Minor changes, Radio Downtime

I haven't had a lot of free time to work on the site, but I just made some minor changes to how the site handles incoming traffic from old URLs. Should mean many less 404 page hits, and more updated indexing in the future. Most old links should still work, but point you to the new page. Also, the radio streams have been down for the weekend. I am aware of this, and will have them restored very shortly.

Posted in Site News by Locke on February 09th 2009 at 10:33am 0 Comments

North American Final Fantasy XIII site live, no new content

You can find it here. No new content there though, just the same nonsensical trailer that has been doing its rounds on the internet lately. It has subtitles though, if you haven't seen that yet. It doesn't really matter though, it makes just as much sense as it did without.

But you know, maybe you want to keep your eyes on that site for more news to come.

Posted in Gaming by Kilu on February 06th 2009 at 8:14am 1 Comment

Upcoming Mabinogi Expansion, New Events and Skills!

Mabinogi is an MMORPG by Nexon that some of the RPGN regulars play and have fun. I thought I would drop some news on their latest happenings and upcoming content. The North American edition is current reaching the end of Generation 3, and the next Generation promises many new skills and a whole new world to explore. We are very excited to see news on this new content! Check out the link below for all the details.

Posted in Gaming by Locke on February 02nd 2009 at 5:52pm 2 Comments

Our VGM Radio is back! 24/7 Streams Revived

UPDATE

Our radio system has been changed! This news posting is old. Please visit our radio page to check out our new VGM radio!

RPGN Radio


Well, its been quite a long time, but our radio streams are back up. We have done some testing, but there is still some changes to be made. For now, its a fairly random playlist of 34,000+ VGM files. We are working out some features for it, and hope to have them available sometime soon. If you want to have a listen, here's the links:

RPGN VGM Radio ~ High Quality:
Listen Now!

If you are using a different media player, you can try using those playlist files, or connect to the stream by entering the manual URLs. Also note, this is actual live streaming radio, not quite like our music streamer on the right side menu. You will hear a much greater variety of music on these streams.

Posted in Site News by Locke on January 30th 2009 at 9:32pm 3 Comments

New Japanese Final Fantasy XIII trailer, new character, has a small chocobo

So the official Japanese Final Fantasy 13 site has a new trailer for the game. It's in Japanese of course, but everyone knows that flashy animation works just as well in any language.

It's very much what you would expect from them considering what the previous trailers have been like. So, flashy action, very little gameplay. There is a 20 seconds or so of some battle gameplay in there, which is more than than 0.3 seconds on the older trailers. It looks like some kind of a hybrid of traditional turn based action and FF12 style free movement. It's probably still random encounters unlike FF12 though, but that you can move inside the battle field. Maybe. It's hard to tell really, there's also a big chance that the movement I see in it is just AI movement, and nothing else, making the combat less of a hybrid and just generic traditional combat. The trailer is available in two sizes, 640x360 and 1280x720.

There's also a few more new things on the site, some kind of a message, but it's also in Japanese, so who knows what that says. A new character called Sazh is also revealed, who apparently has a tiny chocobo as a pet. I don't know what to say about that. It's a tiny chocobo. So I guess that's pretty cool.

Posted in Gaming by Kilu on January 29th 2009 at 10:42am 0 Comments

Xbox360 Resident Evil 5 bundle coming

Oh yeah.

Ben Kuchera at Ars Technica has the scoop. Apparently Microsoft will get a Resident Evil 5 bundle for the Xbox360. This just might finally tip me over to getting the console, since the game is something I definitely want to play.

Not all the details are out yet, but it looks like the console and pad will be red, it will come with a game, obviously, and a RE5 theme for your NXE. And as a bonus, download coupon for Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD.

So, the most important information for me is missing, unfortunately. I would really like to know if the consoles will be new Jasper models or are they cleaning out more old stock like they did with the recent holiday bundles. Because Jasper is where it's at.

Posted in Gaming by Kilu on January 25th 2009 at 11:30am 0 Comments

No news since last week?!

Yes, exactly. The work on RPGN backend is progressing slowly, and as far as any other gaming related news is concerned, nothing all that interesting happened last week.

Something about Fable 2 DLC, something about GTA IV DLC, more crazy ass news from Bob's Game, story trailer for Street Fighter IV. And other stuff. None of which are very important to me. I mean sure, SF4 looks like it will be awesome, its just too bad that I don't have X360 to play it in. Yeah, it comes to PC, but it just doesn't seem like a game I will play on my PC.

There was a trailer for Mini Ninjas, a new game announced from the IO Interactive, you know, the guys who make violent video games like Hitman and Kane & Lynch. Which is like, so bizarre. Just watch the trailer and you'll know what I mean.

But all in all, a slow week.

Posted in Gaming by Kilu on January 23rd 2009 at 9:10am 0 Comments

Final Fantasy XIII, Japan 2009, rest of the world April 2010 or later

As was expected and much speculated, even more so after the site launch some days ago, it has now been officially confirmed. FF13 is slated to come out in Japan sometime 2009, and the rest of the world has to wait until April 2010, or later.

That's what Square Enix president Yoichi Wada said in a financial call in Tokyo yesterday, and I guess that's what everyone have been posting about, and will be posting about for the next few days.

I find the "or later" part interesting, to say the least. Since they have said earlier that it will be a simultaneous west release on both consoles, and that they won't even start the XBOX360 conversion until the Japanese PS3 version is ready, it makes me wonder, have they even looked into porting the game yet, and can't estimate the date more accurately, thus the "later" part? Or are they just playing it safe and all doubters will get a surprise when it actually is ready by then?

On the other hand, I don't really buy the part about not starting to develop the X360 version until the PS3 version is ready. It just doesn't make any sense to me. Sure, they probably leave the actual porting to be done after the PS3 goes gold, but I'm sure that a lot of work has been done already to set up the ground for the port. It's also more than likely that the localization will be done by a separate team, and I expect that that work has also begun already.

So, on one hand, it seems like they sure are taking their time, but on the other hand, they probably are doing it the right way, making sure that it's solid when it ships. Though, at this point the quality of Square Enix's X360 work is an unknown. There isn't anything to base any guesses on. You could say that Last Remnant, but no, not really. Last Remnant was done with the Unreal3 Engine, which has been designed to be used on X360. FF13 is done with SE's own Crystal Tools, which, as I said, is an unknown factor right now. Though Crystal Tools also supports PC, so I'm still holding out hope for a PC port.

But all this remains to be seen.

Posted in Gaming by Kilu on January 16th 2009 at 7:24am 0 Comments

Final Fantasy XIII site lives

So the Final Fantasy XIII site went live a few days ago. What does that mean for the gamers? Well, nothing really. The actual release date of the game even in Japan is anyone's guess, bringing it to west is just somewhere in the future.
A gentleman called Keeng over at GiantBomb has it right I'm afraid.

Quote: Both versions of the game will launch at the same time in the west. However, Square Enix has said multiple times they won't begin working on the 360 version until the PS3 version is done, for quality assurance purposes. It has, in the past, taken them anywhere from 6 months (FFX) to 2 full years (FFXI) to finish localization on Final Fantasy games. So after we wait out that potentially 6-24 month localization process, we'll have to wait on them to port the game to 360 and THEN FFXIII will be out in the west. Considering that people are suspicious about the Japanese version even making a late 2009 release date, after at least two years of localization and porting on top of development time, we probably won't see FFXIII until Q4 2010 at the earliest. And that's being extremely optimistic. My guess, if Square Enix sticks to its guns about finishing one version before the other and a simultaneous western release, is we'll see the game in summer 2011.

So, yeah. Don't expect it to land here anytime soon.
The site has a bunch of nice pictures of the 3 announced characters with their silly names. Well, nice, if you like Tetsuya Nomura's style. I don't, that much. There's just something about his designs that make them all look so similar to each other that it's a bit creepy. And character biographies (maybe) but since it's in Japanese, my guess is not an educated one.
The music is nice though. It sounds a lot like Hamauzu, which should be expected I guess. It's nice nevertheless.

Posted in Gaming by Kilu on January 13th 2009 at 8:57am 1 Comment

Welcome to the new RPGamers Network!

Hello everyone, and Merry Christmas! Welcome to the new RPGamers Network website! We still have a lot of work to be done before the site is fully functional, but we thought it was in good enough shape to put it up live, and let everyone submit some feedback and poke around. Some areas are pretty much finished, such as Lyrics and Reviews. Also, if you look on the side menu, there is an option to change the 'site skin'. There are currently only two skins, but we plan to add more later on!

The backend of the site still needs a lot of work, but we would love to hear your comments and suggestions! Please pop over to the forums thread here or leave a comment under the news posting! We want any and all feedback. Find a bug, something look wrong? Got a question? Feel free to post!

Posted in Site News by Locke on December 24th 2008 at 10:22am 3 Comments