Warlock isn’t really a game about diplomacy any more than it’s a game about city building. There’s diplomacy in here, but like the city building, it sits in the back seat while you fling spells and command armies. City building is there as a support system for your armies. And diplomacy is there to determine against whom to direct your armies. Or to ignore and just direct your armies against everyone. Which is what I’m doing now. I’m at war with everyone.
However, none of them are being aggressive. Is that because the AI is too meek? Let’s see how it responds to an invasion. I’ve decided to pick on my closest neighbor. He’s a wizard named Rjakh, who I mainly think of as the pink wizard because he’s pink. How hard can it be to beat a pink wizard?
In a Civilization game, I would march units into his territory and lay siege to his city. If I brought enough units of the right mix, I’d prevail. That’s not how Warlock works. Because when you correctly do a one unit per hex game, the strategic level map is also the tactical playing field. That’s a whole other kind of war than marching stacks up to city walls and letting your unit mix take over.
This week offers three new games to help you kill time until May 15.
1) Starhawk is out for the PS3 this week. I predict another feather in Sony’s multiplayer cap. This mix of real time strategy, air and ground vehicle-based action, on-foot shootering, single-player campaign, and online multiplayer could be in the same league as Playstation exclusives like Mag and Killzone 3. I’ll have more to say about it once it’s gone live.
2) Turn-based strategy fans get Warlock: Master of the Arcane, hopefully with the day zero patch. I really like what I’ve seen in the pre-release version. It’s not quite Conquest of Elysium 3 in terms of gameplay, but not for lack of trying. And it’s certainly got the production value for those of you who couldn’t stomach Conquest’s spritely artwork.
3) Hey, look, you can play Minecraft on your Xbox 360! Which is pretty much the same Minecraft you already know and love. This console version is a lot friendlier to new players than the PC version. There is no guesswork with the crafting, thanks to extensive tooltips for inventory items and a helpful menu system in place of alt-tabbing to a wiki. While I certainly admire the game, I still can’t shake off a pervasive sense of pointlessness as I play. Where do I check my high score?
We mostly aren’t into the whole comic book thing, but we really liked The Avengers. Well, most of us did. Listen to reveal the secret identity of this week’s wet blanket! Or avoid spoilers by fast forwarding to the 42-minute mark for this week’s 3×3 of unanswered questions in movies.
In The Avengers, as Robert Downey Jr chews high-tech scenery on the control deck of the SHIELD helicarrier, he observes that someone is playing Galaga. It’s just a throwaway joke in a string of throwaway jokes. But the difference is that it’s not thrown away. It’s a setup for a visual gag that scores a place in the credits for Galaga creator Namco.
But is Galaga the right choice? If you want to include a gag about a young technician playing videogames in a high-tech control room, wouldn’t it be more appropriate to go with Team Fortress, Skyrim, Counter-Strike, or Modern Warfare? Just work your way down the Steam usage statistics until you get to the highest paying product placement. Or maybe you should just go with Farmville to ensure the greatest number of people in the audience gets the gag?
But like so many other things in The Avengers, this is a nod to boys of a certain age. The Tony Stark of the Iron Man movies and now The Avengers is the right age and exactly the right demographic to identify a Galaga screen. And the audience is exactly the right audience for this fond brief wink.
As for why some young technician on the deck of a helicarrier would set up an emulator to play a 30 year old arcade game…well, who are we to question what SHIELD employees do to entertain themselves? At least it’s work safe.
Awesomenauts is a mostly unimaginative re-tread of the all-too-familiar Defense of the Ancients gameplay. Pick a lane. Push with your creeps towards turrets. Maybe jungle a little. Kill the other team’s dudes for a leg up. Endure, endure, upgrade, endure, endure, upgrade. Once you get a few levels on the other team, push a little harder. Endure some more. Endure. Push. Upgrade? Nope, not just yet. Endure. Kill. Endure. Now upgrade. Win. Or lose. Like Ronimo’s actually awesome Swords and Soldiers, Awesomenauts is a compressed experience, so a game will typically take 20 minutes instead of 40 minutes. But beyond the fact that it’s a gleefully cartoony 2D sidescrolling game, Awesomenauts does little to distinguish itself from, say, Demigod or League of Legends.
It’s not that I’m over LBP, but for the next few weeks or so we’ll be tooling around in a new community, the RedLynx community that is designing tracks for the Xbox Live game Trials Evolution. This game is my current addiction and I was pleased to find that it somewhat mirrors LBP in allowing its community to tinker with creating tracks and racing them. My favorite thing about LBP is the way its design community is structured, and while Trials Evolution is not remotely close to that level of robustness and accessibility, it’s fresh and doesn’t involve burlap. Sometimes you need a break from burlap.
So we start with my first track suggestion, Bridge Race.
MMOs are fundamentally broken. Like the free-to-play model, they all too often put commercial demands in front of game design. Which is great if you’re a publisher. It’s not so great for those of us who play games. The good guys in the MMO sphere are few and far between: Guild Wars, Eve Online, and, uh, am I forgetting anyone?
So, anyway, Bethesda is finally making Elder Scrolls the MMO it hasn’t been for so long. Imagine Skyrim with a dozen players running in the opposite direction, another dozen players racing towards that dragon you’re trying to kill, instanced housing, everyone sporting his own Lydia, and a faction grinding bar where your title Thane of Whiterun would have been. And probably a subscription fee. Bethesda strikes me as arrogant enough to figure they could charge $15 a month.
After spending 120 gratifying hours in Xenoblade Chronicles, which offers almost everything you might want from an MMO without being an MMO, this is about as exciting a prospect as using Kinect to play Skyrim.
It’s a good time to be a fan of action-oriented tower defense games! While PC gamers finally get to enjoy the original Toy Soldiers on Steam, those of us playing the deliriously wonderful console-only sequel, Toy Soldiers: Cold War, get $10 of new DLC. For some odd reason, it’s broken into two separate $5 packages. Napalm and Evil Empire each include a three-mission campaign, a new mode for the survival missions on the old maps, a new versus map, and a new barrage attack that might come up when you kill one of the bonus targets and get a randomly determined special attack.
The new minigames are as disappointing as most of the old minigames. I can’t see playing either of them more than once to set a basic score. I mean, seriously, whack-a-mole, but with capitalist pigs? Similarly, the new survival modes are puzzling. Trauma mode just means that every time you place a turret, your base loses some health. It’s a pretty minor tweak. It’s more the sort of thing you’d see on an options screen than in a DLC package. Then there’s the commando mode, which means you’re just running around the map using a permanent supersoldier. These are the same guys you get as occasional power-ups. America gets the goofy Rambo and the Soviets get the goofy Dolph Lundgren. There’s no harm in having all of the action and none of the strategy, but it’s a bit like taking a great joke and drawing it out for too long. I can get that for free on Saturday Night Live.
The DLC campaigns each have three new missions, and there’s enough variety in the map layouts and included vehicles to set them apart from the main game’s missions. Since many of the Soviet defenses have their own unique tweaks that you could previously only enjoy in versus games, it’s nice to get more time with them in the Evil Empire campaign. However, Napalm’s Vietnam oriented maps are much livelier than the dreary Eastern block maps in Evil Empire. The new barrage attacks are probably the best thing in the DLC. The Soviet orbital beam is especially gratifying.
The biggest drawback for this $10 of DLC is that Toy Soldiers: Cold War was already such a full-featured package. Without folding any new units or defenses into the mix — this aspect of Toy Soldiers has been pretty much frozen since the original World War I setting — it just feels like new ways to play the same old game. But at least this same old game is one of the best action oriented tower defense games you can play.
According to this unsourced rumor, a Bayonetta sequel that was never announced was cancelled. Which can mean anything from someone throwing away a piece of concept art to an entire project scrapped and internal schedule reworked.
My initial reaction is the expected, “Aww, now I won’t get to play Bayonetta 2!” But it occurs to me that I’m pretty sure I don’t want Bayonetta 2. Some games are fine as self-contained entities, with no further elaboration needed, and no real need for improvements. Remember when God of War, Devil May Cry, and Mortal Kombat were fresh? That’s the same thrill I got discovering Bayonetta that I eventually lost with those other games as they trundled down their path of sequels and remakes and reboots. If any game deserves to transcend the usual franchise treatment, it’s Bayonetta. What’s wrong with a really good one-off from time to time?
Of course, time was I would have said the same thing about Bioshock. Then along came Bioshock 2 and now I’m giddy with anticipation for Bioshock Infinite.
As the old saying goes, one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic, and a billion is a serviceable opening move in Pandemic 2.5.
In this iPhone port of a webgame, you create a disease to infect people, which earns evolution points. You spend these points to add new features to your disease. Your goal is the infection and eventual annihilation of humanity, starting with patient zero. One down, about seven billion to go. This is a horror game as brutally dispassionate and coolly catastrophic as Defcon.
A Valley Without Wind developer Chris Park joins us to talk about Prototype 2, To the Moon, Age of Empires Online, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, and the rumored Xbox 360/Kinect subscription bundle. And, of course, A Valley Without Wind, a curious game of infinite exploration.
The premise of Area 407, yet another found footage movie, is that a bunch of actors who are really bad at improvisation do a lot of improvisation (i.e. screaming their dialogue) when their flight to LA crashes onto a secret government breeding ground for camera shy velociraptors. This movie is notable for having somehow secured the back half of a ruined airplane (pictured). That apparently ate into the budget that would have been spent on CG velociraptors.
I like how sky marshals are now a trope. According to Hollywood, every flight has a sky marshal, and therefore an easy way to introduce a gun. Just pick the most unlikely character on the airplane. That’s the sky marshal. In Bridesmaids, it was the nerdy guy sitting next to Melissa McCarthy. In Area 407, it’s the hot chick with the on-again/off-again Australian accent.
Area 407 is available on video on demand, but don’t bother. For a far better movie about plane crash survivors stalked by predators, check out The Grey or the first episode of Lost.
I’m okay with the robots and hovercrafts and whatnot. But a horseback riding sequence? Oh, please no. I’ve paid my dues in Uncharted, Assassin’s Creed, and Skyrim. With the possible exception of Red Dead Redemption, I have yet to meet a horseback riding sequence that wasn’t awful.
No word on whether Black Ops 2 will have a new zombie mode, but at least its got a zombie narrator. Brains!
UPDATE: In this video, Treyarch’s Mark Lamia says, “If you like zombies, you’re going to be really happy with what we’re doing with Black Ops 2. It’s our biggest most ambitious zombies ever.”
A huge honkin’ earth elemental is blocking my expansion to the north, where I want to grab a patch of holy ground and some ancient ruins. I need the holy ground to build a temple, which unlocks powerful religious units. But I’m not going to have enough gold to afford one of those guys for a long time. More immediately, I need the ancient ruins so I can build an excavation, which boosts my magical research. This is Warlock’s closest equivalent to technology in a Civilization game.
But to grab these two resources on the map — the holy ground and ancient ruins — I need to build a city that will be in striking range of an earth elemental who keeps flinging flaming boulders at my dudes. That’s not very neighborly.
I was pretty ambivalent about jumping into Age of Empires Online. I loved the first two games in the series, and I was on the fence about the third. But I had written off Age of Empires Online. Most of the press at launch was negative, tending to the word “grind”. If there’s one word to turn me off a game, it’s “grind”.
But then I actually played Age of Empires Online for about 16 hours. I’ve discovered four things to like.
