Persona 3, only smaller...but actually bigger.

Ever heard of Persona? Apparently it's quite popular among JRPG fans. Well one of the latter entries in the series is making it's way to the PSP with a new remix. Notice I said "latter" entry, not the latest one, since the game we're dealing with here is the 2+ year old (released August 2007) Persona 3, not the 1+ year old (released December 2008) Persona 4.
I'm not sure whether you should be scratching your head that they didn't go with the latest title, or smiling because this means Atlus will probably port P4 to the PSP sometime next year, giving you two portable Personas instead of one. Questions of age aside, let's get into the details of what make this new edition a worthwhile port.
The new portable version (dubbed...wait for it: Persona 3 Portable) keeps everything from the original intact, the day/night cycle of dungeon crawling combat and high-school sim aspects like homework and dating (Japanese RPG, remember) but also adds a whole new way to play through the reportedly 100+ hour game, as a girl (seen in the boxart above, next to the "standard" male protagonist). Apparently this new aspect of the game opens up new events and relationship possibilities, obviously, in addition to making it a potentially 200+ hour game. The Playstation Blog also claims this will add a "fresh new perspective," which to me says everyone refers to you as "her" and "she" instead of "he" and "him" but I guess I should give Atlus some credit towards making some genuinely worthwhile changes.
The move to portable has also brought some changes to the controls and gameplay like one-button shortcuts in the menus, faster load times and "streamlined" equipment changes for your team. The difficulty options have also increased in number form 2 to 5. Although how much this actually affects the difficulty -- i.e. is it actually harder/easier or are there just more degrees added to the current difficulty -- remains to be seen. Most significant of all, however, is that you can now control each member of your team directly in the faux suicide-centric combat rather than leaving it up to the game's AI. This last aspect seems like the largest reason to purchase Persona 3 again, (first-timers don't really have an excuse not to) even more so than the aforementioned ability to play as a girl.
And for all you PSPGo owner's, yes it will be available as a download from the Playstation Store when the game releases July 6th of this year.

Survive the Horror of Exaggeration in Demon's Souls

If you've heard of PS3 sleeper hit Demon's Souls, you've heard how hard it is. Well in the opinion of Bitmob writer Tony Capri, this is a problem. In the article, which can be found at the link above, Capri writes about how the emphasis on the game's difficulty is driving potential customers away.

According to Capri, while the game is challenging, it should be viewed as more of a survival-horror title with RPG elements rather than a straightforward RPG, putting player expectation of difficulty in a more accurate place. Considering the title, and overall look of the game's enemies and even world, this doesn't seem like a particularly large leap to make.

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Since character stamina is used to perform any action in combat, attacking, rolling, or even blocking, and has a finite supply, use should be treated with the same reservation as ammunition in more traditional survivor-horror titles like Resident Evil or Silent Hill. Along these same lines are the fact that the player cannot become an omnipotent warrior capable of decimating lower level enemies by leveling up. Instead, every enemy poses a considerable threat at all times throughout the game. This is, again, more akin to a survival horror title, where a standard zombie in Resident Evil is just as potentially dangerous in the last hour of play as it was in the first. Even the limiting inventory systems common to most survival horror titles can be likened to the weight limits placed on character equipment. In fact, the system in Demon's Souls is actually more forgiving. Carrying too much weight will cut down the speed of your character's actions, and in extreme cases, the ability to perform them at all, but it will never leave you completely defenseless like running out of ammunition in a traditional survival horror title can.
So gamers everywhere should stop thinking of Demon's Souls s an RPG that caters exclusively to the "hardcore" and instead compare it to the "realistic" challenge of a surviving an onslaught of zombies or other nightmarish creatures. After all, the game, like many others, deals with a horde of monsters that blights the land and threatens the very human race. A horde that has devoured every hero that has challenged it before you. The operative difference between Demon's Souls and other games that take this narrative is that your hero is not an invincible superhuman cracking one-liners as they clear out the monsterous plague that was completely unstoppable up until said hero's arrival, and with a seemingly miniscule level of effort. Rather, your character is just like every other would-be hero in the world, taking up the challenge and hoping to survive the ordeal through the same attributes the player must display: quick thinking and superior tactics.
But is this supposedly undeserved label of difficulty the gaming media has placed upon Demon's Souls truly having an adverse affect on its sales? In my experience, yes. Recently taking my girlfriend's advice to "stop spending all [my] time worrying about bills and get something for [myself]" I decided to pick up a new game. While in the store I considered Demon's Souls briefly before moving on to Batman: Arkham Asylum; choosing to eschew the extreme frustration every review of Demon's Souls told me to expect (in fact, IGN's review gives incite into little else) for the landmark of a comic book game that doesn't suck. Was I disappointed by Batman? Like pretty much everyone else: absolutely not. However that doesn't change the fact that I potentially missed out on a game I could have enjoyed even more, and at the very least missed out on another fantastic game...for now at least. So player's unsure of whether or not they want to take on the highly publicized difficulty of Demon's Souls, or simply not into RPG's, may try thinking of it as something other than your average adventure RPG and more like a survival horror title cooked in a delicious RPG glaze.