360 top JRPGS

by Marius Gheorghe 30. July 2009 05:51

Here my personal top of JRPGS  on the 360 :

1. Lost Oddysey

By far the best one on the platform. It's a massive release (spanning 4 DVD) and takes around 30 hours to complete. The best feature of the game it's the writing (both the storyline and the little stories you find through the game). Related to the little stories......it's pretty weird to have a 28GB game on a HD system and say that the best time you have in the game is simply squinting to read pieces of text. The combat is kind of annoying (standard turn based jrpg fare) but again the writing more than makes up for all the game shortcomings.

2.Tales of Vesperia

This one is a game from the tales series by Namco. Pretty good overall, with some "strong" connections between the party members and some genuine funny writing. The overall story arc is not that interesting. I liked the graphics style (cell shading) and while the quality doesn't reach Eternal Sonata's level , it is quite good.

 

3.Eternal Sonata

Gorgeous cell shaded graphic and THE best battle system (it's real time in a "arena") in any JRPG. These 2 are the best elements of this game. The quirky setting also helps....the game is based on the last hours in the life of Chopin. The storyline is not that interesting unfortunately.

4. Infinite undiscovery

The only good part of this game is the battle system (it's real time on the same map as exploring). Unfortunately the characters are not that interesting and neither is the story.

5. The last remnant

Again a interesting battle system (it's a little more tactical than the rest and it's based on the idea of controlling multiple units) is the only good part of this game.

 

6. Star Ocean : The last Hope

From my point of view the worst game so far....uninteresting plot, cliche characters, worst checkpoint position in the history of JRPGS and the list goes on. Avoid this one.

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gaming

Disappointed by Silverlight support in Visual Studio

by Marius Gheorghe 10. July 2009 13:56

I've started working on a pet project in Silverlight a few days ago (using VS 2008). And frankly there are quite a few problems with Silverlight itself and support for it in Visual Studio :

- the designer is useless. Basically there is NO designer support (meaning drag and drop) for both Silverlight 2 and 3 in Visual Studio 2008. 

- no *proper* SOAP  Web Services support. Instead web services are invoked using WCF backward compatibility model and, here is the kick, are async ONLY. Async calls would make sense if Silvelight didn't have threads.....but since it has threads, why the heck am I forced to call everything aysnc ?!  Also SOAP headers are not properly supported  event though these guys say otherwise.

- still not enough controls.

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dotNET