Kombo.com has a great feature acknowledging a little fact the rest of us are half-ignoring: The Playstation 2 is alive and well. It’ll be some time before its spark dies (’Til the Day All Are One, etc).
The Playstation 2 is small. It’s affordable. It’s–well, I don’t want to say “hardy”, ’cause it’s not. Regardless, I would recommend its purchase to anyone. I recently received a review copy of Naruto: Ultimate Ninja 3 for the PS2 from Namco Bandai (Bandai Namco?), and it was not a bad game in the least. It’ll definitely prove to be a lot of fun for …read more

I think DragonQuest VIII’s most delightful attribute (aside from everything) is the brilliant localisation the game’s recieved. It takes a special job to make me associate Dragon Quest, a series that’s as Japanese as a series can get, with British characters and dialect.
Here’s where the moaning comes in. “Oh no! The purity of the original story has been looooost!” Ha ha! Bugger off. Dragon Warrior / DragonQuest has always gone the classic route with its stories: An ultimate hero versus and ultimate evil. Dragon Quest VIII is no different. Honestly, if not for the fact that the characters have something …read more

If there’s one variable I can blame for turning me into a hack writer, it would be the Dragon Warrior / DragonQuest series. Granted, if you come from a journalist family like mine, the writing gene is always inside you, albeit sometimes inactive…like herpes. But just as that STD flares up and says “Hi” every so often, writers experience triggers that make them say, “Oh man, my muse done gone humped my leg.”
I was about 12 when I played Dragon Warrior III, and it inspired me to take on a stupidly huge writing project. To my credit, it wasn’t fanfiction …read more