I’ve been known to hold forth on how annoying compulsory deaths are in these community levels. Deaths that are impossible for the player to avoid. Deaths that occur because the level designer was incompetent or lazy, or showing off. I almost wrote this week’s level–Desert 5.0–off and deposited it into that file. Glad I didn’t. Because there’s a difference between an arbitrary death, and a death that teaches you something…namely the rules of the game. This isn’t a great level, by any means, but it taught me a lesson. How to learn the rules through dying and not bitch about it.
Much like how you learn to win a good RTS by losing a few rounds.
Wait…did I say a good RTS?
After the jump, I meant great Continue reading →
“What are you doing?”
As I turn around to face my wife, I hit the small button on the bridge of my guitar. The lightshow on the television screen freezes, and my avatar halts in mid-sneer. The music that had been blasting from the speakers goes silent. The cooing of my son in the bouncy chair next to me becomes the most prominent sound in the room.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“I thought it was no TV until they’re two?” she replies with a pointed but amused expression.
She’s referring to one of the baby books we had read while she was pregnant. In it, the author makes a case for no television before the age of two based on studies that show a worrisome impact on babies’ attention spans later in life.
“This isn’t TV,” I say.
“That’s not a TV?”
“Yes, that’s a TV, but this isn’t TV. It’s Rock Band.”
“I can see that,” she says. “What’s the difference?”
After the jump, the worst possible answer. Continue reading →
The original Section 8 didn’t really have a single player mode. It was a multiplayer skrimish mode tied together with a few cutscenes. This time around Section 8: Prejudice boasts a full-featured single player mode called the Campaign.
After the jump, how the Campaign stacks up (or doesn’t) Continue reading →
See that tank up there? That’s me. No, not the sexy US T29 in the foreground, with the sloped armor, twin aerials, and muzzle-braked cannon. I’m the one behind it. The big olive drab thing that looks like a square box perched on top of a rectangular box. That’s my KV, and I love it. It’s kind of like a bulldog: ugly as sin, tough, loyal, dependable, and the last thing you want to see leaping for your throat.
After the jump, meet the KV, terror of the early game Continue reading →
In the course of my tomb raiding, Link has recovered all manner of potent artifacts. Completing the Palace of Darkness earned me a magic hammer. Other excursions have netted me gloves which confer the strength of a giant, the miraculous hookshot, and a cloak of invisibility. To get these, I’ve heroically slashed through legions of carnivorous plants, helmeted lizards, and leaping skeletons.
After the jump, it’s all about the milk bottles Continue reading →
