VideogameVagabond.com

Grab some gel pens and mark it down: as much potential as Microsoft’s forthcoming 360 RPG, Blue Dragon, has, it does bear a lot of potential to fall short of the expectations built by the hype surrounding the game.

Sure, the Mistwalker crew of Hironobu Sakaguchi, Akira Toriyama, and Nobuo Uematsu are something of a dream team. But with such prestigious names associated with the same title, taking on an all-new, unproven IP, the unfamiliarity of the new franchise could make the game a bit of a harder sell than many are expecting.

Think of it this way: you have the character designer of DragonBall Z, the creator of Final Fantasy, and one of the music producers of Chrono Trigger. But none of them are working on DragonBallZ, Final Fantasy or Chrono Trigger. It’s something new, and fans coming to the title expecting it to be a lot like DBZ, FF or CT may come away disappointed by the differences between Blue Dragon and those beloved properties.

That’s not to say Blue Dragon will be a disappointment or a failure. Not at all. But if anyone is expecting it to sell on the same level as a Final Fantasy title, they could be disappointed. A better point of comparison would be Fable.

Fable was a new IP when it debuted on the original Xbox. It had a great set of creative types behind it. And it sold very well … for a first title in a new IP. Within a year or so, Fable 2 will debut on the 360 and is expected to far exceed the sales of the first Fable… because it’s now a known quantity.

I expect a similar reception for Blue Dragon. It will do quite well, for the first title in a new series. But sales likely won’t approach the same level as the top RPG franchises right out of the gate; that will come as future chapters are released. Perhaps by the time Blue Dragon III is unleashed, it will be able to challenge the sales figures of the top RPG franchises.

That’s what happened to Shadow Hearts. Sales figures like that are not shabby. But anyone expecting Final Fantasy XII sales figures from Blue Dragon will be setting up a false expectation of what success for the title will look like.

Playing Pokemon on Nintendo DS is kind fun, but also a pain. It’s certainly no trip to a vacation home Orlando … or any other vacation home location. That’s because, like too many DS games, the touch screen simply isn’t utilized very creatively in Pokemon Diamond/Pearl.

But you can say that about a lot of DS games; what I appreciate about Pokemon Diamond/Pearl is that it’s the first WiFi online Pokemon title. Now, instead of a link cable or being in the same room in order to play, trade or battle against another Pokemon owner, you can actually do it online.

My main complaint, however, is that it’s a bit of a pain to set up. Nintendo WiFi is supposed to be seemless, but unless you’re in a McDonalds, it’s not as slick as they make it sound. You still have to have your home WiFi network’s 10-digit ID/code to get online, and even after you do that, you have to have your own “Friend Code” as well as a buddy’s friend code in order to find each other online.

Worse, you must wait until you’re about three hours into the game before the game will give you the Pal Pad item that allows to you to do any of this to begin with.

However, once all that’s worked out, Pokemon Diamond/Pearl works well online and is the source of few complaints. It’s worth the time and effort, even if it’s more time and effort than folks have been commonly led to believe.

One thing all gamers need is a comfortable place to sit - or lay - as they play their Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 games. Whether it’s simple folding chairs or a custom gamer recliner with built-in beverage holders and a Dolby 5.1 surround sound system built into the chair, or something in between, every gamer needs to be comfortable to really enjoy their favorite pastime.

Except when it comes to the Nintendo Wii. I mean, sure, the PS3’s controllers have motion-sensitivity also, but I doubt most PS3 games will utilize it as comprehensively as the Wii system. Their remote-and-nunchuk controller design tends to discourage lounging around. With motion sensitivity a key element of Wii game design, laying around will likely mean you’re not playing your Wii.

While not every Wii game will require standing up or an aerobic workout, it’s hard to imagine many Wii owners laying back in a comfy recliner and playing most Wii games effectively. Could Nintendo be concerned about the health of their gamers by building a system that requires one to be more physically active?

Maybe… but more likely is that they just needed something to make the Wii seem diferent, especially since they knew their graphics weren’t going to be even remotely close to the graphics of 360 and PS3 games.

Have the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 really future-proofed their new consoles when it comes to RAM capacity? Although set up in slightly different configurations, both consoles possess essentially 512MB of RAM for developers to take advantage of. With such a dramatic improvement in RAM over the last generation of consoles, surely the Xbox 360 and PS3 are immune from being bypassed by PC configurations any time soon, right?

Think again. Try it more like this: they’re already outmoded.

With the introduction of Windows Vista, 512MB of RAM is the absolute minimum the system will run on, and most games had bypassed that a few months before Vista was introduced. In fact, the average Vista configuration has about five times more RAM available to it than either the 360 or the PS3.

Recently, I was browsing through a Best Buy, looking at the new models. While I’m note quite ready to buy a completely new PC and was hoping to get by with a computer memory upgrade, even that seems insufficient after looking over specs demanded by the newest PC games.

Just to focus on the memory aspect, a less expensive PC has anywhere between 1GB to 1.5GB of all-purpose RAM, and the average system has a solid 2GB of RAM these days. Add to that the fact that most decent graphics accelerators now pack on an extra 512MB, which is likely to go up to 1GB over the next year or so, and by Christmas, between general RAM and video RAM, most PCs will soon have between 2.5GB to 3GB of RAM available for game developers to take advantage of.

Compare that to the 512MB of RAM found on 360 and PS3, and it won’t take long for there to be a healthy upswing in the popularity of a new generation of PC software. Both Microsoft and Sony should have planned better, and included at least 1GB of system memory in their spiffy new consoles. By the time 2011 rolls around PCs will feature between 6GB to 10GB of RAM, I predict, and those 512MB of RAM on PS3 and 360 will once again look puny and outdated.

With a little extra market research, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 could have set the bar higher for the PlayStation 3. While the Xbox 360 Core system was always a joke, $399.99 for the Xbox 360 Premium system was a bit of a sticker-shock but was sold as being relatively “future-proofed.” Yet with only a 20GB hard drive, that’s turning out not to be the case.

Microsoft itself has basically admitted as much recently when it announced the impending release of yet a third configuration, the Xbox 360 Elite system. The 360 Elite contains only two major upgrades: a larger hard drive, weighing in at 120GB, and an HDMI output that ought to have been included on all 360 systems to begin with. The Elite doesn’t even toss in an HD-DVD drive; that’s still an extra.

For these two minor upgrades, Microsoft is asking $479.99, only $20 shy of the price of Sony’s lower-end PlayStation 3 unit, which may have a smaller hard-drive at 20GB, but has HDMI and Blu-Ray DVD playback. What this waffling has come to demonstrate is that Sony’s marketing reps were correct all along: PlayStation 3 at $499.99 or $599.99 is actually not that bad a deal, for everything you get at those prices.

The funny thing is, a bit more market research could have prevented the debacle; anyone with half a brain could have told Microsoft that a 20GB hard drive would not have been enough to future-proof the 360, especially since the company has known for years they wanted to use Xbox Live to distribute music, TV shows and movies in digital format. Or that HDMI and 1080p output was essential to call their box a “true HD” unit.

With a bit more vision, the 360 could have looked far more visionary and beat Sony’s position on pricing. As it stands, those PS3 prices don’t look that inflated after all, anymore.