Darkest Night is Victory Point Games’ take on an Arkham Horror style co-op game. Each player gets a character with unique abilities. He moves around the map trying to hold back the tide of baddies and retrieve the relics needed to defeat the main baddie. But instead of the Arkham Horror glut of tiny Ameritrash bits and the requisite hour-long set-up, you’re playing a more Euro-ish game with broader simpler rules that make ample room for interesting character interactions. And instead of fighting Cthulhu, you’re fighting a generic necromancer. I don’t even think he has a name. In the above screenshot, the four hero characters are poised to move out from the monastery on the left. The necromancer is the guy in the ruins on the right. Can you see him? He can be hard to distinguish from the heroes. “No, that’s not my character, that’s the necromancer” is something you’re liable to hear if someone asks you to, say, reach over and move his dude to the swamp.
I mostly don’t believe in modding boardgames. I’m not big on house rules. I tend to trust the developers. Sometimes I’ll make an exception.
Galactic Reign is shutting down. According to a Microsoft representative posting in the official forums, space strategy game developed by Slant Six will be taken off the Windows 8 and Windows Phone stores on August 15th. The servers will be turned off and no gameplay will be possible after December 31st since the game depends on the servers to calculate and synchronize battles. The power of the Cloud!
The forums will remain available until the end of the year, so that players can still communicate and exchange contacts. We will also continue support the Facebook and Twitter channels from now until server closure.
We are proud of the game we created and are thankful to our passionate community. We hope you have gotten many hours of enjoyment out Galactic Reign and will continue to do so until the end of this year.
Developer Slant Six appears to have closed down as well, but there has been no official confirmation. Slant Six has been incommunicado since their “temporary” layoffs in April.
See that? That’s a screenshot of one of the most amazing things I ever saw in wargaming: snow in 1941. As I pointed out a while back, that’s more of an observation about what computers could do for wargames back in 1981 than doubt about the weather in Russia. So I was glad the third bullet point in Shenandoah’s press release for their newly announced game, Drive on Moscow, proclaimed “a changing map based on weather conditions.”
The video above features Microsoft’s Major Nelson explaining the Xbox One’s new controller and touting the innovations in it. It’s important to PC gamers as well as Xbox fans because the new hardware will likely become the PC’s standard controller when it hits store shelves. Microsoft told CVG that they are working on software to make the Xbox One controller work seamlessly on PC and backwards compatible with older games.
“We know people want to use the Xbox One controller on their PC, and we do too – we expect to have the functionality available in 2014.”
The Xbox 360 controller has been the default choice on PC for a few years now. Putting software in Windows that automatically detected and configured the Xbox 360 wired controller once you plugged it in was probably the greatest thing they did for PC gaming.
As Kotaku reports, the designers and engineers in the Xbox Accessories department experiment with hundreds of ideas. Miniature speakers, a tiny screen, touchpads, even a special smell dispersal unit, were tried and rejected. What they ended with is a controller that hopefully improves on the 360’s flaws, but doesn’t try to fix what wasn’t broken.
Dragon Commander depresses me because I don’t like it. I desperately want to like it. It deserves to be liked. It begs to be liked. It should be liked. It has an endearing and deliriously loopy playfulness, like a dog chasing its tail. Here is a videogame that refuses to adhere to any established genre, giving it an unhinged quality you won’t find in better games. There’s a reason no one is jamming real time strategy games into RPGs into turn-based boardgames into card games into action games where you fly a dragon around. And that reason is because it probably doesn’t work. You can tell by playing Dragon Commander. Which I really wished I liked.
American Express is teaming up with Riot Games to offer a League of Legends themed debit card. According to the New York Times, the prepaid American Express cards will be available for purchase on Wednesday. Stefan Happ, general manager for online and mobile at American Express in the US, said the card is part of their strategy to reach a traditionally less affluent, but still actively purchasing online audience.
Users receive 1,000 points when they sign up for the card and an additional 1,000 points after loading $20 onto the card. Additional points can be earned for the first 10 purchases made with the card, and 10,000 points are awarded the first time a card is linked to a direct deposit account.
Additional points can be earned for every dollar spent after that. The card requires no credit check, activation fee or minimum balance. Instead, like most prepaid cards, it is loaded with a cardholder’s own money and used in lieu of cash to make purchases.
Riot Games revealed that they are talking with other blue-chip companies for additional sponsorship opportunities to help defray the costs associated with bringing the game to a wider audience.
It’s not the first time a credit card company has reached out to the videogaming demographic. Visa offers a World of Warcraft credit card that offers points for purchases that can be exchanged for game time.
While rummaging through the closet of my parents’ house back in 1995, I came across this boardgame. I want to play it. Unfortunately, it says 2-6 players and no one is home. Where is everyone? Where is my sister? And what’s with the the elliptical references to time travel, sci-fi, insanity, and dark family secrets? What is Steve Gaynor, the writer of the Minerva’s Den DLC for Bioshock 2, setting me up for in Gone Home, a darkly atmospheric first person exploration game developed by a small team in Portland and available later this week?
After a few weeks that were no real threat to your wallet, it’s the week of August 12. Which is no week of August 19, but it’s close.
If you liked Payday, you need — yes, need — Payday 2. Developer Overkill really lived up to their name with this one. Unfortunately, I’m not going to sink much time into such a deeply progression-based game when my progress is just going to be wiped at release. So after sampling a press build, I’m poised to pounce as soon as the game goes live tomorrow. Or tonight. What time is it?
Unfortunately, there’s one problem. That problem is Europa Universalis 4, also out this week. Paradox’s strategy games have been getting exponentially better in terms of design smarts — Victoria and Crusader Kings are nothing short of revolutionary, and their sequels are better in every way — and also in terms of interface, AI, and quality control. I can’t wait to sink some serious time into this fourth version of their magnum opus series. But there’s one problem. That problem is Payday 2.
Also, there’s another problem. Occult Chronicles is Vic Davis’ fiendishly clever and fiendishly fiendish strategy game about exploring a haunted house. After a beta period of letting players bang on it while he does his usual fine-tuning, Davis releases the final version this week.
Also this week Craig Hubbard, the man from Monolith who arguably invented Kate Archer (pictured, because she’s awesome) in the No One Lives Forever series, releases an early access version of his new studio’s game, Betrayer. It’s just an alpha, but given its pedigree and how absolutely weird it is to play a black-and-white shooter about zombie conquistadors, it’s a viable wallet threat for anyone who doesn’t want to wait until the game is done.
Valve’s The International Dota 2 Championship ended on Sunday night with Alliance beating Na’Vi in a 5-game match-up to take the winner’s spot. There’s a video of the winning match, if you want to set aside an hour to watch it. The commentary is full of stuff like “multiple rax” and “push on the ancient.” Our resident MOBA expert, Jason McMaster, will need to translate it for me between his League of Legends games. In the meanwhile, I guess the summary from the Dota 2 team will have to do.
Game 5? It’s too soon to put into words maybe. In a Tournament filled with great games, it was the greatest game we have ever seen. Not one single action by one team went uncountered by the other. It was a slug fest of team fights.
So there you go. For winning the greatest game, Alliance will take home a $1.4 million winner’s prize, while the second place team will get $632K. The prize money increased from Valve’s initial $1.6 million to over $2.8 million via crowd-funding from Dota 2 players. I need to start learning this game if I want to snag next year’s money!
Neill Blomkamp’s dystopian Matt Damoner, Elysium, divides this week’s podcast. And then the 3×3 on dead pets really brings the room down at the 1:08 mark.
“Did Napoleon Dynamite do the artwork for this game?” my friend asked as I was explaining Rise of the Zombies, a tabletop co-op zombie survival game. The developer, Dan Verssen, is known mostly for a dogfighting card game called Down in Flames and a solitaire game about air strikes in Vietnam called Phantom Leader. I’m currently addicted to Phantom Leader. There are other versions of Phantom Leader involving Hornets, Warthogs, and U-boats. You can even play it on the iPad. Don’t get me started or we’ll be here all day. Verssen isn’t known for lavish production values. I didn’t even need to use the word “lavish” in that last sentence.
“I think this is supposed to be a liger,” my friend mused, studying one of the zombie cards.
He has a point. Rise of the Zombies, a card game with a tiny smattering of chits, doesn’t have much, uh, visual punch. I hate to ding the artwork for such an obviously modest project, but there’s no style to these sketches. There’s no color. Literally, and figuratively. And who picked this wretched font? As near I can tell, the zombie herd is actually a zombie hero.
As a design, Rise of the Zombies doesn’t seem very well thought out. The interface, as it were, is a sometimes incoherent sprawl with little thought for how to relate the cards to each other. The manual recommends that if players want to fight each other, they should make it dramatic. Like a movie. Which is one of the dopiest things I’ve ever read in a rule book, which should instead contain rules. But what Rise of the Zombies does right is the stuff that really counts.
After the jump, no one gets left behind except the guy who made the Napoleon Dynamite crack.Continue reading →
Early on in Ni No Kuni, a JRPG for the Playstation 3, wizard-in-training Oliver and his band of adventuring pals are tasked with completing a set of trials to prove they’re capable of tackling Shadar. Shadar is the Big Bad keeping the world in a perpetual state of brokenheartedness. Seeing how Oliver is the only person willing to take on Shadar, it seems odd that to make him jump through hoops, but this is how wizards have always been evaluated. The Sages aren’t about to let all-encompassing evil get in the way of procedure.
After the jump, find out how wizarding trials break my brain.Continue reading →
A lot of the changes in Legendary Heroes are the stuff of solid patchwork. Lots of rebalancing, tuning, interface improvements, and supposed improvements to the AI. I say supposed, because I still get the sense that the AI players don’t quite understand the importance of grabbing land and keeping a strong army together. But they play by the rules and there’s plenty of challenge to be had, unlike many other strategy games with AI shortcomings.
But like solid patchwork, a lot of the changes in Legendary Heroes mean there’s no way I would play Fallen Enchantress without them. Legendary Heroes makes Fallen Enchantress the game it’s wanted to be all along.
Microsoft’s Xbox One will allow digital game sharing with the Home Gold program. Marc Whitten, Chief Product Officer, posted the announcement that clarifies game sharing and the Home Gold system. Digital games and media purchased on your Xbox One can be played by anyone who signs in on your console with their gamertag. An “unlimited” number of people can create accounts on your Home console and benefit from your Gold membership while they use your hardware, including multiplayer gaming. Additionally, the accounts will remain separate for recommendations and friends lists.
With Xbox One everyone in your home has a personalized account, which will enable powerful and personal experiences, and that’s one of the reasons why we wanted to create Home Gold. It means that your account and your gamertag are truly yours. You don’t have to share your gamertag for multiplayer gaming with others in your home, or see recommendations for your kid’s cartoons next to the recommended first-person shooter for you. It also means that you can introduce new games and enjoy multiplayer with friends while they are at your house. Last but not least, it also means that when you buy one Xbox Live Gold membership, multiple people can enjoy the best benefits of Xbox Live Gold on your Xbox One at no additional charge.
On the Xbox 360, multiple people in a household can share digital games on a console, but must purchase separate Gold subscriptions for multiplayer gaming. Microsoft used to offer a Gold Family Pack but this program was discontinued in March.
In the world of special editions, Saints Row IV just hit level 9,000. There’s only one of the Super Dangerous Wad Wad Edition, exclusive to GAME, so act fast before some other spoiled trust fund party baby snaps it up. At only $1 million, it’s a bargain to someone who drinks Dom with every meal and owns a golden yacht.
