Archive for February, 2012
Amnesia: The Dark Descent stands apart from most recent horror games for how it doesn’t have any combat, and doesn’t even really want you to look at scary things. It’s got an old school adventure game vibe, but it has its share of fans who appreciate not having to headshot zombies for a change. The game’s developers at Frictional Games recently announced the name of their next game, and not much else, to Joystiq. But what a name it is. Amnesia: a Machine for Pigs. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you name a game!
A Machine for Pigs (pictured?) will be written and designed by Dan Pinchbeck, the creator of the artsy Source mod/ghost story, Dear Esther. Frictional intends to release it at the end of this year.
If you’ve played any of the large-scale player vs. player in an MMO, you know what an absurd jumble it can be: a hundred character models jammed together with names hovering above them as if a layer of random multi-colored letters have snowed down onto their heads. Guild Wars 2’s world vs. world battles (pictured) are no exception.
A lot of Dark Age of Camelot players will appreciate how world vs. world pits three factions against each other, often trying to carry away each other’s orbs (owning orbs gives everyone in your faction a health boost), capturing each other strongpoints, and bringing powerful siege engines to bear. Many world vs. world encounters include powerful and expensive golems that excel at knocking down doors. Above is me in a catapult helping a bunch of players in the red faction while we try to knock down a door. It felt a lot like some of the battles I played in Warhammer Online. But it also felt different enough that Guild Wars 2’s world vs. world combat is one of the main reasons I can’t wait for this game to come out.
After the jump, six reasons Guild Wars 2 is a PvP game I want to play Continue reading →
I feel a little silly posting about something as inconsequential as promotional wallpaper, but when it’s wallpaper this good, I can’t help it. As you can see above, it’s a bit of evocatively creepy promotional art for Echo Bazaar, a game I’m still playing long after having written a review. Which isn’t something that happens very often. And the cool thing about that wallpaper is that the mood-breaking promotional URL tucks neatly under your taskbar in Windows XP.
This week we welcome Jeff “wumpus” Atwood to the show, only to embarrass ourselves horribly when we fail his basic interview process. But then he embarrasses himself horribly when he references what he thinks is a Bioware game. So we’re all even! We also talk a fair bit of Darkness II, Far Cry 3, the Game of Thrones card game, Rock Band and…well, you kind of have to hear Jeff’s pick for game of the week to believe it.
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I like to shoot things. Battlefied, Call of Duty, Killing Floor, you name it. If it has guns and things to shoot, chances are I’ll entertain myself with it. If it also has regular people dressing up as homeless versions of Batman and the Joker, trying to kill eachother for no reason with guns, gadgets and rollerskates, I’m going to be in love before I even play it.
After the jump, when is three hours actually forty minutes? Continue reading →
One of my favorite things about the original Guild Wars is it never turned into that typical late-game MMO interface of rows of hotbars framing the screen, each festooned with tiny icons of impenetrable meaning. In Guild Wars, whatever level you were, however many hours you’d been playing, you only ever had eight skills. Before an adventure, you picked any eight skills you wanted. Your character was always a flexible thing. You could freely rejigger Guild Wars’ equivalent of a talent tree, which tweaked your eight skills in unique ways. But playing Guild Wars was always and only a matter of pressing one of eight buttons.
Guild Wars 2 is both simpler and more complicated. But I’m convinced it’s better for a few reasons, including one reason that means I absolutely, positively, no-question-about-it must go into that swamp pictured up there.
Find out what’s in the swamp after the jump Continue reading →
Let me get this out of the way, because it’s important and, as I played the beta of Guild Wars 2, it was something I realized I’d nearly forgotten: Guild Wars 2 is a massively multiplayer online RPG.
That probably sounds obvious to a lot of people. I mean, it’s obvious to me on an intellectual level. But after being continually disappointed by MMOs, and fondly recalling the few that do things differently — DC Universe Online, Rift, the original Guild Wars — I think I piled too many expectations onto Guild Wars 2. So as I was playing, and as I sank into that comfortable groove, I started to smell something familiar: ennui.
Guild Wars 2, for all the cool stuff it does, will not change your opinion on MMOs. It’s very much a part of the genre. It is not the Second Coming of MMOs. It is not even the Reformation; a lot of things I like in Guild Wars 2, I’ve seen in other MMOs. It is, however, an epiphany. What I saw while playing over the last few days was a very good game, easily more polished than many MMOs at launch, and full of exciting content, bold design decisions, and beautiful artwork. It does things differently enough, smart enough, and gorgeous enough that the occasional whiff of ennui doesn’t make me any less enthusiastic about playing when it’s released.
After the jump, you’ve never seen a quest log quite like this Continue reading →
This week’s wallet threat level is pretty relaxed. The array of threats includes an Alan Wake game on Xbox Live Arcade, the new Syndicate shooter from EA, some kind of interactive anime thing from Capcom called Asura’s Wrath, and a Metal Gear Solid for the Nintendo DS. Also, Sony wants you to buy another PSP.
But if you’re up for an indie fantasy game, I heartily recommend Conquest of Elysium 3.
In a fight over Tracy Flick, who would win in a contest between Bane and Captain Kirk? McG’s latest romp, This Means War, explores that very issue. On a more grave note, the 3×3 of our favorite uses of dead bodies starts at the 43-minute mark.
Next week: The Secret World of Arriety
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PvP! It’s a thing. A thing some people are surprisingly passionate about; before my guild chose our server, there was some hot debate on whether we should go Player versus Player or Player versus Environment. Eventually the fear of being constantly killed and corpse camped in open world PvP was too valid an argument, and we decided PvE.
But just because we aren’t throwing down with the other side all the time doesn’t mean we’re deprived of killing us some Imps. This is war, man! Republic (or as I like to say to annoy everyone, Rebellion) versus Empire! Good versus Evil! Freedom versus Oppression! And it’s awesome, when it isn’t being terrible!
After the jump, the high highs and low lows of SWTOR PvP Continue reading →
The Senator faction is one of Conquest of Elysium’s weirdest factions. Because in a game full of crazy imaginative fantasy races with unique gameplay mechanics, the vanilla humans are the weirdos. This faction is basically Ancient Rome, but with occasional Greek revelers and Gandalfy wizards thrown in for good measure. To offset their plainness, they get a hearty bonus to gold income and trade capacity. Trade is a way to buy or sell your other resources. Got extra iron? Sell it with trade! Need more iron for your heavy units? Buy it with trade!
The Senator leader is — I hope you guessed it — a senator. This unit is good for not much of anything. He is awful in battle. His fist does one (1) point of damage. He has no special abilities. He cannot summon anything, gather anything, or cast any spells. He can’t even orate. As far as I can tell, he’s supposed to stay at home and eats grapes. Considering how many games I lose because I get my last commander killed in battle, the senator could be single most useful unit when it comes to not losing the game.
So why am I fighting the AI faction’s senator in battle?
After the jump, it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s whether the AI loses first Continue reading →
That little gear in the middle there, between the two bigger gears? I shot that out of my head. Or rather my helmet. My gear hat. Cog hat? Whatever. It sprang fully formed from my head either way and wedged as you see it, forcing the larger gears to turn and raise the wall over to the right.
InterKinetic. It makes to lull you to sleep with its rocking-cradle tick-tock feel and lullaby music, and then it gives you a gear hat. Add gear hat to the list of things in LBP I want to have in real life, along with fire hat. Go ahead and take cupcake hat off the list. I’m sick of cupcakes already. But then I’m a pie man.
2K Games announces an expansion for Civilization V that sells you more than just a few new factions. Those are there too, but the notable additions in Gods & Kings are new systems for religion and espionage. Both of these were conspicuously absent in Civilization V. One of them I really missed.
The new religion system will feature upgradeable bonuses as your religion progresses. It looks like yet another tech tree, which is the last thing Civilization V needs. Hopefully, the Civilization IV model of religion as an out-of-control viral effect will remain intact.
Then there’s espionage, which was a terrible addition to Civilization IV for how it felt like it was built by someone who didn’t understand what made Civilization IV great. But since not understanding what made Civilization IV great seems to be a core value of Civlization V, an espionage system probably isn’t going to detract from Civilization V very much.
But what makes me cautiously optimistic about the new espionage is the basic model of placing spies around the map to perform specific tasks. I’ve been playing a lot of Crusader Kings II recently, where your council members are tokens you can put on the board for special effects. For instance, your steward can increase tax income, speed construction, or boost technology in a province. Creative Assembly’s games have used a similar system with agents. These units are dropped around the board, independent of marching armies. There’s a very boardgame feel to this concept: I put this piece here and it has this effect. My hope is that the upcoming espionage system in Civilization V feels similar.
Gods & Kings will be released in “late spring”.
The High Cultists are basically the Cthulhu faction in Conquest of Elysium. They gather sacrifices from human settlements and spawn freaky hybrid soldiers from wells in coastal towns. They can summon powerful horrors that wreak havoc, hopefully in the direction of hostile enemies. You can’t really tell a horror what to do. To paraphrase Woody Allen, the horror wants what the horror wants.
High Cultist cultists have access to a spell called Soul Slay. It’s a pretty simple spell. It overrides all but the most powerful magic resistance, ignores a unit’s armor value, and paralyzes its target. It also does 1-999 points of damage (pictured!), which makes the armor negation and paralysis pretty much irrelevant. Given that a typical general has 10 hit points and a giant has maybe 125 hit points, you can safely assume Soul Slay will kill anything it hits.
So it’s pretty much game over for any faction going up against a few cultists with Soul Slay, right?
After the jump, spells in this game are out of control. Literally! Continue reading →
There is no game quite like Twisted Metal. Except, of course, for games already called Twisted Metal. This superfast, superdeep, superskill-based series has been dormant for ten years for a reason: if people want to play deathmatches, they tend to pick up a shooter in which dudes run around shooting each other. But the Twisted Metals are shooters in which cars — or “cars”, given the loose approximation of driving — zip around like greased lightning while they’re shooting each other. Well, trying to shoot each other. It’s never a given that you can keep your sights lined up on your target. If you thought Quake was too slow, Twisted Metal is the shooter for you.
Is there an audience for a game like this? For an odd turbodeathmatch game with no meaningful singleplayer content, a needlessly steep learning curve, questionable online integration, and the sort of launch woes that Sony should have figured out how to avoid by now? These connectivity issues will be ironed out eventually, but in a game as niche as Twisted Metal, the most effective way to prevent a community from forming is to botch the launch. I don’t have much faith that Twisted Metal will have any sort of online presence in a month beyond a handful of dedicated players who are too good for you. As I said, Twisted Metal is oh-so-skill-based, with a mandatory unlocking system to boot.
So why bother? I’ll tell you, after the jump. Continue reading →
