This is a very subjective post, and really we're only going to know more when we get the sales figures in. Nonetheless, after reading some comments this week from the interweb and weighing up my own feeling on the subject, I'm starting to think that this March release date for Final Fantasy XII is going to backfire.

I'm a huge Final Fantasy fanboy. I grew up with the series is in its SNES days, but really fell in love with it in its PlayStation days, particularly with Final Fantasy X on the PS2. Since Final Fantasy IX, I've bought every single main series Final Fantasy game on release day – even Final Fantasy X-2.

And yet release day has come and gone and I haven't bought Final Fantasy XIII.

I do plan to get the game at some point, probably not in the too distant future (we're talking days rather than weeks), but right now all the talk of '25 hours before it gets good', combined with the epic Q1 we're coming out of – there are still tons of 2010 Q1 and 2009 Q4 games I still need to play – well, I'm having doubts about whether I have the time for Final Fantasy right now.

And that's from a Final Fantasy fanboy – although maybe I've lost my license after that statement. Anyway, my point is that if even ex Final Fantasy fanboys like myself are doubting about getting the game at the moment, what about all the new people who we're supposed to believe Square-Enix are going to lure to the franchise with a 360 release. They've done Lost Odyssey, they've got plenty of other games to play right now, so will they even bother with a purchase?

I suspect  Modern Warfare 2 fallout could really work against Final Fantasy XIII in the coming weeks, but of course only time will tell. I hope I'm proven wrong.

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Ugh, I can't believe I used that word. I appall myself.

After playing through recent Xbox Live Arcade games Kriss X (a word puzzle game) and Encleverment Experiment (a kid-friendly Brain Training clone), both from the Blitz Arcade development house,  I feel the need to speak up for games that do come under the ‘edutainment' banner. Both those games did not review especially well – or get reviewed by that many publications – yet both are kid-friendly, very charming pieces of software.

They both have excellent interfaces with well thought-out tutorials that provide plenty of hand-holding for younger players. Yet both games accommodate adult players with ranges of difficulty (to an extent). Encleverment Experiment, in particular, offers a lot of fun in its multiplayer modes, aping the simple yet frantic rivalry you get with Buzz and Scene It! games.

Yet some reviewers only approached the games from brain-testing perspectives, as if they were purely aimed at adult players, calling them out for not really providing a test or for being too simplistic. Sure, because the friendly bespectacled owl in KrissX and the little, beady-eyed professor who goes whizzing around on a flying podium in Encleverment Experiment don't lead you to think this game might just be for someone a bit younger. Definitely not.

I'm aware that reviews of kids games with only adults in mind has long been a problem in this business, but I suppose with Metacritic now providing this metric of scores, it's a problem which I think is becoming more significant. It needs to be called out again. Not every game is made with adult males in mind, and the ones that aren't shouldn't' get shot down just because they aren't.

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Okay, I know I've been going on about Heavy Rain this week and its good and bad points, yet I haven't even mentioned things like the tremendous graphical detail, the great big gaping plot holes, its concepts of agency, the strength of the script, and absolutely everything else that's worthy of discussion.

So I'll make this the last Heavy Rain post of the week, and this one's going to be on FBI agent Norman Jayden and his Minority Report-style sunglasses of the future. As in, what the hell?

Rather than manually searching for clues like, you know, a proper detective would, Jayden has travelled into the future and brought back sunglasses that can detect anything abnormal in a given area, from a bit of pollen floating around to the tiniest of footprints, and then give you information so detailed and extraneous on said abnormality that it puts Wikipedia to shame. Oh, and it can transform your office into a virtual Saharan desert in the blink of a jagged frame rate.

I do understand that it's there to make the detective work more fluid, and make the player feel like Dr. House without having any Housian skills. It's just totally at odds with the contemporary theme, the aim to provide a real story in a world players can identify with. It felt like a cop-out to me.

Then again, I'm not sure I can identify with a world in which every single person you meet has the potential to be a murderous psychopath. London's pretty dire, but it's not that dire.

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So, Mega Man 10 hit WiiWare last week, and will arrive on the PlayStation Network this week, as well as Xbox Live Arcade by the end of March. I would've finished it already, except it hit UK WiiWare on Friday, four days after the US store – balls to that. Also, I suck at Mega Man, so that would've worked against me. It's so damn hard that I wonder sometimes if I only play it for the awesome music…

Either way, I definitely appreciated Mega Man 9 as a retro continuation of a series that lost its way in later years. It was a nice contrast against Bionic Commando: Rearmed in the middle of 2008, one a series continuation replicating halcyon 8-bit days, the other a fantastic remastering of a classic 8-bit game.

There are plenty of retro continuation titles these days, with two New Super Mario Bros. titles, Contra ReBirth, and the upcoming episodes of Sonic the Hedgehog 4. As I much as I loved the modernizing of Mario in NSMB, and simply that Sonic is finally returning to 2D platforming on home consoles, I do prefer the 'as it was' movement of Mega Man 9. That series was always about its 8-bit presentation and tough-as-nails platforming. Sadly, Mega Man just comes across as soulless in newer forms.

So that got me thinking: what other classics would I want continued in 'as it was' form, with old-school visuals and sound? The only thing I could come up with was Crazy Taxi 4. That would be great, wouldn't it? Just like the original Crazy Taxi, with jerky controls, tons of advertising et al, but with a few more characters, more levels and even more booming Offspring tunage.

Someone, make that happen.

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Valkyria Chronicles was very interesting, commercially-speaking. For such a highly regarded game, it simply didn't sell well enough on its release in both Japan and the US. Then people who'd played the game started carping online at PS3 owners for not supporting an excellent exclusive game, and maybe in the hope of securing it a sequel. And, amazingly, PS3 owners actually responded with sales spiking mid-2009. Now a sequel, this time on the PSP, is heading our way this summer.

It's already released in Japan, actually. The word from American importers is that, despite obviously not having much to say on the story, the original's superb meshing of strategy, shooting and role-playing is alive and kicking once more in this handheld follow-up.

So, my advice is that if you're a fan of the original or if you're new to the series but curious to give it a go on the go, then you should import the Japanese version rather than waiting until its American release.

Why? Because you'll miss out on the story, that's why. If it's anything like the first game's story, then it will likely be a whimsical adaptation of a real-life war, and even more likely to completely offend large portions of its players by failing to do any justice to real-life horrors and tragedies. Although, even with the language barrier, you're not going to be able to avoid women in military uniforms that have more in common with male fantasies of schoolgirls than any actual battle gear. Or the piglets with wings.

If you get the Japanese version, though, at least you can pretend it's the soft-pornographic nonsense that it seems to resemble at times. Hell, write your own slash fic, it'll probably be a better story.

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I've seen a couple of posts and a fair bit of Twitter chat on how Heavy Rain highlights parenting and how it affects players who are real-life parents.

Now, I'm not a parent myself, but I am in a long-term relationship with a lovely lady. As much as I may stress otherwise, children is one of the steps on the relationship ladder that we're probably nearer than I realize, like how the Titanic's captain thought that iceberg was pretty far away.

As such, Heavy Rain's opening scene intrigued me. In particular, the mock swordfight between dad Ethan and son Jason, the game's first quick time event.

I quickly decided, like any good parent, I'd let Ethan win while pretending to put up a good fight. I pressed a few of the right buttons but deliberately missed the majority of them, ensuring that Jason would win and that has confidence would grow.

My girlfriend, on the other hand, played to win. No concerns over parenting there, just a total focus on victory. It was ruthless, it was fierce, and to top it off it didn't even herald a trophy for ‘winning' the chapter. Absolutely brutal.

One might argue that she was just approaching the game like – well – a game, whereas I saw something deeper in the sequence that might not have been there.

You may see that, but what I see is a terrible mom in the making. I see my children drying their tears after yet another game of Monopoly lost, an ever-growing well of resent building in their little hearts, resent that engulfs the world and leads to the death and destruction of everything.

Or maybe no children at all if she ever reads this.

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Remember the furore at E3 around Madison's stripping scene in Heavy Rain? Have you played through that scene yet? Sure, it's pretty much mandatory unless you've let Madison die by that point – and a hearty congrats if that's the case. Even so, the actual scene is handled prudently. There's an appreciable context, no real liberties are taken, and moreover a bit of rancorous ball squishing ensures a female-friendly outcome is possible. So, was it a misguided furore?

Therein lies the problem, though. All of Madison's major moments in the game revolve around her being a woman. She becomes the potential love interest to main character Ethan, she can find herself tied up at a stranger's house, within the verges of sexual assault, and of course she has to sex it up to get information from a sleazy club owner in said stripping scene.

These are all interesting situations, all handled well, but Madison should be more than just someone who ends up in compromising situations because she's a woman, or because she feels obligated to use her femininity against men.

Whatever happened to exploring her paranoid insomniac arc, the whole opening scene where she's suffering that vivid nightmare in her apartment? Maybe it surfaces in other plotlines, but in mine it was practically meaningless. Compared to the other characters she got the least airtime, and when she did it was emphasized that she was a woman. There's nothing wrong with embracing a character's femininity, but defining her by it is something else.

Maybe it's meant to be a bold statement about the realities of modern life, but to me it seems like weak character development.

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Time for a bit of patriotic support for a young British indie studio. Beatnik Games are hard at work putting the finishing touches on their debut title Plain Sight, and I think it has the potential to be one of this year's surprise hits when it arrives on PC digital distribution networks this month.

Here's the lowdown on this eccentric multiplayer game. You play as a suicidal ninja robot, and your task is to kill other ninja robots, either with your katana or by blowing yourself up and catching them within your explosion field. Actually, the only way to bank frags is to explode yourself, so kamikaze is pretty much mandatory. The twist is that as you chain frags you become bigger, and you start leaving a colourful trail for people to follow you – hence Plain Sight.

What you end up with is frenetic deathmatch with a bunch of wee ninja bots and some bigger ninja bots all trying to blow each other up,  all to a backdrop of warm-hued space and really bizarre map design.

Whether or not Plain Sight hits the right balance with prolonged gameplay remains to be seen, but Beatnik Games has been fine-tuning it in beta for a several months, so there's plenty of optimism to be had. So, I say you should look out for it when on Steam and others on March 22 for a seemingly dirt-cheap $9.99. There's also PlayStation 3 and Wii releases expected in early 2011, with the potential for motion control, which all sounds exciting too.

If it proves to be an indie sensation, maybe you heard it here first. If not, well, disregard everything I just said. This never happened.

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