Zen Studios announces Kickbeat for the Playstation Vita:
The game combines beat-matching mechanics with an acrobatic style of martial arts, turning every song into a raucous battle.
I just hope this isn’t eating into the time they should be spending on one of these. I still shake my head sadly to think what pinball tables I’m not playing because of Zen’s minigolf game.
To quote stylist Tyler Durden, you are not your fucking khakis. Neither are you your Socketed Silk Britches of the Bear. With that in mind, let’s try to look our best while we’re fighting the minions of Diablo, lord of whatever he’s lord of. I couldn’t hear when they explained that part because my ensemble was too loud.
After the jump, barbarian makeover Continue reading →
Starhawk’s strength and weakness are pretty much the same thing. On one hand, you could say it’s got an egalitarian approach to handing out hardware. Games like EA’s Battlefield series condition us to think of the pilots and tank drivers as a privileged few. There’s only so much heavy iron and high octane on a map, and to the camping victors go the spoils. Similarly with the good guns. You have to put in your term of service to unlock the actual killing guns instead of the ones that tap the other guy on the shoulder so he can turn around and shoot you with the killing gun he’s unlocked. This caste system helps players find their places in the world. It keeps things orderly. It channels the chaos.
After the jump, Starhawk will have none of that Continue reading →
Tentacle rape does not exist. It is a fantasy, like women wearing high heels in bed, hot chicks banging pizza delivery boys, condomless impersonal consequence-free sex, and orcs. Like many fantasies, tentacle rape will appeal to some adults. I don’t pretend to understand that particular kink, but as someone with his own kinks (Is it too much information to mention Sarah Palin here?), I’m not going to judge someone else’s fantasy.
Not all folks are that accommodating. For instance, Luke Plunkett at Kotaku and Brandon Sheffield at Insert Credit, both of whom are intelligent writers with lots of insight into and experience with the fantasy worlds of videogaming. According to circumstantial evidence, they were instrumental in getting Kickstarter to cancel the funding campaign for Tentacle Bento. Plunkett and Sheffield both objected to Kickstarter allowing the project, which is a tabletop card game with a tentacle rape theme.
After the jump, the writhing powerful clutches of moral outrage Continue reading →
This week’s wallet threat level is as low as it is mainly because Defender Chronicles II is so cheap and Mario Tennis is so specific. But they’re both quite good. Defender Chronicles II for the iPhone is a ridiculously generous and long-term investment in tower defense RPGing, even more generous and more long-term than the original. So one of the best tower defense games you can play on any platform just got better. Mario Tennis Open for the Nintendo 3DS is one of those games I like in spite of the Mario goofiness. It’s not just enthusiastic and colorful. It combines the slickness of Virtua Tennis with the finesse of the Top Spin series.
I find Dragon’s Dogma a real chore so far. Capcom has assembled a collection of bad choices, from ugly world building to awkward combat to a wretched party system to the very name. I haven’t played such a “what were they thinking?” game in a while.
Also out this week is Ghost Recon: Future Soldier.
We watch Battleship so you don’t have to. And then Kelly Wand administers a Liam Neeson synopsis takedown. This week’s 3×3, which starts at the 46-minute mark in case you want to avoid Battleship spoilers, is our choice of movies that triumph over silly stuff like Magneto’s hat in those X-Men movies.
Next week: Chernobyl Diaries
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The thing about Trials Evolution is that you can cheese your way through certain levels by stumbling past a checkpoint here and there. You feel yourself starting to lose control of the bike, you’re tipping over the handlebars after clearing a particularly difficult incline and you think you’re going to have to start over yet again. But wait! There’s the next checkpoint marker! You’re falling forward. Will you plant your rider’s face in the asphalt, or like a sprinter straining for the tape will you nose across the marker and turn it green before the crash indicator flashes? That’s not cheating. You take a fault and move on to the next stage. Not perfect, but legit. But sometimes…
The thing about Neosphere, this week’s Trials Evolution community track, is that it never let me cheese the checkpoints. Or rather, it didn’t let me feel okay about it. I’m thinking in particular about a checkpoint I call The Guillotine One. I crashed as I cleared that every single time because I just couldn’t finesse the throttle properly. The game, feeling sorry for me, let me continue as if I’d really cleared it, but deep down I knew I hadn’t. I’d cheesed it, and if a track is really good, you just won’t settle for cheesing it.
Neosphere was designed by DrittesAuge.
You know, Diablo III isn’t the only game in the world. But you’d never know that by listening to this week’s podcast.
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In case it wasn’t obvious, I’m pretty bowled over by Rebuild, a zombie apocalypse game recently ported from a web-based Flash game to an iPhone app. You can read my review of Rebuild here, and you can follow a game I’m playing in real time here. And now I’m bending developer Sarah Northway’s ear about the game’s history. She reveals connections to The Warriors, Day of the Triffids, and Faith No More; she tells you how close you came to having to play a tower defense game; and she reveals the life of an itinerant game developer.
Read the interview after the jump Continue reading →
To the unintiated, the above image just looks like a random hex party. But to folks who’ve played Neuroshima Hex, it looks like the turn from hell. Imagine trying to parse what’s going to happen in that turn.
Neuroshima Hex is a boardgame in which players take turns laying tiles representing post-apocalyptic armies. The tiles variously shoot, pin, cover, protect, enhance, and trump each other. At some point someone lays down a “go!” tile and then it all falls apart in methodically brutal and spectacular fashion. Well, as spectacular as a mathy but atmospheric tile-laying game can be.
The iPhone port of Neuroshima Hex is great stuff, except that it has a good AI. This is one of those games, like chess, that’s built for AI. AI that is better than you (me), even when it’s not very good. Neuroshima Hex is all about looking at patterns and anticipating how the pieces will interact over several successive moves. Since computers have an unfair advantage in that department, it’s too bad you can’t play Neuroshima Hex against your dumb friends on Gamecenter. Like me.
But all that changes soon. The developers at Big Daddy Creations just announced the long promised (free) multiplayer update has just been submitted to Apple! So if you’re dumber than me — surely there are a few of you out there — hit me up on Gamecenter and we’ll see whose mental capacity to look ahead is smallest.
I was one of those guys who played the Diabo III beta and decided — harumph — I liked Diablo II better. So I played a little Diablo II. I sulked for a bit. I resolved not to overly care about Diablo III.
Now that Diablo III is out, it turns out Blizzard was right and I was wrong.
After the jump, one of us really knows what they’re doing Continue reading →
I’m a baseball gamer, generally in it for the majestic flight path of a home run driven into the stands of increasingly photo-realistic polygonal stadiums, or the cortisol spike of protecting a one run lead in the ninth, trying to pin a pitching meter with nervous fingers. I mostly spend my time in the reflex-driven, console end of the baseball gaming pool, where the word “simulation” largely refers to the delicate negotiation between making user input meaningful while making sure players still play like their real-life counterparts.
So why am I writing about a baseball management sim, after the jump? Continue reading →
After Diablo III’s first twelve hours in the wild, I can safely say this online only experience is not your Battlechest’s Diablo! Think of this as the new Diablo. Diablo 2.0, if you will. It’s a whole other thing. And as such, you might need some help.
After the jump, I bring you the wisdom that can only come from first-hand experience Continue reading →
We’re running low on food. We need more people to man the walls during the occasional zombie attacks. But every time I send someone out for food, we have to spend a tense night hoping the undead loitering outside the walls don’t hit us tonight, hoping they’ll wait until after everyone gets back, hoping the scavengers will return with enough food to buy us a few more days to try to recruit another soldier. And we’ve just spotted a horde three days from our position. So all told, I have bigger problems than the low morale. Yeah, everyone’s unhappy. Tell me something I don’t know.
But morale doesn’t matter until it matters. Then it really matters. Tonight, tempers flared and a fight breaks out. Our most experienced soldier kills the scientist who was researching a cure. At least the food will last a little longer with one less mouth to feed. But in the morning, with a horde only two days out, it will be the beginning of the end. This zombie apocalypse isn’t going to end well. Maybe Rebuild, a deliciously bleak, gratifyingly intricate, and surprisingly story-driven zombie apocalypse strategy game, should have a less optimistic name.
After the jump, they’re coming to get you, [insert name here] Continue reading →
You have to come to Warlock on its own terms rather than holding against it that it looks like Civ V. This isn’t an epic strategy game in the traditional sense of the genre, where you build farms on plains and mines on hills and watch the cities grow accordingly. You will never set your tax rate, manage happiness, choose a government, or finesse diplomacy. Instead, Warlock is armies and spells and that’s pretty much it. It is a throwback to the sleeker fantasy wars of QQP, SSG, and, of course, SSI. If those letters don’t mean anything to you, this is going to be a new kind of strategy game.
After the jump, let’s do the monster mash Continue reading →
