Tales of Vesperia (PS3), Super Street Fighter IV & Shinohan’s future

Let’s start off with Tales of Vesperia for PS3. I have not played the 360 version. I did buy the NA limited tin case editon, thinking I’d buy a 360 to play it, but as time went by I never did. So eventually the first words on the PS3 version reached the vast pages of the internet (such as Shinohan.com lol). And now I am a proud owner of Tales of Vesperia for Sony’s Playstation 3! Right off the bat: The game is great! Not sure if I like it more than Tales of Destiny (the original PS1 game) but it’s coming damn close so far. The battle system although nothing really new still holds it’s ground and against all those repetitive standard RPG’s (and I do love them too!). The active battles which I’ve come to love over the last 12 years always take me back to when and Erci and I went straight to mine or his house to finish up yet another puzzle.

The one remember the most was, again in Tales of Destiny, where you had to take the doors in the correct order of the star signs. Neither me nor him could actually reconstruct the correct order of the star signs at the time (I don’t even think I can now to be honest… doesn’t really seem like the most mandatory skill to have…) and internet wasn’t really everywhere yet. In the end after fruitlessly trying to get through the room, we had to refer to one of his mom’s womens magazines… and TADAH we got through.

But back to the actual topic here. I know for most people things that excite me the most about this game, are nothing new especially for 360 owners. For example, I am really hyped about the trophies at the moment. I am having an absolute blast collecting them all. The secret mission always seem to make some sort of sense, although the one against Zagi on the boat was more an accident than anything else, and add just so much more to the replay value of the game. I am used to playing full playthroughs of Tales of Games between 3 – 5 times anyway, but now I can actually keep track of things that I’ve already done and etc.. Again for 360 owners this is nothing big as achievements had been there from the beginning (or so I think anyway). Again all in all very very very happy with the game!

Now let’s get on with the update to Street Fighter IV which is of course Super Street Fighter IV as everybody knows by now.

Character that have been confirmed are, the whole cast that had been in SF4 (duh!) + (about) 8 new characters. 3 of these 8 additions have been revealed already. T. Hawk, the giant native american from Mexico. Deejay, the ever so annoying and in ST almost broken Jamaican dude with a lot of rythm. Yes we got a completely new character as well!

Juri – the first korean fighter to grace the Street Fighter universe and also the first ever Taekwondo user in Street Fighter. Her character design looks pretty decent, although the colors seem a bit strong for a default outfit. In fact her color scheme reminds me a lot of The world ends with you or maybe even Jet Set Radio… Regardless, in motion she looks like a very interesting character to play as. As I’ve more or less dropped Balrog (Boxer / バイソン) and now almost exclusively play C. Viper, she might be someone I could get interested in, but I am still hoping for Makoto to arrive!! Juri’s Ultra shows a lot of evilness that looks outright stunning. A barrage of kicks to launch then running past the floating opponent whispering a few words in his / her ears just to finish them off straight after, it looks great and probably feels very satisfying to kill someone off that way (see video below)!

There are also gonna be few tweaks here and there in terms of gameplay to balance the game a bit more… (eyes Sagat…)!

That’s really it on SSFIV at the moment. Now on to Shinohan itself. We all know I am beyond lazy and most of the time I really cannot be bothered what so ever to even log in to write something. Now I do intend to change this, but the intention doesn’t actually mean it’s gonna happen! lol

The first step I want to go through is to redesign the homepage and make the whole site more blog orientated as at the moment it just looks like out of date news there! I probably will also get rid of the (banner based) Google ads as they don’t really create any revenue. That’s not even in terms of click volumes but rather the money being paid out. Sometimes I see 3 clicks to SUM up $0.01… that’d mean I need between 5 and 6 clicks to actually get at least £0.01 – that’s bullshit! Without ads the site would look a bit empty I feel so the ads in itself are alright, it’s just if Google doesn’t give me the money I want, I’d rather go for ads that look a bit better. Again this only affects the banner ads that Google serves, all text based Google ads will stay where they are. Keep in mind I am both a PPC and SEO Executive, so if anything this is at least sample data for me.

So generally most changes will really just affect the homepage in terms of layout, the design & color scheme won’t be touched as far as I am planning currently – but you never know!

I know a lot of people are bitching about me never having finished the Fragile Playthrough, but the game’s out in NA soon anyway if I remember correctly, so I guess you can just wait and play it yourself now… no? ;)