Boardgame designer Reiner Knizia seems to slap random themes onto whatever mechanics he dreams up. An auction game? Ancient Egyptian dynasties! Matching tiles? The rise of Mesopotamian civilization! Warring cubes, obelisks, and beans fighting for control of hexes? Feudal Japan! Stratego with special abilities? The Lord of the Rings, naturally.
But Lost Cities, his mathy two-player card game, has uniquely intertwined theme and mechanics. The theme is sending out expeditions to find lost cities in remote lands. The mechanics are the calculus of risk/reward, measured against card draws and whatever the other player is doing. Where will you search? How much will you invest? Does the other player know something you don’t? It’s a canny mix of calculation, randomness, and even a touch of psychology.
One of the great things about all these board games being ported over to the iOS is that you can see with fresh eyes how well games have held up. Or haven’t held up, in some cases. San Juan, for instance. It’s a card-based lightweight version of Puerto Rico, a classic board game. Both games share the same 17th century Caribbean motif and the same gimmick of players taking turns selecting roles. But whereas Puerto Rico is still a lean mean resource management Euro-machine, San Juan is a relic of the days before games like Race to the Galaxy, Dominion, and Ascension. I have no idea why anyone would still play it.
But don’t necessarily hold that against Ravensburger’s competent iOS port. It’s a convenient and effective way to get your San Juan on in under ten minutes. It’s a bit surprising that Ravensburger so rotely ported it from the card game, especially given how they completely revamped the playing pieces for their iPad version of Puerto Rico. No such thing happens with San Juan, which is just a straight-up reproduction of the card game, right down to the artwork on the roles. This means you have to learn which card art means which purple building. Is that an archive or a poor house? Better tap on it to find out. Or not, since the game so conveniently flags everything you can do when you can do it. It’s particularly helpful how cards light up when their abilities kick in, and how the little tags representing resources are visible in the corner when the rest of the card is obscured.
Maybe San Juan is too simple not to do well, but Ravensburger has done well with their just-the-cards-ma’am approach. Cards are constantly moving around the screen to show who’s doing what. You literally finger through your fanned out cards when you refer to them. The discard pile is a little messy.
The AI is fine, which is again probably a matter of the game being too simple to not do well. But a central fact about San Juan is that you’re playing against the shuffle more than you’re playing against the other players. If you’re willing to draw out a ten-minute solitaire game into however long your asynchronous matches take, San Juan has multiplayer support. And even if you’re not into multiplayer, it has a nifty take on leaderboards. Gamecenter tracks the points you’ve earned across all your matches and compares your total to your friends’ totals. You may not be better than them at San Juan, but you can beat them by just playing more.
In our final B.G. (i.e. before Guild Wars 2) era podcast, Brandon Cackowski-Schnell joins us to talk about Darksiders II. Jason McMaster nearly masters the new co-op mode in Team Fortress 2. And Tom Chick reviews Madden NFL 13 (pictured).
If you’re interested in level design, theme parks and casinos are great teachers.
Brendon Chung’s commentary mode in Thirty Flights of Loving includes comments like the above quote, a slower look at some of the game’s dizzying edits, and even deleted scenes, such as an earlier incarnation of Anita’s sharpshooter skill that didn’t fit the character. That picture up there tells you all you need to know about Anita, except for the part about her being a confectioner. Don’t worry, it all makes as much sense as it needs to.
Thirty Flights of Loving is Chung’s sequel to Gravity Bone. These aren’t games, and they’re not even stories. They’re snatches of interactive imagery stitched together in the Quake engine, more a series of feelings and images than anything else, cinematic poems about adventure, love, and betrayal. Thirty Flights of Loving is currently available on Steam and it includes Gravity Bone.
The basic design of Darksiders II was pretty well established in the first game. Some hearty God of War combat, some grimly McFarlanesque exaggerated World of Warcraft graphic novel graphics, and gameplay progression in the vein of classic Zeldas and Metroids. Darksiders II is more and slightly better of this, but that’s not all you get! A new “just add Diablo” approach lends it that sheen of sequel newness.
After the jump, can I interest you in a cheap pair of Bitter Punishing Scythes of the Whirlwind?Continue reading →
It’s pretty exciting to discover a new genre, which is what I’ve spent the last few weeks doing with iPad shooters (shmups, bullet hells, STGs, danmakus, or whatever you’d like to call them). It’s something else entirely to discover what may very well be the finest instance of that new genre. The act of playing Bug Princess 2 is the act of gradually realizing, “Ah, so this is why these games are a big deal…”
There’s another Transformers game out this week, if you’re into that sort of thing. This one apparently has robo-dinosaurs in it. Frankly, I’m surprised it’s taken this long for robo-dinosaurs to find their way into a Transformers game. There’s also a new iteration of Counter-Strike, called Global Operations, made by the folks who made Defense Grid. And Dark Souls is out for the PC. Please. Anyone who cares enough about Dark Souls bought a console system to play it on.
The real wallet threat this week is the pre-launch launch of Guild Wars 2 on Friday.
Paranorman, the latest animated movie from the folks who did the Coraline animation, is no Coraline. It’s also no Iron Giant, Brave, The Incredibles, Monster House, or Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. But at least it’s probably better than that thing with the owls. If you want to avoid Paranorman spoilers, skip ahead to the 45-minute mark. This week, we discuss movies that are about the wrong characters.
The original Darksiders started slowly. What’s more, it took its time unfurling bits of gameplay. You’d be near the end of the game and it would basically say, “Wait, hold on a sec, I’ve still got this nifty gimmick to show you! It’s right out of Portal, but I saved it up until now. Here!” That these gimmicks were borrowed wasn’t the slightest bit troubling. I’ll take a game that knows how to borrow over a game that thinks innovation is inherently better any day. Darksiders II also takes its time getting good, although the borrowing doesn’t seem so obvious this time. In fact, Darksiders II feels a lot more like its own creature.
However, unless you veer a little from the main storyline, Darksiders II may take longer than intended to get good. I was plowing through it, just hitting the waypoints for the main storyline, ignoring the side quests — that blacksmith can get his own dang hammer and who cares about all these collectibles? — and making pretty good time. I was mostly unimpressed, but content enough. But then I got sort of stuck and decided to explore. At which point I realized all those glowing blue stones I’d been seeing were for something I’d skipped because I didn’t talk to someone by the side of the road. And those tokens I could spend with Vulgrim are actually useful. And when you go out of your way to figure out how to reach that chest, you have a lot more treasure to feed your possessed weapons, which are suddenly a lot more useful. And it’s a pretty trivial matter to get enough money to learn all the combat moves. Darksiders II gets really good once you stop playing to finish it.
However, even if you do just follow the main storyline, even if you are just making a beeline to the end, Darksiders II gets good once you come to the Eternal Throne. If you’re not sold at this point, which is fairly early in the second world, you’re probably never going to be a Darksiders II fan. The basic concept of the Eternal Throne — which I’ll let you discover — has been done in a few different games, but this bit of Darksiders II is an epic fantasy set piece at its best. Leave it to the developers at Vigil Games to take their time wowing me.
It’s a busy week with McMaster’s new Kickstarter in effect. Go here to check out Cap’n Patch! Is it any coincidence that McMaster is making a game about a spider and is also terrorizing the Bug Princess 2 leaderboards? In other news, Secret World announces an upcoming celebrity appearance sure to excite any fan of the hit movie Armageddon, Orcs Must Die 2 is going to force you to stop using that same trap combo over and over again, and you don’t have to buy the new Payday: The Heist DLC to enjoy it. Plus some Sleeping Dogs, Darksiders II, Hybrid, Modern Warfare 3 chaos mode, and Jamestown.
Among the changes coming to Diablo III are completely revamped legendary items. Senior designer Andrew Chambers notes:
In many ways the Legendary items that we released with the game were just Rares with flavor text. You called us on it, and we’ve listened.
The updated legendary items will have new visuals and — more importantly — new custom effects. This will be part of the 1.0.4 update due by the end of August.
In case you’re considering going to hunt down a few legendaries now (i.e. scour the auction house for a good deal before these items get better), hold on a sec.
…these changes will only affect Legendary items that drop after the release of patch 1.0.4. This includes items that haven’t been identified yet (as items are rolled when they drop).
A lot of shmups on the iPad are ports that were good before they ever got to the iPad. For instance, the absurdly generous War Blade and the epically butt-numbing Battlesquadron One have both wended their way to the iPad from the Amiga. The Amiga, for pete’s sake! They don’t even make those anymore, and here we are, playing perfectly decent Amiga games on our iPads. Cave’s shmups — stand by for more on these, because you can’t talk about shumps without talking about Cave — all come from arcade machines. The iPad lets these games bust free from their origins.
But there’s something to be said for a game built specifically for a platform. The iPad isn’t just a place for ports. In some cases, the iPad is home. And in some cases, it shows.
Co-directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez have had a tough time following up on what made Blair Witch Project so good. Myrick has come closest with The Objective, which has a lot in common with Blair Witch Project. But Sanchez’ latest movies were the wretched Seventh Moon (Amy Smart gets chased by Chinese ghost people) and the uneven Altered (“Hey guys, look! I found an alien!”).
However, Sanchez’ has finally found firmer footing with Lovely Molly, a creepy horror movie that shares some important elements with Blair Witch Project. Lovely Molly flirts with the found footage concept, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. In fact, I can’t help but wonder if it’s a bit of an inside joke for Sanchez. Like Blair, this movie has a strong female lead. As Molly, a recovering heroin addict who may or may not be afflicted by supernatural goings on, Gretchen Lodge is 110% committed to what she’s doing. Is she a good actress? With this sort of absolute conviction, that’s beside the point. The movie wouldn’t have worked without Lodge’s focus, commitment, and fearlessness.
Lovely Molly can be pretty aimless. It takes its time. It meanders. It’s slow. But it will not deny you a payoff. As with Blair Witch Project, you’re in for a memorable finale. The problem with so many horror movies is that once everything is revealed, once the cards are on the table and the monster is out of the closet, it all falls apart. Any crappy horror movie can get mileage out of something lurking in the dark. But it’s a rare horror movie that can shine a light on its lurker and still be scary.
Most of the shootering I do on the PC these days is with friends on a LAN. Since we have a wide range of skill levels, our games of choice tend to be cooperative fare, like Payday: the Heist (the recent Wolfpack DLC is really good), The Darkness II, or Modern Warfare 2. As sleek, accessible, and energetic as Team Fortress 2 is, it never really fit the bill as a game for a small group of guys, some of whom are more FPS challenged than others.
All that changes tomorrow with Team Fortress’ co-op Mann vs. Machine mode. It looks like it’s time to finally reinstall.
Sleeping Dogs would have been quite the game four or five years ago, before Saints Row 3, Just Cause 2, Grand Theft Auto IV, Assassin’s Creed, or Arkham City. As it is, in 2012, it is a thunderless game that does things that have each been done better in at least two or three other games.
After the jump, finding a place in an open-world worldContinue reading →
