PixlBit

Interesting thing I read recently: Jeremy Parish and some other folks were apparently trying to buy out 1UP.com so they could run it themselves as a separate company. They had even arranged financing through a venture capitalist. They actually started this deal while 1UP/IGN were still under the News Corp. umbrella. Unfortunately, Ziff-Davis swooped in and bought IGN and 1UP, and Ziff-Davis had no interest in spinning off 1UP, yet they don't seem interested in doing anything with the site themselves other than collecting whatever money they can from the clicks of the few hangers-on left. Here is Jeremy Parish's personal blog detailing that attempt.

I bought the CE of Bravely Default myself. I love that game. Best 3DS game I've played so far, and I agree: They should have just called it a Final Fantasy game, since it is literally a Final Fantasy game in everything but the name. But perhaps Square Enix wants to develop it as a new series so they aren't so dependent on the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest names.

Awesome, you got it too! I'm thinking of ordering the Valkyria Chronicles artbook myself.

Definitely looks pretty SNES-ish, but a lot of PS1 games did in the early days. Regardless, this game is definitely no Burning Rangers.

Wind Waker HD was incredible, and Super Mario All-Stars on SNES was also a great remake.

The aspect of Fallout 1 and 2 I always had the biggest trouble with was the interface. Yeah, I know, I'm a wimp, but I'm used to gaming with a controller, and even on PC I've always preferred a control pad or WASD/arrow keys over skating a mouse around just to walk. The mouse interface drove me nuts. The actual gameplay aspects were interesting, but the interface kind of got in the way the whole time. If Wasteland 2 makes the interface a bit less cumbersome and allows you to use a keyboard in tandem with a mouse, I'm definitely in. Obsidian did a great job on NV, and I'm sure they'll do a good job on Wasteland 2.

When's this coming out? I was interested in this one. I also hope the new crowdfunded Tex Murphy game that Atlus is publishing is awesome.

Valkyria Chronicles and Ni no Kuni alone are worth getting a PS3 for.

Nintendo went with the Wii's choice in design consciously. They knew it would be useless to compete head-on with Sony (and Microsoft, to a lesser degree) in specs, so they went for cheap and widely available. It worked, although the third parties pushing ultra-expensive cinematic experiences didn't bite.

An optimal environment would be Nintendo's first-party combined with Sony's third-party community, which includes both Eastern and Western developers, but I think in order to get the benefit of such a pairing, it would have to be on Nintendo's terms rather than Sony's terms. An unintended consequence of Nintendo going third party, at least from the standpoint of gamers lusting after Nintendo's catalogue without having to buy the hardware to play it on, would be the inevitable narrowing of Nintendo's focus down to one or two cash-cow franchises that would occur. Much like Sega of today is pretty much all about Sonic, Football Manager, and Total War these days, with almost all of its other franchises on indefinite hiatus or stuck in Japan,  Nintendo would be pretty much nothing but Mario and Pokemon. Almost every third party developer nowadays trades on a small handful of successful cash-cow properties, with anything that isn't a blockbuster abandoned by the wayside. Even EA pretty much runs on annual Battlefield, FIFA, and Madden anymore.

On a related note, I know a lot of analysts are really pushing for Nintendo to move into the Android/iOS space, but I don't think Nintendo would be very successful in that space. The economics of the mobile market would set Nintendo up to fail. Freemium and 99-cent games have created a race to the bottom in the mobile space.  Mobile players piss and moan if the price goes up any more than that. The market rewards them with games that are accordingly low in production values and design that are little more than blantant cashgrabs. The mobile space may be a far bigger ocean than the hardcore space, but flood any ocean, no matter how big it is, with shit, and nothing but parasites can survive in there.

I have yet to touch Dark Souls, but I do of course have Demon's Souls. I like it because it's a throwback to old-school dungeon crawling such as I enjoyed on the Atari 8-bit computers. Those computers were great gaming computers and had a few rather good RPGs. I may as well take the plunge on Dark Souls II.

What I meant is that it's ingrained in US culture. Even those of us who are less uptight about sexual content are subject to it, to a certain degree. Gears of War had gratuitous blood and gore, nobody batted an eye. Mass Effect had a sex scene but little violence, Fox News had a cow. Even the ESRB ratings reflect this. A game with gratuitous blood and gore is on the top rack in Wal-Mart with a M rating and would be advertised heavily by Microsoft or Sony as the must-have game of the holiday season. A game with explicit sex scenes, even with zero violence, would be an automatic AO rating and would not even be approved for release by Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft. It's a cultural thing in this country. We've always glorified war and fighting and been ashamed of sex.