Archive for November, 2012
When Sony Online converted Vanguard to free-to-play, I assumed it was being put out to pasture. Apparently not. Apparently someone somewhere was making new content. Because today, Vanguard gets a whole new area.
In this update, the Efreeti have returned and are imprisoning mortals beneath the fiery skies of Jhor Razkur, otherwise known as The City of Brass. Players are invited to join the fight against the Efreeti and their allies inside the City of Brass in this all-new adventure area.
The new City of Brass area can be accessed beyond the eastern walls of Khal. Users will face off against more than a dozen challenging named and boss mobs, earning valuable new loot. Daring souls who best these foes may summon forth The Keeper of Lesser Wishes, a 12-person encounter that is sure to test their strength.
Will someone take a quick break from Guild Wars 2, Rift, Lord of the Rings Online, or World of Warcraft to duck in there and let me know how it’s holding up? Is this new Orangetown in any way nifty? Because I played a bit of Vanguard about a year ago and was happy to discover that it’s just as good as I remembered it, considering it’s a mostly conventional MMO that emphasizes scope over detail. And you really can’t beat the absurdly detailed crafting and collectible card game diplomacy.
Funcom designer Tanya Short introduces the Albion Theatre, which will be open for business in the next update.
…you’ll be able to go inside, and put on whatever kind of show your heart desires! Our goal is to empower players. Open mic night? Sketch comedy shows? Extensive Shakespearean productions? Cabaret? Music video? It’s really an open toolbox — you and your friends can use the Albion to do whatever you want.
Intriguing. If you’ve played Lord of the Rings Online, maybe you’ve seen impromptu bards loitering around Bree, availing themselves of the game’s indepth music system. I was gobsmacked to hear a halfling plucking perfect Zeppelin out of a lute. Maybe this could be like that?
One group at a time can reserve the stage for an hour for a small fee. Anyone who joins that group at any time has free access to get on stage and do almost anything you can think of! Raise and lower the curtain, place out sets willy-nilly, change the backdrop, add visual effects (weather, filth, confetti, etc), adjust the lights, trigger sounds and music… and tadaaaa you can host whatever show comes to mind. We’ve also added the “stagesay” and “act” chat commands, which broadcast your screenplay across a broader radius than the usual “say” and “emote” commands.
We wanted to keep the Theatre as personal and player-driven as possible, with an eye to promotion. Any would-be directors or comedians can also organise their publicity, through the forums, chat, etc. We’ve combined the Theatre chat channels with the London ones for convenience, and we’re sure some of our fan radio stations (there are multiple!) might also help spread the news of the upcoming high-quality productions, and reviews of those past. Perhaps cabals will use their message of the day to track promising young screenwriters?
As much as I think it’s a fascinating idea, as much as I admire the thinking behind it, I can’t imagine Albion is going to be anything but entirely empty after a week or so.
To get a videogame movie made, game publishers traditionally shop their IPs around to the studios. Hey, Paramount, want to make a Daikatana movie? No? What about you, Fox? Columbia/Sony? Miramax? Microsoft went so far as to get a Halo script written first and then they allegedly got some dude in a Master Chief suit to schlepp it around. See how well that worked out? You can’t wow movie studios the same way you wow Gamespot reviewers.
But Ubisoft has a different idea. Go straight for the star power. They did that earlier this year by hitching Assassin’s Creed to Michael Fassbender’s production company and, by association, Michael Fassbender (who might not actually be in the movie, but never mind that).
This week, Ubisoft enlisted Tom Hardy (pictured) to spearhead a Splinter Cell movie. There’s no director yet, and no studio, and therefore no funding. But given Tom Hardy’s rising star, it’s a pretty safe assumption that the money will follow, and therefore a Splinter Cell movie is all but in the can, with Tom Hardy playing Michael Ironsides.
The first step in doing dungeons is wanting to do dungeons. Peruse the merchants lined up under the bright blue awning at Fort Marriner, trading for trophies you’ll earn in any given dungeon. Each merchant has armor relevant at the level when the dungeon unlocks. Furthermore, they also sell weapons and armor that you can only use at level 80, called exotics. This is a significant part of the endgame. Go ahead and check the stats. Furthermore, feel free to try on the armor (right click and then select “preview”). Pretty nifty, huh? Now try to tell me you don’t care about doing dungeons.
Read this week’s Guilded at Gamespy.
Rudy Basso is here to update us on Natural Selection 2 and the now free-to-play Star Wars Old Republic, one of which sounds pretty darn awesome. We also discuss whether you should skip Call of Duty: Black Ops II, which games you need to get when you pick up your Wii U, what the guys behind Fallen London are up to now (or should we say “down to now”?), and which downloadable Rock Band songs are going strong. Finally, no one will be seated during the thrilling finale, in which Tom Chick recants his Halo 4 review!
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You ever stop reading a book or watching a movie because you don’t want it to end? Me either. That’s another example of how books and movies aren’t like videogames. Because I’m at the ending of Assassin’s Creed III — I’m in the final “sequence”, which is roughly analogous to a chapter or episode — and I have no desire to find out what happens at the end.
After the jump, so far, yet so close Continue reading →
The Storm Legion add-on is now live for Rift. The most relevant part of the update for Rift dilettantes like me who haven’t hit the level cap is the new set of skills for each character class. But the most intriguing part of the update is Rift’s new player housing. Developer Trion takes the mostly traditional approach of giving players instances that everyone can ignore. Voila, player housing! Because, short of selling virtual real estate (imagine what a nightmare this boondoggle is going to be), what else are you doing to do?
But the instances in Storm Legion aren’t just places where you drop your trophies. They’re the sites of building sets where you can arrange components you’ve unlocked or crafted. Use them to modify the location or create your own structures, a la Minecraft. For instance, Trion proudly showed us someone who had made an entire Viking ship, and another player who had built a mountain with a jumping puzzle, and another player’s magical resort. Players can visit these instance to admire each other’s handiwork (pictured). Naturally, you can “like” your favorite creations, visit the highest ranked creations, or just sample them at random.
Is there anything relevant to gameplay in the housing? Of course not. This is no more meaningful than coloring your armor. And as someone who’s diligently collecting dyes and parceling them out among his characters in Guild Wars 2, I can completely understand the appeal.
Jennifer Lynch probably hates being called out as David Lynch’s daughter. And really, it’s not very fair to her, since she’s pretty much doing straight up horror thrillers. Her best movie is Surveillance, a violent and energetic mind trip with a cast that’s clearly having fun. I particularly like how Bill Pullman seems to be in the stage of his career when he couldn’t care less whether people take him seriously. But then Jennifer Lynch made a horrible snake woman movie in India called Hisss (sic, by the way). Hisss’ only claim to fame is that it keeps the Spider-Man reboot from being the most embarrassing movie Irrfan Khan has ever made.
Lynch’s latest movie is an occasionally interesting but mostly just gross movie in which Vincent D’Onofrio plays a serial killer who keeps the child of one of his victims to raise as his own. To be a serial killer himself, natch. Maybe you haven’t seen Dexter. But to Chained’s credit, it’s not sexying up the serial killing. D’Onofrio is slow, loathsome, cruel, and — gasp! — out of shape. As Chained develops the relationship between D’Onofrio and a strikingly odd-looking actor named Eamon Farren, it has a few weirdly effective moments. But these eventually fall away, someone gets stabbed, and any goodwill Chained might have earned is squandered in a disgusting and unnecessary finale.
There’s a German movie from last year called Michael about similar subject matter. But it’s even grosser in that it doesn’t have any opinion on what the psychopath its doing. It’s neither sympathetic nor judgmental, which is an odd way to tell a story about a pedophile who holds a child captive. I could appreciate the craft of actor Michael Fuith’s disconcerting performance (check him out in the excellent German zombie movie Rammbock for a Michael Fuith palate cleanser), but I couldn’t get past how dispassionately the movie Michael portrayed a reprehensible person’s reprehensible deeds. At least Chained knows it’s gross.
Chained is available on DVD.
Playing team deathmatch in Black Ops II on the night of its release, I rack up one kill and 27 deaths in one of my games. So that’s how it’s going to be, huh? Apparently, the kind of person playing online after a midnight release is considerably more, uh, committed to the gameplay. Or maybe my assault rifle of choice, the Type 25, just sucks.
Then I try the ironically named hardcore mode, which relies less on watching the minimap, since it doesn’t have a minimap. It furthermore relies less on the damage ratings of weapons, since all you have to do is basically brush someone with a slow velocity bullet to kill him. In my first game in hardcore mode, I get ten kills to eight deaths.
But by far the most reliable way to earn points has been farming UAVs. As soon as I hear the UAV announcement, I switch to the SMAW I carry on my back. One guided missile for an easy 75 points! And the best thing about UAVs is that they don’t shoot back.
The latest fall from grace for military personnel who collaborate with videogames is David Petraeus, who just resigned as director of the CIA and appears in Black Ops 2. The two incidents aren’t related. That we know of. In Black Ops 2’s 2025 storyline, he doesn’t look a day older than 60! Furthermore, his political career has recovered nicely from that whole mess about having an affair with his biographer, because he appears as the Secretary of Defense under a President named Bosworth. A female President. Kate? As anyone from California or Minnesota could tell you, anything is possible.
UPDATE: So President Bosworth is supposed to be Hillary Clinton, as is obvious from the voice actress and character model. But unlike Petraeus, she isn’t called out by name in Black Ops 2. Whatever Activision hoped to avoid by picking and choosing among real-world political figures — did anyone care that Kissinger and McFarlane were playable characters in the original Black Ops’ zombie mode? — is now all the more notable for the fortuitous timing of Petraeus’ resignation.
Just when you thought it was safe to dismiss James Bond movies… We’re so thrilled with Skyfall that we go on for an hour and seven minutes before getting to this week’s 3×3, at which point we add a shot or scene to the ends of movies.
Next week: Lincoln
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Years ago, every boardgame was a solitaire game. I know that because I played a lot of them solitaire. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there weren’t a lot of ways to play board wargames against someone else unless you wrote your moves on a piece of paper and put them in the mail, or went to a convention, or somehow knew someone in your area who wanted to sit around pushing cardboard counters back and forth for days at a time. When you add that to Soviet Communism, it was a pretty bleak world.
Commies defeated and gaming saved, after the jump Continue reading →
I’m technically not supposed to say this until midnight tonight, but I really like the latest installment in a certain long-running series of games, hence this week’s wallet threat.
Rift gets an add-on called Storm Legion that consists of a new continent, player housing, a new type of rift, and new skill trees for each class. I dropped into the game last week and was surprised at how spoiled I am by the visuals in Guild Wars 2. I didn’t remember Rift looking so, well, rudimentary. But it sure did run smoothly! And the character system is as effective as ever if you like to mix-and-match skills to come up with your own play styles.
The Sims 3 gets seasons. I was tempted to take a cheap shot and say that EA is selling each season separately, but I liked what they did with the Supernatural add-on. And I really appreciate when seasons figure prominently into games. Assassin’s Creed III and Bully, for instance.
Also new this week is Paper Mario for the Nintendo 3DS, which might be the most ironic game ever made.
If you’re not hip to Dominant Species, the superlative boardgame from GMT, you probably can’t tell what you’re looking at in that screenshot of the iPad version. Allow me to explain.
Carnivorous spiders have taken over the world, thriving in its oceans. They started out feeding on grubs, but as the impending ice age forced them out of their jungles and forests into the oceans inhabited by insects and amphibians, they adapted to eating meat. The spiders were so competitive they forced other species into lesser biomes. Even the mammals that were higher on the food chain and better suited to this world’s teeming oceans were forced into the desert. No one could compete with the ruthlessly effective meat-eating sea spiders!
Darwin will never explain this because his ancestors have been eaten. Game over, indeed.
After the jump, how did I get so many points? Continue reading →
I can’t get enough of this silly thing. And boy is Need for Speed: Most Wanted a silly thing. But as I play, I notice things that Criterion and Electronic Arts didn’t have to do. Cool things. Things that ultimately make a difference for me. Need for Speed: Most Wanted didn’t have to be this good.
But, after the jump, it is Continue reading →
