RandomNPC – Video Game RPG Reviews, Editorials, and Features

You may have noticed that we had some technical difficulties this weekend. Specifically, we were flagged as an attack site by Google. Rest assured, we aren’t out to beat you up for experience points and gold.

After checking everything, we determined that it was clearly not our fault. The problem was actually with our webhosting service, which had developed a security flaw. We have now changed to a different webhost and uploaded a clean backup.

We apologize for any inconveniences this may have caused.

Fable II will be getting some DLC lovin’ this December. First up, the paid Knothole Island expansion, which gives heroes a new place to go with new quests, items, and characters.  It’s new.  Second wil be a free bit of DLC that bestows some of the things you’ll get with Knothole and also allows you to play co-op with anyone that’s downloaded the paid content.  And finally, there’s an Albion theme available right now for the recently released New Xbox Experience.  Woot.

The Knohole Island expansion will cost gamers 800 Microsoft Points, while the theme costs 250.

The highly-anticipated Mother 3/Earthbound 2 translation patch has finally been completed, and has been released for public consumption.  Folks with a legal copy of Mother 3 and the knowhow to patch can head on over to the project’s website.

http://mother3.fobby.net/

Sega has revealed more information today on Infinite Space, the title formerly known as Infinite Line.  Helmed by PlatinumGames (a group of former SEEDS developers of Capcom fame), producer Atsushi Inaba and director Hifumi Kouno bring us a high science fiction story, centered around the space-faring adventures of Yuri, a young crewman who journeys the galactic frontier.  Yuri slowly moves up the ranks to become the captain of his own starship.

Over 150 blueprints can be used to build and customize starships of all shapes and sizes, to be used to amass an armada to explore the galaxy.  There are over 200 possible crewmen to recruit to keep the ships in, well, shipshape order.

Infinite Space is based on Arthur C. Clarke’s novella Childhood’s End.  Sega will be releasing the game in 2009 to both eastern and western audiences.

In celebration of E3, we’ve decided to launch some dedicated forum software, which should help get discussion going about the stories you read here on RandomNPC.com.  We hope you like it and use it often!

http://randomnpc.com/forum/ is the address, and it’s linked to in the header of the site for easy access.  Note that the login for the forum and login for the site’s comment system are not linked as yet, though they eventually will be.  However, we intend to move the comment system completely to those forums, as they work better in most respects, so feel free to comment on anything you want.  Just keep it within the rules.

We’re geared up for E3 this week, but that hasn’t stopped some of us from wiling away the hours with happy fun videogames. (more…)

As is supposedly common knowledge, the Xbox 360 has a dearth of RPG titles available for it. Sure there’s Mass Effect, Lost Odyssey, Blue Dragon, Culdcept Saga… ok, maybe not a dearth. Still, it could always use more! To that end, Square Enix, Namco-Bandai Games, and Microsoft announced quite a few interesting bits at the surely well-populated Microsoft Japan RPG Press Event, held, well, about an hour ago. (more…)

As our resident DXpert John “Karlinn” Boske (and I) will attest, Deus Ex is the best thing since nano-augmented bread, and well worth pretty much any price point, regardless of how you come by it.  If it’s not the original game itself, it’s the countless (good to decent) mods available.  That said, ya can’t really beat free.

To that end, GameTap will be adding Deus Ex to its free-to-play lineup starting next week.  For the simple price of a 15 second ad and the time it takes to download the game, you can experience what is arguably one of the best RPGs on the PC.

I’d call that a great deal.

Source: Shacknews

Not content to stand idly by during the Great Western Merger-fest, with such notable names as EA-who-bought-Bioware-Pandemic and Vivendi Activision Blizzard (just rolls off the tongue don’t it?), Square Enix has announced that is has what equates to around $9.20 billion (with a b) to spend on either allying itself with other companies or outright purchasing stakes in them.  The purported reasoning behind this is diversifying their content.  From the mouth of Yoichi Wada himself, “… we need to go beyond traditional Square Enix.”

Source: Reuters (via Shacknews)

Atlus has let fly with details about Etrian Odyssey II‘s classes, for those of you that are salivating for more details about the next game you’ll end up dumping massive time into.  The classes detailed include: Gunner; Alchemist; Landsknecht; Hexer; War Magus; Dark Hunter.

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When a quirky title comes along, one that I think most people won’t hear about or will more than likely ignore, I tend to jump on it. So far, I’ve gotten lucky (Portal and Steambot Chronicles, I’m looking at you). Whether or not Opoona, a quintessentially quirky RPG from Arte Piazza for the Nintendo Wii, can go beyond its mere charm remains to be seen. (more…)

Fear not, good readers of RandomNPC. JC Denton and ourselves have regained control from the nefariousness of Mr. Boske, Mr. Page, and Mr. Simons, and rest assured they are being… taken care of. The servers of RandomNPC are now secure at Area 51, and hopefully this will never happen again.

To commemorate this occasion, no longer will April 1 be known as a day of jokes, frivolity, and rickrolling, but as a day when *insert ID4 speech*.

In summary: Gotcha!

Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to write this review of Page Industry’s latest and greatest piece of Virtual Entertainment: Deus Ex. But first, a few bookkeeping operations: Production of vaccine for the Grey Death has exceeded all expectations. Pay no attention to the rumors of hijacked shipments. It is merely terrorists trying to scare people. They’ll get theirs, believe you me.

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Greetings, readers of RandomNPC.com.

I’m writing to warn you that beginning Friday, March 28 and lasting for a period of up to 48 hours, RandomNPC.com will be temporarily unavailable as our hosting service moves us (among others) to bigger and better web accommodations. The service has stated that it’s possible that it won’t take as long as 48 hours to get us moved and back up, and should it not we’ll be back up before Sunday of course, but otherwise, we’ll be down for two days.

We hope this causes no inconvenience for you, but after the move you should see the responsiveness of the site overall improve.

Thank you, and Happy Gaming!

This edition of Current Quests is brought to you by Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which has slightly taken over my life of late, as it has others I know. Who doesn’t like fulfilling the childhood dream of finding out “who would win in a fight?” Mario Vs. Sonic? “Real” Link Vs. Toon Link? Jigglypuff Vs. An Army of Mutant Cyborgs? Ok, I made that last one up.

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Happy birthday to meeeeeeeeeee!

Welcome one and all to another Quests Roundup. Yeehaw!

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Might I say that I love Firefox? It’s like IE without the Windows baggage and the memory leaks, and the crashes that kill your ability to actually open explorer windows to browse your hard drive. Oh, and the ads. And the autoloading “plugins”. Among many other things. Anyway, it’s Quests time! (more…)

Last week I finally picked up Mega Man X: Command Mission (hereafter referred to as XCM) again after quite a long hiatus from the game. The last time, I’d gotten about halfway through and ran into a boss that quite literally could kick my collective Reploid butts four times over. I restarted it due to losing the story after so much time, still not sure if I could enjoy it enough to make it all the way through. (more…)

Welcome, one and all, to the latest episode of “Where are they now?” Or rather, RandomNPC’s Current Quests of the Week. Not much has changed in the recent week with regard to everyone’s gaming status, so consider this a recap.

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