The First Hour

Obsidian Entertainment recently mentioned that they would like to remake Chrono Trigger into a Western-style console role-playing game and the gaming world went, "huh?"  I personally like the idea, while the usual haters are going to hate, but this actually has a small chance in happening since Square Enix recently recruited Obsidian to work on the Dungeon Siege IP Square picked up recently.  So the companies have a relationship, anything could happen now.

As a gigantic fan of Chrono Trigger, the idea of a remake honestly doesn't bother me.  Any Chrono game at this point is better than no more Chrono games.  Square Enix has shown over and over again that they will never come back to the series in any serious form, so why not contract it out to a studio that is actually interested (and experienced in picking up old IPs, if somewhat lousy at it sometimes)?  Chrono Trigger on the Super Nintendo and its ports to the PS1 and DS sold over 3 million copies, but sales outside of Japan have always lagged, why not take one of the best games ever and adapt it to a new audience?  There's definitely potential.

What comes to your mind when I say "Dungeons and Dragons?" Twenty-sided dice? 2d6? Attack of opportunity? Fortitude save?  Gary Gygax? Figurines? Yes, these all come to mind to those who have never even played the board game that changed the world.

You might be wondering why, on a video game review site, I am writing about Dungeons and Dragons. Well, to many gamers, it is a bit more obvious. "I've played Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, I know about dungeons and dragons!" and that is true, you do.

What I am afraid people don't understand is that while Bioware has certainly helped establish Dungeons and Dragons rules into video games, it goes much farther than that.

After Nate’s excellent and complete wrap-up of the five big conferences, I’m going to cover some of the games that caught my attention over the last few days.  While we knew the existence of some of these games before this week, our knowledge of them was pretty thin.  Hopefully you’ll be seeing these games on the First Hour in the coming year (and hopefully we’ll recommend you keep playing them!).

This list is nowhere near complete, neither as a list of great E3 2010 games or even with games I was impressed with.  Hope you enjoyed the show, I sure did.

With E3 2010 set to kick off next week, we thought it was fine time at the First Hour to make some predictions!  Most of these might be more wishful thinking than realistic expectations, but this is the only time of year where gamers are actually surprised, so we're going to make the most of it.

You'll find predictions from Greg, Grant, Steve, Paul E., Paul A, Ian, Nate, and Mike in Omaha below on topics ranging from Natal to Sega releasing another console and everything in between.  Predictions are guaranteed to be totally inaccurate, but we had fun putting them together and imaging the possibilities.

We hope to sum up our thoughts about the conferences and games announced next week every few days, but we'll definitely have a recap when it's over determining who was the most accurate.  The First Hour doesn't really do news that often, but we'll try not to interrupt our daily reviews and editorials that much.  Either way, we've got a whole slew of content queued up.

Enjoy!