We call out Ironclad Games’ Blair Fraser on why he’d want to make Sins of a Dark Age, a MOBA, when everyone is already playing League of Legends, also a MOBA. And are we really going to keep calling them MOBAs? We also talk Thief 4, Tomb Raider, SimCity, and the gratuitous space battles of a game other than Ironclad’s Sins of a Solar Empire.
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I’ve been playing SimCity for several days now. Electronic Arts was kind enough to set up pre-release press servers. However, I wouldn’t dream of reviewing the game based on my time with those press servers, which gave me almost no inkling of how SimCity is supposed to play. I instead got a look at a game in which a few editors from places like Kotaku and Destructoid casually shuffled around pieces without any sense of purpose.
I also wouldn’t dream of reviewing the game based on my experience with the launch, which is an unfunny comedy of gameplay errors, frustrating login queues, and botched social networking hooha. I can understand some of the errors as matters of server stress. Not everyone can launch a popular online game. So here I am waiting on the mandatory 20-minute timer to count down to the next server error message before resetting the timer. Just 14 minutes to go!
But it’s harder to understand why the fundamentals of the game design are broken. The design is based on cities existing as tiny — yes, they’re tiny — interconnected boxes that exchange resources, including people, services, and goods. It’s a sound concept and a pretty good justification for the tiny city chunks in lieu of the usual citybuilder sprawl. Just as the islands in the Anno games are cramped and incapable of self-sufficiency, so too are SimCity’s city boxes. Furthermore, what’s going on in each box is a lot less interesting than what’s going on when you string several of them together, whether they’re played by you or your friends.
But here’s where SimCity gets tripped up by all the information it helpfully provides. I can clearly see how much power my coal plant is producing. I can then sell it to my neighboring cities for a precise sum of money. And I can then see that the money isn’t going back to the powerplant city. I can tell that the city next door has extra sewage pumping capacity because I built it. So when the game tells me no nearby city provides sewage services, I know it’s wrong. Furthermore, I can send a gift of $50,000 to a neighboring city so it can build a hospital. I can then watch the money truck arrive, load up the money, drive across the map to the recipient, and vanish. And I can then see that the $50,000 deducted from my first city is nowhere to be seen in the destination city. If the basics aren’t working among the cities, who can trust the later and more complex interactions?
SimCity does not work yet. And anyone who has reviewed it favorably at this point is reviewing it entirely on its promise. If that’s how you want to evaluate games, have at it. There is pretty much no reason any game shouldn’t get a stellar review. The industry should be grateful for your enthusiasm.
But the fact of the matter is that as of now, about midnight on the game’s first day in the wild and after about five days of press access, SimCity is a shamefully broken game that does not live up to its design goals. Hopefully, these are launch issues and we’ll soon be playing the game EA intended to design, because that’s the game I’d much rather review in about a week.
Sometimes icons pop up in your city. If you click on them, citizens offer you missions. If you accept the missions, they’re listed on the right side of the screen where your quests would go in World of Warcraft. Sometimes the missions are so important they go straight to the quest list.
For my latest city, one such mission was to build an expo center and hold an event. Fine. It’s expensive, but money in SimCity is inevitable. A given sum of money is usually just a matter of how long you have to wait to get it. Bonds? Pfft.
So I waited long enough to buy an Expo Center and crammed it into one of my last remaining corners of free space. As for the Metro Arena’s inaugural event, I’m not about to wait to save up enough to have a fancy rock concert. My people get the less expensive motocross event, which SimCity says appeals to low wealth folks (I know dogwhistle terms for white trash when I hear them). So far my city of about 20,000 people consists of mostly of low wealth citizens, so that should be perfect. I can seat 3000 of them in the Metro Arena. First come, first served, folks. Get here early. No pushing, please.
Here’s the final tally for an event that cost me $30,000 in a building that cost me $150,000:
Up next: let’s play SimCity!
One of the criticisms I’ve seen of the new Tomb Raider is that the supporting characters aren’t well developed. Which is a good point if you’re comparing it to, say, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, Robert Altman’s Gosford Park, or Mass Effects 1, 2, and 3. But if you’re comparing Tomb Raider to action/adventure videogames, and even most action/adventure movies, that’s only a good point if you didn’t watch any of the cutscenes or read any of the collectible text snippets.
After the jump, it takes a research ship’s crew Continue reading →
I was already back on board with what Ubisoft is doing with the Assassin’s Creed games, but all I need to know about the newly announced Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag is in that screenshot up there. October 29th marked on my calendar.
Tomb Raider, one of the best games of this generation and a reboot every bit as exciting as Arkham Asylum or Skyfall, is a dire threat to all wallets. The game diary starts here. It’s one of the few games I’ve ever 100%ed and now that it’s over for me — the multiplayer is pretty much a non-issue — I look forward to vicariously re-enjoying it through your comments.
I’m not sure what to make of Sim City yet. It’s clearly taking a page from the Anno 2070 book, which is a great book to take pages from. But for better and worse, it leans heavily on EA’s forced social gaming shenanigans by presenting tiny pocket cities that rely on other nearby pocket cities, either your own or those of other players. Is this really the best way to do a city builder? Stay tuned.
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow — Mirror of Fate can’t make up its mind about whether to use colons or dashes, but it sure knows how to use the Nintendo 3DS for some classic Castlevania. Here’s one of those rare 3DS games where I really like keeping that 3D slider dialed all the way up. And it doesn’t just look great. I wasn’t sure what Konami and developer Mercury Steam were doing with the previous Lords of Shadow other than God of Warring it up. But this handheld version I can really get into for how it feels like a traditional Castlevania with latter day production values. I like the 2D movement (ironic!), the relatively simple combat, and the exploration. Now this is more like it!
The University add-on for The Sims 2 is a gold standards for add-ons. It inserted a new age stage between children and adults, creating in that new stage a rich playful world of college life. Can University Life do the same for The Sims 3, which is already piled high with playful add-on content? Will college be lost in the shuffle with spellcasting, winter wonderlands, and nightclubbing?
Speaking of nightclubbing, the Citadel add-on for Mass Effect 3 is a single-player adventure that gives Commander Shepherd more adventuring on everyone’s favorite space station MacGuffin.
Some of us feel very strongly about this critically panned and commercially disappointing follow-up to that earlier found-footage exorcism movie. Not the one with the nuns. The other one. At the one-hour mark, we discuss our favorite explosions for this week’s 3×3.
Next week: Oz the Great and Powerful
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Does any game have better patch notes than a Sims game? From the notes for v1.50:
New air conditioning units and electrical box decorative objects.
Worst. Decorations. Ever.
Pillow Fight wishes will appear much less frequently.
Hopefully they’ll fix this for sorority houses in the upcoming University add-on.
The Heckle interaction is no longer available [to] Sims swimming in the ocean.
Great news for beach comedians.
Ice sculptures from The Sims 3 Ambitions no longer melt in sub-freezing temperatures.
Physics, man.
NPCs that throw parties in the winter will no longer select Swimwear as the suggested clothing.
EA disavows Kate Upton’s latest appearance in Sports Illustrated.
The frequency of alien abductions has been lowered.
XCOM FTW!
Hot Dog and Pie Eating contests can no longer ironically cause a Sim to starve to death.
If there’s one thing better than a playfully inserted adverb, it’s correct use of the word “irony”.
The frequency of umbrellas breaking has been lowered.
As Warren Spector supposedly said, “Anytime reality gets in the way of fun, fun wins”.
2009 was literally years ago in videogaming. When you play games like Crysis 3, Guild Wars 2, Tomb Raider, and Wargame: European Escalation, it feels like 2009 is to 2013 what 1995 was to 2009. But playing Brutal Legend on the PC makes 2009 feel like 2013, which is especially surprising considering how long this game languished in development limbo/publisher hell. Wasn’t this a Playstation 2 game at one point? That’s nearly two Playstations ago!
But on the PC, one of Brutal Legend’s greatest strengths — its artwork — comes alive with new clarity. All the imaginative majesty of Tim Schafer’s metal dreamworld in high resolution glory! From up high, the multiplayer maps look glorious. From down low, all the delirious weirdness is weirder than ever. Not only does Brutal Legend look nice on the PC, it has the system requirements to prove it. 500MB of videocard memory is a hard lower limit for Brutal Legend and an unreasonable expectation for a three year old game, even one that looks this sweet. It’s a shame Brutal Legend won’t run on most of the computers in my house, since this would be a fantastic LAN game. And although this was originally a console game, couldn’t someone at Double Fine have come up with a workable mouse-and-keyboard option for the radial menu? A convenience on a gamepad doesn’t have to be a stumbling block for a mouse and keyboard.
But overall Brutal Legend is better than it’s ever been, both as a single-player open-world game unlike any you’ve ever played and as one of the best unique takes on real-time strategy since Sacrifice.
5 stars
PC
Most videogames are power fantasies. Tomb Raider is no exception. Lara Croft has always been an action heroine, and this latest Tomb Raider is an origin story to get her to that point. However, the template this time is a horror movie instead of an action movie. It’s a bit like Far Cry 3, but without being embarrassingly bad. Far Cry 3 clumsily resembles something by Eli Roth, something about how foreigners are bad, and learning to stab them with a machete is as much a rite of passage as getting a tribal tattoo on your forearm.
So what sets Tomb Raider apart? For starters, it knows better than to mistake Eli Roth for a good horror director.
After the jump, from zero to axe murderer in one game Continue reading →
This week we discuss Metal Gear Rising: Revengance and all things Metal Gear. Since we’re not really qualified in that department, we’ve called in a professional. Metal Gear fan and Engient founder Ian Slutz, whose “hands hold many controllers”, joins us.
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The previous Lara Croft was perfectly expressed by casting Angelina Jolie for the Tomb Raider movies. Larger than life, iconic, aglow with celebrity, handy with pistols, plastically unreal.
The new Lara Croft is none of those thing. This Lara Croft is small and girlish, with a pony tail instead of the previous tightly practical braid. She looks more likely to raid a library than a tomb (she even claims to hate tombs at one point). She’s smart and competent, but aware of her limitations. She expresses self-doubt, grief, confusion, anguish, and pain. She runs out of breath. She is not a superman. She is cold, wet, dirty, and sometimes wounded. Indiana Jones might get his knuckles scraped up before the scene is over, but he — and Nathan Drake, by the way — is defined by swagger and confidence. He has no self-doubt, only the grim resignation and acceptance that befits a stoically invulnerable character. See also, pre-Skyfall James Bond.
So if this Tomb Raider reboot were made into a movie, the new Lara Croft wouldn’t just be someone famous. She certainly wouldn’t be just another model. She would have to express something new for the series and it seems to me Crystal Dynamics had someone in mind.
After the jump, is it as obvious to you as it is to me? Continue reading →
Star Wars Pinball made me do something I have never done in Zen’s superlative Pinball FX series. It made me turn on the music.
After the jump, I think you overestimate my chances Continue reading →
A community manager on Blizzard’s forums explains that the characters I’ve spent dozens of hours playing in Diablo III, with even more dozens of hours potentially ahead, won’t be accessible in the Playstation 4 version.
While we think cross-platform play would be awesome, there are currently no plans to allow connectivity between PlayStation Network and Battle.net (this is pretty standard for most games that have PC and console support). As a result, the characters on your Battle.net account and PlayStation account will also remain separate.
In other words, Valve’s Portal 2 can do what Blizzard can’t.
There’s a certain point where you invest enough in a game that you’re not going to start over just because the developers have adapted it to a gamepad and your couch is comfortable. Diablo III has gone well beyond that point. Still, a Playstation 4 version will be great for people who can’t play Diablo III because they don’t have PCs. If you see any of them, tell them for me.
Skullgirls proves that a fighting game doesn’t have to be part of some long-running franchise to be exceptional. One of the greatest strengths of this game is the character design (Peacock was my pick for best character design of last year). And now the developers at Lab Zero have a new character on the way. Squigly is an opera singer with a fire-breathing cyborg snake sticking out of her head. Her unique ability is to literally change the boundaries of the game. From the developers’ description:
Squigly’s jump is floaty, her dashes take some time to build momentum, and her normals can’t reach across the screen. So how does she get close enough to do damage? By singing. As an opera star, when Squigly sings all eyes focus on her, forcibly shifting the game’s camera towards her. This naturally moves the edge of playfield with it, dragging her opponent towards her. No other game has a move like this, and it should open a number of interesting tactical possibilities.
Squigly is the focus of Lab Zero’s kickstarter campaign on Indiegogo. If if passes — actually, when it passes, based on how much it’s made on its first day — Squigly will be a free update for Skullgirls on all platforms. “If we actually manage to make her,” Lab Zero says in their video, “then anyone in the world can get her, so long as you have a copy of Skullgirls.”
Go here for more info or to support the campaign.
