Today was a great day. I entered the streets of Manhattan's China Town, a place full of hidden gems. Woe and behold, I encountered an old fashioned arcade, fully featured with blaring DDR machines, crowds of spectators, the smell of cigarettes, four Street Fighter IV machines, one Tekken 6 machine, and Japanese-style Arcade Sticks.



Street Fighter IV was well worth the money, and it wasn't cheap. One dollar per play, with single-player machines linked together for multiplayer. While the arcade version lacked Sakura, Cammy, Fei Long, and Dan, I was still extremely impressed. Lacking the parry system of SF3, I was afraid this game would be too simple. Capcom has graced the game with surprisingly deep gameplay, packed with reversals, counters, and very nice looking super moves. I may have lost all three matches I had played, but I had a really good time, and I was vsing the local champion.



Tekken 6 is a very gorgeous game, even on arcades. It's definitely got the next-gen look, without the jaggies that usually come from arcade ports. The gameplay is spot on, pretty much the same as Tekken 5, except it seems like they took out the cheap dropkicking from 5. It feels a lot more balanced and technical, which should make for some excellent competitive play.

I'm pretty sure I'll be preordering both games for my 360, along with a couple of Japanese arcade sticks. They're both very good fighting games, and should allow me to show off my awesome skills on Xbox Live. Soul Calibur IV has nothing on these two.

If you guys would like to visit the arcade I went to, it's called Chinatown Fair, and the address is:

Chinatown Fair
8 Mott St
(between Chatham Sq & Mosco St)
New York, NY 10013

Alucard out.

Hello, Destructoid. Welcome to my first game review. Today we will be reviewing...



Yes, yes. The new Sonic rpg for the DS, made by none other than Bioware. Please note that I am a big fan of Sonic's old games, and a huge fan of Bioware and Sega. Now, I know you're telling yourself "How could Bioware make a bad game?" Well, get a load of this shit.

-= Gameplay =-

I'll start off with the most important part; the gameplay. Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood is an RPG that is fully controlled by the DS's touch screen. This worked for Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass, but a lot of people hated it. If you hated it then, you'll hate it even more. You control Sonic on a 2D map that doesn't physically change. He runs incredibly slow in this game, and when you aren't dragging him around the map, you're poking context-sensitive buttons on the screen. This might not seem that bad, but trust me, it really is incredibly dumb.
When speaking to characters on the screen, Sonic is given a choice in dialogue, similar to other Bioware games. However, this doesn't effect the NPC's attitude at all. None of the responses actually hurt your game in any way, making the choice relatively useless.
In battles, normal attacks are performed by touching the function you want your party member to perform, and then touching the target. Shortly after, Sonic and his friends will repeatedly attack your target for a few seconds. You don't even have to do anything. You just sit and watch, as Sonic repeatedly dashes into his enemies. There is another form of attacking, called a POW attack. These attacks can be bought with points you earn by leveling up. I tried using the first POW attack, which is called Axe Kick, and an Ouendan/Elite Beat Agents minigame appeared on the screen. That's right, when you perform a special attack, you have to play a dumbed down version of EBA, to the game's shitty music. Which brings me to my next point:

-= Sound =-

The sound in this game is pure shit. All of the sound effects sound like noises you'd hear in a Looney Toons cartoon, except they're ALL out of place. When robots die, they make some kind of weird boingy noise, like a spring being let loose. There are some standard sound effects from the Sonic world, but they all sound badly mixed, almost like they'd sound on the original gameboy's speakers.

The music is really generic. It's nothing that you'd expect from a Sonic soundtrack. While you may hear some Sonic 2-esque metal tracks, most of the ingame music is absolutely terrible. It sounds like the Learn to Read soundtrack. Remember that show? Learn to Read with LeVar Burton? Sega and Bioware must have hired the composer from that show.

-= Graphics/Presentation =-

Oh boy, this was the last straw for me. This is where I couldn't take it. In the beginning, you're greeted to an introduction sequence. It's like a half-assed attempt at making one of those Metal Gear Solid Animated Comics that Konami made for the PSP. For some unknown reason, moving paper figures of Sonic and his friends are attacking moving paper figures of Eggman on his badly rendered CGI ship. Right on top of the pre-rendered cutscene, Sonic and his friends speak to Eggman via speech bubbles. It's like they didn't even try.

The ingame graphics consist of a 3D model of Sonic moving on a static 2D landscape. It looks miserable, since the shadows of the characters overlap borders and make it seem like you're playing a board game. Seriously, there's one part where a character jumped off a cliff, and it looked like he just slid himself over a bit.

My last gripe is the presentation. The menus look absolutely terrible. They look like graphics some 12 year old made for their geocities Final Fantasy VII fansite. The buttons have shitty sprites, and horrible animations. Some of the combat buttons are awfully small and hard to press. It doesn't matter though, you won't have to get used to anything. You probably shouldn't play Sonic Chronicles. It's a bad game, that seems like the development team put almost no effort into it. If I had to grade the game, I'd give it a 1 out of 10. Please, don't buy it.

Recently, one of my favorite places in the whole world, my local cyber-cafe/arcade was turned into a pool hall. It was the last of its kind in my wonderfully dull neighborhood, and it was one of the only game-bearing places that wasn't virally infected by 6 year olds who pretend to play racing games by maniacally turning the steering wheel in sync with the demo on the screen because their mothers will not give them quarters. All of the machines were working, all of the games were good, and the atmosphere was great. There was always pool tables, but gamers still had a home in the back, where all the arcade machines and gaming computers stood up wondrously.

However, being a public place in the suburbs of New York City, no one really cared about the games. They came for the music, the alcohol bar, and the pool. After all, why would you go out to play games? That's incredibly anti-social, isn't it? I mean, playing Street Fighter III won't get you laid.

So, the owner of the place removed all of the machines, except for the DDR machine, and put even more pool tables in their place. Now the place is just a gathering of popular preppy teens.

Now, my point here is, I think this is what killed the arcade industry. It wasn't the lack of originality. It was the lack of personality. In the 80s, arcades were popular social places. All kinds of people went there to play, and they weren't criticized for doing so. Today, the arcade industry needs to appeal to everyone, just like the console industry does. Arcade games haven't upgraded to meet the popular American play styles, they're just translations of Japanese arcade games. Fighting games were never that popular in America, aside from Mortal Kombat, and racing/ddr machines are all too expensive to purchase.

I think someone should step up and create a brand new arcade experience for America. An affordable, attractive, and casual experience. Once this experience is created, arcades will become popular, and hardcore arcade games can sprout between the casual, popular arcade experience, sort of like how Pac-Man attracted older people and non-gamers to arcades in the 80s. I hope that someone out there thinks the same way that I do, and tries to fix this. Gamers need a place to go that isn't their bedrooms.

So this morning I woke up at 5:30AM to get ready for school, and I came on Dtoid like I always do. There, I saw this post about how Mario Kart Wii doesn't have any online communication. All of a sudden, people commented about how this has somehow changed their mind about buying the game.

Now I remind you, one of the DS's top selling games, which has wifi, is Mario Kart DS. Didn't have communication, now did it?

Seriously, although it would be great to have voice communication, you guys have to remember. Nintendo probably wouldn't even have a wifi service if we didn't complain about that when the Gamecube was around. They probably just threw it in for us, so we stopped whining. But, no. We were spoiled, by other companies. I know that Nintendo has no excuse for not putting in voice communication, it shouldn't be a selling point for these games, especially because Nintendo would probably screw up voice chat in the first place. And, where would you plug a microphone into the wiimote? You'd have to take out the nunchuck or any other addon.

I think it's fine the way it is, without idiots plaguing the wifi service. Nintendo has already shown us they aren't good at online gaming. They hardly even fixed the problem where people disconnect from DS wifi. You should appreciate that the games are still fantastic after all these years, without needing wifi, and stop being such spoiled brats.

For the past six or so months, I've been waiting for Mistwalker's epic Lost Odyssey to be released. After playing Blue Dragon, I was very disappointed. I expected Blue Dragon to be the must have RPG for the 360. Being skeptical, I waited for reviews of Lost Odyssey in order to form a more rounded opinion.

I couldn't have made a worse decision.

When I read the IGN, GameSpot, and 1up reviews of Lost Odyssey, I began to notice a trend. What's happening to game journalism? It seems that when Spore was announced, and Portal came out, a magic spell was cast on the entire gaming press, making them innovation whores. Lost Odyssey was receiving mediocre grades because it's traditional, regardless of it's well written story.

Lost Odyssey is a fine game, and doesn't take risks for a good reason. Most JRPGs in the past few years that have tried to take risk were fun, but forgettable, with the exception of Final Fantasy XII, which is a change for the series but not 100% innovative. People need to understand that JRPGs are traditional by default, and that's what gave the genre it's name. The genre is heavily story based, and it keeps their gameplay intact for hardcore fans.

GameSpot, IGN and 1up, Final Fantasy VII was a great game in your opinion, wasn't it? You flourished it with near perfect grades, even though every RPG from eras before it shared the same gameplay. What happened now? Portal changed your life, and mine too, but it's unnecessary to make every game different. That will only dry out ideas, and curse the industry for the rest of its days.

So the other day, I was wasting some time, sitting at my desk, and I remembered that I had never beaten many of the world's most famous RPGs.

So I've decided to start a playthrough.

I've decided to start with 16bit era RPGs. This is my current list (in order of playing):

*edited according to suggestions*

Final Fantasy IV (GBA or SNES?)
EarthBound
Chrono Trigger
Final Fantasy V (GBA or SNES?)
Super Mario RPG
Final Fantasy VI (GBA or SNES?)
Secret of Mana
Seiken Densetsu 3


Queue for later:
Breath of Fire 1 & 2 (GBA or SNES?)
Tales of Phantasia (Playstation version, Translated.)

I'm open to more suggestions. Dtoiders, go go go!