There’s another Transformers game out this week, if you’re into that sort of thing. This one apparently has robo-dinosaurs in it. Frankly, I’m surprised it’s taken this long for robo-dinosaurs to find their way into a Transformers game. There’s also a new iteration of Counter-Strike, called Global Operations, made by the folks who made Defense Grid. And Dark Souls is out for the PC. Please. Anyone who cares enough about Dark Souls bought a console system to play it on.
The real wallet threat this week is the pre-launch launch of Guild Wars 2 on Friday.
Paranorman, the latest animated movie from the folks who did the Coraline animation, is no Coraline. It’s also no Iron Giant, Brave, The Incredibles, Monster House, or Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. But at least it’s probably better than that thing with the owls. If you want to avoid Paranorman spoilers, skip ahead to the 45-minute mark. This week, we discuss movies that are about the wrong characters.
The original Darksiders started slowly. What’s more, it took its time unfurling bits of gameplay. You’d be near the end of the game and it would basically say, “Wait, hold on a sec, I’ve still got this nifty gimmick to show you! It’s right out of Portal, but I saved it up until now. Here!” That these gimmicks were borrowed wasn’t the slightest bit troubling. I’ll take a game that knows how to borrow over a game that thinks innovation is inherently better any day. Darksiders II also takes its time getting good, although the borrowing doesn’t seem so obvious this time. In fact, Darksiders II feels a lot more like its own creature.
However, unless you veer a little from the main storyline, Darksiders II may take longer than intended to get good. I was plowing through it, just hitting the waypoints for the main storyline, ignoring the side quests — that blacksmith can get his own dang hammer and who cares about all these collectibles? — and making pretty good time. I was mostly unimpressed, but content enough. But then I got sort of stuck and decided to explore. At which point I realized all those glowing blue stones I’d been seeing were for something I’d skipped because I didn’t talk to someone by the side of the road. And those tokens I could spend with Vulgrim are actually useful. And when you go out of your way to figure out how to reach that chest, you have a lot more treasure to feed your possessed weapons, which are suddenly a lot more useful. And it’s a pretty trivial matter to get enough money to learn all the combat moves. Darksiders II gets really good once you stop playing to finish it.
However, even if you do just follow the main storyline, even if you are just making a beeline to the end, Darksiders II gets good once you come to the Eternal Throne. If you’re not sold at this point, which is fairly early in the second world, you’re probably never going to be a Darksiders II fan. The basic concept of the Eternal Throne — which I’ll let you discover — has been done in a few different games, but this bit of Darksiders II is an epic fantasy set piece at its best. Leave it to the developers at Vigil Games to take their time wowing me.
It’s a busy week with McMaster’s new Kickstarter in effect. Go here to check out Cap’n Patch! Is it any coincidence that McMaster is making a game about a spider and is also terrorizing the Bug Princess 2 leaderboards? In other news, Secret World announces an upcoming celebrity appearance sure to excite any fan of the hit movie Armageddon, Orcs Must Die 2 is going to force you to stop using that same trap combo over and over again, and you don’t have to buy the new Payday: The Heist DLC to enjoy it. Plus some Sleeping Dogs, Darksiders II, Hybrid, Modern Warfare 3 chaos mode, and Jamestown.
Among the changes coming to Diablo III are completely revamped legendary items. Senior designer Andrew Chambers notes:
In many ways the Legendary items that we released with the game were just Rares with flavor text. You called us on it, and we’ve listened.
The updated legendary items will have new visuals and — more importantly — new custom effects. This will be part of the 1.0.4 update due by the end of August.
In case you’re considering going to hunt down a few legendaries now (i.e. scour the auction house for a good deal before these items get better), hold on a sec.
…these changes will only affect Legendary items that drop after the release of patch 1.0.4. This includes items that haven’t been identified yet (as items are rolled when they drop).
A lot of shmups on the iPad are ports that were good before they ever got to the iPad. For instance, the absurdly generous War Blade and the epically butt-numbing Battlesquadron One have both wended their way to the iPad from the Amiga. The Amiga, for pete’s sake! They don’t even make those anymore, and here we are, playing perfectly decent Amiga games on our iPads. Cave’s shmups — stand by for more on these, because you can’t talk about shumps without talking about Cave — all come from arcade machines. The iPad lets these games bust free from their origins.
But there’s something to be said for a game built specifically for a platform. The iPad isn’t just a place for ports. In some cases, the iPad is home. And in some cases, it shows.
Co-directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez have had a tough time following up on what made Blair Witch Project so good. Myrick has come closest with The Objective, which has a lot in common with Blair Witch Project. But Sanchez’ latest movies were the wretched Seventh Moon (Amy Smart gets chased by Chinese ghost people) and the uneven Altered (“Hey guys, look! I found an alien!”).
However, Sanchez’ has finally found firmer footing with Lovely Molly, a creepy horror movie that shares some important elements with Blair Witch Project. Lovely Molly flirts with the found footage concept, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. In fact, I can’t help but wonder if it’s a bit of an inside joke for Sanchez. Like Blair, this movie has a strong female lead. As Molly, a recovering heroin addict who may or may not be afflicted by supernatural goings on, Gretchen Lodge is 110% committed to what she’s doing. Is she a good actress? With this sort of absolute conviction, that’s beside the point. The movie wouldn’t have worked without Lodge’s focus, commitment, and fearlessness.
Lovely Molly can be pretty aimless. It takes its time. It meanders. It’s slow. But it will not deny you a payoff. As with Blair Witch Project, you’re in for a memorable finale. The problem with so many horror movies is that once everything is revealed, once the cards are on the table and the monster is out of the closet, it all falls apart. Any crappy horror movie can get mileage out of something lurking in the dark. But it’s a rare horror movie that can shine a light on its lurker and still be scary.
Most of the shootering I do on the PC these days is with friends on a LAN. Since we have a wide range of skill levels, our games of choice tend to be cooperative fare, like Payday: the Heist (the recent Wolfpack DLC is really good), The Darkness II, or Modern Warfare 2. As sleek, accessible, and energetic as Team Fortress 2 is, it never really fit the bill as a game for a small group of guys, some of whom are more FPS challenged than others.
All that changes tomorrow with Team Fortress’ co-op Mann vs. Machine mode. It looks like it’s time to finally reinstall.
Sleeping Dogs would have been quite the game four or five years ago, before Saints Row 3, Just Cause 2, Grand Theft Auto IV, Assassin’s Creed, or Arkham City. As it is, in 2012, it is a thunderless game that does things that have each been done better in at least two or three other games.
After the jump, finding a place in an open-world worldContinue reading →
Unfortunately, the Hong Kong action movie open-world game Sleeping Dogs is no real threat to your wallet. More specifics tomorrow. As for Darksiders II, after a few hours of play, I’m a bit worried about some of the choices developer Vigil Games has made. Can the first game’s novelty of “holy cats, it’s Zelda’s gameplay meets God of War’s gritty combat but with World of Warcraft’s graphics!” sustain itself for a second game with “also Diablo!” bolted on? But to be fair, the original Darksiders took a while to reveal its charms. More on Darksiders II later in the week.
So what’s the real potential wallet threat this week? A JRPG on the Wii.
I never would have thought a JRPG on the Wii would be a wallet threat, much less my favorite game of 2012 so far. But The Last Story, a JRPG on the Wii, comes out this week. This is the eagerly awaited North American localization of a game by Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi’s studio, Mistwalker. Mistwalker’s previous games, Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon, were mostly by-the-numbers old-school designs. But my understanding of The Last Story — I haven’t actually played it yet — is that it has a few tricks up its sleeve, and may very well be one of those weirdly unique RPGs a la Dragon’s Dogma.
It’s chaos on this week’s podcast, with no one agreeing as to whether Bourne Legacy holds up as a standalone movie, as a follow-up to the Damon Bournes, or even as a cautionary tale about the perils of genetically modified superspies. To avoid Bourne Legacy spoilers, skip to the 59-minute mark for this week’s 3×3. We discuss our favorite incompl
I’ve been playing a lot of iPad games recently that involve getting better scores. That means I spend a fair bit of time poking around the leaderboards, mainly to see how many of my friends’ scores I’ve beaten. But it’s also nice to see where I am on the global leaderboards. Am I in the top 50%? The top 30%? Dare I dream to one day reach the top 10%?
Except that something’s rotten in the state of Apple’s Gamecenter. Or could that guy whose name I keep seeing be that good?
This week we welcome Ian, a shmup expert who posts on the forum as Angrycoder. What’s the deal with these crazy Japanese games? Which ones are good? What makes them good? And is the iPad really the best platform for shmups, or is Tom just more misguided than usual? Also, some Zynga vs. EA, Steam’s latest move towards world domination, a little more Fallout: New Vegas, a bit of Transport Tycoon, a frank discussion of Aquaman videogames, and a two-word early review of Sleeping Dogs.
In the course of exploring shmups on the iPad, iFighter 2 is a game I found myself playing mostly because it was free. It seemed like one of those “how bad can it be?” games that is going to answer the question exactly as I expected, at which point I would promptly uninstall it and go play something worth the 99 cents it cost.
But because iFighter 2 is free, it has a money sink into which you can pour real world money. But unlike most free games into which you can pour real world money, there’s really no need to pour money into iFighter 2. If you’re content to play through the levels several times over — also called “trying to get a better score” and a cornerstone of any effective shmup — then iFighter 2 will inevitably dump its buyables into your lap. The F4F, then the P-38, then the B-25, with different sets of wingmen that fire in various directions. Later you can also buy powerups, which is probably where the iFighter 2 whales dump their cash and definitely where the pursuit of a high score loses any allure. In other words, the more you play, the better the stuff you get, and the higher your score. You’re basically buying your way or grinding your way to a higher score with bigger better planes, skill be damned.
This is both its strength and weakness. If you play shmups because you like to wrestle with cool scoring systems, there’s not much here for you. But if you play shmups for the mindlessness of dodging bullets and watching things blow up, this is a viable choice: crisp, lively, loud, busy, obligingly World War II. And if you want a shmup based on unlocking stuff so you’ll do better next time by no virtue of whether you’ve actually gotten better at the game, iFighter 2 is the shmup to beat.
I’ve only played Road to Enlightenment, the debut boardgame from Conquistador Games, once. So this isn’t so much a review as it’s the breathless enthusing of a kid who wants to get back in line to ride the rollercoaster again.
