I suppose I’m resigned to the November 1 DLC for Gears of War 3 adding three new maps. I’ve still got plenty to do with the included maps, which I’m enjoying in horde mode and, to a lesser extent, in beast mode. Come November 1st, it might feel entirely reasonable to fork over another $10 to the company that sold three million copies in a week. That’s where we are today: $60 for a game with six maps, but $70 for a game with nine maps. If you don’t like it, be happy with the six maps and spend your $10 on something nice for the wife and kids.
But then I see that the DLC will extend the horde mode’s RPG system by letting you level up your defenses beyond the current limit. It will even add a command center.
A brand new type of fortification that allows you to call in fire support from sniper teams, mortar strikes and even multiple Hammers of Dawn.
Hey, I want that! I also want the new decoy upgrade, and the rockets for my silverback mech, which I think is that robot thing up there on the right. But shouldn’t I have gotten this stuff in the core game? Wasn’t horde mode supposed to be a complete package included with the game? Isn’t this a bit like buying a copy of Brink that stops your character at level 18, and then charges you $10 for levels 19 and 20?
I realize the battle for DLC is over. We’ve lost and publishers have won. It’s a bit late to complain about it, but I can’t help it. If we could hash it out again, I’d rail twice as loudly. Also, the South will rise again, Bush totally stole the 2000 election, and you can pry my laser disc player from my cold dead hands.
Sometimes when you’re playing D&D — so I’ve been told — the dungeonmaster feels sorry for you because you’re doing so poorly. So maybe you kill a kobold and find, hey, it was carrying a Vorpal Blade. I’m pretty sure that’s what just happened to me in Dark Souls.
After the jump, only pity can explain why I found what I found Continue reading →
Delays aren’t that unusual. What is unusual is a delay announced the day before a game’s release date. And when the new release date is as vague as “later this month”, announced on the third day of the month, this is not your garden variety last-minute hitch. Whatever’s going on, you won’t be playing Payday: the Heist this week.
Thanks to our continuing grant from the National Foundation for the Preservation of Old Videogames, our “Help Wanted” program is now in its second week. This week, we’re revisiting a Playstation 3 exclusive that was made available free as part of Sony’s apology for the Playstation Network being closed for so long. You did get your copy of Wipeout HD and the Fury add-on, didn’t you?
Wipeout in general, and HD’s Fury add-on in specific, is some of the most thrilling sexysleek sci-fi combat racing you will ever do. In multiplayer, it basically comes down to who knows the track best. But there are Mario Kart style power-ups that help level the playing field. We’ll play some regular races on the more forgiving speed classes, but we’ll also try Fury’s Eliminator and Zone Battle modes. Eliminator is scored based on damage and kills against other ships and Zone Battle is a trippy cyberrific risk/reward calculation about who can build up the most speed while dropping barricades on the field to mess up the other races. I’ll briefly explain the modes from the lobby, but the guide you can access from the main screen features a description in the “Race Types” section. While you’re there, look over the icons for the different pick-ups. There are only ten, and you’ll want to get a sense for what each one does before jumping into a race.
The controls might feel weirdly floaty depending on which ship you take. Wipeout is a game about maglev hovercraft thingies, after all. Consider enabling the pilot assist mode to help you from hitting walls, which is the exact thing you don’t want to do in this game.
The races will begin on Wednesday, October 5th at 6pm Pacific/9pm Eastern and will last for at least two hours. Just add tomchick to your friends list on the Playstation Network before the starting time on Wednesday. Then I’ll host races limited to friends only. Go to “Online”, then “Join Game”, then check the races on the list to find the one hosted by “tomchick”. If a race is in progress, you’ll have to spectate until the next race, but the races are short and few games make for spectating as sexy as Wipeout HD. And if you have a Bluetooth headset, it’s pretty painless to get it to work on the PSN if you want to chat.
What kind of game situates the first NPC vendor so that talking to him means standing with your back to the edge of a fatal cliff, at which point a menu pops up in which the analog stick still moves your character instead of changing the menu selection, so that when you pull down on the stick to select the next menu item, your character neatly steps off the edge of the cliff and dies?
Dark Souls. That’s what kind of game. Remember kids, when you’re in a menu screen, use the d-pad.
After the jump, something else I wish I’d known when I started playing Continue reading →
Like its predecessor Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls isn’t for everyone. But to those who it is for, it will be a dire and abiding wallet threat, not to mention a terrible time sink. The game diary begins today.
Then there’s Rage. Yeah. So in terms of big budget, AAA shooter franchises out this year, Resistance 3, Gears 3, and Rage have laid their cards on the table. Resistance 3 folded, Gears 3 threw down a pair of tens, and Rage reveals a jack high. Okay Battlefield and Modern Warfare, what do you guys got?
The downloadable Orcs Must Die is good, to be sure. But it’s no Toy Soldiers: Cold War. It’s about a Trenched. That’s frankly not a bad thing to be.
Activision follows up on last week’s X-Men game with this week’s Spider-Man game. Can they clear the bars that were the Thor and Captain America game before Batman: Arkham City likely closes the book on licensed superheroics?
Sony has a couple of dark horses this week. Payday: The Heist (pictured) is like Left 4 Dead meets Heat by way of Kane and Lynch 2 with a touch of Gears of War’s horde mode and an unabashed nod to the opening of The Dark Knight. Since it’s Sony Online, it will be available for the PC and PS3. And it looks like the Playstation Network will finally release the PS3 version of Eufloria, a lovely minimalist RTS built for the PC that should fit neatly into living rooms.
Although we’re thrilled to talk about Take Shelter, we have to ask that you don’t listen to the podcast until you’ve seen Jeff Nichols’ spectacular sign-of-the-times slow-burn thriller. All three of us loved it and we’d hate to ruin it for you. So until then, fast forward to the 3×3 starting at the 1:26 mark. We discuss the best practical makeup effects. Oh, and when we ask you to fast forward to avoid Lake Mungo spoilers, the spoiler discussion lasts 14 minutes. But for best results, see Take Shelter and Lake Mungo before listening to this podcast.
Podcast (movies): Play in new window | Download
Subscribe:
A Lithuanian student of “gravitational aesthetics” has designed the last rollercoaster you will ever ride.
The first or second loop might already kill the rider. But the following ones will do the job for sure. If you think in terms of engineering, the coaster incorporates a seven-fold redundancy.
Okay, time to test this baby out. Where’s my copy of Rollercoaster Tycoon?
You might call Dony Moore, a.k.a “wigglestick”, the official aesthetician of Quarter to Three. Or at least our WordPress guru. He pretty much built the page you’re looking at. This week, he’s also our guest on the podcast. We discuss which characters he’d be in a Coen brothers movie, the true meaning of urbex, whether Warwick is suited for Dominion, and the greatest open-world games of all time (that were on the Apple IIe). Also, listen closely for an exclusive Mass Effect 3 teaser!
Podcast (games): Play in new window | Download
Subscribe:
My monthly column on strategy games, From Civ to Starcraft, begins today on Gamepro. However, it feels like I’ve been at it for months. The title has a familiar ring. Weird, huh?
This month, I offer advice, freely and loudly over my headset, to people playing Gears of War 3’s new horde mode. That advice consists of nuggets of wisdom like the following:
Stay at the base, you dummies! You don’t need to venture out into the map to fight them over there so you don’t have to fight them over here. Bush league adventurism has no place in Gears’ horde mode. That’s what the campaign’s arcade mode is for.
Read the column here.
For many games, the multiplayer and single player feel like separate products, connected thematically, but with very little in common when it comes to core gameplay. For instance, I play a lot of real time strategy games. There are almost no real time strategy games in which the single player campaign is even remotely like the multiplayer. The difference isn’t quite as pronounced in shooters, but it’s still there. For some shooters, multiplayer is farmed out to an entirely separate developer. For many primarily multiplayer shooters, the single player seems like barely an afterthought.
The beauty of Red Dead Redemption’s multiplayer is that it feels almost exactly like the single-player, even though it’s an entirely separate experience (contrast this to something like Dead Island, where the multiplayer stuff is the same as the single-player stuff, but with more players). Whether you’re playing the single player storyline, or whether you’re in the free roam online mode where all multiplayer begins, Red Dead Redemption is about being in a wide-open and richly evocative recreation of the Old West, with an embarrassment of riches when it comes to things to do. Several of which we did last night.
After the jump, it’s a hell of thing, killing a man Continue reading →
I have watched and enjoyed some awful movies solely because Lucy Liu is in them. Cypher is one such movie. This 2002 release is director Vincenzo Natali’s transition from the sleek sci-fi horror of 1997’s Cube to the awkward Cronenberg me-too of 2009’s Splice. Jeremy Northam plays the dupe in a mind-bending game of corporate espionage that ends up exactly where you think it’s going to end up. Liu plays Morpheus, but hotter. She even gives Northam red pills. She will arrive dangling from a wire on a helicopter for a hilarious Liu ex machina.
Northam, a capable and British actor, sports an oddly brittle American accent. Liu, a lovely woman, sports a ridiculous unflattering wig. If Cypher is ever rewarding, it’s when these things are shed.
In case you didn’t know yet from my ongoing enthusiastic burbling, I love Renegade Ops.
In the movie Bad Boys 2, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence drive a Humvee through a shantytown. It’s stupid. Who would do that? People might get hurt. But it’s action movie stupid, no one gets hurt, and it looks grand. This is Renegade Ops in a nutshell, although with more explosions, cars way cooler than any mere Humvee, and plenty of surprises.
Now my love has a score. Read the full review here.
So I’m reading over the press release for the upcoming add-on to Distant Worlds, an ambitious, spread-sheet, AI-driven game of galactic conquest that feels a bit like something Paradox would make if they made games in space.
Then I get to this feature and realize publisher Matrix has pasted the wrong text into the press release.
a brand new character system with skills, traits and advancements based on each character
Ha ha, good one, Matrix. I actually had to scroll back up to the top of the email to make sure the error wasn’t mine, and that I wasn’t actually reading the press release for some sort of RPG. But sure enough, Matrix has mistakenly put this text into the press release for Distant Worlds: Legends. Everyone knows that Distant Worlds is as huge and impersonal as the galaxies on which it plays. Space this big and this busy has no room for individual characters, much less characters that matter or change. That would make Distant Worlds more like Master of Orion 2 or Crusader Kings or Shogun 2.
Among the other features mentioned in the press release:
new race-specific events and victory conditions; a new system for borders and spheres of influence; an expanded tech tree with new weapons, facilities, and wonders; improved AI; improved diplomacy including mining and refueling rights; greatly improved fleet management; new main map overlays to show ship routes and fleet postures; improved mod support,
That’s quite a lot. I’m flashing back to the way Galactic Civlization II improved so dramatically with the Twilight of the Arnor expansion. A basically sound game turned into a game exponentially better once its races were fleshed out to give the whole thing some asymmetry and personality. Those are two things the already fascinating Distant Worlds could definitely use.
Distant Worlds: Legends, with or without characters, will be out “by November”. That means within 34 days. Not that I’m counting.
Oh, and if you have any nifty ideas for a space monster that can prowl the galaxy alongside the dreaded space lobsters and space slugs, Matrix wants to hear about them.
The folks at 604 Republic have approached us with phat loot for a contest. I occasionally get offers like this, but I mostly ignore them because it’s goofy stuff like controller decals or a handful of credits for some online poker shenanigans. However, after taking a look at 604’s catalog, I saw about five or six T-shirts that I would gladly wear. In public. Around girls. Like that epic duel design above, which is way better than Jurassic Park 3. Take a look here for more designs.
And if you see anything you like, post in the comments section for this post. Commenters’ names will go into a random drawing. Additionally, join us for the Wednesday night Help Wanted session of Red Dead Redemption, and five (5!) instances of your name will go into the drawing.
A winner will be selected on Monday morning. Your choice of shirt and mailing address will be forwarded to the fine folks at 604, and they’ll send you some phat loot you can wear proudly!
