Shortly after its official announcement, Square Enix has gone ahead and shown off the first trailer to Chrono Trigger for the Nintendo DS. What have we learned so far? Well, let’s see. Akira Toriyama’s idenitfiable art style? Check. Yasunori Mitsuda’s memorable MIDI compositions? Also check. The Super NES quality-gaming grace we’ve come to know and love? A big red-marker colored check there. Assuredly, it doesn’t look all too different from its original iteration, but who cares? Time traveling, a fantastic battle-system, more than 12 unique endings, metal joints and silver points! If you don’t already own a DS, here’s Reason Number “A Billion and One” on why you should. If you have DS, buy another anyway and give it to your house pet.

Also, food for thought. What if Squenix decides to finally bring back Singing Mountain or Zeal Dungeon from the early prototype days as part of the newly planned content? Maybe even localise and pack in Radical Dreamers, while they’re at?

Well, what more can we say? We’ve confirmed with local distributor e-Xpress Interactive a couple of days back that Soulcalibur IV will indeed not make it to Indian shores, thanks to the fact that it’s an Ubisoft game. Since Ubisoft doesn’t believe in offering any sort of sales concession when it comes to Indian markets, and e-Xpress, like anyone else, wouldn’t want non-existent profit margins, Indian gamers eager for Soulcalibur IV will now have to look at Play-Asia (as usual) for their imports.

Speaking to us about the situation, e-Xpress has clarified that rather than haggle with Ubi and import the games for “an obscenely high price”, they’ve elected to not import the game in all likelihood. But the real terrifying part of the conversation came when Fallout 3 came into the picture. In a press release issued last month, Ubisoft had claimed that it would be distributing Fallout 3 in some PAL territory countries in Europe including Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Which indirectly means that if India’s import were to happen via Ubi, there’s no chance of Fallout 3 ever being officially released for the consoles here.

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You’ve played them. You’ve heard of them. Hell, you’ve probably written bad fanfics about them (no, it doesn’t matter how realistic your portrayal of TifaxSquall is. It’s just not happening, fangirls). Japanese Role Playing Games (JRPGs) are one of the must-haves of just about any video game console you can name, with at least one of the most popular coming bearing the Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest stamp. The quality of JRPGs vary just as much as their irreverent spiraling plot lines do, and finding a derivative troll that feeds like a parasite on your patience is nothing new. However, sometimes you stumble upon a real gem that claims you right from the first Limit Break, and once every ounce of gameplay is experienced, a sequel is the next natural course of action. Here are some of the greatest Japanese RPG franchises that haven’t yet received a new iteration, but which occupy the top of the waiting list.

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The World Ends With You (Subarashiki Kono Sekai or “It’s a Wonderful World”), is the odd-child of DS gaming. The antagonizing, “don’t-give-a-damn” gathering of anti-social dispositions set against innate Shibuya cultural musings has been done many times in Japan — the manga Gantz and Jet Set Radio come to mind. Though it received it’s fair share of media attention, thanks in part to the Kingdom Hearts team (led by Tetsuya Nomura) collaborating with developer Jupiter (Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories and the under-rated Picross DS), no one expected the game to be this technically impressive. However, with it’s eclectic mix of Shibuya youth culture, a varied and excellently orchestrated sound track, vivid visuals of anime-esque detailing and graffiti mantels, sharp 2D sprite animation and background design, The World Ends With You presents a compelling, addictive and lengthy package for any RPG and DS gamer alike. And if that weren’t enough, it perfectly follows the guidelines for stellar Japanese game design: easy to get into, full of depth; original yet still staying in it’s carefully constructed mold.

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Know how people talk about history repeating itself, but you still see zidiots running around committing the exact same mistakes as everybody else? Apparently, in EA and BioWare’s case, that’s more than hitting the bull’s eye. In what seems to be a serious case of having gone Rip Van Winkle during the Bioshock / SecuROM SNAFU, Derek French, the Technical Producer at BioWare for Mass Effect (PC) has the beginnings of a fine mess on his hands, especially after announcing a copy protection system that makes the Bioshock activation mess (or StarForce even) seem tame by comparison.

According to Derek French, Mass Effect, scheduled to arrive on the PC this 28th, will employ the same SecuROM online activation system that was initially put into Bioshock, allowing the buyer to activate his copy of Mass Effect for 3 times before politely asking to him / her to go to hell, that is, contact the customer service “helpline” to get it reactivated. And while the game itself wouldn’t require the DVD to be physically present in the drive, it goes one step further and phones home every 10 days and re-authenticates just to make sure legit customers are not the worst form of criminal scum publishers swear we are.

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I can tell what you’re pondering. No, I know what you’re pondering. Here you are, setting idly in your chair and skimming through random game message boards. The howls and cries of the current console generation are anywhere and everywhere, whether its about how balls-to-the-wall it is too see how much Nathan Drake can get his shirt-wet in gorgeous wide-screen high-definition or the municipal assertion that the waggle generation is here to stay, just so long no one has to endure Nintendo’s smutty online service for too long. Yeah, you’ve been there. But not too long back, you were rubbing your thumbs red over a console that reserved a special place in your heart for more than 7 years. Good times! Wonderful times! And now they’ve departed.

“If only there were still some new games to play,” you think to yourself.

Splendidly, it so happens that this April will be seeing several titles released on the PS2, and if you find yourself curious (and you should be), you’ll want to thank – who else – but Japan (or at least the company Atlus for publishing certain titles)! After all, it’s the only country in the world that still has an extensive backlog of games that most people haven’t even heard about.

“Wait, wouldn’t mean they were too crappy for public ingestion or…”

Quiet, you! Now hit the jump like a good munchkin.

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This really is good news or bad news, depending on which way you choose to look at it. It’s a pragmatic statement, so I’m not going into why I think so, because frankly, no one gives a flying hoot about what I think.

But BioWare have announced today that Mass Effect will grace all modern PC’s in May 2008. The EA slaves announced that the award-winning space epic Mass Effect™ published by EA and will sport some redesigning for the PC.
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