One of the so many ways that Tomb Raider is as good as Rocksteady’s Batman games is that it’s sprinkled with collectibles. And not just haphazardly. It’s not “hey, go get me some feathers!”, a la Assassin’s Creed. Many of these are artifacts, modeled in 3D as they were in Uncharted, and sometimes worth turning over to discover a hidden bonus, all tapping into the game’s xp system and all arranged in themed groups relating to the game’s setting.
It’s easy enough to find the locations of most collectibles on the map, by either finding treasure maps, usually in tombs, or by unlocking the skill that lets you “ping” the area with Lara’s instinct mode. You can then go into the map and drop a waypoint on an artifact so that its location shows up in the world when you use instinct mode again. This is a great way to find stuff in the more vertical areas, where you’d otherwise go bonkers trying to figure out if an icon is something above you or below you.
But then there are themed collectibles that don’t show up on the map. These are called challenges. They rely on actually exploring, looking around, peering into places you wouldn’t normally peer, basically poring over the world the developers have created to be a place worth poring over. And at times, they’re really hard to find.
After the jump, the challenge of challenges Continue reading →
In what videogame inspired movie will you find the following plot, which I read at Empire Online?
Aaron Paul plays a street racer who goes into business with a rich arrogant car supplier played by Dominic Cooper, only to find himself framed when another friend dies during a race. Sent to jail, Aaron Paul’s character wants revenge and, once released, signs on for a cross-country race for a chance to strike back. But the rich arrogant car supplier learns about the scheme and puts a bounty on his head, forcing him to go up against various illegal drivers in powerful vehicles. Michael Keaton plays the reclusive oddball host of the event who invites the best racers from around the world to compete. Also in the cast is Imogen Poots as an exotic car dealer who connects rich clients with supercharged rides.
Guess the videogame license that inspired this storyline. If you guessed any driving game other than Need for Speed, you’re wrong.
Need for Speed, due out next year, will be directed by the guy who made Act of Valor, which could easily be a Call of Duty or Medal of Honor tie-in if it changed its name.
This week’s wallet threat is seriously elevated due to the release of three Star Wars themed tables for Pinball FX. Two of the tables are superlative, and arguably among the best developer Zen Studios has ever made. And the third is, well, still pretty decent considering that the Clone Wars cartoon theme is about as appealing to me as a Rocky and Bullwinkle theme. I’ll have more details tomorrow, but you should put your wallet on standby for about ten bucks.
Also, batten down your wallet’s hatches if you have any interest in old school, party-based, stat-heavy RPGs where you get to draw maps on your Nintendo DS. The basic summary of Etrian Odyssey IV: Something Something the Titan Something is that Atlus has done it again! And this time the new skill trees make character builds less inscrutable, the zeppelin overworld offers more non-linearity, and the casual difficulty level is always there if you find yourself against a brick wall (I haven’t needed it yet!). Etrian Odyssey IV is still a lot of grinding, but that’s just a fact of Etrian Odysseys. I’ll have a full review up after I’ve made more progress, but I can safely say that fellow Etrian Odyssists won’t be disappointed.
I should also warn you that Brutal Legend, my choice for best game of the year in 2009, is out this week for the PC. In case you didn’t know, it’s not just a wondrous open-world game, even for people like me who aren’t into heavy metal and who find Jack Black uniquely grating. It’s also a damn fine real-time strategy game. Don’t come whining to me about how there are no new real-time strategy games until you’ve gotten your mouse and keyboard on Brutal Legend.
I don’t think Sniper Elite: Nazi Zombie Army, which is also out this week, is real. Developer Rebellion is probably pranking us. I’m not going to fall for it. But if there is a Nazi zombie army, I can think of no better man to defeat it than an elite sniper. Wait, can zombies tell the direction they’re being sniped from? Someone should make a game that explores that question.
This week we see Dark Skies, a horror movie from the director of Legion and Priest. You can kind of imagine how that’s going to turn out. But against all odds, one of us quite likes it! Then, at the 55-minute mark, the 3×3 covers our favorite pre-existing songs in movies.
Next week: Stoker
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One of the unique features of Path of Exile is leagues. When you create a character in Grinding Gears Games’ action RPG, you select your character’s league. Currently, there are default and hardcore leagues. Default is default. Hardcore means you get one life. If you die, your character suffers a fate worse than death; she is kicked downstairs to the default league. Oh, the ignominy!
However, as of tomorrow morning, Grinding Gear Games will offer additional leagues. 109 of them, to be exact. It’s the start of what they’re calling “season one”. This is a series of temporary leagues. They’re events, really, over the next month and a half, starting with a one-hour solo play league tomorrow morning at 9am Pacific. This means you start a new character and play solo for an hour to get as far as you can. Then your character is demoted to one of the permanent leagues and your account is credited with prize points based on how you ranked, whether you were first to clear a quest, what level you reached, and so forth (scoring for S01E01 — season one, event one — is listed here). Other leagues last varying amounts of time, they allow grouping, or they have superfast turbo speed monsters. You can click on upcoming leagues in the schedule for specifics.
So what’s the point? Prize points are the point. As you accumulate prize points, you work your way up a list of unique items, available only this season and listed on the season page. Maybe I can get Redbeak, a fast, hard-hitting, life-sucking sword that does more damage when you’re hurt. Could I possibly get Wanderlust, a pair of speedy, mana-charging, wool shoes that make you immune to freezing. I’d love to see what the “extra gore” trait does on those Facebreaker gloves. I’m guessing it’s something like Fallout’s “Bloody Mess” perk. But do I like Path of Exile enough to play 240 points worth of league events in the next month?
I’m thinking.
Frankly, given the way the scoring works, I’ll be lucky to have my own Redbeak by the end of season one. But I love that Grinding Gear Games is doing this sort of thing.
Firaxis has added multiplayer support to Civilization Revolution on the iPad. What a great idea! I enjoyed it on the Xbox 360 when it came out, and then I bought it on the iPhone before I had my iPad. Bad AI doesn’t seem so stupid when it’s on an iPhone. How smart can a game be on such a tiny screen anyway? But I haven’t played Civilization Revolution in a while. Assuming it supports asynchronous play, what a great way to enjoy its sleek boardgameyness.
Since I already own it, I go to download it on my iPad. And I see that a separate iPad version is available for only 99 cents. Okay, it’s worth a look. What else am I going to do with a dollar? I buy it, download it, and tap on the multiplayer option on the main menu to see how it works. Can I challenge my friends? Will it work asynchronously? Can I get away with playing Spain in a multiplayer game and running roughshod over my land-bound friends while I explore the seas and their wonders? And what are these two multiplayer modes listed on the game’s “what’s new” page on iTunes?
Oh, look what’s behind the multiplayer option on the main menu:
This week we welcome Stardock’s Derek Paxton to talk about add-ons that make strategy games even better. For instance, the upcoming Legendary Heroes add-on for Fallen Enchantress. We also talk about Crysis 3, Nooky Koodie Poodoo: Wrath of the White Witch, this World of Warcraft thing McMaster keeps playing, the latest on Bungie and Gas Powered Games, and Sony’s Playstation 4 “look ma, no price!” reveal.
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A Valley Without Wind 2 is nothing like A Valley Without Wind 1. So many of the things that made me eventually love Valley 1 — it takes a while to wrap your head around that game, and you might give up before you realize you love it — are missing in this overhaul, which has just been released as a separate executable available for free to owners of Valley 1. Valley 2 has no crafting, no collectibles, no inventory, no spell customization, no fancy traversal gimmicks, no dungeon exploration, no grinding. It is basically missing 90% of the gameplay that dragged me into Valley 1. The sorts of moments I detailed here are entirely gone. Even the music is different. The original game’s 8-bit retro ditty has been replaced with a Japanese pop song, but in English.
So what Valley 1 fan is going to want anything to do with Valley 2?
After the jump, me Continue reading →
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is out this week. I’d like to say I’ve played it. Technically, I have. But only the first thirty minutes or so, and then about an hour of the next five minutes. Look, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, I’m no stranger to brawlers. I understand precise timing. But I can’t get past your robot puma that has a chainsaw on its tail. You’ve obviously put that battle in here to teach me parrying, which I’ve accomplished several times successfully in the tutorial mission that I’ve replayed a couple of times to make sure I understand it. But after no less than 20 attempts at this puma with a chainsaw on its tail, I’m just going to assume that you’re not for me. Which is fine, since I still have Devil May Cry.
Crysis 3 is out this week. It’s very Crysis 3.
Finally, Paradox’s March of the Eagles focuses on combat during the early 19th century, when combat was one of the least interesting things happening.
We see A Good Day To Die Hard so you don’t have to! Then we talk about elevator scenes in movies for this week’s 3×3, which starts at the 50-minute mark.
Next week: Dark Skies
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The fine folks at Eugen Systems, one of our latest greatest hopes for real time strategy, have been awful at thinking up names for their games since their debut with Direct Action, which was clearly not about fighting wars through proxies. I would be hard pressed to come up with a more generic and uninteresting title than Wargame: Airland Battles, their next game. All I can deduce from that title is that there won’t be any naval units.
The main bullet point for Airland Battles is the addition of aircraft (pictured) to the same basics from Wargame: European Escalation. Which is another awful title for how all it tells you is that you won’t have any battles on continents that begin with the letter A.
But for me, there’s something even sexier in Airland Battles than the sexy airplanes. European Escalation appealed to me partly as a collectible game in which you unlocked awesome Cold War units. But one of the problems with that game was the “deck building” that followed the unlocking. There were no meaningful rules about how to arrange your deck. You just chucked stuff into the box. There. Deck built! There was no incentive to use the less useful units. Of all the toys in that very generous toybox, most of them go unplayed with.
Eugen has a very different idea with the deck building in Airland Battles, which gives your deck bonuses if you restrict your cards — err, units — to certain themes.
For example, if you create a Marine infantry Deck from 1980 with 100% Russian troops, you will receive very high bonuses, compared to a Deck made up of little bits from all nations on your side.
Read more here, where the developers spell out in detail what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. Airland Battles is due out this spring. It’s not soon enough.
Immortal Heroes is a pretty terrible name for this latest expansion to Ascension, the deck building game that has effectively ruined most other deck building games for me. But it’s a title that gets to the main new gameplay mechanic, a deck of cards representing soul gems that sits off to the side of the table. Each card in the soul gem deck is from the previous Ascension sets. So when you draw a soul gem, as many of the new cards allow, you’re basically invoking an immortal hero. Hence, Ascension: Immortal Heroes. It’s a touch of randomness within the randomness. Draw a card that lets you draw a card. I like it. Let’s hurry up and get this puppy onto the iOS version!
There are two more gameplay tweaks in Immortal Heroes. Ongoing trophy monsters are the equivalent of constructs that cannot be destroyed. And placeholder event cards let you control the frequency of the global events that shake up the rules and bring fanatics into play, which are now a fundamental part of Ascension’s combat dynamic.
Immortal Heroes works great as a standalone set of cards, but loses its punch when shuffled into the other decks and your soul gem deck can go untouched for so long. But it demonstrates that the developers at Gary Games haven’t yet run out of good ideas.
After the jump, ten reasons to get Immortal Heroes Continue reading →
Who knew commanding a spaceship was such a joyless task, characterized by constantly needing three widgets and only having two? Shifts, a short single-player lack-of-resources management starship voyage strategy game, tasks you with finding five habitable planets before your ship falls apart completely. Mostly your ship will fall apart completely.
And I’m okay with this. As we all know from Darkstar, Galaxy of Terror, and 2001, space isn’t friendly. The dungeons in a rogue-a-like are happy theme parks next to the vast fuel sucking vacuum between barren planets. The dramatic tension in Shifts is whether you’ll run out of fuel or supplies first. Not whether you’ll fail, but how you’ll fail.
This could have made for a pretty good “see if you can do better next time” challenge, along the lines of Elder Sign: Omens, but even more streamlined so it’s easily and always playable in a single sitting. No such thing happens in Shifts, an abrupt “wham, bam, thank you ma’am” exercise in it all being for naught. Not only is your score not saved, it doesn’t even exist. Shifts is a binary pass or fail endeavor, unsatisfying whatever the outcome, because you’re simply dumped back to the main menu where you can choose to play again or read the credits for the aptly named Threadbare Games.
Each turn, you assign crew members to shifts, which determine what your ship can do that turn. It’s all driven by icons and numbers, which may as well be interchangeable. The engineering chick isn’t the engineering chick so much as she’s the one with the swoopy bangs. I still can’t tell the science chick from the executive officer chick beyond one is the fish icon and the other is the party icon. The simple gameplay and simple no-frills theming don’t give the characters any meaningful character, and your ship is a set of three numbers that you don’t want to get to zero. Fuel is as good as hull integrity which is as good as colony arks.
Consider Shadow Watch, a similarly streamlined game about characters with asymmetrical powers who get better at what they do as the game goes on. The same thing happens in Shifts, but it’s a weird combination of simple and undocumented. It’s easy enough to figure out the “brobots” that boost a character’s power, but what good are the upgrade stars? Who knows. Who cares? Not Shifts, a solid idea that needs a bit more work to be a good game. Right now, it’s as merely clerical as the name implies.
2 stars
iOS
Graham “Giaddon” Trail joins us to talk about why we love Dead Space 3. Spoilers abound, so you might want to finish the game if you care about the story. In which case, ha ha, you care about the Dead Space 3 story.
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Playing Gearbox’s Borderlands 2, it’s hard to imagine this is the same studio that stitched together and released Duke Nukem Forever. Playing Aliens: Colonial Marines, it’s not at all hard to imagine.
After the jump, hopping xenomorphs Continue reading →
