Hey, Take-Two Interactive, are you guys seeing this TV show in development for ABC?
Ex-Comm is described as a present-day “presidential procedural” and a cross between the paranormal suspense of The X-Files and the political intrigue of The West Wing. It follows a newly-elected President and his top secret “Executive Committee” (a.k.a. Ex-Comm), the government’s covert team of America’s most elite minds who investigate and protect our nation from the strangest occurrences and “conspiracy theory truths” out there.
Take-Two’s Marin studio is developing the game XCOM, which details a government program to shoot aliens from behind cover, and is based on the game X-COM. Hopefully Take-Two will patch in the hyphen before the game comes out. At least the TV show gets that part right.
At a recent press event, Electronic Arts let a bunch of us press guys just sit down at the beginning of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and do whatever we wanted. It was a lot more instructive than the demo at this year’s E3.
If there’s one thing I came away with after playing Kingdoms of Amalur for a few hours, it’s that it doesn’t really compare with Diablo III, Skyrim, or Mass Effect 3. The closest analog I could come up with was Divinity II. You probably didn’t play that, so it might not help.
Read the preview here. I’ll also be on the next episode of Roleplayers’ Realm, Gamepro’s RPG podcast, to talk more indepth about the game.
Someone who likes Rage apparently tweeted something to the effect that the negative reviews of Rage were just reviewers wishing they were playing Skyrim already. Or so I’ve been told, as I don’t really follow Twitter and if I did, I wouldn’t have that guy’s tweets on my twitlist.
And while I do wish Skyrim would hurry up and come out, what I hoped Rage would be is the following:
a game with powerful ideas about how weapons might look in a post-apocalypse, and how to make gunplay distinct, and how to turn corridors into realized worlds, and how lighting can matter, and how to create interesting bad guys out of familiar scraps.
Okay, maybe not all those things. One or two would have been nice. Metro 2033 managed to accomplish all of those things. In fact, I’d argue it does everything Rage failed to do, and it does it without the driving minigame filler.
You can read my full review of Rage here.
This week we welcome to the podcast Jason Townsend, who is arguably too learned, polite, and uninterested in Rage to hang out with Tom Chick and Jason McMaster. But being from Nova Scotia (pictured*), he’s too affable to turn them down.
* Because the Google image search for “Wehrmacht penis envy”, another topic of discussion on this episode, wasn’t nearly as fruitful.
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This week’s featured community level made me skeptical at first, thinking I was in for a cheap version of the first stealth game I ever played. But The Thief is not that. It is its own unique experience, and it quickly hooked me. It’s got two elements–in addition to the nifty music that plays throughout–to recommend it. The jumping dynamic is great. Actually, it’s more of a leaping dynamic, for in this level when you press L1 your sackboy executes great leaps from cliff to cliff as he makes his escape from the netherworld. I really grooved on that. The other feature is ladder climbing, which in itself is no big deal but I don’t recall running across it before, and the sound your little sackdude makes as he climbs is reminiscent of the clomp of horse hooves. Put like that it sounds annoying, but for some reason I found it oddly enjoyable.
The best thing about The Thief is that while it is a complete playable level, it is also a work in progress. The level linked above is the first chapter, and the designer (ALADCV) notes that Chapter 2 is 5% done.
Actually, this was a very good week for LBP community levels. Every couple of months Weekly LBP has a week like this, and given that and the fact that there’s been a minor clamoring for more LBP in this column, let’s stick with it.
After the jump, hint hint Continue reading →
