David Jaffe (creator of games such as Twisted Metal and God of War) got some flak for saying the primary aspect that he felt was selling Sarah Palin was that she was hot. He had to go on his video blog and be irked recently because he felt people were being too PC about his statement even though yes, Jaffe, it’s a little insulting to suggest a politician is going to be voted for just because she’s hot.

But on that note, I think he’s completely right. She’s attractive. Men are going to like her and want to put her in the office. But oh, you guys have no idea. She’s very attractive, but underneath she’s absolutely dangerous. She’s got that fire, that sharp ferocity underneath that’s just beautifully frightening. That makes her even more attractive to me. She’s got that face to mask the inner limit break.

Mmm. Okay, enough getting riled up. I think Sarah Palin is awesome. I hope she wins. And Jaffe needs to learn to phrase himself more eloquently and not video blog, but he’s absolutely right. I hope John McCain wins. I want this woman defending the country. She’s like Nariko.

Sarah Palin, if I was an American citizen, you’d have my vote again and again. Rock that White House

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When you think of casual games, the first thing that comes to your mind is not Final Fantasy. In fact, usually you’re nowhere near the RPG genre when you’re thinking about casual play. You might consider a shooter or a puzzle game long before you even consider the remote possibility of a casual RPG, and then when you actually stop to contemplate it for a moment, you stop, laugh, and say “Nah, that won’t happen.”

But how little informed we all are!

As a matter of fact, there’s been a few attempts at casual role-playing games in the past. One of the most noteworthy is a PC game by WildTangent (makers of Lumines and Runescape) called Fate. They declare it an “Enthusiast”game (same category as Runescape, an MMO) on their website, but in truth it’s much more a casual game in spirit than a hardcore one. You can play Fate for ten minutes or ten hours, and the result is pretty much still the same experience. And it’s just as addictive as Peggle, so you might end up working it for hours on end and somehow get no sense of accomplishment but all the sense of enjoyment.

There’s been other experiments in the casual/hardcore mix market for RPGs recently in even AAA titles–at least, what I perceive to be triple A. Not only triple A, but the very game we’d never expect to be a casual game. Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core (which I have to say I enjoy immensely) is very much a traditional RPG in the sense that it has a long, spanning story mode that has cutscenes and choices and menus and running around collecting lumber to build flower wagons. But Square Enix and the Kingdom Hearts team therein that was responsible for this amalgam of a game decided to put casual elements into gameplay and allow short, playable bursts of fun for two to five minutes at a time like any good portable game should, and I applaud any PSP title for achieving this standard instead of being a ported PS2 title. This effect is achieved through Missions, a mysterious menu option never before seen in any Final Fantasy game.

It works beautifully–you choose a mission from the Missions menu, complete it, and usually you’ll get another mission to do until you run out of them and need to seek out more through the regular story mode. Missions consist of running around a map and seeking a particular enemy while fighting baddies of differing skill levels (depending on the mission) and picking up treasure chests along the way. You can only access Missions while at a save point, making the transition between missions and saving seamless, quick and effective. It takes about two minutes to run one, and they’re addictive, despite their repetitiveness. There’s just something about Crisis Core‘s seamless battlesystem that makes those two minutes gloriously fun. It might be the fact that in running them, you level up and acquire enhanced items and materia that beef your character and you can use through regular story mode, making yourself vastly more powerful and advantaged. Even so, the game is still challenging, and you have Hard Mode to run through after you complete it once.

Using these kinds of elements in gameplay, Square Enix has toed in on a very different market in a very different way. Remaking Final Fantasy IV for the DS is lovely, I’ll admit, but the truth is that Final Fantasy was never meant to be a portable game. It’s always been a sit-your-ass-down-and-play-that-thing-for-hours game. Seeing a Final Fantasy that has mixes of both gameplay styles makes me content, especially since I’ve noticed from watching the industry that developers think hardcore games are waning. Both elements in a big title like Final Fantasy show that there’s rooms for both styles in the industry, and there’s no reason developers should stop trusting that the epics will sell to the mainstream audience.

In that light, give both games a try. Fate is a fairly low-hardware-specs game and Crisis Core needs only a PSP to work. They’re good fun and I’ve enjoyed both in their own right. When casual games are disguised as RPGs, some interesting things are probably on the horizon. What will Final Fantasy XIII bring? We can only guess.

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While I work on longer blog posts that I can’t finish today, here’s some neat news.

Duke Nukem Forever (4Ever!) has finally been “announced”, which I assume means it’s almost complete since they’ve been working on this thing for 10 years or more.

Perhaps record-breaking for the amount of time spent in development (my game will break this record–it’s ongoing since 2001), Duke Nukem Forever promises to be just like any other Duke Nukem game.

And yet completely different.

But I suppose that’s a good thing.

[Edit] Here’s the new teaser trailer, which says less than nothing about the actual game. I will embed it in my blog as soon as I get this stupid post to WordPress button installed. I had a VodPod button until I realized OH, I CAN POST DIRECTLY TO WORDPRESS. Now I can get rid of that little widget on the side nobody’s noticed.

Oh, and here’s the old 2001 preview video. Of course, the game is completely different by now. So I think any old previews are bound to be irrelevant. But there’s dragons and aliens and explosions, and that’s always good.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDlB2P1leRM]

And because Digg apparently isn’t a reliable source, here’s the head honchos at GamesRadar saying the same things

This post is up here by Jimmy’s request. Be happy, Jimmy.

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