Rockstar is going to give everyone half a million dollars in Grand Theft Auto V’s online mode. If you’ve battled through connection issues, disappearing characters, and general server mayhem trying to play in the online version of Los Santos, you’ll get a cool $500,000 added to your stash in the coming weeks. Bling! To quote a famous philosopher, “I’m rich, bitch!”
In order to keep the current worldwide in-game economy balanced, we will be providing this GTA$ to players via two deposits of $250,000. We will announce specific dates as soon as possible, but are currently hoping to be able to make the first deposit by the end of next week (after we’ve confirmed that issues causing game progress loss have been fixed) with the second installment to happen by the end of the month. For players who experienced cloud server errors, connection issues, and lost game progress and characters in these first days of GTA Online, we hope this GTA$ helps to facilitate a fresh start or makes your continued life in Los Santos and Blaine County extra sweet.
Maybe I’ll give up the criminal hustle and bustle and retire to a life of leisure? Long lazy days of golf and darts are in my future. I’ll sit in the park near the LifeInvader building and grumble about these young whippersnappers and their pants all falling down. Damn kids!
If God hadn’t created Christopher Walken, we would have to invent him. And did no one tell David Warner how awful the dialogue is? Because not only is he trying to sell it, he’s actually selling it. That’s an English actor for you: so much better than the material deserves!
Finally, Clive Owen asks the question on everyone’s mind back in 1996, when Privateer II was released. Spoilers, by the way.
Stardock Entertainment has launched a Kickstarter for a physical version of Dead Man’s Draw. The Kickstarter page explains that Stardock made a few prototype decks of Dead Man’s Draw in the studio to quickly test ideas before going live with the iOS version. People liked them enough that they decided to try making them for real.
Stardock Entertainment is a video game company, not a tabletop game manufacturer. We don’t have the history, the expertise, or the connections to get into that industry – nor do we really want to. At the same time, we have been having a blast playing the physical version of Dead Man’s Draw and want to share that opportunity with anyone who might be interested.
Tom’s review of Dead Man’s Draw on the iPad lauded the mechanics, but did point out the in-app purchases were annoying. There won’t be any virtual panhandling in this version of the game!
Chris: Jessica swims toward the middle of a placid little pond. The sky seems overcast, as if it could rain. The camera hovers just above her looking down, and we see it. Something’s slowly emerging from the depths. It comes into focus and we realize it’s a body. Jessica screams…and the clip suddenly cuts to a card with the lurid title of the movie, urging viewers to tune in after the late local news and the nightly 11 pm twin bill of MASH reruns.
When I was a child, that teaser clip was just about the scariest thing on TV, and for whatever reason Let’s Scare Jessica To Death seemed to air almost monthly on local stations that weren’t lucky enough to have Johnny Carson after the late news. The thing was ubiquitous, and fueled more than a few bad dreams. When I was old enough to stay up late to see it, I always missed it. When I was even older, I’d moved on to more recent films. Setting off on this tour seemed like the perfect time for me to finally see if there was anything to the film that gave me so many childhood nightmares.
After the jump, let’s scare Chris to death before he grows upContinue reading →
Path of Exile has been so gratifyingly playable for so long it’s easy to forget it’s not actually out yet. But then you read these notes for the official release, when Path of Exile drops the beta disclaimer and becomes a 1.0.
My favorite bullet point is a pair of new leagues. What other games might call modes are leagues in Path of Exile. You roll up a character specifically for that league, which has a self-contained balance and economy. The upcoming domination and nemesis leagues give the gameplay a new focus:
Domination: A variety of powerful Shrines now spawn throughout Wraeclast, surrounded by large groups of monsters that are influenced by their power. These monsters receive substantial bonuses or are protected by their shrine’s effects in some way. If you are able to tag the shrine, you receive these powers for a short time. It’s often very risky to run in and try to claim the shrine, but it is a gamble that can pay off. One of the new challenges is to tag each of the shrine types.
Nemesis: Nemesis is a Hardcore league (characters who die are converted to Standard characters). Rare monsters have one guaranteed mod from the Nemesis Pool, which makes the fight substantially harder. One of the challenges is to kill a rare with each of the Nemesis mods.
Among the other features are new enemies, new types of skill gems, guild support, new player vs player options (Path of Exile has player vs player?), and an unlockable Scion character class too complicated for anyone who hasn’t played through on normal difficulty.
Mark you calendars for 10am Pacific on Wednesday, October 23rd.
When I was in college, I lived in a fraternity house and one of the rules for living in the house was that you had to have your class schedule posted on your door should an emergency arise. This was before the time of cell phones and social networks. No there were not dinosaurs roaming the Earth at the time, as difficult as that may be to believe.
The first semester of my senior year I was student teaching, so my schedule had large blocks of open time in the evenings, time that was usually spent on my friend Ron’s computer playing games. I played so many games that someone in the house took to writing “DOOM” in every block of free time on my schedule. I would have been pissed if it weren’t so accurate. However, had they really wanted to nail down my activities, every block would have been filled with “Wing Commander: Privateer”.
Privateer was the first space sim I ever played. Hell, it was the first real space game I played, period. When I was a kid, I played my fair share of Defender, Star Wars and Space Invaders in the arcade as well as hours and hours of Space Quest. But Privateer was a whole new world. For a kid raised on Star Wars in the theater and Buck Rogers on TV, being able to pilot my own ship and look out of the cockpit, juking and diving as I tried to keep a pirate in my sights and blow him to space dust was like nothing I had ever played. Unfortunately, my inexperience with the genre translated into some dicey situations, namely when the alien probe chased me through multiple meteoroid laden systems after I stole their cool ass green gun. I’m not proud of this fact, but when I fled the aliens, I had to enlist the aid of a fraternity brother to toggle the afterburner as I worked on not smashing into asteroids. Thanks Micah, you were a real life saver.
It certainly didn’t hurt that Privateer let me get a taste of the Han Solo life. Winging into a space station, picking up materials, both legal and illegal, and making my way to another system to unload my wares was just as exciting to me as fighting off pirates or shooting Kilrathi. I may not have understood how the game tied into the Wing Commander universe and it would be a few more years before I played another space sim (Wing Commander IV, for the record) but Privateer got its hooks into me good, making me a bona fide fan of the genre.
The history of gaming is distinct, I think, from the history of gaming ideas. Gaming has been such a fragmented hobby that very often people weren’t aware of their peers’ ideas, leading to a lot of reinventing of the wheel. This struck me the other day when I was reading an excerpt from “Designing Modern Strategy Games” by George Phillies and Tom Vasel. Phillies is an old hand from the days of 1960s boardgaming, but what grabbed my attention was not about him, but about someone else. A guy named Sid Sackson. The excerpt below comes from that book. The “I” in the excerpt is Phillies.
Once upon a time, [I] had the good fortune to visit the greatest American board game designer, Sid Sackson, at his New York home. Sackson had by far the largest collection of traditional board games in the world. (He did not collect board wargames.) He estimated to me that he had 20,000 distinct titles. I can confirm that almost every room of his house was filled from floor to ceiling with games, including shelves in the middle of every room except the kitchen. He also had various game fragments, such as the cover of Race to the North Pole, a nineteenth-century game about a race to the North Pole via Montgolfier balloon. The collection was carefully organized, so that he could find whichever game he wanted almost immediately. Sackson’s game library was backed by a set of notebooks, so that when I described design elements of games from my board wargame collection, he rapidly inserted those details into a notebook and indexed them.
I have never heard of Sid Sackson, even though he wrote a column in the 1970s in Strategy & Tactics magazine, and has a Wikipedia page. That is almost certainly my loss. But if someone like me who plays (or at least knows about) a fair number of boardgames has never heard of the greatest American designer of such games, you can at least make an argument that someone should be doing a better job of spreading this information around. Oh, for those notebooks! So many designers were working in a vacuum, oblivious to all the game mechanics Sackson catalogued, reinventing wheels and warp drives.
But games do carry a flavor of their time, and picking up a box from thirty years ago can either dissuade you with the musty smell of outdated implementation, or entice you with the allure of imagination. There is a lot of imagination in games about spaceships. One particular one — The Wreck of the BSM Pandora by Jim Dunnigan and Redmond Simonsen — has about equal parts imagination and frustration. For the time, that was probably a big win. If only they’d had Sackson’s notebooks.
It’s the second time I’ve lost someone at the approach to Thistletop Delve. This is the next to last adventure in the game. Basically, the staging area before the final boss. Two weeks ago, I lost my sorceress to an ambush here. Spellcasters are powerful but frail. If they’re caught off guard, or if they can’t cycle their spells properly, it can get ugly. What’s more, a handful of d4s can be deceptively comforting for the higher minimum range you’ll roll. What nerd wouldn’t rather fight with 4d4 than 2d8? But when an ambush applies a -1 to all your rolls? Well, so much for my sorceress. Permadeath is a hell of a thing.
And just now, we had Gogmurt cornered in the Treacherous Caves. My monk has almost single-handedly cleared the Nettles and the Goblin Fortress. The monk was the only one still hearty enough to go after that little bastard goblin. The monk was primed to fight with a tight cycle of blessing cards to pack a real whallop. But I cut my deck management too close. The monk stumbled across explosive runes that he wasn’t smart enough to disarm. Well, so much for my monk. Did I mention that permadeath is a hell of a thing? Because it’s the driving force behind Pathfinder, an odd hybrid of deck-building game, tabletop RPG, and push-your-luck sadism.
Remember the kerfuffle when it was announced that the Xbox One would not be able to use any headsets made for the Xbox 360, at least until an official hardware adapter comes out? Not to be outdone, Sony’s PlayStation 4 will have the same issue. Game Informer is reporting that Bluetooth headsets that work with the PlayStation 3 will not work with the PS4.
If you have a Sony-branded PULSE gaming headset (or the elite edition of that product), you will need to wait for a system update coming in the future. It seems that those will not work at all at launch.
Any other headset that relies on bluetooth for chat will not work at all. If you have something that relies on USB for chat (like the Astro mixamps and Astro A50 wireless system), you’ll eventually be able to use those. An update will be coming in the future.
All is not lost! You will be able to use the DualShock 4’s integrated 3.5mm jack to listen to in-game audio. The PS4 also comes with an over-the-ear headset in the box, you just won’t be able to use your fancy Bluetooth unit to yell at your opponents.
The ship casts an unimpressive visage with its cobbled together skin of garbage cans, road signs, and miscellaneous debris, but that’s part of its charm. Thunder Road from The Explorers was more than just a vessel with which to sail the skies. It was a symbol of childlike wonder and adventure. Much like my real life attempts to create a spaceship from stuff laying around my house, the ending of the movie was a letdown, but the tone it hits never left me. The idea that a couple of kids around my age could put together a starship and break through the atmosphere was the fuel for many of my adventures in the woods surrounding my family home. Proof positive that looks can be deceiving.
Heroes of Newerth is offering a new announcer DLC that adds Samuel L. Jackson’s voice to the game. S2 Games posted a few samples of the voicepack and Jackson’s smooth delivery certainly adds something to the free-to-play MOBA, that’s for sure.
“Get those m@$%#%^&$ing newbs out of my m@$%#%^&$ing lane!”
Arma III’s first campaign episode will launch on October 31st. Bohemia Interactive announced that “Survive” the first of three free campaign DLC installments, will drop players into the war-torn Republic of Stratis. Jay Crowe, creative director on Arma III, described the setup by harkening back to the franchise’s roots.
“Our first campaign episode, ‘Survive’, introduces players to Ben Kerry, a regular soldier who’s part of a NATO peacekeeping mission in the Mediterranean. Following a couple of years of uneasy cease-fire, this US-led deployment is now in the process of a staged drawdown. The vacuum left by withdrawing forces is being rapidly filled by the opposing CSAT faction, creating the conditions for, one might say, a flashpoint.”
Along with the campaign scenarios, the DLC will add more vehicles, objects, and animations for use in the game’s editor. In my review of Arma III, I praised the strength of the editor and the tense gameplay that can occur, but I was disappointed by the lack of content and technical issues. Hopefully, Bohemia can shore up the game’s weaknesses with this free campaign DLC.
Rosemary sees that written on a page left out by the previous tenant, who has died. What does it mean? Why isn’t the line finished? This ominously incomplete thought isn’t just a bit of exposition about the old lady who used to live here and her local Satanic cult. It’s also a statement about pregnancy, when a woman’s body is taken over by another entity. I’ve never been pregnant, and neither has director Roman Polanski, or author Ira Levin. We can only imagine how frightening and confusing it might be. And wonderful, of course, but this is a horror movie.
You can’t very well have a list of top videogame spaceships without folks like us needing to offer a second opinion. So, in honor of Starship Week, Brandon Cackowski-Schnell, Tom Chick, and Nick Diamon fill some holes in official Quarter to Three list. We also discuss the birth pangs of Grand Theft Auto Online, we celebrate the revival of Bioshock 2, and we stage an intervention from Marvel Puzzle Quest.
“The catch is, a boat this big doesn’t exactly stop on a dime.”
The Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov has three things going for it that made me immediately fall in love with it the first time I saw 2010 in a theater in 1984. First, it is massive. I love a massive ship in space, just as I gravitate to the largest ships in water. There is something comforting about an aircraft carrier, or even a cruise ship. A couple years ago I was on a cruise ship out in the Atlantic and that sense of being out in the middle of the ocean was awe-inspiring. I would sit for hours out on the tiny little stateroom balcony and just stare out at the ocean and the horizon and the unfathomable expanse of what was before me and feel this amazing sense of relaxation slowly move in over me like a tide. Having been on a small boat out of sight of land, I have to say that bigger is better. It just feels like so much can go wrong out there on a small boat, and if it does…well, let’s just say my imagination was fertile as a young boy, and this was decades before I would see the movie Open Water. I had already seen Jaws.
