Atlus U.S.A.'s Persona 3 FES is a welcome re-release of the supernatural high-school RPG. The title includes new bonus features, including an extension of the storyline that veterans and newcomers will enjoy.

In Persona 3 FES, players take the role of a high-school transfer student. He starts life normally from school to dorm until an encounter with the Dark Hour, an hour after midnight wear evil beings called Shadows lurk in the streets.

The title sections the day into morning, afternoon, evening, and Dark Hour scenarios. In the morning, the main character can interact with school friends or engage in extracurricular activities. Strong participation in school can lead to extra points in Academics, Charm and Courage attributes.

In the evening, players head back to the dorm to follow into the Dark Hour to battle.

In battle, players can attack, use skills, or summon Personas, alternate beings that harbor strong powers. Players can also analyze enemies to look up their weak point and gain an extra hit after a knock down. Additionally, characters can be set to act on their own, heal, attack a target, or stand by.

The latest version adds new Personas, new Social Links to characters that boost Persona strength, an optional Hard Mode, a Weapon Fusion feature to create new weapons by fusing Personas, and new requests in the Velvet Room, an alternate space for side missions.

The largest addition is a new scenario called The Journey, a continuation of the story that adds tens of hours of new gameplay.

The graphics in Persona 3 FES are clean at 30 frames per second. Locations and enemies are flat-shaded and well-constructed. Character portraits and solid voice acting relay witty banter among the students.

Persona 3 FES is a great RPG for new and old fans. The added bonuses and new gameplay extras offer plenty more at a budget price.

Hoping to capitalize on the PlayStation 2's install base in the growing economy of India, development studio Aurona Technologies plans to develop a PS2 game featuring Hanuman, a key figure in Indian mythology.

According to a Reuters report, the game will be produced at the company's Hyderabad, India offices. Traditionally, Aurona has provided development assistance and platform conversion services to external studios, but the Hanuman game will be an internal project.

Said Sony Computer Entertainment Europe co-COO Jim Ryan of the announcement, "We are committing significant resources to growing the market for console games in India. We have chosen the Hanuman game as our first title specifically developed for the Indian market as the theme is an ever-popular one across the country."

Aurona CEO Santosh Pillai corroborated Ryan's claims: "We are selected by Sony to develop their first game for the Indian market. Hanuman, as a character, offers infinite possibilities for game play development."

Sony plans to make the game available in certain other regions of the world with significant Indian populations.

Though the Hanuman game is intended for children and young teens, Aurona told Reuters it plans to expand its audience with further games targeting the 16-24 year old market.

One particular system update that has been quite popular and long-awaited by fans is an upcoming photon art re-balancing. One of the many changes it will make is to allow all photon arts to level faster than before. Originally this update was scheduled for April 11, however it was later pushed back to April 25. Unfortunately, Chillaura has apologetically made the announcement that it has been delayed once again. The game master is telling fans to expect the update to arrive in the weeks following the end of Maximum Attack G.

Hello and welcome to the DUX news blog.

I am René Hellwig and as you may already have heard I'm currently developing a 2D shooter for the Sega Dreamcast to be released this year on a physical disc.

I choosed the horizontal memorize type of shooting as personal preference and because the Dreamcast could easily need more of them. Border Down and Last Hope is just not enough. Speaking about Last Hope, you may know that I'm actually part of the NGEV.TEAM and that our next Neogeo shooting game is still in progress, so it will hopefully get an relase next year.

So let's take a look at DUX.







These screens showing an early development status of roughly 65%.

As shown DUX will completely consist out of CGI to use the advantages of Dreamcasts 2D capabilities. So the game features high-resolution to allow some super smooth graphics in 60fps. Also notices, the game is still in development but the screens present the games overal look pretty well. The final results will look much better.

As the screens also hopefully show, this is going to be memorizing shooting. So it will be necessarily to memorize some parts of the game here and there, but there's still a focus on action. When you never have heard about memorizing in shooters then you probably never heard of R-Type. Yet DUX won't be just a clone of mentioned classic, but rather a modern and standalone game inspiried by the games within the same subgenre. By saying modern I mean this memorizer will take the advantages of recent shooting games to combine it with an undying gaming concept. Accessibility, highly-visible bullets and a lot of those simultanesly on screen, are one of the advantages - just to name a few of them.


To shoot yourself through the space alien scum you will need following arms. Depending on the games situation you can change the actual wep by picking up the individual item since all of them has strong and weak points.



Hyperbeam

Maximizes the power of the on-board shots including hyper charge beam. This shot is very helpful to get read of a bunch of enemies at the same time and it also makes more damage on boss enemies.

Potency: Does a lot of damage to boss enemies, and takes many enemies to death on one blast.

Weakness: Slow to load.



Bouncinglaser

Warps two lasers with bouncing effect onto the environment. This bouncinglaser can be quite powerfull, when it's used right. Especially cannons on the roof and ground will fear this laser. Not so recommend for boss encounters.

Potency: This shot can do a lot of damage to enemies when bouncing along the walls.

Weakness: Doesn't harm boss enemies too much due to the 45° shooting angle.



X-Ray
Fires a strong x-shaped laser onto the screen and has a minor bouncing abillity depending on the active power level. Use the enviroment with this x-ray shot to make this weapon even more dangerously. Maybe the strongest weapon in the game but seldom to find.

Potency: Very powerfull, especially with bouncing abbility active.

Weakness: Relative low shoot frequency and saldom to find.

Additionally to this fire power, you can get upgradable rockets and bombs. All in all this selection of weps in this is pretty straightforward and increases efficiency when used properly.

Next time some enemies will be introduced.

The good news is that I now have regular access to a mac again, and it’s actually fairly up-to-date (ie it’s running 10.5). So as a result, I have to say I’m stunned that other people have managed to get as far as they did - as far as I can see, Apple seems to have broken GLX pretty thoroughly[0] .

So I’ve done 3 things:

* Fixed the crashes at least, with glx, and generally fixed up the configure script for 10.5. I’ve probably broken it for 10.4 though. Which raises the question - is anyone actually trying to use lxdream on 10.4?
* Added support for the native GTK port w/ NSGL. This actually works fairly nicely. Unfortunately the only binary I can find for GTK/Quartz is provided by macports, and the font support is broken at the moment (ie completely missing). If anyone actually manages to build it from source… do let me know

* Started implementing a (fairly minimal) native cocoa UI. Well I was always going to do this eventually, I just hadn’t been planning to do it _now_.

In unrelated news, pulseaudio support is now in, along with spanish and italian translations (thanks to segnini75 and ghost22)
[0] So far I’ve noticed: It’s restricted to 16-bit depth buffers, has various other regressions from 10.4, creating a context with fbconfig crashes the app, glSecondaryColorPointerEXT fails if given a size = 4 (and lead to a crash), not to mention the libGL link cycle issue…

Amazon must need to clear out its GameCube stock of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, as this is the second sale the online retailer has hosted in just two days, not that we're complaining!

The last deal lasted only four hours and offered the GameCube release for only $19.99, and, while that sounds much cheaper than the $25.99 Amazon is asking for Twilight Princess now, keep in mind that that $25+ pricing includes free shipping. You can make that kind of change slashing at grass and breaking pots for two minutes!

This release has very short change log and does not address many of the problems pointed out in last post comments. I have managed to fix annoying SGB multi player games input problem though. Apart from this the only difference to 0.10 is emulation speed. Both video render and CPU interpreter were heavily optimized. Sadly some games still won’t do 60fps.

Since majority of the code base was touched in process of optimization there can be some regression in compatibility.

Change log:

- changed: optimized software renderer
- changed: optimized cpu core
- fixed: multiplayer pad reading in SGB games (Battle Arena Toshinden and others)

Earlier today, the Cherry Blossom lobby theme was activated, replacing the Easter theme. Under this theme, the lobby music is replaced with Cherry Blossom and sakura appear on Guardian Colony/Neudaiz. Also, players will be able to purchase the Flowers room decoration from the Guardian Colony Variety Store.



Unfortunately, this lobby update seems to be causing graphical glitches on Parum and Moatoob. The normal lobby decorations for those planets are non-existent at the moment.

Maximum Attack G is almost here! In preparation for the event, we'd like to help SonicTeam spread the word about MAG Live Support. In order to make Maximum Attack G the most fun and well-supported PSU event to date, game masters will be providing live support to players on a regular schedule for the duration of the event. Continue reading below for complete details.

Five days a week (Monday-Tuesday, Thursday-Saturday) starting Saturday, April 25, between the hours of 4:00p.m. and 8:00p.m. PDT, game masters will be on-hand to provide customer support to players who have concerns over cheating, scamming or other abusive behavior. Support will be provided at the party recruitment missions located at each planet's GUARDIANS Branch. At first, an in-game announcement will be made to let players know when a support shift has begun and where to go for assistance. Later in the event, a standard location for support may be established. When there are no open support issues, game masters will be on patrol in the lobbies to chat with players and occasionally may join active missions.