Last week I got an email from a woman named Vickie who asked me to take a look at her let’s play series, which she posts on YouTube under the name owlsighs. I don’t normally enjoy let’s plays, mainly since I’d just as soon play a game myself, but also since they’re often cynical or ironic. But after sampling a few of Vickie’s videos — this “let me show you my house” for Skyrim is particularly charming — I was struck by her absolute lack of cynicism and irony. So I asked her if Quarter to Three could sponsor a Tomb Raider series. She graciously agreed and it begins in the above video. Furthermore, she’ll be dropping in on the podcast in the coming weeks to keep us updated.
You’d think children would be useless in SimCity Societies given its population model. When you build houses, you add people to your city. Those people visit venues — movie theaters, retail shops, bars, churches — to keep their happiness up so they don’t riot. And that’s all you need in a city if you have infinite money.
But since you don’t have infinite money, you need to build workplaces. People go to workplaces to fill the available jobs, which provides you with money. That’s the basic economy in SimCity Societies. Houses provide people; workplaces translate people’s time into money; and venues make people happy. And the happier they are, the more money they (i.e. you) make.
So in a game without aging, what good are children if you can’t put them to work? Because you can’t put children to work. There are a few options for dystopias in SimCity Societies, but none so Dickensian.
After the jump, children aren’t the future. They’re the now.Continue reading →
As you may know, Electronic Arts publishes one of the worst citybuilders you can play, and one of the best. I’ve been heartily enjoying the latter now that I’m no longer playing the former. SimCity: Societies, a 2007 game created by the folks at Tilted Mill who know citybuilders like no one else, takes a unique approach to the genre. Love it or hate it, you haven’t built a city like this.
Many citybuilders are based on a “gardening” model. You stake out rows for particular crops, make sure the conditions are right, and stand back while they grow. It’s an organic and arguably realistic approach to how cities develop. But SimCity Societies is nothing like planting a garden. It’s more like fitting together unique pieces to create elaborate clockwork systems with unique personality. And one of the game’s strengths is how much personality you’ll find in the different pieces.
After the jump, let me tell you about one of the pieces. Bring your knitting needle.Continue reading →
Landing is that part of the flight, where an aircraft returns to the ground. Easier said than done: sometimes it’s not that trivial to pilot an aircraft through strong winds, a deep fog or a roaring thunderstorm. Mayday! Emergency Landing…challenges players to overcome the fiercest difficulties and have their planes touch the ground safely all by keeping the passengers as happy as possible.
I have no idea whether this iOS game, which includes “heartbreaking airplane failures”, is any good. But I love that the stewardess — I think I should be allowed to call her that if she’s going to dress so old school — is giving directions. Take that, George Kennedy!
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
