Qt3 Games Podcast: nothing to see here, folks!
Unfortunately the podcast is down this week. But we’ll be back next week with Vickie, McMaster, and Bioshock Infinite.
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Archive for March 21st, 2013
Totems is what would happen if animals ruled the world
The monkeys stand for honesty, giraffes are insincere, and the elephants are kindly but they’re dumb. Zebras are reactionaries and antelopes are missionaries. Welcome to Totems.
Okay, not really. That stuff about monkeys and giraffes is way more complicated than Totems, a game about putting an animal head on a territory when it’s your turn. Period. That’s all you have to do. So you might think Totems is a modest thing. You’d be right. Maybe even a frivolous thing, utterly inconsequential and without enough maps for a puzzle this simplistic.
But hopefully you’ll play it a few more times and discover it’s no more inconsequential than any lovely two-minute strategy game. Here, I’ll teach you how to play. Put one of your six randomly drawn animal heads on a neutral territory to claim it and all identical adjoining totems. There. You now know everything you need to know about the rules. Now you can play against the AI, which tracks your score against the AI players, or online asynchronously.
What’s not so easy is gauging when a region is going to have only a single neutral space left so you can lay ultimate claim to its points. Now you’ve got to do some maneuvering around the fringes of the larger regions, trying to box them in, trying to secure their borders, trying to line up that ultimate claim, trying to…oh, rats, you don’t have any more cobras and now the map is awash in the other player’s color! Totems is also the perilous guesswork of calculating who has how many of what left, with some brinksmanship about who will hold out with the last monkey or wolf. It’s not over until it’s over, and in the context of its clean simple gameplay and evocatively primeval artwork, there will be many reversals of fortune along the way.
4 stars
iOS
In the battle between gameplay and story, Starcraft loses
The above screenshot is how Starcraft II’s Heart of the Swarm introduces itself. Pretty cool. Then you get into the actual game, where you get this:
Why do developers like Blizzard continue to make cutscenes so awkwardly out of sorts with the experience of the actual game?
Gears of War Judgment’s delicious diced leftovers
Gears of War Judgment isn’t a new game. It’s a remix. And a pretty good remix that fits Gears of War like a glove. What better way to present a game world that consists of a series of boxes than as a series of boxes? Judgment is divided into discrete bite-sized chunks of shooting that derive meaning not from the story — a series of flashbacks from B- and C-list characters — but from a scoring system. It’s no surprise that People Can Fly, the developers of Bulletstorm, know that there are other ways to make you want to shoot things than making a good game.
After the jump, I shoot, I score Continue reading →