The latest Tom vs Bruce has just gone live. The game is a solitaire boardgame called Nemo’s War.
…games tell the best stories when they don’t overtly try to tell any story at all, and cushions it with the background of a great story you can conjure up in your mind any time you want, which is Verne’s book about a mysterious captain who travels the seas in a futuristic submarine and has adventures while pretty much being a badass.
Part one is available here, with parts two and three tomorrow and Thursday. May the best Nemo win!
There’s a certain comfort food quality to God of War: Ascension. It’s all very familiar, even though it’s pretty much run out of recognizable mythological trappings. The stuff I recognize is straight-up repeats from the previous games; the best of the rest of the stuff achieves a gratifying “WTF?” quality. The opening boss is named something like Heckle Donkies. He’s just a bunch of arms and a gross face that seems to have dropped in for a visit from Bayonetta. He’s funky, but ultimately no different from any other God of War boss. X X X X X X, circle circle circle circle, circle, square, X.
But what I like best about this newest God of War is how it’s willing to concede that Kratos is no longer what makes these games good.
After the jump, triangle, triangle, triangle. Continue reading →
The last corporate partnership (i.e. product placement) in a SimCity game was with British Petroleum in SimCity Societies, which was before the Gulf oil spill. You can see the BP logo here, standing out from the rest of the city’s simlish signage.
Since then, BP isn’t really a great way to express consumer friendly green sentiments. So Electronic Arts has sold your eyeballs to Nissan instead. Now Nissan billboards appear around your city, just like Nissan ads appear in Origin. If you click on them, you can download a special Nissan electric car recharging station which spreads happiness. It’s basically just a park. For cars. A car park. Cute.
Frankly, I’d rather have McDonald’s logos, like in The Sims.
Remember Kodu? It’s a free PC application that launched in 2009 from Microsoft Research Labs and uses a simplified programming language to teach children how to create their own games. There’s a version for the Xbox 360 that costs $5, if comfy couch programming is your thing.
Microsoft has added a Kodu game design challenge to their Imagine Cup competition to encourage budding young programmers to start coding their gaming dreams. Winners will claim cash prizes and a trip to Russia. The deadline for submissions is May 17th.
Come on kids! Program the next-gen gaming fad and get bought by EA!
I still don’t much care for Shifts, a rather dry spaceship crew management game, sort of like FTL minus combat, exploration, and charm. But I have to commend the developers for adding a scoring system to give the brief expeditions some replayability. As of the latest update, as you play, you earn points, which are displayed at the top of the screen. Like some of Shifts’ other features, the score is undocumented. As near as I can tell, the best way to earn points is to settle planets, which is incidentally the overarching goal. Makes sense. But I can’t tell whether there’s an effective correlation between playing harder difficulty levels and getting more points. That sort of thing is important in a game with a score list.
And, yes, there is a score list. You’d never know this from the fact that it’s inaccessible from the main screen. Instead, you have to start a game and then check the menu you would normally use to quit the game or turn off the music. Ah, there’s your score screen.
Dean “Rocket” Hall, creator of the popular zombie survival mod DayZ, told The Escapist that a console version is likely if the standalone game is a success.
“Certainly I think if we don’t, for want of a better word ‘fuck up,’ the PC release then I would say a console port is almost certain,” Hall revealed. “I know a lot of people get really hot and bothered about it. Like, I’m not a console gamer, I’m a PC gamer, but I don’t think it necessarily has to hurt things.”
But what consoles would be likely to see a DayZ title in the future? At the moment it seems like the PS4 may be the leading candidate. “It appears to be the kind of game that Sony are interested in, I think we just have to wait and see,” he continued. “We’ve talked and met with Sony, and they’re very – you know, they’re obviously interested.”
Runic Games updated Torchlight 2 with the long-awaited editor, Steam Workshop integration, new monsters, items, and areas. They also added a few new pets to keep your adventurer company in the dungeon depths.
New Unique and Legendary weapons for every item class
New class armor sets
New MapRoom maps
Additional side dungeons in Act 1 and 2 during New Game Plus play
Nether-Realm portals take you to a new Nether-Realm tileset, with new creatures
Headcrab pet
Alpaca pet
Panda pet
Stag pet
Wait. What?
After the jump, let’s see the new buddy! Continue reading →
Supergiant’s recently revealed follow-up to Bastion, Transistor, may have a multiplayer element that will seem familiar to players of Fable 2 or Dark Souls according to what Creative Director, Greg Kasavin, told Rock Paper Shotgun.
“Something we’re more interested in is a sense of feeling connected to other people who are playing in a subtle way,” Kasavin said. “You can still have your personal experience around the story, but you always know you belong in a larger [world]. For example, players can sometimes see traces of other players’ paths moving around. Things of that nature. What’s interesting to us about this world is that it lends itself to some interesting things like that.”
Kasavin specified that the multiplayer feature will be optional.
“If we do it properly, I think it’ll be completely transparent – offline or not. It’s not like an ambitious always-online DRM strategy. That’s not what we have in mind!”
I used to read specific publications for news. These days, out of laziness, I just swing by Google news on the way to checking my email. All the news that’s fit to print — and then some — is arranged in handy categories. World, U.S., sports, health, technology, entertainment.
But why is everything relating to videogames clustered under technology? What does a Bioshock Infinite review or a GDC announcement or Diablo 3’s success have to do with technology? Or, more precisely, why does it have more to do with technology more than any given movie, which is where it belongs under entertainment? Don’t movies use even more technology than videogames?
To many people, videogaming is a facet of the platform on which it’s played. The news isn’t about videogaming so much as it’s about Xboxes or PC or iPads. Which is absurd and a far greater obstacle to meaningful videogame discussion than the idea that videogames are for kids. At least other stuff for kids — The Croods, for instance — is evaluated on more dramatic terms than the latest cell phones. For me, the next milestone in public acceptance will be when videogame news lives where it belongs next to TV news, movie news, and music news. Videogames are entertainment, not technology.
But maybe I shouldn’t complain. Entertainment is the same category where I found out that Justin Beiber’s monkey was confiscated by German customs agents. That uses up a space in my brain where I could instead know the capital of Latvia.
(The answer to the question in the headline is “both of them”. Yahoo, which includes esoteric categories such as fashion and theater under entertainment, has everything videogame related under technology.)
One of my favorite talks at GDC this year was from Stone Librande, the lead designer of the latest Sim City. Lebrande shared with the audience the one-page design documents he created to express Sim City’s gameplay to the development team. These pages — they’re diagrams, really — stress elegance and simplicity. They look great. They’re drawn with a degree of charm that you can see in the game’s graphics. And the ideas they express should be instantly familiar to anyone who’s played Sim City enough to know how thoroughly, miserably, heart-breakingly broken the game is.
Listening to Lebrande talk reminded me that I really want to play the game he designed. I hope one day Electronic Arts finishes making it.
For an April Fool’s Day joke, I considered pretending that Super Black Bass 3D for the Nintendo 3DS, out this week, is an awesome game. But I’ve never been able to pull off April Fool’s pranks. Speaking of which, maybe Trion’s online shooter/Syfy series tie-in, Definance, is awesome. I wouldn’t know. But it’s worth noting I would have been similarly dismissive of their previous game, Rift, until I played it.
Cities in Motion 2 is the sequel to Cities in Motion 1. Before you get visions of a Sim City that works, I should warn you that these games are strictly about public transportation. I live in Los Angeles, so I have no idea what they’re on about.
Also out this week is Sang-Froid, a werewolf-themed tower defense/action game for the PC. It seems to share gameplay DNA with Orcs Must Die. I’m eager to hear people try to pronounce the name. I’m pretty sure it’s “sang-fwaa”, which is something I’d never attempt to say in public. The latest add-on for Borderlands 2 will raise the level cap and add a super badass difficulty level for your third playthough. In other words, it is of no use to me whatsoever and likely won’t be for a long long time, but I wouldn’t dream of not owning it. Just in case.
Finally, Electronic Arts will release a free patch that makes Sim City work exactly as intended, along with an offline mode for people without reliable internet connections or any interest in playing with others.
In Spring Breakers, Harmony Korine explores the moral depravity of today’s youth, or something like that. We’re a bit confused. At the 43-minute mark, we talk about American flags in movies.
Next week: Evil Dead
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While Tom is at GDC, Jason has a nice conversation with Gus Mastrapa about not going to GDC, how LEGO can melt the hardest of hearts, and why we envy Richard Garriott.
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Battle of the Bulge snapshot
See that screen? If you play a lot of John Butterfield’s Battle of the Bulge: Crisis in Command: Volume I (actual legal name) you know something important that I am about to tell you. I’m not sure if Tom knows it, though, so I may be compromising operational security. That’s opsec for you people who are in the know like me. And not like Tom, just to reiterate that so there isn’t any misunderstanding. About Tom being in the know, I mean. Anyway. That’s the German 1st SS Panzer Division, the biggest, baddest unit in the German army. In this game, I mean – there might be other, badder units on the Eastern Front or something. I’m only in charge of this game. So getting back to the opsec, I am in Malmedy without having taken any losses. That might be because (a) I attacked the two-pip Allied armor that was there and blew it totally up, or (b) Tom evacuated it (‘bugged out’ in military vernacular) so that it wouldn’t get seriously bushwacked. Either way, the 1st SS Panzer Division is essentially guaranteed to get to Werbomont on the next day (Dec. 17th). (In Bulge there are multiple ‘turns’ per day but each unit only moves once.) Once I am in Werbomont, I am guaranteed to be able to attack Huy on the first impulse of Dec. 18th. If I can clear that space on the 18th, I have a decent chance of winning an automatic victory on the 19th. Since the game could technically extend all the way to the 28th, that’s pretty quick business by the Germans.
But here’s the thing: it’s two days early, and I already know what the chances are of me clearing that space if Tom defends it with one elite infantry. He gets two elite infantry as reinforcements on the 18th, but has two key spaces to defend with them. If he defends Huy with one of them, my chances are exactly 41.8%. I did the math so that you don’t have to.
On the other hand, if Tom had inflicted one hit of damage on 1st SS Pz during the combat in Malmedy, my chances would drop. To 27.3%.
That sounds like a lot of nerdy hoo-rah. Except that pushing for Huy and trying for an early victory is only one possible strategy in the game. Part of playing the Germans is making the Allied player think you are doing one thing when you are planning another. If Tom were reading the numbers, he’d be able to deduce that the river crossing strategy is still a viable one for me. And if you’re playing the game, and see the Germans take a hit in Malmedy on that first attack, you can breathe a little easier about the early victory, because your chances of stopping them from even getting into position for it in Huy are a hefty 73.7%. And you’d know that two days in advance.
Anyway, better keep strict opsec on this one.
Bioshock Infinite is aptly named. It’s an ambitious and sometimes dazzling story far too big for the too familiar game that holds it. It contains multitudes and they’re all pinned under the boots of an unseen protagonist in a two-fisted first-person shooter, plasmid in one hand, rivet gun in the other. It is beautiful in the way that a snow globe is beautiful. Small, ruthlessly bounded, a little precious and silly, but its intricacy undeniably lovely in that diffuse light. I admire it more than I like it. I’m glad I played it, and although I’m pretty sure I’ll never play it again, I’ll be talking about it for a long time to come.
After the jump, let the talking — spoiler-free — commence Continue reading →
