Back in 2000 Sony released a game called aconcagua for the PlayStation 1. An adventure game set in the aftermath of a plane crash in the Andes, it has spent the last 22 years only available in Japanese. Until now!

hilltop—who we covered last year for their work on Racing Lagoon—will be releasing an English-language patch on July 11 that will finally make the game playable for, well, anyone who is able to be reading this post.

I’ll be honest, I had never heard of this game until today, and a quick search reveals that it’s not exactly considered as a classic (a 29/40 from Famitsu is never great, even back then), but like Racing Lagoon, that’s not really the point here. The point is that this game is interestingand practically none of us have ever got the chance to play it, so it’ll be cool to get the chance to check it out.

aconcagua has you playing as a number of characters (you can swap between them), after only five people (including a journalist and political leader) survive a plane crash in South America caused by a terrorist bombing. It’s got a third-person viewpoint, and has you wandering around a snowy mountaintop solving puzzles and helping the other survivors get down to the bottom without being murdered by said terrorists.

Here’s some footage of the original Japanese release: note that it actually has a lot of English in it already, but only for cutscenes and voice acting; the text you needed to actually play the game was all in Japanese:

Here’s the English patch’s trailer, showing that the subtitles have now been translated:

You’ll be able to get the patch when it’s out here.

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<p>The post Obscure Japanese PS1 Game Aconcagua Soon Available In English first appeared on harchi90.</p>

We got a bunch of information about Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion today, including the important news that flavor text about Sephiroth’s gratuitously thorough hair care routine will be carried over from the original game.

reunion is, as the name suggests, the upcoming remastered re-release Ugh Crisis Corea PlayStation Portable action RPG from 2007 that acted as a prequel to Final Fantasy VII. When it arrives on every gaming platform under the sun later this year, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion will feature more voice acting, upgraded visuals, and new gameplay elements, but Square Enix is ​​planning to keep pretty much everything else the same.

Speaking with Eurogamerproducer Mariko Sato explained that the original Crisis Core story remains intact in reunionvery much unlike what’s being done with the ongoing Final Fantasy VII remake trilogy. reunion is largely meant to reintroduce players to Crisis Core protagonist and Final Fantasy VII background character Zack Fair, whose role is expanding in the Remake storyline.

“If you played [Final Fantasy VII Remake]or the original, you’ll probably know that Zack is in the first Remake game where he doesn’t appear at that point in the story in the original Final Fantasy 7”said reunion executive producer Yoshinori Kitase. “So he’s featured more than he was. We thought that people who were starting the story there would really want to know more about this character.”

But let’s be honest: While it was nice to see Zack’s backstory fleshed out, the biggest moment of Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII came when we learned how the villainous Sephiroth keeps his long hair so luxurious. Over the course of the original game, Zack can join a Sephiroth fan club known as the Silver Elite that sends him emails with trivia about their silver-maned hero, including his hair care routine.

The introductory message after Zack enlists with the Silver Elite reads as follows:

Dear members of the Silver Elite:

In this update, we present another piece of Sephiroth trivia—the secrets to his beautiful long hair.

The hair products he uses are of the highest grade, made and supplied by the Shinra Company.

He seems to use one whole bottle of both shampoo and conditioner every time he washes his hair.

They are scented with thirteen kinds of perfumes, including Rose and Vanilla.

Apparently, the scent in the air after Sephiroth tosses his hair changes daily!

I don’t need to tell even the most hygienic gamers out there that that’s a lot of shampoo and conditioner. How does Sephiroth even find the time to use that much product between all his war crimes? Kudos for the dedication to maintaining that beautiful head of hair, but damn, does Sephiroth always have to be so extra?

“I think [Crisis Core’s story] stood the test of time,” said creative director Tetsuya Nomura, a man with his own flair for the dramatic. “It’s something that is very highly regarded by people. And when I look back over the story and how it’s put together, there are not many faults I can find in it really. I think it’s still a very complete and almost perfectly put together story in a lot of ways.”

Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion is coming to PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, and PC sometime in late 2022.

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<p>The post Crisis Core Final Fantasy 7 Reunion Won’t Change Original Story first appeared on harchi90.</p>

Manga artist Kazuki Takahashi, best known as the creator of the Yu-Gi-Oh series (and the popular card game it’s based on), has been found dead.

ace NHK reports, via an English-language story in the Japan Times, a body was “found floating while wearing snorkeling gear in the waters off Nago, Okinawa Prefecture, on Wednesday morning”. Japanese coast guard officials confirmed on Thursday that the body belonged to Takahashi, and are currently “looking into the cause of death”.

Takahashi began his manga career in 1982, and for the next 14 years struggled to find success on titles like Fighting Hawk and Tennenshoku Danji Buray. In 1996, however, he released Yu-Gi-Oh, and the rest was history.

In addition to creating the manga, Takahashi—who had some experience in games design—also designed the broad outlines of a card game (originally called Magic & Wizardsbut later changed to Duel Monsters) featured in the series itself, which after popular request was first released in 1999 as an actual trading card game in Japan by Konami and blew up. It saw an American release in 2002, and is still popular around the world today.

Alongside the manga (which has now sold tens of millions of copies) and card game (which has sold tens of billions of cards), Yu-Gi-Oh has also inspired a range of other media appearances, like several long-running anime series, a number of motion pictures, book releases and, of course, video game adaptations. the latest Yu-Gi-Oh game, Master Duelreleased earlier in 2022 on PC, Switch, Xbox and PlayStation, was at one point pulling in over 200,000 concurrent players just on Steam.

Takahashi had still been active in the comics scene; he was still involved in broader creative decisions on Yu-Gi-Ohand it was only two weeks ago that a Marvel collaboration he had worked oninvolving Iron Man and Spider-Man, was published.

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<p>The post The Creator Of Yu-Gi-Oh!, Kazuki Takahashi, Has Died At Age 60 first appeared on harchi90.</p>

It’s not a Switch Pro but it’ll do. Just in time for the ink shooter’s September launch, Nintendo is releasing a Splatoon 3-themed Switch OLED on August 26. It’ll go for $360, and if you haven’t already upgraded to the newer model, now might be the time, at least if you can manage to get your hands on one.

the special edition Splatoon 3 Switch features squid-themed art from the game on the back and two flashy Joy-Con controllers—one purple/blue and one yellow/green—both with their own game art and white underbellies. It also comes with a graffiti art dock that includes more lightly traced art and a single splash of yellow paint in the bottom corner. They could have gone all out with the squid stuff, but the low-key black-and-white scheme of the main unit and dock really make the Joy-Cons pop. If only you could buy them separately.

Meanwhile, a Splatoon 3-themed Switch Pro Controller ($75) and carrying case ($25) both launch alongside the game on September 9. I still prefer the existing Splatoon 2 Pro Controller, but the rest of the package is a big stylistic upgrade over the previous Splatoon bundle.

In the face of a ceaseless swirl of Switch Pro rumors, Nintendo revealed the OLED model last summer. While it was a big letdown for the internet at the time, I bought one during its autumn launch and was immediately won over. The slightly bigger screen size makes a big difference in handheld mode, and I’m continually amazed at how beautiful games like Xenoblade Chronicles look with the deeper, more vibrant colors.

Despite ongoing component shortages, Switch OLEDs appear to be easier to get ahold of these days (at the time of writing both are currently in stock at several retailers). Time will tell if the same can be said for the Splatoon 3 special edition version. Limited pre-orders for a Xenoblade Chronicles 3 collector’s edition recently crashed Nintendo’s websiteand even now scalpers are trying to sell them ahead of release for huge markups on Ebay.

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<p>The post Splatoon 3-Themed Nintendo Switch OLED Out This Summer first appeared on harchi90.</p>

If you didn’t beat them the first time around (fair, they’re huge), you now have a second chance. three of the best Yakuza entries are coming back to Microsoft’s games-on-demand service, alongside a handful of more family-friendly games. here’s everything coming to Xbox Game Pass over the coming weeks.

July 5

• Last Call BBS (PC)
• Yakuza 0 (Cloud, Console, PC)
• Yakuza Kiwami (Cloud, Console, PC)

• Yakuza Kiwami 2 (Cloud, Console, PC)

July 7

• DJMax Respect V (Cloud, Console, PC)
• Matchpoint: Tennis Championships (Cloud, Console, PC)
• road 96 (Cloud, Console, PC)

July 14

• Escape Academy (Console, PC)
• My Friend Peppa Pig (Cloud, Console, PC)
• PAW Patrol The Movie: Adventure City Calls (Cloud, Console, PC)
• PowerWash Simulator (Cloud, Console, PC)

And the following will become unavailable as of July 15:

• atomicrops (Cloud, Console, PC)
• carrion (Cloud, Console, PC)
• Children of Morta (Cloud, Console, PC)
• Chris Tales (Cloud, Console, PC)
• Lethal League Blaze (Cloud, Console, PC)

Are they gone for good? Who knows! At this point, Game Pass has become a true revolving door, with popular games like Cities: Skylines and outer wilds getting added to the library, leaving, and then coming back.

The latest to do so are three entries in Sega’s popular Yakuza series of bazillion-hour action-RPGs: Yakuza 0which is a prequel, and Yakuza Kiwami and Kiwami 2, respectively remakes of the series’ first and second games. All three were previously part of Game Pass before getting kicked off the service last December.

It’s a bit of a curious strategy, Microsoft shifting expectations like this. If a game leaves Game Pass before you’re done with it, you can buy it at a 20 percent markdown and keep playing. (Xbox save data is automatically stored in the cloud.) But if Microsoft conditions players to assume those games could come back, such a move could have a chilling effect on the Game Pass sales pipeline.

Some of the new library additions are worth checking out as well. road 96, a procedurally generated adventure game about escaping a dystopian nation with a political landscape that’s frighteningly reminiscent of America’s, is entertaining, if not as biting as it thinks it is. the Peppa Pig and PAW Patrol games are terrific for those with younger children. And, after a year and change in early access, PowerWash Simulator—which is exactly what it sounds like—finally sees its full release. But no, sorry, that internet-winning idea you’ve just had? Everyone already beat you to it.

anyway, play Yakuza 0. With enough dedication, you could hit the halfway point before it leaves the service again.

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<p>The post Xbox Game Pass Adds Yakuza Games For July 2022 first appeared on harchi90.</p>

Back in October 2020 I did a feature on a project that was trying to find every Super Nintendo manual in existence, scan them and upload them onto the internet. I’m happy to report that, as of July 2022, the project has now completed a significant—and for many of you reading this it’s primary—milestone.

When I published that featurethe team (including Arachness, BuffaloJoe, Timber, SNES Central and Grant Kirkhart) working on the project—led by streamer and archivist Peebs—had uploaded around 600 scans, and had only around 100 manuals remaining until they had scanned the instructions for every game ever released in the West during the console’s lifespan.

That was good progress, but also, the deeper they got through the SNES’ library, the harder it was going to be to find booklets for the weirdest and rarest games in the collection. Then, last week:

That means that the project’s archives now have an English manual for every single Super Nintendo game ever officially released in the language. Sometimes that’s the North American version, sometimes it’s the PAL (European/Australian) version, sometimes it’s both if there were differences beyond just the cover artwork, spelling and mailing addresses in the back (like the way Contra 3 was called Super Probotector in PAL regions).

It’s not quite every game ever released in the westsince some games could get different unique releases depending on the language market, but since this is an English-language website I figured this was an important milestone for our readers to know about!

And it’s still very close. The team is just a single game shy of that “every Western manual ever” achievement by a single release: an original scan of the unique German-language version of Daze Before Christmas (though they do have a translated version of the rare English-language Mega Drive release in case anyone needs the information).

After that, though, it seems their work is never done. Even when every manual has been scanned and uploaded, some games—including many RPGs—had important information written down elsewhere, like on separate maps/posters, so they’re looking at getting those uploaded and scanned wherever possible as well. They’ve also got a Super Famicom manual section to chip away at as well.

If you want to take a look through the complete library, or jus bookmark it for a future time in need, it’s available herethough you can also just search for a particular game on the Internet Archive and it’ll come up there as well. And for something more action-packed, in addition to collecting their manuals Peebs is also working his way through the SNES library and trying to beat every single game on Twitch (at last count he only had 47 to go!)

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<p>The post You Can Now Read Every Super Nintendo Manual Ever Released first appeared on harchi90.</p>

Summer Games Done Quick, a charity speedrun marathon that was back with an in-person event for the first time in a few years, was held between June 26-July 3 in Bloomington, Minnesota. And at the end of the week, once all the runs were done, the event had raised an enormous $3 million for charity.

The final tally was $3,021,310.49, all of which will be donated to Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders. When you add that to the $3.4 million that Awesome Games Done Quick raised earlier this year, which went to the Prevent Cancer Foundation, that is a lot of money people are parting with to see runners do some very cool shit with video games.

SGDQ 2022 was the first in-person GDQ event since the pandemic began back in early 2020, so it was awesome seeing a live crowd on-hand to support/react to all the action taking place. If you didn’t catch any of the action yourself, here are some highlights. We’ll start off with this incredible Ocarina of Time run, which beats the game quick, sure, but also does so much more:

And here’s a Pokémon Emerald run that involved four-player co-op, along with a randomiser that meant every time their Pokémon leveled up, it would randomly change into a different Pokémon. The result was absolute chaos:

This is a Super Mario Sunshine run that has ups, downs then ups again before it’s over:

And finally, here’s a Yakuza: Like a Dragon run that finished the entire game in less time than it took me to complete a couple of the tougher boss battles:

If you want to see more runs, or just pick one out of a game you’re particularly interested in, the organizers have recordings of every one of them on their YouTube page.

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<p>The post Summer Games Done Quick Raises Over $3 Million For Charity first appeared on harchi90.</p>

Yesterday, the studio behind the Nintendo Switch port of Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords announced that it’s finally fixed a game-breaking bug that had previously rendered the game impossible to finish.

Previously, those who bought the port of the Obsidian Star Wars RPG were forced to cheat their way past game-crashing cutscenes. This was resolved via an in-game cheat menu, but it was still a band-aid solution at best. Kotaku attempted to use this method to skip past a game-breaking cutscene at the end of a late game questline, but boarding the ship would just cause the game to crash again. But rejoice: the buggy cutscenes have finally been fixed. Sort of.

After updating the game, I was finally able to play the previously problematic cutscenes without being ejected to my Switch home screen. There’s one caveat though. KOTOR 2 has a special ability that increases your movement speed, and it’s indispensable for a game that forces you to traverse quite a bit of empty space. The trade off is that the game forces a blurry filter over your screen while the skill is active. The new patch may have fixed the cutscenes, but it makes it so that these blurry filters carry over to said cutscenes. So you get gross looking screenshots like this:

KOTOR 2 has a lot of cinematic scenes that automatically play when you cross an invisible boundary, so you can’t really turn off the filter manually when they start playing. The blurriness stops after the skill duration has elapsed, but it has arguably made my experience a little bit worse. But hey, at least I can get around to other planets now!

Did Aspyr knowingly release an unfinishable game? yes. Am I annoyed? Also yes. But I recognize that the vanilla version of KOTOR 2 was also released in a broken and buggy state. Maybe it’s one of those games that’s always doomed to imperfection. In any case, I recommend keeping multiple save backups just in case more horrible bugs await you at the very end of the game.

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<p>The post The Sith Lords On Switch Is Finally Playable first appeared on harchi90.</p>

for the past week, Games Done Quick has held its annual speedrunning festival. As always, the event has been awesome, full of some truly mind-blowing feats, including an exploit-packed run through Halo Infinite‘s open-world-ish campaign. But organizers appear to have saved the best for last, with a truly stacked lineup slated for tomorrow, the event’s final night.

Games Done Quick, now in its twelfth year, is a semi-annual event (happens once in the winter, once in the summer) wherein some of the world’s best speedrunners live-stream blisteringly fast, often creative runs through popular games. the festival also fields donations for charity; this year’s go to Doctors Without Bordersan international humanitarian organization.

All of this year’s completed runs are archived on Games Done Quick’s YouTube channel. Some of the most promising runs are still in the pipeline, though. Here’s the full schedule for the weekend (with times that automatically adjust to your local time zone). Some runs to watch out for:

• Linkus7 will blast through every dungeon in the Wii version of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Wakerwhich some (hi) say is the “best Zelda game,” in less than three hours.
• the metroid speedrunner kekumanshoyu will complete Metroid Dread, the latest game in the series, in an hour and 21 minutes. (For those interested, here’s a rundown of how dreads speedrunners clear the game in less than 90 minutes.)

• Also in metroid world, oatsngoats will do a two-and-a-half-hour “any%” of Kaizo Super Metroidan altered version of Super Metroid that turns the 1994 classic into what can only be described as “fffffuuuuuccccckkkk this.”
• Shredberg will complete all of the difficult dark levels in Super Meat Boythe infamously tough side-scrolling platformer, in just over an hour.
• But perhaps the top of the marquee is a Super Mario Maker 2 relay race from PangeaPanga, juzcook, CarlSagan42, Aurateur, Shoujo, and TanukiDan. These are always a blast.

That’s not all. As a finale, on Sunday, Games Done Quick will wrap up with a pair of Elden Ring runs: Catalyst will earn all “remembrances,” or consumable items from high-level bosses, within two hours; that’s followed by a 33-minute traditional any% speedrun from Hyp3rsomniac. It’s gonna rule. You can watch the event via Games Done Quick’s main website or its Twitch channel.

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<p>The post Games Done Quick 2022’s Metroid-Heavy Final Night Is Gonna Rule first appeared on harchi90.</p>

Type A: If you’re playing Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, stick with the “classic” mode, whatever happens. c’mon. Despite its musou trappings, Three Hopes is still a Fire Emblem game, with all the life-or-death stakes and high-minded strategizing that entails.

To be clear, this is not an assessment of the game’s inherent challenge level. Three Hopesreleased last week for Switch, is a spin-off of the 2019 strategy game Fire Emblem: Three Housesand is playable at three difficulty settings: easy, normaland hard. More than just a measure of health and damage values, these settings also dictate how many enemies attack you at once and the rate at which your various special attack meters fill up. All settings are totally valid. (I personally play on normal.)

Three Hopes is further playable in two game modes, which will be familiar to longtime fans of the mainline entries:

• casual: When a party member runs out of HP, they’re unusable for the rest of the battle, but will resurrect at the end of the mission.
• classic: When a party member runs out of HP, they’re dead for good. Sorry!

The actual ramification of your choice goes into effect during the game’s fourth chapter, and you can switch from classic to casual in the game settings menu. Fair warning, though: You can’t switch from casual to classic. (During the first three chapters, fallen units will come back to life even on classic mode.) So there’s a bit of an impetus to start a new game on classic, see if it works for you or not, before deciding which mode you want to play on at the end of the third chapter. If you’re just looking to tap YYYX your way through some frenetic battles, casual mode will serve you fine. But if you want to replicate the nail-biting torment of traditional Fire Emblem stages, classic is the way to go.

Three Hopes is ostensibly set in an alternate timeline of Three Houses, but stars most of the same characters. Early on, you get to ally with one of three factions: the Blue Lions, headed up by the stoic Dmitri; the Black Eagles, led by Edelgard, who desperately wants to make fascism fashionable; and the Golden Deer, which counts the swoon-worthy Claude as a frontman. and like Three Housesyou soon get to know—and deeply care for—the people who comprise these factions.

In a tactical game, it’s one thing to send a nondescript, nameless “brigand” unit into the fray. It’s another entirely to send Hilda, your reliable, pink-haired, ax-wielding warrior into the same fight. You know she likes singing and dancing and colorful flowers. You know she’s lazy as hell, she hates responsibility, and she will pass the buck at any opportunity. You know she’s tight with Raphael, the Golden Deer’s hungriest member, and she is a close confidant to Claude. If she dies, that’s gonna sting. The same could be said for every member of the Golden Deer whose name isn’t Lorenz.

On classic mode, this devotion reflects in battles. At any point, you can press the plus button to pause the game and pull up a grid-based map of the battlefield, and then direct party members to attack enemies they have an inherent advantage over. (Three Hopes makes use of Fire Emblem‘s classic “weapon triangle.”) You can also use the D-pad to swap between characters, giving you greater control over any particular party member who may be in a bind. When battles get tense, when your party members start losing health, you start to make these moves more intentionally, because any fuck-up means losing a favorite character—for good. That feeling isn’t possible when playing on casual mode.

And if you do end up losing a character you really, really like? Hey, that’s what save-juggling is for!

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<p>The post Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes: ‘Classic’ Or ‘Casual’ Mode? first appeared on harchi90.</p>