Final Fantasy Favorites: Gameplay

Arguably the most important aspect of any game is, as the name suggests, gameplay. Beautiful graphics, wonderful stories, everything else becomes pointless if the interactive portion of the game isn’t interesting to the gamer. Otherwise, you might as well just read a book or watch a movie. I’m not talking about the battle system here, however, since I feel that deserves an entire post to itself, but I will be going into as much of the interactive experience of Final Fantasy as I can, including things like World Maps, minigames, transportation, and even simple things like controls and talking to NPCs. Let’s get to it.

Maniacal Monday: Dr. Nefarious, from Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal

This week, we’ll be taking a break from the heavy, terrifying villains in favor of a more comedic villain. When it comes to bad guys in the world of comedy, their actions tend to be over-the-top and farcical. Their plans are crazy, and are usually either horribly convoluted to the point where you have NO idea how it works, or so spectacularly simple that you wonder where they learned how to be evil in the first place. Just like normal villains, however, they have just as varied and deep a background as any other (usually) and are the driving force behind the plot of the story. Enter Dr. Nefarious, from the Ratchet & Clank game series.

Music Review: NiGHTS: Lucid Dreaming

Video games seem to have it all. Even from their early arcade days, when the game had a singular, simplistic objective, video games had the populace enamoured. As time progressed, they expanded, evolving into interactive complex stories with surprise twists, with a variety of increasingly spectacular gameplay, not to mention the inevitable increase in graphic quality. One of the things that has always been at the core of great gaming, however, has been the soundtracks. To keep the sound of a game fresh and interesting when you have hours upon hours of playing ahead of you is a feat in and of itself, but audio directors always find new ways to go above and beyond when it comes to catchy game music. But for some of the older video games, from the 64-bit era and beyond, their soundtracks find themselves being lost to the ravages of time despite their superior quality because the sound has become outdated in these High Definition times. Thankfully, a website called OverClocked Remix has made it their mission to remix popular video game soundtracks, bringing a whole new dimension to the catchy tunes that filled our childhood. One of their most recent collaborations is entitled “NiGHTS: Lucid Dreaming,” an album comprised entirely of remixes from the Sega Saturn game “NiGHTS into Dreams.”