My Tumblr dashboard will never hear the end of this…

I guess I was referring more to the Polygon review guidelines stating that 4’s and below are reserved for games that have technical issues which prevent or severely impair the ability for a player to complete the game. I was surprised that this game got higher than a 4 because, were I to want to beat this game, I would have to buy new copies over and over until I found one which did not freeze my console when I started playing.

But since the bug only affects a subset of the population, and checking with Megan on Twitter she says she didn’t see any bugs like that nor had heard of them at the time of writing, I can see why this game may not qualify for that low a score.

I personally would’ve given Xenoblade Chronicles a similar score as Megan did to Pandora’s Tower… But I’m in the minority regarding my feelings for that game. I’d like to see Megan or Alexa’s take on Fragile Dreams, which is my personal favorite game on the Wii.

… Then again, maybe I wouldn’t want to see that. Perhaps my heart couldn’t take having to admit all of the games failings I’ve so far successfully ignored. :(

I’m surprised this didn’t get a lower score because of the rash of glitched US pressings of the game which render it somewhere between unplayable and barely playable.

For a decent subset of the population of Pandora’s Tower purchasers in the US, upon entering towers 11 or 12, the game will freeze your console (Wii and Wii U alike), and you have to pull the power cord to get it to reboot.

There are several reports of it occurring, though XSeed says it’s unable to replicate the issue with their copies so they can’t begin to work on a fix. Meanwhile, I apparently have one of the severely glitched copies – I’ve spent roughly 4 hours trying and failing to use every workaround people have posted and no matter what I always freeze on tower 11.

More reading:

• GameFAQs thread compiling a list of workarounds people have tried
• Destructoid PSA about a related tower 11/12 glitch
• And (if you don’t mind the fact that I happen to be linking a video of me playing the game) here’s video of me encountering the bug on my copy:

Man that new Nobunaga’s Ambition game looks crazy gorgeous…

Also, I’m so out of touch with the Atelier series… Last one I played was on PS2. I should really head out and buy the five or six I haven’t played yet and try to steamroll through them sometime… HAHAHA yeah that’s not gonna happen.

Fairy Fencer f looks kinda like I’d just as readily hate it as love it… I’ve heard quite a bit of rumbling over it lately, though. The design team has a pretty nice pedigree (Yoshitaka Amano and Nobuo Uematsu specifically). The developers being from Neptunia Team… Eh… Not so much.

Finally, the thing that I was the happiest about, more Etrian Odyssey!

(" … like a traditional Etrian Odyssey game with no story… " very slightly rustled my jimmies though. :P)

Curious where you got that $8.7b figure… I will admit I’m not a finance person, I was just reading the shareholder’s report I linked to in the above post.

But from what I saw the company has $30.36 billion overall.

I was just going to post “Oh You” dog, but last time I did that Shaun yelled at me :(

So based on available capital the video game division of Sony is only $2 billion behind Nintendo (who, at $10 billion, is roughly $1.5 billion behind Activision-Blizzard), and still about 3 times better off than EA (who are sitting on $2.5 billion). Note that’s “available capital”, not net worth. They have quite a long way to go before they need to sell anything to anyone.

Short answer: They’re still a ways away from needing to worry about “cutting their losses” and bowing out of the industry.

Sources:
Activision-Blizzard: http://investor.activision.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1047469-13-1506&CIK=718877
EA: http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:EA&fstype=ii
Nintendo: http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2013/130424e.pdf
Sony: http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/financial/fr/12q4_sony.pdf

Not only did all tickets sell out in 6 hours, the 4 day passes sold out in 23 minutes. I actually received a notification about “4 day passes are sold out” before I received the notification that they were on sale.

Dumb Twitter text message notifications. ¬__¬