“Wait, crap! What happened?”
My thirteen-year-old son, Aaron, groans upon seeing his character do a virtual face plant after leaping from height in Portal 2. He is sitting next to me on the couch, Xbox controller in hand, and I glance up to his part of the split screen, just as he glances down at mine.
“Did you put your portal over mine?” he asks.
“Oh, I’m sorry, son,” I say. “My bad, my bad.”
I’m screwing around with my portal gun, trying to get a feel for the game. Aaron dismisses my mistake with a good natured chuckle. There was time when I might have had a better grasp of a game as popular as Portal 2. There was a time when, if you had come to my house, you might have found various joysticks and force feedback steering wheels clustered around my computer desk, itself piled high with the cardboard boxes of games, or plastic CD holders stacked in towers. There was a time when I was the last one up in a quiet house, my face bathed in the monitor’s soft blue glow.
Of course, that time is now no longer with us.
After the jump, the prince kills the pauper. No wait, that can’t be right . . . Continue reading →
NOTE: The Minerva’s Den DLC for Bioshock 2 is finally available for the PC version of the game. Following is a reprint of the review I wrote for the Xbox 360 version.
Bioshock 2 is a tough act to follow. I don’t envy anyone who has to come up with the storyline for a ten-dollar downloadable add-on to one of the best written videogames you will ever play. That’s like having to make a short film to screen after Citizen Kane.
Oh, hello, Minerva’s Den, the single-player DLC for Bioshock 2. So. What have you got for us?
Read the review after the jump. Continue reading →
Hateful, threatening, sinister and not in the least bit thankful; it makes you wonder why humans were stupid enough to give others hyperdrive. The apes should have taken over if this was what we knew we were going to unleash.
After the jump is a galaxy full of jerks Continue reading →
Victoria 2 is Paradox’s massive spreadsheet strategy game about the 19th century, give or take. It’s the game I’ve been playing instead of Pride of Nations, since the “review build” of Pride of Nations is in really bad shape. The developers have their work cut out for them between now and their June 7th release.
So while not playing Pride of Nations, I was greeted by the following message in Victoria 2:
Scientists in our country have discovered Proto-Existentialism.
This was not a philosophical movement but disparate philosophers analyzing and discussing concepts and conceptions which they considered flawed. The general notion about things as Intuition, Time, Intellect, and Being had to be reformulated not do create pesudoproblems.
In terms of gameplay, it means my research had lead to an invention, which is an additional bonus that trickles out after you complete research. Instead of giving you everything at once — BAM! Now you can build granaries! or BAM! Now you’ve unlocked musketeers! or BAM! Now you can research the Apollo Project! — many research results dole out their benefits over time. In this case, Proto-Existentialism gave me a small boost to my prestige rating, which is a nation’s overall metric of success. This will happen some time after a nation finishes researching Idealism under the Philosophy category of the Culture tech tree. Even though it not a major gameplay twist, it’s a nice touch that many of the techs keep on giving with follow-up sub-techs.
But in terms of flavor text, it’s a brilliant combination of eternal wisdom, Paradox Interactive typos, and 19th Century philosophical earnestness. Proto-Existentialism is so hardcore that it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry! And don’t get me started on my discovery of Neokantian Idealism shortly thereafter.
The difference between Pride of Nations and Victoria 2 is pretty stark, even though they have identical subject matter and are played at identical scales. Victoria 2 is Paradox’s classic model of gameplay as data surfing, where you just ride the wave of history as it’s presented in a realtime sea of numbers, charts, lists, tooltips, and map displays. And since the game has been out long enough to have three patches and plenty of rough-honed mods, I’m almost dreading the release of Pride of Nations, which will have no such advantage.
I’m afraid I have no idea what to tell you about this week’s releases. Hunted: The Demon’s Forge, some sort of fantasy action thingie from a developer whose last meaningful release was The Bard’s Tale back in 2004, starring Cary Elwes and a moldy Interplay license? Another add-on for The Sims 3, subtitled Generations and consisting of a set of grasping bullet points that include bunk beds? Considering how enthusiastic I was to discover BlazBlue recently, you’d think I’d be excited about BlazBlue: Continuum Shift II, but who can get excited about a such a serious fighting game released only on the PSP and Nintendo DS, neither of which has inputs for my decidedly serious Arcade FightStick Tournament Edition S? I predict your wallet is in very little danger this week.
Unless, of course, you’ve got Bioshock 2 on the PC. In which case, you might want to have ten bucks handy.
