Archive for September, 2011
I think at some point in this series I promised you some role-playing. Strategy role-playing, to be exact. Not by me, of course, because I don’t do that kind of stuff. But from a game design perspective, you can’t help but appreciate the possibilities. Because the best games tell the best stories, the chance to tell a good one shouldn’t be missed. From a strategy role-playing perspective, what could be a better story than what I’m about to show you?
Find out after the jump Continue reading →
I don’t envy Atari having to promote their upcoming game for the Wii and DS. Thanks to Dutch filmmaker Tom Six, I mentally put the word “human” in front of the word “centipede” whenever I see it. It’s his fault the last feature in this paragraph is so unintentionally creepy.
Centipede returns as an updated version of beloved gaming classic. Explore an expansive new world with seven different environments and 40 stages. Defend Maisies [sic] garden from waves of nasty creepy crawlers with an arsenal of over 20 weapons. Test your power and skill against five devious bosses. Team up with a friend for maximum fire power for nail biting two player co-op action.
The Debt is one of those movies where characters deal with a Deep Dark Secret from Many Years Ago ™. And, to be fair, these are interesting characters. Tom Wilksinson, Helen Mirren, and Ciarin Hinds are former Mossad agents credited with taking out a prominent Nazi many years ago during a mission in East Berlin. Cue Samuel Jackson making a gun-to-the-head gesture and asking “taking out”? Yes, taking out. Mossad, dontchaknow? The Debt is about something that happens thirty years later.
Well, at least that’s what The Debt is about before it spends far too much time with the less interesting younger versions of the characters, particularly Jessica Chastain. She’s certainly lovely, and we know from Tree of Life that she’s capable of gravity. But here she’s just lovely and not much else. The most interesting thing about her is that she’s going to grow up into Helen Mirren. She does demonstrates one hell of a way to take out a gynecologist who you might suspect is a former Nazi, but that’s still not as interesting as growing up into Helen Mirren.
I saw in the credits that Sam Worthington was supposed to be in this movie, but I don’t recall seeing him. Maybe he was in the Sam Worthington-shaped hole that was moving around on screen a lot. And I’m always up for watching Marton Csokas, who you probably know as Mr. Galadriel in Lord of the Rings, or the agent who Matt Damon kills with a toaster and a magazine in Bourne Supremacy. But it wasn’t enough to keep me from wondering when we were going to get back to Helen Mirren. And when that finally happens, the movie is nearly over, leaving just enough time to literally stumble to a silly and hurried finale in which Mirren demonstrates that she is the worst secret agent ever.
Hey, Hollywood, can I tell you a secret? People over 40 are inherently more interesting than people under 40*. I say this having been on both sides of the equation. Now if your goal is to get people under 40 to see your crappy movie, good job focusing on Jessica Chastain. But if your goal is to tell an interesting story, The Debt is doing it wrong.
* if I knew how to do footnotes, here I would cite episode 12 of season two of Louie
During the Civil War — bear with me — battles often happened by accident. That’s just how it worked back then. Two armies would maneuver around, chasing each other, or feeling their way around the land, trying to find advantageous ground. Eventually, they’d tangle up a flank, or stumble onto arriving enemy reinforcements, or get caught flat footed crossing a river. Skirmishes blossomed into full-blown encounters that gave birth to unplanned Civil War battlegrounds. We don’t often think of battles as surprises, but that’s often what they were.
After the jump, why I thought of this as I plunged to my death in Dead Island Continue reading →
New content goes live for DC Universe Online today, including a new set of superpowers and some more instances.
Introducing DC Comics legend The Green Lantern and the game’s seventh power set (Light), the “Fight for the Light” pack allows players to join the Green Lantern Corps or Sinestro Corps as reservist members while helping to restore balance to the universe.
Along with interactions with Green Lantern based favorites and foes, players will be launched into multiple action-packed scenarios, including an epic battle for control in S.T.A.R. Labs, a light-to-light showdown with the Red Lantern Corps in Coast City, and chaotic prison break at Sciencells Prison.
I really enjoyed DC Universe Online, and if I had time to jump into an MMO, it’s on the very short list of MMOs I’d like to get back to playing. But I wish the developers at Sony Online would find a way to get players out into the cities of Gotham and Metropolis. When the game launched, these cities were full of players zipping to and fro, getting into skirmishes with each other, and generally bringing the places to life while they did quests on the short trip to the level limit. At which point they all retreated into instances to grind for raid gear. Last time I checked, Gotham and Metropolis were ghost towns.
And Sony Online seems content to keep them ghost towns by continuing to shunt players into places like S.T.A.R. Labs, Coast City, and the Sciencells Prison. What about Metropolis and Gotham City, which are already in the game and in dire need of things to do and players doing them? And when is Sony Online going to unbottle some of those buildings and let us fight over them?
I couldn’t tell you the first thing about the storyline in Bodycount, which is all about the gunplay like a shooter should be. However, throughout the game, an obligatory female voice is talking you through the missions. She’s your handler or narrator or Cortana or whatever. This is how you’re supposed to figure out the story, but I was only half listening. Near the end of the game, she gets attacked and you have to mumblemumble data cores mumblemuble nexus mumblemumble cyber program mumblemumble to save her. And that’s when I realized the voice actress is a dead ringer for the host of NPR’s Fresh Air, Terry Gross. Who I’d much rather rescue than Neal Conan or Robert Siegel.
I’ll have a full review of Bodycount posted later this week. Until then, suffice to say Bodycount doesn’t close nearly as strong as it opens.
Everyone knows that strategic games with tactical battle engines are better than strategic games without them. Any game which tries to abstract out combat in the name of tighter, more thematic game design is eventually going to get crushed by complaints from gamers who want to fight out the battles turn by turn, or for truly advanced players, in real time. You know it, I know it, and the American people know it. So why do developers keep missing the boat? It’s so cute that you think I am about to give you the answer. I would never be that straightforward. Maybe I just don’t know.
After the jump, there are known unknowns, where we know what we don’t know Continue reading →
So far the most powerful weapon I’ve discovered in Dead Island is Xian’s high-heeled shoe. Once I’ve knocked a zombie to the ground, I can aim at its head and tap the E key to apply my shoe (pictured). It is the equivalent of going nuclear. Let’s look at the numbers.
The early trash weapons do about 30 or 40 points of damage. More durable weapons do two or three times that amount. As you upgrade weapons and specialize with your skills, you can get that into the 300 or 400 range. At level 20, with most of her points in combat skills, my Xian has a rare bolo machete given to her by a nun. After investing considerable lucre, the machete does 700 points of damage. A molotov cocktail will apply about 150 points of burning damage every second or so, pretty much until a zombie is dead. The first homemade bomb you discover will do 5000 points of damage.
Xian’s stomp routinely does over 20,000 points of damage.
As much as I’d love to consider Dead Island a subversive commentary on women’s footwear, it’s not just the high-heeled shoe. All four characters have a stomp attack once they get about half way into the combat branch of their skill trees. Stomps are actually — get this — a part of the game’s economy. Every point of damage you do without spending some of your weapon’s durability rating is money you’ll save on repairs. Timothy Geithner has nothing on me.
Shark Night, which features a scene in which a one-armed man wades out into waist-deep water and wins a hand-to-hand fight against a shark, introduces its cast with a pair of Tulane students playing Halo 3 in their dorm room. Microsoft’s shooter gets quite a bit of screen time, some map-specific discussion, and a generic Xbox shout-out. The word “pwned” is used unironically. And considering that the cast of this forgettable tripe is so uniformly unlikable — I was even rooting for the dog to die — I’m not the least bit surprised they’re the sort of people who play Halo online.
I was digging on Crimson Alliance, a simple and spirited action RPG that pulls back from the usual finicky loot chase in favor of a scoring model. You try to avoid taking damage to rack up a multiplier. At the end of the level, you earn points based on your combat effectiveness, the secret areas you’ve found, and the time you took to reach the end. If you finesse the multiplier, you can hit the score thresholds for silver and gold medals. That’s the overall metagame around the lively hacking-and-slashing.
But then I get to the business model for this Xbox Live Arcade game. I don’t really mind the overall pricing model. The three heroes are sold separately for $10 each, or for $15 for all three. That’s an interesting enough alternative to the usual price.
But then I get to the stores between each level, where you spend the gold you’ve accumulated to buy gear. Gear is a bit more meaningful than the usual action RPG, because there’s no leveling. Each character always has three attacks, but the attacks get more powerful based on which items you equip in each of a character’s three slots. Some equipment even gives you extra health, or a bonus tweak. This wizard’s orb might improve your direct flame attack and add a few points of health, but that wizard’s orb will boost your electricity crowd control attack as well as add a slight chance of critical hits. Simple meaningful choices without too much fuss. Now let’s go eff up some more goblins!
But what rubs me the wrong way is that each store includes a nag for you to buy 40,000 gold from the Xbox Live store. In the overall calculus of the game, 40,000 gold is an unbalancing metric butt-ton of money. It will basically unlock all the best items for each of your three slots. I’m guessing it will let you effortlessly plow through the levels, pretty much guaranteeing silver medals all the way.
Is Crimson Alliance supposed to work this way? Shouldn’t the developers tune their game* so the amount of gold you earn is commensurate with either the amount of time you’ve played, or how well you’ve played? When is gameplay just a grind that you should be able to buy your way past? Should indie developers shirk their duty like Electronic Arts routinely does, giving players the option to subvert whatever challenge level their game should provide? And should an indie developer include a nag for this every time I’m counting out my hard-earned gold for whatever minor item I can afford?
I don’t know the answers to these questions. But I do know that I lost interest in Crimson Alliance after being repeatedly nagged to pay extra money as an alternative to actually playing the game.
2 stars
* otherwise known as “doing their jobs”
Hey, look, it’s a found footage movie that goes, pow, straight to the moon! If you don’t want Apollo 18 spoiled, then fast forward to this week’s 3×3 at the 57-minute mark, where we discuss our favorite battles of the sexes.
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Gamespy has printed my field guide to Banoi fauna. Which is also a sort of advisory FAQ for anyone considering whether to travel to Banoi, the New Guinea island where Dead Island takes place. For instance:
Are my children in danger?
Despite what you may believe based on the 2010 promotional video for Dead Island, children on the island of Banoi are absolutely safe. You will not encounter any child zombies, even though they’re a fundamental part of zombie traditions ranging from 1968’s Night of the Living Dead to 2010’s The Walking Dead. Thanks to the diligent efforts of the ESRB, the zombie apocalypse will not affect anyone under the age of 18 in anything that isn’t called Dead Rising 2. And even then, it occurs tastefully off-screen.
You learn to listen for zombies. The walkers are the more lugubrious zombie noises, although you never know when they’re going to show up. Sometimes they stir awake at your feet. The infected are the more shrill zombie noises. They’re just yelling, really. Just someone yelling and running directly at you. You can always hear them coming. They’re the opposite of a surprise. They’re all, like, “Hey, I’m way over here and I’m on way so I’m going to give you plenty of advance notice to prepare the weapon of your choice and even to throw it at me if you’re so inclined!” If you want to illustrate the Doppler effect for someone, just drive past one of the infected.
So I’m scrounging around the streets of Moresby — this game is so very Fallout 3 — when I hear a walker. He’s close. Really close. I check the bodies at my feet. No movement. I look around the corner. Nothing. I check for nearby non-fake doors. Nope, all fake. It seems to be coming from behind a truck. I look all around the truck. No. I check in the cab. Nothing. It seems to be coming from inside the truck…
Ah, I finally notice what kind of truck it is. Audio bug? Joke? Vignette? Whatever the case, I certainly enjoyed it.
Welcome to the holidays. Your wallet is now officially under siege.
Dead Island is the only release this week that I’ve actually played for any meaningful length of time. The review is under embargo, but I think you know where I stand: in a puddle of blood, amid hacked-off zombie limbs, clutching one of those knives you use to cut down cane sugar, with a few of my friends at my side*.
But this week would still be a potentially dire wallet threat even if it weren’t for Techland’s zombie masterpiece. I really like the car-hopping conceit that Driver: San Francisco brings to multiplayer. Resistance 3 is out this week. Disgaea 4 (pictured). Space Marine. The Starfox remake for the Nintendo 3DS. The cute rock-rolling tower defense game Rock of Ages. The Xbox Live Arcade action RPG Crimson Alliance. Rise of Nightmares for your Kinect.
I’m sorry, I tried. I really tried. I tried to mention that last one with a straight face, but I just couldn’t.
* i.e. wandering away to look for loot, even though they know they’re just going to get jumped again
