To be featured in the next Kingdom Hearts.

The E3 eclipse is now over and the (moon?) dust is starting to settle within gaming news. All the announcements and gadgets and craziness of the huge gaming event are being combed over and absorbed leaving out all the poor feeble news stories that aren’t tied with the monumental event. Time for me to give them the spotlight they deserve!

The first story comes from KOEI and their glacial series, Dynasty Warriors. The PSP exclusive, DW: Strikeforce, is getting a ‘Quest Pack’ a month only through PSN. The  first add-on was added two days ago (June 2nd) and included 5 new challenges with exciting names like “Multi Attack! – Use Multi Attack with your allies to take on Cao Cao” and “Ice Bi Xie Appears! – Defeat Ice Bi Xie at Hu Lao Gate.” The difficulty of these five scenarios for Quest Pack 1 range from level 1 (very easy) to level 9 (turbo button required) to add some variety for the player and up to three friends (if the ability to select from a billion characters wasn’t enough). Full press release here.

While the KOEI employees who didn’t make it to E3 were hard at work with their DLC, the folks at Video Games Live sent an exclusive e-mail over to the fine folks at NextGen Player about new tour dates in Canada. For the Philistines among you, VG Live is a group that tours game music all over the world. Featured soundtracks range from classics like Super Mario Bros and Pac Man to Epic RPGs like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy to cult favourites like Earth Worm Jim and Beyond Good and Evil.

These performances are made even more interactive with large screens with games constantly being projected along with the respective music and sections where audience members are invited up to play specific titles. So while E3 was being prepared for the teeming masses, opportunities for Canucks to get their vg groove popped up right underneath our syrup -stained noses. News story here.

Now onto games that were released during E3 which apparently were vying for a spot on the worst release dates ever.

On June 2nd, the first day of the world famous gaming conference, 3 different games came out for both the PS3 and the 360 – Red Faction: Guerrilla, Virtua Tennis 2009 and Fuel. While each had coverage at E3 with release trailers and booth babes, these promotions were heavily overshadowed by millions of peripherals and games that were, y’know, not even announced yet. This doesn’t seem to be such a crime with the mild outing of Fuel, but games such as Red Faction that generally seem to have strong reviews will probably suffer in sales. Who knows if video game tennis fans rabidly devour E3 stories but the fact that VT 2009 is not even close to the spotlight seems like a shame too. That’s why I’ve decided to include these three games in the list.

The most refined game ever... of breaking sh*t!!!

The real big news that’s been buried for the last few days are the release of two very different RPGs – Final Fantasy VI: The After Years and Knights in the Nightmare. While the re-release of the sequel to the original FFVI (which originally was only available in Japan… on cell phones!) did get coverage at E to the 3, the huge announcements with Final Fantasy XIII and XIV completely nulled anything else Square Enix had to show.

The After Years is huge news to a 2d FFFan such as myself because it is a direct continuation of a game in the series that isn’t FFVII and it’s all presented in classic 16bit glory… no fancy modern upgrades here. Available only on Wiiware, the game follows young Ceodore as he tries to find his place in a world where both his parents are renown heroes and deal with a celestial evil growing in the moon above.

Another moon reference? Hell yes!

Gameplay mixes old school RPG level grinding while throwing in some new ideas like banding; This element is much like the idea of double and triple techs in Chrono Trigger except with the ability to have chains that have upwards to five people. A classic RPG with a new, epic story and  Chrono Trigger like tendencies? Sign me up!

Knights in the Nightmare is a DS game that had a bit of coverage by IGN leading up to it’s release but has suffered a fate similar to all the other games mentioned in this article… but worse. Atlus’ newest strategy RPG is plucked from the ripe harvest of the millions of unique offerings from Japanese shores. Unfortunately, this is a quality that will work against the game’s familiarity.

Atlus, much like Xseed, publish very niche games to import over to North America hoping to hit a chord with the hardcore role playing crowd. Knights in the Nightmare, for instance, offers a new take for strategy RPGs: you basically control a wisp that you move along the bottom screen with your stylus and you avoid certain hazards much like a vertical shooter. However, while you’re doing this, you’re flying over characters to make them attack, managing hundreds of items and a ton of different variables that help or hinder your attack.

This might help you visualize it a bit better.

This is a complex game (here’s an old press release because I couldn’t find a current one: reading the PR jargon won’t help you understand the game any better) made for serious gamers that will probably miss this gem because of the mountain of news that is E3.

So there you go, news and games that you might of missed if it weren’t for your favourite blogger, Eightywithout and a critique of choosing release dates to boot!