Egosoft’s X games are the last word in open-world space sims by virtue of being the only word in open-world space sims. At least in terms of ones that are still in development. X Rebirth, the latest X game, is a mess. This is no surprise given Egosoft’s penchant for releasing messes and then tidying them up after the fact. But the problem with X Rebirth is that it’s a different kind of mess than the previous games, in new and terribly wrong ways that are beyond tidying up. X Rebirth doesn’t seem to understand what people liked about the previous games. It is a game based on misguided assumptions.
After the jump, X Rebirth’s serious misconceptions about me.Continue reading →
The Xbox 360 Mincraft Elder Scrolls: Skyrim Mash-up Pack features wintery Nord terrain textures, Elder Scrollsy crafting objects, a revamped user interface, and music from Skyrim squashed into Minecraft. It’s two games with aimless wandering and player-driven stories combined into one mega-open-world DLC!
Pre-made World recreating the area of Whiterun, Riverwood and Bleak falls Barrow (on a smaller scale in order to fit with technical constraints of the games map size limits)
Okay. Maybe it’s not so mega-sized. The pack will be available on Wednesday for $3.99.
Alexander Payne’s latest meditation on the absurdity of human weakness features Bruce Dern not paying attention when Will Forte talks to him. At least one of us on the podcast thought that was pretty funny. At the 45-minute mark, we take note of our favorite secretaries for this week’s 3×3.
I kicked off the Playstation 4 launch just like any other day. I got up and went to work. I didn’t attend any midnight launch events. I didn’t wait in line at my local Best Buy. I preordered the Playstation 4 from Amazon back in June; I just had to wait for delivery. I had hoped the package would be waiting for me when I got home, but it wasn’t. Only later in the evening did I notice the Amazon box on my front porch. I have no idea how long it was sitting there. The UPS guy didn’t even bother to ring the bell.
It’s been seven years since the launch of the Playstation 3 and this banged up box on my front porch was the harbinger of the next generation. From press conferences to preview events, to day one system reviews, the Playstation 4 has been splayed open and laid bare. Before you even open the box you’re probably predisposed one way or another. We know about resolutiongate, firmware updates, network issues, defective HDMI ports, and poorly reviewed launch titles. But regardless of all that, here it was, this box, this new console, this is what I was waiting for.
That’s my current go-to squad in XCOM: Enemy Within. My back-up squad is an all-female group as well. It’s either the coolest bug or feature the expansion brings to the game. Apparently, the chance for female soldiers to enlist has increased dramatically. I’m more than fine with this. It certainly makes nabbing the Flight of the Valkyries achievement a lot easier.
State of Decay’s Breakdown DLC will be available on November 29th, for $7, for both the Xbox 360 and PC. You’ll get a survival sandbox mode, new characters, and an RV. Did you hear that? An RV! Like in Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, and We’re The Millers. More info here.
I can’t say I’m terribly excited about another Minecraft clone, even if it is made by some of the folks at Trion who brought us the reliable Rift and Defiance. But I like the cel-shaded look. And I like the name. How come no one has used the name Trove yet?
Trion pledges they’ll communicate “directly with alpha testers and forums such as Reddit to help determine the direction the game will take”. That should end well.
When an MMO launches, it does so trumpeting the boldest of intentions for its continuing evolution and development. That’s especially true for a game launched with a subscription model, like The Secret World. Sure enough, when Funcom released the game 16 months ago, Game Director Ragnar Tornquist bravely predicted monthly content updates would follow.
You could almost see the disaster coming here. An ill-advised publishing deal with EA produced no significant pre-release marketing, but may have contributed to the game being rushed to launch. As released, The Secret World was plagued by frustrating bugs to fundamental things like quests and chat that the Funcom team struggled to fix over a six week span of time. Sales were awful, large-scale layoffs at Funcom ensued, and when Tornquist abruptly “stepped aside” a year ago, I’d have laid even money that The Secret World wouldn’t live to see 2013.
After the jump, it’s not a bad little tree at all, Charlie Brown. Maybe it just needs a little love.Continue reading →
If you were to see the name Desktop Dungeons and study a few screenshots, you would get the wrong idea about this fiendishly clever little gem. You would think it’s a roguelike. A cute frivolous one with wacky graphics. You might figure it had a lot of competition. You might figure you’d just as soon play Dungeons of Dreadmor, Rogue Legacy, or Diablo. You might figure you already have games like this.
Boy, would you be wrong. Furthermore, you would have no idea what you were missing.
Did you get your PlayStation 4 last night? Joey Chiu, the guy in the picture, did. He was first in line at the New York PlayStation launch event. He doesn’t seem as excited as those PS4 advertisements say he should be. Doesn’t he know he’s the first regular guy in the US to get the “most immersive, jaw-dropping gaming and entertainment experiences imaginable” with his new consumer hardware? His life is going to be totally different.
At least until Nov 22nd, when the Xbox One launches and offers Joey even more immersive, jaw-dropping gaming and entertainment experiences imaginable thanks to the Power of the Cloud.
This is an exciting season to be a console gamer. Regardless of whether you decide to make a day-one purchase of the PS4 or Xbox One, you likely are slurping up console news and unboxing videos in anticipation of release. Perhaps, even, in a momentary lapse of 140 characters, you fired a tweet off to your devoted followers, gushing with enthusiasm for the new Kinect. Maybe you then lost half of your followers (and gamer cred), so you deleted the tweet.
Download-only Xbox Live games will have 1000 points worth of achievements on the Xbox One. The longstanding rule on the Xbox 360 has been that games featured only as a downloadable title through the Xbox Live Marketplace were limited to 400 points of achievements, while games sold through retail channels were allowed 1000 points. There had been indications that this policy was changing for the next gen console. PopCap tweeted that Peggle 2 would have 1000 points of achievements, and the achievement list for Halo: Spartan Assault showed 1000 points. After some speculation by fans, Microsoft confirmed that all games on the Xbox One will have the same achievement score potential.
“On Xbox One, games are games. All games follow the same policies for achievements and Gamerscore.”
Good news, gamers! Your Peggles, your Castle Crashers, and your State of Decays are just as good as Halo!
On this week’s podcast, Nick Diamon and Tom Chick discuss whether it’s a good idea to rush headlong into an XCOM map just for the chance to cybernetically enhance your soldiers. That’s what Firaxis seems to want us to do. Also, Chris Hornbostel reveals the latest in The Secret World and Jason McMaster wields a mighty blowtorch in Battlefield 4. Also, Desktop Dungeons is not what you think it is.
Tom: Secret World is not an easy game to jump into, especially after you’ve been away for a while. You only ever have a few skills slotted, but the array of skills and how they fit together is incredibly meticulous. This is a tinkerer’s game. Or a game where you just load one of the preset templates and mash the buttons. But who wants to do that?
The significance of the title of Frances Ha is arguably a spoiler because of when it’s revealed. It’s a bit like how Greenberg, director Noah Baumbach’s last movie and similarly a showcase for Greta Gerwig’s gangly charm, ended with the simple insight of the line, “This is you”. What a way to close out a movie.
Frances Ha might seem at first like the hip stylings of twentysomethings in New York City. But it would be a mistake to lump this movie in with the precociousness of Lena Dunham’s Girls. Because for all the emotional honesty and stylized naturalism in Girls, it’s still a neatly packaged weekly show arranged into seasonal arcs, neatly divvied up among its cannily arranged cast. Frances Ha is also emotionally honest and stylishly naturalistic, but it’s a far more focused story about the pain of transitioning into adulthood at a different rate from your friends. It’s about not quite being able to move into your place in the world. It has bite. It’s almost never played for laughs, although it’s certainly funny. Sometimes cruelly so.
Baumbach’s fondness for New York is in full force, shot in lovely black-and-white. Also, it’s masterfully edited as a series of flashes about the process of day to day life over the weeks and months. It even jumps nonchalantly to a whole other country. If there’s one problem — and this is a great problem for a movie to have — it’s that Gerwig is so striking in black and white. She has the elegance of Ingrid Bergman, but with an amazing unselfconscious expressiveness. It can be hard to accept her as a down-on-her-luck twentysomething. Isn’t the world kinder to people this luminous?
