Features// SPOnG's Review of the Year 2010: February

More disappointment was to come from Square Enix that same day, with the revelation that the company will not pander to the frenzied demands of fans wishing to play a Final Fantasy VII HD on their PlayStation 3s.

“It’s very hard to make games on the PlayStation 3 in the same style as the games in that era had,” Yoshinori Kitase told a magazine at the time (HD Kills Final Fantasy VII PS3 Remake, 5th February). It was also the reason why there ended up being few towns in Final Fantasy XIII as well.

Final Fantasy XIII, while we’re on the subject, was the talk of many gamers and journalists ahead of its Western launch in March. We had a chance to play the game as much as we could in two hours and have a pleasant chat with Kitase-san as well as director Motomu Toriyama.

I noticed the lack of exploration and town/NPC interaction at this stage and wondered whether the studio was going for a more ‘accessible’ approach to RPGs. Toriyama added that the “main attraction… is in the missions you find around the landscape [of Gran Pulse, some 20 hours into the story].”

The Japanese developers were keen to speak highly of Square Enix’s other projects, and in fact of the recent acquisition of UK studio Eidos. SPOnG was able to get its hands on some of these games - dark adventure game Nier as an example of the former, and Avalanche Studios’ Just Cause 2 an example of the latter. While I wasn’t too sure of Nier’s potential, I ended up loving every absurd, explosive second of Eidos’ open-world action title.

As Square Enix had just finished the deal with Eidos, Warner Bros was expanding its own studio lineup with an acquisition of Rocksteady Studios - the fine creators of Batman: Arkham Asylum. With WB owning the rights to the license in the first place, the buyout seemed to make sense for the company, and the UK team was quickly confirmed to be working on a sequel when the news was announced (Warner Bros Snaps Up Batman Arkham Asylum Developer, 23rd February).

A whole tonne of other features and writeups had gone live at SPOnG during this manic month. One of Sony’s big PS3 exclusives for 2010, Heavy Rain, had launched and it was so intriguing that we reviewed it… then wrote about it again just to make sure. News of Sonic the Hedgehog ‘returning to his roots’ with digital download title Sonic 4 prompted me to vent my spleen over the state of the franchise at the time, and we covered the release of EA’s Battlefield: Bad Company 2 at great length.

EA also used February to get all ironic on us for Valentine’s Day, with the launch of Dante’s Inferno. Mark reviewed that, putting it down a peg or two for its attempts to out-Bayonetta Bayonetta. That, and God of War III was just round the corner.

THQ’s Metro 2033 got a good looking at, and the original novel’s writer Dmitry Glukhovsky got a good talking to as well. I managed to play some of Nintendo’s upcoming Summer hits, including Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Capcom’s Monster Hunter Tri - all of which initially impressed (with Metroid dropping off in quality by the time it was actually released).

Microsoft squeezed us into an Alan Wake preview (along with an interview with Remedy’s Oskari Häkkinen) and the lovely Pete Donaldson kicked off SPOnG’s very first video show, titled (imaginatively enough) SPOnG’s Vidcast.

February was so busy, there was even room for hardware speculation! Sony Ericsson’s president, Bert Nordberg (quality name), had let the cat out of the bag regarding a product that could fuse mobile and PlayStation technology together.

“In the past there was no tie-up between us, the PSP platform and Sony, but you can expect to hear much more about that…” he said, before realising he did all he needed to get people looking at the Ericsson company for another five minutes (Sony Ericsson Hints At PSP Tie-Up, 24th February). Saucy git.

[b][u]Finally…[/u][/b]

Sonic the Hedgehog was getting in the headlines for more reasons than his apparent retro revival. Theme park Alton Towers had redesigned one of its outdoor rides to feature all kinds of Sonic branding (Sonic Spinball Opens At Alton Towers - Pix!, 15th February).

Titled Sonic Spinball, it’s an attraction where you sit in a sort of teacup-ride style carriage, and get whisked around a rollercoaster track at high speed while the carriage constantly spins. Sega took SPOnG and a bunch of other special guests to be the first to ride it, and I even won a contest to be the first person to sleep in the £300-a-night, Sonic branded hotel room. Lush.

Don't forget to check out what happened in January!