Skyward Fire

Developed & published by Square Enix for the PlayStation 2 in the last quarter of 2006, FFXII is the last game in the Final Fantasy franchise before Final Fantasy XIII, the title on which the series will go multi-platform. In Microsoft’s E3 2008 Conference, it was announced along with the screening of a very promising teaser trailer, which said that FFXIII would come to the X360, at the same exact time as its release on the PS3. The announcement drew flak from Sony fans all across the world since this deal was going to delay the street break of FFXIII for the PS3. The development of the X360 version is supposed to start once the PS3 version is finished, and even when it’s done, it won’t be out till the X360 version is done. So consequently, there’s a long way to go until that happens.

Final Fantasy XII is the immediate successor to Final Fantasy IX, the last Final Fantasy title for the PlayStation, Final Fantasy X, the first Final Fantasy game for the PlayStation 2 and Final Fantasy XI, the premier Square Enix game that’s played online over at PlayOnline. At around the time of the development of FFXII, Final Fantasy X-2 was released as a sequel to Final Fantasy X. What gave the team a push-up motivation was the success that Final Fantasy XI obtained. The group of developers that was working over Final Fantasy Tactics got together to pitch in into FFXII, because FFX and XI were being sharpened, thus introducing a third FF console and Games for Windows team.

The FFXII development team comprises of Hiroaki Kato, the project manager, Taka Murata, the project supervisor, Takashi Katano, main system programmer, Akihiko Yoshida, main character design, Jun Akiyama, event director, Kazuhiro Kataoka, lead map system designer, Yoshinori Tsuchida, real-time rendering programmer, Hiroyuki Itoh, director of game design, and Hiroshi Minagawa, visual design director. These developers have developed action/real-time-based battle systems, which certainly bridges the gap between fields and battles. The previous games in the franchise used a random encounter-based battle system.

In my opinion, FFXII had great potential of being a better title than Final Fantasy X, but then again, there’s just something big that’s missing in XII that Final Fantasy X had. The integration of the action/real-time-based battling system seems to have magnified the difficulty in developing the game. It seems like every individual working over this integration had a distinct speculation of the franchise, which resulted in something very unpredictable, when they should have created prototype for testing to determine what could have faltered in the new system. Now, everyone knows that the FF franchise is a big one, and if they’re going to have a new project enlisted, fans and contemporary developers will obviously have expectations, which indirectly put a lot of pressure on the core development team, be it the field of audio, or system graphics. Square Enix has got some of the most advanced minds in the industry, but then again, chaos and confusion had to pop up since too many cooks always spoil the broth. The slightest error while distributing such a massive project to generic teams would have certainly added to the dilemma. In spite of the fact that the team working on FFXII was absolutely fresh and capable of producing something very new, the perspective of using too many contributive ideas ruined things.

The very basic tools that have been used while synthesizing the game include top notch industry brand names like Autodesk, OPTPiX and Softimage, with products including but not limited to Maya & MotionBuilder, iMageStudio and XSI. SE also used a lot of tools they had built themselves, which helped the team when it came to the hit-and-trial method for pre-visualizing the graphics for real-time previews using the rendering engine, but that wasn’t enough. The whole build deal took longer than expected, and the hit-and-trial error assessment program had to be side-stalled within a timeframe. A time restriction always limits the ability to try something new, and it also imposed a no-option situation for the creation of another error. There was a time when Hiroyuki Itoh had to ditch parts of the game which felt like they would stress out the team if they were to be worked upon any more.

Another crisis that was faced happened when the game went in for quality assurance. The game is mammoth & complex and the debugging process for a game from such an important franchise within time restrictions could have been another limiting factor. The game was bound to attract many gamers, out of which a major number plays just for fun. The difficulty level was supposed to be set in an orderly way, and here’s where the time factor comes in. By the release date deadline, there was just way too much debugging to go through, and all of it couldn’t be attended to, and the game seems to have missed out there too.

In spite of all odds, the game eventually succeeded. The development team tried there best to overcome all the hurdles they had in their way and shipped out a title that was welcomed. In spite of the various drawbacks within the game that didn’t please everyone, many aspects of the game-play mechanics became a pioneer in game development and set a benchmark for future titles in the genre. You have to give it up to the team developing Final Fantasy XIII for taking their time. This assures we won’t come across the kind of situation we faced while playing FFXII. This goes out to everyone who has been cussing at Square Enix for extending FFXIII to late 2009 or early 2010. The time that would be taken to develop the title for the X360 gives time to the PS3 QA Testers to give out their best. This will help the core development team to debug and minimize every last possibly visible glitch within the game, giving the PS3 version an upper hand.

With all the downloadable content planned for Xbox Live including mini arcade games as spin-offs to FFXIII and everything, plus everything exclusive that PSN and PlayStation Home is going to get, this doesn’t get any better than this. Patience pays, so sit tight until Final Fantasy XIII hits the shelves; it would be totally worth the wait and bigger than what any one can imagine.

The latest and maybe the most important invention in mankind’s history since the discovery of powerful video game consoles, the cell processor and the various games that we play in modern times has been invented. Yes, I am talking about the Time Machine (was just finished last week) and I am going to be the first one to use it and will be using it to travel back in time to the date 22 June 1965 and location Wermelskirchen, Germany. “Why that particular date?” you might ask; well that was the unfateful day when the infamous Uwe Boll was born and I will make sure that he does not grow up to become a movie director and make vomit inducing movies out of uber-cool games (Farcry anyone?).

Are you still reading this? OK, so now that I have your attention, here’s the real deal.

The time machine has not yet been invented ( I bet I had gotten all your hopes up for time traveling to the Mesozoic era and playing Turok first hand, but sorry people, maybe in the next century). What this article is really about is .. well .. ACTION FIGURES!!

Yes you read that right.

What do you understand when i say the word “Action figure”? According to our wonderful Wikipedia -”An action figure is a poseable character figurine, often made of plastic and other materials, and often based upon movie, comic book or video game characters.”

Now that you have a basic idea of what it is, allow me to elaborate in my own words what I think an action figure is, first of all and quite simply it is a magnificent piece of art amongst other things. It is also a faithful replica of your favorite game, comic or movie protagonist which you can keep in your room, on your desk, in your display shelf and many other possible places to basically appreciate the work of the hard working creators and designers who made the character for that movie or game in the first place.

Now if you are going to say that these things are for kids then my friend let me tell you how hugely mistaken you are. Action figures are a big deal in this time and to support that claim here is a little fact for you guys - Today Action figures are a 1.5 billion dollar business and one of the few segments of the toy industry that actually grew in the last few years. The majority of people that buy these are in their twenties and their thirties and are really not kids anymore. Let’s look at an example shall we - If I buy and wear a t-shirt that says ‘Metallica Rocks’ then it’s cool, and I am just expressing my love for their music? But if I buy an action figure of James Hetfield and keep it on my desk then that’s kiddish, eh?? Oh pleassse … and you say I need to grow up. These days there are companies solely devoted to making action figures and nothing else like Mcfarlane, NECA, Mezco, SOTA along with many others.

It’s less about play action for the collectors than it is about getting it right. The overall look and feel of a figure by which i mean the sculpt, the paint job, articulation and capturing the intricate details (like say the mandibles of a predator or the chains of Kratos) has to be awesome.

Nowadays with every new blockbuster movie or a great game there are licensing deals for making action figures and collectibles of the characters.It started with Star Wars and became a rage from then onwards. May that be movies, sports, games, comics even music bands there are action figures of almost everything. And it is a great way of immortalizing that particular moment or the character in 3D and it is also a way of just showing your likes and dislikes, like “Hey, I like God of war and that’s why I have a 12 inch Kratos standing on top of my desktop monitor.”

I am an action figure collector myself and have been one since as long as I can remember. Sadly in our great country India, this hobby is almost non-existent, but I wish to change that and I hope this post will work as a catalyst for the same. Here’s a link bunch for some fantastic action figures from my very own collection. Keep a look out for more on action figures right here!

The past few years have been great for the video games industry. Amazing titles being launched ever so frequently ensured to keep an avid gamer happy throughout the days. Not to forget to mention, the advancement to the next generation of gaming, as the world witnessed the launch of three new consoles more or less around the same time-period. Franchises were really true to the spirit of the game and kept the power flowing by constantly enhancing the graphics, gameplay etc. of upcoming titles. Other than these obvious facts, a certain aberration has indeed been observed. A truly appreciable change in the trend of game-development is that, the designers have begun to experiment with the franchise itself and carve out a game in a whole new genre. This is not a very new thing, but looking at the number of aberrations in so many franchises, certainly forces one to acknowledge the potential of this trend.

Command and Conquer; if we say it out loud, it instantly brings to memory the fast paced tank rushes and full motion video sequences that made the series so intriguing. Somewhat around 2002, a new game hit the stands by the name Command and Conquer:Renegade. Any C&C fan would not leave out a game launched freshly that was obvious, so the game sold over a million copies in the very first month of its launch. What gamers were delighted to see, was that it wasn’t an RTS game. It was a First Person Shooter! How did this happen? A franchise doing so well, that their last game at that time, Red Alert 2 was still selling like hot cakes; changed genres? Quite unnatural, yes, but not an attempt in futility, simply because Renegade was an amazing game. The battle over Tiberium between GDI and NOD was just begging to be made into an FPS. Many gamers fantasized seeing all the action up-close and with Renegade, it was delivered so well.

Killzone on the Play Station 2 was a big let down. It was a good shooter, no doubt but could have been a lot better. When Killzone was announced for the PSP, gamers couldn’t help but sigh out loud, as no one expected it to be anything but an FPS with bad graphics and horrible gameplay, as FPS titles on the PSP don’t really sound as if they would go a long way. Lost Boys (now known as Guerrilla) did a fantastic job by making Killzone: Liberation an over the top , third person shooter, which won the hearts of gamers all over and took portable multiplayer action to a new level.

Same can be said for the Warcraft franchise. World of Warcraft needs no introduction. 12 million users online are proof enough. Starcraft, Star Wars, Quake , Mario, Sonic etc. are some other franchises that changed genres for the better. Sadly, this doesn’t always work. Commandos was a great franchise literally torn to shreds by the horrible execution of its FPS version called Commandos: Strike Force. Its all about hits and misses actually. You cannot expect raging success every time. Nonetheless, it is very creative to change genres and bring a lot of excitment to the table. Lets just hope we see Halo Wars soon!