Archive for January, 2012
Elder Sign: Omens is basically a race. Can you use your resources to accumulate 12 elder signs before 14 doom tokens stack up? Your resources include your investigators, who get battered in the process and have to burn turns healing themselves. In my case, the most precious commodity is sanity, since no one on my team of burly investigators is known for his mental stability. I frequently send them back to the museum entrance to recover sanity. Meanwhile, the doom tokens build up.
After the jump, things get a little crazy Continue reading →
A good turn-based tactical game has the feel of two armies squaring off, watching each other as units move into position, arrange themselves, entrench, feint, engage. There are fronts, flanks, reserves. With a good AI or a human opponent, it’s a series of urgent questions. Where he gonna go? What’s he gonna do? What am I gonna do? What is going to happen? When is it going to happen? It’s a dance.
Then there’s Hero Academy, where two players take turns hitting each other really hard.
After the jump, the slugfest Continue reading →
Okay, so Monday’s nothing but a memory they implanted in your head which leads us to Tuesday, the day we really get our game on. The morning walk is spent pissing and moaning to my buddy about last night’s League of Legends debacle. I bitch that I wish he would learn more than the one champ he’s pro with. He mentions something about dealing with a wife and kids are a priority and time constraints and blah, blah, bleh, blah, boo-hoo. Learn another champion, noob.
After the jump, the price of late-night League of Legends Continue reading →
In another Lovecraft themed iPhone game (that isn’t very good) called Necronomicon, I’ve had the most luck pairing a lunatic with a shotgun and just letting the cards roll out. It’s a bit like trench warfare, with cultists, monsters, shoggoths, Old Ones, and so forth dying in suicidal charges against my lunatic and his shotgun. Cthulhu’s Verdun.
But in this game, Ashcan Pete has amply demonstrated that a hobo and a shotgun are only as good as the handfuls of dice they roll. Since his disastrous showing, things haven’t gotten much better.
After the jump, can we snatch victory from the flabby maw of defeat? Continue reading →
That’s not Richard Garriott up there, but I can’t show you a still from the sci-fi movie he wrote, directed, and starred in. No one can. Because NASA has put the kibosh on it, unlike the movie Apollo 18, which accuses NASA of spreading sentient moonrocks around the world in a bid for, uh, world domination? I’m not clear on that part of the movie Apollo 18, which wasn’t written by, directed by, or starring Richard Garriott, but it did take place in space. The difference is that Garriott’s movie was actually shot in space during his $30 million stint as a space tourist.
Garriott’s space movie is news to me. I know he was promoting whatever that MMO was at the time that had his name attached. But he also made an eight-minute short, starring himself and some local talent (i.e. astronauts). However, NASA hasn’t given him clearance to, I dunno, post it on YouTube or whatever he would do with it. Garriott insists NASA doesn’t have ulterior motives, and he speculates that it’s just a matter of the levity not being appropriate. But that’s exactly what he would say if he was trying to deflect suspicion from an organization spreading sentient moonrocks in a bid for world domination that didn’t want their plot inadvertently exposed by something you might be able to see in the background of Garriott’s footage.
I’m here to piss on your day. Not intentionally, mind you, but a dose of reality is in order here. You see, I was once like you, single. Or maybe you got a girlfriend who lives on the other side of town and you just whispered “I love you, miss you, wish you were here.” And you dream about the day you’ll have a girl of your choosing, married, ring on the finger and a couple little rugrats running around. Stop dreaming. Feel that? It’s raining and there’s not a cloud in the sky. Let me tell you what you won’t be doing when your dreams come true; joining in on a ten man raid, going up against another Riot inspired OP champ, saving Arkham City, exploring the Sword Coast, blasting every Zed in sight, doing something badass in Skyrim…you get the idea. Enjoy yourself now, because lemme tell you, when you’re finally old enough to get married and have a bunch of kids or two, it’s all over. It’s all over! I can not stress that enough.
So, I’m gonna take you through a week in the life of a gamer with a wife and children. For the first entry we’ll start with, hmmm…how ’bout Monday?
After the jump, reality beckons Continue reading →
The real divide this week has nothing to do with Xavier Gens’ horrible post-apocalyptic sci-fi horror movie, The Divide. The real divide takes place during this week’s 3×3 of running gags, which begins at the 53-minute mark, and eventually explores the difficult issue of whether Hudson Hawk or Armageddon is the better bad movie.
Next week: Haywire
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Elder Sign: Omens takes place in the Miskatonic Museum. The museum is stocked with encounters called adventures, each consisting of one or more tasks. Some adventures need to be resolved quickly because they cause widespread negative effects. For instance, the above screenshot show us looking at the koi pond adventure in the upper left. But let’s see what’s going on with that pulsing red circle in the administration office, down there in the lower right.
After the jump, we need to find help Continue reading →
When I first read the title Black and White platformer, I got excited. A level all in black and white would be a nice change of pace. That didn’t pan out, as you can clearly see from the fireballs in the above screenshot. I still had a blast with the level in spite of this little letdown, and in spite of the weird thrusting phallus sections. Maybe I’m misinterpreting that part though. Sometimes a pointy column with a slightly bulbous tip is just a pointy column with a slightly bulbous tip. You be the judge.
Speaking of judging, it’s Sackie Awards nominations time! Yep. Sackies. That’s what they’re calling them. Get your nominations for your favourite levels of 2011 in before 06/02/2012, and seeing as there’s a ‘u’ in favourite, please note that the deadline is February 6th, not June 2nd. Also, my mention of pointy columns followed by an announcement of the Sackie Awards is entirely coincidental. No need to page Dr. Freud, I assure you.
If you’ve played Fantasy Flight’s Arkham Horror cooperative boardgame, some of Elder Sign: Omens will be familiar to you. This is basically a dice-based iPhone solitaire version of Arkham Horror (available here for $4). It plays a bit like Clue, where you align several pieces on the board for one of the adventures, which consists of rolling dice and matching them to the adventure’s component tasks. For instance, Sister Mary the nun in the North Wing with the dynamite against the Medusa exhibit. Then you roll the dice and see how she fares.
The overall goal is to accumulate 14 elder signs, which are rewards for beating some adventures, before you accumulate 12 doom tokens, which are penalties for failing some adventures, as well as occasional draws during the dreaded midnight phase. I’ve played three games, each with a hand-picked group of investigators. In all three games, the world was devoured. Oops. Maybe I’ll have more luck this time with a random party.
After the jump, meet the boys Continue reading →
If you don’t have a pinball game from Zen Studios, the latest Nintendo 3DS version is a great way to fix that. It’s only a seven dollar download from the Nintendo eShop away. But what if you’re already an aficionado of Zen Studio’s pinball tables. You’ve got them on your Xbox 360, your PS3, and even your iPhone, for Pete’s sake. Why bother paying seven bucks to download four tables for your Nintendo 3DS?
After the jump, I’ll tell you why Continue reading →
Hey, look, the Writers Guild of America has selected its annual nominations for best writing in a videogame!
In the category of video game writing, the teams behind Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, Batman: Arkham City, Brink, Mortal Kombat, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception were all nominated.
The WGA awards are kind of weird, because they’re limited to WGA members. That’s just how guilds work. But I actually lied about one of those nominees. I’ll bet you dollars to donuts you can’t figure out which one without clicking on the link.
This week we welcome spaceship expert Brian Rubin (his credentials here) to help us determine the greatest spaceship of all time, whether Supernatural is just for tween girls, and who would win in a Dance Dance Revolution last-man-standing showdown.
For our posts of the week, Brian chose this thread of Terminator geekery, Tom chose this announcement of the impending Fallen Princess Enchantress beta, and Jason chose this discussion of 2K’s other X-com game.
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The Old Republic has the same sense of morality that’s present in the other Bioware games. The choices you make often give you light or dark side points. These points are combined, light subtracting from dark, etc, to give you an overall score. For instance, Willy has 3,900 points towards the dark side because I have 250 light side points and 4,150 dark side points.
Morality has never been so easy!
After the jump, diplomatic immunity… revoked Continue reading →
All Zombies Must Die is the other sequel to a very good twin-stick shooter about killing zombies that jumps genres and aggressively shoves bad writing in your face. But unlike the similarly misguided Zombie Apocalypse: Never Die Alone, this one from the developers of Burn Zombie Burn has its gameplay smarts still intact.
After the jump, JAFZG? Continue reading →
