GameShark - Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon Review

After a bit of a drought, I'm back with my first of a few pieces posted over at GameShark! I've been playing Chocobo's Dungeon every second that I had for the past week or so, and I have to say that it's the most enjoyable RPG experience I've had on the Wii yet. While Opoona nudges ahead in terms of music and artistic style, the way that Chocobo's Dungeon makes the dungeon crawling experience palatable is worthy of a Nobel Prize. Seriously.

Give it a looksee and tell me what you think. I have a preview for Need for Speed Undercover coming up shortly, so stay tuned for that!

Read: Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon - Review

GameShark - Guitar Hero: On Tour Review

Well, it's finally here! My first review for GameShark has just gone live, right before the big E3 rush that will surely knock it off its pedestal within days. If the article feels a little awkward at first, it's because the longer introduction had to be cut short due to length limitations. Oops! It basically drew an analogy between real life guitar and GH:OT since they both are extremely painful and embarassing at the beginning. Once you get the hang of them, they're great, but it may not be for everyone.

If anyone wants to see the full review, just let me know. It's not a monster, but it is about 300 words longer.

GameShark: Guitar Hero: On Tour Review

Long time, no update!

While it might initially appear that I've been a sloth-and-a-half, in reality, I've been crazy busy trying to keep up with life and its many transitions. As of July 16th I'm officially a college graduate of UCSB, and conversely another member of the "unemployed workforce." I traveled to the East Coast for a week to see my father, and am currently on another trip to Colorado with my girlfriend to see her family and enjoy the finer things in America (read: tourist destinations, traps, and everything in-between).

Because of all the life transitions, I'm currently looking for more paying positions. I've recently been hired over at GameShark.com for reviews and other miscellanea, and hope to find a few more positions or internships in the nearby future. Until then, I'll keep toiling away at my few websites, hoping to see where things take me over the next month or two.

If you ever need to reach me, you can do so by leaving me a comment or sending me an email (found here).

Thanks for reading,
Cole

RPGamer – 2008 NIS Press Event Impressions

Almost a month ago (!) I had the privilege of heading up to San Francisco to cover the 2008 NIS press event for RPGamer. I bumped elbows with some internet friends and rivals, enjoyed some delicious food on the house, hosted an interview, and was lucky enough to get my hands on a few new RPGs from NIS that are coming stateside this year. I wish I could have broken this into a few separate updates to make myself seem more productive, but since this event occurred three days before my last final and graduation, I obviously had no time for that.

Anyways! Take a look at the impressions below. It's always fun actually playing something before writing about them and I think they turned out rather well. Especially A Witches Tale, considering I saw no actual footage of the game. Enjoy.

• Disgaea DS - Hands-On Impression
• Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure (DS) - Hands-On Impression
• A Witches Tale (DS) - Hands-On Impression

(I also covered Disgaea 3 again, but I wanted to save those impressions for the big preview of the game I'm writing this month. Now that I can go in-depth into the storyline, churning out another "I walked here and threw this" impression would be absurdly redundant.)

GameSpite - Link's Awakening Review

I thought I posted this a while back, but I was wrong! Here's my article about Link's Awakening posted over at GameSpite. It's a bit short, but has some good stuff in it. Peek if you dare.

GameSpite: Link's Awakening Review

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