If I had a million dollars, I’d buy a Dodge Viper. Just because. I’m not sure what that says about me and I’m not sure I want to know. But I tell you this by way of explaining that when I’m playing a racing game, I’m driven (ha ha) to pick up a Viper as soon as I can. I am fueled (ha ha) by crazy dreams of being able to actually make any headway with it. Which never happens. For me, the Dodge Viper is an excellent vehicle for accelerating quickly into the nearest wall and, depending on the damage model, crunching up that big beautiful hood.
Surely there’s some practical use for this gorgeous car, right?
After the jump, the Viper is good for only one thing Continue reading →
After looting the bodies of a camp full of bandits, I had a lot of ammo and other goodies. But after getting seriously sidetracked by other quests on my way home, I end up back at the trader camp and find I have next to no ammo for any of my effective weapons.
After the jump, my superpower is the ability to solve ammo woes Continue reading →
I regret to inform you that Patapon 3 is nowhere near as good as Patapon 2. I suppose it’s an okay game, but it betrays a lot of what made Patapon 2 special. I’ll have a full review on 1up later this week, but my current assessment is that if you loved Patapon 2, your wallet isn’t any danger.
Otherwise, this week sees the release of a Vietnam war expansion for Magicka. You’d think I was making that up, but I’m pretty sure I’m not. Also out this week is an MMO about tanks called — again, I promise I’m not making this up — World of Tanks. I can’t imagine it’s not silly. We’ll have a game diary for it along shortly in case I need to be set straight.
This week, only one of us is capable of enjoying what he describes as “Princess Bride for stoners”. And it’s not the one you think. Also, our 3×3 of our favorite “real” moments in movies might not be what you think it is either. It might not even be what we thought it was. Whoa…
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One of the great joys of LBP2 is using your little Pod computer, choosing Recent Activity, and seeing the community levels your friends have played and rated. The game makes it so easy to do this, and to jump into any of those levels immediately. I love that.
This is how a fella named Desslock reminded me to return to Maximum Carnage, a level in which you run around blasting malevolent robots with a laser cannon. I played this weeks ago and meant to return to it but forgot. Returning to it tonight was the perfect way to end the week. Also, sackboy plus laser blaster equals crazy delicious.
After we surface, I see a sizable plume of smoke in the distance, more than can be justified by even a large ship. Seems like I hit something sensitive that may be worth investigating further — but after dark. If it ever gets dark in this blasted land of sun, anyway. I’ll just keep plodding along here submerged, since I can also see that escort a bit too starboard as well. A quick check on batteries and CO2 level tells me we’ll be fine for a while; the action against the convoy and subsequent evasion were surprisingly swift. Shifting those external torpedoes will just have to wait.
After the jump: “oops”, or what happens when you forget your XO Continue reading →
I hate the Lotus Exige S. It’s small, whiny, twitchy, unreliable, full of energy, but not solid enough to really harness that energy. It’s like an overpowered slot car that’s jumped its slot, or an annoying yipping dog hopped up on meth, or a rollerskate with a V8 engine. It feels so bantamweight. It slides when I don’t want it to. I cringe when I approach gravel. Are these loose stones going to throw this tiny skirling thing off the track? It looks like a faux sports car some rich daddy’s girl would drive.
So why am I driving it over and over and over?
After the jump, the thin finish line between love and hate Continue reading →
In Stalker: Call of Pripyat you play a stalker, of course. Stalkers hunt through the Zone for artifacts, revenge, weird critters, and more. But not women. There are no women in the whole game. Maybe that’s why everyone is so grim and angry. You do a fair amount of talking and information gathering, but it’s primarily a first-person-shooter. There are some role-playing elements. You don’t have stats like agility, but you do get tired from running too long. You find better armor and weapons while playing, and need to get them repaired. You talk to lots of masked men with guns and shoot many, many more.
After the jump: reloading. It’s not just for your guns. Continue reading →
Is Wind Walker the best Zelda game? What does it have in common with Star Control, Far Cry 2, and The Last Unicorn? And why do so many people get the name wrong? Listen as sinnick, whose real name is Nick, breaks it down. He also reveals the shocking secret of his darkest, edgiest side. Plus, being movie geeks, we do a fair bit of movie talk.
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I like the rest,
but the part I like best
It goes: doodle-ee-doodle-ee-doo. Woo.
Demented Doodles 3: The Final Scribble.
The Dead Island zombie count will never be able to match the Dead Rising zombie count. But at least it’s now up from 5 to 11. Maybe 13 depending on whether a dead zombie technically still counts as a zombie.
Reader Brian has helpfully pointed to a previous zombie count of 19, but these numbers are hard to track and inherently unstable. We’ll be keeping an eye on Dead Island’s zombie population as it fluctuates.
On my way north to intercept the other convoy I run across a strange sight in the night — a fully lit up ship. Having operated near territory at war where all ships are running without lights, I take a moment to remind myself that the Gibraltar Strait services many, many nationalities and ports, and some of them might not even be at war with us. Bugger. Time to run some drills!
After the break, I lose half of my torpedoes. Continue reading →
Every time you play Patapon 3, you’re first greeted with the PSP splash screen, followed by the epilepsy warning. So far so good. Then you select your language of choice, even if you’ve already selected it before (maybe you’re feeling like a little French or Spanish this time). Then the game pops up a dialogue box telling you it’s looking for storage media. You then have to manually confirm the autosave feature by selecting “understood”. There is no option to not understand. Then there are three screens reporting the Patapon 3 is looking for, finding, and loading your system data (not to be confused with your saved game data, which you’ll get to manually load later). Then a loading screen displays a snatch of pulsing artwork in the lower right corner of the screen while the Online User Agreement loads. This is eleven pages long. You have to page through all eleven pages, one at a time, each with a button press. Then a box appears asking if you accept the terms, even if you’ve already accepted them during a previous playthough. Because, you know, it wants to make sure you haven’t changed your mind. So you have to move the d-pad to bring a highlight on screen for the accept option, at which point you have to hit a button to confirm. Then an elaborate cinematic plays for a while as it loads. After it’s played for a bit, it’s apparently loaded sufficiciently that you can skip it to reach the main splash screen. From there, you select continue and then select your saved game. Once your saved game is loaded, you have to confirm that you’ve loaded the saved game. Then three dialogue boxes scritch by and you have to confirm the last one, at which point you’re at a new loading screen on the way to the actual game. When that’s done, Patapon 3 informs you that you can press any button to start playing.
Congratulations, you have gotten into Patapon 3! You’ll get your chance to take this epic journey when the game is released next Tuesday.
Welcome to Stalker: Call of Pripyat. The game opens in a field after a long and badly dubbed intro. There I am, staring out at a wooded plain. There’s nothing around. Just…woods.
Up pop five objectives, but I haven’t been trained to use identify or set them yet. Having played many modern AAA games, I’m used to a short tutorial on the game systems, so I sit there for several seconds, hoping some friendly guy will come over and take pity on this sad, stupid man who’s just appeared and explain what the hell is going on. I’m not sure if it’s an eastern European thing (the developers are Ukranian, I think), but this game just drops you in, and leaves the systems up to you. Welcome to the Zone, stalker!
After the jump, splashing around in the deep end Continue reading →
The opening cutscene for SOCOM 4, Sony’s upcoming military shooter, introduces you to Lead Character McMainDude on his way to get a briefing from the commander. He waits outside the commander’s tent while an argument plays out inside. A feisty Korean woman is upset that her recon team isn’t being sent into the action. She’s furious. She’s seething. She mouths off to the commander, like you do in videogames. They exchange words over a map table and then the commander dismisses her. As she leaves the tent, she passes by Lead Character McMainDude and presses a pen into his hand.
“This is his pen,” she hisses. “Make sure you stab him with it.”
Then you get your briefing. Some stuff about Korea and a terrorist group. It’s mercifully brief, since everyone knows you want to get into the game proper. Naturally, you don’t stab the commander with a pen. Instead, as the scene winds down, the commander absently pats his pockets, looking for his pen. Nothing more is said about the pen, because nothing more needs to be said about the pen.
It’s a sad state of affairs in videogaming that I noticed this detail, not necessarily because it was memorable — the Korean woman is actually pretty cool, and she’ll figure prominently in the story — but because it meant the writers and animators collaborated on a gag. The writers wrote the pen gag, and the animators animated it. Normally, writers just write dialog and animators make characters that gesticulate generically. Then someone sticks them together and, voila!, cutscene.
I recently saw a demo of Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One, the upcoming co-op action game. Composer Michael Bross, known for the Oddworld games, was announced during the demo. At the end of the level, the players kill a big sort of squid/crayfish. As the creature chokes and coughs its last, Bross’ playful score slows and halts in tempo with the creature’s dying gasps. Here was an example of the animators and the score interacting specifically.
We can start talking about how games have reached the level of other entertainment when I stop noticing this sort of thing and I start taking it for granted.
