Old Final Fantasy mind-head, Hironobu Sakaguchi, or “The Gooch” as his friends and Diff’rent Strokes fans like to call him, has elaborated a bit more on his first Xbox 360 RPG Blue Dragon. It seems they’re really coming down to the wire to meet their launch date. While reading this I wonder if The Gooch isn’t just trying to get some more cash out of Microsoft. MS Japan really needs Blue Dragon to come out, somewhat on time. At first the game was promised before November 4th, now it’s slated for December 7th. So if Blue Dragon doesn’t make it out before 2007 sees the light of day MS Japan may loose what little credibility they have with the public. With The Gooch saying that they’re only at 90% complete now makes you wonder if that’s just his way of trying to get MS to shell out a little extra cash to help with development. My prediction: The Gooch wants the MS money but regardless of whether he gets it or not Blue Dragon will be released Christmas week and it’ll take a whole year for Blue Dragon to reach our North American shores.

Also Gamespot has a Final Fantasy 12 preview up, with lots of gameplay movies. I was disappointed to see that you’ll only be able to have 3 to 4 characters on screen at any given time. The MMORPG style of battle looks fine, if somewhat joyless. And was happy to note that they were pleased with the voice acting.

Nintendo of America President and leader of the Reggie-lution, Reggie Fils-Aime will be personally selling Wii consoles on launch day.

In other news it's only 1 month until we finally get our hands on Final Fantasy 12!!!

Well I dunno if that's 100% true but this new 8minute clip of Lost Odyssey has got me believing.

It's too bad that they were unable to deliever on their promise of releasing Blue Dragon within a year of the launch. Still if they deliever that game in December in Japan they won't lose too much face. I just want Lost Odyssey on or before Christmas 2007, please.

A few years back I put up a heavy bag in my living room. Then to give my workouts better structure I created a boxing timer program in visual basic. But the program was never quite right. The timing seemed ok but the display was wonky. After getting back into programing with the whole XNA thing, I decided to take a second look at that program. It seems good enough now to offer to you: boxing timer

Nintendo's new gaming console, the Wii, will be available in stores on November 19th for the sevlt price of $249.99. Also for the virtual console, the platform which older Nintendo games can be downloaded and played, the games will cost $5, $8, and $10 for NES, SNES and N64 games respectively.

When PaJaMo called me about this late last night, he said "Why two days later than PS3?" And I've got to say I'm with him on this one. It would seem like they'd want to launch at least a week earlier. Also I think the pricing on the virtual console games is a bit dissappointing. $8 for an SNES game that has been available on computer ROMs for forever? Hopefully Nintendo will lessen this blow by offering a shit-ton of games (right now 10 new games a month is the word). Also it'll be interesting to see if only Nintendo made games will be released or if we'll see some of our old 3rd party favorites too.

Speaking of beat'em ups (well at least I was until the buzz was mellowed on Yakuza) here's my take on the second Buffy game.

new Metal Gear Solid 4 trailer up at gamespot. I don't exaggerate when I say it's a-maz-ing.

hrmmm maybe i should finally play MGS3 instead of Final Fantasy 8 (in preparation for the new Final Fantasy.)

Seemed like a good idea to post this here, now that Pajamo's no longer functioning and now that Disgaea 2 has hit shelves.

So as you may have noticed with some of my linkage on the homepage, I've gone into business for myself. So if you're looking for Zebra Printers or PSC Falcon Terminals, look no further.

well so the IGN review, while a little more positive than the gamespot review leads me to believe that Yakuza is really nothing like Shenmue, except in cutscenes. So, I'm going to be steering clear of it for now.

In other news, 400,000 PS3s will be available at launch in the US. This will make the ebay sales go through the roof but other than that it's no big deal. Sony should wake me up when they have killer app to play it on.

Well the hype bubble starts to burst as gamespot gives a mediocre 7.4 to Yakuza. I'm not super surprised as he listed some of my fears I had begun to have for it after seeing the gameplay footage, it's a small environment and the beat-em up gameplay get's old.

Even though the comparasons to Shenmue have been downplayed, I still think that Yakuza is a spiritual successor so I wish he would have weighed in on how the two games stack up, besides on the scorecards.

Gamespot has several videos of the Yakuza voice talent at work, including one of "Lex" Rosenbaum, with hair!

That part of the production looks fine but I'm still reticent about the gameplay footage I've seen. I guess we'll find out if the game was worth the hype, the release is less than a week away =)

In other game news, Final Fantasy 12 is drawing some attention both at Gamespot who has a preview and at IGN who has a write-up of the soundtracks. For the record, the best soundtracks are FFT, FF6, FF7 and FF8. I can't believe they added the X-2 soundtrack, even they hated it in their review.

I think it's finally time to post my old game reviews here, as Pajamo.com seems unlikely to ever be free from the clutches of domain claim-jumpers. This is, I think the best review I have ever written. It happens to be for one of the best games I've ever played, funny how that works, eh?

Yakuza 2 Reported here at gamespot. That's got to be a good sign for the first game, right? I'm not so sure. At first I was excited to see a new game from Sega that seemed to incorporate at least some of the genius of Shenmue. But from what I saw of the gameplay it looks like a really simple beat-em-up. So now I've got some reservations. Still it comes out next week so we'll see then.

Also in the news, apparently a third Xenosaga game has been released, to decent reviews. I've personally never been a fan of the series.