Coheed and Dissidia

As some of you probably know, I'm a huge fan of Coheed & Cambria, so you can bet that I'm super pumped for Year of the Black Rainbow. I've already preordered the Deluxe Hardcover Edition and can't wait to get my Black Card! The most recent update on their site was the brand new music video for their new song "The Broken." I like the way they went about making the video in that it encapsulates the dark visuals of The Amory Wars (the basis of the new album). Its nice to see them making videos that are closely related to Claudio's C&C mythos. If anything it definitely helps the fans visualize the story. Here is the video:

As far as video games go, I've been playing Dissidia Final Fantasy a lot lately and I have to say that it was one of the most innovative fighting games I have ever played.

I'm not even sure if it's fair to call it a fighting game. Square Enix has single-handedly created a brand new genre with this release. Sure, at its heart it's a fighting game, but it has many RPG aspects both in its customization parts and its intriguing story of the origin of good and evil. It's also really cool to see the ways the main characters from the Final Fantasy series are portrayed, especially the ones from earlier games that had yet to be given voices or any sort of three dimensional rendering. If you have a PSP, I highly recommend you check this one out.

In other game news, I was recently reading through Nintendo Power and came across some awesome stuff. Sega has finally released information on the new Sonic 4 game, coming to the Wii's WiiWare and Xbox 360's Xbox Live Arcade this summer, and let me tell you, things look GOOD. Sega company put Takashi Iizuka in charge of the project. If you aren't familiar with the name, Iizuka worked heavily on the production of both Sonic 3 and Sonic and Knuckles (arguably the best games in the series). Nintendo posted an entire interview article in the newest Nintendo Power with Iizuka and lets us know that Sonic 4 seems to be everything the retro fans have been looking for in a Sonic game.

The visuals are fully 2-D with heavy aspects on retro style and the gameplay is returning to the single button layout that the series started with. The music is also being produced by a Sonic Team veteran, Jun Senoue, who worked on some of the music for Sonic 3 and Sonic and Knuckles (some kick ass video game music in my opinion). The only real new aspect that they will be adding to the game is the homing attack which debuted in Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast. However, we are told that this added ability will only help expand on the games return to revolving around platforming. The game will be released in separate episodes, each containing 4 stages with 3 acts. I'm definitely excited and will be nabbing this one the minute its released on WiiWare.