GRID is the game hogging my attention lately. I got it on a whim, because I haven't played a good racing game in a long while. Although everything Codemasters make is good, for the most part. Their racing games are top notch, from the graphics to the physics and sound, I can't say enough good things. I will say however that I would imagine this game has steep system requirements like DIRT did; but that is the price you pay. If you are lucky enough to own a platform capable of displaying this level of detail at a respectable speed, and like racing games, I highly encourage you to try it out. I've also included some gameplay footage of yours truly driving, below.

It should be noted that I am simply driving with a keyboard, using the arrow keys, so don't let the lack of a gamepad or steering wheel throw you off. Ideally it would be nice to have an analog controller, but as you can plainly see it is not a hard set requirement for lots of enjoyment.

Gameplay captured with FRAPS, basically just drove a race and then captured the replay. In game resolution is 1280x1024 on all highest settings with AA enabled, average framerate is 75, although the video was captured at 30fps. Original capture was 4 GB, which I compressed to 67MB to upload to gamespot. Unfortunately the quality of their encodes does no justice at all to this video, but you will get the general idea.



In other news, I'm picking up a 28" 1920x1200 1080p/HDMI/HDCP LCD monitor and a PS3 with MGS4 and GTAIV in the next week, so I am looking forward to that immensely. I have also been playing Mass Effect (PC) which is excellent, and highly recommended to anyone that hasn't played it. Again, it requires some half decent hardware to get the full experience.

Hope all you Gamespotters are well, and until next time.

GunnyHath

So I've been absorbed by Crisis Core since I started playing it. The nostalgia is thick, they were very true to the series, and the production values are through the roof, simply one of the best games on the PSP, and also a worthy predecessor to the original Final Fantasy VII. This game is on par with Final Fantasy X in terms of graphics and presentation, and true to the plot and characters of Final Fantasy VII.

Of course, the main storyline of the game can be run through in 10-15 hours easily, and is very good; but the bread and butter of the 'challenge' to the game are the missions. Some might argue that these are repetitive and useless, and they can be repetitive I will not deny that. However, useless they are not. I am on the side of the fence that enjoys them, simply because they give me more time to spend in the Final Fantasy VII universe. You will also run into cameo appearances of characters that do not otherwise show up in the main plot of Crisis Core, but which were important in the original game.

The main campaign can be finished at level 27 or less, if you do not do any missions. Personally I chose to do the missions as I wanted to milk as much out of the game as possible, and while this was a lot of fun and rewarding (because my character is now very strong) it is also a double edged sword. Now that my character is so strong (He is level 82, basically immune to everything, with stats around 200 each and deals 30,000 damage with a swing sword blow or spell, or 99,999 damage with one particular skill, and has 99,999 HP) the main plotline is a joke in terms of difficulty. In fact the second last boss in the game (which is where I have stopped playing so far), has somewhere in the neighborhood of 85,000 Hit Points. Needless to say, doing 30,000 damage per hit made very quick work of him.

Now, I had been doing the missions (300 or so in total. By the way, the last mission has a boss with 10 MILLION HP so toughen up before you try to take that on!) all along during the storyline, but chasing one of the main bad guys through a basement near the end of the game is where I stopped and decided to finish them all off. I did not know at the time that I was so close to the end, so now that I am on the doorstep to the end, I don't want it to be over. Of course, I will go back and play Final Fantasy VII immediately afterwards, but this game is excellent and it will be sad to see it end. I feel this way about all good RPGs.

So is anyone else playing Crisis Core, or finished it? Where are you in it if so? Are you struggling with anything? What are your thoughts on the game?

For me this is a really difficult question, I would say near to impossible. In fact I was going to label this blog post "The Impossible Question", but I felt that it would be too ambiguous.

I believe that my favorite RPG of all time would have to be the original Lunar: The Silver Star on the SEGA CD, which I had as a child. The reason, I went into at length in my post about Lunar, but in short it's the characters and the anime cutscenes making them very expressive. You get very attached to them and it makes the story feel very important. For those of you that don't have a SegaCD or know about emulators, the Playstation remake is also very good, but a little "dumbed down" as far as difficulty, to make it more accessible.

Close runners up for me would be the KOTOR series, Final Fantasy 2 (SNES), and also VAY for SegaCD, which is a very difficult RPG but very good as well.

I look forward to hearing your favorites, and reasons; I'm on the lookout for new RPGs to play that I haven't heard of, so feel free to mention rare ones.

I was recently informed that the backwards compatibility with the PS1 and PS2 games have been removed from the North American PS3. I was under the impression that the European PS3s never had it, and the 40 GB North American PS3s didn't either, but the 80 GB PS3 did have full backwards compatibility.

I have been waiting for a price drop, and for FF13/MGS4 to purchase a PS3, the price is high, but the backwards compatibility justified it somewhat. Not having it is a bit of a deal breaker for me.

Can anyone confirm this? Do the 80 GB North American PS3's have or not have backwards compatibility anymore?

(Sunday March 2, 2008 ) -- Blind rock and jazz musician Jeff Healey has died after a lifelong battle against cancer. He was 41.

Healey died Sunday evening in a Toronto hospital, said bandmate Colin Bray, who was in the room with Healey's family when the guitarist died.

Healey had battled cancer since age 1, when a rare form of retinal cancer known as Retinoblastoma claimed his eyesight.

Due to his blindness, Healey taught himself to play guitar by laying the instrument across his lap.

His unique playing $tyle, combined with his blues-oriented vocals, earned him a reputation as a teenage musical prodigy. He shared stages with George Harrison, B.B. King and Stevie Ray Vaughan......


Rest In Peace........

The following is taken with respect, from JeffHealey.com:

March 2, 2008

Guitarist and bandleader Jeff Healey dies in Toronto hospital

Following a lengthy struggle with cancer,
Healey passes away on the eve of the
release of a new blues rock album

Jeff Healey, arguably one of the most distinctive guitar players of our time, died today (Sunday March 2) in St. Joseph's Hospital, Toronto. He was 41, and leaves his wife, Cristie, daughter Rachel (13) and son Derek (three), as well as his father and step-mother, Bud and Rose Healey, and sisters Laura and Linda.
Funeral and memorial arrangements are pending.
Robbed of his sight as a baby due to a rare form of cancer, retino blastoma, and he started to play guitar when he was three, holding the instrument unconventionally across his lap. He formed his first band at 17, but soon formed a trio which was named the Jeff Healey Band.
After his appearance in the movie Road House, he was signed to Arista records, and in 1988 released the Grammy-nominated album See the Light, which included a major hit single, Angel Eyes. He earned a Juno Award in 1990 as Entertainer of the Year.
Two more albums emerged on Arista, with lessening success as the '90s passed. Various "best-of" and live packages were released, and he recorded two more rock albums, before turning to his real love, cl@ssic American jazz from the '20s, '30s and '40s.
By then, however, Healey was an internationally-known star who had played with dozens of musicians, including B.B. King and Stevie Ray Vaughan, and recorded with George Harrison. Mark Knopfler and the late blues legend, Jimmy Rogers.
A family man with a three-year-old son and a 13-year-old daughter he preferred to stay close to home. "I've traveled widely before — been there and done that," he told friends, determined to avoid the lengthy, exhausting tours that marked his life in his twenties and early thirties.
A long-running CBC Radio series saw him in the role of disc jockey — My Kinda Jazz was a staple for a while, but in recent years he had hosted a programme with a similar name on Jazz-FM in Toronto. A highlight of his broadcasts was always the use of rare — and rarely heard — music from his 30,000-plus collection of 78-rpm records.
As his rock career wound down as the millennium came, he recorded a series of three album of early jazz, playing trumpet as well as acoustic guitar in a band he called Jeff Healey's Jazz Wizards. The most recent was It's Tight Like That, recorded live at Hugh's Room in Toronto in 2005, with British jazz legend Chris Barber as guest star.
At the time of his death he was about to see the release of his first rock/blues album in eight years, Mess of Blues, which is being released in Europe on March 20, and in Canada and the U.S. on April 22. The album was the result of a joint agreement between the German label, Ruf Records, and Stony Plain, the independent Edmonton-based label that has released his three jazz CDs.
Mess of Blues was recorded in studios in Toronto, with two cuts recorded at the Jeff Healey's Roadhouse in Toronto and two at a concert in London England. The backup group on the upcoming CD — the Healey's House Band — played with him regularly at the downtown Roadhouse, and at a previous club bearing his name in the Queen-Bathurst area.
Early last year, Healey underwent surgery to remove cancerous tissue from his legs, and later from both lungs; aggressive radiation treatments and chemotherapy, however, failed to halt the spread of the disease.
Despite his battle with cancer, he undertook frequent tours across Canada with both his blues-based band and his jazz group; he was set for a major tour in Germany and the U.K. and was to be a guest on the BBC's famed Jools Holland Show in April.
Remembered by his musicians — and his audiences — for his wry sense of humour as well as his musical playfulness, Healey was a unique musician who bridged different genres with ease and assurance.

I'm talking about a little known gem called Lunar: The Silver Star which made its North American debut on the Sega Genesis add-on called the Sega CD in 1993.

I was a fledgling gamer when Lunar came out, but well into my gaming journey. I had conned my parents into renting hundreds of NES, Sega Master System, Super Nintendo, and Sega Genesis games, and was quite happy with my hobby. Along came the Sega CD; completely raising the bar for the quality of gaming. I remember coming home from school one day to find my parents playing Sewer Shark, the pack-in game that game with the Sega CD, and I was blown away to see full motion video in a game for the first time. Enamored as I was with it, the true beauty of this system didn't come along until I accidentally happened to buy a game called Lunar: The Silver Star. I had credit at a local store and didn't know what to buy so I asked for a recommendation, and the clerk gave me this title.

I had never played an Anime game before, and I can't really think of any serious RPGs that I had played previous to this. I am sure that I had played the likes of Final Fantasy for the NES, but what stands clearly in my mind as the best RPG of my young life is undoubtedly Lunar.

The storyline basically the same story as most other RPGs on the surface, but what really brings this game to life is the characters. Lunar was one of the first games to feature voice acting, and a full orchestral score to take advantage of the large storage capabilities of the CD-ROM format (I still have the original theme as an MP3 on my playlist to this day). You play as an orphaned boy named Alex who wants to grow up and be a Dragonmaster like his idol, Dragonmaster Dyne, who passed away fighting a powerful Black Dragon who had gone insane. The game begins with Alex in a sleepy little village called Burg, where his biggest concern is playing in the local festival. Like most RPGs things take a turn, and Alex finds himself crossing oceans and coming of age in an epic quest of discovery and peril. Along the way you will become attached to these characters, the charm of this game is unlike anything else.

The game play is pretty standard RPG turned based combat, and can be quite difficult at times. At several points in the game you are almost forced to spend time leveling up your party to acquire certain spells or skills which you'll need to move on. A good example of this is when you arrive in the first big city of the game, you have a quest to complete in the sewer and the boss at the end is difficult to defeat without a particular spell. That particular boss can only be damaged by ranged attack, so your knives won't cut it. You gain spells and skills from reaching a certain levels, not by buying them or being taught as in other games. At a couple points in the game, you will benefit from taking time to level up, but this is a small drawback of games of this era, and you should not let this ruin the experience for you.

There is a fairly large cast of supporting characters, and all the characters have high quality artwork, and great animation for the time. It was the first game I had seen which had full motion Anime, which for the second time on one console had blown me away. This game has a small cult following, those that have played it are loyal followers of the series, and I'm sure I speak for us all when I say we can't wait for a modern Lunar game.

Lunar has a sequel called Lunar: Eternal Blue, made in 1995, which takes place thousands of years in the future from the first game, and is equally as good as the first. There is also a version of both on the Sega Saturn which are graphically superior, but is only in Japanese and so I have not had the pleasure of playing it.

A remake of both these games was made for the Sony Playstation, in 2000 and 2002. They were called Lunar: Eternal Blue COMPLETE, and Lunar: Silver Star Story COMPLETE. These remakes featured enhanced graphics due to the power of the Playstation console, a redone soundtrack and a simplified over world and combat system. I highly enjoyed both the originals and the remakes, but the remakes are definitely easier.

Lunar has not had the commercial success of games such as Final Fantasy, or Chrono Trigger, or many others which have become household names to gamers, but this does not diminish the charm and quality of these great titles, and you should absolutely pick this game up if you are able.

I purchased the Playstation remake of Lunar: SSSC when I did not even own a Playstation, and when I sold my Sega CD, the one thing I kept was Lunar: The Silver Star. To this day it sits in my desk with the remake and I will never part with it. The Lunar games have become collectibles, and some in good condition have sold for well over a hundred dollars. I was lucky enough to get my copy at a pawn shop for $15.

I highly recommend to anyone who is able to get a hold of a copy of this game to do so, you won't be sorry.

If anyone has played these games and enjoyed them, also be sure to check out Vay. And if you have played these games, please give me your feedback J

A short video showing the beginning of the game. This video is not my own, just one I found on the web to show you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5KLJipyCC0