Flip Ship is 30% a tilt game, 30% a shooter, and 40% a horribly insidious risk/reward challenge designed to make you hate yourself. When things go wrong — and they will often — you have only yourself to blame. And, really, that’s what makes this deceptive simple iPhone game so good.
After the jump, high scores and self-loathing Continue reading →
Remember in Resident Evil 5 how cool it was to have Sheva by your side? She was exotic and sometimes competent and, most important, she had personality. Those were the days.
In Resident Evil: Revelations on the Nintendo 3DS, you get new partners. When you’re playing as Jill Valentine, a character whose cleavage you literally wrestled with in Resident Evil 5, your partner is a rather, uh, portly European fellow. Would husky be a more polite word? I’m not sure if he’s French or Spanish or what, but I get the impression that he reeks of cologne and has a bunch of candy bars in one of those pockets.
But that’s not the worst of it. When you’re playing as Chris “Derp” Redfield, your partner is a woman named Jessica who seems to have been inspired by the Shit Girls Say Twitter feed. Within the first five minutes of the game, she’s complaining about being cold and her feet hurting. Then she starts nagging you about whether she’s better than your last partner. At the end of your first mission with her, you fall down a pit and get attacked by a bunch of zombie dogs. You have to survive the zombie dog onslaught while she makes her way to you. At one point, I thought she said, “Me and my sweet ass are on the way!” That’s what it sounded like and I was too busy reloading my dog-killing popgun to check the subtitles for what she had actually said. But the main point is Jessica is so annoying that’s what I thought she said.
But then I died and had to replay the zombie dog sequence again. Sure enough, that’s exactly what she says. “Me and my sweet ass are on the way!” In this day and age, are you allowed to talk to your coworkers that way? It’s enough to make you long for Ashley’s cries of “Leon!”
One year ago, a fellow in Sweden writing under the name rasmadrak announced that he was going to blog his attempt to make a pinball machine in his living room. The blog continued apace, often with a lot of technical details about electronics and woodwork and circuits and various other things that pinball fans care about nearly as much as movie fans care about emulsion techniques. Several months later, he announced that it would be a Fallout themed table. Ooh, that’s pretty cool! Maybe not cool enough to actually make me want to go to Sweden and knock on his door, but still pretty cool.
But you know what’s cooler? He changed his mind shortly thereafter and now he’s building it as a Bioshock themed table.
It’s really the perfect “replacement” for the original theme – the art deco is there, the decadence and all the major game elements could almost directly be translated into a Bioshock feature…The old theme was based on the early Fallout games! Also a setting very dear to me, but it was really hard to find high resolution images to use and the color palette was mostly brown-isch. With Bioshock, I’m allowed to use blue, red, green, pink, purple etc without it getting weird. It all fits together really nicely.
He still hasn’t tipped his hand about the table layout, but you can see he’s got a Big Daddy figure with a rotating drill and green, yellow, or red lights depending on its hostility state. From bits of the table art, it also seems to have a reference to Big Sisters, Rapture’s disastrous New Years Eve celebration, and the option to harvest or rescue Little Sisters. Rasmadrak read my mind! Or vice versa.
Anyone know where I can get a cheap plane ticket to Stockholm?
(Thanks Robert Bjarmyr!)
It’s a bit of an insult to call Triple Town a match-three game, but technically, that’s exactly what it is. But this is no mere puzzle. It’s arguably a city-building strategy game with just enough abstraction to fool people who like puzzles into playing. Each turn you draw a random item to drop into your city. This is usually a clump of grass. When you drop three identical objects next to each other, they’ll collapse into an upgraded version of those three objects. The three grasses become a single bush. Carefully position your upgrades so they’ll further collapse into even more upgraded objects. You progress from grass, to bushes, to trees, to houses, to mansions, to castles. Okay, maybe it is just a puzzle. But it’s got just enough strategy to fool people who like strategy games into playing.
After the jump, it’s also got terrible bears! Continue reading →
If you’re not into niche strategy games, this isn’t your week yet. Instead, this is the week for A House Divided, the American Civil War add-on for Victoria II, a fascinating historical strategy game in dire need of one of Paradox’s trademark add-ons. You can also pick up an indie tower defense game called Oil Rush that looks just as pretty as Anno 2070, but presumably won’t suck up dozens of hours at a time.
UPDATE: The Victoria II expansion was pushed back to February 2nd, making for a strictly monochromatic wallet thread level this week.
All right, which one of us is the wet blanket who’s down on Gina Carano’s turn as an action star in Steven Soderbergh’s lean Haywire? Listen to find out. Then our 3×3 of the best bathtub scenes starts at the 50 minute mark. Next week: The Grey.
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Now that reporter Darrell Simmons and famed archaeologist/adventurer Monterey Jack have gone stark raving mad — a proud tradition for any Lovecraft hero — I’m left with two investigators running around trying to gather elder signs. One of them, private detective Joe Diamond, is clearly the hero of the rest of the game. The Graveyard, Something Has Broken Free, You Become That Which You Fear Most, Stay Away From The Windows, The Pleateau of Leng. Joe Diamond defeats them all, amassing relics, spells, weapons, powerful clues, and even elder signs!
Meanwhile Ashcan Pete, his pockets empty and his sanity waning, spends a lot of time failing adventures and then hanging out at the entrance to heal up.
In the end, one man is no match for Cthulhu, even if that man is Diamond Joe Diamond. One fateful midnight, we draw our final doom token and the world is devoured. My final score is 2,980, which is actually one of my better scores.
Shortly after my defeat, I play another game with the same team. No dice are ever locked. No one goes insane. We handily gather the required elder signs for a win, while the bad guys only ever get a handful of doom tokens. The stars align and I save the world. My final score is 4,540. That’s the thing about dice-based games. Sometimes you roll a one. Sometimes you roll a six.
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You can’t very well talk videogames right now without some serious RPG talk. Particularly with this week’s guest. Jeff, who posts as Sapper Gopher, is a bona fide JPRG enthusiast with the credentials necessary to talk about the Final Fantasy XIII-2 demo. You’ll also hear a bit about Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, Diablo III, Payday: The Heist, and various other games where you level up. Such as Dungeons and Dragons. Jeff also casts what is by far the most memorable vote in the ongoing zombies vs. SWAT debate.
For our posts of the week, Tom picked this defense of Diablo III, Jason picked this guarded defense of the Kingdoms of Amalur demo, and Jeff picked this riff on Skyrim written by someone using a familiar moniker.
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Ancient relics? Monterey Jack knows ancient relics, even if they’re guarded by a high priest. He’s got his cigarettes and his two magic books. Lighting up and reading a page from The Nameless Cults, he rolls the dice.
After the jump, Yahtzee! Continue reading →
One of the concerns some of us have with the DLC business model is that we suspect good content is being held back. We worry someone is cutting cool stuff out of our games and then selling it to us separately. Fortunately, no such thing seems to be happening with Saints Row 3!
After the jump, Saints Row 3 jumps the panda Continue reading →
Elder Sign: Omens is basically a race. Can you use your resources to accumulate 12 elder signs before 14 doom tokens stack up? Your resources include your investigators, who get battered in the process and have to burn turns healing themselves. In my case, the most precious commodity is sanity, since no one on my team of burly investigators is known for his mental stability. I frequently send them back to the museum entrance to recover sanity. Meanwhile, the doom tokens build up.
After the jump, things get a little crazy Continue reading →
A good turn-based tactical game has the feel of two armies squaring off, watching each other as units move into position, arrange themselves, entrench, feint, engage. There are fronts, flanks, reserves. With a good AI or a human opponent, it’s a series of urgent questions. Where he gonna go? What’s he gonna do? What am I gonna do? What is going to happen? When is it going to happen? It’s a dance.
Then there’s Hero Academy, where two players take turns hitting each other really hard.
After the jump, the slugfest Continue reading →
In another Lovecraft themed iPhone game (that isn’t very good) called Necronomicon, I’ve had the most luck pairing a lunatic with a shotgun and just letting the cards roll out. It’s a bit like trench warfare, with cultists, monsters, shoggoths, Old Ones, and so forth dying in suicidal charges against my lunatic and his shotgun. Cthulhu’s Verdun.
But in this game, Ashcan Pete has amply demonstrated that a hobo and a shotgun are only as good as the handfuls of dice they roll. Since his disastrous showing, things haven’t gotten much better.
After the jump, can we snatch victory from the flabby maw of defeat? Continue reading →
That’s not Richard Garriott up there, but I can’t show you a still from the sci-fi movie he wrote, directed, and starred in. No one can. Because NASA has put the kibosh on it, unlike the movie Apollo 18, which accuses NASA of spreading sentient moonrocks around the world in a bid for, uh, world domination? I’m not clear on that part of the movie Apollo 18, which wasn’t written by, directed by, or starring Richard Garriott, but it did take place in space. The difference is that Garriott’s movie was actually shot in space during his $30 million stint as a space tourist.
Garriott’s space movie is news to me. I know he was promoting whatever that MMO was at the time that had his name attached. But he also made an eight-minute short, starring himself and some local talent (i.e. astronauts). However, NASA hasn’t given him clearance to, I dunno, post it on YouTube or whatever he would do with it. Garriott insists NASA doesn’t have ulterior motives, and he speculates that it’s just a matter of the levity not being appropriate. But that’s exactly what he would say if he was trying to deflect suspicion from an organization spreading sentient moonrocks in a bid for world domination that didn’t want their plot inadvertently exposed by something you might be able to see in the background of Garriott’s footage.
The real divide this week has nothing to do with Xavier Gens’ horrible post-apocalyptic sci-fi horror movie, The Divide. The real divide takes place during this week’s 3×3 of running gags, which begins at the 53-minute mark, and eventually explores the difficult issue of whether Hudson Hawk or Armageddon is the better bad movie.
Next week: Haywire
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