Update 4/8 - Gemini Rue, Onore no Shinzuru Michi wo Yuke, Color a Dinosaur

Busy busy busy! As it turns out, 380,000 words is a whole lot to edit! In the meantime, please whet your appetite with a look at Gemini Rue, which came out not more than two months ago, and is already the darling of the adventure gaming world - and for good reason. Nowadays, niche genre fans complain that mainstream rags give the shaft to JRPGs and shooters - meanwhile, adventure game fans have had to deal with the same stuff for something like the past fifteen years. So when a place like IGN gives it a sparkling review, you know it has to be at least pretty good. (Selectbutton also posted a decent write-up recently.) It might be chunky and low def, but it's certainly stylized, and soundtrack is legitimately fantastic.

We've got something like three decently sized shooter articles somewhere in the works, but in the meantime, please enjoy this look at Onore no Shinzuru Michi wo Yuke, a cool Japanese PSP puzzler based on a Flash game. It's one of those (unfortunately numerous, as of recent) portable titles that never came out in North America or Europe, but it's definitely worth a look. But at least we can be happy for Xseed, as they recently released Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, part of Falcom's fairly popular RPG series. The article's been around for awhile, but it's recently been updated to clear up some spoilers and mention its longcoming English release, thanks to one SpaceDrake. Longtime PSP fans will remember the early Legend of Heroes games released by Namco-Bandai - those are the third, fourth and fifth entries in the series, and not only where the ports kind of bad, but the translations were dire. And considering the biggest strength of the series lay in its characterization and storytelling, that ended up being a death knell. Thankfully, Xseed did a much better job with this one, the first entry (out of three) on the sixth Legend of Heroes series. Yes, that sounds confusing, but please buy it so they'll release the rest of them, and maybe Zero no Kiseki (the seventh entry), or maybe something rad like Brandish.

Oh, and your weekly kusoge is Color a Dinosaur, a conceptually flawed NES title that somehow fails even within its fairly limited scope. I do like the screenshot used for the "recent articles" pic, as it seems like the dinosaur-thing has gotten entirely too baked.