RPGamer - Disgaea 3 Impressions

The second half of the Run to the Sun meetings I was able to attend consisted of a trip to NIS America to meet up with a few staff members and play an early build of Disgaea 3. While embargoes forbid me from going into too much detail at this time, things are certainly shaping up well for fans of outlandish Tactical RPGs. Disgaea 3 was rough around the edges, but left many of us happy with NIS's progress so far. While it didn't score too high in our overall rankings, a lot of that can be chalked up to the early build we played and the ways that D3 can't really be picked up and enjoyed like a good shooter or fighter can be. I have high hopes for August.

Here's my impressions. A in-depth preview will be going up sometime during the first week of June, and I'll be attending a press event for NIS to spend some more time with their upcoming lineup and do an interview. Things are looking up!

Read: Disgaea 3 Impressions

RPGamer - Summon Night: Twin Age Impression

Yikes!

In one of my more memorable strokes of luck, I had the chance to meet up with a few other fun fellows from RPGamer down in Southern California to talk videogames with two huge RPG publishers - Atlus and Nippon Ichi Software (NIS) America. The latter was a complete stroke of luck, as I was only originally planning to meet up, talk with Atlus, and help relieve some of the coverage pressure from the publisher's eight+ games. Luckily I was able to tag along and go to dinner, and even get asked to go to a press event in SF next month. Exciting!

Here's the first game Atlus let us get our hands on, Summon Night: Twin Age. It's an Action RPG through and through, but looks to be surprisingly fun and fresh, allowing for neat exploration, item conjuring, and other interesting things to do in comparison to your usual hack-'n-slash. I wrote up more of my impressions over at RPGamer, so go take a look over there.

Read: Summon Night: Twin Age Impression

MyWiiNews - WiiMiidia Homebrew, and Wiikly Wii Releases

Finally found the time to update this thing with my two latest pieces for MyWiiNews. Both are news stories, one tells the tale of a homebrewer's valiant efforts to port XBMC over to the Wii, while the other is simply a quick Wii release update. Both are solid and worth a peek.

I'll be heading down to Irvine tomorrow to meet up with Atlus for RPGamer. It should be fun! Time to dust off that copy of Etrian Odyssey!

Read:

• Want to Watch Movies On Your Wii?
• Wiikly Wii Releases : 5/4 - 5/17

DailyNexus - "Wii Kart Unites Casual and Hardcore"

My latest Daily Nexus article went up today, and it was actually featured in the physical newspaper two days ago as well!

This is my second article to be promoted from an online-only column to an actual piece within the opinion section, and I was even asked to join the columnist staff for the next year. Unfortunately I won't be around UCSB to work for the Nexus, but it's nice to know that my words are appreciated.

This piece did two things I had been meaning to do for a few weeks: talk about Mario Kart and casual gamers. I had a complete article on casual gaming all edited up and ready to turn into the Nexus two weeks ago, but I restarted my computer and everything instantly vanished. Apparently my hard drive decided to die without giving me any real warning, taking the last five months of data along with it into the depths of Hard Drive Hell. Along with this completed article went my Summon Night DS preview, and a 80% piece for My Wii News on the Wii's rechargable battery problem, making for quite the depressing past two weeks.

I just got my Mac back with a fresh HDD and I'm ready to get back to blogging business. Expect a lot more from me in the next few weeks, and I'll be sure to back everything up before submitting articles and restarting computers. :(

Rant aside, the article is a goodie. I talk about the prevalence of casual gamers, the ways in which Mario Kart Wii is Nintendo's first forray into kart-driven Communism, and even namedrop Ghosts n' Goblins and the real SMB2 to show how cool I am (yeah, right). It's always nice to get printed in a real publication, so take a peek and enjoy!

Read: Daily Nexus - Wii Kart Unites Casual and Hardcore

GameSpite - Golden Axe Warrior Review

Woohoo! Another review! I can't help but get excited whenever something I put a lot of work into sees the light of day, and this Golden Axe Warrior (GAW) piece pretty much personifies this feeling. Jeremy Parish decided to switch over to a weekly digest format after I submitted this piece; making it sit all alone for almost a month. This was actually a blessing in disguise, as the initial draft I wrote up was extremely rough and needed a good amount of polish to get to the stage it's in today. Jeremy did a good amount of edits, but most everything stayed true to my original words and visions.

I thought GAW was a really neat, if unoriginal, game that deserves more attention than it seems to get, so go and read the darn thing and find out for yourself! I promise you'll giggle at least once at the screenshots.

Read: Golden Axe Warrior Review

P.S. I have a preview for Summon Night: Twin Age DS coming up at RPGamer soon. The game just got pushed back, so I couldn't have picked a better time to do a preview! Woohoo!

Daily Nexus - "The Makings of a Classic"

Last week my mind came to a screeching halt when I finally sat down to start writing something for the Daily Nexus, and for some reason my mind was suddenly inundated with plumbers. Super Mario Bros. is arguably the game that changed videogaming into the industry it is today, with the whole "bringing videogames back from their premature 1983 death) thing, and I felt it was due time to talk about the importance of that monumental game. In the article I give a brief history of what games looked like in the early 80s, how things have changed, and the innovations that SMB brought to the table. I could have written twice as much in my sleep about this subject, but I think it worked well in its slightly truncated form.

See for yourself.

Read: "The Makings of a Classic"

Daily Nexus - "The Makings of a Classic"