Archive for October, 2012
2K has announced the first DLC for XCOM.
In this new set of linked Council missions, gamers will meet an enigmatic Triad operative, divert an alien ship’s course, and do battle with the aliens in the skies over China. The Slingshot Content Pack includes three new maps tied to the Council missions, a new playable squad character with a unique story and voice and new character customization options. The release date and pricing of the Slingshot Content Pack will be announced soon.
Linked Council missions? Like a mini story arc on pre-set maps? Do you play it on its own, or does it just drop into your ongoing game? A new character for your squad? A character they’re making instead of me? It sounds to me like someone at 2K doesn’t get XCOM.
On a related note, you can now buy the option to customize your soldiers’ armor for $5. This was previously only available to folks who pre-ordered XCOM.
Overheard from a level 26 player in the multiplayer lobby of Forza Horizon, a game in which you spin a roulette wheel every time you level up, earning a random car or sum of money:
After level 25 it’s pointless to level up, other than to get free shit, because you don’t get an achievement for it.
I can’t really speak to that, as I haven’t even gotten the achievement for hitting level 10 yet. However, I’m shocked — shocked, I tell you! — that Forza Horizon won’t let me drive a Honda Fit or a Dodge Viper. I shall ragequit forthwith–
Wait, what’s this? A classic black and gold 1977 Trans Am Firebird, one of mankind’s greatest kitsch accomplishments? Forza Horizon may very well be the awesomest driving game ever conceived.
Mechanically, Eufloria is one of those quasi RTSs in which you scoot numbers around a bunch of nodes until you win. Except they’re not numbers. They’re weird bird things. When you look closely at Eufloria, it reveals the delicate sensibility of frail new life, whether its sperm fertilizing a veined translucent egg, a sapling pushing its way out of the soil, or new leaves budding from fractally generated branches. For its aesthetics and visual metaphors, Eufloria is unique and lovely. Even the music sounds like you’re getting a massage or contemplating the mysteries of the universe on peyote.
After the jump, like, wow, man, totally, but what about the game? Continue reading →
Blood of the Zombies is one of those “turn to page 24 to go left, turn to page 69 to go right” choose-your-own adventure books. It’s a recent volume in a series called Fighting Fantasy that’s been around since the 80s. And now it’s on the iPad, where it’s exactly as dated and tedious as you’d think it would be.
I don’t mind the concept of a choose-your-own adventure book. In fact, I love the idea of talented writers using prose to let you pick your way through an adventure. But Blood of the Zombies is missing the “talented writer” part of the equation.
Thanks to English’s gender neutral second person pronoun, you don’t know whether the lead character is a dude or a chick. I guess the idea is that you’re supposed to associate with this graduate student of the supernatural who travels Europe asking random bystanders if they’ve seen any vampires or werewolves. He or she is fortuitously kidnapped by a mad scientist who’s turning people into zombies. That’ll make quite the thesis.
While paging through text, you’ll occasionally roll a D6 to tick zombies off a list based on what weapon is in your inventory. You’ll forage through stuff, most of which is useless. You’ll eventually rescue a damsel in distress and meet a few named enemies. You’ll hit plenty of dead ends that you would have no way of anticipating, or you’ll just run out of stamina points and die. When this happens, hope that you didn’t use your single save point — it’s a bookmark! — at some point after you went down the fatal branch. If that’s the case, start over from the beginning.
A game that relies on graphics to create a world should have good visuals. Similarly, a game that relies on words to create a world should have good writing. But this is the sort of writing you’d normally skip. Blood of the Zombies is mostly prosaic descriptions of zombies, corridors, doors, furniture. Not a single memorable thing happens. It has no personality. It’s like a dungeon drawn on graph paper. As you read, creepy music plays. There are sound effects and an occasional drawing in the style of a comic book, looking vaguely out of place for how rarely they occur.
In the 80s, these choose-your-own-adventure books were novel and exciting, particularly on your way to discovering some of the well written Infocom adventures. But today, on an iPad, Blood of the Zombies is a tedious relic, not unlike playing Adventure on an Atari 2600 emulator. It might sound like a cool idea until you’re actually doing it. Some things are better off remembered instead of experienced.
1 star
iOS
The better part of my weekend was spent with the final version of Fallen Enchantress, mostly losing against the AI. Stardock has really outdone themselves this time. If you like turn-based strategy games, if you like fantasy, even if you like RPGs, don’t miss this one.
A Game of Dwarves is publisher Paradox’s version of Dwarf Fortress with a 3D tileset and, presumably, a under-friendlier interface. Dwarf Fortress for Dummies? That doesn’t sound like a bad idea for those of us who’ve been standing at the base of the Dwarf Fortress learning cliff, staring up and wondering how we could ever get up there.
Forza Horizon is a perfectly cromulent caRPG with a laidback open-world conceit where the no-frills campaign mode used to go. Skylanders Giants is this year’s iteration of Toys for Bob’s and Activision’s Spyro-themed collectible toy/videogame series (look for a review later this week and coverage on the next games podcast). Oh, look, Medal of Honor: Fightwarrior, the latest in Electronic Arts attempt to answer the call of duty.
We pretty much agree that Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths is no In Bruges. At the 37-minute mark, we transition to this week’s 3×3 of our favorite transformations.
Next week: Cloud Atlas
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Most MMOs punish you when you stop playing, even if it’s inadvertently. Not so with Guild Wars 2, a rare MMO that doesn’t mind if you want to take some time off to see other games. Go ahead and take a break. Guild Wars is cool with that.
Read about guilt-free downtime in this week’s Guilded.
So I’m letting Steam do it’s thing (i.e. download updates) when I notice the little envelope icon is green. A message. It’s a friend request. It’s a name from Breaking Bad, with some sort of clan taggery around the name, and an accompanying Bryan Cranston icon. I have no idea who it is and we don’t have any friends in common. But I’m not picky. This isn’t Xbox Live, where no one could possibly have more than 100 friends. So I accept the friend request. At which point I almost immediately hear that little bloop of an incoming chat message from my new friend.
After the jump, hey mister, how much for the hat? Continue reading →
We live in strange times. I never figured I’d be playing faithful recreations of X-Com and Carmageddon on an Apple system, much less a handheld Apple system. Along with an iPad version of X-Com called Aliens vs Humans, this iOS port of Carmageddon is a mind-blowingly faithful trip back into the 90s.
Carmageddon isn’t pretty any more (pictured). Was it every pretty? Did we ever think that looked good? But you’re not playing Carmageddon for the graphics. You’re playing it for the physics, and they hold up splendidly. Here is a game whose driving model was not only far too serious for its subject matter, but also before its time. It was as in tune with where the rubber meets the road as classics like Grand Prix: Legends. Not to mention where the steel meets the steel, or the steel meets the meat. Okay, so sprites of exploding body parts aren’t technically physics, but they feel like physics. I still have to smile at the bloody tire tracks after you drive over roadkill. What kind of sick genius thought to put that in a game? This is as good as it gets when it comes to powersliding into a football team, landing on a herd of cows, or trying to get around that barely possible loop-de-loop on the second map.
It even controls well on the iPad. Carmageddon was made for digital input from a keyboard, so tapping the controls on the touchscreen doesn’t feel awkward (you can set it to analog controls if you’d rather drive that way, but don’t let any purists see you playing that way). The instant replay system is entirely intact to let you admire the gore and physics. Just swipe the touchscreen during a race and you’re ready to rewind, slo-mo, or change the view of every despicable awesome thing you’ve done so far. I guess Halo’s replay features weren’t so unprecedented after all. You can even upload clips to YouTube from within the game. Witness Cowmageddon.
I have no recollection of how the original game progressed — I mainly just remember the moment-to-moment glee of splattering pedestrians — but this iOS version is a series of unlockable levels, a collection of unlockable cars, a garage full of car upgrades, and variable goals for each level. If that’s not enough, leaderboards, achievements, and challenges are all supported on Gamecenter. In other words, a whole lot of incentive to drive, smash, and splatter.
4 stars
iOS
Our guest this week is Ryan “Ohmwrecker”, formerly of Voodoo Extreme and currently of the Masked Gamer channel on Youtube. Naturally, we’ve all got a lot to say about XCOM. But that’s not all that’s happening this week. We’ve got a thing or two to say about the “more guts, more glory” Diablo III patch, the shear delight of Carmaggedon on the iPad, Sony’s latest overseas misadventures, why you’re not playing Mechwarrior Online right now, what makes Chivalry no mere War of the Roses, and how Dwarf Fortress is a gateway game that can lead to a nasty Towns habit.
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Time travel has not yet been invented. But thirty years from now, it will have been. This will lead to a series of events that would take me all day to diagram with straws, and even then, trying to understand it would fry your brain like an egg. Suffice to say, time travel will allow me to write the following XCOM review with the help of a leading authority on all things X-Com: myself.
After the jump, I came across time for you, X-Com Continue reading →
Cargo Commander is one of the worst titles to grace a great game since Renegade Ops. You wouldn’t know it by the title, but this wildly inventive, wildly enthusiastic, wildly randomized, and deeply deep space dungeon crawl belongs on your hard drive when it comes out in a few weeks. I’ll have more to say as the release date gets closer. But today, I want to warn you about the font.
After the jump, that’s no G Continue reading →
Lord of the Rings Online finally comes to Rohan this week. At this rate, the One True Ring will splashdown in the Crack of Doom sometime in 2017. Go Frodo, go!
007 Legends is a box of chocolates approach to celebrate fifty years of James Bond movies and 10 years of mostly forgettable Eurocom tie-ins. The Jewel of the Nile add-on for Serious Sam III adds Egyptian themed levels to a game that consists entirely of Egpytian themed levels. Furthermore, Serious Sam III itself comes to Xbox Live. The Legacy of Rome add-on for Crusader Kings II will get Byzantine on your ass. Dance Central 3, aka “the only reason to have a Kinect”, is out this week.
Finally, a Japanese RPG called Mugen Souls is out for the Playstation 3. It would have been out earlier, but publisher NIS had to edit out a sequence in which you grope women to level up. I am not making that up.
The Japanese version of the game contained a mini-game in which the player had to scrub/grope 2D depictions of female characters in a variety of bath scenes. The characters and surrounding audio/visual elements were extremely sexualized, and a number of the characters were depicted as potentially being pubescent or pre-pubescent. We decided to remove this content out of concern for the potential of receiving an AO rating from the ESRB, which would prevent us from releasing the game. In addition, as a company, we did not want NISA to release or be known for content that could be seen as sexualizing or objectifying children in this way. As this system contained no real story elements or gameplay (it was used to level up your characters, but the player’s inputs had no impact on the final stats) we felt it was not a substantial loss of content. Note that your characters will still level up as if you had viewed the scenes, so no gameplay functionality is lost.
We quite liked the #2 movie in America, Argo. One of us also saw the #1 movie in America, Taken 2. Listen to find out more about both! Then, at the 52-minute mark, we do a 3×3 of our favorite nicknames.
Next week: Seven Psychopaths
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In an RPG, gear is mostly for your paper doll on the inventory screen, even though it sometimes shows up on the character model, which is really just a 3D paper doll. Your gear’s personality is in the stats. Sure, maybe your pauldrons have spikes on them. That’s pretty cool, but I bet you’re more interested in the effect on your stamina or dexterity. Best case scenario, there’s some sort of particle effect on whatever sword you’re using.
Borderlands 2, an RPG, isn’t shy about numbers. Lord knows I spend enough time comparing the stats of pairs of guns. This one has the bigger magazine, but that one does a smidge more damage. A lot of playing Borderlands is the headshotting and careful shield management, so I don’t have to sweat the numbers too much.
After the jump, the numbers are just the beginning. Continue reading →
