Phantasy Star Online 2 will recieve three updates in August the first update arrives on the first of August, the second on the 8th and the final update sometime during the end of August.
The August 1st update will include the summer lobby (which feautures a rappy riding a surf board!), new enemies and new AC content. Plus some new summer themed clothes and hair styles.
Make sure to check out the trailer the new locations and boss look superb!
Admit it. When a game gives you the option to be bad, you go for it. Unlike the stupid real world, video games have no repercussions. While game designers may not intend for you to do these bad things, or there are in-game penalties, in the end it’s just a game so you can be bad to your heart’s content, hit the reset button and return to playing the game as it was intended. In this week’s Weekly Five, we celebrate Friday the 13th with five SEGA games which allow you to be (you guessed it) bad.
Welcome to the return of Tuesday Tunes, everyone! Changing focus away from remixes and original music, we’ll be focusing more on SEGA’s own music. Boy does SEGA have some great stuff! We’ll be starting this feature back up with a song that inspired me to write up a few of these and restart the feature: PSO’s “Whole New World”, a song that recently saw a remix in the latest PSO2 video. Now, I love SEGA’s orchestrations, especially from the Dreamcast and early third party period. To me, this music represents some of the most beautiful original orchestrations ever done in gaming. One of the first SEGA songs to ever land on my mix CD was this beauty of a track. Very different from the cheesy rock I was used to hearing from the Sonic Adventure games.
This is one of those songs that I think would be really neat to hear in a real live orchestra. SEGA really needs to do something equivolent to the Zelda tour for their series. Come on SEGA, just have Crush 40 pop in at the end to play Live and Learn after the orchestra plays all your other masterpieces. People will go!
To Read Part 1, go here.
In July, reality finally caught up with me. Something had possessed me to join the SEGA forums. Because I hated being told that my name was already taken, and I figured the Knuckles name must already be taken given he’s such an awesome character, I decided to cut to the chase and just leave the K out of my name. Upon joining the forums, I discovered the Dreamcast had been canned and, being a teenager, I immediately latched on to the first online petition I saw. Those were the days. Keeping a thread ever present at the top of the forum whenever I got home from school or my friend’s house. Arguing with older, wiser, more realistic individuals like the naïve teenager I was, a large part of my Dreamcast experience came from defending it from bashers and supporting a petition that SEGA probably never even saw, let alone cared about.
[Part 1]
I’m sure any avid PSO fan remembers that not so long ago there was a media briefing in Japan for Phantasy Star Online 2, given by the games producer ‘Dragon Sakai’ (Satoshi Sakai). The problem with Japanese media briefings is that, well, they’re in Japanese, a made up language that nobody really understands, similar to talking in tongues.
Thankfully fans exist and so the fan dub was born and so at long last we can present the entire Media Briefing subbed in English. The briefing was translated by Jeremiah Bourque while Ian R. Justman and Velocity7 who did the audio editing, and subtitling, so give them all a round of applause!
Hit the jump for part 2 and part 3 of the briefing!
This weekend some kind of information regarding the long awaited Phantasy Star Online 2 will be revealed! This reveal will take place at the ‘Thanks Festa’ (Japan) on 4/24/2011 JST.
You can watch the Festa live along with the Infinity Grand Prix on Nico Nico, a Japanese website similar to YouTube. (Provided that premium members don’t nab your seat first.)
I will be watching with bated breath, I don’t care if they only show a photo of a Japanese man enjoying PSO2 from afar, I’m far to excited about this game! BRING ON THE WEEKEND!
We all have our own personal favorite SEGA moments. So this week the staff is sitting back, thinking about our favorites. As always you can let us know your favorites via the comments.
Check out that action figure of Elenor from PSO, pretty cute? I bet you want yourself one. Well it’s Japan only as of right now, but you can get it on AmiAmi for ¥2,530 ($31).
Seems that this figure, which was shown 8 years ago at Wonder Festival, will finally be in mass production in May 2011. The figure will be made by Kotobukiya.
[Source: TinyCartridge]
After 6 years, the Japanese Phantasy Star Online: Blue Burst servers are going down for the last time. This isn’t just the end of PSO:BB this marks the end of a decade of Phantasy Star Online. The Japanese PSO:BB server was the last, official running server in the legacy of Phantasy Star Online, truly the end of an era.
Here is how the last few months of PSO:BB will play out;
-November 29: Hunters License sales and usage of all special access codes halted.
-November 30 – December 27: Free access to the game servers. December 14
-December 27: Special bonuses applied (rare drops x10, rare enemies x5, EXP x2).
-December 27: Servers go offline at 4:00p.m. JST.
Sad news indeed, but every cloud has a silver lining! In this case, Phantasy Star Online 2!
Posted by EspioKaos of PSOWorld, their resident translator of Japanese,
But fear not, you enduring Hunters of Ragol! In that same announcement, SonicTeam mentions that they are in discussions to grant access to a Phantasy Star Online 2 “user participation test” (among other things) to Japanese PSOBB subscribers at a later time. No further details are known at the moment, but stay tuned. We’ll be posting more information as it surfaces!
So if you want to beta test Phantasy Star Online 2, I suggest signing up to the Japanese PSO:BB for its final swan song.
Oh shi-
So I’m watching Sega’s TGS live stream which currently is just playing trailers for their upcoming games while no press conference is going on. I was just happily playing it in the background as I catch up on some work while minding my own business.
Suddenly I head something that fills me with nostalgia and fond memories. Pioneer 2, Spread Needles, Rappys and beautiful Caves 3 come flooding back; It’s the main (vocal) theme of the original Phantasy Star Online! What the?
I quickly Alt-Tab to the stream and what do I see? Phantasy Star Online, the original, what is this? Then it shows PSOv2 and proceeds to go though each game in order of release right up to the very newest announced game, Phantasy Star Portable 2: Infinity. I’m excited about the game so I continued watching but that wasn’t all. Right at the end… My mind was blown.
Phantasy Star Online 2
Release: 2011
Known system: PC
[More info as it comes]
Live Stream HERE
Apologies, article written at 3AM in a fanboy frenzy.
Seems Valkyria Chronicles 3 isn’t the only potential sequel SEGA has registered a domain for. According to PSO World, Sega of Japan has also registered PSO2.jp.
While this has only been recently reported, it seems this is actually old news. I past the domain’s whois entry by my good pal Kichigai, the girl who, along with her mother, helped translate NiGHTSintoDreams.com’s Yuji Naka interview. It seems the domain was first registered last year; meaning that this isn’t a simple renewal of a URL SEGA has had for years. With strong hints from SEGA that they are planning something for classic game’s tenth anniversary, might we be seeing a sequel announced at some point in the future?
Disclaimer; What follows is the humble opinions of a Sega fan! You may not agree with these opinions, but that would just make you WRONG! 😉
I would usually argue that anyone still toting the ‘Sega makes crap games’ line needs a swift kick to the nuts. Not only because this all to common phrase is simply not true, but also because this must mean the person suggesting such a thing would have missed a lot of frankly brilliant Sega games released recently such as Yakuza 3, Valkyria Chronicles, Bayonetta, Phantasy Star Portable 2, Napoleon: Total War and After Burner Climax to name but a few released this year.
Not to mention, we often tend to forget forget Sega has a strong Arcade presents to uphold. Games like Border Break, Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown and Lets go Island are all quality games that have yet to see the light of day outside of a Japanese arcade.
I’m not here to talk about all of the things SEGA’s done right, though. Anyone who’s actually interested in good SEGA games can find that out for themselves. What I intend to talk about is how this misconception started and where it does have some grounds in truth. We’ll be looking at the games Sega really did mess up, how they were fixed and if they weren’t how I personally feel they could be.
So let’s start this ruckus!
Hit the jump for more of my ramblings.
I love Phantasy Star Online, while Phantasy Star Universe was still a good game, it suffered from some bad decisions in gameplay and the way it was handled. It did however do a good job of stepping the gameplay up a notch.
If SEGA is planning a new HD Phantasy Star Online franchise, they need to make it a huge leap forward, not just baby steps. Here’s how we’d do it!
