One of the problems with dynamic environments like changing weather and time of day is that they’re dynamic. For instance, during one of the cutscenes in Xenoblade Chronicles, a character looking out over a landscape observes that it’s so peaceful. Meanwhile, she’s being pelted with rain. The wind whips the trees and grass into a frenzied dance. Thunder crashes overhead. Lightning tears through the sky, illuminating ominous shapes in the distance.
“It’s just the calm before the storm,” says Shulk, as perceptive as ever. You’d think a guy who could see into the future would make a better weather man.
This week will be a test whether updated versions of classics are as good as they were in the olden days. Legend of Grimrock is an old-school, tile-based, first-person dungeon crawl in the same vein as classics like Bard’s Tale or Eye of the Beholder. But with better graphics. Similarly, Naval War: Arctic Circle is a latter day version of Harpoon, the classic dispassionate wargame that modeled SIGINT-based C3 warfare. In other words, a real-time spreadsheet battle of lines and circles. But Naval War: Arctic Circle has 3D graphics that will supposedly let you watch things blow up. Will these games play today as well as their precedents played ten years ago? Find out at your wallet’s peril.
Nintendo’s Spirit Camera is a cute gimmick-based game that adds ghosts to what you see in the camera, kind of like that bit in Disney’s Haunted Mansion ride where you go past a mirror and see a ghost sitting in the car with you. Actually, you can probably strike the word game from that description. Skullgirls, the 2D fighting game which was supposed to be out last week, will be out this week instead. Tribes: Ascend, the free-to-play shooter/skiing sim, transitions from open beta to no-foolin’-we’re-actually-official.
Mass Effect 3, Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, and Uncharted 3 will all get DLC this week at the cost of free, free, and $10, respectively. Mass Effect 3 gets two new maps, as well as new characters, weapons, and consumables you can keep your fingers crossed for as you’re grinding for booster packs. Operation Raccoon City gets a new mission playable as the Spec Ops characters from multiplayer matches (i.e. the good guys). It will be followed over the coming weeks by additional levels — these won’t be free — that tell a new story for the Spec Ops team. Finally, Uncharted 3 gets four multiplayer maps.
Want to listen to a bunch of Americans of the non-Canadian variety gush enthusiastically about a hockey comedy starring Sean William Scott? Then this week’s Qt3 Movie Podcast is for you! If you want to skip any Goon spoilers, fast forward to the 41-minute mark for this week’s 3×3. We discuss jump scares that don’t cheat.
Jon Shafer, currently at Stardock and formerly of Firaxis, has a great article on his blog about why limits are good things. It also explains briefly why boats (pictured) are awesome.
Game design is the art of providing enjoyable frustration (credit to Andrew Meyer for that phrase) and the frustration part is something that often has to be tiptoed around or hidden from players. Most players think they’re just in this for the power fantasy of it all. Shafer gives a few examples of how limitations and scarcity create value. Read the article here.
If I’ve done my job correctly as a Xenoblade Evangelist and the proprietor of xenoblade.quartertothree.com, you should be sitting down to play Xenoblade Chronicles sometime soon. If so, I’m a bit envious. You can only discover how cool this game is for the first time once. Enjoy.
To help you enjoy it more, following are a few tips. Spoiler free, of course.
After the jump, the thing I wish I’d known when I started playingContinue reading →
I find myself gravitating more and more of late to levels that stretch beyond the usual jumping puzzles and platforms. Not that there’s anything wrong with platforming (can you say it like that?), of course, I’m just in a phase that calls for different challenges than bounce pads and grappling hooks usually provide. Unfortunately this can lead me into community levels that are beyond my ability.
Such is the case with Perfect Cell: V2 Remake, which feels like it’s making me use separate halves of my brain simultaneously. But I don’t care when a level is too hard, especially when I get the sense that I will eventually turn the corner. I’m almost there with this one, and I like that. So, you know what? Strike the word ‘unfortunately’ from that above paragraph. If I’m going to expect the level designers to stretch, I should expect the same of myself.
Electronic Arts, declared the worst company in the world by people who vote in online polls, has announced that the current ending of Mass Effect 3 is not the ending of Mass Effect 3.
Through additional cinematic sequences and epilogue scenes, the Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut will give fans seeking further clarity to the ending of Mass Effect 3 deeper insights into how their personal journey concludes. Coming this summer, the Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut will be available for download on the Xbox 360 videogame and entertainment system, PlayStation 3 computer entertainment system and PC for no extra charge.
Note that Electronic Arts insists they aren’t technically changing anything by pandering to fans seeking further clarity. Instead, it looks as if they’re just talking more slowly and using shorter words.
You can tell Political Machine 2012 is a fantasy game by the fact that California isn’t a soothing shade of deep blue. Also, what is Obama doing in Texas? Dude, get out of there. Get your ass to Mars. I mean, Florida. Same difference.
I love the Political Machine games for how they distill Presidential politics to a manageable and simple strategy game in which I can model myself as a candidate and beat Bruce Geryk. I don’t love the last one for how useless the AI was. But fool me once, we can’t get fooled again, etc., etc. The point being that I can’t very well not play a Political Machine game. Political Machine 2012 will be out this summer for $10.
This week we are joined by Rudy Basso, a member in good standing of the comedy troupe Cows Come Home and the author of Farming Vader, a series of short stories about Star Wars: Old Republic. We discuss Rock Band: Blitz, the upcoming facelift for Anarchy Online, the Leisure Suit Larry kickstarter, and then our picks for game of the week. We should warn you that Rudy does some weird jujitsu by picking a subscription based hybrid of computer game and tabletop RPG. Mass Effect 3 isn’t mentioned even once.
The latest trailer for Steel Battalion: Kinect sure does look nifty for a game I’ll never play (the Qt3 offices are Kinectless). But what an awful way to cut together game footage. It’s like those scenes in Lost when a hapless Desmond is yanked around in time. You’re looking down a quiet country road, but as soon as you fire your guns, you’re in a raging battle. Pop the hatch and now you’re in a narrow alleyway. Raise the binoculars and you’re raiding a depot. Shift into high speed and it’s suddenly night time. If the message is that Steel Battalion: Kinect is going to be confusing, mission accomplished!
My favorite part of the trailer is my own little inside joke. At one point, the narrator explains the escape hatch by saying, “We don’t want a repeat of last time”. I think I speak for all Steel Battalion fans when I say, no, we sure don’t.
There aren’t any mounts in Xenoblade Chronicles. That I know of. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if the game surprised me. But for a game with so much running around, you’d think there was a way to get there faster.
Sometimes kids make a swordfighting video and post it on YouTube. Maybe they do it with lightsabers. At best, it will have some good production values and decent fight choreography. And it’ll usually be over in about ten minutes. Good work, kids! You’ve obviously watched The Matrix several times! The Raid: Redemption, an Indonesian production working its way into US arthouse theaters, is cut from the same cloth. The difference is that it’s stretched out over ninety minutes. An exhausting, pointless, mostly samey ninety minutes.
The production values are pretty good considering it takes place almost entirely in a run-down tenement building. Oh, another hallway. Now some guy’s room. Then a hallway. Then another guy’s room. Then another hallway. Nakatomi Plaza this ain’t. The fight choreography and physical prowess on display are undeniably impressive. In fact, the first shot of our hero punching a punching bag is electric. The movie also deserves props for its gratuitous knife porn, which unflinchingly considers what happens when you introduce sharp things into fist fights. You might recall Jason Statham’s knife fight on a bus in one of the Transporter movies, which was toned down in the editing. It’s got nothing on The Raid. This movie even saves refrigerators from the punchline they’ve become since the last Indiana Jones movie!
But one of the first rules for any fight that’s going to last longer than ten minutes is that the audience has to care about who’s fighting. No such thing happens here. You could be charitable and say The Raid resembles early John Carpenter. But Carpenter put grit and even characters into his early movies. There was a rough-hewn affection for violence in movies like Assault on Precinct 13. Consider the labor of love that is the extended fight scene in They Live. But without characters or affection, with only stunt men and slick choreography, The Raid runs out of creative steam and turns into drawn-out repetitive scenes of mostly random men yelling and punching and kicking. All the early clever stuff with guns, knives, and refrigerators is forgotten in favor of a ridiculously long boss battle against a boss character with about 10,000 hit points. If I want that, I’ll go play something by Capcom.
Goodbye Chase D’arnaud. Be good Lastings Milledge. Take care Dirk Berkowitz (see you at Thanksgiving).
I’ve been traded. To the New York Mets. Well, the Triple-A Buffalo Bisons for now. On the Vita our home stadium sits amidst non-descript rural greenery, while on the Playstation 3 we’re in a stadium under a bridge with a view of the Empire State Building that’s either in Hoboken or Queens or maybe even geographically impossible.
