During one of the storyline missions in Guild Wars 2 — these will vary based on your answers to multiple choice questions when you make your character — I had to investigate some strange goings on in the sewers of Lion’s Arch, the game’s main city. The mission takes place in an instance of the sewers scripted to involve some things I’ll leave you to discover on your own. But as soon as you walk in, you see a steady stream of rats coming out of the sewers. The idea is that there’s something up ahead that they want no part of.
So I did the mission and then ended up back at the entrance, watching the rats stream out. I’m not proud of what happened next.
After the jump, a one-man Vamanos Pest Control Continue reading →
NHL13, which stands for the National Hokey League 13, is out this week. In this sport, you hit a round thing with a stick, which means hokey is very similar to the sports of golf, baseball, and jai alai. If you’re into hokey, this is your lucky week.
The other game out this week is Tekken Tag Tournament 2, which is a lot more fun that NHL 13 when it comes to saying the names of a game out loud. Go ahead, try it. Saying NHL 13 makes it sound like you’re ready to take a nap. Saying Tekken Tag Tournament 2 makes it sound like you’re announcing the impending arrival of something at least snappy, if not downright exciting.
In The Expendables 2, a bunch of former movie stars stand around shooting guns at stunt men and then saying various things that Kellywand will reenact in this week’s synopsis. Plus, we solicit advice from folks who sell movie tickets. This week’s 3×3, our choices for best shutdowns, begins at the 46-minute mark.
Next week: The Master
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After saying a few words about the sexual harassment suit against Stardock, we briefly try not to talk about Guild Wars 2. Tune in to see how well that worked out.
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During this year’s Penny Arcade Expo talk on X-Com: Enemy Unknown, lead designer Jake Solomon was talking about various ideas Firaxis batted around for the game’s strategic level. He mentioned a strategic level that would play like a card game. He said this in the sheepish tone of someone admitting he wore bright red clown shoes to a funeral. Personally, I wouldn’t have minded a strategic level card game in X-Com. Cards make everything better.
Although I’m not getting a card game layer in X-Com, I did see four innovative card game gimmicks.
After the jump, draw! Continue reading →
I hate to be the wet blanket who doesn’t like Zen Studio’s enthusiastic cheerful Plants vs Zombies table for Pinball FX2. But I don’t really have any choice. It’s more a matter of exhaustion than cynicism, or any sort of high pinball standards, or problems with the how the source material was adapted. On that last count, the Plants vs Zombies table is beyond reproach. It hits all the right notes from Popcap’s enthusiastic cheerful game. Even though this is a pretty superficial table, it manages to incorporate an admirable numbers of familiar concepts: sundrops, coins, various plants, various zombies, lawnmowers, Crazy Dave and his Gremlin, fog, the jack-in-the-box, and the chipper sunflower voiceover are all present.
But the table is just too darn long. I suspect Zen Studios intended it to be player friendly, designed to appeal to casual players unaccustomed to pinball. The result is minimal opportunities to lose the ball, lots of extra balls, frequent multiballs, and liberally activated kickbacks. Here is a table that does not want to let you stop playing. When you launch that first ball, expect to be here for at least a half hour. That is not an exaggeration. At least a half hour. You don’t even have to be good. That’s just how it’s going to happen. What an odd way to adapt a game played in short ebullient bursts.
Furthermore, the core mechanics of earning sundrops to make new plants and money to buy upgrades seems underdeveloped. I almost always have more sundrops that I know what to do with, and I can easily buy up Crazy Dave’s upgrades, which leaves me with nothing to do with my money but spend it on bacon for points. The handful of missions are clever enough, with actual zombies shambling around on the table, but there are too few of them. I don’t see any sign of long-term goals beyond the sheer endurance of letting your score rack up to 100,000,000, then 200,000,000, then 300,000,000. At a certain point, it feels as if the table has revealed all it’s going to reveal, and you’re just hanging fire watching numbers creep upwards. Sometimes casual gets you a bit too close to tedious.
2 stars
Xbox 360
Tom Hardy, Shia LaBeouf, and another guy make moonshine and drive it around in the olden days, back when cars had running boards and men wore Indiana Jones hats. We consider all this and then consider the best use of famous landmarks for this week’s 3×3, which starts at the 38-minute mark in case you want to avoid Lawless spoilers.
Next week: The Expendables 2
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Chris “I’m Not Going in the Water” Hornbostel joins us this week to talk about what we love about Guild Wars 2, what we don’t love about Guild Wars 2, and the anecdote we would tell to express what’s special about the game. You can find us in the game at tomchick.6739, mcmaster.9567, and triggercut.2059.
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The nifty but terminally fidgety 10000000 just got an update. This match-3 plus free-runner plus RPG plus high score chase for the iPhone had an issue of the tiles not clicking into place very effectively, which is a horrible thing to happen in a game you play against a relentless clock. But I’m happy to discover that the latest update fixes that admirably. I’ve been able to play with nary a hitch lining up the tiles I want, unlocking doors, zapping ninjas, swording skeletons, and gathering wood without having to fight the interface.
Finding those tiles is another matter entirely, but that’s a me problem and not a 10000000 problem.
Here’s how the internet works. Someone writes an article. A popular aggregate then plucks an incendiary quote from the article. At which point guys like me blog about the incendiary quote in lieu of reading or actually discussing the article.
But in this case, I’m not even going to get that far. In this case, I’m done with the whole affair after seeing a single word. It all started when Polygon sat down with the developers of Spec Ops: The Line for a long talk about all sorts of things. Then VG247 latched onto the term “cancerous growth”, which lead designer Cory Davis used to describe Spec Ops’ multiplayer, developed by a separate studio. He was frustrated with what he felt was a waste of resources for a game he designed primarily as a single-player experience.
But Davis wasn’t content with “cancerous growth”. He further noted, “The multiplayer game’s tone is entirely different, the game mechanics were raped to make it happen, and it was a waste of money.”
No, Mr. Davis, the game mechanics weren’t raped. Compromised, botched, bungled, fumbled, or even fucked up. But they were not raped. That word means something else. Now go sit in the corner with Missouri’s Republican Representative until you learn to talk like an adult.
This fall, Capcom will publish the first three Phoenix Wrights on the iPad as a single game. Well, it’s technically a single game. You download it to play the first two chapters for free and then you have to buy each full game separately. You also get this bonus feature:
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy HD will also come with the “Everyone Object” mode (at no additional cost) to help players communicate their displeasure of everyday situations with the help of popular Ace Attorney characters and sayings. With a simple touch of a button, the phrases, “Objection!”, “Hold it!”, and “Take that!” can be emailed to friends or tweeted along with an animated image.
You know it’s a Capcom release when they have to explain they’re not going to charge extra for something.
As an online game that you jump into to play simultaneously with a bunch of other people, the launch of Guild Wars 2 was remarkably successful. But as a game with the name “guild” in the title, the launch of Guild Wars 2 was an unmitigated disaster. I guess you could say they got it half right.
After the jump, belonging to clubs that wouldn’t have you as a member Continue reading →
Madden NFL 13 (pictured) is out this week. Nothing but net!
Guild Wars 2 is technically out this week, but any real Guild Wars aficionado has been playing since Friday night. Can Sony interest you in PS3 collections of the God of War, Infamous, and Ratchet & Clank series? Paradox is releasing an RTS called Starvoid, which I honestly thought was about a very hungry creature. It wasn’t until I was actually typing the word just now that I thought, “Oh, star and void…”. I would have gone with Voidstar.
This week we enlist professional help to talk about Beasts of the Southern Wild. Dr. Bruce Geryk, the guy who got us to see the movie, explains himself. At the 1:05 mark, we pour a 4×3 of best uses of alcohol in a movie.
Next week: Lawless
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It wouldn’t be a launch without a catastrophic failure and a lack of communication from the developers. But for most of Guild Wars 2’s first evening, ArenaNet decided to play it a little differently. The game launched exactly at the announced time, it was easy to get onto servers that weren’t listed as full, and the game ran smoothly for the most part. Other than being dropped a few times, which just meant quickly logging back on to find my character patiently waiting in the same place, the Guild Wars 2’s launch was a thing of beauty for how utterly unremarkable it was. It was the sort of launch that didn’t even seem like a launch. And you almost never see a launch like that.
For about seven hours, anyway.
At about 4am Saturday morning, the game basically shut down. The only error message implied that it was my router’s fault that I couldn’t get online. For a couple of hours, the only server status message from ArenaNet was that they were experiencing heavy volume and they are “monitoring the situation”. Now I can’t even get to the launcher.
But boy was it nice while it lasted. At a certain point, there was just too much to do, too many things to see, too many things to progress, too many places to go. I had to get away. So I ducked into the world vs. world to wander around and see what I could do as a solo player. Not much, of course. But I ran across someone else who had the same idea. We dove into the ocean to enlist the help of some little fish people. They’re like a cross between a seal and an otter and a Gungan. If you grind a bit for them, driving evil sea snakes out of their temple and gathering pearls, they’ll waddle out of the water. On land, they can summon a storm that heals your faction and randomly throws lightning bolts at enemy factions. Unfortunately, Guild Wars 2 shut down before I could see them in action. They better still be there when I get back.
