I'm ashamed to say, I haven't even begun to play my copy yet. It silently mocks me from the other room.

Very Japanese! You play as Crono, a boy whose best friend, a girl named Lucca, invents a machine that can transport a person from one place to another and is showing it off at the town's Millennium Fair. The princess in disguise, Marle, comes out to play at the fair all incognito-like, and after Crono gets in Lucca's machine successfully, Marle wants to try. When she gets in, her heirloom pendant causes the machine to send her into the past. You set off to rescue her and eventually visit some six or seven time periods and try to fix all of the world's ills by changing things in each period.

You start off as Crono alone and eventually end up with a party of six (so far), three (including Crono) of whom you can have active at any one time. You can switch out party members just about any time, but for certain quests you are forced by the story arc to take one or another. Each has a regular melee attack, and then the human characters also have attacks called “tech” or “combo,” which equate to magic. Different character combinations in party can combine their magics to make whopping attacks, and some of the techs include healing or resurrection. All of the magics are elementally aligned, so I tend to pick characters according to what type of monsters I am facing, e.g., I take the water and ice characters into the desert and the fire character into the forest. Crono's alignment is lightning, which is good in most situations. As you level up, you get more and better magic attacks, and you earn money with which to buy better weapons and armor.

You get a choice between two battle modes, Active and Wait. I chose Wait because it amounts to classic turn-based combat where you have time to choose what you want to do. I think Active, though I have not tried it, means the combat is more along the lines of that in Anachronox or Knights of the Old Republic, where you can pause to choose attacks or just let combat flow with minimal intervention on your part. Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong about this.

The game is mostly combat, but there is a surprisingly rich backstory (of course–it is Square, after all). This is a remake for DS of an old Super Nintendo (I believe) game. It translates very well to the dual screen. The top screen has all of the action, and the bottom screen has the map and menus. Mostly you use the buttons, though.

Welcome Aaron!

Did Matt also tell you that all hazing of new members is carried out by Helmut? [Image Can Not Be Found]

If I remember correctly, Steerpike wanted the silo but Helmut was lobbying hard (and winning, I might add [Image Can Not Be Found] ) for the tunnel. The tunnel was more spacious but there was the whole underground damp, rats and darkness thing. The silo offered cliff diving into the unknown depth pool of water at the bottom and elevators. Neither involved windows.

*edit: And Aaron.. why the heck were you in 'Bama? I've been there and there ain't nothing there. 😀