Getting your hands on all the Square Enix games out there is tough, with games from the publisher appearing on everything from the Xbox 360 to the latest cell phones. But one batch of games will be available for everyone to play -- well, everyone who has a PC, that is (and if you didn't, you wouldn't exactly be reading this now, would you?)
The company began today a beta test for Game Town, an online games service for members of its Square Enix Members rewards program. The site promises to offer free games based on Square Enix properties.
The first games are a series of flash-based mini games featuring Chocobo: Chocobo Flight, Chocobo Balance Stick and Chocobo Classmate. Once you've played these simple games, you can choose to post your scores to an online ranking mode.
If you want to sample these and future games at the Square Enix Game Town site, you'll need to get yourself registered at the Square Enix Members site. Registration is free, but you'll have to do your best to work through a few pages of Japanese text. Here are some page-by-page hints:
1. Enter your e-mail address at this page
2. Open your e-mail software and click on the link at the top of the e-mail from
[email protected]
3. At the contract page, ignore all the text and click the right button.
4. Enter a login ID, then enter a password twice. You'll then have to select a secret question from a list and input an answer on the next input line. Your answer has to have Japanese characters in it, so we'd suggest simply selecting the first question, then cutting and pasting the text from elsewhere on the page (make sure the text doesn't have kanji characters in it -- just grab a couple of characters from the text to the left of the password entry boxes)
5. Enter a nickname (must be different from your login), select your sex, enter your birthday, then select your location and profession and click the right button at the bottom of the page. Note that the first three items can never be changed. NEVER!
6. Select your mailing preferences for receiving junk mail... err, updates... from Square Enix. For maximum ease quotient, click the second circle box from the left for both bottom items, then click the right button at the bottom of the page.
7. Ignore all the survey questions and click the right button. Or, totally screw up Square Enix's survey by making choices at random before clicking the right button.
8. At the final confirmation screen, click the right button.
That's it! Click the Square Enix Members icon and select "GameTown" midway through the page to enter the world of Chocobo-based mini-games.
