I bring news of the gaming variety!

Thanks to a friendly message from someone, I was alerted that a canceled fan-made game project has had a mostly-complete leak. It is called, "Chrono Trigger: Crimson Echoes." It tries to be a Chrono Trigger 2, to help bring together Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross. Both are games I enjoyed a lot when I was younger, as I was hungry for RPGs after beating the two Dragon Quest games that did not make it to USA at the time. Someone directed me to Chrono Trigger and I was hooked. (Download site for Crimson Echoes here. Follow what it says on the instructions, you will need ZSNES [other emulators crash it supposedly] and to download the prepatched link on bottom)

In mild celebration, here's some fanart of Chrono Trigger's Crono!

In any case, this fanproject was going to be 100% complete and released to the public for free until Square-Enix took notice of the online publicity it had and mailed the project group a Cease-and-Desist order. They were 98% complete when the summon was issued to them. Since they could no longer work on the project or distribute it, they decided to just record the gameplay of the project on youtube (The channel and play list). It's a long 90 videos, some of which could probably use some editing out but they wanted to show the difficulty of the monsters compared to the original. I watched them all and found the game to be utterly epic, despite some of its few flaws.

For one, the character that generally represented the player as the main character no longer can be defined as such. He is designated a name and is no longer silent, but just another character to play as. The idea behind it was to bring the idea of there not being just ONE main character, but EVERYONE is a main character. It's not a bad reason, but it still irks me a little. I'd probably prefer if he just remained silent and other characters say what he says in general. The other thing is the personalities of the characters were slightly altered. This is to be expected in a fangame, I suppose; not everything can be perfect. In either case, I started to play the game already, and already died a few times. The monsters are indeed tougher, but I enjoy following along the story all over again.

While I know ROMs are illegal, I disagree on the lines of fangames based off ROMs. To those worried about such things, then I recommend NOT downloading and playing it, but instead watching it on youtube. It still is a decent homage to CT and CC.

Enjoy the CC wallpaper as well.