Archive for December, 2012
Look, I know Mercer Frey is the head of the Thieves Guild, but he has got to be kidding with this one. He wants me to investigate this dude in the city of Solitude. No big deal, right? Well, except for the fact I’m in Riften (where the Thieves Guild is located) and Solitude is all the way across the entire map. This is not some jaunty day trip to the corner store–this is a serious journey, one that should take me across three or four separate climates in Skyrim. This is some serious Lewis & Clark exploration, and it will require some actual planning and attention to detail.
After the jump, join the thieves guild, see the world Continue reading →
The hot topic this week is Steam in McMaster’s living room. And zombies on Steam. And then not on Steam. Also, we open our Christmas gifts early in case of the end of the world.
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The Drunken Huntsman in the city of Whiterun is one Twain’s favorite haunts in all of Skyrim. My character is a sneaky guy who kills lots of stuff with arrows, and the Huntsman is a great place to both replenish ammunition and also check for bow upgrades. Twain’s been shopping here since he was a mere level 2 rube visiting the big city to take the Ataxia cure at the temple.
That first visit, Elrindir the proprietor showed the young and impressionable Twain a mix of goods of fairly low quality. If I made no changes to the way Skyrim works, when I’d send him back in to the store at level 10, level 15, and level 20 he’d see incrementally more powerful things on offer to buy. While it’s certainly nice to be able to buy better and better gear as you advance in the game, it also illustrates a problem inherent with vanilla Skyrim.
After the jump, making crafting worthwhile Continue reading →
You might be able to tell by looking at the picture above that Twain — my character in Skyrim — is having something of a crisis of confidence right now. That’s him on the barstool, drowning his sorrows at the Vilemyr Inn, and I can’t blame him for his despair. While Steam tells me I’ve spent nearly 18 hours in Skyrim since I started keeping this diary, I can’t help but notice that Twain’s still wearing the same grungy furs he’s had since early on in the game. What’s worse, I could pull up a menu showing that despite all that in-game time the poor guy is still only level 11. If we were able to ask him, Twain would probably take a swig of Honingbrew Mead and express that he felt like he’d been through all this before.
After the jump, mod-induced deja vu syndrome Continue reading →
I need money. More money. I’ve got some money, but not enough for the really nice weapons. For instance, the dual pistols would be nice for the aesthetic appeal of flintlocks akimbo. The three-round magazine on the pepper pistol would be really sweet for setting up chainkills. Of course the most practical firearm would be the cute little pocket pistol, because Aveline can use it when she’s disguised as a slave or out on the town as a proper lady. I would love to be able to whip out that pistol when Aveline, dressed like a lady, starts getting grief from those thugs at the docks, or in the slums to the northeast. They don’t care about Aveline when she’s dressed as a slave, and they know better than to mess with her when she’s decked out in her assassin’s gear. But when I show up in a dress, they’re downright impertinent. A pocket pistol would be just the right response.
Otherwise, Aveline can only pack heat when she’s in her assassin outfit, and that attracts far too much attention for just getting around town. I suppose I could lower the assassin’s wanted level by paying off New Orleans magistrates, but that gets expensive. Once Aveline has knifed a few soldiers, the going rate for hush money is a few thousand dollars. I’m never going to get better weaponry if I keep paying corrupt politicians.
But what I really need the money for is a hook axe. It hits hard, it’s fast, and it can set up dramatic chain kills on up to four enemies. Chain kills are cinematic freedbies without any counterpart in the other Assassin’s Creed games. Once I’ve built up charges, I can pause the game, pick as many targets as Aveline’s weapon allows, and dispatch them in a flurry of dramatically presented automatic kills. With a hook axe, I’ll be a melee powerhouse. And this is important, because the melee in Liberation isn’t quite the gimme that it is in Assassin’s Creed 3.
A hook axe costs 24,000 from the weapons shop. By the way, don’t buy anything expensive from the wandering smugglers. They may talk a good game, but they’re only good when you need to buy something cheap in a hurry. They’re selling hook axes for 31,000. Fools. Do they know that I’ve made thousands of dollars dealing drugs in Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars? Do they think I have no business sense when it comes to open-world games played on handheld systems?
After the jump, they might be right. Continue reading →
I’m guessing that I smell like a wet dog. Worse than a wet dog, perhaps. It’s pouring in Riverwood, and the locals have had the good sense to get under shelter out of this rainstorm. Me, I’m out in it, dressed from head to toe in animal furs and probably smelling like the crotch of a quarterhorse. I can’t stay in from the weather today — if I don’t hunt, I don’t eat. If I don’t eat, my ability to stab things in the dark takes a big hit. It’s awfully hard to sneak up on people when my stomach is rumbling.
After the jump, a week in Riverwood Continue reading →
By now we’re at the fourth installment in this new War in the East series, and you’re probably wondering if I’m ever going to attack another hex, or if I’m going to just keep going to my closet and pulling out different games about Stalingrad. I assure you that both of those things are definitely going to happen. But I also promise that before this post is done, I will have attacked many hexes and shown you several actual in-game screenshots. But before that happens, I have to tell you a story. It’s kind of long, but at the end you’ll know a little more about what I’m trying to tell you. If you don’t like it, I promise to give you your money back.
After the jump, follow me down the board wargaming rabbit hole Continue reading →
By January of this past year, playing Skyrim had become a chore to me. I kept telling myself that when Bethesda released their mod tools–The Creation Kit–that things would somehow get better, that the shortcomings I’d begun to struggle with in the game might be fixed by the modding community that had done such excellent work with Oblivion and the Fallouts. It is entirely possible that I was totally right about that…but I never found out. Just ten days after the Creation Kit arrived in early February, I abandoned Skyrim. I’d hit the wall and was burnt out, but not so much that I didn’t vow to return at some future point in time.
Perhaps it was the cold snap that brought unseasonably cold nights to the East Coast this fall. Perhaps it was just absence making my gaming heart grow fonder. Whatever the reason, recently I started to feel that pull back to Tamriel’s far north province. November marked the anniversary of Skyrim’s release, and after a year of patches, DLC, and fan-made creations, I wondered what the state of the game was. I knew that if done right a fully-modded version of Bethesda’s game could be a brand new experience; a Director’s Cut of sorts. If I chose wisely and installed carefully maybe I could finally get out of Skyrim the experience I’d always wanted to have.
After the jump: Spoiled for choice. Continue reading →
It’s the first third of Peter Jackson’s prequel to The Lord of the Rings! Then it’s a 3×3 of scenes in tents, which makes for a much better 3×3 than you might think.
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When I first learned about Red Turn, I was surprised to hear the scenarios were designed by a member of the community: Pieter de Jong, better known to most wargamers as ComradeP. And as a new wargamer, I’m still intrigued by the history behind the games. Like art appreciation, it feeds back into my appreciation of the game. So I decided to go right to the source and ask Pieter a few questions.
After the jump, add some perspective to Red Turn. Continue reading →
Two years ago, the Assad regime in Syria assumed they could just clamp down on this Arab Spring nonsense until it went away. It didn’t go away. Instead, a long civil war happened. The death toll has been staggering, thanks to the Assad regime’s unfettered use of the military power it has cultivated over the years in Lebanon and against Israel. One of the most common criticisms leveled at the international community (well, Barack Obama) is the failure to impose a no-fly zone over the county, as it did during the Libyan civil war. Sometimes it’s convenient to ignore the difference between Libya and Syria to score political points.
But as the opposition hangs on and pushes back, sometimes city block by city block, they get closer to winning. Well, “winning”. If Egypt can’t even be an Egypt, what are Syria’s chances? But with every defection, with every sanction, with every captured tank, with every demonstration, Syria’s various rebels get closer to taking control of their country. And we mostly just watch through a Google News page.
After the jump, now we can watch through a videogame Continue reading →
I’m not sure that any of these games would have made my top ten, but I never got around to trying the Walking Dead series, Mark of the Ninja, Hitman: Absolution, Guardians of Middle Earth, Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, Natural Selection 2, Last Story, Tokyo Jungle, Yakuza: Dead Souls, or Spec Ops: The Line. So, mea culpa maxima.
But of the games I did play, here are my favorites for the year.
After the jump, the Qt3 trophies go to… Continue reading →
Red Turn feels like a late-war Eastern Front game. The distances and the size of the armies in each scenario are mind-boggling. The scenario pictured above, To The Dniester, has 816 steps between the two sides. I had to manage multiple fronts in many of the scenarios. Often the battles began with Soviet units stacked 4 or 5 deep against thin German lines. Playing the campaign feels like the multiyear ordeal that it describes. I spent as much time on Red Turn — if not more — than I did on Stalingrad Campaign. Officially, 2×2 Games calls this DLC. That merely embarrasses every other game developer that releases DLC. They’d probably release three challenge maps, a few new costumes, and charge 1600 Ruble Points for it. Well, it does sound pretty great when I put it like that.
During the hefty campaign in Red Turn, I picked up on two themes. One was the tipping point I noticed partway through the campaign. After that, the Soviet advance felt inevitable. Or was it? The other theme was how the Axis still had some punch left. Nimble veteran armored divisions impeded my plans at every turn. It took a lot of work to eject tough units from key positions.
After the jump, play along for a history lesson. Continue reading →
You’ve read enough of Tom Chick burbling on about the games of 2012. On this week’s podcast, it’s time for Jason McMaster to burble on about the games of 2012!
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Of all the years I’ve been playing videogames, 2012 was definitely one of them.
After the jump, some specifics Continue reading →
