Bioshock Infinite apparently made quite an impression at E3. I’ve heard people talking about Songbird and Elizabeth and Columbia. Someone showed me a picture of a giant robot crow sticking its head through a hole at the 2K booth. I don’t know what any of that is. And I don’t really care to know.
After the jump, Bioshock Infinite fails to impress me Continue reading →
The Rise of Isengard add-on for Lord of the Rings Online comes out on September 27, raising the level cap and adding a new region and 24-man raid against a dragon that I’ll never see until I knuckle down and get through Moria. Which is awesome, to be sure. But it sure is hard jumping back into an MMO after you’ve been away for a while.
When you pre-order Rise of Isengard, you immediately get a few doo-dads, most of which are borderline useless. The actually useful one is Derudh’s Stone, which a character can equip in his pocket slot for a 25% xp boost. Handy for leveling alts, if you’re into that sort of thing. The stone’s name is taken from the Welsh word for druid. Turbine is drawing from Welsh mythology for Dunland, a poor tribal area that Saruman is recruiting in the upcoming war against Rohan. See how I know this stuff? Do I sound like the Tolkien dork I wish I was?
So when I got my pre-order code today, I figured I’d take a quick look at the cosmetic stuff. Not that I care about any of that. I mean, really, who cares what kind of horse your dude rides or what kind of cloak she wears, right? Not me. Pish.
Hey, these are whole new cosmetic armor sets. I wonder how they look if I just try them on. Ooh, look at the cool circlet thingies, which are very fetching on my elf. Whoa, my willowy elf suddenly looks kind of bulky and bad-ass in that cloak. Wow, the armor looks all, I dunno, rangery. Hey, these new mounts are supposed to be Rohirrim mounts. Surely they’re just horses, right? Whoa, they’ve got some kind of, like, bad ass horse tabards and headplate dealies! Here’s me riding around Bree in my bitchin’ armor of the Edelhorn, or whatever, with my Rohirrim mount. Level 75, here I come!
Since pictures are worth a few dozen of my most excellent words, I thought I’d illustrate my impressions of the Dungeon Siege III demo with some views from…whatever that country is called. As you might be able to tell, the lore in the demo didn’t make a huge impression on me. And the previous 2 games are fairly hazy in my memory.
After the jump, Wendelius’ Dungeon Siege demo travelogue begins Continue reading →
In some games, it’s easy to say writing doesn’t matter. In games like Infamous 2, that’s not so easy to say.
True, Portal 2 can hurt your head if you play it too much. True, the soundtracks on YouTube of people playing Portal 2 are mostly filled with silence or the occasional, “Hummm,” as players struggle to figure out the level. True, sometimes after I solve a level, I am not even sure why it worked the way it did. So why, then, should I keep playing Portal 2 multiplayer?
After the jump, I’ll come up with three good reasons. Continue reading →
If the early reviews are to be trusted, things aren’t looking good for Duke Nukem Forever. Raise your hand if you’re surprised that a sequel to a 15 year old shooter feels like a sequel to a 15 year old shooter.
Alice: Madness Returns has the advantage of being a sequel to a more recent but middling platformer, so it doesn’t have far to go to be better than the original. The latest Transformers game is in a similar situation. I don’t have any desire to play Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time again, but if I did, I’d probably want to play it on the Nintendo 3DS. It looks great, even (especially?) in 3D. It’s enough to make me almost sorry that I don’t have any desire to play through yet another Zelda game.
But this week’s biggest wallet threat is probably Child of Eden, a wigged out puzzle game from the creator of Rez, one of the original wigged out puzzle games. With full support for Microsoft’s Kinect and Sony’s Move, this might be one of those games that makes your fancy controller a not entirely worthless investment.
Finally, hey look, it’s Wipeout: In the Zone! At last, a Wipeout game for the Xbox 360 (pictured)! I don’t remember it looking quite like that, and it seems odd to me that it’s published by Activision, particularly now that it’s available as a free “I’m sorry” download from Sony because the Playstation Network being down for so long. But it’s about time such a great sci-fi racing game has slipped the surly bonds of the Playstation hardware.
We see JJ Abrams’ heartwarming tribute to the various movies of our childhood made by people such as Steven Spielberg and whoever did The Explorers and whoever did Short Circuit and whoever did Cloverfield. Then, at the 59-minute mark, we discuss our favorite facial expressions for this week’s 3×3.
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‘Neath the black
the sky looks dead
In addition to all the crappy cinematic levels that seem to have infested Little Big Planet since the PSN went back up–look, once again, I do not play LBP2 in order to see your crappy homemade sack-movie. I own stacks of movies and the backlog of films I need to see is…well it’s more movies than you can imagine. I came here to play, get it? Stop. Just stop–I’m experiencing a ton of levels that are just too damn dark. Enough of that too. I can’t see what my little sackboy is doing! So unless you’re making a McCabe and Mrs. Miller homage level, cut it out.
That might be why when I came across this week’s level, white dust sea, I was immediately into it. As you can see from the above shot, darkness is not this level’s problem. If anything it was almost annoyingly bright, but after all the gloomy levels it was a welcome change. That and the fact that it is a long level. I’ve been seeing a good deal of that lately, which is also a welcome change, especially when accompanied by a reasonable uptick in difficulty. This one took me a few tries to finish, and I still cannot figure out how to get most of the golden apples, but it won me over by being bright, long, and hard. I know, I know. TWSS.
So, to recap: long, bright levels = good. Sack-movie adaptations = bad. Hmm. Speaking of movie adaptations…
after the jump, the cunning use of flags Continue reading →
Fifteen years ago, Abel Ferrara made a low-budget black-and-white vampire movie called The Addiction, with Lili Taylor and Annabella Sciorra. I figured I’d go see it. On the way to the theater, I had one of those fish sandwiches from McDonalds. Part way into the movie — I don’t recall exactly what was happening, but it was probably some poorly lit blood-slurping — I had a funny feeling. Like I was going to hurl. I had to go out into the lobby and put down with my head between my knees. I’m not sure if it was the fish sandwich or the Abel Ferrara.
I finally got to spend some time with the Nintendo 3DS recently. Before firing up Ridge Racer 3D, I had a cup of coffee on an empty stomach. After a few racers — and man, I really don’t get why anyone tolerates these Ridge Racer games — I got a funny feeling. Like I was going to hurl. I had to dial down the 3D mode. I’m not sure if it was the coffee or the 3D.
At that point I was left with a pretty decent Nintendo DSi with an awesome analog stick. Not that I know of any game that really needs it yet. Tonight, an update will add a web browser and support for the Nintendo Store. But I’m not sure I’ll crank that 3D dial up any more than I’ll go back and try to sit through The Addiction again.
I have no idea what to tell you about this week’s wallet threat level, since I’ll be at E3 seeing various dog and pony shows. You’ll be the folks actually playing Infamous 2 and Red Faction: Armageddon, so you’ll have to let me know if they’re any good. Also let me know if the new campaign in Operation Flashpoint: Red River is any good. And plus let me know about Pride of Nations, the industrial revolution strategy game from Paradox that isn’t Victoria 2. You’ve got your work cut out for you!
Meanwhile, updates on Qt3 will be few and far between this week. Instead, I’ll be moonlighting over at Gameshark, where we’ll be doing daily updates and podcasts about the dogs and ponies.
Bonjour, pantalon interessant! Sorry about last week. Tom put me on restriction for making fun of Christian Xtein Amanpour Merzibooski Dingus’ Little Big Planet Not Really Little Big Planet columns. Apparently he actually writes about stuff not related to LBP in those! Shit, who knew! That’s what I get for only putting Bruce’s articles on my RSS feed. Ha ha, just joking! I don’t know how to set an RSS feed. Anyway I’m back and I hope this column annoys you, otherwise what the Hell is Tom paying me for?
All the way back in the 1980s a study was done analyzing 3000 top hit songs in an effort to discover what makes a hit a hit. Among the results was the fact that roughly 80% of the sampled hits began with a word repeated at least twice. Is that what gave Nintendo the inspiration to name its next-gen console the Nintendo Nintendo, to be announced at this year’s E3? Or has Iwata merely finally finished his amusing descent into money-soaked madness? We may never know. Rumors are it might even be called the Nintendo Current, because the Nintendo New Happy Time Fun You Like Box was just too silly and the Nintendo Obtuse was too on the nose. Maybe it’s all just a big in-joke from Nintendo. Assholes.
Hella in-jokes from assholes and rampant italics abuse after the jizzle. Continue reading →
In our three-way split on X-Men First Class, we separate the comic book nerds from the snooty movie snobs! And then it’s our 3×3 of best weddings in movies, starting at the 1:03 mark.
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Every woman in The Witcher 2 has breasts the size and shape of bowling balls. So you might think it’s another videogame with no idea how to do effective female characters. LA Noire with implants. And elfs.
Nothing could be further from the truth. If you can accept the Frank Frazetta aesthetic — and, really, there’s no reason not to, given the venerable tradition of horny fantasy art — you’ll find a world in which women aren’t just objects. They are power brokers and pawns, whores and warriors, villains and victims. A female character is literally turned into a toy for much of the game. Another female character is the strongest opponent you will face. Yet another female character has a shockingly abrupt and grisly fall from power. Strangely enough, they’re never mothers, since this is a game mostly without children. The mother of a grown child, who you meet early in the game, isn’t exactly maternal. But overall, there’s a welcome multi-faceted portrayal of women in The Witcher 2.
Furthermore, The Witcher 2 has a mature approach to sexuality. Unlike Bioware’s skeezy salad bar romance subgames, The Witcher 2 comes with a hardcoded and meaningful relationship. As befits a choice-and-consequence RPG like this, you can ignore the romance and whore it up if you want. But you’ll miss an erotic and surprisingly effective love scene. This is still just puppet theatre, often awkward in a post-LA Noire world, but it’s as good as I’ve ever seen it. And it puts to shame anything Bioware has done.
Plus, The Witcher 2 is a really good game.
Thumbs way up. Read the review here.
The dirty little secret about Portal 2 multiplier is this: It’s dull. It’s incredibly, mind-numbingly slow.
After the jump, more dirty little secrets about Portal 2 multiplayer Continue reading →
Dirt 3 is great for how it got me playing Dirt 2 again. It also afforded me the opportunity to use the word “revanchism” in a review!
