New items for Blue Dragon

Microsoft has piped up this morning to tell us about some fresh downloadable content for role-playing game Blue Dragon.

It comes as a handful of new items to collect, and is available now for 200 Microsoft Points (GBP 1.70 / EUR 2.33).

The best of the goodies is a set of Shuffled accessories that boost your magical power but harm your Speed. However, when Helmet, Breastplate and Splint are all equipped, then the Magic effect is quadrupled and the Speed effect reversed, leaving you with +160 Magic and +40 Speed. Very good, in other words.

Elsewhere there is a Spring-wind Scarf that boosts your Health and Speed by 20 per cent - useful if you have enormous statistics already - and Whimsical Mind, a growth item that randomly bolsters Shadow Classes by 0-4 levels.

There is also the Way of Thieves loot that lets you steal rare bits and pieces from enemies while fighting.

Those of you who are gluttons for punishment will like the new Nothing Glasses, which mark out all of the areas you will get "Nothings" from looting. Yes it sounds ridiculous, but these can be collected up and traded in later for fancy bits and pieces - rare items that you will collect elsewhere anyway. All very pointless if you ask me.

Or you can listen to the new Devee Ponograph, which lets you listen to the Devee-tribe dance again and again until you realise you were already fed-up with the high-pitched wailing of character Marumaru to begin with.

A little extra to drag out an already laborious game then, and no I am not bitter just because I only got 100 Gamerpoints for 55 hours of gameplay.

You might also like the difficulty package that Microsoft released in September, which adds a trio of settings to give your high level characters a bit more of a challenge.