As a city-builder, Anno 2070 is as hardcore a strategy game as you could want. But it’s also got something I haven’t seen in a strategy games since RollerCoaster Tycoon: an almost childlike sense of charm and wonder.
This is what kids see in their heads when they play with blocks. This is what you saw years ago when you stood a block on end and imagined it was a skyscraper…
Read the review here.
All this could be mine. Will be mine. I’ve been busy doing other things, so I haven’t gotten around to actually taking over Steelport just yet.
Unlike the previous games, Saints Row 3 decouples the story from the city conquest. You can approach both at your leisure. And given how good the storyline is, don’t be surprised if you “beat” the game and still have a lot left to do. You can save Steelport without turning it purple.
The basic stats on your profile divide completion into four sections: storyline, collectibles, activities, and neighborhoods controlled. My own completion is at 96% of the storyline (you can replay the final mission to see the game’s other ending, which I kind of don’t want to do for reasons you’ll understand when you get there), 44% of the collectibles, 41% of the activities, and 6% of the neighborhoods. I’ve got my work cut out for me. Yet here I am hanging out in my crib, trying on different outfits, and customizing the color of the anime kitty backback to match my real-life cat. I would make a terrible gang leader.
Anno 2070 lets you know when something goes wrong by posting a message in the alert queue and sticking a floating icon over the troubled area. For instance, when citizens get sick, a red cross hovers over the afflicted building. If a hospital is in range, it will dispatch an ambulance hovercar thingie and all will be well soon enough. If a hospital isn’t in range, well, you should probably build one or suffer the population reduction.
Furthermore, Anno 2070 will almost always reward you for taking a closer look. The above screenshot is what you’ll see if you zoom in and look at a building under one of those hovering red crosses. You can see officials in hazmat suits have posted barricades around the afflicted buildings while they wait on an ambulance hovercar. Good work, guys. So why has the sickness spread to three buildings? Let’s get there sooner next time, okay?
Sometimes when your car matches the neighborhood, you just have to pull over for a quick picture.
When you start a city in Anno 2070, you choose either the corporate faction or the eco faction. Basically, you decide whether you want progress, or a bunch of layabout tree-hugging hippies whinging about pollution. Not that I’m trying to color your choice in the periodic online elections that determine ingame bonuses.
When you choose the corporate faction, you get your power from coal power plants. Yeah, sure, they’re dirty. But that’s no big deal. Corporate citizens don’t fuss about pollution. They understand that you can’t build a city without cracking a few ozone layers. The bigger problem with coal power plants is that I kind of need that coal for iron, tools, steel, weapons, and so forth. So one of the important early shifts is to nuclear power, which uses uranium and frees up all that coal.
Nuclear power is great. Mostly. I think. I hope. Every now and then I get a little pop-up message like the one in that screenshot, which reads:
Accident at the Nuclear Power Plant! Nuclear power plant in Omicron reports minor incident. Situation under control, no radiation leaked, production unaffected.
So everything’s peachy, right? Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that message is a veiled warning? I mean, I know there’s a small chance of mishaps in nuclear power plants, but it’s so small as to be a non-factor, right? Should I be eyeing the option in my Academy to research increased nuclear safety?
I should have played the eco faction and used windmills.
Up next: down with the sickness
At some point when I had my nose buried in Skyrim or Anno 2070, THQ finally flipped the switch to activate Saints Row 3’s online stats tracking and screenshots. Now, if your friends have registered their Saintsrow.com accounts and if you know their profile names, you can check their stats. For instance, this guy is in the top 95% when it comes to total kills. Pretty good. That’s an A+ on most grading scales.
Now that I can finally post the screenshots I took while playing on the Xbox 360, you’re going to have to humor me, much the same way you might humor someone showing you his vacation pictures. For instance, in the above screenshot, witness the power of a fully upgraded and operational Grave Digger shotgun. Well, maybe not the power, but certainly the aesthetics. Suffice to say I sank enough money into that gun that when I shoot things, they burst into flame.
A reader sent along pictures from Justin Bieber’s latest music video, in which he ravenously purchases Nintendo 3DSs. According to the reader:
All He Wants for Christmas – is Nintendo 3DS! In the newly debuted video for his holiday song, “All I Want for Christmas” Justin Bieber and his friends go on a holiday shopping spree and fill their carts up with this season’s must have gifts – including Nintendo 3DS!
The video also stars Mariah Carey, who demonstrates a complete lack of interest in videogaming. According to examiner.com:
The uniqueness of the All I Want For Christmas is You video has fans from both artist checking out the video. Shot in the middle of the night at the iconic Macy’s Department Store, both entertainers shared their parts with the song quite differently. Justin Bieber was seen singing in the middle of the store while Mariah Carey was dressed in a mini Santa skirt close to a decorated wall.
(Thanks Nintendo PR!)
We enlist Eric “shellfishguy” Campbell to help us solve a dilemma. Then we settle in for some serious talk about World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic, at which point Tom Chick sets a couple of n00bs straight on the finer points of Star Wars lore. Plus a touch of Distant Worlds, Battlefield 3, ESRB controversy, and pinball. Skyrim doesn’t come up. Oh, wait. Yes it does.
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I fully expected that the Legends expansion for Distant Worlds would mainly be cool for adding characters who level up (pictured). I was wrong.
After the jump, what a difference a chart makes Continue reading →
In the last episode of Walking Dead, one of the characters explains his cavalier attitude about being lowered into a well to try to extract a zombie from the drinking water. He says he approached it as if he was playing Portal. “It’s a videogame,” he explains.
I appreciate the product placement, but I don’t really get a Portal vibe from that scene. It does vaguely recall a certain Valve game, but not Portal. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Maybe Team Fortress 2.
Skyrim is putatively a game. More accurately, it’s a narrative loom.
Is Alexander Payne’s The Descendants an effective story about a man’s struggle through a family crisis, or a maudlin soap opera with a made-for-TV sensibility? Depends on who you listen to on this week’s Qt3 Movie Podcast. At the 52-minute mark, for this week’s 3×3, we discuss our favorite uses of the color red. At least one of us is literally color blind.
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The wallet threat level isn’t high due to any new releases. There aren’t any, of course. Instead, the threat to your wallet is due to any holiday sales that may or may not be going on. But if you made it through Steam over the weekend — that front page of deals was deadly — you’re probably past the worst of it.
The Quarter to Three offices will be shut down for the holiday so our employees and interns can spend time with their families. Happy holiday to everyone, best wishes if you’re going to wade into Shopping Hell, and whatever you do, don’t forget to spend a little time leveling up as well.
We try mightily to talk about stuff that isn’t Skyrim (pictured). We succeed part of the time. It doesn’t help that this week’s guest, Justin “Demon G. Sides” Utegg, is more hardcore at Skyrim than McMaster and Chick put together.
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