Time For a New Fantasy
So as we edge into the New Year and growl at our friends across the ocean, we step back and look at the Square-Enix’s latest installment into the main Final Fantasy lineup.
It’s easy to see that Square needs to really hit this installment out of the park, if it wants to continue with these massive and counterproductive schedules. Final Fantasy 13 was one of the technical demos that were shown before the Playstation 3 was even released, and here we sit over 3 years later finally with a released version. While the Japanese people may show enough devotion to make that a viable business strategy, for Americans and the rest of the world the Final Fantasy brand is getting over taken by new and inventive entries into the gaming world. In the time it took Square-Enix to make one game, whole series of triple-A titles have come and gone from the public mind. Unless SE can do something about their workflow, Final Fantasy 14 Online might truly be the final fantasy.
Problems aside, I of course being a geek a heart cannot help but play. I look forward to my birthday when I can enjoy a new fantasy, but in the meantime, I will look and follow the release in Japan and see what people say about the game.
The Playstation without the Play
Next week Sony will be releasing its diskless variation of the Playstation Portable series. With the PSPGo Sony is hoping to unburden itself with the horrible choice of including an optical disk drive on a portable system. The problem is this one move has the potential to invalidate the purchases of an estimated 55 million users who have already purchased one the system’s previous incarnations and the software titles to go with it.
I’ve heard of removing backwards compatibility (Sony seems to be mastering that concept of late) but to remove current generation compatibility from a system would seem like a death sentence. In the end they have created a device that is not compatible with the millions of units of software sold around the world, and cost more than any other version without any physical update besides form factor. I cannot see a reasonable reason that any customer new or returning would want this device. New users can get the regular PSP for less, and existing users have no reason to buy one since it cannot play any of the game they already own. Even more of a concern is the longevity of such a system, being built on an already aging hardware, this is clearly only a move to try and milk the last bit of money out of consumers in this console's end of life cycle.
Unless Sony can make it possible for users to painlessly transfer their games to the PSP Go without the lost of the physical media, I fear this new version will suffer a dark fate. I can see it now, a brand new shiny PSP Go stocked right next to a wall of game that the system cannot even play. I mean it’s like Nintendo releasing the DSi without a DS cartridge slot.