Xenoblade Chronicles is on the Wii. Which is, at times, a shame. It is too big for the Wii. It is perhaps even too lovely for the Wii. The amount and scope of its imagination cannot possibly fit on Nintendo’s last-gen system! I keep waiting for everything to abruptly stop because the disc has run out of space.
Part of what this means is that you’re not getting elaborate animation, or even very good animation. When you come to a mining node indicated by a mining pick icon, your characters don’t actually swing a mining pick. It’s as if the developers just decided pick swinging animation wasn’t worth the bother. So the character stands there impassively and sucks colored dust into his body. Mining.
After the jump, where animation counts Continue reading →
Netflix somehow convinced me to watch a French thriller called Black Heaven. Until I knew what was going on, it was a nifty thriller with an appealing cast and an even more appealing location. So that’s why people talk about the south of France! But then it turns out it’s about a videogame.
The game in the movie is called Black Hole, and it seems to consist only of people walking around, voice chatting with each other (ha!), and having cybersex (not shown, although the movie isn’t nearly so shy about its IRL sex). The obvious inspiration is Second Life. In fact, the French title of the movie is L’autre Monde, which means The Other World.
There is apparently keyboard mashing combat in Black Hole with a hefty death penalty and the option to loot characters you’ve killed. In other words, the sorts of thing no modern online game with any reasonably large player base would do. The interface is minimalist to the point of being non-existent. Obviously, the filmmakers want their videogame to look more like an animated movie than a videogame. Also obviously, they are as clueless about actual videogaming as the folks who made Gamer with Gerard Butler and that NBC cop show Life in which the police hack a computer by getting to level ten of Prince of Persia.
One of these days, someone will make a movie that actually shows how people play videogames online. Until then, for a much better hybrid of thriller and videogames, please see the Spanish movie King of the Hill (El rey de la montana) without reading anything about it.
Okay, let’s see what’s out this week. Star Wars Kinect (pictured). A niche 2D fighting game called Skull Girls on Xbox Arcade (UPDATE: which isn’t out until next week). More cars for Forza 4. An add-on for the PC version of Tropico 4. Not much of a wallet threat this week.
Except, of course, for Xenoblade Chronicles. If you’re into RPGs, or even into just good games, you won’t want to miss this one.
One of the advantages of doing a sequel to a terrible movie like Clash of the Titans is that it’s relatively easy to make a better movie! So Wrath of the Titans has that going for it. Speaking of wound management, that’s the topic of this week’s 3×3, which starts at the 39-minute mark.
Next week: Goon
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The various sprite packs Paradox has been selling for their games — basically skins for the units — is one thing. That stuff is silly and if anyone wants to buy it, he and his money deserve to be parted. But charging for basic personalization options? It’s not unlike THQ charging you for cheat codes in Saints Row 3.
With the new Crusader Kings II: Ruler Designer DLC all these are in your hands. Customize your character your way. Tweak and change any aspect of the character or even create an all new character and dynasty to play with. Create your portrait, change the name and dynasty and even customize your coat of arms. Change traits and stats at will and decide the size of the immediate family. The game that lets you choose your goals will now let you choose your character.
In my day, we could name our dudes in X-Com whatever we wanted and we didn’t have to pay $5! If I want to do things to customize my experience in a game, I shouldn’t have to pay extra. DLC should be content, not options that already belong in the core game.
The Ruler Designer will be available for $5 in a few weeks. Don’t buy it. You’re just encouraging them.
No one is trying to sell me content when I play Xenoblade Chronicles on my Wii. There are no retail exclusives and even if there were, there is no place to enter a code to activate them. There will be no DLC. No one is going to vaguely promise to change the ending. No one is going to sell me a new gun or add skins for Sera or Garrus or Magneto. It’s almost enough to make me not mind spending literally dozens of hours on my Wii playing a single game.
After the jump, the character that would have been DLC Continue reading →
The real time combat in Final Fantasy XIII-2 is quite the cinematic spectacle, thanks to that game’s impressive production values. But as the game itself soldiers on, the spectacle wears off. Eventually combat is just a formality. Battles in Final Fantasy XIII-2 are speed bumps between the cutscenes. Filler. Busywork that isn’t even much work. When combat is one of your primary ways of interacting with the world, you better get combat right. You hear that RPGs? You hear that Final Fantasy XIII-2? You hear that Skyrim?
After the jump, Xenoblade Chronicles hears that Continue reading →
On this week’s podcast, we take film restoration technician Seth Berkowitz to task for defacing Dr. Strangelove. Then we derail into some movie talk that ranges from Citizen Kane to Chelan Simmons. In case you’re not familiar, Citizen Kane is an old timey movie by Orville Welles and Chelan Simmons is one of the stars of Chupacabra Terror. And since we finally have an assembly of three people who’ve finished Mass Effect 3, we variously offer our two cents on the ending (but only after a spoiler warning that will tell you exactly how far to fast-forward to avoid spoilers).
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Xenoblade Chronicles is the latest RPG from Monolith Soft, the Japanese developer of the Xenosaga series. It was released last summer everywhere in the world except for stupid America, where it comes out next week because we’re slow, dumb, loud, and too busy playing Mass Effect 3.
Despite the prefix, Xenoblade Chronicles has nothing to do with the Xenosagas. I don’t know this first-hand, since I’ve never played a Xenosaga game. They were on the Playstation 2 when me and my PC were busy playing Western RPGs with the Dungeons and Dragons license. The occasional Final Fantsy excepted. But I read on Wikipedia that Xenoblade and Xenosaga are separate things, so I know it’s true.
What I can tell you from experience is that Xenoblade Chronicles is one of the best RPGs I have ever played, right up there with games as diverse and superlative as Planescape: Torment, Lord of the Rings Online, The Witcher 2, and especially Dark Cloud 2. I am head-over-heels in love.
After the jump, the story so far. Spoiler-free, of course. Continue reading →
That headline is misleading in a couple of ways. First, the game Echo Bazaar, a cannily uncanny union of writing, RPGing, and world building, is no longer called Echo Bazaar. Now it’s called Fallen London, after the name of the place where it’s been set all along. Good move.
Second, they didn’t really ditch Facebook so much as make it optional, which is a great move considering the developers have always been suitably sheepish about hitching their work to social networking. Now you can play Echo Bazaar…err, I mean, now you can play Fallen London by simply registering an email account here. However, the optional social elements of the game — the multiplayer, if you will — are still tied to Twitter and Facebook. Perhaps as the developers develop Fallen London’s nascent clique system, it will make Facebook and Twitter even more optional.
And because it wouldn’t be Fallen London without some great prose, here’s the little snippet of lore that appeared on the side of my screen while I risked scandal by gossiping with the Melancholy Curate’s servants to get information on his Enigmatic Sister.
You can study many things at the University of London. The Department of Cryptozoology studies the small, hidden creatures of the Neath. Creatures that have never been seen, but almost certainly exist. Under the right circumstances. Hopefully. Otherwise, the Department might lose its budget.
The developers at Slant Six are mostly known for successfully packing Sony’s SOCOM series into the PSP a couple of times. In Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, they’ve tackled an equally ambitious project: packing Resident Evil into a Lost Planet style team-based shooter with asymmetrical characters, persistent progression, some fancy zombie concepts, and online co-op and versus play. All the while, zombies and spec ops soldiers fight it out around you. Jump in whenever you’re ready. It must have been one hell of a design document.
After the jump, the unfortunate matter of the game itself Continue reading →
Not enough games have armored zeppelins. Gettysburg: Armored Warfare (pictured!) intends to address that by going back in time and making the Civil War less boring. Unfortunately, it’s one of those team-based multiplayer only shooters with RTS elements that will confound your average gamer and probably leave the servers sparsely populated. For your less boring Civil War single-player needs, you’ll have to be content with Darkest of Days. Go ahead and Google that.
Also out this week is the option to twist a little metal on the Playstation 3 with Wheels of Destruction, a downloadable car combat game. Gears of War 3 gets new maps. Someone hasn’t told Namco that Ridge Racer has been played out for ten years. That guy who cheated on his supermodel wife with a Denny’s waitress has a new golf game.
We love great movies in which Jennifer Lawrence plays the desperate provider for her fatherless backwoods family, subsisting on squirrels and true grit. Unfortunately, this week we saw The Hunger Games instead. At the 40-minute mark, we react to this week’s 3×3 of our favorite reactions.
Next week: Wrath of the Titans
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Last week, I reviewed Journey. If you gauge an article by the quantity of comments in the comments section, it was Quarter to Three’s most successful article. If you gauge an article by the quality of the comments in the comments section, it was Quarter to Three’s least successful article.
In case some of the people who posted comments stuck around, I thought I should answer some of their questions and address some of their concerns. But rather than wade into the morass of comments, I present it here as a FAQ for the Journey review.
After the jump, everything you always wanted to know about the Journey review and weren’t afraid to ask in expletive riddled language Continue reading →
Maybe things will slow down in April, but as March subsides, we have far too many things to talk about. Michael Barnes joins us to discuss Mass Effect 3’s fan administered beatdown, the Journey brouhaha, the crazy 2D shooter Sine Mora, the enjoyable awfulness of Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, Kid Icarus taking flight on the 3DS, and even a taste of the upcoming Xenoblade Chronicles. Of course, given that Barnes covers boardgaming over at Gameshark, expect a touch of tabletop talk.
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