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It's bee quite some time since I quit playing Final Fantasy XI. I actually quite liked the game, but the pacing of the game was ponderously slow and if you didn't have a group of at least 5 friends then you had troubles making it to the next town without getting savagely beaten to death by rabbits and silkworms. If you did have a balanced group then the game was quite fun, even standing in one place slaughtering fish was entertaining if your group worked well together.

I thought that the barrier to entry for this game was fairly low, since you can get the game and 3 expansions for $20, but apparently it gets lower. Eurogamer is reporting that folks will be able to get a 'starter pack' version of the game (just the main game with no expansions) and a free month of gameplay for £5.99 (or about $12.27 in American money, or about the equivalent of a one month subscription to the game). I wasn't able to determine if it was coming out stateside or not.

Is this a desperate attempt to increase a stagnating userbase or ingenious plan to draw attention to the new expansion pack?

Time will tell!

Link! (Eurogamer)

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It looks like Europeans can't catch a break today. Mario Party gets recalled three days after release, and now we find out that anticipated collection Capcom Puzzle World shipped with a crash bug.

"It seems to affect the Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo part of the puzzle bundle primarily, freezing the game within a few minutes of starting. We managed a couple of rounds with our European promo copy before it locked up on a load-screen."

I'm not naive enough to believe that every game that ships is 100% bug free. For some reason it was made public well over a month before release that this bug existed. What's particularly perplexing is that a bug this easy to reproduce was able to get through QA.

Link! (Eurogamer)