A long-standing feature of the Shin Megami Tensei series is that you won't get very far on your own. You need help from a supernatural entity, be it a demon or a Persona, if you want to advance in the game. It's also a long-standing feature that you can't walk up to a random god or spirit and go "Wanna hang?" You need to use some sort of device to communicate.
In some games it's a mystical widget, like your evil devil eyeball in SMT3: Nocturne or the playing cards from Persona 4. More typically, it's an actual technological device. In the SNES SMT titles, all it took was a PC to let you communicate with demons or make gaping portals to hell. You could even write demons to the hard drive! Spin-off games tended to use more elaborate widgets, like Persona 3's Evoker guns and SMT: If... 's massive computer-claw-with-goggles VR headset.
In the upcoming Persona successor Devil Survivor for Nintendo DS, the characters need a technological widget to communicate and form pacts with their demon pals, and they use the same widget to summon them. That widget, called the COMPS... is clearly just a Nintendo DS Lite. Good one, Atlus.
Square-Enix Japan wants fans to submit weapon name ideas for Think & Feel's upcoming DS RPG Blood of Bahamut! To submit your weapon name, first you need to sign up for the Square-Enix Members online service if you haven't already. The interface is all in Japanese but pretty easy to survive with an auto-translation.
Once you're logged in to your Square-Enix Members account, head to the Blood of Bahamut special page and scroll all the way down to the bottom. Click the button at the bottom of the ToC-looking thing to get to the submission form. The site will accept entries written in alphanumeric (that is, standard American computer) characters.
You can submit the name of a sword (for protag Ibuki), a staff (for protag Yui), or an axe (for protag Kamo). Along with your weapon name, you need to submit a little story about your weapon idea, and a message for the development team. All kudos to Game Tsunami for finding this, and there's more details about submitting your entry there if you're confused about anything.
Check it out, Club Nintendo is now live! Initially I was going to register all of my games before posting, but gave up after a few hours. For someone with a collection the size of mine, it'll take all day.
So instead, some quick info... above is a screenshot nicked via DS Fanboy of the current selection of prizes. It includes the Game & Watch Collection along with the range of Nintendo-themed playing cards, carrying-case type dealies, and Nintendo Hanafuda that I'm gunning for.
For registering Wii titles and completing surveys, you get 50 Coins; DS titles are worth a mere 30, and anything from the Shopping Channel is worth 10. You can only register first-party titles, a major downer. It looks like in the future everything off the Shopping Channel will be Coin-worthy, but only a handful of titles (apparently selected at random) published in December 2008 and before are worthy.
List of Coin-worthy Shopping Channel games behind the cut. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have tons more things to register...
Take Two and Rockstar just hours ago issued a press release confirming some very good news for fans of M-rated gaming on the DS. Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is going to ship in North American on March 17th, and Europe on March 20th.
For those not in the know, GTA: Chinatown Wars was announced at E3 this year and is being developed by Rockstar Leeds, the team behind Grand Theft Auto IV, Bully: Scholarship Edition, and... Manhunt 2. Well, everyone has their bad days. Chinatown Wars returns to GTA's famous LIberty City locale and rebuilds it with the DS interface in mind, offering players a massive city to explore and all sort of nasty crimes to commit. Should be good fun, hopefully more news about the game itself breaks as we get closer to Spring.
Press release in full behind the cut, though there's not a whole lot to it besides the ship date announcements.
People say such nasty things about MadWorld being a negative game mostly about killing people. With this trailer, MadWorld proves it is a positive, cheery game about killing people! This trailer is also notable for being some of the first hints at the game's localization, which is looking snappy.
Check behind the cut, if you dare, in order to read Sega's holiday poetry about MadWorld. (No, I'm not making that up, Sega really sent MadWorld holiday poetry out to journalists.) Here's the text as it appeared at GoNintendo
MadWorld
This week sees Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People come to a conclusion, which means it's time for us journalists to start bobbling our heads about whether or not it sucked. There's also Big Kahuna Party, which looks a bit like a mobile phone cast-off, and ... Enduro Racer for the Master System, which is the game you bought if you didn't have an NES and couldn't play ExciteBike. In this case, though, I'm not sure the Sega kids didn't come out a little bit ahead.
Honestly, though, this week is mostly just "Strong Bad and some other stuff". Press release behind the cut.
Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People
Square-Enix controls the two most outrageously popular lines of RPGs in the world: Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. While the Final Fantasy franchise is outrageously popular on both sides of the Pacific, Dragon Quest never quite managed to catch on as well in the US. It's looking like Nintendo wants to help change that. 1upa reported on some comments Iwata made at the press conference that revealed Dragon Quest X as a Wii title, and the quote seems like a sign of great things to come.
"With the release of Dragon Quest IX, there are two things I'd like to make reality. The first is to build a thriving Japanese game market together with Dragon Quest that rivals the West's. The second is to form a strong tag team to promote Dragon Quest overseas. At Nintendo, we were able to popularize the Brain Age series overseas, which was said to be unmarketable. I want to increase the number of people worldwide that understand the appeal of Dragon Quest, which represents all Japanese gaming culture...even if that only turns out to be a single person. I'm looking forward to working together with Mr. Horii and Square-Enix."
This wouldn't be the first time Nintendo went out of their way to try and build up Dragon Quest's reputation in the West. Nintendo published the first game in the series as Dragon Warrior, and gave it away to Nintendo Power subscribers as a bonus, complete with a handy Player's Guide. Could Iwata be hinting that Nintendo's going to attempt to take on North American publishing duties for Dragon Quest IX? No way of knowing until later in 2009, really.
Dragon Quest IX: Guardians of the Starry Sky
Your average Wii owner probably has a pile of plastic Guitar Hero instruments of whatever type lying around, so this is very good news. IGN confirms, through their latest Rock Band 2 preview, that the Wii SKU of Rock Band 2 is going to be compatible with all of the Guitar Hero Wii instruments, including the drum kit. This makes it easier to forgive the fact that Rock Band 2 is shipping only six months after the decidedly lousy original Wii SKU of Rock Band.
Skimming through the preview reveals some other good news, like almost all of the next-gen Rock Band 2 features coming through intact, including the robust online element. The one frown-inducing detail in the whole thing is the revelation that you won't be able to buy DLC songs through the menu as you do in other Rock Band 2 versions. Instead you'll have to leave the game entirely and go into the Wii Shop Channel, which is lame, lame, lame.
Rock Band 2
IGN's made good again on details with new features for the Play on Wii series of GameCube remakes with Wii Remote controls. Pikmin is getting enhanced save files, so that now your save data stores what you were doing on particular days in discrete blocks. You can use your save data to go back to any day in your game and resume play from that point on. This is a really cool idea for managing save data and I'd love to see other games with "calendars", like Persona 4, implement it.
Mario Power Tennis is getting multiple control styles for Wii. A Wii and Nuncuk style is going to give you full control of your character, as in the original game. There will also be a Wii Remote-only style of play for fans of Wii Sports Tennis, that mimicks the controls of that game closely. Your character moves on its own, and you execute swings by moving your arm. Spin shots come from changing the Wii Remote's angle, while special shots just call for you to press buttons while you swing.
Oh, snap. Yeah, Dragon Quest IX isn't even out in Japan yet (though it'll drop March 28 there), but that didn't stop Square-Enix from announcing Dragon Quest X. In a huge surprise, at a recent press conference, Dragon Quest X has been announced as a Wii exclusive. There's no assets, release date, developer, or any other meaningful information about Dragon Quest X yet. Where Dragon Quest goes is such a big deal for Japanese game publishing that the news by itself is important enough for Wii. You have to wonder if this is what the Quartermann rumor about Dragon Quest IX on Wii was actually referencing...
While Dragon Quest IX isn't confirmed for North American release yet, it seems like an inevitability. The same would go for Dragon Quest X, provided it doesn't fall into the years-long development limbo that's made the series infamous. Of course, both games are probably a long ways off. Clever that Square-Enix has a DS line of remakes of old Dragon Quest games to tide us over, eh?
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