I have a legitimate series of reasons, please forgive me and don't send Denzel Washington to come beat the living tar out of me. This stretch of the year is one where I tend to vanish from any form of internet socialism as my urge to play games and do shit overcomes me. In short I've been doing what every good Dtoider does, play a fuckload of games.

Champions Online

Superheroes make everything better, this goes without question and is an indisputable fact. Take away Daredevil from his movie and you have Gigli, remove The Hulk and nobody would know about Lou Ferrigno, strip away Ghost Rider from Ghost Rider and we have... well, another bad Nicholas Cage movie instead of another bad Nicholas Cage movie featuring a flaming skull bike rider guy. What I'm getting at is simple, the fact that I can slap on any goofy costume, fly around with awesome jet boots, throw semi trucks at bad guys, and then promptly follow up by blasting them away with a super chest laser beam thing instantly makes this game more appealing than any of the knight-elf-mohawk crap you see in most other MMOs. Couple this in with a game that is surprisingly action oriented, by MMO standards, and you have me hooked on a game that I personally think has enough legs to eventually be a WoW contender.

Duck Hunting

See, around October I actually leave my technological mecha of gamer crap and go outside and do this thing that involves me putting on a ton of camouflage that's intended to make me look like a floating caucasian head amongst a mass of trees and grass (or a very bad version of one of the Bushwhackers). I follow this up by aiming a large noisy gun and shooting at geese and ducks (the equivalent of sky carp) until one of them falls from the sky to become my feast. Now before all of the animal rights tree hugger hippy fucks get on me for killing natures creatures, I highly doubt any of these birds will cry if anything bad were to happen to me so I'm not going to shed any tears for them.

Being the Goddamn Batman

Yeah, Arkham Asylum's been out for a while but I'm finding odd replay value in the game. I dunno, maybe it falls back to the fact that superheroes make everything better, but I keep popping the game back in to pound in countless amounts of thugs while going “I'm Batman” over and over.

Killing All of the Fucking Aliens

Aliens are a constant and growing threat to modern day society. In fact they've grown to be such a threat that the government now ranks them only behind Robots (because robots are everywhere, and they eat old peoples medicine for fuel. And when they grab you with those metal claws you can't break free, because they're made of metal and robots are strong). Because of this bothersome threat my friends and I have taken it upon ourselves to stage a defense against aliens through Halo ODST's firefight mode. Humans - 1 / Aliens - 0.

Uncharted 2

Is it possible for a game to be this good? I mean seriously, I know everybody is already well on board the “Uncharted 2 is so goddamn amazing” train... but I've been trying to pump people up for this game for a good damn while now as well as hyping myself up, and yet even I was amazed at how great this game was. By the way, that Memory Card piece about the gunfight inside of the falling building... perfect, that moment was probably one of the most jaw dropping experiences I've had in gaming probably ever.

Anime Con!!

I've also been prepping myself for an anime convention about a half hour from where I live. Part of the preparation comes with getting ready to cosplay at the event; since I am more gamer than otaku yet my cosplays will consist of Dante (Devil May Cry 4 version, along with Waffle King's Nevan Rock Band guitar) as well as Nathan Drake from the already-mentioned awesome Uncharted series. Considering, as Trev can confirm, my hometown pretty much blows in almost every conceivable way I prep heavily for anime conventions since they provide a nice escape from my otherwise mundane reality. Booze also fixes this, but it's more fun to drink booze with a babe dressed as Yoko from Gurren Lagann.

Sadly, I'll probably be gone from Destructoid (besides commenting) for periodic bits as the anime con grows closer, Modern Warfare 2 comes out, and the whole holiday thing happens. Hope to blog again soon otherwise I'll see you all online for some FNFs or something.

(Note: I wrote this entire review before reading Jim Sterling's review of the same game. For the record, I strongly disagree with his review and think he bypassed most of the positives of the game. Not to mention reading that review was like watching a person go to McDonald's and get angry because he couldn't get a pizza, complaining that the game wasn't something that it never intended to be. My only rebuttal is that it seemed like Jim played the game for maybe an hour or two and simply put it down and made a brash review).

Die hard fans of the Final Fantasy franchise have no doubt been anticipating the PSP fighter Dissidia. Now while a certain pointy-eared vigilante named Batman might have overshadowed the release of this mash-up I’ve made an attempt to keep Dissidia in the forefront as much as I can. Since the full game has been on western shores for a bit I can safely tell you that my efforts were not in vein, because honestly if you completely hate Dissidia then I seriously question whether or not you like things that are good.

For those of you who are still unaware of what exactly Dissidia is then allow me to give you a summary. Two gods known as Cosmos and Chaos have been waging an eternal war of light and darkness, a war that has remained balanced through the ages. Both sides gather their chosen warriors from various realms, the heroes and villains from the first ten proper Final Fantasy titles, and a good old-fashioned battle of good versus evil takes place with the fate of the world in the balance.

Oddly enough Dissidia doesn’t start up with the role-call and gathering of the various warriors, accumulating with the huge confrontation. Rather, Dissidia opens up with the huge brawl of good versus evil (all shown to you in a very glorious full motion video) and quickly explains that Chaos’s forces have disrupted the war’s balance in their favor. In short the game opens with the good guys barely surviving and bad guys winning, an odd decision in my opinion but one that ultimately works out in the end.

Sandwiched between the, admittedly, lengthy introduction are two tutorial missions to help get you accustomed to the mechanics of Dissidia. Upon starting a new game you’re thrown into an easy battle as the Warrior of Light in order to get a feel for the controls, a handy nice touch that prevents you from jumping headstrong into the game and getting overwhelmed. Another tutorial accompanies the opening to the Destiny Odyssey story mode, again putting you in the shoes of Warrior of Light and giving you a feel for the story modes combat/chess piece system. The tutorials may seem a tad tedious to some, however when compared to the total amount of storyline content found in Dissidia these tutorials are nothing but short, necessary, distractions.



Dissidia packs two different storyline modes into the game; Destiny Odyssey and Shade Impulse, the later of which is unlocked upon completion of a Destiny Odyssey storyline. There are ten different chapters to Destiny Odyssey, each one focusing around the storyline of each Final Fantasy protagonist and his quest to retrieve one of ten crystals as instructed by Cosmos (confused? Don’t worry that big intro I mentioned explains it).

Each character’s Destiny Odyssey storyline functions pretty much like you’d expect. The characters go through their quests, go through gripes and pains similar to what they experienced in their stand-alone Final Fantasy games, and cumulate with your character confronting his or her nemesis. While I will admit that I have not championed all then of the Destiny Odyssey story lines myself yet, the ones I have played through were pleasing experiences and each storyline felt like a fitting extension to the characters original game. None of the characters do anything drastically uncharacteristic and each hero/villain confrontation seems to be very authentic to source material (for example, Dissidia does a truly great job of recapturing how Sephiroth is such an integral force in Cloud’s life). In summary, if you have a favorite Final Fantasy game then you will probably feel joy while playing through its respective Destiny Odyssey storyline.

The Shade Impulse storyline is a second story that you unlock upon completion of any Destiny Odyssey and functions as Dissidia’s second half of the story. Instead of having different storylines per character, however, Shade Impulse features all of the heroes in one overarching story that cumulates with the final battle. This allows you to see the end of the game and do it as the character of your choice, with only minor alterations as each character has another run-in with their respective enemy. It is to be noted though that you should not enter this mode with a low level character, it is a noticeably more difficult mode even compared to the hardest Destiny Odyssey quests.



Beyond the storyline modes Dissidia has to offer, there are a variety of more traditional fighter modes to keep playing. First up is Arcade Mode, which is everything you would expect from a typical fighter. You’re put up against a series of random foes with the difficulty progressively rising on you as you near the end, and completion is rewarded with a large sum of money that you can use to unlock more things. Arcade Mode provides a fitting diversion from the storyline of the game, and lets you just beat up on a few helpless foes.

Quick Battle mode is your standard versus mode. Here you can set up a match and customize a series of features before battle; who you fight, where you fight, and what level your foe is. You can even, to an extent, customize how the AI fights with the character. For me personally, Quick Battle became a good way to test out a few battle tactics and figure out ways to beat foes that were troubling me in Story Mode.

Dissidia also features a two-player mode, referred to as Communications Mode, that allows you to send one of your customized fighters into battle against a friend’s fighter. Sadly this mode can only be done via Ad-Hoc due to a lack of a true-online mode and since I am the only resident PSP owner who owns Dissidia I was not able to review this portion of the game. I will hopefully provide a follow-up article to this review at a later date that details the functionality of this mode.



The final game play mode tha Dissidia features is the Duel Colosseum, which is essentially a survival mode or an endless version of Arcade Mode. You pick whom you want to fight as and from there three ‘cards’ are drawn for you, from there you can pick one of the three cards and determine what happens next. The three cards vary between opponents, treasure chests, and job cards. Opponents explain themselves; you fight another Dissidia character with the chance to win money from them. Treasures require you to spend said earned cash to receive an item, ranging from anything to a basic crafting item to a rare stone needed to receive a powerful weapon. Job cards alter what cards are drawn, how many are drawn, and other scenarios such as healing you after a fight. If you’re one of those people who just absolutely has to get everything in the game and get every character up to level 100 then this is definitely the mode for you, and this mode has been my main area of focus since I got the game. It is important to mention however that the Duel Colosseum isn’t available at the start of the game and is unlocked once you complete the Shade Impulse storyline once.

There are a ton of items to unlock through Dissidia’s various game play modes as well. All of the money you earn through fights, both gil and PP currencies, can be used to purchase new weapons to improve your characters statistics as well as provide secondary abilities. Other things can be unlocked as well including the ability to play as the villains in the various game modes, story mode being the exception, as well as alternate costumes for every character in the game. Other nice items you can discover are two secret characters in the game, more background music, and various voice over works for each character in the game.



The actual fighting mechanics of Dissidia are one of the main things that deserve praise. Each character has two different kinds of attacks in the game; HP attacks and Bravery attacks. The names of these attacks are rather self-explanatory; HP attacks take away an opponent’s health, Bravery attacks reduce an opponent’s bravery and builds up yours. The trick with Dissidia is to keep a good balance of HP and Bravery attacks in play, as both are of equal importance to achieve victory. Hit Points are your health, the most basic stat in the game, and when this reaches zero the fight is over. Bravery Points are the interesting variable that can change the momentum of a fight very quickly. The damage an HP attack deals is directly determined by how many Bravery Points a fighter has. For example; if Sephiroth has 975 BP and then connects with his Octaslash HP attack, the Octaslash does 975 HP damage. While they do no HP damage on their own, landing Bravery attacks are just as important as HP attacks not only because they raise your BP but they also reduce the BP of your opponent. So while you wont be doing any health damage to your opponent, you’re preventing him from landing an attack that could be fatal. This gives Dissidia an extra level of depth to its game play, as you need to keep your variables under control.

Graphically, Dissidia is one of the more impressive PSP titles to come along for a while. While the character models themselves are of absolutely no concern, the arenas themselves are a slight hodgepodge of good and “meh”. Certain arenas such as the ones from FF7 and FFX are exceptionally gorgeous looking arenas full of motion and color, while others like the FF2 and FF6 arenas are rather bland use the same texture on every wall. Thankfully there’s noticeably more ‘good’ graphic wise then there is ‘bad’, however it’s those few areas of the game that make you wonder how much effort was put into them.

Fans, myself included, raised an eyebrow when we were told that Dissidia’s battles would be reminiscent of Advent Children. I’m thankful to say that Dissidia actually accomplishes this. As each characters moves combine with the destructible environments found in each level, it’s very easy to create an Advent Children or dare I even say Dragon Ball Z level battle that makes you really feel as if you’re laying waste to your opponent as you send Tidus flying through a small mountain.



Music has seemingly never been a downside of the Final Fantasy franchise, so it would be hard to assume that Dissidia doesn’t continue the trend of good soundtracks. Even with this in the back of my mind, the soundtrack for this game can only be described as really damn good. Dissidia features recreations of tracks from all across the proper Final Fantasy titles as well as original pieces exclusively for the game. These pieces are used in all sorts of facets in the game as well as traditional themes will play as background music for each Destiny Odyssey storyline. Other various themes are used for battle music and menu themes, including a nice remixed Chocobo theme for the game’s Data Install feature. Dissidia simply has no bad music in it at all from start to finish. As a special note of interest, the ending credits theme for Dissidia is quite possibly the most beautiful piece of music I have ever heard in a game and is a true example of the contributions Nobuo Uematsu made to the franchise over the years.

Dissidia is not without faults though, like any other game. A minor thing that can occasionally agitate is that if an enemy starts an HP attack that’s a combo attack, even if you get hit by the very last hit in that chain you take full damage as if you were caught by the full combo. This can be annoying from time to time if you’re fighting a combo-heavy opponent, the only silver lining to this is that you don’t lost as much bravery by only getting caught in part of a combo.

Choas, Dissidia’s final boss, is one of those bosses who carefully tiptoes the line between hard and cheap. His native arena is small and yet his character has many long-range attacks or sweeping moves that damage anything in a certain radius, some of these attacks are unblock-able even and can only be disrupted by specific attacks. While he is certainly a beatable foe, which I might add is quite satisfying, he can certainly be viewed as an annoyance to some but a challenge to others.

The one true flaw I feel exists in Dissidia is the lack of a story mode for the villains. This one is a head scratcher for me considering the whole marketing ploy of the game revolved around “What will you fight for?”, implying you can be good or evil, yet you can only fight as the good guys (something we’ve done already through the proper Final Fantasy titles). The villains definitely get a high amount of face time through the current story, however it would have been nice to fight things out from their point of view and maybe live out a few “What if?” scenarios. Perhaps this is something that can be addressed should a Dissidia sequel come around.



Dissidia: Final Fantasy is definitely a game that drips with fan service for die-hard fans of the franchise. There is clearly a tremendous amount of polish put into making each character feel as authentic to their original universe; stemming from things such as Cecil’s Dark Knight and Paladin modes, Terra’s Atma-Weapon like sword, dialogue boxes kept in the same color and style as each character’s game, and even certain limit break procedures are kept the same. While Dissidia is meant for long-time fans it is also a pretty accessible fighter to those who aren’t as rooted in the franchise as others as it offers a fun yet surprisingly deep fighting experience. It’s hard to argue against Dissidia: Final Fantasy not being one of the top ten, perhaps even top five, PSP games of all time.

(Now, I'll admit that I originally wrote this piece for a different gaming site as an optional secondary review of the game. Thus I submitted my own scores of the game, as seen below. Normally I would omit these from my blog, however considering the length and detail I tried to give with this review I'm going to submit my base scores anyway for reader benefit).

Presentation : 8.5
The cut scenes and overall style of the game are very well done.

Gameplay : 8.5
Not a traditional fighter per say, but offers a modified Kingdom Hearts style with surprising depth.

Sound : 10
Gorgeous recreations of classic Final Fantasy themes, and an overall amazing soundtrack.

Longevity : 9.0
With the various gameplay modes, unlockable items, and different storylines you can easily put 40+ hours into this game.

Overall : 9.0
A very worthy addition to any PSP library, and a reason for die-hard Final Fantasy fans to finally buy themselves a PSP if they already don’t have one.

My Recommendation: Buy It!

...because first I'm going to precede this blog with a large spoiler warning for anyone who shall read this article. Anyone who hasn't beaten Batman: Arkham Asylum should not read this because it talks directly about the ending of the game. Plus, if you're reading this and haven't beaten Batman yet, shame on you.... go beat the game... now... it's a great game.



People seem to be bitching that the final boss in Arkham Asylum was a lame out-of-character thing simply designed to fit the role of "final boss". So the wambulance has been out for a little while now and I say to you all STFUAJPG! The Arkham Asylum ending wasn't that bad because there was simply no other logical way to put together said ending. Any other final battle or ending would have been even further jarring given the direction the plot was going and would have been an even worse ending.

First in regards to Joker's self-titan-injection being out of character; we're talking about the Joker here, a character who has made a career from of being out of character and doing off-the-wall things when going up against The Goddamn Batman. Whether or not you believe Joker is just bat-shit crazy or has some sort of super-sanity that makes him crazy, you'd have to believe that if Joker was cornered against Batman and had the chance to make himself a physical superior to Batman he'd take it! In regards to the actual battle itself, yeah it was kind of lame fighting a bunch of guards and just getting a few punches in on Mr. J. However his actions during the battle were pretty in character given that he's a giant attention whore through-and-through and that a news chopper might actually distract him from killing Batman.

Secondly, having the Joker as a final boss in a video game is flawed inherently. Joker, in video game terms, is a terrible final boss; he poses no direct physical threat to Batman, is a flee-instead-of-fight character, and relies on gimmicks more so then brute force. When you strip away the whole Batman feel of the game and just look at the formula that makes Joker, he is a terrible recipe as a game villain. The Titan Joker battle was the best possible way to have any kind of engaging climactic Joker vs. Batman battle because any of the more traditional comic-book like final encounters would have been even more lame then what Arkham Asylum currently has.



---Have Batman straight up fight Normal Joker? Unless you wanna see the Clown Prince of Crime punched around for 5 minutes then no, that would have been stupid.

---Have Batman solve some elaborate puzzle and then simply throw cuffs on Joker? Yeah, that would have been extremely anti-climatic especially considering the whole premise of the game revolved around Joker pretty much getting caught by Batman without a fight.

--Have Joker stand back and shoot his gun a lot while Batman tries to fight through a bunch of thugs to get to him? Unless you'd want a copy/paste of the Poison Ivy battle, then I doubt you'd want this.

Face it; while Joker is a terrific storyline villain he is a terrible video game villain, and the ending to the game was the best possible outcome we could have had. However come the inevitable sequel to Arkham Asylum (Batman: Gotham City, perhaps?) there are other members of Batman's rogues gallery that would make much better adversaries in video game terms.

---Hush (close quarters gun-fu/martial arts battles)
---Mr. Freeze (dodge ice beams, slide around in packs of ice, and fight a guy in a big metal suit)
---Ra's Al Ghul (big elaborate sword fight)
---Clayface (can turn into any weapon)



Arkham Asylum utilized what it had to probably the best logical potential. Now don't get me wrong, there can be room for improvement come a sequel. Also, was I the only person who was bugged by the fact that Clayface in this game was not Matt Hagan?

So, from this day forth all complaints about the bosses in Arkham Asylum are re-directed towards this random video of Arnold Schwarzenegger in a Japanese commercial. In fact, it's so random that the only link I can make to it and this blog is the fact that Arnold played Mr. Freeze.

All right we all know that Sony announced the worst kept secret in the industry by announcing the PS3-Slim and announcing that it will come out at $299. Hooray, I like cheaper prices just like everybody else. And then I was excited thinking, “sweet this means the current PS3 SKU is going to drop even lower!” only to see “All current PS3s drop to $299 in price immediately”. Lame.

So, we’re going to have two different PS3 models out on the market at the same time and they’re both going to be the exact same price? Am I the only person who thinks this is retarded as hell, an older model being priced at the same price as a new model? If I’d go to my local GameStop and ask to buy a PlayStation 3 right now for $299 they’d tell me to just wait two weeks and buy a slim model for the exact same price (yes, my GameStop is employed by people with common sense).

With the current pricing setup Sony has in place, they’ve essentially rendered the original PS3 obsolete in every way. Who in their right mind is going to buy a PS3 knowing that there’s a more energy efficient and slimmer unit available that does everything the original unit did plus comes with a larger hard drive for the exact same price? Okay, so you can’t install Linux on the PS3 Slim, whoopee fucking do. If you are savvy enough to utilize Linux properly you already have a machine more properly capable of running it anyway and don’t even need to put it on a gaming console.

Sony, just as you finally do something right you follow it up with something that leaves a giant question mark over my head. Yes I can understand that you don’t want your older-model PS3’s selling for the same price, or cheaper, then the PSP Go but you just don’t sell an obsolete model for the same price as your newest. Ever. People wouldn’t buy an Xbox 360 Pro for the same price as an Elite. They wouldn’t buy a 2008 Monte Carlo if it cost the same as a 2009 Monte Carlo. You don’t buy third deck stadium tickets if you can get front row for the same value. I highly doubt anybody would have been happy if the original PS2’s would have been the same price as a Slim.

Sony, the PS3 is personally my favorite console of this generation and I really didn’t think you needed to lower your price in the first place considering everything that comes with a PS3. However I swear your mantra this generation is to always follow up something right with something wrong, or at the very least bewildering.

To my own amazement the Dissidia demo hit PlayStation Network at the end of June and somehow missed my attention for almost two weeks (that’s what finally starting Mass Effect does to you). Needless to say, the moment my eyes found the PSP demo available my bandwidth immediately went towards downloading 76 megabytes of glorious fan service. While Dissidia has been available in Japan for a while now and others have demoed the game via E3 and other similar conventions, this demo was my first hands-on experience with the game.

The idea of a Final Fantasy mash-up fighter has been something myself, along with many others, have been dreaming of for quite some time given the great unique characters the series has spawned. However, I was still hesitant to fully embrace Dissidia leading up to the demo since I still had distant echoes of Ehrgeiz etched into my gamer soul back on the PS1.

I need to get this out of the way, Dissidia will very likely go down as one of the absolute best PSP titles ever. With the total hours I’ve put into the Dissidia demo I could have beaten God of War: Chains of Olympus twice and put a very sizable dent into Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII. My skepticism went out the window after a half hour with the game and thus my interest level for this game propelled from want to need.

Dissidia’s demo only lets you play through arcade mode on either normal or hard difficulty. None of the leveling up features or story mode features that accompany the final game is present. The demo lets you play as five characters (four heroes, one villain) listed below:

* Onion Knight (Final Fantasy III)
* Cecil (Final Fantasy IV)
* Terra (Final Fantasy VI)
* Cloud (Final Fantasy VII)
* Sephiroth (Final Fantasy VII)



The arcade mode puts you up against a series of foes in one-on-one fights, like a typical arcade mode found in a fighting game. Stats and abilities are preset for every character, both on normal and hard mode so the fights are even for the demo. Your chosen foes in each battle consist of other characters in the game (Squall, Garland, etc.). I logged most of my time playing as Sephiroth & Cloud, since Final Fantasy VII is my personal favorite of the series, however I did give every character a couple of sessions on arcade mode to get a feel for them.

Each character I fought as, and against, seemed respectably different from the others giving a nice taste of variety and style required to make each fighter effective. Cloud, for example, is a sword fighter with a great deal of power but has a bit of a build-up before each attack, making him a close range fighter who requires a lot of precision and good timing. Terra, on the other hand, uses a lot of spells and ranged attacks while having a sword as a close ranged backup, thus distance must be used to make her effective. Then there’s Kefka, who seems to fill the Voldo role as the odd chaotic fighter in the game and fights just like his character would, a dirty little bitch.

The demo effectively teaches you the game play through a few quick slides that appear during loading screens. In short; square and circle perform your HP and assisting attacks, triangle allows you to run up walls or grind along rails, X jumps, left shoulder button controls what you’re locked on to, and the right shoulder button lets you block and can be used along with triangle to perform a dash.

The combat in Dissidia proved to be much deeper then I was expecting for a PSP fighter. Simply mashing the square button might get you through a battle or two on normal mode, but once you get to the later stages of the demo’s arcade mode both on normal and hard you’ll find that your foe will not tolerate your one dimensional attack.

Saying timing is key might seem obvious, given that timing is usually a key factor in any fighter, but precision timing with both attacking and blocking seems even more key in Dissidia . A majority of the attacks in the game seem to have a specific range to them where they are most effective, thus being too close or too far away while attempting an attack or spell will result in the enemy countering or avoiding the attack.

Every character’s attack is a combination attack or spell rather then a single jab or attack like a traditional fighter, so using poor or hasty judgment with your attacks with result in a very emphatic punishment. The same can be said about rolling or dodging as well. When everything is rolled together battles can become quite intense and epic, resulting in confrontations you’d expect to find in Advent Children rather then a fighter. Don’t believe me? Go find some Youtube Dissidia replays, like this one, and tell me otherwise.



Dissidia's visuals are rather impressive given it’s reliance on hand held technology. The style of the game seems reminiscent of a slightly more anime-styled version of Kingdom Hearts. The character models are quite impressive in their levels of detail and each character’s animations seem to flow nicely from one to another. The arenas themselves seem to be the one potential weak point of everything visually only because they seem to be a mixed bag of good and bad. Textures on walls seem a tad repeated and some levels look slightly on the bland side, like the Final Fantasy VI level, while others are very impressive, such as the the Final Fantasy X Zanarkand level.

This mixed bag of levels seems to make up for things in regards to their interactivity and surprisingly high amount of destructible objects. Pretty much every wall you see can be scaled with no magic goofy invisible walls blocking the way while platforms and pillars seem to be fair game in the destruction market. It makes a fight feel a lot more epic seeing Sephiroth crash through a series of pillars in order to get to Squall, instead of flying around them.



One thing I cannot stress any more is how impressed I was with the levels of detail that were put into the game to make each character feel very authentic. Terra fights with the Atma Weapon and not a generic nameless sword, item and spell windows for each character resemble the style that was used in their respective game, each character/level seems to be accompanied by various themes from each respective game (like FFX’s battle theme and Zanarkand theme), and Sephiroth’s Hell’s Gate attack is the same stab that slew poor Aeris, being quick examples I can throw out. Dissidia appears to be filled with things, both little and large, regarding each character that can make die-hard fans of their respective game squee with childish delight, and I can only imagine how much more the full game will have. It seems SquareEnix might have their finger on the pulse of the die-hard audience and are delivering what the people want in terms of authenticity.

If you have a PSP and want a good game I’d highly recommend picking up Dissidia or at the very least give the demo a ride around the block. If you’re a die-hard Final Fantasy fan this game should be a day-one purchase for you, and if you don’t own a PSP Dissidia and Crisis Core should really make you consider buying one. Needless for me to say that August 25th is really going to be a brutal day for me in the wallet as both Arkham Asylum and Dissidia hit shelves the same day.

As written, by yours truly, for Gamer Limit.com

No doubt one of the most anticipated first person shooters of this year has to be Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, the first title in the modern-era Call of Duty offshoot was by many considered Game of the Year and a later released “Game of the Year Edition” for all right and reason verified that. Modern Warfare featured a campaign that was jaw-dropping and epic, and it’s multiplayer was so addicting that it pushed the Halo 3 juggernaut out of the number 1 spot on Xbox Live’s activity charts.

Nobody can deny the success of the first game, however it had its flaws just like any other title and there are a lot of things still left unchecked that Modern Warfare 2 can modify. This is where I come in and explain what should be changed to avoid similar flaws. More after the jump.

As a prologue to this editorial, anybody who follows my normal writing and blogs will know that I tend to do a few of these “Here’s what should be done to improve _____ game”. So before I continue on let me explain why I fancy making such suggestions; first, a lot of the things I suggest are well thought out and usually carry reflections of similar feelings I’ve seen throughout the gaming community. I try to not make rash statements without at least finding foundation in what I think. Secondly, I tend like my ideas a lot and swear to God that the Dreamcast would have gone down as the most successful console in history had Sega listened to me!

Now while a lot of people might gawk at the idea of modifying things citing “if it aint broke don’t fix it” I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that I don’t want Modern Warfare 2 to simply feel like an expansion pack for the original game. I don’t think anybody wants to see the fanbase become split and protest the game by complaining about it being a little too similar to the original, similar to what happened with fans when they saw how very similar Resident Evil 5 was to Resident Evil 4. Modern Warfare 2 should trump the original in every way and make the game feel essentially obsolete, not feel more like Modern Warfare v1.5. In order to prevent this from happening a few things really need to be changed in order to keep the experience fresh and new for gamers when it comes to this highly anticipated sequel.



Fix martyrdom

As arguably the most annoying thing in COD4, the martyrdom perk needs some major tweaking in order to prevent people from complaining any further about it. You’ll note how I said tweaked, not removed like others would like. Martyrdom was still the best go-to perk for eliminating those pesky campers who sat around a tight corner spraying at anything in site (you know those people, those people who can aim in one spot and think they have “skill”). Overall there are two things about this perk that could be very easily modified to make it balanced.

1. The first thing would be to increase the fuse of the martyrdom grenade, make it last a second or two longer so any enemy who’s not in a prone position can easily get away from the grenade. In short, make the fuse last so long that if the martyrdom grenade kills you then you’re simply an idiot for standing there that long.

2. The martyrdom grenade should count as one of the two grenades a player normally carries with them, this way if a player runs out of grenades they won’t magically get a third grenade upon death. This would also help tone down at least a small fraction of the grenade spamming commonly complained about in COD4 and World at War.

Choose the gun you want… for a price

Possibly the one true frustrating thing, at least for me, in Modern Warfare was the grind required to get some of the guns I enjoyed. I had to wait way too long to get my precious Barrett .50 Cal and friends also had to wait various amounts of time in order to get their favorite gun of choice. This also, in my opinion, hampered the game play a little bit as the game nearly forced you to use guns you didn’t want to use in order to speed up the leveling process. A little flexibility in regards to weapon unlocking wouldn’t hurt at all and would allow players to play the game their own way a lot faster.

A good weapon unlock system that could be used for Modern Warfare 2 could be a kind of level-up-and-purchase system. For example; if you rank up once in a match you are then given 1 point that you can use towards unlocking a weapon. Each gun at this point would then be given a price tag (ex: Barret .50 Cal = 7 Points) and early or weaker weapons would be cheaper then your high quality power weapons you’d get in the 50+ level range.

So while you can in theory get the super awesome gun you like the most in the game early on, you’d have to level up a certain amount of times to get it meaning you’d have to muscle through a few levels with a weaker gun a little longer then you would normally in order to attain a much grander prize. Meanwhile weapon add-on’s like scopes, bayonets, and other such items would retain the same system as in previous games meaning you’d have to use the gun to get the perks of it.



How about you not be the Juggernaut, bitch?

Juggernaut inherently was a broken perk to begin with in COD4 because a player needed to have two perks to negate a juggernaut with balanced effectiveness. First you obviously needed Stopping Power in order to lessen the ammo required to take him down. Secondly, you needed to have Sonic Boom in order to make grenades effective against a juggernaut as well.

A player basically had to have an entire class dedicated to just taking out a juggernaut, and if you’re a sniper who uses something other then Stopping Power (ie: Overkill) then you’re essentially useless against one even with a .50 cal sniper rifle. Juggernaut needs to be modified into a less noticeable health gain, simple as that. Just lessen the amount of extra health a juggernaut gets so that players don’t need to unload entire clips at them to score a kill, and so that point blank shotgun blasts or other powerful impacts like high end sniper rifles or RPG’s take him down with little effort.

Make indicators more noticeable

This is a very short and too the point fix. Make the grenade indicators and other points-of-interest stand out like a sore thumb on the heads up display. During moments of high intensity combat were there is dirt and debris flying all around you the standard white indicator tends to get obscured by everything going on around you, not to mention a brightly lit environment naturally obscures said indicator. Just simply do something to make points-of-interest stand out more, like put a bright flashing neon sign that says “EAT AT JOES” over them.

Make last stand a surprise tactic

Last Stand on it’s own is still a pretty effective perk, however its usefulness is negated by the game removing the element of surprise from it. In the campaign’s finale, you go into Last Stand mode and catch the bad guy by surprise to win the day. In multiplayer however the perk doesn’t carry the same element of surprise.

When a gamer finds an enemy they traditionally don’t stop shooting until they see the kill confirmation pop up on their screen, a +10 in the case of Modern Warfare, and thus they’ll keep unloading their clip onto a baddie even as they go into Last Stand mode. This, as you can obviously see, takes away the main purpose of Last Stand.

A very easy simple fix would be to give the attacker his points simply for dropping the enemy, putting him into Last Stand, and not for the kill itself. This way if the player see’s the confirmed “kill” on their screen they’ll more then likely try to move on not knowing that their prey is in fact loading his pistol for his final salvo, providing the attacker with one hell of a “WTF” moment a few seconds later.

This fix would dual benefit the game; Last Stand would have that surprise factor again, and players who send a person into Last Stand mode wouldn’t get their kill stolen by another person who takes out the player a half second later after all the dirty work is done. All in all, the main attacker gets his points and the Last Stander gets his chance at revenge.



Grenade spam

This is a given, everybody hated the grenade spamming in Call of Duty 4. Every game on Shipment would start with the initial couple second sprint followed by the obligatory blind grenade throw over a few obstacles to score a cheap kill. In fact, pretty much every game started out with a blind grenade throw for a cheap kill.

he grenades themselves in the game aren’t the problem, the problem is that everyone always has grenades and if they have them then they’re going to use them. Need a good way to lessen the grenade spamming? How about grenades become a perk? I like the idea of needing to sacrifice extra ammo or claymores in order to become Sir Spams A Lot. The grenade spamming from the last few Call of Duty games has, in my eyes, shown us that grenades should be a privilege and not a right.

Give me something for prestige

Prestige mode, both in Modern Warfare and World at War, really functioned as nothing short of an internet-penis designed to flaunt how much free time you have and nothing more. Besides some gloating, there’s really no reason to use this mode unless you are just that bored. Why not give some kind of option for the player when it comes to prestige? If a player is basically going to reduce himself back down to a grunt again, why not let him keep one of his guns or something? My suggestion for spicing up Prestige Mode is to make it a 3-choice option.

Choice 1: You reduce yourself back to complete nothingness; no guns, no perks, no achievements. An option identical to what the current Prestige Mode is.

Choice 2: You get to keep all of your unlocked weapons but lose everything else, including peripheral weapon items. The downside to this is that your player achievements are not cleared out upon doing this prestige, meaning you don’t get any of those nice 500 or 1000 point bonuses along your way back to the top nor will you get any bonuses when you meet the criteria required for regaining a weapon peripheral.

Choice 3: You get to keep one gun, peripheral items and all, and everything else is reduced to its original starting point. The downside being is that all of the achievements linked to that one gun are kept, meaning you won’t get any benefit from using that one gun. Along with that, keeping this one gun after your prestige would result in that gun being swapped out for another gun of that class. Meaning if you decided to keep your M4 Carbine, the M16 would take the place of the M4 in the tree of un-lockable weapons.

There’s only other complaint about Prestige Mode in its current format is that if I want to show the game to a few of my friends I can’t exactly show them much that is really cool if I’ve recently done Prestige Mode. A temporary “Anti Prestige” option would be nice, in that it reverts you back to your previous level 55/65 state with everything you previously had unlocked back at your disposal. The drawback option for this would be that you couldn’t earn any level up points or anything in this mode, meaning anything you would do while in this reverted state would not effect your current Prestige Mode.



Needs more nazi zombies

Nazi Zombie mode simply needs to be in Modern Warfare 2. It was almost without question the coolest thing to come out of World At War and remains one of the more popular multiplayer options in the entire franchise. If this mode doesn’t return in Modern Warfare 2 I will be beyond disappointed. Obviously the survival mode doesn’t necessarily need to be Nazi Zombies again, but at the same time why not just keep it Nazi Zombies? Sure, Modern Warfare 2 is set in the modern times, World War 2 was certainly a good while ago, and Nazi’s sure wouldn’t fit in - but zombies didn’t exactly fit in World At War either did they?

Keep them Nazi Zombies and don’t even bother trying to make them Terrorist Zombies or anything like that, simply because modernizing the zombie mode might tick off a few people (and seriously, everybody hates Nazis). Keep some of the goodies like the random weapon crate and the soda bottles that give you perks, and perhaps just modify it a little so the player can customize their guns a little more as if it were the standard multiplayer mode.

There you have it, these tweeks along with a few of the other already announced new features are all that should be needed to make Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 the most awesome first person shooter multiplayer experience to date. Not much was wrong with the original Call of Duty 4, however a continued strive for perfection will result in something memorable for long after this console generation is over.