I’ve been jumping back into Starcraft II and discovering it’s a muscle you need to exercise or it will atrophy. So what do I do after building a spawn pool? But regardless of how bad you suck, you can’t shuffle units around in this game without re-appreciating that it’s a finely tuned RTS that couldn’t possibly be more finely tuned. Or could it? We find out this week. And we also get one of those campaigns with crazily elaborate production values to distract you from the fact that you’re just flinging blobs of units at a mostly passive AI. But frankly, I think I care less about Heart of the Swarm being a Starcraft II add-on than I care about it being a Blizzard game.
Also out this week, a $10 add-on for Dead Space 3 called Awakened makes this almost infinitely replayable sci-fi shooter/meat stompin’ sim even more playable. You had me at telemetry spike, Dead Space 3. Just give me more weird things to shoot and new ways to shoot them.
Also, Sony’s taking one last half-hearted Playstation 3 stab at the God of War franchise. Remember that one? The angry bald guy with the tattoos who yelled “Zeus!” a lot?
As one character says in the movie, “Not so great and powerful, after all”. We all agree. But we have a spirited disagreement about the original Wizard of Oz, variously calling it creepy, charming, hilarious, and dated. Then this week’s 3×3, starting at the 54-minute mark, is our favorite wardrobe malfunctions.
Next week: The Call
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(See the comments section below for, uh, a little more detail.)
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
