Archive for December 12th, 2011
At the end of Mario Kart 7 — well, when you’ve finished all of the grand prix events for the first time, which is hardly the “end” — the credits roll. Fair enough. I liked the game enough that I’ll let them roll for a few names. But not the entire thing. I will watch your credits in proportion to how much I liked your game. I’ll sit through the entirety of the credits for an Arkham City, Bioshock, Far Cry 2, Brutal Legend, or Bastion. I’ll check out the first few names after a Fear 3, Red Dead Redemption, Splatterhouse, or Brink. I’m out of there as soon as an Uncharted 3, Gears 3, or Modern Warfare 3 is over.
Plus, my 3DS isn’t plugged in, so I’m on borrowed time here and I’d like to run a few more races. So I press A to skip the credits. No? B? No. Y? No. X? No. Start? No. Select? No. Left shoulder button or right shoulder button? No. Left shoulder button and right shoulder button? No. Some combination of two buttons? No. Four buttons? Whoa, wait, isn’t there some four-button combo that formats the cart?
As near as I can tell after my rigorous scientific inquiry, there is no way to skip the credits in Mario Kart 7. Which I can kind of understand. These people made the game and they demand recognition. But that should be my prerogative.
Wait, what does this have to do with Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One?
Afer the jump, glad you asked! Continue reading →
I couldn’t begin to tell you which are the worst games of 2011. Hopefully, I didn’t play them. But I can tell you which games most disappointed me. Note that some of these aren’t necessarily bad. I just felt they should be better.
After the jump, the most disappointing games of 2011 Continue reading →
I love when that little red number appears on my iPhone’s App Store icon. It means updates! Sometimes these are just bug fixes. Sometimes these are new features. Sometimes they’re even new content. Best case scenario, these are the new expansion for Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer, an amazingly thorough iPhone port of one of my favorite tabletop card games.
Ascension: Return of the Fallen, based on the expansion to the tabletop game, adds an entirely new set of cards, including some that introduce new rules. Cards eat other cards. Monsters invade your deck. You can reach into oblivion. Crazy fate rules mean you can get some action even when it isn’t your turn. Now when you play Ascension, you either decide to use the basic cards, use the new cards, or shuffle them both together into a crazy big new deck.
A new turn timer limits how long players can take for their turns in multiplayer games, which means unresponsive players will automatically forfeit after a while. Given that I flaked on several games a few months ago, I’m glad to see a mechanism that doesn’t force my friends to disconnect me. That can’t be easy. I say that as someone who has also had several friends flake on their Ascension games. It’s just the nature of asynchronous multiplayer. I’m scared to boot up UniWar these days, which isn’t so much a cool turn-based tactical game on my iPhone as it’s a repository of shame, guilt, and shattered dreams.
Speaking of shattered dreams, I’m glad to see Ascension now tracks my total games played, and wins and losses. It was apparently paying attention before the feature was even implemented, as I show 55 games with 28 wins and 27 losses. But why can’t I see that stuff on my friends? Let’s make this stuff public. Information wants to be free! Well, it does as soon as I get another victory and tip the balance from losses to wins.
Unfortunately, the expansion has also broken my copy of the game. I can only select the first and second cards in the row, and I can only select the second card by actually selecting the fourth card, which selects the second card instead. Cards three, four, five, and six are out of luck. As am I until the game is fixed.
Update: I just heard from Incinerator Studios that a fix for this issue, which seems to affect iPod Touch 2Gs, has been submitted to Apple.
Updated update: Fixed!
I continually forget what I am doing every time I reload my game so I have half a million quests going at the same time. It’s gotten so bad that I end up in a town talking to a random NPC who has a quest for me that hey, I’ve already done, so here is this thing you wanted. Clairvoyance ain’t got nothing on me!
After the jump, magiclessness, butterfly mangling, and a new friend Continue reading →
The Playstation Network is free, and it’s got ads. Fair enough. Xbox Live costs $60 a year. And as of last week’s update, it has more prominent advertising than the Playstation Network, without any commensurate price cut for the service. In other words, it brings additional revenue to Microsoft with no additional value to you. Don’t write it off as a simple piece of screen real estate you can ignore. There’s a principle at work here. Microsoft is selling your eyeballs and you don’t get a cut of that. As the internet and videogaming hash out various revenue models, I feel there should be a line between subscription-based and advertising-based services. One or the other, gentlemen. Make up your mind.
It takes a bit of work and a free OpenDNS accounts, but I recommend this Reddit poster’s suggestion for how to disable the ads. Which I will gladly endure on a service that doesn’t cost $60.
Now if only someone can figure out how to get rid of the ubiquitous tab for a search function I will never use. Anyone on Reddit know how to de-Bing my console system?
I never got into the Team Fortress 2 hat craze, but you can bet I’ll get behind my mask collection in Payday: the Heist. A recent patch added new Santa masks that look delightfully creepy. There’s also something about collectible Christmas presents that I don’t quite understand, but I was delighted to find one among the money in the bank heist. A brief snow flurry ensued.
The patch also offers some new features. For instance:
You can now join an ongoing game! You will no longer be locked out of games just because they have already started or because you dropped out during play. Just rejoin and continue collecting those precious dollars and gems!
A lot of the changes involve new animations. I was so surprised to round a corner and nearly trip over a SWAT officer in mid animation for a fancy slide that I almost forgot to shoot him with the shotgun I just unlocked. The patch also lists a whole lot of AI work that seems to come down to this point:
Combat will now be more mid ranged and not run-in gun battles
Fair enough. Fortunately, this is one of those Rainbox Six: Vegas style shotguns that works just fine as mid range. Perhaps my favorite change is this:
Slaughterhouse and Diamond Heist are now available in the Normal difficulty setting setting
These maps were previously available only as difficult missions for leveled up characters. Now it’s as if developer Overkill has unlocked two new maps. And what a boon, since I think Diamond Heist might be my new favorite map. It’s obviously based on Die Hard, featuring a big atrium plunging through the middle of multi-storied offices at the top of a skyscraper. It has you moving around the map a lot, which is a much more interesting space that the boxy crackhouse that plays similarly. It also starts with your gang hiding from guards, so like the bank heist, you can decide when to start hostilities. But unlike the bank heist, you can actually push through several of the objectives without alerting the guards. I’m guessing Diamond Heist could go for quite a while as a stealth mission, which would mean the silencer on the pistol is actually useful. I really like the objective progression as well. Nothing in Payday taps into the zeitgeist quite the grisly end the CFO meets in Diamond Heist!
Join us for secrets, betrayal, suspicion, and hidden identities. And that’s just the podcast! We also discuss Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which two of us loved and one of us was all “meh” about. This results in a discussion so, uh, in-depth that the 3×3 doesn’t start until the 1:37 mark. At which point we figuratively jump into the pool and talk about our favorite swimming pool scene, as well as some other swimming pool scenes.
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