Housing poses one of the most interesting challenges in the base game of Tropico 4. Initially, when money’s tight, most of the downtrodden citizens live in crime-ridden shacks that provide nothing but an incentive to rebel. Upgrading their living conditions is a critical goal, but one with options that provide an interesting series of trade-offs and choices. Do I stuff hordes of my ungrateful workers into cheap low-quality tenements that are just barely good enough to prevent them from shooting me? Do I build dozens of expensive lower occupancy but higher quality apartments? How about condos or mansions for the wealthy and upper-middle class residents, or some combination of these and several other choices?
The net result is often an island whose housing winds up looking pretty realistic, one where grindingly poor neighborhoods stare enviously at the good life that’s just a few unattainable streets away. Towards the end of scenarios where I’m flush with cash and feeling magnanimous, I’ll often demolish the cheaper stop-gap housing that I built to stave off revolution and replace it with higher quality dwellings while basking in the imaginary acclaim of my virtual subjects.
Sadly, the Modern Times expansion eliminates all of the base game’s housing challenges by introducing a single, massively overpowered structure.
After the jump: the only housing building you’ll ever need Continue reading →
The Assassins Creed games open with a hand-wringing disclaimer about how all world religions are equally valid and Ubisoft intends no offense based on anything it depicts. Which turns out to be pretty much nothing of consequence and, hey, look, you can climb this building! Action games keep you too preoccupied to think about being offended until they stop and intentionally offend you to make sure blogs talk about them. I think the last time I considered someone might actually be offended by an action game was when I found out several months after playing Prey that the lead character was supposed to have been Native American. Maybe some folks would object to the “native” class in multiplayer Call of Juarez bringing a bow to a gunfight. But no one plays that game, which raises the question, “If someone programs an ethnic stereotype on an empty server, will anyone hear it?”
After the jump, the games that can only offend people too smart to get offended Continue reading →
The Tropico series of city builders has always been one of my favorites. While it lacks the complexity of the Sim City titles or the accurate historical settings of classic Impressions games and Tilted Mill’s Children of the Nile, Tropico boasts a charm all its own. Its lighthearted approach to Cold War era banana republics and its silly personalities and scenarios disguise solid gameplay mechanics.
The recent Modern Times expansion propels Tropico from the Cold War into the War on Terror, exchanging the Communist Party and Che for the Tea Party and Rupert Murdoch. More importantly, it adds twenty six new buildings and ten edicts for would-be dictators to use and abuse on their populace. Today, I’m going to focus on those that change the fundamental basis of the game’s economy, food production and distribution.
After the jump: how you gonna keep ’em down on the biofarm? Continue reading →
Hey, look, Elder Sign: Omens gets an update, including new elder gods, new monsters, new heroes, bigger icons for those of us without iPads, and even some new rules. Basically, a whole mess of new playing pieces to flesh out an already great (deep breath) dice-driven, single-player, single-session, score-based Lovecraftian adventure.
Previously, you had to fight — ha, “fight”! — Azathoth. He was the game’s sole victory condition. Azathoth had a set number of spaces on the competing victory and failure tracks. But now you can set up an easier game by taking on Yig. He’s a sort of junior elder god. It’s like going up against an intern. His victory and failure tracks are shorter, and he isn’t accompanied by nearly as many monsters. Yig comes with the free update to the game, which also adds options to skip more quickly through transitions. Basically, the free update lets you make Elder Sign faster, easier, more of a lunchbreak game than it already was. How the strange eons fly!
But if you want the main event in Elder Sign: Omens — the Big C himself — you’re going to have to fork over three bucks. The add-on lets you take on Cthulhu, which starts out familiarly enough. You’re still faffing about the Arkham Museum, tackling adventures, risking bodily harm and insanity, grabbing cigarette cases, copies of the Nameless Cults, or Swords of Glory. You deal with the occasional cultist in the koi pond or Byakhee in the gift shop. Along the way, you’ll discover some cool new game mechanics. Maybe it’s not so easy to take a stab at a risky task. Maybe your inventory isn’t so safe anymore. Maybe the new monsters have a surprise in store. But even after all this, if you think Cthulhu can be arsed to show up at some rinky-dink college town in New England, you’ve got another thing coming.
So half way though the game — assuming you’ve made it that far — you board a ship called the Ultima Thule and hit the high seas. Now Elder Sign: Omens plays on a new map, with new adventures, and even new rules for what it takes to beat the game. You have to find three relics. You have to bank precious clues from your adventures. You still need to accumulate elder signs. And then…well, I don’t know what happens then because I keep failing. The Cthulhu campaign is the hardest difficulty level. It even unlocks a new investigator. I’ve already unlocked the new investigator you get for beating Azathoth, and like many of the investigators, I’m not convinced she’s useful, until suddenly the stars align and I’m convinced she’s the best one.
Fantasy Flight, a company with an enormous and diverse catalog of boardgames, is doing a heck of a job with their debut on the iPhone. Elder Sign: Omens was a smart choice for their first port, and they’re doing a great job supporting it with this latest free update and this bountiful $3 add-on.
Did you play The Witcher 2 last year? You should have. If you didn’t, or even if you did, this week you can play the Enhanced Edition on the PC or the Xbox 360. Because isn’t it time we all moved on from Mass Effect 3?
Also “new” this week is Deadliest Warrior: Ancient Combat, the suitably subtitled re-release of two previous Deadly Warrior games. The Playstation Vita gets Disgaea 3, which was already released for the PS3 and is the only option for Vita owners who want their portable Disgaea. Thanks to Sony’s approach to backwards compatibility (i.e. “What’s backwards compatibility?”), your UMDs of Disgea 2 are no good here. Trials Evolution for the 360 is the sequel to Trials HD, which doesn’t seem to have a lot of wiggle room for new gameplay. Isn’t the latest-gen Excite Bike market on the 360 tapped out since Trials HD and Joe Danger?
The really new thing this week is Botanicula (pictured), the new and squishier game from the folks who made Machinarium, an adventure game about robots.
You think you know the podcast. Actually, you pretty much do. This week we all love A Cabin in the Woods. Then we get to serious cussing for our 3×3 of favorite uses of profanity in a movie. It starts at the 43-minute mark if you want to skip Cabin in the Woods spoilers.
Next week: Contraband
Podcast (movies): Play in new window | Download
Subscribe:
So you’ve paid $100 for a Mad Catz Pro Circuit Controller for your Xbox 360 when you could have bought a regular controller for $50. Or just used the one that came with your 360 for free. What do you have to show for it?
For starters, your Pro Circuit Controller comes with a manpurse for stylish portability. You’ll be the talk of the system link party as you unzipper the side and take out — whoops, you’ve accidentally brought your beard trimmer and all its attachments. Next time, remember the Pro Circuit Controller manpurse has a small Major League Gaming logo on the side.
After the jump, enough about cases. What about the controller itself? Continue reading →
A couple of months ago LBP came up with a new invention called Attract-o-Gel, a substance that enables your sackboy to walk on walls and ceilings. I rejoiced, hoping this would mean less of those hanging-from-the-ceiling elements I so hate. R1Grip, swing, release-and-quickR1. R1Grip, swing, release-and-quickR1. Ugh. So tedious. Attract-o-Gel to the rescue!
Except, not. It’s too easy, and unfortunately too many community designers use it as a crutch. Because of that I came to despise it. But it was a new tool, and designers, they adapt.
Designers like EDOGAN1, the creator of Rapunzel’s Rodent Problems, for example. Yes the level is so dark in parts that you can barely see what you’re doing. Yes, Rapunzel looks creepy and talks too much. And yes, your sackboy’s main ally is a hair vermin that is freaking out the teachers and parents of elementary students everywhere. Just typing that is creating a phantom itch on my scalp. Ignore that and dial down your squick, because someone just figured out how to make Attract-o-Gel a worthy LBP tool.
That, and decent level music. Well done.
This week’s guest, Brian Kent, was a senior airman in the US Air Force. That is 100% true. He spent time in a secret underground bunker in Omaha. That is 50% true. He joins us to discuss the latest Bethesda silliness, if Dark Souls is suited for the PC, and whether we should be skeptical about Lost Planet 3. And while you might expect that Xenoblade Chronicles is at least one of our games of the week, you’ll never guess what we picked for the other 302 games of the week.
Podcast (games): Play in new window | Download
Subscribe:
After spending literally dozens upon dozens of hours to get to the culmination of this epic RPG, I am disappointed to discover that all the time I put into advancing my characters; all the personal feelings of investment; all the various story arcs; all these myriad worlds; all the sacrifice, betrayal, romance, and camaraderie; all the sophisticated themes about the nature of organic and synthetic life; all the hard work I did — yes, hard work, that I paid good money to buy a game to do — all came to this.
After the jump, an ending is a very delicate time Continue reading →
There’s a scene in Fight Club when Brad Pitt and Edward Norton are stealing human fat from a liposuction clinic. They have to get a plastic bag of the stuff over a fence with bobwire along the top. The plastic bag catches on the bobwire and rips open, spilling lumpy viscous goo everywhere. The Splatters, a game in which you fling lumpy viscous goo for points, is like that, but with a more candy colored sensibility.
The Splatters is available now on Xbox Live. Based on slogging through a few poorly explained levels, it’s as appealing as it sounds. Maybe The Splatters 2 can recall that scene in Dead Alive with the pus in the tapioca.
Pandemic is a supposedly co-operative board game in which players control asymmetrical pieces in an attempt to contain the spread of global epidemics. It’s a bit of territory control, a bit of card drawing, a bit of dice rolling, and a lot of themework. It’s also a pretty awful multiplayer game, since social interaction (i.e. having more than one player) adds absolutely nothing. I like to think of it as a single-player single-session adventure. And therefore I’d love to play it on my iPhone.
Fortunately, Operation Eradicate is an unofficial 1:1 port of Pandemic to the iPhone. Unfortunately, it is a textbook example of how not to make an iPhone game.
After the jump, who let the zombies out? Continue reading →
Like a bunch of dudes my age, Carl Sagan’s PBS series Cosmos had a huge effect on me as a kid. One of the things I remember was Sagan explaining how we can conceive of interdimensional travel, or wormholes, or the fourth dimension, or something like that. I don’t really remember what he was explaining so much as I remember the explanation. He suggested we imagine creatures who live on a flat plane — say a piece of paper — with no concept of elevation. Basically, a 2D life form. To get from one point on the paper to another, these creatures assume they have to cross that distance by moving in a straight line. But since we live in a 3D world, we know it’s possible to fold the piece of paper so that the points are right next to each other. We know how to eliminate the distance by folding space. And just as those creatures couldn’t conceive of folding a piece of paper, we can’t conceive of interdimensional travel.
As I explore the world of Fez, I keep thinking back to how that blew my mind as a kid.
After the jump, Fez’s unique hat trick Continue reading →
Okay, let’s address the elephant in the room first. Is Farsight Studio’s Pinball Arcade better than Zen Studio’s Pinball FX 2? No. Is it as good as Pinball FX 2? Not quite. Is it a must-have for pinball junkies? Absolutely.
After the jump, why would you want another pinball game? Continue reading →
As far as Ridge Racers go, you could do a whole lot worse than Ridge Racer Unbounded. This latest Ridge Racer from Namco finally does more than shunt you down narrow sterile roads with only a contrived drift mechanic where the gameplay should go. It instead takes a cue from actually good arcade racers. Which you should probably play instead.
After the jump, what’s in a name? Continue reading →
