Final-Fantasy-Xiii

Even the Pittsburgh Pirates played video games this year. Knock on wood, you guys, but I managed to get through 2012 without having all my video games stolen from my house while I was sleeping [EDITOR’S NOTE: It’s 2013 now, you dummy. You don’t need to knock on wood]. Should that even be an achievement? 2012 seems to be a shift in the status quo. Perhaps it’s because the new console generation hasn’t yet kicked off, but I feel like fewer and fewer AAA, big budget titles have been grabbing my attention lately. Of the 56 games on this list I feel like very few (about 12) were big, huge landmark games. Maybe that’s not all that different, but it feels different… ...

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“The enjoyable paradigm system returns for the sequel. (Photo courtesy 289chjl)”] [/caption] Man, oh man…If I asked you which Final Fantasy game you were most hoping for a sequel to, would you have said XIII? No, of course not. I wrote quite the lengthy post about how Squeenix should have allowed the complete destruction of mankind in the ending of XIII and I also gave them far more credit than most did as to the story and themes of the game. Since they didn’t kill everyone, they had the chance to make a sequel and…I’m not annoyed by it. I like the way that the story is handling time travel, even if it seems disconnected and/or sometimes characters say contradicting things in back-to-back lines. ...

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“The Joker looks pretty gnarly in this game. (Picture used courtesy gamesweasel)”] [/caption] There may be spoilers ahead. Tread carefully. Growing up in Florida confers all kinds of benefits to the aquatic athlete that you almost take for granted. Outdoor swimming, for one. I never swam indoors once during my years as a high school swimmer. Sure, things got cold in the winter, but we just heated our pools up a little and tried not to hang out on the pool deck. ...

In their last show as a band, the Sex Pistols played one song and left the stage. Before leaving the stage, Johnny Rotten quipped, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” The thing is, I don’t feel this way for the reasons everyone else might think I might. I suppose we’ll go after the biggest point of contention first. Linearity “Final Fantasy XIII is The Worst Final Fantasy Ever (TM) because all the dungeons are straight lines and there are no towns.” Guess what. The non-linearity of those Final Fantasy games you all hold so dear is an illusion. Final Fantasy XIII draws so much ire because it has the gall to tell you what you already know. ...

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“375” caption=“Super Potato in Akihabara”] [/caption] As is typical of me, I played a ton of video games this year. Here’s a listing of what I played along with a few short (or long) words on each game. For the most part, this list is restricted to games released in 2010 unless I did not play them until this year. It’s also mostly in chronological order, with some skips here and there. ...

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Most impressive ensemble goes to the gaggle of Doctor Whos, but this was definitely my favorite Otakon cosplay ensemble.”] [/caption] The USA’s second largest anime convention came and went and I took pictures of it. Yes, Otakon 2010 happened, but, no, I didn’t want to actually pay admission to go in since I don’t watch as much anime anymore and I didn’t know any of the artists that were appearing, so I freeloaded along with my brother and took pictures of the cosplayers who were coming into or leaving the convention center on Saturday. ...

So you walk into a Boss Room, and your six dudes are there, talking about how “You can’t do this to us!” “Let’s get him!” “Yeah, let’s do it!” And then the fight starts: and you’re just the three dudes you had picked previously on the menu. Then the battle ends, and there’s all six characters, some of them wounded, others just winded. “We did it!” Uh, okay. What were the other three characters doing during the fight? Were they fighting some other boss that the artists didn’t care to draw? (They were probably off in the corner smoking a bowl and talking about what it’d be like to get a blow job in space.) ...

Dragon Quest is inexorably tied to the Japanese video game space. The series was the first big hit RPG and its core qualities, simplicity, relative ease, and lightheartedness touched that first generation and continue to bring the same degree of fondness with each installment. It is unquestionably the premiere mega-franchise of Japan. Somehow it just never caught on in the states. In the states we play Final Fantasy. ...

Despite Ian’s claims that I’m insane for doing so, Final Fantasy XIII lays almost untouched on my coffee table each night as I’ve been spending the past week playing Mega Man 9, 10, and Yakuza. Here are a few more words on the Mega Man games and a few on Yakuza: Mega Man 9 & 10 I still stand by my assertion that Mega Man 10 is just too easy compared to 9. It makes me seem like a masochist to claim that I had less fun with it because it was easier, but that’s part of the fun of Mega Man. There were definitely some frustrating moments in 10, but I never got angry like I did with 9. It was much simpler to beat. I’ll have to play it some more so that I can beat my friend Lee to more trophies. ...

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“The famous and super-busy scramble crosswalk at Shibuya.”] [/caption] Here we are on the last (full) day of the Main Tour. It would be the last day that Dave and I were together in Japan, so we decided to hit up all our Tokyo loose ends. That mostly meant wandering around getting the last of our souvenirs and checking out some of the famous districts within Tokyo. ...