Confidential to Square and Apple

Screw you, Square, for making an interesting-looking RPG for iPod that I am incapable of running on either of the iPods I own, or on my iPhone. And screw Apple for creating such a fragmented platform to begin with.

It’s a shame, too. Song Summoner looks like a Barcode Battler kinda thing mixed with Final Fantasy Tactics, capable of translating MP3s into character data. I imagine that song length is a salient factor in this process, so I’m bummed that I won’t be able to annihilate the forces of evil with indestructible giants made from Tales from Topographic Oceans and A Passion Play.

Speaking of Square, I’m on tap to go to Japan next month and cover their public event. Any Tokyo types care to partake of the privilege of buying me dinner while I’m over there? I plan to stick around for an extra day or two trying to drum up interviews and such, so you’ll have plenty of opportunities to fete me.

24 thoughts on “Confidential to Square and Apple

  1. I’ll buy you dinner if you arrive before July 31 or stick around til August 10 = )

  2. That’s… dissapointing. I hope to find out that it’s nothing more than a time killer.

    But then again, I can’t imagine any other genre I’d rather kill time with. If it could randomly generate levels in an alternate play mode, that would be great.

  3. I guess I’ll have to cry myself to sleep every night while I’m on vacation then. ;)

  4. How about I take a trip to Japan again, at the same time as you? Again? I’ll buy you dinner and toast to the joy of not bringing a girlfriend to run up my credit cards.

  5. Sweet, will this be the game that finally breaks my Peggle addiction? I’ve sunk more hours into that game (which I run on my iPod Nano w/ video) than many of you have in Shiren Odyssey: Legend of the Mystery Dungeon Ninja.

  6. There is NO WAY this is staying only on iPods with click wheels. That would be teh dumb.

  7. It’s admirable to actually take advantage of the “system’s” capabilities, but… didn’t someone already do this on the PS1, where you put in a CD and it randomly generates a monster? What’s it called again? Either way, that’s what I first thought of.

    I’m interested to see what SE has in store for the event, aside from that stupid name they gave it. The announcement of FFVII: Advent Children Complete sounds kinda lame… I expect some kind of other FFVII announcement. Like, I dunno, say, a PS3 remake? I dunno though, no one wants the internet to explode, so who knows.

  8. Good call, turkish101. Monster Rancher let you insert CDs into it and create monsters. The anime wasn’t bad either.

    This game does sound pretty cool, but I am surprised they did not make the game compatible with more Apple products. I doubt that games of this sort can thrive on such a specific hardware especially when most people already own another version of said hardware.

  9. Hey Jeremy, I’m a big fan of your 1up coverage and this site, so I’d love to take you out to dinner and chat! I work pretty close to Akihabara, so if you’re free lemme know what dates Aug. 1-6 might work best…

  10. You covered it all for the most part in your interview with that Sega/Apple developer a while back, but it bears repeating: Apple’s in a unique position of having several viable gaming platforms that can both perform well and have an enormous installed user base. The problem is games have always been an afterthought to the devices’ uses as media players, which don’t need to be unified (and would hurt the higher-end models if they tried to be).

    Really, either way Apple wins, but I like to think of it like this: in the Apple family of “gaming consoles”, the 5G/Classics are like a GBA and the iTouch/iPhones are PSPs, which is kind of a direct technological analogy. You normally wouldn’t see games crossing over between those systems (quality ones, anyway), so there’s not much of a need to with iPods.

  11. If you swing by Nagoya I’ll buy you a beer and we can hunt down Alexander Fraioli and kick the shit out of him.

  12. it amazes me how many people here live in japan and, in addition, want to help jeremy re-pack on the pounds he’s been bicycling off.

  13. I totally can’t keep iPod generations straight anymore. I have one with a wheel and color, but I”m going to go ahead and guess it’s too old to play this since it doesn’t, you know, play videos or anything.

    That said, if “Dancing Mad” didn’t produce something epic, I would be disappointed.

  14. So I level up my troops while I shelve books? Very nice! For $6 I am all over this. (What, no S-E tax?) I really hate cell phones and by extention cell phone games, but my video ipod has talked me into a few little DL games. I love Phase and Peggle so much.

  15. If you don’t mind meeting some guy who sent you games from Germany a few years ago (and then made you pay with a check!), I’d spot you dinner.

  16. FYI, overly-long songs are not superpowered. But “Rydia” from FFIV Piano Collections is.

  17. They should make Vib-Ribbon for the Zune! ;) I’d like to play this game… but I don’t even own an iPod.

  18. Hey, I’ll be leaving to return to the States on August 4th! So if you want to grab some food sometime before then, let me know! Any idea what kind of food you’d be wanting?

  19. I want this game too…but while my ipod can run it, I use it on two computers, which means any time I bring it to my ‘non-home’ one, the game will get erased. and there’s no way to fix it, I guess. I bought three games before I realized. Fuckers.

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