Do over

In an effort to retain their official leadership position of the American publishing market, Ignition Entertainment (a UTV company) delayed the release of Arc Rise Fantasia AFTER it had already been released last week. Some of the shipments got out of the factory and went on sale last week, while the official release date was changed to July 27th. We should be expecting this one promptly tomorrow then, since it has been "in transit" for the past week. Other than Ignition's shenanigans, we can look forward to Aksys' shenanigans as they try to release BlazBlue Continuum Shift. I picked up the first one, played it only until Street Fighter IV hit, and haven't touched it since. It's always been a similar story with Arc System Work's past games. They just don't hold my attention, so maybe I should stop handing over my money. I shall contemplate this issue further. From Japan the most interesting thing I see is Metal Max 3. Neo Geo Shooting' is also kind of interesting, but since I know it's coming to XLA, where it'll be playable using an arcade joystick, I just can't bring myself to care much about the PSP port.

There's also a bunch of other crap that we covered last week, that I don't feel like re-posting. The last thing I need is for "Strike Witches" to become a keyword for this blog in Google's database. But perhaps I've said too much.

For next week I have Castlevania Harmony Of Despair, and Corpse Party's PSP port, subtitled Blood Covered. I've been keeping an eye on Corpse Party for a while now, since it looks really cool. It has a really cute anime art style, and old school 16-bit sprite graphics that resemble a long lost SNES RPG. As the name implies, the story it tells is not as cheerful as it looks. It's basically a J-horror high school drama thingy, which normally would be all kinds of uninteresting, but the presentation makes it noteworthy. This is a port of a doujin game, so it'll need appropriately lowered expectations. I might not get it immediately, but I'll definitely keep my eye on it.