Caylus is at once intricate and elegant, a nifty worker-placement game where players compete for limited resources to build a castle, develop a town, and progress through a unique scoring system. It’s challenging and rewarding. I guarantee you’ll be nonplussed your first few play-throughs. Somewhere around game three or four, it will click. And if you’re the kind of strategy game wonk who plays Caylus more than two times, it’ll probably find a place in your heart. As a boardgame, Caylus is a classic.
Somewhere around Final Fantasy XIII-2’s seventh or eighth final battle — there are so many of them, it’s hard to keep track — I had to save the game and quit playing for the afternoon. I was fighting some tag team coterie of dragons who seem to have flown in from another game. That happens a lot in JRPGs and anime, doesn’t it? Someone turns into a dragon for no reason other than dragons are cool. This guy in Final Fantasy XIII-2 was so cool he turned into a whole mess of dragons.
The January doldrums are officially over! Which is a good thing, since it’s February. The very Fable-esque Kingdoms of Amalur: The Reckoning (pictured) will meet all your glib action RPG needs. Gotham City Impostors will meet all your Team Fortress 2 wanna-be needs. And The Darkness II once again mixes tentacles and mafiosos, in case that’s what you’re looking for in a shooter.
If you’ve got a Nintendo 3DS and you’ve not averse to some traditionally absurd survival horror, then Resident Evil: Revelations gets a seal of approval from this guy. Of course, that same guy is also really psyched that Rock Band gets a couple of Bush songs this week, so what does he know?
Back at the end of September, I got an e-mail from Alan Gerding with an unusual subject line. “An Ascension Marriage Proposal.” Intrigued, I opened it up and learned that Alan wanted to propose to his girlfriend, Crystol Shelton, using the game they love to play together–Ascension! We jumped at the opportunity, and quickly set to work making it happen.
See the results in the above video. You’d think he wouldn’t hit her with a Noxious Soul first. What a jerk.
This week Matt Nute joins us and explains how he might not be eligible to join the VFW, but he is kind of a conquistador. It’s complicated. We also talk JRPGs, which at least two people on the podcast are qualified to do.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one. In Resident Evil: Insert Slightly Intriguing But Ultimately Irrelevant Word Here, a virus, a secret laboratory, a sneering villain, Jill Valentine, a ship, and bioterrorism walk into a videogame.
Fortunately, no one has cross-bred a pinball machine with an an RPG. It’s bad enough that we can buy loot on the Blade table and upgrade the actual table in Moon Knight. The last thing I need is a persistent RPG system that lasts between games. I get RPGing in, well, nearly every other genre I play.
But the pushers at Zen Studios will change that later this month with the Epic Quest. At first glance, Epic Quest looks like a tongue-in-cheek Medieval fantasy themed table. You should be so lucky. It’s a persistent RPG in which you level up your character and earn loot as you play, all of which lasts over successive games. As if pinball wasn’t already enough of a time sink.
Before I get to the downside of Echo Bazaar, a text-based game set in a fantastical Victorian underworld called Fallen London, I want you to know two things. The first is that if you’re going to try Echo Bazaar, the next two days are a perfect opportunity. Trust me on that. I’ll explain later, but suffice to say February 1st and February 2nd are the days to play.
The second thing you should know is that Echo Bazaar isn’t just a text adventure in the same vein as the early Infocom classics. That’s just the basic structure, although with a more modern sensibility about gameplay. What makes this game special is the content: H.P. Lovecraft meets Sherlock Holmes meets Edward Gorey meets Lewis Carroll meets Monty Python. Early Tim Burton wishes he was this weird.
About ten to fifteen hours into Final Fantasy XIII-2, you’ll finally come to Serendipity, the casino dimension (pictured). It features chocobo races, slot machines, and card games. One of the employees tells you more activities will be added later, which is par for the course for this game. New stuff is constantly being folded into Final Fantasy XIII-2.
I can’t make any sense of the chocobo races, in which big slow chickens take far too long to trot around a track. I’m supposed to bet on them. Presumably I should bet on the one I’ve entered into the race. Having accumulated three chocobos over the course of my travels, I proceed to run them into the ground. Each chocobo has so many races in him. They come in last place every time. Short of searching time and space for faster chocobos, I think I’ll stick to the other minigames.
The slot machines are, well, slot machines. I know better than to throw money into those things. Which leaves the card games. Ooh, I like card games! The room of slot machines has card tables on one side, and a hostess offers to explain how the card tables work. Okay, let’s give this a shot. I select the “Learn about the card tables” option.
To be unlocked with future downloadable content.
Now I wouldn’t normally mind if these minigames weren’t all present and accounted for. If there’s one thing I can say after about twenty hours in Final Fantasy XIII-2, it’s that the economy is absurd, pointless, and very likely broken. I don’t really need to race chickens, yank a lever, or play cards to earn FinalBux. But I’m here in Serendipity because one of the characters just told me that he can make me a super paradox-fueled uberweapon if I bring him a Chaos Crystal. And guess what’s at the top of the list of prizes that you can only get by cashing in your casino chips?
I’ll be over here at the slot machine with a bucket of coins.
However you felt about Soulcalibur IV, you have to give it credit for its own sense of style and identity. I can safely say there was no other fighting game quite like Soulcalibur IV. I can say no such thing about Soulcalibur V. Because there are, in fact, several other fighting games quite like it, most of them recently published by Capcom.
While you’re playing Oil Rush, a naval themed RTS, you can press the “F” key and the camera will supposedly fly around and show you cool stuff. This isn’t a unique feature — Petroglyph’s RTSs do the action camera particularly well — but it gets at the heart of the main problem with Oil Rush. Namely, that you might as well watch ships, because there’s not much else to do.
An elevated wallet threat level has been issued for die-hard fans of JRPGs or fighting games due to the release of Final Fantasy XIII-2 and Soulcalibur V. I’ll have full reviews soon, but at this point all I can say for sure is that one of them is terrible.
On the completely unknown front is Neverdead (pictured), a shooter from the developers of the forgettable but decent Rogue Trooper five years ago and the forgettable but terrible Aliens vs. Predator two years ago. And if you’re a sucker for iPhone games and Cthulhu, make a sanity check against the five-dollar Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land, a tactical combat game about fighting Shug Nigguraths and whatnot.
The Grey is not the movie one of us wanted, but two of us loved — yes, loved! — it. Listen for a spirited conversation about what Joe Carnahan’s latest movie is, isn’t, and/or should be. For this week’s 3×3, which starts at the 1:03 mark, we talk about those parts in movies where the audience knows something the characters don’t. You know, like when the rope is fraying, or when a cup is poisoned, or when a monster is creeping around behind someone. But we mostly pick better examples than those. Next week: Chronicle.
What? Why are the sheets wet? Was I drooling? Jesus, that’s sweat. Who’s sweating in my bed? It’s getting all over me. Oh, I’m sweating. It’s me. Right, I’m sick. Is that good, that I’m sweating? Doesn’t that mean I’m hydrated? God, I hope so. I can’t drink any more water. Why are my lips so dry? How long is that D20-sized clot of pain going to throb behind my eyes?
It’s still dark out. I can’t believe I woke up before dawn. Looking at the digital clock — oh, shit, the digital clock isn’t turned on, did the power go out? No, no, it’s on, I think. I just have to squint because my eyes are all bleary and I can’t see anything. It’s 7 o’ clock. Why isn’t it light out yet? I have to change these sheets. I’m wearing my clothes? I went to bed in my clothes? I don’t think I can get up just yet. I feel like I’m going to be sick. When did I last eat? Maybe it’s 7 o’ clock in the evening. It is. 7 o’ clock in the evening. Last I remember it was the afternoon and I was just going to lie down for a second because I could see the dark wave coming. What happened to Tuesday? Or Wednesday? Did I have something I had to do today? Is it still Tuesday?
This week we offer you twice as much McMaster as any other week. What’s more, we also bring you 100% more Brandon Cackowski-Schnell than any other week, lending the podcast some serious Dr. Who and 50 Cent cred, yo.
