Sorry for yet another long absence. Whenever I thought I would have time to post here, something else came up. At other times, I didn't really feel like posting. There are so many topics I was going to talk about, but most of them probably aren't relevant anymore anyway as they are old news and have been discussed to death elsewhere - for example, anything remotely E3 related. Therefore, I'll just ignore those for now and skip straight to more current issues.

I'll start with Puyo Puyo Fever. To be honest, I didn't even know the game was out here until I wandered into the local game store a couple of months ago, scanned the shelves, and saw its 'cute pop' box staring back at me. (This was the same trip on which I discovered Shinyaku Seiken Densetsu had also been 'blessed' with an English translation.) I've now battled through single player mode and played a few 2-Player matches, thanks to FrF and his cuboid, so I thought I would share my thoughts on the game here.

Although I was sceptical at first, I have to admit that it seems Sonic Team knew what they were doing with Fever. The old Puyo franchise, while loved by hardcore Puyo devotees, had become stale. Making a game to appeal to a small (albeit enthusiastic) fanbase is not good business. Although the game concept was sound, Puyo Puyo needed a fresh new look and feel to bring it up to date and make it able to compete in the general game market.

The updating of Puyo Puyo isn't just restricted to its look and feel. My overall impression of Fever is that it is now a "party game", much more so than previous Puyo incarnations, thanks to such additions as Fever Mode and new puyo block shapes. This could be a reflection of the trend in game playing behaviour over the last decade - away from the concept of a "bedroom nerd" and more towards the social gaming scene.

Fever Mode, one of the aspects of the game I wasn't too sure about, actually isn't as bad as I had feared. It is probably more responsible for the new "party" feel of the game than any other new feature. For casual, party gaming, it introduces a whole new way of playing. Well, perhaps not entirely new - Puyo fans will remember the introduction of offsetting in Sun. However, this time around, you don't have to be a hardcore Puyo player to get anything worthwhile out of it. Speaking of hardcore Puyo players, having seen some of the games from the recent Puyo Puyo Tournament, it's interesting to see how expert players have taken to using Fever Mode. It appears to be a common tactic to use it as an escape - to set up your game screen in such a way that should you ever find yourself in a spot of trouble, you can always "flee" to Fever Mode to hurl a few ojama at your opponent, hopefully distracting them and giving you enough time to sort out your own mess.

Fever releases are still continuing with the Mac (2) version hitting stores yesterday (Saturn USB pad!) and the GBA version due on July 24th.

Tales news now! (cue groaning noises) There are some nice new screenshots up over at the Rebirth site. It feels quite similar in many ways to Symphonia - similar art, the same character cell shader, etc. The battle system has now become the "3-Line Linear Motion Battle System", a supposed upgrade from Symphonia's "Multi-Line Linear Motion Battle System", but which appears to be almost exactly the same too. Still no release dates as of yet.

I'm not sure if I mentioned the forthcoming PS2 port of Symphonia, so I'll do that now. It's old news now, but there's the link anyway, in case anyone missed it. Meanwhile, the US Symphonia site continues to grow as the US release date nears. Apparently Genius and Refill weren't good names, having become Genis and Raine respectively in the US version. Shihna, which I thought was a rather pleasant name, becomes the somewhat more grating Sheena. She also appears to have been given a surname, which I don't recall her having in the original version. It's certainly not as bad as I was expecting. I'm sure at least one person on the localisation team must have been tempted to change Colette to Sharon. >_>

Ren'ai game news. I'll go through each company in turn, starting with Key. Lia's debut album, Prismatic, is out today. Unusually, Visual Arts appear to have created an entirely new label just for this release. The Air movie appears to have a new site, as does the Air TV series. That's a lot of Air. Finally, for anyone who doubted the success of Clannad, take a look at the Clannad review page over at myreview.jp. ^^

Next, Leaf/Aquaplus. The To Heart 2 site went live last week, giving the world a taste of the sequel to one of the most popular visual novels of all time. The character design is interesting - original To Heart meets Routes, with a bit of something else added. However, it does feel satisfyingly To Heart-like, so will hopefully prove to be a worthy sequel. An Aruru to Asobo patch has also been released.

Studio Mebius, distant cousin of Key and who, for a time, seemed to be following in its relative's footsteps by appearing to do nothing, has suddenly sprung back to life. Not content with just releasing information on its anticipated new titles, it has gone ahead with a complete site renewal. According to the site, further information on Tomodachi Ijou, Koibito Miman will be released later today. We already have a release date - September 24th, 2004 - so it would appear that everything is still go at Studio Mebius. It's also interesting to note that the development time on TomoKoi, from its initial conception to release (assuming the release date is kept), will be a little over a year. Perhaps Key could learn some lessons here. I wonder what happened to Toki no Uta though, the game Mebius supposedly had in development alongside TomoKoi. It appears to have vanished without a trace...

It's not a game and it's not cute, but it is my distro of choice. Slackware 10 was released on Wednesday, the first Slackware release in almost 9 months. Slackware. Because it works.

Finally, I've made a few changes to the site. The CSS has been modified so that an exact point size is specified for most of the text on the site. I didn't really want to do that, but browsers these days seem too stupid to be able to pick a reasonable size of type themselves. If anyone has any problems, let me know. On a related note, recent Gecko-based browsers (Mozilla, Firefox, etc.) seem to have table rendering problems. This site isn't too bad, but my other site can render horribly sometimes. Other updates to the site include a few added links (go and read Voxie's site - it's more interesting than this one) as well as a new Ragnarok Online page. I decided that since AzieƖ has been around for over a year now, it was about time she had her own page, especially since that young upstart, Tammui, has already been in on the act for a while. Incidentally, I may give Tammui a screenshot diary as well since the full playdiary idea will just take up too much time - I've written half a playdiary entry so far. >_> Take a look at AzieƖ's screenshot diary and let me know what you think of the idea.