Tokyo Game Show

Recently, I made a trip to the Tokyo Game Show. It's a yearly event, and open to the public on certain days. I've been eager to visit to many years, and as I'm in Japan for the time being, it seemed as good an oppurtunity as any, especially as there were a handful of games I wanted to check out.

Unfortunately, the actual amount of games I was able to play was a lot less than I'd have liked. Admittedly, the vast majority of these were all by Capcom, but with around an hour to wait for each game, I had to prioritise. As much as I'd have liked to play Dragon's Dogma, the queue for that dwarfed the one for Capcom's merchandise stall, which in turn dwarfed several of the ones are Square-Enix's booth. Kudos to Capcom, certainly, but I could only watch from the sidelines.

Of course, one of the games that I made absolute priority to play, regardless of wait, was Street Fighter X Tekken. Even before the release of Marvel vs Capcom 3, I'd been more hyped about SFxT, mainly because Yoshinori Ono was in charge. Almost purely because of my love for Street Fighter 4, I have a lot of faith in the man, and SFxT did not disappoint, thankfully. I did only get two matches, due to time constraints, but I was very pleased overall.

Other titles I tried were the latest Dragon Ball game, the Puyo Puyo Anniversary on 3DS, which is a console which I really dont like all that much and... that was possibly it. I think the main focus of the day was watching trailers and being impressed at booths.

If I ever get the chance to go again, I'll need to be a bit more focused!

Lording about

It's been a while! For some time now, I've had several articles in mind, across quite a few topics, but it seems a bit beyond that now. They're either not that relevant anymore, a bit long-winded, or have simply been covered better elsewhere. With that, and with the established reputation of Samurai Rocket being quiet for long periods of time, I'm simply going to get on with things.

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of trying Lord of Arcana on the PSP, which is mostly a Square-Enix attempt on Monster Hunter, with a fair bit more gore and a lot of guest designers, with Todd MacFarlane being one that comes to mind. It's a bit by the numbers as these sort of games go, with a few little extra features, and certainly better than some of the other attempts out there.

However, more importantly, and more interestingly, Lord of Arcana is a spin-off of an arcade game series, Lord of Vermillion, which I played today. LoV is an arcade based card game, which I admit I'm not exactly enamoured with, but having one in an arcade seemed enough of a novelty to give it a try. First impression is that it's very expensive. 500円 yen for a starter pack, which is required to play, and then 200円 for a game, with some places offering subsequent plays for 100円 after the first credit. With those places, that's generally considered the best method, as after each credit you receive a new card, and rather than one card for 200円, you can get two for 150円 each.

The game is quite simple, with the focus being on your placement of cards/units and which way they're facing, putting them into the best position that enables you to do a special attack. It's definitely something that will take some time getting used to, as there are a lot of things going on at once, but it's not like anything I've played before, so I'm still very interested in it.

All I'm going to need soon is a packet of card protectors... which saddens me greatly.