Another month, another milestone.

Today I got a quote and my name in a press release for the first time. For the truly dedicated readers out there, here’s the press release in full:

Nintendo Life unveils redesign and enters PlayStation sector with Push Square

Loughborough, UK, 13th February 2012: Nlife Ltd is proud to announce that Nintendo Life, the world’s largest independent Nintendo-focused website, has undergone a major face-lift to cement its position as the world’s leading destination for Nintendo fans.

The latest update builds upon an existing well-loved design and adds HTML5 support. The site has been refined to make browsing Nintendo Life’s world-beating archive of news, features and over 2,100 reviews easier and more enjoyable than before.

The major upgrade comes hot on the heels of the Nlife Ltd’s acquisition and successful relaunch of Push Square earlier this month. With 500 reviews and 10,000 news articles in its back catalogue and now the guidance of the Nlife team going forward, Push Square is poised to become a major player in the global PlayStation space.

“It’s great to finally see Push Square and the new Nintendo Life design go live,” said Nintendo Life Managing Director Anthony Dickens. “We’ve been working on these updates for some time; our site’s readership has grown exponentially over the past few years and we hope they’ll love the new layout as we progress with more updates and features in 2012.”

“I’ve been a fan of both Nintendo and PlayStation for many years,” said Network Editor James Newton. “I’m really excited to lead the team into a new era of game coverage: with Vita and Wii U both due out this year it’s set to be a great 2012 for gaming, our network and our readers.”

Nlife has also entered into a partnership with Eurogamer Network to handle the advertising sales for Nintendo Life as well as the newly relaunched Push Square. Rupert Loman, Managing Director of Eurogamer added: “We’ve been really impressed by the Nintendo Life team and what they’ve achieved so far. We’re looking forward to helping them maximise their success with both sites.”

Visit Nintendo Life at www.nintendolife.com.
Visit Push Square at www.pushsquare.com.

About Nlife Ltd.:
Incorporated in 2010, Nlife Ltd publishes Nintendo Life, one of the world’s leading Nintendo-centric consumer websites; Push Square, a brand new exclusively PlayStation website; and KINECTaku, a leading specialist KINECT-focused website. The network of sites boasts an international roster of contributors and attracts a global audience of over 800,000 unique users each month. Nlife Ltd has recently partnered with the Eurogamer Network in a deal which will see Eurogamer.net becoming Nintendo Life’s sole agent for advertising sales and business development globally.

More information on Nlife Ltd and related sites can be found at www.nlife.com.

NiGHTS into Dreams on Sega Saturn was what stopped Sonic Team from developing a proper Sonic the Hedgehog game for Sega’s black beauty, but I couldn’t be happier we got the purple jester instead of the blue blur. It was a huge risk that, sales-wise, did Sega much more harm than good, but it resulted in the creation of what I believe to be the greatest video game of all time.

A recent games article stated that NiGHTS plays like a further simplification of Sonic the Hedgehog, with its reliance on speed, collecting and a recurring challenge to beat rather than it being a necessarily difficult game. In Sonic you have times to beat: in NiGHTS, the score is all-important. Even after ten years of beating my own scores, I’m still amazed to read some of the scores on Score Attack.net, some of which are ten times better than my top efforts! That’s the beauty of NiGHTS – whereas most ten year old games rely on players revisiting the familiar to make them worth playing, NiGHTS offers a continual challenge and the promise of greater reward with each play.

It’s interesting to see how complicated Sonic’s move set has become in recent years compared to how simplistically he started, but NiGHTS is even more straightforward – you can fly, dash and Paraloop, but they’re the only important moves. Every level, boss and top score can be conquered by skilfully combining these controls, and for a game so simple to challenge after twelve years proves depths I don’t think even Sonic Team could have predicted.

I’ve written about NiGHTS into Dreams in such length over the past three or four years of this blog that you must be wondering if there’s anything else I can say you won’t have heard before. If you haven’t read or listened to any of my previous posts on NiGHTS, they’re listed here:

NiGHTS into Dreams

My Personal Journey of Dreams

NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams – Podcast Episode 3

Episode 4 – Innovation in NiGHTS into Dreams

NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams Impressions

No. 18 – Christmas NiGHTS

This time last year I was worried whether NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams would spoil my memories of the original one if it turned out to be rubbish. Well, even though it wasn’t rubbish it hasn’t changed my opinion of the original at all; if anything, it’s made me realise what an amazing achievement it was. It clearly wasn’t an easy game to get right, with so many daring ideas that they all had to work for the game to succeed. Artificial Life, remixing music and a reliance on score over completion were all daring choices that extended the game’s lifespan far beyond the few hours needed to defeat Wizeman.

A thought just occurred to me – what would I have missed out on if I’d just defeated Wizeman and decided not to play the game any more? How many people thought that was the game’s end and traded it in? That thought actually gave me quite a chill.

The most beautiful, innovative, unbelievable game I have ever played, NiGHTS into Dreams is the greatest game Sega ever created, and in my eyes the best game ever.

I realise I’ve been rattling through these games at quite a pace, so here’s a handy rundown of all the games so far in my Sega Top 50. 56k warning – there’s lots of lovely pictures to download!

To many Sega fans, Shenmue is a sacred text, representing everything about Sega that delights and frustrates; hugely ambitious, completely original and, sadly, a flop. With a budget reportedly around the $100m mark – the most expensive game ever, until Grand Theft Auto IV – it was always going to struggle to make its money back, even at £40 a time. Those that did buy into Yu Suzuki’s paean to 1980s small-town Japan found a game as beautiful as any ever constructed.

From the very first scene, Shenmue drips the production standards and level of detail you would expect from a big budget AM2 project; a broken dojo sign has visible splinters, each character has eyelashes and the detail of Lan-Di’s dragon design is absolutely breathtaking. Through judicious use of cinematic conventions – lightning, the mysterious intruder, Ryo’s harrowing cry of “no!” – the scene makes a strong impression extremely efficiently, ditching lengthy exposition for a quick hit of action to act as a catalyst for the whole saga. It’s quite a brave decision, but the whole scene has a visual impact countless video games would kill for even now, and is such a strong start that no matter how many times I see it I never fail to get drawn in.

The detail level rarely drops from here on. Famous for its “go anywhere, do anything” doctrine at the time, Shenmue offers a hugely interactive world unlike anything before it, with working drawers, light switches, arcade machines and hundreds of other objects. After finishing the game you can even play through again with the weather as it was in real life on those days, which is so exciting I find it quite frightening. Such detail goes a long way to creating a realistic picture of 1986 Japan, and perhaps explains why it wasn’t quite so well received in the West. It may seem at odds for a game dealing with patricide, but it’s precisely this depth that forms a huge part of Shenmue’s appeal, crafting a believable world for the player to explore. With a slow pace and relatively small game area it’s crucial that you can’t see the cracks, and it’s here that Shenmue excels.

In order to stay strong you have to train your skills every day, a sometimes tedious exercise that sees you repeating moves for fifteen minutes a time. The rewards are real though, as moves increase in potency and even take on different forms, with follow-up attacks or greater speed other benefits. For a game that doesn’t use experience points or equipment there has to be some way to develop your fighting skills, particularly with the game’s later emphasis on combat, and as you play through you begin to pick up a training routine. You can learn new moves by translating move scrolls, or even by befriending certain characters and being in the right place at the right time. Even Tom, the world’s worst Jamaican, has a new move to teach you. Like a lot of Shenmue, many of these elements are completely optional, but go far in maximising your experience.

Friendships are more than just a means for learning new moves, though. Regularly buying coffee for a friendly (if twitchy) Chinese chef befriends him, meaning later in the game you can bring him Chinese scrolls to translate, but by far the most important friends to have are Fukuhara and Nozomi. Far from presenting friendship as straightforward, Ryo’s relationships with these two are more complex than your average game. Fuku-san is a student at Ryo’s late father’s dojo, a well-meaning if somewhat clumsy teenager who has always felt his skills are second best compared to Ryo’s. Fuku-san pleads with Ryo not to pursue Lan-Di, but when he realises he can’t stop him he breaks open his piggy bank to help pay for a ticket to Hong Kong. It’s a wonderful gesture of childlike warmth that even gets through to the oft-stony Ryo, and a genuinely touching moment in their friendship; Fuku-san is so often the doting little brother it’s only fitting he raids his loose change to help in any way he can.

The real crux of the relationships, and the game’s heart in many ways, is the interaction between Ryo and flower shop girl Nozomi Harasaki, probably the most problematic friendship in all of games history. The two are (quite literally) made for each other, yet Ryo maintains his distance for the same reason as any comic book hero would: protection. It’s clear that Nozomi resents this, but no matter how many cut-short telephone conversations and words of advice they share, she finds it almost impossible to break through his guard. Towards the game’s end there is a (completely optional) scene on a park bench that stands out as one of the most heartbreakingly romantic moments in any game or film I can remember, filled with the sort of restrained desperation you’d expect from a literary classic, not a Dreamcast game. Theirs is a kind of doomed relationship – she knows he has to leave and he knows he can’t risk taking her with him – and so they suppress every emotion imaginable to keep each other at arm’s length. You can imagine the therapy their children would need.

There are so many memorable moments in Shenmue I could spend another 1,000 words and still only get halfway through them. The often-maligned Quick Time Events give rise to some of the most cinematic and incredible fight scenes ever witnessed, my particular favourite being the bar room fight that’s as exciting as any traditional fighting game with twice the impact. The real-time fighting is essentially Virtua Fighter with more moves (and movement), and knowing you’re strong enough to conquer the game’s huge final brawl because you trained every day is an extremely satisfying pay-off.

Shenmue deserves enormous praise for setting its sights so high, and even higher praise for getting so damned close. It’s not a perfect game by any means – some of the voice acting is a particular bone of contention of mine – but it is still a unique and endlessly fascinating adventure that stays with you long after the boat to Hong Kong has set sail.

Shining Force III is the high point of an incredible series, telling one huge story over three different Scenarios, each with its own heroes, perspectives and unforgettable battles.

The epic trilogy starts with Scenario I: God Warrior of the Kingdom, the only part of the game officially released in English. The plot starts with peace talks between the Republic and the Empire, but soon escalates into kidnappings, religious plots and a vicious cult seeking to bring about the end of the world. The second game, Target: Child of God, occurs simultaneously but sees you take the role of the Empire’s Prince Medion. Both games start and end in the same place, but along the way show very different sides of the same conflict, and that’s where Shining Force III‘s genius lies.

In many games players aren’t encouraged to see events from alternative perspectives, but developers Camelot devised a system named Synchronicity that not only shows conversations and battles from both sides but also the effects your actions can take on others. For example, if you allow the brainwashed General Spiriel to live in SFIII: Scenario I, she appears in Scenario III to join your force to help defeat the Bulzome Cult. This is just one of many examples of the Synchronicity system at work: treasure chests opened in Scenario I remain empty in Scenario II, a stolen key on one disc can unlock a character in the next, and any number of other strands serve to keep all three Scenarios locked together as one huge game, rather than playing like three disparate versions of the same story.

Shining Force III was the very first RPG I played, and it made such a huge impact I’ve been a big fan of the genre ever since. I remember reading a preview in Sega Saturn Magazine and completely obsessing over it, even going so far as to plan a play diary so I could recall all the major plot points, items and secrets. When the game eventually arrived I was absolutely blown away by it, leading me to get my Saturn switched, which proved to be one of the best decisions I ever made!

There’s a rather good piece on the Shining series in this month’s GamesTM (although it does neglect Shining Force II, officially the tenth best game ever), but for all the talk of its political plot and the lack of translation for the last two discs, it doesn’t sum up why I love the game so much. Crammed into the three discs are so many amazing battles, characters, weapons, attacks and enemies that it’s like a constant revelation to you, with something new in every battle. Scenario II has a great battle by a lighthouse, and at the end of each turn you have to take cover or the lighthouse’s beam will expose you to the enemy as you sneak over the bridge. The idea of making a stealthy turns-based battle amazes me every time.

Shining Force III‘s sense of spectacle was only bettered on Saturn by Panzer Dragoon Saga, but as beautiful as PDS is, it could never compete with the SFIII trilogy’s sheer size: completing all three Scenarios properly probably takes between 100 and 150 hours of gameplay, a huge game even by today’s standards. Even better is that by completing the third Scenario, you can access even more battles on the best "thank you" gift ever, the elusive Premium Disc, which lets you use the  characters you’ve so lovingly raised to take on classic Shining bosses including Darksol and Dark Dragon. For a Shining Force fan, it doesn’t get any better.

I could reel off another fifty unforgettable moments from the trilogy, but the fact is that Shining Force III changed my life. I must have completed the first disc at least six times, and I have a save file on Scenario III that’s no more than a few months old.

For Christmas, my brother gave me the Shining Force III artbook, and it reminded me how incredible the series is. It was clearly a real labour of love for the Takahashi brothers and Camelot, and it’s such a shame that we’ll never again see their vision of the Shining world brought to life. The three Scenarios of Shining Force III stand as the pinnacle of Sega’s greatest RPG series, and the third-best game they ever made.