Square-Enix

When you’re on a 2.5 week trip, it hardly seems like it’s ever going to end, but it was my last day in Tokyo and it felt pretty surreal. It would be my last chance to tie up all my loose ends, so I headed out to get my final souvenirs and replace that stupid sake cup that I broke. The plan was to go over to the Square Enix store to grab a CD for Min, the Tokyo Seibu Loft to try and replace the sake cup, somewhere to find another bag because my suitcase was now too full to travel, the Tokyo Dome to get Fighters jerseys for Eric, and maybe a CD shop to look for a live Persona music DVD/CD. ...

[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. ...

Insert another credit, because it’s time for your weekly video game news and you’ve just hit the Game Overview screen. Guess what guys, it’s the slow season. Not much is going on…at all… Let’s celebrate the start of this week with some Phoenix Wright! The folks over at OCRemix have put out some mixed versions of the songs from the soundtrack. Man do I love this series. OBJECTION! Classic. No Yakuza? ...

Hey loyal readers, I need your help in deciding what game to play next. I haven’t quite gotten my polling software down, so here’s a nifty embedded poll instead. Basically, I want to continue to write impressions about games that I’m playing, but I don’t know which one to move on to next. A little about each of the choices: Earthbound (Mother 2) A fantastic, Dragon Quest-inspired RPG series by Shigesato Itoi, Earthbound is fantastic, quirky, and interesting. I played this back when I was in middle school, but I think it deserves reexamining. Ideally I would be hooking up my SNES, which I still have, to get this to work, so that would be an adventure in and of itself. ...

Pankraz is dead. Madalena is alive. Prince Harry and Dan are still in Ladja’s clutches. What sinister plan does he have for the poor boys? The story continues ten years later. Dan and Harry were sold into slavery and have been spending the past ten years building a temple for some cult. At this point I started to realize that Dan’s life pretty much sucks. Harry fills Dan in on the details of the past ten years and it seems that it’s been pretty bleak. The guards all seem to imply that once the temple is completed (soon) there will be a slave massacre. Still, Dan and Harry don’t make much trouble…until Maria gets herself in trouble with some of the guards. Dan and Harry have too much honor to allow her to be abused, so they get into a scuffle with the guards and end up killing them. It turns out that one of the other, nicer guards is Maria’s brother and he knows that death for all three slaves will be the inevitable result of Dan and Harry’s insubordination, so he allows Dan, Harry, and Maria to escape from the temple in a barrel. ...

When we last left Dan and Pankraz, they had just showed up in Coburg to be bodyguards for Prince Henry. It seems there’s some strife within the castle, as the king has two heirs and the queen clearly favors one son over the other. It’s some serious Jacob and Esau-type stuff and an example of a family gone horribly wrong. The princes are either apathetic (Wilbur) or total jerkfaces (Harry), but it doesn’t really matter anyway, we’ve gotta guard Harry after all. ...

Insert another credit, because it’s time for your weekly video game news and you’ve just hit the Game Overview screen. The most amazingly adorable Mega Man ever. See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor. Sweet Brothers Art Ever wanted to see some great renditions of the Mario Bros.? Well, BAM! SNES! It’s kind of old news, but here’s a neat way to use an old SNES to connect to a PC and play your carts on an emulator. ...

When we last left off, young Dan had arrived on land in Littlehaven after dreaming that his father was a king. Exciting! Except Pankraz seems to just be a wanderer, but a well-respected guy. Almost everyone Dan can talk to seems to think that Pankraz is the finest specimen of a man they’ve ever met and that he’s bound to grow up to be as great as his old man. As Dan continued to wander around, he eventually found his way outside of the city and onto the world map. Here he got into his first random encounter with monsters! Before Dan even has a chance to get worried, Pankraz shows up to save the day and WRECK SOME MONSTERS. Holy cow, Pankraz is a tough guy. Nothing seems to faze him and he mows through monsters with ease. If Dan starts to dip in HP, Pankraz will heal him up. He takes control and walks Dan back over to his hometown, Whealbrook. ...

Like I said I might do before, here’s a rundown of a game I’m playing to try and encourage me to make significant progress. Unfortunately, even if there were commercial DS capture devices available, I don’t really have the cash to spare for them anyway, so we’ll start our look in with words and I might snap some ugly iPhone shots if I really want to hurt your eyes. As a final warning, I’m going to be getting into plot points. Leave if you don’t want to read SPOILERS ...

Insert another credit, because it’s time for your weekly video game news and you’ve just hit the Game Overview screen. King of Fighters XII, yeah that’s still coming out. I’m having a hard time caring without Mai :hint hint: See the episode below to catch the trailer. Explosive Remember last week when I told you all about that Giant Bomb achievements feature? Seems I’m not doing that well. I’ve only got ‘A’s in Mass Effect, Castle Crashers, and Lost Odyssey and a good chunk of my rare achievements are World of Warcraft achievements available only to those who were playing the game way back in the day. That being said, I do have a lot of Lost Odyssey and Mass Effect rare achievements and I think I’m going to ignore the DoA 4 rare since it’s probably the anti-achievement I got for losing tons of matches. ...