Anyone do Joachim's story mission?  This is the first mission I have encountered in this game that has me completely stumped.

It's easy enough to get to the third map, but once you're there here is the problem:  There is a gatling bunker on the far hill completely overlooking the route you need to take and there is absolutely no way to sneak around behind it from your starting position.  Furthermore you are not allowed to deploy a tank on this map at all.

The gatling bunker has the perfect vantage point and enough range to ensure it will make swiss cheese out of any infantry that you try to send towards the objective and if attacking from the front you will need something like 15 rockets from lancers to destroy it, which obviously isn't practical.  One thing you can do is send an armored tech straight at the bunker because their shields will protect them, but they don't have any weapons that could actually hurt the bunker so this doesn't serve any purpose as far as I can see.  Unfortunately the objective is in the opposite direction from the bunker and there is no way to make your armored tech walk backwards...

So other than continually shelling the damn thing from far away with lancers (and getting a terrible score because of how many turns it would take) I don't see a solution to this map.

Seconded.

Depends what you mean by 'completely mindblowing', I guess.  I'm not sure I can think of any game--Western, Japanese, RPG, or otherwise--that meets that mark.  However there certainly have been some good ones.  I am intentionally leaving out SMT games because everyone has already had a fangasm about them:

Valkyria Chronicles
Nier
Demons Souls
Resonance of Fate
Dragon Quest IX
Ys VII

All very recent games.  What WRPGs of note have come out during the same period?  There's Dragon Age and the Mass Effect games (both by the same company...).  I know a lot of people like Bethesda's stuff, but personally I am so sick of their games.  Talk about not evolving the genre, they've been making the exact same game for the last 15 years.  If you're going to count them then on the JRPG side you should count Namco's Tales studios, which can also make good games but are also stuck in a rut.  And that's pretty much it for major WRPGs...two developers.

There are plenty of bad JRPGs out there and I don't think a single person has tried to dispute that (despite people like Danku responding as if like somebody was disputing that).  But why ignore the good ones?  People are putting blinders on, only looking at the worst examples they can find (and there are just way more low-budget RPGs in Japan than the west so it's not hard to find examples), and declaring the genre dead.

Lower quality graphics in a lot of Japanese games is simply because of budget issues.  They know the games aren't going to move as many units but they still want to be profitable.

I agree that the article seems incredibly condescending.  FFXIII, for all its faults, is an incredibly good looking game.  They were able to make it that way because they knew it would sell.

There are a lot of puns in Japanese.  Get used to it.

Kanji (the name) is not written with the same characters as kanji (the characters).  It just happens to sound the same.  For that matter neither is Ichigo from Bleach written with the same characters as strawberry.

And just to be clear here, this is not a JRPG/anime thing.  These are real names.

I like how Thoren only compares the worst JRPGs have to offer to the best WRPGs have to offer and acts like he's making some kind of point...

I don't have Ico and I have looked far and wide for a copy of it (Do you have any idea what that game was going for on eBay?!  Of course it has probably dropped now.), so this is a no-brainer.

Unless they have seriously reworked the game I don't see how a versus mode could be any good.  Disgaea has never been balanced.

I honestly preferred Disgaea 2's story to Disgaea 1, but I seem to be in the minority there.  Etna, Laharl, and Flonne were fun at first but they were all very shallow characters.

One of these days I have to actually play Disgaea 3 (which I already own...).

Wait, where did this Yosuke is gay/bi nonsense come from?  That thought had never even crossed my mind.  Is there something specific?

Press release

Wasn't quite sure where to put this since there are general implications, but the only games announced so far are shooters so this seems like as good a place as any.

Basically it seems that MonkeyPaw Games is releasing Japanese PS1 classics on the US store through a new service called Imports.  So far they have announced Cho Aniki and GaiaSeed.  They are not translated, though being shooters they shouldn't be too hard to figure out.

What do you think?

I was doing my best to just ignore this comment because I knew responding to it could not possibly be brief, but then somebody actually went and took it seriously.  There is so much wrong in these few sentences that I don't even know where to begin.  Heck, sometimes there are multiple factual errors in one sentence!

But I'll give it a shot.

"technically, the human eye has a persistence of vision cap at around 20fps."

Utter nonsense.  The human eye does not have a 'persistence of vision cap' at all.  It doesn't even see in term of frames per second (not 'fields per second'...whatever the heck that is) in the first place.  However there does come a point where the brain is not able to distinguish between framerates.  That point is nowhere near 20fps, it's roughly 60fps but for some people it's even higher than that.

"Movies are all 24fps, and they look great."

Movies are 24fps, I'll give you that.  This is the result of a standard developed in the 1920s, and frankly there is room for improvement.  The only reason movies look good at 24fps is because of motion blur, which is to say that each image was not taken from a still scene and then spliced together, but rather when filming something in motion you get a series of blurry frames and your brain fills in the detail to understand what it's looking at.  This happens naturally when using film because of the exposure time.

However, motion blur doesn't come for free.  You are literally looking at blurry images, and there is an associated loss of detail.  For instance there are times when it is impossible to read text on things that are moving in a movie when from a corresponding position in real life you would have been able to.  But these kinds of effects are subtle and most people don't notice.  There have been actual studies showing motion-heavy movies to people recorded at higher framerates and yes they absolutely can tell the difference in a side-by-side comparison.  And interesting point, though, is that people have become so used to looking at 24fps movies that when shown something at a higher framerate they will often comment that it looks 'fake' or 'cheap' despite the fact that they're seeing more detail.  24fps is how people think movies are supposed to look.

BTW, it is possible to do motion blur in video games but the easiest way to do it is to interpolate between frames, which is generally more work and doesn't look as good as just running at a higher framerate in the first place.  That's why nobody bothers.

"The reason behind 60fps (fields per second), is because it can use AC power as a regulator, which cycles at 60 times per second."

Complete and utter nonsense.  AC power has nothing to do with framerates.  Most electronics converts to DC power anyway, but even without taking that into account framerate != refresh rate.

"Early CRTs couldn't keep a pixel lit for a whole cycle without looking flickery, which is why they invented interlacing."

First of all, interlacing is a total red herring here.  Second of all, you are again confusing framerate and refresh rate.  A CRT with a refresh rate of 60Hz absolutely does look flickery.  How much it bothers you depends on the person, but I can't even look at a 60Hz screen.  It hurts my eyes.  That's why most (if not all...) CRTS run at more than 60Hz.  The refresh rate refers only to the scan time for the electron beam.  A CRT running at 120Hz displaying 60fps would refresh twice for each frame.  That kind of thing is completely normal for a CRT.

"So 60fps is kind of unnecessary, just one of those standards like like QWERTY keyboards, that is there for no other reason than issues with outdated hardware."

Given that everything you said to support this statement is nonsense, I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that your conclusion is nonsense.

Some more reading for you

I don't feel like that's an accurate description and I played the damn thing.  It is faster paced, yes, but that doesn't have to be a bad thing.  You can still pause and issue orders, switch between the characters in your party, etc.  For anyone who played the original on a console the controls were basically the same.  It's just when not paused things move and happen faster.  And that's a good thing as far as I am concerned.

And Dragon Age was never turn-based...it was, and still is, pause-and-play.

The more I learn about this game the more I want it.  I don't care if it's on the PSP.  The biggest problem with VC2 was the story/characters but the game plays great.  Better than the original in a lot of ways.  With this game they seem to be returning to a more serious, linear story.  They've also promised larger maps than VC2.

However I do have one huge concern:  What is having a playable Valkyur on your team going to do to the game balance?  I mean heck, why would you even use any other unit?

Man, I don't even like racing games and they're making me want to buy this...how did they do that?

Except it's not a sequel, it's a reboot.  Why does he have to look the same?