The best and most obvious way to get a head start on ingratiating yourself with a particular faction is to start there. Warband lets you begin the game in one of the six faction capitals, where you get to experience a short set of tutorial quests. These are optional beyond killing the first bandit that attacks you, but they offer an opportunity for a little bit of coin and reputation with minimal risk. After being set upon by a bandit in the streets of Jelkala, the fief of King Graveth of the Rhodoks, we are taken in by a merchant who explains that these same bandits have been plaguing the town. Furthermore, they have kidnapped this man’s brother and are holding him in an unknown location. The merchant offers some gold for me to recruit a small militia, hunt down the bandits and free his brother.
I accept.
After the jump: what’s a warband without cannon fodder? Continue reading →
That’s me in the corner of the screenshot. That’s a sad, empty, starting grid in the rest of the screenshot.
Jerry put it well Monday on Penny-Arcade: “Even as a satirist, there’s no savor in the [PlayStation Network] story anymore.” There’s nothing new to say. The PlayStation Network has been offline for almost three weeks. The jokes have been made, the questions were raised, answered, then the answers were questioned. If you look hard enough, there’s probably still some fascinating coverage. If you don’t, there’s a lot of anger. Anger at the hackers that took down Sony’s multiplayer service, anger at Sony’s mishandling of the situation (perceived and otherwise), anger at each other for being too angry or not angry enough. So I don’t have any gag headline for you (“more like PlayStation NOTwork!”), it’s just a sad situation. Not pathetic-sad, just regular sad. It’s not Motorstorm’s fault, it’s just the hand they were dealt. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter, because the best shot this game had for holding my attention isn’t available to me. Everyone loses.
After the break, I give the multiplayer my best shot anyway Continue reading →
This is my first view of Atom-city from behind the wheel. In addition to showing me that is indeed how I’m supposed to write “Atom-city,” my opening diary entry informs me that on September 24th, 2006, there was a failure at the particle collider there. As everyone in the post-924 world (never forget!) knows, when your large hadronic collider has a “White Ring” anomaly that’s accompanied by “forceful energy blowouts”, everyone around it is either going to die, or turn into a zombie. Or, as my diary puts it, they will pass into a “somnambulic state,” which really doesn’t seem like the right term even if you are a Romero purist about what exact state of unpersonhood constitutes zombieness. It may be an accident of translation, but if so it’s a happy one–the frequently bizarre phrasing adds to the sense of disorientation from the start.
Keep reading after the jump to learn the solution to all problems. Continue reading →
After the disappointing With Fire and Sword, I went back to Warband, the previous expansion for Mount and Blade. With the benefit of a fair amount of patching, it is devoid of any crippling issues and one of my favorite games in the recent past. It was only last week that I realized I had a way to write about Warband in a relatively fresh manner.
I could create a female character.
After the jump, the fairer sex Continue reading →
If you’re going to review Portal 2, that’s cool with me if you don’t bring up Jesus. Seriously, I’m totally okay with that. I reviewed Portal 2 here and I didn’t once mention Jesus, or any other religious figure. It’s a perfectly viable approach. So why would I have a problem with this Jesusless review of Portal 2?
Because the site is called Christ Centered Gamer. I followed a link to the review because I was genuinely curious to read a Christian perspective on Portal 2. Doesn’t a game about an all-powerful being putting her hapless subject through trails resonate with a religion that sees fit to include the story of Job in its bible? Isn’t there a cute analog to the Incarnation of Christ when GlaDOS is made flesh in a potato, tormented by a bird, bereft of much of her power, and brought to a closer relationship with Chell? Do I detect something Christian in Portal 2’s vertical movement, plunged into the depths and eventually reaching into the heavens? Doesn’t Wheatley’s easy descent into cruelty say something about human sin, even if he’s a man-made simulacrum of humanity? Isn’t Cave Johnson about as big a blowhard as Paul? Okay, I’m not really a Christian, so it’s not my job to come up with that stuff, but that’s the sort of thing I’d like to read about.
Instead, I got a review that’s no different from what I could read on a boring ass secular site like Gamespot or IGN. It’s all stuff that may as well be on the back of a box. Not a shred of insight, much less Christian insight. Which is really nothing new. So many reviews are dryly observational, minus any meaningful perspective, or much insight, or even context.
I poked around Christ Centered Gaming in vain, hoping to read about how Alan Wake’s dark world might resonate with a Christian, or how a Christian might feel about the historical representation of his religion in Paradox’s strategy games like Victoria II. No such luck. Instead, the Christian perspective is reduced to an absurd morality score, explained here, in which points are docked based on the presence of occult themes, profanity, violence, homosexuality, or disrespect for family values. In other words, the only potentially interesting observations are reduced to a numerical score that equates Christianity with facile morality. I suppose it’s about as helpful as any review score.
I hope no one ran out and bought Motorstorm over the weekend because of all the nice things I said about the courses in my last entry. It’s actually become a bit of a chore to play at this point, but maybe I just need a break. So today I’m not going to tell you about how frustrating it gets to repeat the same race half a dozen times with no sense of what you’re doing wrong, how to improve, or any alternative if you want to make progress.
Instead, after the jump I’m going to talk about that guy clinging to the side of my car, and maybe Amped 3. Continue reading →
Why the Hell aren’t you people playing Yakuza 4? It’s so goddamned joyously weird it nearly defies explanation. I mean, Yak 3 was like this (courtesy of Lizard King):
There is no way to describe this game accurately in a manner that is going to make it sound anything but ludicrous for most people, but…any game where boss fights are frequently heralded by mutual shirt ripping and flexing of lavishly illustrated yakuza tattoos and you don’t run screaming out of the madness vortex that ought to create has to be doing something right.
And Yakuza 4 is Yakuza 3 turned up to 11, simmered in man what sauce, dressed in all pink and sporting a sweet afro. I am mixing metaphors because Yakuza 4 just doesn’t give a fuck.
Mew Shoes, Noire, sexy Hillary and Ambrose Burnside’s greatest victory after the jump. Continue reading →
If you haven’t had your fill of Legos or Pirates of the Caribbean, you’ll have to let me know how Legos: Pirates of the Caribbean is. I can’t be bothered to try it not just because I’ve had my fill of Legos and Pirates of the Caribbean, but because I’m already busy with two really good games.
The first is Brink. It’s no surprise that Brink is really good. It’s from Splash Damage, the folks who made Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and Quake Wars. They know what they’re doing: making sure players are thrown together in a carefully crafted multiplayer experience. The second is Virtua Tennis 4, which has a cool career mode that puts Virtua Tennis’ tennis onto a sort of turn-based board game.
Hey nerds, you love comic book movies, right? So do we! Well, some of us. So we’ll argue a bit about Thor before going on to this week’s 3×3. Our discussion of the least bad pregnancy reveals begins at the 54-minute mark.
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The players in Virtua Tennis 4 look less zombie-like than ever and the animation is as good as it’s ever been. And I’m really digging the latest campaign mode, even though my custom tenniseer ended her long tour through Asia by crashing and burning at the Melbourne tournament. We’ll do better in Europe.
But I’m not convinced by one of Virtua Tennis’ boldest and grossest innovations: sweat. You know how characters in Dragon Age get spattered with red droplets, and then they go about their business and look ridiculous? Imagine that the droplets are white. Now apply them to famous tennis players like Roger Federer, Andy Roddick, Boris Becker, and Caroline Wozniacki.
I see what Virtua Tennis is getting at, but I’m not convinced it works. The best case scenario is that these players are sweating off liberally applied sunblock. The next best case scenario is that they have buboes from some horrible plague. The next best case scenario is that they’re goddamn robots. And all of these are preferable to the first thing I thought when I saw these white droplets spattered on my tennis player’s face. I think it’s best if I just leave that to your imagination rather than actually write the Japanese term, partly because I can never remember how many K’s are in that word.
Virtua Tennis 4 is out next week and aside from the really gross sweat technology, I’m pretty well won over.
After laying into With Fire & Sword yesterday, I found myself contemplating why I did not want to continue with the game. It’s Mount & Blade with guns. The gimmick works for Bethesda, so why doesn’t it work for Taleworlds? Unfortunately, it takes a lot more than simply having a bunch of good ideas to make a good game. You need to actually execute on those ideas and make them work within the framework you have set for yourself.
After the jump, one pace forward, ten paces back. Continue reading →
Credit where credit is due: I’m supposed to write clever headlines for my diary entries, and instead I’m lifting this one straight out of the game. It’s the name of the course in the picture above, the one with the ferris wheel coming unhinged in the middle of a tornado ripping the boardwalk out from under my tires. I’ve got some problems with the presentation in Motorstorm, but borrowing a Pixies track isn’t one of them.
My focus so far is the single player campaign, and without much choice in how it unfolds, I haven’t had a reason to look ahead to what courses are coming up next. I did look at some of my stats though, and as I glanced at my course standings, the thumbnail for Waves of Mutilation caught my eye immediately. An offshore tornado? How could that go wrong? Sign me up!
But after the break, I’ll tell you why it’s only my second favorite course so far. Continue reading →
It tasks me; it heaps me; I see in it outrageous gameplay, with an inscrutable dexterity sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be Marvel vs. Capcom 3 agent, or be Marvel vs. Capcom 3 principal, I will wreck that hate upon it.
After the jump, Marvel vs. Capcom 3 tasks me Continue reading →
PlayStation Network is currently undergoing maintenance.
That’s the notice you get when you try to sign on to the PSN nowadays. Well, that’s one way to put it. Here’s another way…
DUHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.*
Look at my little sackboy up there. He’s a gamer. Old school. You know what he’s doing in addition to playing that old school game? He’s unlocking a new Versus level for me. What’s a Versus level you ask? Well just look at that screenshot again and you’ll see an open seat to the right of my sackboy. That open seat is just waiting for a friend to fill it so we can play some pong against each other. Or whatever. This game loves to make spaces for us to interact as gamers. It’s all about establishing community and engendering a sense of collaboration and healthy competition.
After the jump, board beyond belief Continue reading →
I remember this place. Dad and I came here on business once. I can see the little common house we stayed in. The yard I played in with my temporary friend — Angela, the inn-keep’s daughter. All of that is gone now, replaced with this endless war.
A sound. Gravel slipping, cascading. Could be nothing. A rifle report. Jenkins hits the ground. I wish it was nothing. It never is.
After the jump, the greatest show on Earth Continue reading →
