VideogameVagabond.com

Can a 45-year-old man maintain a marriage and a videogame habit? Let's find out!

Daily Archives: March 5, 2010

Loving my nano

It may not be an app-savvy Touch, but I’m loving my purple 16 GB Apple iPod nano. Sure, it lacks the gaming feature, but it has plenty of room for stuff, is great for music and radio, and even gives me a camera I can vlog with.

Who could ask for more? Sure, it doesn’t surf the net like the Touch… so you can’t use it for a Philadelphia job search, but hey… that’s what my computer is for. I bought a music player to play music and audiobooks, primarily, not to give me driving directions and such.

My nano suits me just fine.

Final Fantasy XIII out soon

March 9, 2010. It’s a date many are anticipating with great fervor, because the first Final Fantasy main-series release will be unveiled that day… now only five days away. It took 23 years since the release of the first Final Fantasy, and thirteen titles to reach this day, but is the series finally showing its age?

Nonsense. While SquareEnix has sunk millions into FFXIII’s production, and has even hinted that the series may head in a markedly different direction in the future, the game is as relevant as ever because despite experiments nearly every time out with the character progression system and battle system, the truth is that Final Fantasy has always defined the standard role playing experience on videogame consoles, from the original NES until today.

Sure, some folks will complain that FFXIII is either a sconce too old school, or too new-school for those who loved the previous outings, but Final Fantasy has never really been all that staid; the series has thrived on experimentation.

So, yes, games like Dragon Age: Origins, Oblivion and Fallout 3 may all thrive in open-world settings, but that means little; Final Fantasy has never played follow the leader to someone else’s flute. Don’t expect that to start now.

Tomb Raider no more?

All that has been released is a game logo, but it speaks volumes; the next videogame featuring Tomb Raider star Lara Croft won’t feature a lot of Tomb Raiding… or at least, it won’t feature that aspect in the title. While loose diamonds may be a girl’s best friend, Lara has always been a more underground sort of gal … in the archeological sense, at any rate.

But the name of the new game only focuses on Lara herself; it’s called Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light. Beyond that, no one outside of developer Crystal Dynamics and publisher Eidos knows much of anything, except that the game is expected in 2010 and will be sold via digital download, rather than via retail Blu-Ray disc.

So is it a typical Lara Croft shooter/platformer action and adventure title or something else? We’ll have to wait until the Game Developers Conference next week to find out for sure, at the very least, but here’s what Crystal Dynamics’ Darrell Gallagher had to say about the new title, Lara’s first appearance since Tomb Raider: Underworld in 2008:

“This is a really exciting project for Crystal Dynamics, we have created something completely new and very different to what people might be expecting. Lara Croft is such an iconic character in videogames, with Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light we have created what we believe is a truly original digital experience.”