Toyed around with Phantasy Star Zero for a bit. Here are my findings, complete with screen captures.

The game shows you the opening cutscene, which then segues to the game’s start screen.

After you Press Start, you are taken to the character select screen. Since I have nothing saved, I had to create a character. Similar to Phantasy Star Online, you can choose from three different classes: the Hunter (melee attacks), the Ranger (ranged attacks), and Force (magic users). Similar to Phantasy Star Online, there are three distinct races of people: Humans, Casts (the robots), and Newmans (the people with the pointy ears).

During character selection, you pick your race first, and pick your class from within that race. Humans have 6 different classes within them, while the Cast and Newman only have 4 each (because Cast cannot use magic and Newman cannot use guns…ever!) After that, you are taken to the character select screen.

During our time with Phantasy Star Online, my main character was a Ranger Cast, so I figured I’d go with the same thing this time. I also took the liberty of drawing up mock characters based on the classes Binks, Danger, and Stew played during our time in PSO. Pictured below are the character selection screens for the RACast, the HUCast, the HUMar, and the RAMar.

Your choices for character creation are similar to PSO, although you are limited. A lot. Whereas your colour options were something like 3 dozen in Phantasy Star Online, you are only able to choose from half a dozen colours (if that) for most characters. For the Cast, you are able to change your head, three colours on your body (the main, and accent colours). The fifth choice on every character select screen is your voice. When you press Y, it gives you a small sample of what your voice sounds like. I picked the one that sounded like a squeaky wheel. I thought it was comical.

Anyway, the final selection on your screen is your MAG. It seems as if MAGs will be less diverse in this game (probably due to the limited storage space). So, everyone starts with the same base mag, but you pick the colour.

After you save, it takes you back to the Character Select Screen. Each DS cart can store three characters.

From there, you have a few options. There is the Campaign Mode, Local Multiplay, and Wi-Fi Multiplay as far as the game types. There is also a feature that allows you to change any facet of your character design, so if you decide you dislike your head, or hair colour, or that ridiculous hat Stew is wearing, you can change it up without paying the $10,000 bucks it cost you in PSO.

From here, I dived into the campaign.

I saw a few anime FMV cutscenes and then…

My emulator crashed. Or the ROM crashed. I can’t tell. I’m going to download a different ROM and give it a whirl.

Until then, consider this TO BE CONTINUED…

I’ve acquired a Japanese copy of the game. I’m going to play through it to the extent that I can without understanding the language, and give you all an idea on how it plays.

Hopefully everyone who used to play PSO is still willing to acquire this game when it comes out toward the end of the year. Stew? Danger? Binks?

But yeah. I’ll mess around with it for a little bit and give you a breakdown of the classes. I haven’t seen the robot hunter that Binks got so attached to in any promotional material, so I’m hoping that they are just hiding a lot of classes.

An Informed Expert Discusses RE5 Racism

Hurray. An expert in racism has actually played RE5, and says that the game is not racist. Apparently people just want to jump the gun and label things with Africans and violence as being racist.

Take Two A One-Hit Wonder

I question why they used that as the headline. The article is actually about how Take Two can expect a 50% increase in their earnings from the next GTA game, based on how the console market will expand in the next two years.

I question how some editors latch onto a specific part of an article and make that the headline. Sensationalist.

Red Steel 2 Prototype

Apparently the previously conceived Red Steel 2, which is different than the one on the horizon, had a bit of a fantastical element to it. Check out the screens.

I think that my absence from milk products has resulted in me becoming intolerant of lactose. I didn’t get milk at all when I was living in CLV. All I ever ate that was dairy was cheese. The same was true for the Spring term (although I ate less cheese). And, at Bronte, I didn’t have any dairy (apparently Oriental chefs don’t believe in dairy…).

So, since I’ve started buying milk again to go in my cereal, I have been getting terrible cramps and feeling really bloated. I cannot believe this. It is unsettling to think that I may never enjoy a glass of milk again (without suffering horrible side effects).

In my Twitter feedback post, I accidentally said that 5 is the third largest prime number…which is absurd because there are infinitely many prime numbers.

Thank you to Liam for pointing out my error. The sentence should have read that 5 is the third prime number.

Again, my apologies.