Archive for 2013

The mondo update for SimCity has just gone live. Read the notes here.

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THQ closed up last year, and the licenses for top-tier games like Saints Row and Company of Heroes were snatched up immediately. The auction for THQ’s less in-demand properties ended with almost $7 million being raised. (Contrast this amount to the figure paid by Sega for just Company of Heroes – $26.6 million.) Licenses were divided into six lots for bidding according to court documents.

Lot 1: Darksiders
Lot 2: Red Faction
Lot 3: Homeworld
Lot 4: MX
Lot 5: Titan Quest, uDraw, Summoner, others
Lot 6: Supreme Commander, Worms, Costume Quest, others

The sales will be finalized through the next few days so information will trickle out from various sources.

First up, space battle fan favorite Homeworld has been purchased by Gearbox Software. Let’s hope that whatever they do is more like the quality of Borderlands 2 and less like Aliens: Colonial Marines. This sale is especially interesting as it was the target of an unsuccessful bid from fans using Kickstarter to bring a port to iOS.

Update: Nordic Games Licensing AB bought Darksiders, Red Faction, and Lots 5 and 6 for $4.9 million. Gearbox paid $1.35 million for Homeworld. Finally, 505 Games purchased the Drawn to Life license for $0.3 million.

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I partly admire Starseed Pilgrim, a colorful languid creation that might be the game design equivalent of poetry that doesn’t rhyme, for how it plays its cards close to the vest. It took me quite a while to figure out the first few steps, and that’s something you don’t see much in this age of hand holding and spoonfeeding. Instead of instructions, I got a snippet of verse that didn’t make a lick of sense until after I’d figured out what to do. It’s a rare game this willing to elude me for this long. Pacing is not on the agenda.

But it’s also a rare game that puts this much trial and error between me and progress. This color does that, that color does this, but not always in the direction I want, and now that block went to the wrong place and I think this sortie is all for naught, but I’m waiting to see if the pink blocks can grow fast enough, and hey, I didn’t know I could float, so maybe I should try a few more times. You will have no idea what this means if you haven’t played Starseed Pilgrim. You might have no idea what this means if you have played Starseed Pilgrim. And for all I know, it’s all about to be meaningless because Starseed Pilgrim is on the verge of doing something else entirely. So do I hunt down spoilers about how it all works, or will that just defeat the purpose? I had hoped to explore a lovely spare universe, but I think I’m in a game about exploring a set of rules instead.

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April Fools’ Day gags on the internet are normally tired affairs that elicit a groan rather than a chuckle, but every now and then something truly inspired happens that takes on a life of its own. Remember the Tauntaun sleeping bag? Once people saw that joke, all they could do was think about how cool it would be to actually sleep in one and the pranksters were forced to get it made to sell it to eager little Luke Skywalkers.

The best thing to come out of the most recent April Fools’ Day was Guild Wars 2’s Super Adventure Box event. This isn’t some blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gag. It’s a full event mission with new graphics and level design all made to resemble a goofball 16-bit game. The joke commerical was pretty aces too.

Guild Wars 2 is continuing the old-school love by releasing a free version of the side-scrolling game in the commerical! Rytlock’s Critter Rampage is a bite-sized chunk of silliness made real. Have at it!

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I, for one, am glad to have more Dead Island. So Dead Island: Riptide is hitting the sweet spot for me, especially since it’s pretty difficult early on. Yeah, sure, I’ve imported my high-level character from the original game but — surprise! — I got captured at the start and all my weapons got taken away. My captors also apparently took away all my memories of how to make homemade weapons to shock, fry, freeze, melt, fold, spindle, mutilate, and explode zombies. Which is fair enough. This is a sort of reboot in a new area of the same old tropical paradise gone wrong. I have no problem with a reboot. And this time I know to keep all the sticks of deodorant I find for when I remember how to made deodorant bombs.

Namco Bandai (Namco Bandai?) is publishing a Star Trek shooter made by Digital Extremes. I wouldn’t normally care (a Star Trek shooter?), but Digital Extremes’ last game was The Darkness II. Still, a Star Trek shooter? It doesn’t inspire confidence that the only name they could think up was Star Trek: The Video Game. Why couldn’t they take a cue from Monaco: What’s Yours is Mine, a game also out this week that looks like a combination of Pac-Man and a heist?

If you’re up for some serious strategy — I’m not real keen on the moniker 4X, but it fits here — Masters of the Broken World is this week’s fantasy flavor and StarDrive is this week’s sci-fi flavor. Lego City Undercover for the Nintendo DS is a miserably shrunken version of the excellent Wii game that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. Dragon’s Dogma gets some DLC. Finally, the third and final installment of Assassin’s Creed III’s Tyranny of King Washington DLC is out this week.

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Amnesia scared the beejebus out of me. I’m not ashamed to admit that I yelped like a little girl a couple of times when I first played it. Once I figured out that Amnesia had almost no penalty for dying, the terror wore off. It was still creepy, but I no longer went nuts every time the screen blurred. One of the most effective tools in its bag of tricks was the fact that you had to choose to put down your light whenever you wanted to do anything, exposing yourself to the dark. The dark was where your fears lived. Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, promises to be another romp through creepy passages and scary rooms, but this time you’ll get the sounds of clanking industry around you thanks to thechinesroom’s development. They’ve published examples of the terror you’ll strain to (not) see soon.

Squint at the new screenshots after the jump. Continue reading →

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It’s a spirited two-to-one split on Oblivion, which is why the 3×3 doesn’t start until the 1 hour and 17-minute mark. Speaking of marks, this week’s 3×3 is tattoos!

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In Soul Sacrifice, a superlative action RPG out on April 30th for the Vita but with a demo currently available, I have to fight some orcs. This should be easy. If there’s one thing I know, it’s fighting orcs. I’ve been doing it since sixth grade. Wait, those (pictured) are orcs? What? How do they figure those things are orcs? Soul Sacrifice has a lore entry for every creature. I didn’t intend to read any of these. But it can’t hurt to check just one.

It turns out that rats fed on magic back in ancient times to prevail against cats. This turned some of them into cat-killing goblins. So cats began to calculate the best way to absorb magic themselves. They discovered that the source of magic is human sorcerers, and that by eating humans, they could become powerful. Furthermore, by eating the humans who love them most, they could become even more powerful. This is how orcs are made. An orc is a corrupted cat who has devoured the master who loved him.

I don’t remember that part of Lord of the Rings, in which Peter Jackson established that orcs are basically people in demon/zombie make-up. But as I fling poisoned thorns at these sluggish vaguely caterpillar shaped beasts with huge misshapen vomiting mouths full of human skulls, I can see the cat influence. In fact, they’re downright Cheshire! I’m also reminded of the orcs in Ralph Bakshi’s animated adaptation of Tolkien. Those orcs had vaguely feline features and huge mouths. It’s nice to see — and read! — a different take on orcs again. And it’s also nice that when you kill these guys, their souls escape in the form of liberated cats that scurry away happily. In that regard, the end of a level in Soul Sacrifice isn’t unlike the end of a level in Sonic the Hedgehog.

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Orion: Dino Beatdown, by Spiral Game Studios, has been re-released as Orion: Dino Horde. Spiral would like everyone to forget the low review scores and technical issues that plagued the game when it was first released in May 2012 and give it a shot in its relaunched state. In fact, Spiral calls Horde a sequel to Beatdown even though it’s essentially the same game, but with more polished animations, new weapons and dinosaurs, and the addition of an in-game microtransaction store. Owners of Beatdown got the update for free.

All is not rosy however. Beatdown, besides getting panned by reviewers, was plagued with controversy due to allegations that the developer had stolen assets from Natural Selection 2 as well as laying off team members to avoid paying them. The Horde update has been similarly mired in upset amid accusations that Spiral was trying to manipulate Metacritic score of Beatdown by classifying Horde as a new game. Spiral’s head David Prassel has even been accused of using too heavy a hand in moderating Steam forums by locking and deleting insulting threads. Of course, the new addition of an in-game store has not endeared him to the few fans he had.

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“Well is it better than Marvel vs Capcom?” my friend eventually asked. He had started off asking me, “So how is Injustice?” But until I’ve played enough to write a review, I never know how to answer so open a question. So I just stammered noncommittally. But with his more pointed question, I was suddenly floored. I’d certainly thought a lot about Marvel vs Capcom while learning and playing Injustice, and obviously the developers at NetherRealm have thought about it as well. But I hadn’t yet considered the simple matter of which is the better game.

I have a strange complex relationship with the Marvel vs Capcom series. Marvel vs Capcom 3 was both one of my favorite and most disappointing games of 2011, mostly because I liked it as much as I did and Capcom Capcommed it as much as they did. It taught me a lot about fighting games, including how to actually play them. After all these years, that was the game that truly introduced me to the genre.

But given the choice, would I rather play Injustice: Gods Among Us or Marvel vs Capcom 3? And why?

After the jump, who wins in a fight between The Avengers and Batman? Continue reading →

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Today’s update for God of War Ascension, a surprisingly good multiplayer game, just raised the level cap from 30 to 40. To really appreciate what this means, you have to understand that any given character actually has four levels, one for each of the gods, who are the functional equivalent of character classes. So whereas you used to have 120 levels to earn, now you have 160. Furthermore, these levels also unlock new rewards for each of the four gods, including a new item (i.e. four new items), two new relics that give you passive powers (i.e. eight new relics), and an “ultimate magic” (i.e. four “ultimate magics”). With Ascension, Sony did a great job keeping God of War relevant, and this is exactly the sort of post-release support that keeps on keeping it relevant.

Also, double xp weekend in effect, y’all!

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Peter Molyneux is either an inspired genius, an impractical dreamer, or a gifted con artist depending on who you ask. His game Curiosity – What’s Inside the Cube? launched in November 2012 and asked players around the world to cooperate at chippping away bits of a virtual cube to uncover the “life-changingly amazing” secret in the center. This is done by tapping at “cubelets” one at a time. Since the cube is made of billions of cubelets, the task would seem to be a daunting one. Luckily, the game allows players to purchase special tools and abilites with real money to increase their mining ability.

Molyneux, and his development company 22Cans, has always maintained that Curiosity is a social as well as a financial experiment and the newest feature added to the game reinforces that. Players can now buy blocks of cublets to add back to the total. For $0.99, you can return 10K cublets back to the cube and annoy some people. For $6.99, you can negate 100K cublets of work and make some players angry. For $10.99, you can add back a whopping 500K cubelets and really mess with the game.

As part of the experiment we are also offering the opportunity for those keen to preserve the experience to add back cubelets at the start of a layer. We don’t know what will happen in this war of attrition.

Molyneux, you magnificent bastard! I never want to play this game, but I eagerly await the outcome.

Curiosity is available on iOS as well as Android systems.

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We’ll find out more about Evil Within as Bethesda carefully doles out information starting next week, but five things struck me about the live action teaser.

After the jump, could this be an actual horror game instead of a shooter? Continue reading →

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Now we know what those mysterious Vine videos from Bethesda were about. IGN has the exclusive announcement trailer for The Evil Within, a survival horror game from Shinji Mikami, creator of the Resident Evil series, and Tango Gameworks. Unfortunately, it’s a live-action trailer, so there’s not much information on the actual game yet. Still, for everyone saddened by the recent action-heavy direction of the Resident Evil games from Capcom, perhaps now there’s hope for some good scares.

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Polygon reports that TimeGate Studios lost an appeal last week against publisher SouthPeak Interactive and may have to give up the rights to the Section 8 property as well as pay $7.35 million in damages. The decision came from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit following a prior federal ruling stemming from a lawsuit begun in 2009.

TimeGate staff met yesterday to discuss the future of the company and its recently announced project, Minimum, in light of the decision, a source familiar with the matter told Polygon today.

Watch the announcement video for Minimum here.

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