April Fools’ Day gags on the internet are normally tired affairs that elicit a groan rather than a chuckle, but every now and then something truly inspired happens that takes on a life of its own. Remember the Tauntaun sleeping bag? Once people saw that joke, all they could do was think about how cool it would be to actually sleep in one and the pranksters were forced to get it made to sell it to eager little Luke Skywalkers.
The best thing to come out of the most recent April Fools’ Day was Guild Wars 2’s Super Adventure Box event. This isn’t some blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gag. It’s a full event mission with new graphics and level design all made to resemble a goofball 16-bit game. The joke commerical was pretty aces too.
Guild Wars 2 is continuing the old-school love by releasing a free version of the side-scrolling game in the commerical! Rytlock’s Critter Rampage is a bite-sized chunk of silliness made real. Have at it!
I, for one, am glad to have more Dead Island. So Dead Island: Riptide is hitting the sweet spot for me, especially since it’s pretty difficult early on. Yeah, sure, I’ve imported my high-level character from the original game but — surprise! — I got captured at the start and all my weapons got taken away. My captors also apparently took away all my memories of how to make homemade weapons to shock, fry, freeze, melt, fold, spindle, mutilate, and explode zombies. Which is fair enough. This is a sort of reboot in a new area of the same old tropical paradise gone wrong. I have no problem with a reboot. And this time I know to keep all the sticks of deodorant I find for when I remember how to made deodorant bombs.
Namco Bandai (Namco Bandai?) is publishing a Star Trek shooter made by Digital Extremes. I wouldn’t normally care (a Star Trek shooter?), but Digital Extremes’ last game was The Darkness II. Still, a Star Trek shooter? It doesn’t inspire confidence that the only name they could think up was Star Trek: The Video Game. Why couldn’t they take a cue from Monaco: What’s Yours is Mine, a game also out this week that looks like a combination of Pac-Man and a heist?
If you’re up for some serious strategy — I’m not real keen on the moniker 4X, but it fits here — Masters of the Broken World is this week’s fantasy flavor and StarDrive is this week’s sci-fi flavor. Lego City Undercover for the Nintendo DS is a miserably shrunken version of the excellent Wii game that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. Dragon’s Dogma gets some DLC. Finally, the third and final installment of Assassin’s Creed III’s Tyranny of King Washington DLC is out this week.
Amnesia scared the beejebus out of me. I’m not ashamed to admit that I yelped like a little girl a couple of times when I first played it. Once I figured out that Amnesia had almost no penalty for dying, the terror wore off. It was still creepy, but I no longer went nuts every time the screen blurred. One of the most effective tools in its bag of tricks was the fact that you had to choose to put down your light whenever you wanted to do anything, exposing yourself to the dark. The dark was where your fears lived. Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, promises to be another romp through creepy passages and scary rooms, but this time you’ll get the sounds of clanking industry around you thanks to thechinesroom’s development. They’ve published examples of the terror you’ll strain to (not) see soon.
Squint at the new screenshots after the jump. Continue reading →
It’s a spirited two-to-one split on Oblivion, which is why the 3×3 doesn’t start until the 1 hour and 17-minute mark. Speaking of marks, this week’s 3×3 is tattoos!
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In Soul Sacrifice, a superlative action RPG out on April 30th for the Vita but with a demo currently available, I have to fight some orcs. This should be easy. If there’s one thing I know, it’s fighting orcs. I’ve been doing it since sixth grade. Wait, those (pictured) are orcs? What? How do they figure those things are orcs? Soul Sacrifice has a lore entry for every creature. I didn’t intend to read any of these. But it can’t hurt to check just one.
It turns out that rats fed on magic back in ancient times to prevail against cats. This turned some of them into cat-killing goblins. So cats began to calculate the best way to absorb magic themselves. They discovered that the source of magic is human sorcerers, and that by eating humans, they could become powerful. Furthermore, by eating the humans who love them most, they could become even more powerful. This is how orcs are made. An orc is a corrupted cat who has devoured the master who loved him.
I don’t remember that part of Lord of the Rings, in which Peter Jackson established that orcs are basically people in demon/zombie make-up. But as I fling poisoned thorns at these sluggish vaguely caterpillar shaped beasts with huge misshapen vomiting mouths full of human skulls, I can see the cat influence. In fact, they’re downright Cheshire! I’m also reminded of the orcs in Ralph Bakshi’s animated adaptation of Tolkien. Those orcs had vaguely feline features and huge mouths. It’s nice to see — and read! — a different take on orcs again. And it’s also nice that when you kill these guys, their souls escape in the form of liberated cats that scurry away happily. In that regard, the end of a level in Soul Sacrifice isn’t unlike the end of a level in Sonic the Hedgehog.
Orion: Dino Beatdown, by Spiral Game Studios, has been re-released as Orion: Dino Horde. Spiral would like everyone to forget the low review scores and technical issues that plagued the game when it was first released in May 2012 and give it a shot in its relaunched state. In fact, Spiral calls Horde a sequel to Beatdown even though it’s essentially the same game, but with more polished animations, new weapons and dinosaurs, and the addition of an in-game microtransaction store. Owners of Beatdown got the update for free.
All is not rosy however. Beatdown, besides getting panned by reviewers, was plagued with controversy due to allegations that the developer had stolen assets from Natural Selection 2 as well as laying off team members to avoid paying them. The Horde update has been similarly mired in upset amid accusations that Spiral was trying to manipulate Metacritic score of Beatdown by classifying Horde as a new game. Spiral’s head David Prassel has even been accused of using too heavy a hand in moderating Steam forums by locking and deleting insulting threads. Of course, the new addition of an in-game store has not endeared him to the few fans he had.
“Well is it better than Marvel vs Capcom?” my friend eventually asked. He had started off asking me, “So how is Injustice?” But until I’ve played enough to write a review, I never know how to answer so open a question. So I just stammered noncommittally. But with his more pointed question, I was suddenly floored. I’d certainly thought a lot about Marvel vs Capcom while learning and playing Injustice, and obviously the developers at NetherRealm have thought about it as well. But I hadn’t yet considered the simple matter of which is the better game.
I have a strange complex relationship with the Marvel vs Capcom series. Marvel vs Capcom 3 was both one of my favorite and most disappointing games of 2011, mostly because I liked it as much as I did and Capcom Capcommed it as much as they did. It taught me a lot about fighting games, including how to actually play them. After all these years, that was the game that truly introduced me to the genre.
But given the choice, would I rather play Injustice: Gods Among Us or Marvel vs Capcom 3? And why?
After the jump, who wins in a fight between The Avengers and Batman? Continue reading →
Today’s update for God of War Ascension, a surprisingly good multiplayer game, just raised the level cap from 30 to 40. To really appreciate what this means, you have to understand that any given character actually has four levels, one for each of the gods, who are the functional equivalent of character classes. So whereas you used to have 120 levels to earn, now you have 160. Furthermore, these levels also unlock new rewards for each of the four gods, including a new item (i.e. four new items), two new relics that give you passive powers (i.e. eight new relics), and an “ultimate magic” (i.e. four “ultimate magics”). With Ascension, Sony did a great job keeping God of War relevant, and this is exactly the sort of post-release support that keeps on keeping it relevant.
Also, double xp weekend in effect, y’all!
Peter Molyneux is either an inspired genius, an impractical dreamer, or a gifted con artist depending on who you ask. His game Curiosity – What’s Inside the Cube? launched in November 2012 and asked players around the world to cooperate at chippping away bits of a virtual cube to uncover the “life-changingly amazing” secret in the center. This is done by tapping at “cubelets” one at a time. Since the cube is made of billions of cubelets, the task would seem to be a daunting one. Luckily, the game allows players to purchase special tools and abilites with real money to increase their mining ability.
Molyneux, and his development company 22Cans, has always maintained that Curiosity is a social as well as a financial experiment and the newest feature added to the game reinforces that. Players can now buy blocks of cublets to add back to the total. For $0.99, you can return 10K cublets back to the cube and annoy some people. For $6.99, you can negate 100K cublets of work and make some players angry. For $10.99, you can add back a whopping 500K cubelets and really mess with the game.
As part of the experiment we are also offering the opportunity for those keen to preserve the experience to add back cubelets at the start of a layer. We don’t know what will happen in this war of attrition.
Molyneux, you magnificent bastard! I never want to play this game, but I eagerly await the outcome.
Curiosity is available on iOS as well as Android systems.
We’ll find out more about Evil Within as Bethesda carefully doles out information starting next week, but five things struck me about the live action teaser.
After the jump, could this be an actual horror game instead of a shooter? Continue reading →
Now we know what those mysterious Vine videos from Bethesda were about. IGN has the exclusive announcement trailer for The Evil Within, a survival horror game from Shinji Mikami, creator of the Resident Evil series, and Tango Gameworks. Unfortunately, it’s a live-action trailer, so there’s not much information on the actual game yet. Still, for everyone saddened by the recent action-heavy direction of the Resident Evil games from Capcom, perhaps now there’s hope for some good scares.
Polygon reports that TimeGate Studios lost an appeal last week against publisher SouthPeak Interactive and may have to give up the rights to the Section 8 property as well as pay $7.35 million in damages. The decision came from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit following a prior federal ruling stemming from a lawsuit begun in 2009.
TimeGate staff met yesterday to discuss the future of the company and its recently announced project, Minimum, in light of the decision, a source familiar with the matter told Polygon today.
Watch the announcement video for Minimum here.
Season two for Path of Exile starts tomorrow morning at 10am Pacific with a two hour and fifteen minute solo race. Start a new character and see how far you can get before 12:15.
In season two, you don’t have to amass a certain number of hard-to-earn reward points to quality for prizes. Every point counts as a raffle ticket for random prizes. If you just get to level 12 tomorrow and earn a single reward point — surely you can get to level 12 in two hours? — you qualify for one of 20 unique Karui wards, 5 unique Shiversting bastard swords, or 2 unique Quill Rain bows. Alternatively, you can win any of the race’s various goals for an assured prize, or you can cash in all your points at the end of the season.
Check the schedule here for details on events and prizes. Why can’t Diablo III do cool things like this?
Slightly Mad Studios started Project CARS in April 2011 with a different crowd-sourced funding model. Instead of a Kickstarter, the realistic driving simulation would be directly funded by players who would not only have a say in the direction of the game development, but could receive a share of any profits. It’s this innovative funding model that’s being investigated by the UK’s Fincancial Services Authority for being a possible unregulated collective investment scheme. Eurogamer has the story on why the FSA is investigating and how Slightly Mad has had to stop receiving contributions for their game. Andy Tudor, the Slightly Mad Studios Director, says they made sure that every contributor was clear on the intent of the project and disputes that it was ever framed as an investment.
There may have been talk, or people may have interpreted it that way and replied back to posts saying it’s an investment, but it’s not. We were very clear. We discussed this for months and months before we launched. Internally we never called it an investment, externally we never called it an investment, the terms and conditions never call it an investment, ever.
The people on the forums right now understand it is not, and that is the way it has always been. We basically hire you as a staff member. The royalties are us paying you wages for contributing to the project.
Unfortunately, Ian Bell, the founder of Slightly Mad had written the following in April 2011 to prospective customers on a fan forum making things slightly less clear.
My idea is to let anyone interested invest in the development, both financially and with their time, if they want. Our lawyer is working on the terms and conditions so this is going to happen.
Becoming the biggest developer on earth overnight would be newsworthy, which would pull in more investors. We suspect we might even get banks in looking for a 200 per cent – 500 per cent-plus return in 18 months.
Imagine we sell 2 million units of the final game (Shift 1 did 5 million and Shift 2 is tracking well also). The revenue from those sales is approx. 70 million dollars. 5-7 million dev cost and a few more million for marketing, and we’re still looking at a very healthy return for the investors.
The plan is that any investment into the development is exactly that, an investment.”
The investigation is ongoing and the outcome could determine if the game is ever completed, let alone shows a profit and pays back the contributors.
Developer 82 Inc pegged it when they named their last game New World Colony. That game plays pretty much as you’d expect, what with the hexes and lumber and villages and victory points. But then they name their next game PWN, which doesn’t do much to put me in mind of cyberspace and hacking. Fortunately, it’s got the subtitle “combat hacking” so that you know this isn’t about 13-year-olds showing each other up through stunning feats of juvenilia.
Combat Hacking — I’m just going to pretend it’s not called PWN — is a nifty exercise in fingerwork and brain power. It looks like a puzzle game, but it’s not. It’s actually a head-to-head real time strategy game focusing on territory control, maneuvering, and the careful application of special powers, all lovingly cyberpunk themed. It’s too fast to be simply brainy, and way too brainy to be simply an action game. The matches are short and eventually decisive, but they allow for plenty of dramatic give and take, and there’s even a campaign mode to unlock characters with special abilities, dopey names, and individual leaderboards.
It’s a good enough game that it could have supported some sort of narrative beyond “and now Cipher fights Prime on the Megacube map”. As someone who’s been steeped in Fantasy Flight’s excellent Netrunner card game, I really dig how Combat Hacking hits that cyberpunk sweet spot where gameplay and theme overlap. If it had just gone a tad further and given the action some sort of strategic context, I’d be in cyberpunk nerdvana. It turns out this is what I wanted from the hacking interface is the last Deus Ex.
The 3D maps are an unfortunate bit of busy work that lend plenty of cyberspace theming — cyberspace is totally 3D, duh — but they don’t lend themselves well to the touchpad controls. I meant to de-virus my nodes, but I accidentally spun the matrix around so now I can’t see what’s going where. The action is too fast for accidental map twirling. And although you can play multiplayer, you can only do it with people in the same room. But until a new Neuromancer game comes along, this will do just fine.
3 stars
iOS
