Final Fantasy III : The Gullibility Test

Final Fantasy III, remade, rehyped, reheated, remarketed and eventually reissued for Nintendo's graveyard of shuddering undead remakes, is the latest game-shaped practical joke from Squeenix's nostalgia division. The punchline is, bluntly, that we are being made nostalgic for a game we never played, a game that was not even translated for American or European release and only has relevance as the precursor of another Japan-only title (the fifth in the series).

This gnawingly difficult and frustrating effort is lovingly modelled on the original, to the point that it translates all the quirks and failings implied by the prehistoric NES technology to the relatively lovely and well made DS interface and presentation. This is amazingly stupid. Considering the game looks so much like the, by now also antique, nineth Final Fantasy title and borrows a bunch of features including the Mognet, why try to trick the gamer that they are playing something classic when what we infact have is a brand new Final Fantasy, completely crippled by a thoroughly redundant levelling system.

As for the job system, it inspires respect from those who spend hours slaving with Tactics or V, but here is it is a burden. When you've completed one job, or rather if you have that much patience, you have no option but to start afresh with another, from zero with none of your new abilities carrier over. If you consider this great gameply, I guess you'd also think that Final Fantasy VII would be improved if the materia suddenly vanished as soon as a character mastered it.

Another joke at our expense here is that Square has spent millions and millions of dollars on disembarking from the Final Fantasy devices and cliche, desperately abandoning the irritation of random battles and D&D inspired classes, power levelling and missable quests and items. And, after finally getting away from these things, they serve them to the fans and expect us to pay for the honour of digging through their trash.

Readers, you are better off with Tetris. Five out of Ten.

Contact: The Latest Piece of Shit For the DS.

How low can you go to promote a stale RPG? Contact's true innovation seems to be the publisher's idiotic use of the beloved Earthbound's style and character for its promotion, when in fact the lame European looking design of the game outnumbers the 'retro' characters by almost a hundred to one. Well, 7 to 1, see as there are a grand total of 8 characters in this rotten game and only one is 'retro'

Contact is lame. It is remarkably short on actual gameplay outside of relentless power leveling and cursor pointing, which seems to be inspired by LucasArt's point and click adventures, only instead of using the Rubber Chicken with the Pulley, you'll be clicking attack and waiting several minutes for either yourself or your enemy to keel over. If you haven't switched off already. The close thing to gameplay here is moving yourself away from enemies so they can hit you less frequently. If you are pining for the clumsy, hack and slash of Final Fantasy XII already, this is the game for you. Also recommended for gamers who bought Rage of Mages for the PC back in '97 and were too stupid to notice that it was blatently the worst RPG of all time.

As for the story, it feels like Metal Gear Solid 2 retold by an lobotimised sci-fi nerd with amnesia. The 'in jokes' are so bad, I dropped my DS through cringing. LOL WINDOWS XP IS TERRIBLE, LOL PLAYSTATION. It feels like a court jester entertaining an audience of vacant nerds who don't know anything outside of Youtube and IGN.com.

Overall 3.5. Stick with Tetris.