The tale begins with a young boy, Luso Clemens or “Shinji” as I chose to name him. (Come on, who plays with default names?!) Now this kid is stumbles across an ancient text in a library which magically teleports him to the world of Ivalice (familiar territory to those who’ve played FF12 on PS2 or FF Tactics Advance on GBA). He immediately joins a clan who are determined to help him back to his world and together they embark on many quests. Along the way the ancient text begins to write stories of the journey in it’s blank pages and only till the book is filled may it’s powers transport you back home.

Now my god the developers have upped their content in Grimoire of the Rift! Tons more job roles than ever, your clan members are guaranteed to build some hefty CV’s. The high maintanence game just pushes the perfectionist in me and my units will have at least some experiences in being soldiers, mages, archers, paladins, knights, etc etc. If only the item list would automatically sort itself in type and order, I’d have a little easier time remembering who’s wielded which weapons, who’s learnt which skills and what not.

The shops now have a new “bazaar” feature where you mold your collected items to make new weapons, armour and accessories. However it kinda makes you feel cheated as what you make from your materials is not rewarded to your inventory but to the shops list of sale items. Then you’ve got to fork out a little more gil to buy it. Harsh right?! Although it’s only a minor niggle considering that there’s plenty of gil to go around if you’re playing sensibly.

There’s a lot more flexibility with missions, whether you want to get the job done by yourself or if you dispatch a mini coop of your clan members. Learning from the GBA it was pretty easy to tell that if your chosen member was jumping up and down with hands in the air, you knew the mission was going to be easy for success. This time around it doesn’t seem to add up, sending out my hinted good men still bring 1 in 8 attempts for success. Unless there’s some hidden tact to who you choose as your dispatch leader and followers, someone tell me where I’m going wrong!

Pubs are where you go to seek out and accept quests, paying the barman for his tip of information. Quests range from delivering, retrieving, head-hunting, surveying areas, escorting, all contribute towards gaining item rewards and advancing the story. You can also take up clan trials which upon succession will benefit clan abilities to use during combat. Since I unlocked the clan ability “Regen” which does a nice job of replenishing small HP on each of my turns in battle, I haven’t really needed anything else since.

FF Tactics is more of the likes of Disgaea rather than the usual FF turn base gaming. So perhaps think more of a digital version of Chess. Moving your units to locations and performing attacks, spells, special abilities or using items in specific spaces. What also adds to the game play are the laws of the battlefield. Clans have their own judges who will reward you if you win the battle without breaking any rules. Failing to comply with the law of the battle the judges will take away your clan ability, any fallen members of your party will be caged and you can’t revive them. The laws seem to have become a lot more varied, most of the time they aren’t going to effect your battle greatly. Things like “dont use attack” is easily overcome when you’ve prepped up your characters with a good round of skills. However with laws saying that “counters are forbidden” can be a pain when you’ve forgotten to un-equip it from your unit. They get attacked by an enemy and your unit counters, boosh! Bye bye Regen-ability and revive rights, Noooo!

Anyway I could argue my dislike for Hobbits or Gnomes all day, but I digress, back to the matter at hand and I’ll sum it up in one sentence. I really can’t remember the last time I was so excited about an expansion pack. That’s right, not a game, an expansion pack. Is this how fans of the Sims feel four times a year?

Of course the expansion is set to arrive and deliver more zones, spells, skills, talents, monsters, quests, lore, mounts, focus on world PvP again, a level cap increase, achievement system, end game bosses more accessible - it’s not hard to see why many (if not all) WoW players are getting excited.

Oh, did I mention it’s also getting a bit of a graphical update too? It’ll still run on a basic PC, but with now improved textures, affects, lighting and not to mention dynamic shadows and a greatly increased draw distance, the World of Warcraft is becoming a more beautiful place to adventure in.

It’s getting close now, I can sense it. My virtual entities can feel the change brewing in the wind, forgotten lands lay in conflict, powerful enemies wait to be slain, soon we sail north!

Another month has gone by and we’re now into September and if the release date of somewhere in November is to believed, that means a new chapter in my WoW adventure could be well underway in approximately eight weeks time - it’s getting close, very close!

Hello, my name’s Ben, and I’m a wow-aholic!

Note: If you haven’t seen the cinematic that was recently released then go take a look at it, you won’t be disappointed!

I’ll start by saying that I have no clue how to play Gin. I went through the tutorial and was taught, by the silhouette of a woman in a hat, how to play the game. It seemed quite straight-forward. You have 10 cards and the idea, from what I could gather, is to get a run of cards in a suit (3,4,5,6,7 etc) or a group of same value cards. When you think you’ve done all you can, you knock (hopefully before your opponent) and the round ends. The player with the lowest total of left-over cards is the winner. It really did sound simple. I played for quite some time. I didn’t win once.

That’s not a reflection on the game, it’s a reflection on my bad card skills but I did find that this was the hardest card-based game to get into. This is partly due to the quite clunky control system. You’re asked to confirm every button press, which just seems to ruin the flow of the game. Having never played Gin in real life, I can’t be sure that a person doesn’t come to you after every move and say “Are you sure?” but I’m reasonably convinced that they don’t.

Graphics wise, they’re really nothing to write home about - after all, this is a card game so there isn’t really much call for dynamic lighting and particle effects. As graphics go, they do what they need to do and are better than looking at a blank screen and as with most other card titles there are a variety of backgrounds to play against.

If you are a Gin fan, then there are six game modes available. I struggled enough with conventional Gin to fear going anywhere near Speedy Gin and siblings. As a single player game it really didn’t do much to grip me - it just didn’t have the thrill that even Texas Hold ‘Em possesses. I could see it being quite fun as a multiplayer game - the title has Xbox Live Vision capabilities - and could possibly be a more sophisticated (and somber) alternative to the garish colours and fasted paced fun of Uno.

If you do play Gin, and can’t find the time to get your Gin buddies together for a game then you could get some enjoyment out of this title. For anyone else, Gin Rummy is, maybe, a card game too far.

At first I couldn’t help thinking the artists had gone somewhat over the top with Soul Calibur IV. Look at Ivy. She practically has a bum on her chest. The bum-chest defies the laws of gravity. The bum-chest is miraculously protected and supported by a strap of purple material.

Breast or Bum? Answers on a postcard…

It’s easy to take this stance, it’s something you can point out in hosts of games. Oh, look, more armoured bikinis. Great, another misrepresentation of women, and so on.

But have you ever thought about the guys? Male characters vastly outnumber the ladies. They’re nearly always huge, handsome, strapping, toned and have a generic cool-looking scar over one eye. Even worse, the guys are either totally, utterly awesome, complete with a deep masculine voice or they’re generic, badly trained dispensable guards. As far as men go, I think they’re worse off than women. They either take the form of an unbelievable hero who can take on the world and flirt with the ladies, or one of many simpleton soldiers a player is expected to swipe down by the hundreds.

I think women have a tendency to complain about female characters more than any other game ‘element’ I can think of (this includes myself). In comparison, I was wondering, do doctors roll their eyes every time they pick up an instantaneously effective health pack? Do recruits in the army feel angered by a recharging health bar? Some athletes and professionals (for example, Tony Hawk) actually promote all their hard physical labour being demeaned into button-mashing.

I’m certainly not a doctor and I’m in no state to join the army (I’m short-sighted with the strength of a fly and an unhealthy caffeine addiction), but I’ve never heard complaints from these groups, or any other. So, as of now, the repetitive complaints about female characters are going to stop from me. Games are ridiculous and unrealistic in many ways, but that’s part of the fun. Would you enjoy a game where after taking a single bullet, you either:

a) Died.

b) Got bandaged up by a fellow soldier, and shipped back to a hospital where you had to sit in bed for months before any opportunity of returning.

There are fundamentals and traditions in video games (exploding barrel, anyone?) and although I’ve fought hard in the corner for ‘normal’ female characters for a long time, I’m putting an end to it now. The day where all females become fully clothed brunettes with mid-length hair and average form would be a sad day.

Now, I’ve been wondering about such things as how much you can know someone that you’ll likely never meet in the flesh, how much stock there is in the word “friend” in virtual terms. Personally, whether on Xbox Live or the myriad of social networks that have sprung up, I tend to not differentiate between those I have grown to know virtually and those I know in person and my behaviour pretty much reflects that, if I have even a passing familiarity, that’s it. Passing familiarity can take a fair while for me, let me tell you! As I understand it, that’s how these things work in the real world; you meet some folks through, say, a common interest, you get to know them a bit and then it invariably snowballs. No? Part of that is keeping in regular contact, I thought. Now, apparently that is occasionally seen as a bit weird in what some describe as the whimsical world of ‘teh interwebs’.

I don’t think - in the likes of FaceBook, MySpace, Bebo and beyond into the realms of Xbox Live, Second Life, other game worlds - that a distinction can really be made. To call it whimsical seems a cop-out, it’s just another form of interaction; the rules don’t change where you can be acquainted with someone in a different hemisphere. The fact that there are so many social networks speaks volumes and they all say one thing, “people are the same”. They grow to know, to form bonds, sometimes to even get married. A prime example I know of is a bunch of people banding together to buy an Xbox 360 and some games (or even just giving away some old games) for a thoroughly nice bloke. Someone who they perhaps didn’t know by their real name, merely by an alias. That’s gamers, that is, and I count myself lucky to know them. I’ve observed that many of my gaming peers have similar interests, tastes in films, etc. Curiously, I’ve also met the odd person who stands out and I find such individuals particularly, hmm, intriguing?

As Laura, rather astutely, put it “When I first started feeling alienated by my gaming passion, I turned to the place that most outcasts turn to find others like them - the Internet.” Gaming has been a huge part of my life for years and, being a fairly typical geek, I’ve never been very socially adept. What can I say, stereotypes often hold a grain of truth. Time was I’d be the quiet one looking intently at the ground and I don’t mind telling you that. But these days I can, for example, look people - complete strangers - in the eye with what, to me, is surprising ease and I can honestly say I believe knowing there’s a world of fellow gamers out there is a significant part of the reason for that change in me. So, far as I’m concerned, the family of the 21st century is made up of friends and relatives. I’m no cynic.

The world doesn’t just disappear when you close your eyes go online. Does it?

As the game starts you get to choose between a warrior, a mage and an archer. The nice touch here is that you can have a game running separately with all three characters so if you discover you made a horrible mistake all is not lost and you can always return to your semi-built-up character once you have the hang of the game.

You are a powerful servant of Artemis, with the sole purpose of protecting the  people of Arkadia which eventually involves destroying the almighty Gorgon that has kept everyone shaking in their homes. To enable you to do this you can transform your character into a mythological beast with immense power for short periods of time during combat. You also collect weaponry and armour as you battle you way through the many varied dungeons and potion for willpower, health and morphing ability. These are in no short supply so even those not accustomed to scouring a room for items will end up with a full inventory very quickly (good job there’s a handy shop where you can make a nice living selling all this stuff - I guess weaponry is in high demand this season!).

The missions, whilst varied in skill level and monsters, could get repetitive if you weren’t around the first time this style of game was around. But a dingy dungeon with medieval traps and treasure chests made a pleasant change from all the Tetris clone type games that tend to appear on Arcade. It’s not the most original game out there, or even the most original arcade game but it certainly manages to provide many hours of fun if you enjoy this sort of game. It’s not mentally challenging (see something and kill) but sometimes that’s what you need in an arcade game.

Obviously, as the dedicated RPG fan that I am I can’t say that there’s not a level of satisfaction to finishing a game after playing it constantly for weeks on end, madly clocking up the hours and basically having to live the game to get it finished before the next big release comes out. However, since the dawn of the new age consoles we have been seeing an increase in gorgeous, playable games that just don’t last.

Personally I feel that with gaming becoming increasingly popular in recent years, I would rather have a new game every week that was short to complete but breathtaking and innovative. However, I am aware that those who don’t have quite as much time to dedicate to their gaming hobby may end up with stacks and stacks of half completed games with not enough time to finish, and too much choice to dedicate themselves to just one game at a time.

As someone who flies through games at the speed of light I live off the trade-in system at my local games shop, constantly changing what I’m currently playing, but this really isn’t for everyone. So, let’s think about the fabulously playable yet devastatingly short games that have appeared in the last year or so. Well, obviously if you have some sort of allergy to being online then Call of Duty 4 is incredibly short, yet still praised as one of the best games in it’s genre. The couple of people I know without Live who have played this game offline still praise it as amazing.

Another obvious but now quite old one that has to be mentioned is Tomb Raider Legend. By far the shortest of the Tomb Raider games, I had completed everything on every difficulty and in time trial mode within 5 days, but it remains in my games drawer to this day (one of only two games I haven’t traded in because I found it soooo playable!). Although it won’t keep you occupied for long in the first run through, the puzzles are fun to work out, the gameplay feels so natural it’s untrue and you’ll find yourself loving every second of it (unless you get stuck on a puzzle and end up yelling at the TV!).

I would also like to take this time to mention other gems such as Bourne Conspiracy, Beautiful Katamari, CSI, Bioshock, and the many other games I simply whizzed through but thoroughly enjoyed.

And then there’s the epic long games. RPGs aside, (let’s face it, if they were short there’d be an uproar), there have been many titles which mean you lose a significant chunk of your life, and get left thinking, “Was it really worth it?” Certainly first up on my list of these is Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom. I managed to clock up an obscene amount of hours playing this whilst not really enjoying myself. Anyone who read my reader review in 360 Gamer will know I gave the game a 6 - I was thoroughly unimpressed and horrified to find it makes my top ten games played list on 360voice.

The next one to mention is a bit of a strange one but I know Kate will agree with me on this one - DOA Xtreme 2. Possibly one of the most ridiculous and pointless games ever, but myself and several people I know found ourselves hopelessly addicted to this volleyball game that meant you spent 20ish hours to get a 20 point achievement.  The problem with this game was not the lack of enjoyment, but the fact that everything took so much time. Once I realised how much time I’d already spent on the game with so far to go, I marched myself into town and traded it in in order to regain my life, or at least time for other games!

So which is preferable to you? Long or short? Does it really make a difference? I’ve played a lot of amazing short games and not regretted trading them in the next week, and I’ve also played some awful or just ridiculous long games, and honestly I can say that to me size really doesn’t matter - it IS what you do with it that counts!

But wait… my tiny voice of reason battles to the front.  My birthday is in October and Crimbo/New year are round the corner (depressingly), so FFS, what’s the problem?  I could just wait.  The ‘W’ word, however, is not something I am good at.  At all. My problem is that I don’t want to wait.  I want them now.  I don’t want to be pressed against the gaming glass watching everyone play the games I want.  Though the sarky part of me wonders what the chance is that I’ll actually play them as soon as I get them and not leave them in a pile with the other ‘to play’ games.  But I’d have them at least and the want would be satiated.  Until the next time.

I want them today,
No, not tomorrow…
I want to play ‘em, to score whore and slay ‘em,
And I don’t want to share em’
Give them to me!

The suspense has me hating, I don’t plan on waiting, ignore the score ratings
I’m going to scream…because I want them noooooow!

“Daddy, I want another XBOX.”

The three games included for your 800 Microsoft points are Fortune’s Tower, Keystone and Spinnerbox. These games are all run on casino-like rules and are surprisingly strict in their randomness and balance. Much like a visit to the real casino, you’ll be quite horrified how quickly you can fritter away both your basic money purse and your meagre winnings. Keep in mind that money lost or gained will be carried over to your funds in the full game. Do you really want to be starting with a deficit? But then you could just not link up your temporary character in the pub games to the full game if you were on a losing streak, right? There are some great things to be won, though, that would force your hand and make you transfer your rather poor character over regardless. You can win some really bitching items. Who doesn’t want to start the full game with heavy duty weapons, a new hairdo and a tattoo? A crazy person - that’s who.

Spinnerbox

Spinnerbox is a simple one armed bandit, fruit machine type game. Starting with three slots press the button, watch the spin, and see if you match up three of the same picture. Some matched pictures pay out money, some give free spins, some create multipliers. Although you get more and more slots the more you play, ultimately the game is entirely random and just boring.

Keystone

Keystone is Roulette by another name. With a wide variety of bet-able odds you can place chips on drawn across the screen you’ll decide which numbers to place your money on, which colour, if it’s even, odd, high or low. Each bet has specific odds and of course any combination of these bets might come in for you - but probably won’t. Lets face it, Roulette has always been for chumps. You have to keep in mind those totally boss items you could win though. Is it worth losing your shirt to win a Championship Cutlass… maybe.

Fortune’s Tower

The only game really worth a play, Fortune’s Tower is a fancy medieval version of Patience. Using some saving cards judiciously you’re charged with choosing the right moment to cash out before the hand goes bad and the multiplier ends, losing you your initial bet. There’s no upping the ante however. You’ll always only lose the original bet whereas the possible prize money can be pretty good. Although as random as the other games, knowing when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em can be a genuinely useful skill here. There’s a glitch in Fortune’s Tower’s tournament mode that lets the game think you’ve bet hundreds when you’ve only bet five monies. Using this you can win a fortune and lose very little. The glitch will be patched shortly so get in there today or forget you ever heard about it.

As Lorna had spoken before on the issue, Maxis truly know how to keep us wrapped around their fingers. Their massive success in the Sims series claimed many victims into a life of irony. The expansions kept coming and we all bought into it. Sims 2 hit the scene and even though that meant restarting the whole damn thing, we did it anyway! Wave after wave of Sims 2 expansions continue taking our pocket money and now there’s the new danger of Sims 3. Why do we do this to ourselves?! Who knows… I’m afraid I’m just as guilty as the rest. However Maxis have come back to steal our lives sooner than Sims 3, come 5th September and we meet the magnificent Spore!

Finally the endless hours of our pitiful lives spent on the creature creator will bear fruit. Let us continue our god-like roles and see our species rise to glory from tiny specs to the masses of the galaxy! Time to revive our creations, Live!… Live!… LIIIVE! *Mwah ha ha ha!*

Alongside the release of Spore, Ready Up are having a little giveaway. Two lucky readers shall be chosen at random to win a Spore promo t-shirt! All you have to do is send us an e-mail to entries@ready-up.net. Closing date is 14th September when two winners will be drawn at random from all the entries. Good luck!