Skyward Fire

It was more than a year ago when Sony made it’s acquisition move over the UK-based company Evolution Studios that had the World Rally Championship franchise for the PS2 under it’s belt. It was the first Motorstorm game in the summer of 07, that pushed Sony to go ahead with the deal in hopes of establishing another (off-road) racing genre for it’s current generation console. Motorstorm, in itself, was a very attractive product, and it’s sequel is no less. You can check out the trailer here.

The game impresses on first run, and all the tracks look amazing and are dangerously addictive, with an opportunity to take up more than one route. The game has 16 tracks with 4 different lighting options, and every combination is of an awe-striking diverse design. They left no stone unturned when it came to perfecting the flaws present in the previous game, including major improvements within the vehicle classes.

Pacific Rift Boxart by radoxist

Some of the texture work, the lighting, the motion blur and the water & other dynamic natural elements are just too good. The intensity of geometry & physics within the game has been magnified with some astounding detailing. The sunlight is a subsequent improvement to the lighting, and it’s just as satisfying as the game itself. The track deformation sequences are sophisticated too. The frame rate is more stable than the prequel, and Evolution deserves due credit for that. Technically, the game is more sound than Pure. The vegetation’s interaction & animation deserves plus points too. You don’t have to install the game, but during load times which don’t span to much time, a whole lot of media is cached on the hard disk.

Compared to Motorstorm, it’s easier to choose & play from amongst so many new events. Though the core game play remains the name, not that I was expecting the slightest change. The offline split screen feature was also a stimuli for many gamers that went on to become a purchase decision factor. The multiplayer component allows you to pick a server from over five regions. Unlocking trophies for various achievement eventually unlocks some amazing extras. Somehow, voice chat seems like the gamers’ kryptonite, and there’s scope of improvement there. Since I noticed no lag issues during continuous multiplayer game play, I doubt the weak voice chat had anything to do with my connection. Also, the lack of static pointers is a bit disappointing. Though an update of the game is in the works, which is to supposedly fix issued related to backing up saved data and other stuff about which more information can be found out here.

A major add-on that is crucial in many races, is the brand new Sixaxis tilt. It’s very helpful when it comes to balancing your vehicle and cushioning the jumps without actually having to break the speed. While handling the quad bikes though, switching to analogue sticks is highly recommended. Getting hold of the various controller techniques might take some time initially to understand and get habituated to, but once you’re through that part, they come off as a breeze. The same goes for the various tracks which might seem a little extensive, but once you get the idea of the geography after some exploration, it all comes down as easy. The 5.1 surround support with artists like Death From Above 1979 & David Bowie is fascinating. These artists have hardly been previously featured in various racing games, thus adding to the beauty of Motorstorm: Pacific Rift.

There’s news on a PSP port of the game, and a sequel, which there’s no reason to doubt, since this is a franchise with a lot of room for improvement and there’s a whole lot to be worked upon.

Skyward Rating – 8/10

Deals on Amazon -- PS3

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.

This has to be one of Hideo Kojima’s ideas to take on the X360 fanboys. Obviously, just for the sake of humour, this does indeed tell us Konami still favors the Sony PS3. Here’s an in-game video that cracked me up, don’t worry, it’s spoiler proof.

I can hardly wait for my copy to arrive.

Edit: Embedded video link fixed. YouTube removed the old video for some reason.

Edit 2: Okay so the video is off YouTube again. I’ll put up a consistent link very soon. Promise!

Edit 3: Embedded video link fixed, again.

Just in case the link goes down again, you can download the FLV version of the video here.