Capcom

Three Hundred Hours and Still Going Strong

HIGH A skin-of-my-teeth victory after a knock-down, drag-out, forty-five minute battle.

LOW Struggling to survive the nasty dual Tigrex mission... Twice.

WTF Watching my Felyne companion get the game-winning hit in on the last boss.

I announced this on twitter a few days ago, but it was such a milestone for me that I felt like a little micro-commemoration here at the blog would be appropriate. The big event? I finally finished the single-player campaign in Monster Hunter Freedom Unite on PlayStation Portable.

Since many of you are playing Marvel vs Capcom 3, I thought you'd appreciate some Ryu cosplay. As cosplay goes, you have to give this guy the prize for actually producing a fireball for the photo shoot.

Nintendo has finally unveiled details for the upcoming release of their new handheld, the Nintendo 3DS. The company revealed their pricing plans and launch strategy for the system at an event held today in New York City. Reggie Fils-Aime assures us there'll be 30 games available for the 3DS by June, but the one that has horror geeks most intrigued has to be Capcom's Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D. The Japanese developer released a new teaser trailer for the game today and my reaction is mostly mixed.

As anyone who has the misfortune of following me on Twitter will know, I've been engrossing myself in Phoenix Wright for the past few days, and the game has pretty much been riding solo in my newly acquired DS. I'm just about at the end of episode 5, so not totally done yet. However, unless the game suddenly turns into Mega Man X7 within this last case, I can safely say that Phoenix Wright will rocket straight to the top of my "late to the party" list. And as a bonus, I have the correct spelling of "Phoenix" memorized after years of always relying on spellckeck.

While the recent announcement of Street Fighter X Tekken was met with applause from legions of dedicated gamers who stuck with the series or many who returned with the revival of Street Fighter 4, as someone who fondly remembers spending countless hours at arcades in the late 1980s and feeding quarters "borrowed" from his mother's purse playing Street Fighter 2, I can't help, but to think somewhat cynically of this new partnership between two classic fighting franchises that in different era of video games didn't need this sort of gimmick to stand out. For me, it highlights how the series and genre no longer hold the iconic status of an entire generation of video games.

Capcom's considerable library of excellent 2D fighting games were a perfect fit on the Saturn—not only was the hardware well-suited for them, but the Saturn controller was laid out in a similar configuration to Capcom's arcade control setup as opposed to the less-than-ideal button layout on the PlayStation controller. As a result, games like Street Fighter Alpha 2, X-Men: Children of the Atom and the Darkstalkers sequel Night Warriors shined on the Sega Saturn.

The Third Time is (Kind of) the Charm

HIGH Getting saved a split-second before death by my AI sidekick.

LOW Getting helplessly pinned by bosses while the camera goes crazy.

WTF Why does this feel like it hasn't advanced in years?

Game Description: Monster Hunter 3 (Tri) is an action role-playing game (RPG) from Capcom. The first iteration of the popular Monster Hunter franchise to make an appearance on the Wii platform, action in it revolves around quest based gameplay built around the hunting and capture of monsters as a means of character development. The game features multiple modes of co-op gameplay—both online and offline—new monsters and weapons classes, multiple controller options and Wii Speak and text chat player communication support.

I’m still putting time in on Monster Hunter Tri. I wasn't sure it was going to be worth the effort when I started, but I'm somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen hours deep now and I feel like I'm going to push through until the end. (Well, the end of the off-line single player mode, anyway.)