New rule: designers who don’t bother to state explicitly that the level I’m about to play is a versus level should be smacked with a sackpuppet. I don’t know if such a thing as a sackpuppet even exists, but I’m willing to invent one for just this purpose. Jumping into a level and then being told, after the level loads, that it is really for more than one player drives me bonkers. That must have happened five or six times the last time I played, and given the length of my load times of late, it really is too much to take. You’re making me just want to ditch my PS3 controller in favor of grabbing my iPhone and checking my Ascension turns, something that will not take much to persuade me to do. You really want to do that?
LBP CUP 2011-William Tell Overture, does not have this problem. While it is indeed a race, you race against the clock so a versus tag is not necessary. What’s more, after you’ve galloped Fred Flintstone-like for awhile, the level becomes something totally other. Weird. Unexpected. Kind of wonderful. No tags needed for that. However I would love to be able to just bloop back, TiVo style, to where the shift occurred, because I can’t quite figure it. A quick replay would be nice.
What had me most excited about The River, ABC’s latest post-Lost paranormal activity, is the team behind it. One of the creators is Oren Peli, the director of Paranormal Activity, a horror movie every bit as effective, iconic, and ill-suited to a franchise as Blair Witch Project. The first two episodes of The River were directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, who put some creative visual styling into his House of Wax remake. But where he really got my attention was with Orphan, a splendid slice of latter-day Hitchcock with some really good actors thrown in for good measure. When Peli and Collet-Serra are pressed into service for TV, I want to be there.
But executive producer Steven Speilberg, fresh off executive producing Falling Skies and directing Tintin, should have been a red flag. Because The River is thoroughly TV in the worst sense of the word. It has no edge. It plays out with a soft safe made-for-TV feel, from the Lostly lush locale; to the ghost-of-the-week episodic format; to the convenient found-footage conceit recalling dopey reality TV ghost hunters; to the blandly telegenic and unremarkable cast. It’s all as menace-free as horror can be. Nice try killing the Jewish guy in the first episode. It’s so obvious that any character’s lifespan is proportionate to the number of lines he or she has.
Furthermore, it even fails as a haunted house fun ride. Peli uses tricks from Paranormal Activity, like fast forwarded film, sleeping people dragged out of bed, and bodies flung forcefully, usually at the camera. I expect footprints in flour next week. When the only memorable scare — and it’s not a scare so much as a mildly creepy shudder — is a monkey peering out from under a mask, I might as well just watch that scene from The Omen where baboons freak out on Lee Remick’s car.
Chris Gardiner spearheads the British invasion of the Qt3 Games Podcast, joining us from rainy Queen-loving England, where he helps make Echo Bazaar as good as it is. How good is it? Listen to find out! For our news of the week, we discuss eccentric game-loving millionaires, sleeping dogs, and unrealistic sci-fi. For games of the week, Jason fondly recounts his latest honeymoon, Tom insists that maps of America suck, and Chris changes his mind.
I haven’t played Space Marine, but if I do, I need to remember to bring a few extra bucks for multiplayer games. Because, as of today, here’s what three dollars will get me:
Unlock the deadly Power Sword weapon in multiplayer. Sheathed in a power field, it cuts through armor and flesh alike and features unique animations, combos and damage output.
I’m pretty sure I know what “unique damage output” means. THQ has all sorts of cosmetic DLC for Space Marine, but as near as I can tell, this is their first time selling something that gives the buyer an advantage in multiplayer.
Justin Gary, the founder of Gary Games and designer of Ascension, talks about his inspiration for the game, some of the changes introduced in the two expansions, and what’s next for fans of this breakout deck-building game and iPhone app. He’s also kind enough to humor Tom Chick’s observations on game balance, the mechana construct nerf in the latest expansion, and interpretive readings of the new card art. Which Mr. Gary doesn’t confirm, but neither does he deny. Victory!
The surprising thing about this list of inaccuracies in the latest Mass Effect novel, Mass Effect: Deception, isn’t that it’s so long. The surprising thing is that some of the inaccuracies are so egregious. And the even more surprising thing is that Bioware has conceded that some of them are actual mistakes. They’ve promised to address some of the issues in a later print run. It’s almost as if George Lucas admitted that Greedo didn’t shoot first.
I don’t have enough insight into the Mass Effect universe to understand some of these complaints, but then again I haven’t been contracted to write a Mass Effect novel. But I have to wonder why Bioware didn’t catch author William Deitz’ errors of krogan anatomy, batarian isolationism, quarian largesse, volus couture, and even the sexual predilection of at least one character. Bioware’s lore keepers should be at least as astute as the Amazon.com police.
Caylus is at once intricate and elegant, a nifty worker-placement game where players compete for limited resources to build a castle, develop a town, and progress through a unique scoring system. It’s challenging and rewarding. I guarantee you’ll be nonplussed your first few play-throughs. Somewhere around game three or four, it will click. And if you’re the kind of strategy game wonk who plays Caylus more than two times, it’ll probably find a place in your heart. As a boardgame, Caylus is a classic.
Somewhere around Final Fantasy XIII-2’s seventh or eighth final battle — there are so many of them, it’s hard to keep track — I had to save the game and quit playing for the afternoon. I was fighting some tag team coterie of dragons who seem to have flown in from another game. That happens a lot in JRPGs and anime, doesn’t it? Someone turns into a dragon for no reason other than dragons are cool. This guy in Final Fantasy XIII-2 was so cool he turned into a whole mess of dragons.
The January doldrums are officially over! Which is a good thing, since it’s February. The very Fable-esque Kingdoms of Amalur: The Reckoning (pictured) will meet all your glib action RPG needs. Gotham City Impostors will meet all your Team Fortress 2 wanna-be needs. And The Darkness II once again mixes tentacles and mafiosos, in case that’s what you’re looking for in a shooter.
If you’ve got a Nintendo 3DS and you’ve not averse to some traditionally absurd survival horror, then Resident Evil: Revelations gets a seal of approval from this guy. Of course, that same guy is also really psyched that Rock Band gets a couple of Bush songs this week, so what does he know?
We’re raiding! Or operating, I guess, as Star Wars: The Old Republic’s end game instances are called operations. So, we’re operating! And it’s great!
Every aspect of it is satisfying for me: the required teamwork, the pressure not to let the group down, the elation when the boss is reduced to zero health, the sense of camaraderie between my fellow operators and myself. I even enjoy when we wipe because it leads to group strategizing on how to do a better job. There’s only one thing that I truly hate about operating: the loot.
Back at the end of September, I got an e-mail from Alan Gerding with an unusual subject line. “An Ascension Marriage Proposal.” Intrigued, I opened it up and learned that Alan wanted to propose to his girlfriend, Crystol Shelton, using the game they love to play together–Ascension! We jumped at the opportunity, and quickly set to work making it happen.
See the results in the above video. You’d think he wouldn’t hit her with a Noxious Soul first. What a jerk.
This week Matt Nute joins us and explains how he might not be eligible to join the VFW, but he is kind of a conquistador. It’s complicated. We also talk JRPGs, which at least two people on the podcast are qualified to do.
One thing I’ve been clear about in playing community levels, one might say to the point of harping, is that I don’t care to go into a level that is a movie. I don’t want to sit through your sack-version of the Scream movies, or watch you remake Indiana Jones with LBP design tools and no real gameplay. I have better things to do with my time. Therefore, I tend to automatically avoid levels described as “cinematic” in the review notes, because more often than not this means I’ll be watching instead of playing. I don’t play games for watching. I have real movies for that.
The drawback here is that in avoiding “cinematic” as a descriptor I miss out on some levels that are not movie remakes, but play like your sackdude is in a movie. This week’s level, Hurricane Edna, is one of those. I took a chance on it because I remembered playing another level by its designer, Kelitorious, last year. It was called The Casino Robbery, and while it had pacing problems I liked it. Hurricane Edna is much leaner, but still very cinematic, in the best possible sense.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one. In Resident Evil: Insert Slightly Intriguing But Ultimately Irrelevant Word Here, a virus, a secret laboratory, a sneering villain, Jill Valentine, a ship, and bioterrorism walk into a videogame.
