Wii

Is Xenoblade the Greatest JRPG of This Generation?

HIGH Taking down a rare monster ten levels higher than your party with Melia in the lead.

LOW Traipsing through seemingly endless sidequests to build affinity.

WTF The ending is weirdly reminiscent of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Uncanny valley? Kinesthetic projection? The guys at Extra Credits break down what's wrong with Microsoft's Kinect.

Mortal Kombat and Portal 2 combined last April to move well over 1.5  million units. Compare the significance of those two games with Kinect Star Wars, and Prototype 2. You really can't. Even adding The Witcher 2 to the mix, these games simply don't have the same kind of selling power as last April's slate of game releases. Without prominent and captivating game releases, consumers aren't going to spend money on software… or hardware, for that matter.

The simple truth is that if you spend your time at PAX waiting around in line for a demo you'll play on Xbox Live in a few months anyway, you are a chump. There are so many awesome games from smaller publishers and indies on the floor that you might not get exposed to anywhere else. So, if you were being a linefool, here's some of what you missed.

The convention's stealthy aspect kicked off with a great panel on the subject featuring Nels Anderson, Andy Schatz, and Dan Silvers, chaired by Matthew Weise, also featuring the con's largest single-room concentration of guys in suits.

I don't know about you but the side-scrolling platformer wasn't just a genre, it was the genre for most of my childhood. The games that got it right were the ones that kept ushering you forward—to the right—even when it only seemed to be getting tougher.

There is probably some life lesson or allegory in there somewhere. This video with its nice editing and great music does a good job of highlighting that.

Just when you're ready to argue that no one is excited about the Wii U or its software, a video is leaked onto the Internet that appears to show Ubisoft's Rayman Legends running on a Wii U (development kit) and demonstrating Wii U-specific features.

I knew very little about XCOM before the show, but now it's one of my most anticipated titles. A re-imagining of the classic PC strategy series, Enemy Unknown gave me a very distinct Frozen Synapse vibe, which makes sense since it was itself heavily influenced by the XCOM games. There was no playable demo at the show and the presentation consisted of a pre-beta build, but I liked what I saw and will likely be picking it up when it releases.

I was talking to someone who would know, and the current word is that XSeed games currently has no plans to localize Pandora's Tower (Wii) for the states. Out of the three Operation Rainfall titles, this was the one I was most interested in and after seeing XSeed step up for The Last Story, I'd hoped that they would do the same for this one as well.

And here it is, the final part of Extra Credits' take Western role-playing game vs Japanese role-playing games. Here they look at why the Japanese RPG has fallen behind its Western counterpart and maybe how to reverse its course.