I picked up the game yesterday, and just finished my first workout this morning. I'll spare you the before pictures but I weigh 248 pounds. I was originally planning on trying to get below 200 but that definitely won't happen on this 30 day challenge and I don't know if the game will keep me interested long enough after that to do it. So I just won't set a goal as I'm not quite sure whats feasible for the game.

One thing I didn't enjoy was that the first thing the game asked me was for my age, height and weight. I've got a Wii Balance Board sitting right in front of me, why don't you take my weight yourself so I don't have to go into the bathroom and pull out the scale. I also don't like this Bob Greene guy. I don't really care about you being on Oprah, why are you even in the game?

Upon skipping Bob Greene's intro video, I was asked to choose a trainer. I chose the guy since I assumed the woman would be annoying to listen to throughout my 30 days. The trainers primarily introduced all the activities with little videos, but they'd also incessantly give you encouragement during the exercise. That is except when my character was slowing down and speeding up at his own will during the running no matter how even a pace I kept. The running was put at the beginning and end of my routine and by the end I was able to keep an even pace.

Maybe I got better at it or maybe I just learned the limitations of the Wii controls. In the same sense was the inline skating, which was basically just squatting and jumping. It would fail to read my jumps half of the time, so I eventually just took the nunchuk out of the leg strap and would jerk it up as I jumped.

Overall, I think this game has a lot more of a chance to make me lose weight then Wii Fit did. Wii Fit would kick you back out to the menu after every activity and let you choose what to do next. Not only would that make me feel less inclined to do the more strenuous activities, it would break up the momentum of the exercise routine as a whole. With Active, it just throws another activity at you right when you finish the last, so your heart rate never slows and you are told what you should be doing rather then just doing another Ski Jump or Tight Rope Walk like in Fit. We'll see whether that works for me as the challenge continues. Look for another update on Day 5.

I've been thinking about how to make a post out of my thoughts for what I'm currently playing, but couldn't come up with anything that seemed like it would be a topic worthy of a blog post. So instead I decided that from now on, in lieu of having a podcast or something to discuss my feelings on something, I'm going to make posts on my general feelings or thoughts on things I have played. The first of these posts is on Final Fantasy 3.

When I first started playing, I had a rant forming in my head. After coming out of the cave in which you start the game, I quickly found that anywhere that I went that wasn't exactly where I should be going, there were monsters there that could slaughter me. So before I could ever head into the next part of the game, I had to grind out some levels. Now, I've had to grind in RPG's before, but having to that early lead me to think that the rest of the game would be ridiculous. Usually games gradually ramp up that kind of stuff throughout the game.

Eventually though I got into a groove with the game though, and stopping before any dungeons to gain a level or 2 usually prevented my immediate death. This game is still extremely unfriendly to anyone who hasn't played a million RPG's before. It's tiny little things that keep adding up. For instance there is no place to save anywhere in the game except for on the world map. This means that you can save before entering a dungeon, but there will be no other place to save until you have completed that dungeon, so if you die fighting the boss, tough shit, you have to start over again.

Things like this are most likely why this game was never released in America until now. Back in the NES days, Japanese people thought Americans couldn't handle difficult games. Thats why we got another game completely as Mario Bros. 2 instead of the real one which had killer mushrooms and other such insanity. My issue with this thought process is that if FF3 had come out back then, I wouldn't have even thought about the difficulty. NES games are notoriously unforgiving. These days I've grown out of that. It's especially annoying on a handheld when I don't want to start a dungeon because I don't know how long it'll take and I might have to stop playing before I can beat it.  Thankfully they do have a quicksave function to help with this but it's still not ideal.

I trudged my way through the game partly because I want a handheld game to be playing and partly because I feel some sort of strange sense of commitment to the Final Fantasy series. The storyline is completely throw away though and I still have the PSP God of War to get through. The crystals have called the four warriors of light to save the world from the darkness, yeah yeah, I could be ripping off medusa heads.

Behind the obvious Final Fantasy series, my favorite role playing game series is most likely Suikoden. It's a series that few have discovered, but those that have are very devoted to. Just look at ebay auctions for the limited released Suikoden 2 for evidence of fan devotion. There are so many reasons to love these games though.

Suikoden did many things different from other Japanese RPG's when it came out. Instead of a party of characters 1-10 or so in size, it brought 108 to the table. It was based on a classical Chinese novel involving 108 stars of destiny that gather together at a moment in time. You are usually the first star, the Tenkai Star, and the one with whom all the other stars gather. As it works in all the games, you're the leader of an army essentially, and you're gathering troops.

This leads to another of the features that stand out in the series, combat. While primarily combat is the normal RPG type, there are many skirmishes between your army and other armies. In the first game these worked out as rock-paper-scissors type battles where you would attack with a charge, a bow attack or magic. In later installments however, military encounters played out like a grid based strategy game. You'd move your units around a map and have them attack enemy units. Thrown on top of all of this, is one on one duels.

Its these things that drew me into the game, and its the characters and their stories that kept me coming back. Unfortunately, after the third game, the main story writer left. He had supposedly been building to something for the fourth game, but that was never fully realized. Instead, others have continued the games in his absence, and in my eyes, the series has fallen significantly in greatness. While all the normal features were technically there in Suikoden 4, the story was set more then 100 years before the first game, probably to help hide the fact that they had no idea where to take the characters we had already been introduced to, and it lacks a lot of polish. The fifth game did a lot to make up for the fourth, but it just doesn't seem to be on par with the first three games.

If you are out of the loop on these amazing games, a new way to catch up seems to be here. Recently, the first game was released on the Playstation Network, so those with a PS3 or PSP can purchase it for the measly amount of $5.99. With the amount of sequels to games previously released on PSN, there's a good chance that the second will come out there too. Meaning you will no longer have to shell out more then $100 to get it on ebay. I couldn't reccommend these games highly enough to those looking for a new series to familairize themselves with. Whether you want to move on from those and find copies of 3, 4, and 5 on PS2 is up to you, but picking up the first and hopefully the second on PSN is a no brainer.

If ever there was a sign that Nintendo just doesn't seem to understand why gamers are constantly saying they've been abandoned, here it is. An interview with Nintendo of America's president, Reggie Fils-Aime by Venture Beat. I'll provide a brief excerpt to show some of the most ridiculous parts.

VB: Used games are coming up as a big issue again. Why?
RFA: More and more retailers are experimenting with the used game model. We don't believe used games are in the best interest of the consumer. We have products that consumers want to hold onto. They want to play all of the levels of a Zelda game and unlock all of the levels. A game like Personal Trainer Cooking has a long life. We believe used games aren't in the consumer's best interest.
VB: Because?
RFA: Describe another form of entertainment that has a vibrant used goods market. Used books have never taken off. You don't see businesses selling used music CDs or used DVDs. Why? The consumer likes having a brand-new experience and reliving it over and over again. If you create the right type of experience, that also happens in video games.
VB: Could this be rectified if the retailers share some of that used game revenue with the publishers?
RFA: That could make it more palatable. But we just think it's a bad idea. The one retailer that has a substantial business in this has figured out a way that is effective for the consumer. That's tough for other retailers experimenting with this, in part because their employees don't have the expertise in this market.

What? So much of that made no sense. They make games that consumers want to hold onto? I've been sick of Wii Sports since 2 days after I bought my Wii. Almost everything put out since then has been some sort of minigame collection or party game. Granted, a couple of them make for a good time when guests are over, but thats all that my Wii ever gets used. They haven't put out a Zelda for me to "play all the levels of and unlock all of the levels" (I won't even attempt to mock that line, it's too easy) since launch.

Still, I can get past Nintendo's new commitment to casual and party games. As I said they can be entertaining when people are over, despite the fact that thats hardly worth $250 when it gets played 3 times a year tops. What I can't get past is his comments on used games. Thats because Nintendo doesn't ever lower their game prices. Mario Kart has been $50 since it came out over almost a year ago. It's not worth it to me to pay that much for it when I'll only play it 3 or 4 times a year, and since they'll never lower MSRP then that leaves me with used games.

Don't shit on your consumers Nintendo. Its a recession! If you want to say that you don't think the used game market will hurt you because people hold onto their Wii games for family occassions and such, then fine, but don't try to say Zelda is something that people want to play still, and don't try to say that saving money isn't in your customers best interest. If you cared about your customers best interests then you would lower the prices of your games as new ones came out. You wouldn't put out 10 games and then expect those to keep people happy for 5 years or more.

I've come to a conclusion in this. This is how Nintendo sees their Wii lineup.

Zelda Twilight Princess
Mario Kart
Smash Bros.
Metroid Prime 3
Wii Fit
Wii Play
Big Brain Academy

Thats it. Look! We've got something for everyone! There's no need to ever put out another hardcore adventure game because we put out Zelda and our consumers like to unlock all of those levels.

They think they can ride off of the success of a game for years, and the sad part is they probably can.

I've been playing a lot of older RPG's lately and something caught my attention. Maybe when I was younger I didn't notice, but there are some ridiculous sound effects in these games. Maybe they just had a cd collection of random sounds and they found a way to shoehorn them into the games.

Nobuo Uematsu has been called the John Williams of video game music. It's quite clear why. From early on he composed rich and complicated music that had to be squeezed out of the NES's severely lacking sound chip. He would make themes for different moods, or characters within the games, some of which have carried over into each subsequent installment. Well before the music in a game was thought of as an important part of the game, Uematsu brought importance to it.

Sometime last month, I had the pleasure of attending a live symphony orchestra playing music of his. I stumbled upon this event less then a week before it was to occur, and was somewhat hesitant to go. While I've played Final Fantasy games since I was a kid, I'm not normally one who buys the soundtracks and listens to the music during non-gaming parts of my life. Still, I've always been a sucker for orchestrated music and full choirs and all that so I thought I'd give it a try.

I was quite impressed. This was definitely not just a cheap cash-in on the success of the game franchise. They could have done only music from the more recent installments, and probably more popular ones, that would have been easier to translate to an orchestra, but they pulled out a lot of surprises. One of particular note was the epic opera scene from Final Fantasy 6. Where on the SNES, it was almost archaic sounding by today's standards, in the translation done here it was brilliant and amazing. Everything I'm sure Uematsu imagined when he first wrote it.

There were lots of neat little touches to help bring gamers who have probably never been to a symphony before into the show. A large screen behind the orchestra would play clips from the games that originally featured the music being played. It was a great idea and wonderful to have something to watch other then tiny people playing instruments, but there were moments that shined greater then most.

During one song, they started up a clip of FF8 that was merely the characters talking. Then they took off and before you knew it the screen flashed, signifying a random battle, at the same moment the orchestra started into the song, which was the boss battle music from the game. Moments like that left me wanting more. Most of the clips they showed were just collections of the cut scenes from the games, but if they were all like that battle music it could have been so much better. That's what live video game music should be. Imagine watching an event from a game you love play out on screen, while a live orchestra is playing the music to it.

If shows like that were around for a bunch of popular video game series, it would certainly help draw the fans out to watch the show. Even so, Distant Worlds did not disappoint me, and it definitely helped draw in a crowd. The show I saw was the show that the orchestra had sold the most tickets to out of any of their performances the whole season. Gamers are clearly interested, so I hope more events like this come about. Just a tip of advice if you are thinking about going to something like this though: dress nice. Nobody cares about your Mario t-shirt that you think is giving you gamer cred. If we want people to respect games, we have to dress respectfully. We're at a symphony, not some cheap bar.

I was talking with a lapsed gamer friend about old RPG game series we used to enjoy and he mentioned how he was surprised that none of them had sequels yet on the newest console generation. It got me thinking, is this generation just too costly too develop for if you aren't making a triple A game? The Persona series hasn't been shy about saying that they keep putting out sequels on PS2 rather then PS3 because of the cost of development.

It certainly seems as though that's the big reason that many developers are moving to handhelds. A awhile back, SquareEnix made a huge announcement that the next sequel to their Dragon Quest series would be exclusively for Nintendo DS. Dragon Quest has always been a huge series, on par with Final Fantasy, in Japan, but here in America its never done amazing numbers. The Castlevania series had many experiments into a console version during previous generations but none were as successful as the handheld ones, so that's what they've been sticking to entirely in this generation.

More and more we are seeing once popular series that can no longer equal out their development costs with their sales numbers moving to handhelds to save development costs. So will this be the trend throughout the current consoles lifespans? The original Playstation as well as the Playstation 2's lineups were filled with second and third tier game series. Its looking more and more like that won't be case for the Playstation 3.

Maybe the Xbox 360 is cheaper enough to develop for that some of these series will move there, or maybe they will dive into the ocean of Wii titles and try to stay afloat, but I have a feeling the majority will move to the PSP or DS. This isn't a problem for me at all. I find myself playing more handheld games nowadays then console anyway. Its just easier to play something that doesn't require hogging the main tv or leaving the room when you've got a 1 year old running around. So bring on the games, handhelds are definitely my saviors of gaming.

This isn't going to be one of those rants about the PSP having no games or anything. I love my PSP, and have gotten a lot of use out of it. Sure it could use some more games, but I don't get a lot of time to play games as it is and still haven't got around to God of War, Crisis Core, or Loco Roco 2. This post is more about features and updates that I would like Sony to put out for the PSP. They add things quite frequently, but most of the time it's stuff that I'll probably never use, so I'm suggesting these things:

1. Flash Support/Youtube Support

The PSP isn't ideal for internet surfing, but occasionally when the computer is occupied or I'm out of stuff to read while taking a dump, I enjoy using it for that purpose. So it would be nice if things like flash was supported. The Wii's web browser had this from the start, so websites that had flash games designed specifically to be played on the Wii began popping up immediately. If Sony is putting out updates on such a regular basis, they might as well work on this so that I can play some flash games or watch Youtube while in the john.

2. Multitasking

I'm not sure how feasible this is but it'd be so nice to be able to do multiple things on the system at once. When I'm playing a game, I can turn off the PSP whenever I want and be able to turn it back on and pick up right where I left off whenever I want. It's a feature I love, and one that I wish the DS had, because it allows me to never have to watch loading screens or intro titles. Plus I don't want to have to look for a save point on a handheld game because sometimes I have to be able to turn it off at a moments notice. Along the same lines it'd be nice if I could minimize my game and then pick it back up from that spot later. While I love being able to turn off the PSP while playing a game, that means that the next time I turn it on I better be willing to keep playing until I find a save point. It'd be amazing if I could surf the internet or watch a UMD movie or something and then go back to the game from where I left off afterwords.

3. Set Schedule for PSN Releases

I'm really loving the feature to download games to the memory stick. The problem is that I have no idea when new games are going to be released. All 3 of the consoles have a certain day every week that new downloadable games are put up, so why can't the PSP? I'd love to know that every Tuesday I can log on and see what's new, and not have to log on 5 times a week hoping that they finally added Suikoden 2 or Wild Arms 2.

4. Any Japanese PSN Releases

They have what over in Japan?!? I'd buy that in a second! So why don't I have that opportunity?

5. Better Online Support

Games that take advantage of the online features of the PSP have seemed to disappear. I'd love to be able to play more games online. I will never use the Ad Hoc multiplayer modes because the only people I know with a PSP, never buy the same games as me. On the same note, how amazing would it be to able to play online PSN titles against PS3 users with the PSP? Sony should release some PSN games simultaneously for PS3 and PSP, then allow multiplayer between the two systems. Fat Princess comes to mind. Didn't the PSP Socom game have voice chat support for online play? They could get bluetooth headset support going on PSP so that players could use voice chat while playing online. Where is Trophy support for PSP games? Hell, they could even make Playstation Home available for PSP and I'd be happy that they were at least trying to give a better online experience to it. There are so many cool things they could do. I'm crossing my fingers that the levels uploaded from the PS3 Little Big Planet will be downloadable to the PSP version and vice versa.


Well there you go Sony, some helpful suggestions. I would absolutely love to have these features added to my PSP experience. Anyone else have any ideas?

5. Trains:  Alright, so this one isn't very cliche, I can only think of Final Fantasy 6 that had it, but it amuses me. What guy came up with this? When thinking of different dungeons to use in a game, usually you'd like to have one that can have many different branching paths and different routes to take. Walking in a straight line from car to car is fun too though. I will give credit to this dungeon though for the sole reason that you get to fight it at the end. What other RPG dungeons end boss is the dungeon itself? It's some sort of genius at work.

4. Towers:  This one is kind of along the same lines, only going up instead of to the left. Sometimes the tower design will be so lazy as to simply include a ridiculously huge amount of staircases for you to climb ala Final Fantasy 7. I don't know about you, but I love staircases so much in real life that I'm glad people have put them into video games as well. After all, the only thing that could make staircases better, is random battles.

When I saw the news story of Microsofts rumored motion sensing control thin on my RSS feed I decided I should get around to posting my E3 Predictions post that I've been thinking about for a little while, and quickly. We are now less then a month from the biggest event in the gaming industry, and things are beginning to leak like a sieve. So before every surprise is blown, let's get on with my foolish predictions that will end up being wrong.


Sony

What I'm sure will be a big part of their press conference has already been leaked, the PSP Go!. It might prove to have been just a rumor, but it seems pretty concrete, and with the attention that Sony has suddenely put on their handheld it certainly seems likely. The new PSP and the bevvy of new games for it is sure to be a big part of their focus, but what of the PS3? We can only hope that that fabled price cut will happen, and that it will be $100 one and not a measly $50 one. Other then that most of the attention will be on the upcoming holiday and spring 2010 games, and possibly some new announcements of games even further out. I doubt that the next Team Ico game will finally be announced here in America, as that's usually saved for Tokyo Game Show, though I would love for it to be. Heavy Rain will probably be hands on this year as it was shown behind closed doors to select journalists at last years E3. I'm going to take this time to call something now, I don't know if it'll be said at E3, but that M.A.G. game that the Socom team is working on has to be somehow branded with the Socom name. They wouldn't really put it out the door with the name Massive Action Game would they? My guess is it'll have the Socom name attached to it at some point soon.


Microsoft

This press conference is going to go one of two ways. 1. It'll be the same old boring thing. They'll say how great their sales are, give hands ons for all the fall releases, and that'll be about it. Or 2. They will show something off that we won't be expecting. Up until today, I didn't know what that could be, but now I'm suspecting that it will be some sort of motion controller or sensor bar. The 360 Arcade unit is already $50 cheaper then a Wii, if Microsoft could pull motion control off as well and support it then they might be able to grab onto the Nintendo train thats quickly racing away from it's competitors. They've already got Rare in their pockets to make perfect Wii type games for a new motion controller. As for games, I have no clue, maybe a new Crackdown?? Microsoft doesn't like to show things off until they are coming out that year, so there might not be very many surprises gaming wise. Perhaps we will finally see more Alan Wake though.


Nintendo

This press conference will go one of one ways. Nintendo has nothing up their sleeves that will be at all exciting. DSi just came out, Wii Motion Plus is on its way, and the Wii itself is selling gangbusters. We won't be seeing any price cuts, new gadgets, or new hardware guaranteed. The only thing they will be doing is talking up the Wii Motion Plus and DSi. They might have a few games to unveil, my guess is Red Steel 2 will be announced and shown off with the motion plus controls. Possibly they'll pull out a big gun and announce a new Wii Zelda game or something else like a Donkey Kong, Star Fox or that fabled Kid Icarus reboot. I'm doubting that though, it'd be nice but probably won't happen. If anything, we'll see some DSi Ware games that are actually good to try to convince people that theres a reason to buy a shiny new DSi.


Well, that's all I've got. I'm not going to get into third party companies and games that they might announce. Yeah, I kind of played it safe, it's less a list of predictions and more just general thoughts on what will probably happen. Sure I didn't get all crazy and start calling out things that will be announced, but I prefer to not get my hopes up for that kind of stuff anyway. Either way, I'm really excited for this years E3. Even if nothing else is exciting, all the PSP love will be enough for me. It'll be nice to be playing it much more over the next year or so. Anybody else have any thoughts on what'll happen at E3 this year?

I hunted down a copy of Wii Fit in the first few weeks of release, mostly because my wife wanted it and I never say no to permission to buy a video game, but also because I was curious. I'm not exactly "in shape", so if it works for losing weight then all the better. Of course, like everyone else who bought Wii Fit, it ended up in the closet a few weeks later. Well, my wife made it a few weeks and I actually made it over a month.

I still didn't see any weight loss though, and thats probably because a good amount of my daily time on the game was used to just randomely pick activities. I'm not a trainer, so I don't know when I should do aerobic or yoga or whatever else, and there was no direction given. From what I've heard about EA Sports Active though it is much better about giving you an idea of what you should be doing and for how long.

They have some sort of 30 day challenge thing going on, and while I'm not officially partaking in that or anything, I figured I would give the game 30 days of my own and see where I end up. I'm plenty happy with my gut, but in the interest of not hearing the wife nag me about losing weight, its worth a shot.

The game comes out on Tuesday I believe. When I find it and pick it up, I'll do a Day 1 post. After that I'll keep everyone up to date every 5 days with my weight and such to see if it's working. After 30 days, we'll see how much weight I lost.