Square Enix Games on Vodafone Live!

Role-playing game connoisseurs were seen weeping tears of joy today after Vodafone announced that they had teamed up with Square Enix to produce content for Vodafone live!

live!, (the bane of copywriters, editors and just about everyone believes that, in order to be useful, a language should have a consistent grammar that isn’t broken just so that marketing departments can sell things), is a content delivery service for Vodafone customers.

The first up of two titles will be Aleste, a port of the 1990 Master System game from Toppan. Whilst not exactly Ikaruga, it should provide some twitch-gaming fun with some imaginative (well, for the time) bosses and power-ups.

The next is Actraiser, a 1991 SNES RPG with world-building elements and a side-scrolling play dynamic.

Tantalisingly on the horizon is a mobile version of Drakengard, which can be described as Panzer Dragoon meets Dynasty Warriors. You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?

The excitement in this deal lies in the future – Square Enix have a back catalogue made up of the very best RPGs in console history, and if they choose the right properties, many thousands of fans will happily hand over cash (or bags of gil) for Final Fantasy yet again, just to play it on another format.

Vodafone live!

Square Enix

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Fraser Lovatt

Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people. Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon. At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC. After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video. These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?