I played through the demo, without sound. I probably lost a lot of the atmosphere in doing so, but it did put the focus on the actual gameplay. I found the fights annoying with far too much mouse clicking going on to do the basic attacks. In between the fights when you were running around, smashing crates and picking up stuff the game would pause and show the item you picked up in the middle of the screen messing up any kind of flow you could have had. Had it not been for the promise of PA hijinks I would just forget all about it.

Now I'm holding off for impressions of the non-gameplay parts, since it's going to have to be the writing, story, voice acting(?), etc. that sells it. This is pretty much what I expected anyway.

I'll probably pick it up.

I've purchased it and will download when I get home. Leaving work in a few minutes.

I was reading in an interview that the PC and 360 versions would control significantly different. Has anybody gotten a chance to compare? Any thoughts?

It is a bit steep in price but I picked it up on XBLA and I'm liking it so far. It's an interesting take on the whole RPG idea. The writing is good and the characters so far have been pretty amusing. I think it'll be good but I'd definitely suggest the demo if you aren't sure.

On the 360 I certainly don't have the

issue. The actions are mapped to the face buttons. A for items, X for attack, Y for special attack, and either trigger to block. This works really well for the rather frenetic combat. Well, frenetic for turn-based, anyway. I can see where using the mouse would be annoying to some.

1600 points is money whether it's on a card or otherwise. Your outlook and actions aren't consistent.

Played the 360 demo today. You'll have a lot of trouble reading stats if you have a standard definition TV.

That may be the case with some, but definitely wasn't with me. I would not have purchased this without a demo.

I'm curious about the game mechanic of having the Item timer run much faster than the Attack timer is a new innovation, or is this old hat for turn based games? Categorizing games by original features is some kind of neurosis; but as far as neuroses go that's not too bad, I think.

I like this a lot. The mouse interface on my Mac was fiddly, but I found the Xbox controls easier to deal with, so with a hint of guilt I got the Xbox one.

The battle system reminds me of Anachronox, which is a huge compliment, coming from me; Anachronox has my favorite turn-based battle system ever. Being able to see enemies before I fight them is huge, and I like the initiative bar a lot more than any of the similar systems in any Final Fantasy. I never understood those well enough to actually know if there's any difference between the two, but there ya have it, nonetheless.

I LIKE GAMES WITH CATS IN THEM!!!

I have to say, after playing the demo I'm really disappointed in the PC port. I get pretty bad tearing on the cutscenes, even after going in and turning on Force VSync in the control panel, and there's no way to configure controls. As far as I can tell, the controls are mouse-only on PC, but it doesn't behave at all like they were designed with the mouse in mind. You can't just click an enemy to attack like in every other mouse-controlled RPG, you have to click the attack button, and then click on the enemy, over and over again, every turn. There aren't even keyboard hotkeys, at least as far as I can tell. But then, just to keep you guessing, it goes ahead and makes you use keys that you can't reassign for things like blocking that could have easily been mapped to, say, the right mouse button.

The game itself seems like a pretty cool old-school RPG, and the writing (what I've seen of it so far) is enough to sell me, but why is every little thing so annoying? Just starting the game angers me. When you open it, you get a main menu in a window. When you click "Play," it goes fullscreen and plays a long, unskippable cutscene (all of the cutscenes are unskippable, unless I missed something while pounding every key on my keyboard), followed by a different main menu with the same buttons on it, in fullscreen this time.

I think I'm going to have to buy this one for my Xbox, much as I hate playing single-player games in the living room.

I'll probably pick this up, just because $20 isn't much, and it's the only commercial Linux game I've seen this year, though the demo is waiting for me to play at home so I might give that a go first.

I got it last night. The graphics and the writing are extremely well done, and it really does look and feel like the comics.

I'm still not totally comfortable with the combat (again, I tend to flap a bit trying to select an attack and then realising that I need to block and screwing it up), and there must be elements that I'm missing as to strategy. The key to doing really well at the combat seems to be blocking, which I find quite difficult (you essentially have to learn at which point in the attack animation you need to press the block button) You pick up a lot of buffing, debuffing and healing items. Your actions charge up one at a time, first an item use, then a normal attack, then a special attack. In theory you should be able to keep one guy charging his special attack up whilst the others use normal attacks, but at the stage I've got to (I'm generally fighting 4-way combinations of hobos and FFs) I generally need to use everything I've got just to not die.

Wow, sounds to me they made some very basic mistakes for the PC version. Like the need to click attack before you can attack a enemy, that's so basic I would not think they would make that mistake. The item pop-ups also sound like sh*t, I actually expected them to create perfect controls, because that is always the thing everybody most bitches about. Now, to download the demo myself and play it.