching Pulse or slick-controlling Ice are available during the four-player competitive ad hoc multiplayer. You can take any of your 58 tightly tuned cars or bikes against a few friends in standard races as well as a few other unique game types: Capture the Flag is full of ramming and slamming as you try to steal the flag marker from your opponents to score points; Paint is a trial of checkpoints as you try and paint the city in your colors before the clock runs out; and Tag is exactly as you remember it on the playground--except you're T-boning and fishtailing opponents' rides instead of tapping their shoulder.

Midnight Club: LA Remix is an extensive game with loads to offer, but the difficulty might hamper your experience. You'll spend plenty of time retrying and redoing races as you attempt to rack up your rep, but the grinding rarely becomes a problem because you're enjoying the intensity of kicking off of ramps for crazy hang time, drifting around tight bends with the help of automotive super powers, and creaming your pals in the crash-heavy multiplayer modes. As one of the better-looking and best-controlling PSP racing games on the market, LA Remix is a must-play for portable racing pros thanks to the variety of game modes, substance of the city, and a mess of great customizable rides.

By Mitch Dyer, GameSpot

TGS 2008: Musou Orochi: Maou Sairin Hands-On

We report for duty in the second Warriors Orochi game to come to the PSP.

It's no secret that developer Koei has found a specific niche with its many Warriors games, and Musou Orochi: Maou Sairin is no exception. When Warriors Orochi first came to the PSP earlier this year, it brought with it the familiar one-against-many combat scenarios and a rich character roster. We hunted down the sequel at Tokyo Game Show 2008, grabbed our halberd/sword/staff, and waded into the fray.
Like its predecessor, Musou Orochi: Maou Sairin is all about combat. You choose a team of three characters from the quasi-historical roster and do battle in samurai keeps, open plains, mountainous passes, and a variety of other environments. Though you represent a team of three warriors, you use only one of them at a time, magically switching between them with the press of a button. Each warrior has a handful of attacks, varying in strength and range, and you'll find yourself employing them all during the course of a battle. In addition to the legions of cannon-fodder enemies, we also encountered stronger foes whose attacks were more varied and powerful. As we cut our way through the demo levels, we found that making use of our full range of attacks was the best way to slaughter hundreds of hapless foes, and was downright necessary when facing stronger opponents.
The battles you engage in are spread across a variety of game modes, ranging from the relatively forgiving Story Mode to the brutally difficult Dramatic Mode. The latter mode grants you but one life, and succumbing to the swords of your enemies will end your game straight away. There is also a Survival Mode that lets you take your favorite characters into one-on-one combat, and a versus and two-player matching mode for online play.
As you might expect, Warriors Orochi's second outing feels a lot like the first. We got a glimpse of a wide variety of game modes, but each seemed to play to the series' strengths: giving players control of a powerful warrior and setting them loose in a densely populated battlefield. Koei isn't reinventing the wheel, but the company seems to have dialed in on what Warriors fans want, and is continuing to deliver with Musou Orochi: Maou Sairin. Keep an eye on GameSpot in the coming months for word on a possible North American release, as well as updated impressions of this hack-and-slash-apalooza.

By Chris Watters, GameSpot

TGS 2008: Final Fantasy Agito XIII Trailer Impressions

Don't be agitated: Square Enix showed off a brief teaser of its upcoming role-playing game for the PSP.

TOKYO--More CGI goodness was on display today at Square Enix's remarkably dark Mega Theater on the TGS show floor. All three Final Fantasy XIII games were represented by trailers, including the PSP iteration, Final Fantasy Agito XIII. The trailer was remarkably similar to the one we'd already seen earlier this year, but in case we missed a detail or two, we thought we'd bring you a quick look at yet another promising game in the famed Final Fantasy series.

The trailer begins by showing us an enormous crystal lighting up as the famous Final Fantasy arpeggios set the stage for the coming drama. We then see imagery that is bound to give most viewers a chill: a Hitler-esque leader stands on a dais, calling out propaganda in a commanding speech to the legions of apparent soldiers ready to cater to his every wish. The placement of the leader and his subjects, as well as the scratchy, black-and-white visual style, hark back to the heyday of the Nazi regime, and it's chilling to see such imagery, even today.
In an even-more chilling twist, the buildings lining the street around the soldiers transform and then fly into the air. They are, in fact, enormous battleships, and they fly across the sky en masse, a terrifying sight to a peaceful nation. The view then changes, and we see a tall, thin spire rising into the air. The camera moves downward toward the crystal that we saw at the beginning of the trailer. The crystal cracks and shatters, and the camera pulls away to reveal its island residence. The entire isle then explodes, perhaps taking all of its residents with it.
But maybe there is a survivor after all. From chaos, a shrouded figure emerges and is soon surrounded by the regimented troops so ready to commit to their apparently evil cause. The troops aim, but our hero isn't a single renegade after all. As the camera rotates, we see that more caped silhouettes join the lone rebel, until there are a dozen or even more. The trailer also cut to something that we didn't see in many of the other trailers in Square Enix's shadowed theater: gameplay footage. Although there wasn't much, we did see that the game will let you command a party of four, and based on that footage, it seems that each party member is assigned one of the four face buttons.
And in a final gasp, the trailer informed us that Final Fantasy Agito XIII will be released for the PSP, but it indicated no release date. Of course, we'd rather show you the footage than describe it, but for now, it seems that there is plenty to look forward to where Agito XIII is concerned, and indeed, for all of the upcoming games in that crystal-themed collection. Keep your eyes open: We'll bring you more news as it becomes available.

By Kevin VanOrd, GameSpot

Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology 2 Impressions

If you threw your favorite Tales characters into a giant pot and brought them to a boil, you'd get something like this sequel for the Sony PSP.

TOKYO--Tales series enthusiasts, brace yourselves: Another Radiant Mythology game is coming to the PSP, and it will be overflowing with all of the fan service that the first one provided. We talked with Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology 2 producer Hideo Baba on the Tokyo Game Show floor this weekend and asked him some questions while getting in some hands-on time with this PSP role-playing game.

The most important facet of the original Tales of the World was its cast. It was the video game equivalent of fan fiction, tossing a crowd of well-known characters along with a few original creations into a stew of random quests and a standard Tales combat system. Baba told us that the sequel's structure will remain essentially the same. If his statement applies to the mission structure, it means that you will take various unrelated quests from a local guild, and be able to recruit up to three other characters into your party at any given time. Baba did confirm that the friendship system from the first game will remain mostly the same, so to recruit people, you will want to remain on his their good side. We were more curious about the full cast, but Baba didn't wish to share details, and told us that this information hadn't yet been passed on to the Japanese press either. We also asked if Tales of Vesperia, the most recent game in the series, would be represented, but Baba would only confirm that Tales of the World 2 would include more than double the number of characters as the first.

However, it's unclear why Baba was so tight-lipped regarding the character list. By accident, we were flipping through some Tokyo Game Show promotional material, and a two-page ad for the game showed a complete list of playable and non-playable characters that will inhabit the Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology 2 story. They include Zelos and Presea from Tales of Symphonia, Bruiser and Rutee from Tales of Destiny, Chat and Reid from Tales of Eternia, and Suzu and Arche from Tales of Phantasia. Other characters are ripped from Tales of Destiny 2, Tales of Rebirth, Tales of Legendia, and other games that, as you can guess, all have titles that begin with the same two words. It's a huge and familiar cast, numbering more than three dozen, so if you're a franchise fan, you'll be quite pleased with the selection. However, the biggest news in the ad is that Yuri will represent Tales of Vesperia, and due to the way that the page is laid out, it seems that he will be a playable character. This is good news indeed for those who enjoyed the most recent entry.

As for the story itself, no surprises sprung from the pages of the ad, and Baba didn't have much to say on the subject. He did tell us that the story will be completely different from the first game and will take place in a totally different world. Like in the original, you will create a character from scratch and choose a profession, though we don't yet know what the job choices will be. You can also choose from other options, such as clothing and voice-over styles. From there, your goal is to find out exactly who you are, which leaves things rather vague. But for now, that's all we know.

As for gameplay, combat should be familiar to anyone who has ever played a Tales game. You take control of a single party member, and battles take place in real time within the combat arena. Pressing the attack button will automatically target an enemy, at which point your character will run toward it and perform the move. You can also perform spells known as artes, and though you can have only a limited number of them mapped to the PSP's buttons at a particular time, you have a good variety from which to choose, so you have a certain amount of flexibility in customizing party members to your own style. The three characters you don't control will attack, heal, and use items as the artificial intelligence sees fit, or you can customize their behavior in various ways.

The one play mechanic that we were curious about was a third gauge at the bottom of the screen. We wondered aloud to Baba about what that meter indicated, but like with other facets of the game, he didn't want to get into specifics and indicated only that it related to additional party skills. Nevertheless, we assume that it's the overlimit gauge of the first game, and screenshots confirm this assumption. Perhaps it's just as well that Baba has been so cryptic; RPGs are at their best when we let them surprise us as we play. Regardless, the one thing that we will spring on RPG fans is the release date--when one is announced, that is. Keep your eyes on this space for future updates!

By Kevin VanOrd, GameSpot

Wipeout Pulse Hands-On Impressions

Studio Liverpool is no stranger to the Wipeout franchise, having created 2005's well-received Wipeout Pure, a game that helped the PlayStation Portable establish a foothold in the handheld market. Two years on and Liverpool is back at it again with a new game for the PSP: Wipeout Pulse. We got some early hands-on time with the new title and took it out for a thrash in anticipation of the game's December global release.
Just in case you're new to the series, Wipeout is a futuristic driving game with high-speed antigravity vehicles which race above increasingly convoluted tracks--usually accompanied by a thumping dance soundtrack. Regardless of what kind of racer you are--whether your penchant is time trials, competitive AI slog-fests in the single-player campaign, or just blowing stuff up--Pulse seems to have all the major bases covered. Several different modes are available to play, including head-to-head, which sees you and another AI-controlled competitor race to be first past the post. There's also the obligatory time trial mode that lets you race the clock and break your own personal best times. Then there are speed laps, which are almost identical to time trials except that you receive one "boost" power-up per lap to be used at your discretion. Speed laps also allow you to do up to seven laps of the same circuit per attempt, and experience tells us that even on well-known venues, the last few tend to be your best as you Zen out and hit the perfect amount of airbrake per corner.
Zone and eliminator make up the last two modes. In the case of eliminator, players will try to destroy fellow drivers' rides while staying on course and protecting themselves from attacks. Zone is much like a crossover between speed lap and time trial mode in that you race it solo and without power-ups, but you race for as long as you can survive. This mode is particularly useful for first-timers to the Wipeout series or those who want a quick indication of their skill level. A dynamically generated rank flashes up above the vehicle as you do laps showing you what level you should be competing at. All the weapons and power-ups you've come to love from the Wipeout series make a return, with energy shields, machine guns, rockets, and mines randomly assigned once you drive over a power-up panel on the track's surface.
The single-player racing campaign in our demo included 16 grids, with each grid made up of between eight and 16 stages. These include various challenges from the six types listed above, and while you'll race across only three different tracks in the first grid, there's enough variety in the modes to keep it interesting. The mixture of time trials and races also helps you quickly learn the acceleration, braking, and power-up points of each track--skills that become invaluable when you take on other AI-controlled players.
Based on our race times and general progress through the demo code, completing each of the challenges per grid and then all the grids themselves means you won't blow through this game in one afternoon. Once the game is completed, you have the option of replaying to unlock more high scores and gold medals, or you can simply bump the difficulty and start all over again with faster vehicles and smarter AI. If after all that you're struggling for things to do, Wipeout Pulse will also offer both ad hoc and infrastructure wireless modes and Internet play. Sony has also said that it has plans to offer new tracks and vehicles via download once the game goes on sale, and while we have no idea what the intended release schedule looks like for this content, it's nice to know there will be extra content straight away as well as further down the line.
As always, music plays a huge role in the Wipeout series, and Pulse is no exception, drawing on licensed music from known DJs and artists such as Dopamine, Stanton Warriors, Aphex Twin, and Kraftwerk to provide the game's soundtrack. The range of tracks contributes to the gameplay, and we found ourselves dodging and weaving through traffic in time with the music on more than one occasion.
Wipeout Pulse will include a photo mode, allowing drivers to snap a couple of photos once their race is finished. Simply hit the select button after your race is done to enter the mode. From here you'll be able to cycle through internal camera, external front, and above-vehicle views, as well as shots of the track. You can use the PSP's analogue stick to cycle around the camera or zoom in or out depending on which view you're in.
So far, Wipeout Pulse doesn't present any significant departures from the games that helped make it a PlayStation identity. Fans of Wipeout won't be disappointed by the franticness and pace of the driving, while the arsenal of weapons at your fingertips means if you can't outrace your fellow competitors, you can always just blow them away. There's plenty here for both returning gamers and those who may have missed the boat earlier on in the series.

By Dan Chiappini, GameSpot AU

Harvey Birdman grounded until 2008

Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law needs some room to soar. That's the basic reasoning Capcom gave this weekend for delaying the release of Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law for the PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, and Wii until next year.
Capcom's senior director of strategic planning and research Christian Svensson responded to a message board post on Saturday asking why online retailers were listing the game with a 2008 launch date.
"The game is and has been finished, submitted and approved," Svensson wrote, "however we felt releasing the game on the same day 112 other SKUs released was not ideal for its chances. Retail buyers agreed."
"As such, we've opted to move the title out into a slightly cleaner release window. This will allow us to get on more shelves, do a bit more outreach to the media and hopefully get the fans in on the action a bit more."
Some of the competition Capcom hoped to get away from is actually going to be joining Harvey Birdman in 2008, as Electronic Arts today delayed Army of Two until next year as well. Both games had previously been scheduled for release on November 13.
A Capcom representative has narrowed the new release window for Harvey Birdman, telling GameSpot that the title is now expected to ship in January.

By Brendan Sinclair, GameSpot

Manhunt 2 Producer Q&A

The Wii Remote should really come into its own with Manhunt 2. The Wii Remote should really come into its own with Manhunt 2.

Manhunt 2. The road to retail has been anything but smooth for Rockstar Games' Manhunt 2, but next week fans of the first game and attention-seeking suits alike will be able to get their hands on the game. Fascinated by both Manhunt 2 and by all of the work that has gone into earning it an M as opposed to its original AO rating, we caught up with producer Jeronimo Barrera and made with the questions.
GameSpot: So before we get started, can you fill us in on who you are and how long you've been with the company?
Jeronimo Barrera: Since the beginning. I help oversee game production.
GS: Take us back to when the game was being discussed? Why another Manhunt?
JB: Obviously we're very proud of the original Manhunt and we didn't hesitate to start working on another Manhunt when the opportunity presented itself. A big motivation was the fans. We've had games that have sold more copies, but Manhunt did well and gained a very loyal following. That, coupled with the fact we love the horror genre, made it a no-brainer for us.

GS: Why did you guys take the all-new character approach? Where did you look to for inspiration?
JB: Manhunt 2 is not a true sequel to the original story. It expands on the theme of the original. The approach was to put the player in a similar situation of having to make very hard choices about survival, but where in the original the overall goal was very clear, in Manhunt 2 we introduce a heavy psychology that makes the choices to the player much more difficult. I don't want to give out any spoilers, but let's say that Manhunt 2 offers many twists and turns to keep the player on the edge of their seat.
We didn't really draw from any one source for inspiration. We're all very proud of the original game and we were in a unique situation to draw inspiration from our own work. With making sequels to games, sometimes we continue the stories of previous games, but often we feel the story itself is more or less complete and instead we want to expand on the narrative themes and gameplay mechanics and style, which leads to sequels that are related, but not necessarily narrative sequels. We've done this with GTA--where the games are related but not but not sequels--and we will continue to use this approach.
GS: Can you give us an idea of how the game came together? Was there a set plan, or was it more organic and collaborative? How long was development?
JB: There's always a plan and it always ends up getting changed massively as the game takes shape and it's always a collaborative effort. We had the story in place early, and then it was a matter of fleshing out the game using the story as the core and building upon it. From the start we knew we had to really surpass the first game's narrative, so there was an emphasis on having the story in place before we started building the game. One thing that isn't mentioned often is that Manhunt 2 is a very story-driven game. The writers needed to work very closely with the designers to ensure that the game mechanics fit within the world we were creating and that the actions onscreen were being complemented with strong dialogue and audio. Things tend to get more organic once you have all the pieces in place, and then you have to really start critiquing your work, and sometimes that means going back to the drawing board.
GS: There have been a number of survival horror games and quite a few successful stealth action games in the last couple of years. But the original Manhunt really presented something unique in terms of combining the best of both stealth and horror gameplay. What was the motivation to continue in this vein, and what were you looking to improve on with this second installment of Manhunt?
JB: First, the original Manhunt has a very loyal fan base, and when we decided to start working on Manhunt 2 it was immediately decided that we had to stick to certain themes and mechanics to keep the original fans happy--but we also wanted to expand and surpass what the original accomplished so well. That was very difficult, but in the end we created a piece of horror fiction that is not only terrifying at times but incredibly thought-provoking in the themes that we explore.
GS: The first Manhunt went to extraordinary lengths to craft unforgettably creepy--and sometimes very funny--dialogue. The audio experience of Manhunt was quiet memorable. Care to discuss what you have going on this time regarding the audio in Manhunt 2? What have you done to surpass expectations?

JB: The real star of the game is the audio. Not only does it play an important part of the gameplay, it sets the tone and mood for every single experience we throw at the player. We learned so much from the original Manhunt and knew going into writing the dialogue what works well in the game. The emphasis [is] on making the interactions (especially of the Hunters) seem real but so twisted that we blur the lines and it truly comes off sounding psychotic and at times very funny. We hope we have surpassed expectations by maintaining the production quality all Rockstar games have and at the same time increasing the variety of situations people speak in, which aligned to improvements in the AI that should lead to a game world that feels more "alive."
But the PS2 version still has headset functionality! This really helps to enhance the experience. You'll hear Leo, and you can use the mic to make sounds that attract the Hunters. On the Wii, we use the speaker on the Wii-Mote in interesting ways too.
GS: As it was taking shape did the violence stand out at all? Did it raise any flags for anyone?
JB: Since we started out making a horror game, we knew this would be a pretty violent game. The vision for the game was very clear to everybody that was working on it. We wanted a game that created the same feelings as watching a horror movie, similar to the original game but with a greater focus on psychological horror.

GS: How violent is too violent for a game like that?
JB: Of course, that's a matter of opinion, but we always knew the game needed a truly mature storyline that wraps the whole package together and makes the player recognize what's going on. Games are all about choices regardless of content. In Manhunt 2, the question is: What decisions are your characters going to make, given a particularly dire situation, not to mention your inability to trust anyone, including yourself? We are very much of the opinion that games should be judged by the same criteria as movies as they are part of the same culture, and in terms of the horror genre the game does not strike us as particularly violent.
GS: As things were coming together how did the Wii come into the equation?
JB: The Wii version was decided on quite early on. We are excited about the Wii in general, and it's a cool way of making new experiences, although there are still a lack of story-driven games that really work well on it. We hope Manhunt 2 will help to change that.

GS: Were there any concerns on how Nintendo would react?
JB: We're a licensed Nintendo developer. They knew what we were doing. We (Rockstar) are known for our award-winning, cutting-edge adult content. I'm pretty sure Nintendo knew what to expect when they announced that we would be making games for their system.
GS: How was it working on controls for it?
JB: Incredibly fun. It wasn't an afterthought; we were developing it simultaneously to the PS2 and PSP. We couldn't be happier with the results.
GS: To dwell on the executions for a moment, can you elaborate on the new weapons and environmental executions--how does that work?
JB: The player is presented with more options than in the original. Not just by variety of weapons but also how to best use the environment. There are what we call "environmental executions"; these can be very useful when you don't have access to a weapon. For example, you only have a tin can and you can see an open manhole just off in the distance. You can throw the tin can near the manhole. The noise from the tin can will cause the Hunter to go and investigate. You can then sneak up on the Hunter and...well, I'm not going to tell you what happens next but you get the picture.
Truly shocked. I know that sounds strange since the media has played this up as the most violent piece of media ever! We still believe that the original submission was well within the bounds of an M rating.
GS: Did you ever think it would go where it did?
JB: Not at all. We made a horror game, the contents of which are more interesting than any contemporary piece of horror fiction available on any medium. We're very proud of that. If this was a book, graphic novel, or a movie we wouldn't have this conversation.
GS: How do you all feel about the focus on the game? Is it good to get the word out or are you all cautious?
JB: I'd love to have us just focus on the gameplay. It's an amazing game. In a genre were few people get it right I think we've got something really special. I think the game now is going to be an unjust target. Who knows what people's expectations are going to be now that so many strange things have transpired? But we're very proud of it. We made a compelling horror game for a mature audience. The fact people still want to pick on video games is a strange and unfortunate reality.
GS: Tell us about what the mood was when the word came it was going to be AO?
JB: We were floored. We really couldn't believe it. There seemed to be no logic behind it, given other ratings decisions they have taken recently, and given the kind of content in other contemporary media.
GS: About the changes, was there talk of simply scrapping the game? How difficult was it to agree to edits? How did you end up cutting it without affecting storytelling and pacing? How much extra work did that process entail?
JB: It never crossed our minds to scrap this. Never. The challenge became how we were going to get the game out with the vision and story intact. And I think the team did an amazing job in the end.

The problem was that we didn't really get any direction. You don't get a list from the ESRB. We stuck to our vision, and we are happy with the outcome. All the levels stayed intact. And we originally came up with the effect for the executions to show how Danny's psychosis would affect his vision during violent moments.
GS: At any point, did you all see this coming?
JB: Not at all. I knew there would be one or two out there that would be offended by this game, but we aren't making this for everybody. This is a mature title and was designed as such.

GS: Now that this is all done and the game's shipping, can you tell us about the aspects of the game you all don't want overshadowed by all the controversy?
JB: There are so many things that need to get mentioned. We've elevated every aspect of the original and added so many new cool things. The interactions between Danny and Leo. The story of these two is the stuff of nightmares! The stealth gameplay is as great as ever. The environments are very dynamic. It doesn't look or feel repetitive. The animations are top-notch. Manhunt evolved out of a weakness we felt in stealth games--that people were hiding, but they weren't afraid of the people they were hiding from. For us, the most compelling reason to hide from someone is because you are frightened of them. This was the inspiration for the original Manhunt and it remains true for the sequel--to make the player feel like they are cowering in the shadows.
GS: Given the hassle on this title do you think this might mean the end of the Manhunt series?
JB: We enjoy making them, and if you enjoy playing them there is a good chance we'll see more in the series, but only time will tell. If we feel like we can make another compelling stealth game, we will.
GS: Thanks for your time.

By Staff, GameSpot

Medal of Honor Heroes 2

Heroes 2 supports a whopping 32 players in online multiplayer matches.

The EA Nation login should help simplify getting up and running online.

Medal of Honor Heroes 2. The online-shooter category may be dominated these days by the Xbox 360 and, to a lesser extent, the PlayStation 3. But that hasn't stopped Electronic Arts' studio in Vancouver from bringing frantic, large-scale action to the Wii and PSP with the forthcoming Medal of Honor Heroes 2, which is due to hit both platforms in the second week of November. The game supports 32 players in-game across six maps, which are set across a number of World War II-esque strongholds and crater-pocked battlefields. We went a few rounds online with both versions to see how things are shaping up.

On the Wii, the game has a pretty robust control model that seems as if it will afford you precise shooting when you get past its learning curve. You move with the analog stick and aim with the remote, as per most Wii shooters. You can also go to a view that zooms in through your weapon's sights, and when you're in this view you can twist the Nunchuk left and right to subtly lean in those directions, which will naturally come in handy for firing around corners. In the single-player campaign, you'll have a powerful melee attack that requires you to thrust both controllers forward simultaneously. That attack is still available in the online mode, but as you'd imagine, it can be hard to pull off while you're engaged in a firefight. So the designers have also added a weaker one-button melee attack that won't kill in one hit but is much easier to execute.
You'll get an exceptionally large crosshair in the multiplayer game, which sometimes makes it tough to gauge where exactly you're shooting at when facing an opponent. At first, it felt as if we were emptying entire clips at our opponents and hitting only air, but after a few minutes we were able to figure out where we ought to be aiming to score effective hits. However, even a headshot won't necessarily guarantee you a kill. Often when you get a headshot, you'll see your enemy's helmet go flying, accompanied by a satisfying metal clang sound. Once your opponent is bare-headed, your shots will certainly kill, but that helmet can sometimes make the difference between life and death when the action is moving quickly.
New to the Wii game's single-player campaign is a number of gesture-based control mechanics intended to enhance the realism of the combat experience. For instance, when you want to use the bazooka, you'll have to actually hoist the Wii Remote over your shoulder before you fire, as you would the real weapon. (The Wii will look for the remote to be upside down to verify you're doing it right.) There's also a pump-action shotgun that you actually need to pump to reload after each shot--by making a pumping motion with the remote, naturally.
These gestures have made their way into the multiplayer, but in a modified form. In a multiplayer match, you're permitted to fire the bazooka from the hip for a quick response time, but you'll lose some accuracy. On the other hand, you'll have full aiming precision if you hold it up over your shoulder. You can similarly disable the shotgun-pump requirement via a menu option if that seems too laborious for you during a fast-paced multiplayer match (as it did to us). There's also a motion-based grenade-toss mechanic that has you arm the grenade, then hit the fire button to designate a rough target, and finally make a throwing motion with the remote itself. The strength of your motion here will ultimately determine the grenade's trajectory.

There will be three modes--deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture the flag--that will occur on the game's maps, and all of them play out exactly as you'd expect. Luckily, getting into a match will be much easier than with most online Nintendo-based games. No friend codes to be seen here--instead, you'll use EA's "EA Nation" Web portal to set up an account and then log in through the game's front end itself. The EA Nation login will let you browse for running games online, and you'll be able to jump into or out of games that are running at any time, rather than being required to join a game's lobby before it starts. The PSP version's matchmaking works the same way, though it's inherently less noteworthy there because Sony's online multiplayer strictures are less severe than Nintendo's.
It looks as if EA Canada has made a real effort to get solid multiplayer into Heroes 2, especially given that the game is on two platforms that don't typically excel at online multiplayer. We'll bring you the final verdict for both the multiplayer and the game's story-driven single-player campaign when it ships in mid-November.

By Brad Shoemaker, GameSpot

Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions

Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions. While some games don't withstand the test of time, others, like the commonly praised Final Fantasy Tactics, exist in a state of pristine stasis: never changing, yet standing proud at the head of the class, and rarely bested by legions of pretenders to the throne. In other words, you won't need the rose-hued goggles of nostalgia to appreciate Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions, since it's a great game even by modern standards. If you're new to Tactics, you'll find a strategy role-playing game with plenty of deep gameplay and one of the finest stories in a Final Fantasy game to date. If you've already experienced the 1998 PlayStation original, you'll enjoy some nifty additions in this enhanced port, including terrific cutscenes, new character classes, and new playable characters. There are some noticeable issues in the presentation, and some lurking frustrations in the gameplay remain. In the context of such satisfying gameplay, though, the annoyances are easy to forgive--especially considering you can squeeze 60 or 70 hours of quality entertainment out of it.

One of the original's many strengths was its complex, moving story. Almost 10 years later, Tactics expresses more excitement and romance in a single moment than many modern games can manage in their entirety. It helps tremendously that the awkward localization of the original has been replaced with realistic dialogue devoid of grammatical errors (well, except for a few famous ones). There's also another major storytelling enhancement: beautiful, fully acted cutscenes that provide an even greater sense of atmosphere. Calling these scenes cel-shaded wouldn't do them justice, though, since they have a grainy texture to them that resemble a painting more than a cartoon. Suffice it to say, it won't take you long to get caught up in the internal struggles of Ivalice's House of Beoulve, the binding ties of friendship, and the social stigmas of the lower classes.
But if the story ropes you in, it will be the gameplay that keeps you coming back for more. A word of warning to new players, however: War of the Lions throws you into the fire, expecting you to figure out the convoluted class and character systems on your own. As a result, you may find yourself getting your butt handed to you until you get used to the mechanics. Once you do, however, you'll find an engaging character development scheme that will keep you constantly reevaluating the makeup of your adventuring party. Every party member begins as either a squire or a chemist, but can ultimately evolve into a monk, mage, assassin, oracle, and more. But you also have a secondary job slot to equip, as well as other ability slots that can be lifted from other classes.
As you gain experience in battle, not only do your characters level up, but so do your job classes. In turn, you are then able to purchase new abilities within those classes. It's a terrific system, for while it gives you the freedom to customize characters in endless ways, your party members still retain the core strengths that lend them to certain roles. There are two new classes to play around with, too: Onion Knight and Dark Knight. Experienced players will probably get more use from the Onion Knight than new players will, since its jack-of-all-trades nature requires some patience. Dark Knights, on the other hand, are deadly from the start, though you have to master multiple classes before you gain access to this profession.
Battles are generally intense, though the downside of the class system's flexibility is that the level of difficulty can vary wildly, depending on how you set up your parties. You may find some early battles almost impossible to get through without a bit of grinding first, while you will absolutely breeze through others. Still, most battles are quite challenging, requiring you to closely examine each move before committing to it. It's perfectly plausible (and if you aren't careful, downright common) to waste a spell because you don't have enough mana, or damage party members in addition to enemies. In light of this, it's too bad you can't take back your move orders once committed, as you can't always tell if a square will put your enemy in attack range until you occupy it.
The Final Fantasy I & II Anniversary Editions released earlier this year featured more striking visual upgrades than does War of the Lions. Yet the graphics hold up remarkably well, using familiar (and charmingly noseless) 2D sprites on 3D maps. The presentation has been enhanced to take advantage of the PSP's widescreen resolution, yet there are some awkward moments during scenes in the game engine where the map is cut off to the right or left, since it wasn't created to fill the wider screen. Some spells and attacks have new effects to go along with them, though the slowdown that accompanied some attacks in the original is still present in War of the Lions--as is the lack of synchronization of certain sounds that accompany them. The soundtrack is slightly enhanced, yet even without the tweaking, it remains one of the finest Final Fantasy scores to date, featuring tracks by both Hitoshi Sakimoto and Masaharu Iwata.

War of the Lions adds both cooperative and competitive ad-hoc multiplayer options, accessible from taverns within the game. One-on-one matches are fine provided you have a buddy with characters of approximately the same level, though we don't recommend exploring the inherent frustration of imbalanced battles between a weak party and a strong one. Co-op play fares better, but even then, a player with a less experienced party may not enjoy the relatively strong monsters that spawn in, thanks to the other player's higher level. Two players on equal footing, however, should have a blast, especially because there is new equipment up for grabs.
There are other small annoyances that the new version retains, such as its camera, which can be rotated and tilted, but may not always give you the most helpful view. But by and large, Final Fantasy Tactics remains a great game even by modern standards, thanks to its finely tuned character development system and challenging battles that will have you using every trick in your arsenal. Whether you are a newcomer to Final Fantasy Tactics or an experienced fan, you will lose countless hours falling to War of the Lions' insistence that you take just...one...more...turn.

By Kevin VanOrd, GameSpot

Sega Rally Revo

Sega Rally Revo for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 brought the years-old Sega Rally franchise into the current generation of consoles, crafting a fun, though sometimes overly challenging arcade rally racer around the series' trademark powerslide-happy gameplay. Revo was also released for the PSP, and it attempts to do the same thing as the console games, albeit with far less enjoyable results. In a sense, Revo on the PSP suffers from opposite issues of its console counterparts. Whereas the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions featured overly tough computer opponents that you couldn't bump off their racing lines to save your life, in the PSP game the opponents are total pushovers. There is next to no challenge in this game, and what little there is has more to do with the off-kilter controls than anything else.

Your first impression of Sega Rally Revo is likely to be the one you'll keep all throughout your time with the game because for as much as things change in the game, they ultimately stay the same. The second you get on a track, you'll know that this is pure arcade driving. Cars are incapable of going off track, with invisible barriers causing vehicles to bounce off everything from trees to minor shrubs. Powerslides are the name of the game, no matter the surface on which you might be driving. And there is a wide variety of surfaces on display. From mud-bogged jungles and sandy beaches to the icy, snowy mountains, you'll encounter all manner of terrain as you drive.
Maintaining tight, accurate powerslides on the PSP, however, is something of an exercise in futility. Whether you try to use the D pad or the analog stick, cars have an innate tendency to slide out and spin you too far in whatever direction you're turning. The amount of precision needed to make accurate powerslides just isn't there with this control setup, and you'll find yourself sliding every which way far more than you'd prefer. It's not impossible to keep a handle on the controls, but it requires more babysitting than it should to do so.
Granted, no matter how much you slide around like butter on a skillet, you'll probably still end up winning most of your races. The opponent drivers in Sega Rally Revo don't have much interest in keeping you from victory. Oh, sure, they'll try to cut you off when you steer around them, but that's not much of an issue because you can just bowl right into them and send their cars flying. All the cars in this game feel like tin cans on plastic wheels. A simple rear bumper tap will send the bumped car flying into the air for a second, and most times, the rear section of an opponent's car will fall down on your car. Simple taps from the side will send cars spinning like crazy. Granted, such wrecks will often lead to you losing some control of your car as well, but usually, you can get by without any other cars sneaking up and passing you.
Sega Rally Revo offers a few different modes of play. Apart from the standard quick race mode, there is a time trial mode, as well as a championship mode. There are three championship tiers, each tied to the three car classes in the game. You start out with the premier league, which consists of standard rally rides, such as the Subaru WRX STi and Mitsubishi Lancer Evo IX. Then you move on to the modified league, with such cars as the VW Golf GTI and Grande Punto Rally. Then finally, you hit the masters league and drive rally classics, such as the Lancia Super Delta HF Integrale and Lancia Stratos. Each league also has several unlockable cars, many of which are often much faster than the default rides (though at the same time, often more challenging to handle). With such a limited number of tracks, you end up repeating a lot of them again and again as you progress through each championship, though with the differences in speed between car classes, each step upward often results in a race that feels somewhat different.
Finally, there is multiplayer. Up to four players can play wirelessly via both ad hoc and infrastructure. The online play is functional, though we hardly ever found anyone playing. There is also a game sharing option, though only two cars and three tracks are available.

Graphically, Sega Rally Revo looks pretty solid, though it is a bit on the grainy side. This version of the game does have the dynamic track deformation that the console versions did, though not to quite the same degree. You do tear up the tracks as you go, but it doesn't really seem to have any effect on how you drive one way or the other, so it's more of just a visual trinket in this version--and not all that great of one either. Car models look great, and as each race goes on, you can cake them up with dirt or mud pretty nicely. In terms of performance, the frame rate holds steady, though the load times are pretty lengthy.
There are elements of Sega Rally Revo that provide some enjoyable moments, but too many irritations and issues get in the way of those moments. It might look good, as well as offer up a number of ways to play, but the suspect controls and relative ease of the gameplay prevent this from being a particularly captivating racer. When you factor in how many better and more interesting driving games there are on the PSP, you're ultimately better off skipping this one.

By Alex Navarro, GameSpot