Archive for February 16th, 2012
That little gear in the middle there, between the two bigger gears? I shot that out of my head. Or rather my helmet. My gear hat. Cog hat? Whatever. It sprang fully formed from my head either way and wedged as you see it, forcing the larger gears to turn and raise the wall over to the right.
InterKinetic. It makes to lull you to sleep with its rocking-cradle tick-tock feel and lullaby music, and then it gives you a gear hat. Add gear hat to the list of things in LBP I want to have in real life, along with fire hat. Go ahead and take cupcake hat off the list. I’m sick of cupcakes already. But then I’m a pie man.
2K Games announces an expansion for Civilization V that sells you more than just a few new factions. Those are there too, but the notable additions in Gods & Kings are new systems for religion and espionage. Both of these were conspicuously absent in Civilization V. One of them I really missed.
The new religion system will feature upgradeable bonuses as your religion progresses. It looks like yet another tech tree, which is the last thing Civilization V needs. Hopefully, the Civilization IV model of religion as an out-of-control viral effect will remain intact.
Then there’s espionage, which was a terrible addition to Civilization IV for how it felt like it was built by someone who didn’t understand what made Civilization IV great. But since not understanding what made Civilization IV great seems to be a core value of Civlization V, an espionage system probably isn’t going to detract from Civilization V very much.
But what makes me cautiously optimistic about the new espionage is the basic model of placing spies around the map to perform specific tasks. I’ve been playing a lot of Crusader Kings II recently, where your council members are tokens you can put on the board for special effects. For instance, your steward can increase tax income, speed construction, or boost technology in a province. Creative Assembly’s games have used a similar system with agents. These units are dropped around the board, independent of marching armies. There’s a very boardgame feel to this concept: I put this piece here and it has this effect. My hope is that the upcoming espionage system in Civilization V feels similar.
Gods & Kings will be released in “late spring”.
The High Cultists are basically the Cthulhu faction in Conquest of Elysium. They gather sacrifices from human settlements and spawn freaky hybrid soldiers from wells in coastal towns. They can summon powerful horrors that wreak havoc, hopefully in the direction of hostile enemies. You can’t really tell a horror what to do. To paraphrase Woody Allen, the horror wants what the horror wants.
High Cultist cultists have access to a spell called Soul Slay. It’s a pretty simple spell. It overrides all but the most powerful magic resistance, ignores a unit’s armor value, and paralyzes its target. It also does 1-999 points of damage (pictured!), which makes the armor negation and paralysis pretty much irrelevant. Given that a typical general has 10 hit points and a giant has maybe 125 hit points, you can safely assume Soul Slay will kill anything it hits.
So it’s pretty much game over for any faction going up against a few cultists with Soul Slay, right?
After the jump, spells in this game are out of control. Literally! Continue reading →
There is no game quite like Twisted Metal. Except, of course, for games already called Twisted Metal. This superfast, superdeep, superskill-based series has been dormant for ten years for a reason: if people want to play deathmatches, they tend to pick up a shooter in which dudes run around shooting each other. But the Twisted Metals are shooters in which cars — or “cars”, given the loose approximation of driving — zip around like greased lightning while they’re shooting each other. Well, trying to shoot each other. It’s never a given that you can keep your sights lined up on your target. If you thought Quake was too slow, Twisted Metal is the shooter for you.
Is there an audience for a game like this? For an odd turbodeathmatch game with no meaningful singleplayer content, a needlessly steep learning curve, questionable online integration, and the sort of launch woes that Sony should have figured out how to avoid by now? These connectivity issues will be ironed out eventually, but in a game as niche as Twisted Metal, the most effective way to prevent a community from forming is to botch the launch. I don’t have much faith that Twisted Metal will have any sort of online presence in a month beyond a handful of dedicated players who are too good for you. As I said, Twisted Metal is oh-so-skill-based, with a mandatory unlocking system to boot.
So why bother? I’ll tell you, after the jump. Continue reading →
When I first discovered Minecraft, it was still pretty early on. Survival mode had been added but there weren’t a ton of monsters in the game yet. It resembled what the game has become, but it wasn’t nearly as advanced. I played around with it a bit and fell in love.
Whenever I find a game I love, one of the first things I do is introduce it to my wife Sarah. I love watching people play games. Watching someone play, the concentration on the action and the elation at success, is like a drug to me. However, before I introduce a game to Sarah, I go through my checklist of things that she likes. If I don’t, I end up with two copies of the same game sitting on my shelf.
After the jump, she likes it! Continue reading →
