Final Fantasy.

Mages, potions, heroes, quests, battles, and presumably somewhere down the line, a boss that can only be fought after several hours spent grinding. Oh, and moogles, chocobos, and a hundred other recurring themes and ideas that the series is frequently notorious for. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King, undoubtedly the posterboy for the launch of Nintendo's answer to Xbox Live Arcade that is, WiiWare, thankfully tries to move the series forward while still retaining it's roots and incredibly deep conventions. This is one RPG where you're not going to be adventuring.

The plot is immediately throwaway, but is best being summed up as follows: you are the king's son and heir, returning to the home realm with hopes of restoration and success accordingly. The game's objective follows hand in hand with this, and the game as a whole is very sim RPG, a Theme Final Fantasy if you will. Against your best wishes and recurring desires to do the opposite, all your time in-game is spent within the realm building houses and restoring your once was home-town, speaking to the residents and keeping everyone happy. As King, this is somewhat obvious, but adventurers can be hired and dispatched to numerous dungeons around the gameworld to do your bidding, return with treasure, and wipe out any villain that remotely poses any threat to your empire.

Okay, so it might sound a little tedious, but the game's surprisingly addictive, and the micro-management of your adventurers is for the most part, pretty interesting. As the game progresses you're able to train them as black/white mages or thieves, while building armouries and weapon shops allows them to tool up before departing, perhaps increasing their success in battle. They're battles you don't see, but Life as a King goes back to the origins of RPGs by being entirely text based. Your decisions following these battles will be the agenda for the next day in-game, be it allowing them to rest, head out somewhere else, or, umm...grinding to take down that boss. But with one in-game day only lasting a few minutes, the gameplay is surprisingly fast. Being confined to the city however does become slightly frustrating, and before long you'll realise your input to the game is only marginal, but it's fun while it lasts, and seeing progress and the development of the realm take place in front of you is pretty rewarding.

Easily the big-name title for the WiiWare launch, My Life as a King is big, both visually and in design. Waggle controls are thankfully kept at a minimum, but the game is immediately a far better choice than half the licensed crap on Xbox Live Arcade, and more interesting, the Wii itself. It's no killer-ap, but Life as a King is enjoyable, fun, and most importantly, a good indication of what the Wii's new service is capable of.

* There was a visitor spike here on 16th. I wasn't here. Were you? If so...why?

* Sidetracking the usual musical interests of all things post-hardcore and new-fangled dance-punk, this past week i've been listening to Lupe Fiasco's The Cool. I'm not an avid follower of hip-hop by any means, but both the album and the man behind it seems immediately fresh and exciting. In a genre so overblown and awash with all the correctly-applied and numerous stereotypes, this is a good thing.

* LOST ends it's fourth season run towards the end of the month after yet another (but altogether shorter than the previous one) hiatus. Because of the WGA Strike the season's seemed a whole lot shorter than it actually is, but being the rabid fanboy that I am it'll still be my favourite show this year. The spoilers for the finale are out too, which is either good or bad depending your stance, but if the finale is anything like it's predecessor's then the twists will be huge, and that isn't something I want to spoil. Operation avoid-Internet-at-all-costs-and-go-into-hiding, starts here.

* Continuing with TV, last night's episode of Desperate Housewives on E4 was Something's Coming. Over the last few years the show and I have had numerous fallings out, and i've vowed to stop watching several times, but every so often the show redeems itself. Something's Coming is reportedly the most-expensive episode of the show, and it's understandable- there's a mother facking twister that hit's the show's fictional locale. It wasn't as good as it could've been-only two deaths? realism bye bye- and the show still insisted on continuing with it's season of silly stories, but those aside, it was a great forty minutes of TV.

* It's my birthday in twenty days. Buy me something nice. Or not, whatever. 

* I've abandoned playing through GTA IV. I'm in the closing stages of the game, but i'm finding it all incredibly repetitive, and some of the problems are a lot harder to ignore than others. Another uncompleted game that i'm going to have to revisit later. Nah, this past week i've been playing Viva Pinata. I've had it for ages, but a five minute revisit immediately reminded me how relaxing, charming and well-developed the title was to begin with. The good news is that yes, it is a game I have almost completed.

* Things I want to do that i'll never get round to:
1/ Go see Iron Man.
2/ Go see Indiana Jones & The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
3/ Ever be able to keep this blog frequently updated.

Back soon...maybe. Possibly with new posts, but then again, well... better not make promises.

I wrote a little about Muxtape last month- new site, upload twelve songs and share, internet excitement all round- and with the site still online (and thankfully seemingly devoid of any legal rambling), I've decided to update the songs to keep the page fresh.

There's no artist or band continuations, but again, the current line-up is once again a list of 'songs I like at the moment', rather than being focussed on something specific like genre or a letter of the alphabet, though those mixtapes may be coming eventually. That said, there's one or two more elusive acts listed this month that last- if you listen to the playlist and discover someone new anyway then that's great, I guess the site really works.

Here's the May listing: [Stream Here]

1. Jane's Addiction - True Nature
2. Hell is for Heroes - Kamichi
3. Nshwa - By Your Side
4. The Longcut - Holy Funk
5. Radio 4- Enemies Like This
6. Röyksopp - Sparks
7. Sufjan Stevens - All the Trees of the Field Will clap Their Hands
8. Computerman - Spies on You
9. Portishead - The Rip
10. ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead - So Divided

Muxtape Post and April listing

Just a couple of things- more Castle and some more of the Indiana Jones sets. Theoretically I don't need any of it, but with spare money and no other unhealthy addictions to spend it on, why the hell not?

7620 is going to be staying boxed. Generally hoarding away boxed sets isn't something I do, but having missed out on the original Star Wars sets ten years back (yes, it's really been that long) i've decided to do it for one or two of the Indiana Jones sets. The amount they might be worth in a few years time is anyone's guess, but if they're anything like it's Star Wars big-brother, they may be worth quite a bit. If not, i'm sure they'll make for nice 'from me, to me' presents in a a couple of years.

I've been excited about Grand Theft Auto IV for sometime. Long before those first promos were revealed and those early details were released, being honest, it's a game i've been looking forward to for years, and the promise of a then next-gen sequel is something that would presumably get everyone excited about. Naturally as the weeks drew nearer and the hype machine started making more and more noise, it was something that I was anticipating so much. Then the TV promo, then those early across the board ten out of ten reviews, and then finally, the release.

I'm not a fan of numbers in reviews- what's the point in writing all those words and arguments if you're going to degrade it all with a single digit?- but the truth has to be told, this is not a 10-worthy game, despite what the gaming press may have been telling you. To be completely honest, the fourth installment of the series is just that; a sequel, and while it's obvious rather early on that improvements have been made to the gameplay-most noticeably the fantastic new gunplay cover system- the game, as ever, is still plagued with the same problems that it's predecessors before it suffered horrendously from.

Alarmingly, pop-up is still an integral part of the game, with an all manner of in game objects ranging from lone trees to sprawling play-parks randomly appearing before you as you drive. Certainly this is perhaps something that would be expected of the background, but textures loading five seconds after your arrival is not just annoying, but completely off-putting, and certainly not something you expect to see given the already well showcased abilities of this generation through other games. The game feels unnaturally slow, even when you're at your fastest, and the game continues to struggle with having anything near a smooth framerate, evident when there's explosions and onscreen havoc, something I imagine most players will notice given the game's focus and content. The game feels sluggish in places, slow in others, but collectively, incomplete, and certainly far from perfect. In regards to the new-fangled sandbox genre itself, Crackdown seemed like a gigantic leap forward, whereas with GTA IV that forward direction seems merely a small step.

But while pregnated with faults and shortcomings, GTA IV is lots of positive things. It's fun, it's exciting, ambitious, huge, and most of all enjoyable, as long as you pay no heed to the 'revolutionary' adjectives attached to the game reviews and desires for the game in your head. While Rockstar are perhaps already renowned with immersion in their games and the so wildly-designed cities that play host to these games, the Liberty City sets new precedent to the genre in this regard. As with GTA III this isn't a mere city-themed level, it's a gameworld that for once, deserves to be named as such. More than ever this feeling of immersion seems so complete, and the gameworld with it's unique citizens, politics, TV channels, shoe-brands and car companies is an aspirating addition that not only completes the game, but in someway, completes it. While indirectly it doesn't affect the gameplay, that freedom to do whatever you want -whenever you want- is as ever the game's biggest strength, with plenty of more options in here from the previous titles in the franchise.

GTA IV is, depending how you look at it, not exactly innovative. As a game, it contains many of the elements from other genres driving, shooting, platforming et al and combines them to relative success. Obviously if you want a driving game you'd do better to search elsewhere, while, again, if you're after a third-person shooter, there's plenty of better examples out there. That GTA IV -and the series of which it belongs- can combine these elements as one set against a backdrop of a sprawling city backdrop is now the stuff of legend, but it's crucial to remember that GTA IV is a sequel, and that it not only doesn't improve much on previous faults, but also, that it hasn't fixed some of those problems the series is renowned for, just yet.

Maybe next time?

'West' from Season 2 of Heroes.

Being the geek that I am I saw the second season months ago, but with my rewatching of it as BBC2 finally gets round to airing it, two things are still immediately clear from that primary viewing. One, the episodes and stories are nowhere near as good as that of the opening year, Two, West is an irritating twat who deserves to be forgotten about for all coming episodes.

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