Sonic’s had a tough couple of years, but Sega managed to reignite interest by teaming with BioWare for the DS RPG “Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood.”

“Sonic Chronicles” arrived at retail yesterday. If you’ve decided to take another chance with Sonic and friends and are just starting out in the game, you’ll want to pay attention to this post.

We reached out to BioWare for a list of 10 things you absolutely must check out while trying to save the world in “Sonic Chronicles.” Here’s what three developers at BioWare recommended:

BioWare Developers’ Must-Do List For Players of
“Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood”
(Nintendo DS RPG, September 2008)

Michael Liaw – QA Analyst
1. Discover the space pirates that are plaguing the merchants - Their speech impediment is quite unique.

2. Help Big find Norton - What frogs do on their own time is pretty amazing.

3. Take a look around for Omega in Metropolis - He might give you a hand.

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If “Rock Band” isn’t the best role-playing game of the year, then I might have to nominate “Little Big Planet” for that award. Or “Guitar Hero.” Or “Spore.”

Many years ago, words started to fail fans of video games. Three words, in particular, that seem to be doing a poor job describing the games they are attached to are “Role Playing Game.”

Or maybe the games are failing the words, because the games that everyone else calls RPGs — the “Final Fantasy“s and “Oblivion“s and “The World Ends With You“s aren’t making me feel like I’m playing a role nearly as well as the games I mentioned up top.

“Little Big Planet” is a role-playing game? Allow me to explain:

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The next entry in the “Blue Dragon” universe will not be a sequel on Xbox 360.

Instead, “Blue Dragon Plus” is an RPG romp on the DS. As with “Viva Pinata,” Microsoft is not publishing this side-story; that task goes to Ignition Entertainment.

Ignition passed along a few exclusive screens of “Blue Dragon Plus” for MTV Multiplayer readers. Keep reading to see all of the screen shots.

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Although “Alpha Protocol” is an action-RPG starring a government operative in modern times, I couldn’t help but think of “Mass Effect” when I saw the game at E3 last week.

Everything from the dialogue tree to the real-time combat system (replete with an “active skill” wheel that pauses the combat and allows the player to choose a special attack) to the main character’s circular targeting reticule echoed gameplay elements of the best-selling space saga from BioWare.

During a closed-door demo, senior producer Ryan Rucinski of Obsidian Entertainment acknowledged certain similarities to “Mass Effect,” but told me that the “Alpha Protocol” has been in development for over two-and-half years, and has plenty of differences to boast about. It goes deeper than the setting.

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Today Square-Enix announced that SNES role-playing game “Chrono Trigger” is coming to the Nintendo DS. Lots of people got happy. I just got reminded of one of my gaming blindspots. I never played “Chrono Trigger,” even though I heard it was important.

So, the same way I asked readers to once help explain the glory of “Final Fantasy VII” to me, I now ask — in 50 words or less — for someone to explain why “Chrono Trigger” is so fantastic.

To help everyone out, these are the Japanese RPGs I’ve really liked: “Paper Mario 64,” “Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga,” “The World Ends With You,” “Suikoden V,” any “Fire Emblem.” And these are the ones I really haven’t liked: “Final Fantasy X,” “Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga,” “Super Mario RPG.”

So… why should I share in the excitement about “Chrono Trigger”? Fifty words max, please. The only prize is the satisfaction of convincing me.

UPDATE: Never trust your notes. And never trust anyone else, not when you studied Japanese in college and should be able to read the katakana in the image to the left.

As the commenter below states, the title is actually pronounced: “Three Five Eight Days Over Two.” Next time I’ll do my own translating.

Do you appreciate the oddity of English names for some Japanese-made games?

Do you marvel at such turns of phrase as “Infinite Undiscovery” and “Time Crisis: Crisis Zone“?

Then do you too love that the DS edition of the famed “Final Fantasy” - Disney mash-up will be called “Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days“?

Ah, but do you know how to praise that game out loud? How to say that?

I’ve been flummoxed for a while. And I’m the editor of a blog that used to feature a Pronunciation Guide (before a meteor wiped it out). So I’ve been wondering: Is It “Three hundred fifty-eight divided by two days”? “Three hundred slash two days”? Or how about “One hundred seventy-nine days”?

Well I will wonder no more. Yesterday, while playing the impressive early-2008 line-up — keep your mind, hands and A.D.D. tendencies ready for the DS’ warped “The World Ends With You” — I asked a Square-Enix rep how to pronounce the “Kingdom Hearts” game name.

I was told that it’s: “Kingdom Hearts: Three five eight over two days.”

Really! [UPDATE: Actually, no! See the note at the top of the post]

I never would have guessed. That is all.

(Below is the beginning of my latest GameFile column. For the full thing, check out MTVNews.com)

NEW YORK — “Final Fantasy” games usually keep a thorough gamer busy for more than 50 hours. So it was a challenge Monday morning not just for GameFile to brave the bluster of Manhattan on a minus-9-windchill day, but to somehow soak in the details of nine games from the makers of “Final Fantasy” — nearly all of them epics — in just 60 minutes.

We actually needed 70 … and would have been better off if we were right-handed and prepared for the most daunting game a company has demonstrated to the press in a long time.

Two representatives from Square Enix offered coffee and juice and showed trailers for a battery of upcoming games. Action sequences appeared from “Final Fantasy Tactics A2” (Nintendo DS), “Final Fantasy IV” (DS), “Chocobo’s Dungeon” (Wii), “Infinite Undiscovery” (Xbox 360), “The Last Remnant” (Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3) and “Star Ocean 4” (no platform announced), most of them in Japanese and pushing the graphics on their respective platforms. All featured the standard cocktail of swords, magic and high-tech gizmos that typify the Square Enix line. [Update: Square Enix reps have clarified that those trailers represent games that were shown at last year's Tokyo Game Show and are not all announced for U.S. release, though that status is subject to change.]

The trailer reel consisted of every epic game Square Enix is promising for the next year except “Final Fantasy XIII,” which, then again, isn’t actually planned for 2008 — it’s just rumored to be coming out sometime this year, and maybe in Japan.

Ten minutes spent watching trailers (we watched the short version of “Star Ocean 4″) left a healthy amount of time for three hand-held games all slated for early 2008, each pushing its platform and one pushing GameFile itself to the limit.

Check out the rest of this column at MTVNews.com

Throughout the week the team at Kotaku and just about everywhere else that writes about games on the Internet have been covering the report on Fox News’ “Live Desk With Martha MacCallum” about the sexual content in “Mass Effect.”

I know that sex scene — at least a version of it. A few weekends ago, under my Xbox 360 control, one Samus Shepard had sex with a bisexual alien woman near the end of my 29 hours and 24 minutes with the game.

Fox News reported that “Mass Effect” shows “full digital nudity and sex.” And to any Fox News viewer who hasn’t played the game, it may well have seemed like it has quite a lot of it. A panelist who participated in a round-table discussion following Fox News’ report described the game as “Luke Skywalker meets ‘Debbie Does Dallas.’” That didn’t quite square with how I remembered the game, nor with Spike TV gaming reporter Geoff Keighley who said, in the segment, that it was wrong. Fox’s MacCallum even read a statement from Microsoft saying that the description of the content was “inaccurate.”

Still, the report was headlined “‘SE’XBOX” and focused on why allegedly inappropriate sexual content was being marketed to kids.

Gamers got angry about this. So did Electronic Arts, new-found owners of “Mass Effect” developer BioWare.

(Note: Responses from both Fox News and EA follow below)

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Back when I was playing “Final Fantasy X” and not completely loving it, it did not occur to me that one way the developers could have made the game better would have been to include text-based short stories that I could read on my TV.

That’s what has been done with “Lost Odyssey,” an Xbox 360 role-playing game overseen by “Final Fantasy” creator Hironobu Sakaguchi set to go on sale in North America on February 12.

I received a preview build of the game’s first disc, of four, last Wednesday. (Readers of this blog’s What We’re NOT Playing series, this was the secret game mentioned in the most recent entry).

I clocked a paltry two hours and 10 minutes in the game this weekend. I know that is paltry because this game looks, walks, and quacks like a “Final Fantasy,” and therefore must be dozens of hours long.

I’ll get to the reading thing in a moment, but first, here is how it met many of my “Final Fantasy” expectations:

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