You know the early stages of a new game, when you’re trundling along, hoping that it won’t do something wrong and reveal that it is, in fact, a bad game? You’re basically muttering to yourself, over and over, pleasedon’tstartsucking, pleasedon’tstartsucking, pleasedon’tstartsucking, pleasedon’tstartsucking. That’s where I am now with Van Helsing, an action RPG from a small studio with middling to big ideas, but since they’re still a small studio, the game only has one class instead of five. The class is a Van Helsing with his feisty ghost wench as a sidekick. Her idle animation is basically struggling to keep herself in her, uh, whatever you call the top part of one of those old timey dresses.
Fortunately, it hasn’t started sucking yet. I’ve already been through about three or four things that could have sucked. And I felt like I was in good hands early on.
Fans of 2011’s Mortal Kombat will finally be able to play the fatal fighter on their Windows PCs in July! The Komplete Edition will come with all the previously released console DLC including Skarlet, Kenshi, Rain, and Freddy Krueger. All the “klassic” skins and fatalities will be added as well.
Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition for PC features dynamic gameplay including Tag Team, Challenge Tower and a full feature length story mode. Players choose from an extensive lineup of the game’s iconic warriors and challenge their friends in traditional 1 vs. 1 matches, or gamers can spectate battles and interact directly with Kombatants online during the King of the Hill mode. The game supports the Mortal Kombat Tournament Edition Fight Stick and delivers full controller capability. Players will also be able to access achievements and leaderboard stats.
The game was originally made by NetherRealm Studios, but the PC port is being developed by High Voltage Software who created The Conduit and Conduit 2.
Although I’m a sucker for the “just add zombies” approach to game design, I’m not sold on its viability for boardgaming. I know there are some co-op zombie games. But I’m over co-op boardgaming that doesn’t have some sort of traitor gimmick. There are probably even games that stick some poor sod with the role of zombiemaster. But I was convinced zombies aren’t a good subject for boardgaming.
And then I played Dawn of the Zeds and realized I was dead wrong. Victory Point Games has done a dead-on job of expressing zombie mythology, and they’ve furthermore done it in a solitaire game, so I don’t even have to press my friends into service.
After the jump, when there’s no more room in hell, the dead shall walk the tabletopContinue reading →
I show 13 hours on Steam’s “time played” entry for Metro Last Light. To some folks, this is short. To me, it’s exactly how long developer 4A needed to tell Artyom’s story. But to 4A, it’s not the whole story. Today, they announced four sets of DLC will be released over the summer, all available as part of a $15 season’s pass.
The Faction Pack and the Chronicles Pack will include new, original single player gameplay that expands on the Metro: Last Light universe and story. The Tower Pack will present a unique solo challenge to Metro veterans… The Developer Pack will give creative players some interesting tools with which to explore the world of Metro.
Artyom’s story may have been concluded in Metro: Last Light, but there are other characters with stories to tell, some familiar locations that fans of the Metro series wanted to revisit, and some new challenges that 4A wanted to explore.
Here’s hoping for a storyline featuring the Venice fisherman with the boat, the crazy hat, the cigarette, and the box of dynamite. I liked that guy. Plus, I owe him a blood debt.
Microsoft’s new Xbox One console will not differentiate between indie, arcade, or big-budget games. According to an Eurogamer interview with Phil Harrison, there will be no special channels for indie games on the new console.
Eurogamer: So no Xbox Live Arcade, no Xbox Live Indie Games – just games?
Phil Harrison: Just games, right. Search, recommendation, what your friends are playing, game DVR – these all go to helping you discover the games you want to play, so I think we solve fantastically some of the challenges that independent developers face, particularly around discovery and connecting their game to an audience, by some of the platform features we have in the machine itself.
Eurogamer: It does sound more elegant, but I think one of the functions of Xbox Live Arcade and the Indie Games channel was to give undue prominence to those things within the 360 ecosystem; for a game like Geometry Wars to be front and centre when actually, most of your install base would be more interested in Call of Duty day to day – isn’t that something you’re losing?
Phil Harrison: No, no, not at all. We don’t give that up – we don’t give up the ability to put a spotlight on the products that we think are going to be exciting to our user base, but in addition to that, what your friends are playing, what other people think is hot in your area, your country, your continent, will propagate up the most interesting and exciting games.
Additionally, ShackNews reports that self-published Arcade games will not be happening on the new console. In contrast, Sony’s PS4 will have a self-publishing program that will allow smaller developers to get their games on the system without going through a known publisher. The Nintendo Wii U already has a program running through their eShop.
The Xbox Live Indie Games and Arcade programs have been the targets of some well-deserved complaints amongst developers lately because of bureaucratic hoops, patch expenses, and discoverability issues in the Xbox menu. The issues have been egregious enough to make some studios swear off the service entirely opting for more friendly venues like Steam. The Xbox One appears to make the situation worse for smaller budget games.
Microsoft has a problem. I talked about this before. They seem to have a heck of a time controlling their messaging when it comes to their next-gen console.
The most repeated questions for gamers concerning the just revealed Xbox One have been fairly consistent. Can you play used games on the new console? Does the console require internet connectivity to function? Neither of these requirements were touched on in the livestreamed Xbox Reveal Event that ended this morning, so various members of the media asked the Microsoft representatives. Surprisingly, it seems the answers varied depending on who or when you asked.
Wired was told by Microsoft in a pre-event visit that the console would require a fee to play used games, but that the console would not require an online connection to play singleplayer games.
Microsoft vice president Phil Harrision confirmed to Kotaku that the console would require a fee to transfer a game license from one player to another, but he clarified that the Xbox One would need to connect to Microsoft’s servers at least once per day.
Kotaku: If I’m playing a single player game, do I have to be online at least once per hour or something like that? Or can I go weeks and weeks?
Harrison: I believe it’s 24 hours.
Kotaku: I’d have to connect online once every day.
Harrison: Correct.
A Microsoft representative emailed Polygon to refute Phil Harrison’s statements.
“While Phil discussed many potential scenarios around games on Xbox One, today we have only confirmed that we designed Xbox One to enable our customers to trade in and resell games at retail. There have been reports of a specific time period – those were discussions of potential scenarios, but we have not confirmed any details today, nor will we be.”
Finally, Phil Harrison talked to Eurogamer to try to reclarify what he meant. This time, Harrison said that the used game issue isn’t settled and the Xbox One does not require the internet to function… Sort of.
“Some bits of the system will work offline,” he said. “I think the key point to make is that Xbox One requires an internet connection, but it does not need to be connected all the time. We think that most of the biggest games on Xbox One and most of the games and experiences and services you want to use will be internet-connected.”
Microsoft’s own Q&A site is oddly unclear about the whole thing.
I don’t get paid to consult for Microsoft, but I’ll give them a freebie. They should probably get together and agree on basic responses to questions that will get asked. Questions that gamers have been asking for weeks. That would probably improve the stories they get out of the media when they launch a new console.
One of the most insidious formulas for a horror movie is to let you hang out for a while with people you get to know and like, and to then do terrible things to them. Wolf Creek and Black Water, for instance, are examples of horror movies in which nothing horrific happens for a long time and the movie is all the better for it.
The latest crop of bad horror movies — many of them found footage — gets this all wrong by forcing you to sit for a long time with unlikable characters played by bad actors. By the time anything horrible happens, you couldn’t care less. In Aftershock, mostly forgettable bad things happen to an unlikable bunch of snotty Chileans with a couple of foreigners sprinkled into the mix, including Eli Roth, who perfected bad things happening to bad characters to bad effect in his wretched Hostel series.
Roth didn’t direct Aftershock, but you’d never know considering what artless trash it is. It consists of a half hour of three dude hitting on chicks in nightclubs. Kill me now. Eventually, a low budget earthquake happens, a funicular crashes but they didn’t have the budget to show it, local hires playing escaped prisoners tastefully rape one of the actresses and burn Roth alive with CG fire, the heroine and a surprise bad guy flop around contentiously in a poorly lit cave, and then a really chintzy CG tsunami shows up for the final shot. Aftershock is ultimately like one of those cheaply made “bad weather” Sci Fi Channel movies, but with an R-rating made pointless by the fact that the director was clearly influenced by either Roth’s Hostel movies or the sorts of crass 70s exploitation horror that Dimension Films would never let him shoot.
Aftershock is available for video on demand. Not that you should care.
Now that the post-show glow has faded, we know a lot more about Microsoft’s new Xbox One console. We still don’t know the price or the exact launch date, but we can talk about which pre-show rumors turned out to be true and which were complete crap.
The Microsoft Xbox Reveal Event just ended and the new console is going to be called XBOX One. No laughing! It’s got a new Kinect sensor, a redesigned controller, and a revamp of Xbox Live. Stop laughing! It’s got a lot of TV features. I’d say 45 minutes of the presentation was various people telling the audience how awesome watching TV will be on the XBOX One. Seriously, you have to stop laughing.
For all you tech heads, the next-gen console has 8GB of RAM and 5 bajillion thingamajigs inside it, so you can go from gaming to a TV show (and vice versa) a lot quicker. Go from a movie to live TV to a game in seconds! You can control your console using universal gestures, like swooping your hands to get to the home screen. Your laughter is really distracting, by the way.
Steven Spielberg is apparently producing a Halo TV show. XBOX One and the NFL are partnering up for some kind of new transmedia way to watch football games. Okay, look. I’m not going to continue if you’re just going to laugh like a loon the whole time.
Is it always online? What’s the price? Are there any good games coming? Good questions that had no answers in the presentation.
Microsoft officially unveiled the Xbox One with a release date of “later this year” and a price of “uh, what?”. Nick has a more detailed breakdown above, but for my money, the only standout was a few glimpses of Infinity Ward’s upcoming Call of Duty: Ghost, in which you get a cool SEAL Team dog. Move over, Dead to Rights! You can watch the presentation at xbox.com, but I don’t necessarily recommend it unless you’re in the market for a voice-activated cable box.
Perfect World and Cryptic had to deal with a critical economic issue in the Neverwinter MMO over the weekend that allowed exploiters to make off with millions of Astral Diamonds. These diamonds function as the in-game currency for the game. Rather than allow the perpetrators to benefit from their ill-gotten gains and completely upend the economy, the developers chose to shut down the servers and reset time. Seven hours of server progress were turned back and rendered invalid.
Thanks in no small part to the efforts of our continually amazing Beta community, we were able to quickly identify the exploit and the perpetrators. Once identified, we took immediate action, calling in the entire development and publishing teams to lock down the Neverwinter OBT as we sought out a solution.
Rest assured, the issue has been corrected and we have taken appropriate action against all players who took advantage of the bug, including but not limited to enforcing permanent bans.
Sadly, the damage to the economy was done.
Rather than let the malicious efforts of a few unsavory players linger and continually impact the game’s economy and balance as we progress through these later stages of Open Beta, we have made the extremely difficult decision to rollback Neverwinter to a time shortly before the abuse and exploitation began.
It’s a drastic step, but as we saw with Diablo III, correcting a monetary exploit is paramount to any game that balances gameplay with its economy. An imbalance in the auction house can have a ripple effect throughout the game even if it’s not a free-to-play title. All it takes is an exploit that inflates pricing to ruin the balance.
Neverwinter is currently in beta and should officially launch later this year.
Microsoft is holding their Xbox event tomorrow at 10AM Pacfic time. The event venue (pictured) is in the Redmond, Washington campus of Microsoft. During a recent Major Nelson podcast, Microsoft’s interactive entertainment chief of staff Aaron Greenberg, confirmed that that the May 21st event would be “about revealing the next Xbox platform and our vision for the future of games.” For months, we’ve been hearing rumors about the console, internally codenamed Durango, that have set people buzzing.
Today is Victoria Day. No joke. It’s a holiday they celebrate in some countries. I’ve never heard of a Europa Universalis Day or Crusader Kings Day or Hearts of Iron Day. Just a Victoria Day. Fitting. Victoria is one of the most Important strategy games ever made.
After the jump, yeah, I just spelled important with a capital IContinue reading →
Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes is the add-on that makes the game that made Elemental better even better. That might sound convoluted. For good reason. But if you want meatier tactical combat and more character development in your Fallen Enchantress, Legendary Heroes will deliver. This is the strongest leg in the three-legged renaissance of fantasy strategy gaming consisting of Fallen Enchantress, Warlock, and Eador.
The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing is an action RPG from Neocore, the Hungarian developer who made the King Arthur RTS/RPGs. King Arthur featured some clever gameplay in what was mostly a Total War-a-like, so it’s entirely possible this Diablo-a-like might have a few tricks up its sleeve. For instance, this on-the-fly skill tweaking looks promising. Van Helsing is out this week for the PC, with an Xbox 360 version to follow later this year.
Donkey Kong Country Returns is ported to the Nintendo 3DS from the Wii. Resident Evil Revelations is ported from the 3DS to the Xbox 360 and WiiU. It looks a bit, well, chintzy on the 360, but it’s a good game. Here’s my review of the 3DS version which I presume will mostly apply to these latest gen versions. But you should probably keep in mind this was a far more relevant description of my experience with the game.
Ubisoft goes back to the basics — or at least the Old West — with Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, in which a cowboy shoots stuff. I don’t have any inside information on whether it’s any good, but I have a mental image of two interns in a back room making this game to fulfill Techland’s obligation to Ubisoft while everyone else was working on Dead Island stuff.
Activision is publishing a Fast and Furious branded racing game. Paul Walker isn’t in it. I bet you didn’t know there have already been a whole mess of Fast and Furious games. I hadn’t heard of a single one of them. Paul Walker wasn’t in those either. Quod erat demonstratum.
Denis Dyack posted the above video in response to a Kotaku article that accused Silicon Knights of mismanagement during the development of X-Men: Destiny. In the video, Dyack refutes the charge that Activision was kept in the dark on the budget expenditures and progress of the project. He does admit that “there were some mistakes made” but offers no explanation beyond that for the dire reviews of the game.
Dyack is currently working on Shadow of the Eternals with his new company, Precursor Games.
