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Daily Archives: June 15, 2009

Grandia series lives on!

From the days of the Sega Saturn, when Working Designs was still alive, and throughout the first two iterations of the PlayStation, the Grandia series is about to make a return to live in the PS3 era … as an MMO. Hold your moldy tomatoes, dude! It’s not my fault!

While Grandia Online is set in time before the events of the first Grandia title, the new game is expected to be a bit more turn-based than recent MMO-style Final Fantasy titles. Since the battle system in Grandia has always been its main strength and appeal.

If Grandia Online has no monthly fees, I’ll give it a try; but monthly fees could easily kill interest in this one; it doesn’t have the brand power that Final Fantasy does, even if SquareEnix is behind both titles. You may now return to reading your phenphedrine reviews, people. The breaking new bit is now concluded.

Final Fantasy XIV a PS3 exclusive… MMO

I was as shocked and surprised as anyone when Sony’s Jack Tretton took the stage at E3 and announced to the world that SquareEnix’s Final Fantasy XIV was not only in the works, not only arriving in 2010, but would be a PlayStation 3 exclusive title (as long as you don’t count the PC format).

Then details began leaking out and it became a lot less impressive. Here’s why: Final Fantasy XIV will be the next “MMO” from SquareEnix. Yup, the company is ready to move on from Final Fantasy XI, which wasn’t nearly as successful as SquareEnix had hoped.

By launching a new MMO in the Final Fantasy series, SquareEnix hopes to take advantage of several new market realities. First, Sony has a much stronger online community built up than in the PS2 generation. Every PS3 has a hard drive. And the next-gen firepower fill allow SquareEnix to make FFXIV that much more impressive.

On the downside, its unlikely that FFXIV will stay a PS3 exclusive for longer than maybe the first year, and the monthly fees are likely to limit the appeal of the title, just as they did for FFXI. As nice as this announcement may be, it still lacks the punch that would have been delivered if FFXIV had been announced as a single-player, offline RPG that was a PS3 exclusive. Color me, and the acne pills-needing crowd for that matter, disappointed.

PSP Go is announced

While not as practical as a fresh round of bathroom safety products, Sony has set the videogame world a’buzzing with the announcement of its newest iteration of the PlayStation Portable, the PSP Go!

Here’s the upside: The PSP Go will be 43 percent lighter than the first PSP and will abandon the failed UMD experiment, going instead for 16 GB of internal flash memory as well as supporting the Memory Stick Micro format for additional storage. There will be Bluetooth support as well, and the screen will shrink from 4.3-inches to 3.8 inches, though it’ll still be a nice screen.

Here’s the downside: a hefty $249 price tag, which is just above the comparable 16GB Apple iPhone/iPod Touch; no touch-screen; still only one analog stick; no revved-up processor or additional RAM.

So while the PSP Go definitely makes the PSP sexy again, and perhaps having a chance to be more competitive with Apple’s iPhone/iPod Touch initiative, it’s still hardly a reinvention that could be dubbed properly a PSP 2. While that makes backward compatibility a non-issue, it also means the PSP Go isn’t quite the “PSP reinvented” solution many were hoping for.