Wii-Tards.net : We Never Finish Anyth

The new DSiLL is out, and it’s huge. Is it Xbox Hueg? As ostensibly portable consoles go, yea, it is.

Click here to find out all the details.

I love Castlevania.

Consume consume consume! Any Castlevania Konami spits out is ravenously being devoured by me, a crazed fan addicted by the slavernous addiction of leveling and platforming at the same time. Thus, I think I should share my view on this little piece of software.

Since it’s the first time in ages I made a review and my only one here was of Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, I’ll do Order of Ecclesia now before starting with proper Wii games. (Here’s looking at you, Cursed Mountain.)

Did I mention I loooove Castlevania?

So, yeah, I haven’t been posting a lot this year. There’s several reasons for that. The biggest one, though, is that there just hasn’t been a lot to write about. I’ve been watching the new releases for PS3 and Wii and there just isn’t all that much I’m interested in, and the few releases that do interest me are either in the distant future or keep getting their release dates pushed back into 2010. Even the DS, which for some time had more releases I wanted to play than I could keep up with, has now seemed to dry up. Chalk it up to the global recession, I suppose.

But even so, it seems I have less time to play games than ever, much less to play them in enough depth to be able to write about them.

That, plus a feeling of general disappointment. Being disappointed by titles that I waited for with great anticipation, like Cross Edge, or disappointment in the revelation that the Wii needs an extra plugin, the Wii Motion Plus, in order to actually do the kind of motion-tracking gameplay that was first promised in its promotions of three years ago. Not to mention the dizzying amount of shovelware that’s being poured onto that system. With sheer volume alone one would think that there would be *something* worth playing on there. But it seems that Nintendo are just about the only ones putting out anything worthwhile on the Wii. There are exceptions, of course, but those are so few and far between…I’ve started to lose hope.

So…what now? Well, I’ll still keep making figure posts, regardless.

Several people have asked me what the deal is with Aeria and LaTale. Basically it’s a regional thing. Aeria is to be the publisher for LaTale in Europe now since they didn’t officially have one. OGPlanet will remain the US publisher, unfortunately. But Aeria will not be closing their version to the rest of the world, and as far as I know, neither will OGP.

The reason I care at all, personally, is because OGPlanet’s version doesn’t work with Windows7, and the responses I’ve gotten back from their ‘support’ on the issue seem to indicate that they know there’s a problem, but they don’t care, and don’t expect anyone to even start working on the problem until several months after Win7′s official release. That, coupled with their dropping of Pangya earlier this year, forcing that game’s developer to take over publishing duties as well, really doesn’t leave me very happy with OGP, and even though I love LaTale, as a customer I’d also love to deal with someone, anyone but OGP.

Sadly, Aeria’s version seems to need a bit of work. It’s in Closed Beta right now, and there are a lot of people complaining of in-game lag, and it doesn’t seem to make any difference where people are connecting from. And with a game like this, a .5 second delay between the time you enter commands and the time you see a response from your character, really makes it unplayable. They’re also missing the new ‘Machinist’ job class.

Here’s hoping that will be fixed soon.

I had a friend translate some quest information for the Chinese version of La Tale (called Cai Hong Dao, or Rainbow Island). Essentially, these two quests provide exactly the same rewards as the US version of La Tale. They have the same number of repeats, and the same rewards. It’s now highly unlikely that any version released outside the US has any better quest rewards. And considering these quests and the Japanese ones earlier… it looks like we might have the best quest rewards. Click through to see the comparison.
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