This game is not of high enough quality, it needs more Lightning with jiggle boobs!
Final Fantasy to be Made by Committee
Final Fantasy has not been quite right for a while now. It is as though the series was not y2k compliant, and emerged from the other side of the millennium with an infestation of defects and bugs, causing it to misfire randomly. The series has had its bright points since then, but it has been a decidedly patchy affair on the whole. People have been suggesting for years that the Final Fantasy series was in desperate need of some form of quality control, and now it seems that Square Enix means to do something about it.
FF-Reunion has this week revealed that Square Enix has established a ‘Final Fantasy Committee’ – a group charged with watching over the series and bolstering the quality of series entries. While this is a laudable move in theory, one nonetheless harbours a degree of doubt as to how well it will serve them in practice. When attempting to solve a problem one is ill-advised to appoint the parties responsible for said problem to positions of authority. That is to say that any committee charged with correcting the trajectory of Final Fantasy should have been formed, at least predominantly, by people further removed from it than its principal creators. The ‘Final Fantasy Committee’ is comprised of Yoshinori Kitase, Hajime Tabata, Naoki Yoshida and Motomu Toriyama. One has no qualms with Naoki Yoshida and Hajime Tabata’s involvement in overseeing the series, as Tabata’s output has been sterling, and Yoshida knows a thing or two about salvaging an ailing project. Kitase is a little more of a stretch, as he does not seem to have been much of a potent custodian of the Final Fantasy series in recent years, yet his directional work on three of the four projects that he led in the 1990s may warrant his inclusion. The one real head-scratcher is the inclusion of Motomu ‘Lightning is my waifu’ Toriyama, who is held by many to have steered the Final Fantasy series towards its current seventh generation nadir.
Notorious belt and zipper fetishist, Tetsuya Nomura, has not been included in the committee on account of his being too busy directing Final Fantasy XV and Kingdom Hearts III, yet one dismaying oversight is Square Enix’s failure to include Hiroyuki Ito, the man responsible for creating the ATB battle system, directing Final Fantasy IX, and co-directing Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy XII. If anyone were an obvious choice for Final Fantasy custodian, then it should have been him. At any rate, while the committee may not be up to the task of remedying all that ails Final Fantasy, it may nevertheless be able to put a halt to the creation of true stinkers like All the Bravest.
This is one bugtype you might prefer not to catch.
X and Y Have Shipped as Bugtype Pokemon
In a move that is quite uncharacteristic for Nintendo, it appears that they last week released one of their key franchises replete with one crippling bug, capable of crashing the game and corrupting save data. As readers may be aware, attempting to save your game when located in the outdoors portion of Lumiose will cause this error to occur, leading many gamers to suppose they had just lost several hours worth of progress. In response to this Nintendo have pledged that a patch for the game is a top priority, and that it will be able to salvage corrupted save files – yet there is no ETA on when this patch will be available.
Fortunately for impatient gamers, a more immediate work-around has been found for users with corrupted save files. Allegedly, players are able to get corrupt save files to load by repeatedly hammering the ‘Home’ button during loading when the music begins to play and the screen is still blank. Still, as the saying goes, prevention is better than the cure. It is incidents such as this which perfectly illustrate why one is becoming increasingly dismayed at the growing prevalence of portable RPGs which only ship with one save file. Maintaining multiple saves is an excellent way of mitigating game breaking design flaws.
Kinect may seem laughably nonthreatening, but Microsoft may have delivered on the promise of 1984.
Kinect to Place Shoppers Under Surveillance
It would appear that the watchful eye of Sauron that is the Kinect is not set to stop at watching gamers in their living rooms, and then passing along the information to the NSA. In perfect timing to throw a spanner into Microsoft’s hamfisted mollification efforts ahead of the Xbox One’s release, Mondelez International, the company behind brands such as Triscuit, Ritz and Oreo, have this week announced that they will be using Microsoft Kinect in order to spy on consumers as they do their shopping, so as to to harvest their response data, and to ultimately better target marketing at individual shoppers.
“Our goal is to understand how shoppers see, scan, spot, show interest and select products from the shelf in the store, we can also engage and influence the purchase decision by delivering a targeted shopper experience. For example, we can deliver audio or play a video based on demographics, distance and even the time of the day.”
When Microsoft created the Kinect it was never going to end up as just another sub-par video gaming peripheral, not when it is capable of stealing/processing the kind of data which virtually any commercial entity would find invaluable. Indeed, probably the only reason that Kinect is not being used for surveilance purposes by America’s law enforcement agencies is the fact that it cannot see black people!
