Good news! This week’s wallet threat level plummets with the release of Lollipop Chainsaw. I can’t post the review until midnight tonight, but suffice to say your wallet can sleep safe and sound. Wait a second! The red phone is ringing! Hold on.
Oh dear, it seems the wallet threat level has elevated substantially with the release of Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion. Since its release, this epic sci-fi RTS has gotten cool add-ons that fold in new bits of gameplay. But Rebellion remixes the entire experience for the better. One of the best RTSs you can play just got better.
Krater is an oddduck from Fatshark. Based on the beta, I’m not convinced it works as a direct competitor to Diablo III and Torchlight 2, the games it most closely resembles. But I’m intrigued by its touch of real time strategy, party-based RPGing, and characters who can actually die. It goes live tonight, so stand by for more detailed impressions this week.
Sony releases a new game for the PSP Veeta called Gravity Rush. I did my term of service with gravity rushing in last week’s stinker, Inversion. Which I didn’t have to play on a $300 handheld boondoggle. Furthermore, Konami ports a few old Metal Gear Solids to the Vida. Meanwhile, Atlus shows some love for the PSP Regular with a nifty tactical RPG called Gungnir. From playing a few levels, I can plainly see the same colorful charm and exhaustive detail of Jean d’Arc, Tactics Ogre, and Disgaea.
Finally, Dirt: Showdown is out. And by out, I mean it’s out on the platform of preference for those of us who take our arcade racing in the living room.
Ridley Scott’s eagerly awaited sci-fi saga, Prometheus, is here at last. Boy, is it here. It really showed up. It was released like you wouldn’t believe. And we saw the heck out of it and talk about it for exactly an hour. Then we do a 3×3 of awesome nighttime scenes in movies.
Next week: Snow White and the Huntsman, plus a side helping of John Carter
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Act of Valor is an offensive movie. But not for the reason you think. As a guy who has dutifully answered his annual Calls of Duty, I can dig on Act of Valor’s fetishistic loving lingering shots of men and their hardware. A submarine slipping sleekly underwater, or those adroitly scudding riverboats, or a wordless nighttime jungle creep, or the calculated way heavily armed men communicate by gently squeezing each other on the shoulder. Some of the procedural stuff is fascinating up until it gives way to its inner Michael Bay and breaks out into satisfyingly R-rated firefights. I could do without the blatant pandering to the videogame sensibility of it all with pointless FPS POV shots. Like I said, I’ve already answered to my Calls of Duty.
After the jump, so what’s the big deal? Continue reading →
E3 loves screenshots. But is it really safe to trust screenshots from games you don’t know? So here are some screenshots from a game I do know. The Rebellion add-on for Sins of a Solar Empire, which will be out next week, is full of white-hot space porn.
But since you might be browsing from work, the above picture is an unassuming Vasari colony ship on its way to settle a planet somewhere past the blue sun of Quirari. This is nothing you won’t see in the basic Sins of a Solar Empire game. Everything after the jump is stuff unique to Rebellion and potentially NSFW. Depending on where you work.
After the jump, don’t let your boss see you looking at these pictures Continue reading →
Before I make a sheepish confession about Defender Chronicles II, let me show you the new map added in yesterday’s update. That’s Sanctuary up there. Brightly lit, lots of room for your halflings to poison monsters as they wend their way to the top, plenty of chokepoints for your warriors and berserkers to pin down enemies while archers and mages rain down arrows and lightning. Defender Chronicles II is never really about the map, but it’s nice to have a pretty backdrop.
The update also rejiggered the economy. The most conspicuous change is that you get more than a token or two for selling your useless reward loot. You can also jump more quickly to the harder difficulty level if you want to push the risk/reward equation a little harder to make more tokens. Still, barring a microbuy with real-world money, it’s still going to take for-frikin’-ever before you can unlock the new archer or cleric hero.
After the jump, how I unlocked the cleric hero in five minutes Continue reading →
E3 has always been about the people who make videogames controlling the message. Which is probably as it should be, given the financial stakes. It takes a special kind of irrelevance to ignore E3. This noisy concentrated blast of messages sprayed over a willing audience like chunks of watermelon at a Gallagher show is an important tool publishers use to sell their games. But since I’m not really in that line of work, and since my boss (i.e. me) isn’t paying me to pass along the controlled messages this year, I’m going to talk about what I did today instead of going to E3.
Because, frankly, I’d rather talk about a great ten year old game than a potentially great negative one year old game.
After the jump, I exercise my own special kind of irrelevance Continue reading →
If you’ve played Pandemic, you’re going to get a powerful sense of deja vu from Plague Inc. The basic design of these iPhone games is identical. You control an insidiously morphing disease in an effort jump it from country to country, infecting as many people as you can. Once it’s gone global, you make it deadly in a bid to wipe out humanity.
The difference is that Plague Inc, which borrows the raw power of Pandemic’s enormously effective formula, tries to apply more gameplay finesse. Because it’s mostly successful, it’s a better game than Pandemic, but it still makes its share of rookie mistakes.
After the jump, how to tell a Plague from a Pandemic Continue reading →
Katy Perry’s Sweet Treats* excepted, this is no time to actually buy or play games. What’s the matter with you? This is the week to try to pick out bits of information from all the noise of E3. Stay tuned to Qt3 for exclusive coverage of E3 2012, starting tomorrow!
* That’s the name of an actual Sims 3 add-on.
Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom is in limited release right now. We all totally think you should see it when it comes to a theater near you. Until then, fast forward to the 55-minute mark, at which point we submit our 3×3 of favorite courtroom scenes.
Next week: Prometheus
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If you’ve played Midnight Club: Los Angeles or Red Dead Redemption, you’ve probably got a Rockstar Social Club account. In Midnight Club: Los Angeles, the Social Club was a great way to admire your screenshots, and it also had some unlockables based on driving tests. Red Dead Redemption used a confusing but suitably atmospheric old-timey newspaper, The Blackwater Ledger, as a way to track achievements, challenges, unlockables, and events.
But with Max Payne 3, Rockstar is using the Social Club to lay groundwork for a persistent crew system that will carry over into Grand Theft Auto V. I’m sold.
After the jump, my clubhouse. Let me show you it. Continue reading →
This week Bruce Geryk joins us to talk about the Tom vs. Bruce Kickstarter, as well as Conflict of Heroes, Ratchet & Clank, Max Payne 3, Dragon’s Dogma, and CD Projekt’s new cyberpunk game, Cyberpunk. Geryk also fails two quizzes and confesses that he hasn’t seen The Avengers.
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Come on in, dear boy. Have a cigar. You’re gonna go far. You’re gonna fly high.
But first, we have some notes, after the jump. Continue reading →
My entire career as a writer has been based on talking about games as a shared experience. We play games, singly or in groups, and then we talk with each other about them. In that way, they are no different than movies, music, or books. In that way, they are more than the self-contained experience of actually playing them. In that way, they are clearly art. Ugh, I just said that, didn’t I?
I was fortunate enough to get to write about games collaboratively with Bruce Geryk for many years in Computer Gaming World. The series was called Tom vs. Bruce. It started out as a way for me and a buddy to do strategy guides together, but it turned into something else entirely. You can find out a lot about a game from listening to one guy talk or write. But what about two guys, turning their experience with a game into a story?
Bruce and I would like to keep writing Tom vs. Bruce. And we’d like your help. If you’re not Kickstartered out — and who could blame you if you are? — go here to find out more. With your support, we expect to start monthly episodes of Tom vs. Bruce starting later this summer.
Also, T-shirts! We promise they won’t be black and they’ll be designed by someone who knows what she’s doing.
You know when someone comes up with one of those really good ideas you wish you’d thought of? Brian Kent and Matt Clark are two such people. Their podcast, Late to the Party, considers games in pairs, comparing an older classic to a recent game. They invited me to join them to compare Dead Rising 2 and Resident Evil 5. But, you know, zombies. Zombies are way too big to confine a discussion to two games. For instance, this Qt3 Games Podcast, with freelancer writer and fellow zombie aficionado John Brownlee, hits the three hour mark. Like zombies themselves, zombie discussions just keep on going. Listen to the latest Late to the Party here.
So how is everyone else playing Diablo III? Blizzard offers some stats:
* On average players have created 3 characters each
* 80% of characters are between levels 1 and 30
* 1.9% of characters have unlocked Inferno difficulty
* 54% of Hardcore players chose a female character
* The majority of Hardcore deaths (35%) occur in Act I Normal
* The most common level 60 build in the game is only used by 0.7% of level 60 characters of that class (not including Passive diversity)
* The most used runes for each class at level 60 are Barbarian: Best Served Cold, Demon Hunter: Lingering Fog, Wizard: Mirror Skin, Monk: Peaceful Repose, Witch Doctor: Numbing Dart
Blizzard’s design update explains what to expect in the next two patches. It also has some comments on tuning inferno difficulty, legendary items, and this tidbit on balancing skills:
If any single skill or rune feels absolutely required to progress, it means that skill is working against our goal of encouraging build diversity — and those “required” skills need to be corrected.
Of course, that’s how I feel about pretty much every skill I’m using, but that changes as soon as I experiment with another skill. I can’t begin to imagine what Diablo III’s balance looks like to Blizzard, from a high level looking down at the reams of data they’ve collected. But from where I’m sitting, down in the trenches of nightmare mode, only starting to scratch the surface of the game’s tougher choices, one of my favorite things about Diablo III is its sense of tuning. From my perspective, the most powerful class is whichever one I just got done playing.
