Studio Ghibli & Level-5: Ni no Kuni

I just checked on Kotaku about a game, collaboration between Studio Ghibli (I am a great fan of their movies) with a Fukoka-based game developer named Level-5. The game is titled Ni no Kuni and it will be released on the PS3. I have to admit that I really like that kind of graphics and the animation on the video seems pretty smooth and nice. You can check the video here.

So Blonde… So Bugged?

So Blonde: Game Cover

At Wednesday I started playing a new adventure game called “So Blonde” developed by Wizarbox, although it is not the best adventure game I ever played, I have to admit that it got me kind of interested in playing it and watching the story proceed.

The game description is the following: “She is young, she is pretty and she comes from rich parents: Sunny Blonde has little to worry about in her life. Especially not today: the 17-year-old American beauty is on a luxurious Atlantic cruise with her parents, celebrating their wedding anniversary. But it’s not really a party after Sunny’s taste – she’d rather be getting down with her friends. That’s why she uses every chance she gets to get away from her parents and explore the ship. Just when the ship passes by the Bermuda Islands, the inevitable occurs: a heavy thunderstorm rolls in; the cruise ship is overwhelmed by the sea. Sunny passes out and is transported into one of the vessel’s lifeboats…”.

However while playing I faced a major problem. After playing for a few hours and reaching an advanced point I forgot to do something for a quest, I did what I needed to do but I forgot to take an item (although it was “optional” it was needed to unlock some bonus features probably). I had a few saves but the where really almost near the start, so I gave it a try; because having some puzzles less is better that starting all over again. Unfortunately, after loading I got a dialog box which wasn’t supposed to be there. The problem is that while you are in dialogs you are unable to interact with anything else, and you need to press at any dialog option, in order to proceed. Well the result was a nice game crash, because the dialogs were in the wrong place. So I started the game all over again.

At some advanced point however, a little bit before the 3rd chapter of the game, I decided to save… this time the game completely froze. No response at all, I couldn’t even alt-tab to get out of the game and back on the Desktop. However I still wanted to see what happens after that so I decided that it would be easier for me to reach this point again, because I knew all the puzzles, and I could pass the dialogs fast. And so I did, and I reached and I passed the point I crashed, while saving the game regularly. I once got stuck with the loading screen… although Sunny (the character) was moving normally, I could only see the loading screen, so I restarted the game from a very close point. And after passing the point I crashed earlier I did save the game. And then I closed it, and when later I tried to load, I faced the same “random not-supposed-to-be-there dialog after loading” crap.

So I tried to re-install the game, to see if the problem would be fixed with the re-install, but the problem remained. So I uninstalled the game completely, I deleted the game saves and I got rid of it because even though I want to learn how the story ends, I neither have the patience nor the time to play the game again from the begging, and certainly not at one go. Unfortunately all these problems ruined my fun…