Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The first trailer for Square Enix’s second Final Fantasy MMO, Final Fantasy XIV, has washed on the shores of the internet. It’s… Japanese? And pretty. That said, I’m not sure how close to the game this is, because the main site shows stills from the video as “screenshots”, which seems a bit unlikely. Anyway, this is very much a next-generation build for Final Fantasy XI, with Square Enix talking about allowing people to transfer old character names to the new game, as well as being able create very similar avatars based on the same race types and classes. Lots of changes to the details of combat and professions, of course, but we can assume the core experience will be rather similar. The game is scheduled for some time in 2010.

Come on, hands up if you played and loved Final Fantasy XI, I know you’re out there.
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Squeenix’s World War II RTS (you want to make a strategy game, set in World War II, are you sure?), Order Of War, has a demo up on Steam. Here it is. The 3D RTS boasts some bold scale, with “up 1000″ troops being under your command and on screen at any one time, and it’s being developed by the chaps at Wargaming.net, the same developer behind Galactic Assault and the Massive Assault games, and it looks a bit clever. Unconvinced? Check out the snazzy trailer below.
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Ack, how did we manage to miss this? Oh yeah – it must be because we don’t care about PC games one jot. So did you see that Ratchet & Clank XII, eh?

Pfft. SupCom 2 is a fascinating endeavour – partly because it’s a sequel to a game that scared away half of the people it wanted to appeal to, and partly because developer Gas-Powered Games teaming up with Square “…” Enix is about the most improbable match-up since Howard the Duck and Lea Thompson. Uber-hardcore RTS meets incoherently self-indulgent auto-mythologising: whatever will happen?
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Robots! Squenix seem to be making some serious inroads to newish (or at least refreshed) gaming territory, with their most recently announced title being a mech-based third person shooter called Front Mission Evolved, of this lineage. The robots in question are called “Wanzers”, which made me snigger a bit, but I’m sure they’ll satisfy a few robo-porn-hungry gamers out there. Clearly it’s going to be action-tastic, rather than a Battletech type robo-sim, but that could be okay. Not much other info at present, other than it’s being developed by Double Helix Games, a California-based spin off from Shiny Entertainment. Perhaps we’ll find out a bit more at E3. Early CGI robo-trailer beneath the click.
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As Britain’s foremost expert on real-time strategies, it’s my pleasure to bring you these three videos of the forthcoming Order of War. I mean, what can I say about the RTS, and the role this game plays in it? Well, “War”, that sure implies there will be battles, and they certainly do require strategy. And you can’t be strategic without some manner of order, I’d imagine. So I think we can all agree, it definitely is an RTS, and they are games that people like. And they have tanks in them. And something about resources. Look, everyone else is out, okay. More helpful information below.

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Square Enix’s not-that-well-received JRPG The Last Remnant is set for release on PC on the 20th of March. Word has it that the game will use Steamworks for its savegame system, and it will, naturally enough, be available to buy on Steam at the time of its release. Whether or not you decide to invest in this stylish fantasy prettiness may well depend on this 1Gb demo, which apparently lets you mess about with a chunk of the game, as well as the PC benchmarking tool. Perhaps unsurprisingly, none of the RPS Four have actually played the original game, so we’ll have to shrug and let you tell us how it is in the comments.

Launch trailer after the jump.

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The beautiful but poorly-received Square Enix turn-based action-RPG The Last Remnant is set to arrive on PC in “spring 2009″. The game hasn’t done well at review om them there consoles, criticised for typically long and rambling cutscenes, and poor battle mechanics. There’s no word on any PC-specific features, other than the Unreal 3 engine looking even more sparkly on high-end systems. I’ve posted the most recent – and rather attractive in that plastic JRPG way – trailer after the jump, although it’s neither PC-specific, nor particularly illustrative of in-game activity…. Or perhaps it is.
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Seems like a bit of an odd hook-up, but it’s apparently to do with top Japanese publisher Square Enix’s “goal of increasing western development efforts aimed for the global markets”. They’re going to publish the sequel to Gas Powered Games’ long-zoom RTS, Supreme Commander, on an unspecified date. Yeah, there aren’t really any other details at present, but I’d anticipate there being enormous robots, and even more enormous maps. We had a crack at the original game on our LAN the other week, and I had meant to do a little write up about how surprisingly good the multiplayer actually is for a bit of a mess around with super-weapons. (I found the campaigns to be something of a drag.)

Cheers to Acosta for the heads up.