Elder Sign: Omens takes place in the Miskatonic Museum. The museum is stocked with encounters called adventures, each consisting of one or more tasks. Some adventures need to be resolved quickly because they cause widespread negative effects. For instance, the above screenshot show us looking at the koi pond adventure in the upper left. But let’s see what’s going on with that pulsing red circle in the administration office, down there in the lower right.
After the jump, we need to find help Continue reading →
If you’ve played Fantasy Flight’s Arkham Horror cooperative boardgame, some of Elder Sign: Omens will be familiar to you. This is basically a dice-based iPhone solitaire version of Arkham Horror (available here for $4). It plays a bit like Clue, where you align several pieces on the board for one of the adventures, which consists of rolling dice and matching them to the adventure’s component tasks. For instance, Sister Mary the nun in the North Wing with the dynamite against the Medusa exhibit. Then you roll the dice and see how she fares.
The overall goal is to accumulate 14 elder signs, which are rewards for beating some adventures, before you accumulate 12 doom tokens, which are penalties for failing some adventures, as well as occasional draws during the dreaded midnight phase. I’ve played three games, each with a hand-picked group of investigators. In all three games, the world was devoured. Oops. Maybe I’ll have more luck this time with a random party.
After the jump, meet the boys Continue reading →
If you don’t have a pinball game from Zen Studios, the latest Nintendo 3DS version is a great way to fix that. It’s only a seven dollar download from the Nintendo eShop away. But what if you’re already an aficionado of Zen Studio’s pinball tables. You’ve got them on your Xbox 360, your PS3, and even your iPhone, for Pete’s sake. Why bother paying seven bucks to download four tables for your Nintendo 3DS?
After the jump, I’ll tell you why Continue reading →
Hey, look, the Writers Guild of America has selected its annual nominations for best writing in a videogame!
In the category of video game writing, the teams behind Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, Batman: Arkham City, Brink, Mortal Kombat, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception were all nominated.
The WGA awards are kind of weird, because they’re limited to WGA members. That’s just how guilds work. But I actually lied about one of those nominees. I’ll bet you dollars to donuts you can’t figure out which one without clicking on the link.
This week we welcome spaceship expert Brian Rubin (his credentials here) to help us determine the greatest spaceship of all time, whether Supernatural is just for tween girls, and who would win in a Dance Dance Revolution last-man-standing showdown.
For our posts of the week, Brian chose this thread of Terminator geekery, Tom chose this announcement of the impending Fallen Princess Enchantress beta, and Jason chose this discussion of 2K’s other X-com game.
Podcast (games): Play in new window | Download
Subscribe:
All Zombies Must Die is the other sequel to a very good twin-stick shooter about killing zombies that jumps genres and aggressively shoves bad writing in your face. But unlike the similarly misguided Zombie Apocalypse: Never Die Alone, this one from the developers of Burn Zombie Burn has its gameplay smarts still intact.
After the jump, JAFZG? Continue reading →
One of the most valuable lessons for videogames to learn is that they aren’t movies. I love this Gamasutra interview with Ken Levine about working with actors for Bioshock Infinite, partly because it digs deep into a process that eludes too many videogames: how to effectively use actors to capture the human element. But I really like the following anecdote, which gets to the heart of the matter that videogames can’t just do things the way movies, comic books, or TV shows do them. Understanding the limitations of a videogame is a fundamental part of the design process.
You gotta work with the tools that you have. You also have to make sure you’re not trying to do things that you can’t support. I think one of the first lessons I learned in the game industry, in my first few weeks, I was working on a Star Trek Voyager game that never shipped, and I wrote an opening cutscene for the game. I was a writer on it.
The last part of the opening cutscene I wrote in the stage directions, “The camera pulls in on Janeway’s face, and we see her eyes widen in terror.” Now this is 1995. Janeway’s face was a bitmap that was approximately maybe 32 by 32 pixels.
And my lead programmer said to me, “Dude. You’re not pulling in on Janeway’s face, and her eyes are not widening on terror. She’s sitting there, 32 by 32 pixels, you know, doing nothing.” And I was like “Ohhhh. Okay. I need to figure out different ways to get these emotions across.” That was a very valuable lesson.
Too many videogames are still trying to “pull in on Janeway’s face” in some manner or another. As Levine puts it at the end of the interview, “Whenever you find yourself fighting against your toolset, you’re not going to win that fight”. And now I will resist the temptation to reel off a list of recent videogames that should have known better and still lost that particular fight.
What the heck kind of MMO doesn’t have crafting? DC Universe Online. Until today, that is. The latest update added “Research & Development”.
…decide what kind of item you wish to create. Equipment Mods can be socketed into gear for powerful benefits, and various Consumables will lend you bonuses for short durations of time. Plans for the creation of either can be found throughout the world or purchased at new Research and Development vendors.
Once you have learned the appropriate plan, collect the necessary components, including Exobytes, and assemble the new item at a Research and Development station. Equipment Mods come in various colors which, when matched with similarly colored sockets on your gear, can provide even further bonuses and power.
As a fan of DC Universe Online, I think this is a great idea. One of the strengths and weaknesses of this game is that you can get to the level cap pretty quickly. This means it’s relatively easy to get to the endgame content. But it also means that satisfying sense of advancement comes to a halt and you’re left grinding instances for bits and pieces of raid gear. A good crafting system, especially when it relates directly to the player’s equipment, is a great alternate track of advancement once character leveling slows or stops. See, for instance, the legendary items in Lord of the Rings Online or the modular weapon system in Star Wars: Old Republic.
The new R&D system is part of Update 8, which went live today.
Every game of Jetpack Joyride opens in a room with a gramophone playing a languid holiday ditty. A jetpack sits on a table with a sign next to it that reads “DO NOT STEAL”. Some scientists shuffle around. At the other end of the room, another sign notes your high score as a measure of your best distance.
After the jump, all this changes when you touch anywhere to start Continue reading →
As much as I’d love to revisit Lord of the Rings Online, a writer who goes by the name of Revious at Kill Ten Rats details exactly what I know will happen:
When I logged back in I was beset on all sides by system mailings, announcements of new achievements I had somehow started, resets to all my legendary weapons, and a new trait / stat regime. It was bad enough that I was in the middle of a book, with tons of other quests already started, in the beginning of a region I didn’t remember while staring at a virtual cockpit of skills. Like a strange, albino gangle creature emerging into sunlight, I just blindly stumbled around for awhile until I found something to kill. It took me way too long to kill the enemy (as I, in the madness of things, had forgotten to up my legendary weapon’s DPS because it had been reset), and frustrated I logged off.
I don’t mean to engage in duelling MMOs, but this is exactly why I instead jumped back into Rift, which is atypical among MMOs for how it’s generous with respecs. One of Rift’s unique selling points is that every character class is, at any time, eight different character classes. Actually, that’s not quite true. A character is technically a mix of skills and abilities from any three classes at once. That’s not even quite true. A character can have several of these set up at once, and can furthermore toggle among them at any point. This lends Rift a lot of variety in terms of how it plays, but it also makes for a relatively painless re-entry. Don’t understand your character build? No sweat. Tear it down and build a new one from the ground up. Build a few. That’s how Rift works.
But I recommend Ravious story, because it actually has a happy ending. Spoiler: you can get by with a little help from your friends. In the end, the main draw of an MMO is the social element.
Unfortunately, this week’s movie is horror director Ti West’s The Innkeepers. Fortunately, it gives us a chance to talk about West’s other movie, House of the Devil. If you don’t want The Innkeeper spoiled, you can fast forward to the 3×3 at the 42-minute mark, where we talk about our favorite door scenes.
Next week: The Divide
Podcast (movies): Play in new window | Download
Subscribe:
My first paid videogame review was in 1994 for c|net’s Gamecenter. I’ve been writing reviews as a freelancer ever since then. By my math — hold on, gimme a second… — that’s either 16 or 27 years of experience as a freelancer. Today, it comes to a close.
After the jump, why you won’t be seeing my byline out there anymore Continue reading →
Far be it from me to question the genius of Will Wright. The guy has more insight into the art of game design in his little finger than I have in my twenty years of leveling up clerics, Forza cars, and FAMASes. But when he reveals his latest project, HiveMind, as follows:
…a group of cross-platform, cross-media online applications…designed to turn a gamer’s everyday life into part of the interactive experience by building upon Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) and tapping into streams of personal information on phones, tablets, social networks and computers.
I have no idea what to make of that. My brain shuts down about half way through the description. Whatever a buffer overflow is, I think that’s what happens in my head when I try to read through those words. You’d have better luck trying to explain the third law of thermodynamics to my cat.
You can read more in this perfunctory Q&A, but I don’t recommend it. It’ll just confuse you even more.
Tom “I hate free-to-play” Chick proclaims his love for a free-to-play game, Jason “What’s Cosmos?” McMaster throws down some serious trash talk at Carl Sagan, and our guest Tim “Union Carbide” Smith breaks all the rules and goes a little crazy by bringing up Playboy magazine articles, NASCAR driver Peter Soderbergh (not his real name), and some Star Wars MMO that surely no one is sick of hearing about by now. And just when you thought you’d heard it all, special guest Rob, a.k.a. “Repo Man”, explains just how dorky things can get when he and six other grown men convene in a basement in Seattle to try to fly a spaceship.
If you’d like to check out our posts of the week, Tom chose this liveblogged starship simulator session, McMaster chose this Josh Bycer article on difficulty levels, and Tim chose this profile of the guy who will bring us a new Cosmos.
Podcast (games): Play in new window | Download
Subscribe:
Hey, it’s our epic (i.e. about an hour too long) end-of-the-year podcast. We go over our picks for top ten movies of the year. Rest assured that the discussion is spoiler free, thanks to the careful editing of our elite bleeping team. After two hours and 22 minutes — I know, right? — we do our 3×3 of favorite montages. Kelly Wand ends up $5 poorer for not knowing Jaws very well.
Next week: The Innkeepers
After the jump, I’ve posted our lists in case you don’t have two and a half hours to spare Continue reading →
Podcast (movies): Play in new window | Download
Subscribe:
