A friend once described Vegas as “Disneyland for adults meets Wal-Mart”. I don’t get it, but I agree with the sentiment, which is to say Vegas is weird and slightly icky and it’s hard to explain why because it’s trying so hard to do things to make you like it.
I’d like to thank the fine folks at Blue Castle, now an internal team at Capcom, for making Dead Rising 2. I haven’t been to Vegas since playing Dead Rising 2. But I’m here now for a press event and I can’t help but look around at all the kitsch and evaluate its effectiveness against zombies. Thanks, Blue Castle, for making Vegas interesting again.
Welcome to the inaugural Help Wanted, a program sponsored by the National Foundation for the Preservation of Old Videogames. Every week, I invite you to join me to play a game that’s been out for more than a month (i.e. it’s old). It could be any genre, on any platform, and it might not even be very good. The game will be announced on Monday. The playing will take place on Wednesday, hopefully with help from you. A write-up will be posted on Thursday, and I hope you’ll to share your impressions in the comments section if you joined us.
This week, join me at 6pm Pacific/9pm Eastern for Red Dead Redemption. No paid DLC is required, although you’ll want to download the Outlaws to the End co-op mission DLC, which is free. We’ll mess around in Free Roam, maybe take out some of the gang hideouts, and then try some of the co-op missions. Ideally, I’d like to beat all six co-op missions to unlock the advanced versions. After that, time allowing, we can repair to some head-to-head games. Later in the evening, I intend to try the co-op zombie mode from Undead Nightmares, which is paid DLC you should have if you own Red Dead Redemption. Undead Nightmares belongs up there with Dead Rising, Dead Island, Atom Zombie Smasher, and Space Pirates and Zombies for its canny ability to translate zombie lore into gameplay.
To join us on Wednesday night, send a message to the gamertag “tomchick” on Xbox Live and I’ll invite you into our free roam session. From there, we can form posses and split off into separate missions as needed. Hope to see you Wednesday, pardner*!
* I promise I won’t be talking like that over voice chat.
FIFA 12, a Forumula 1 racing game, is out this week. And X-Men Destiny, a DIY mutant game from the creators of Too Human. And an RTS based on Game of Thrones from the creators of Bloodbowl. And a standalone follow-up to the fantasy dungeon sim Dungeons, called Dark Lord, from the creators of Dungeons. And finally the bundled remasters of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus for the Playstation 3.
Don’t worry, next week could be a little brutal.
Is Kevin Smith’s Red State a horror movie? A showcase for actors like Michael Park, John Goodman, and Kerry Bishe? A polemic about religion and government? A combination of all those things? We have a pretty broad three-way split on this movie, ranging from a conditional thumbs up to one of us being offended on multiple fronts. Then at the 1:04 mark, for this week’s 3×3, we discuss scenes we wish had been in movies.
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DC Comics apparently has a line of dolls based on videogame characters as well as the expected superheroes. I have no idea who that guy is up there, but he’s from a videogame. He’s too beefy to be Nathan Drake and too slight to be Marcus Fenix. Man, I have no idea. At any rate, you can purchase him next week for, I’m guessing, about thirty bucks.
Having now played or played alongside each of the five character classes in Diablo III, I think I’ve settled on a favorite.
After the jump, the voodoo that she do Continue reading →
Hard Reset got a patch today that made a few significant changes to how the game plays. Mostly for the better.
Some commentary, after the jump Continue reading →
I partly blame Blizzard for my disappointment at the Diablo III beta. To me, “beta” implies a complete but early build of a game. “Demo” implies a brief taste of a game. If the Diablo III beta had been called a Diablo III demo, I wouldn’t have been quite so surprised at the giant Diablofont message, “Conratulations, you have beaten the Diablo III beta”, after a couple hours of play. Fair enough. I guess Blizzard just wants a few of us banging on their servers. I’m happy to oblige.
But the more pressing issue is that, after playing through this beta twice, I still don’t have a character.
After the jump, this is not your older brother’s Diablo Continue reading →
Peter Ginsberg joins us for a podcast in which we talk a lot about two games he’s not even playing: Gears of War 3 and Diablo III. Also, Jason P. McMaster wins money off Tom Chick. And what’s the deal with this hot new Monkey Preschool Lunchbox thing on the iPhone?
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We were just trying to stay alive, I suppose. We were doing okay for a while. And then we were attacked. They came in through the kitchen window. They were really fast, you know? Chased us. Chased your mum. And we were trapped. Trapped in the bedroom. I seen them, biting. I couldn’t do anything. I tried to go back. She was already gone. She was already gone.
I wrote — well, appropriated might be a more accurate term — the above fan fiction. That passage is from the perspective of one of the creatures in Kirby Mass Attack. A turnip or a fish or a flower or something. In that scene, the creature is explaining to his kids why their mother isn’t around anymore.
After the jump, when Kirbys attack en masse Continue reading →
Before I hand you over to Jason “Fenix” McMaster for Quarter to Three’s enthusiastic Gears of War 3 game diary, I leave you with this review:
You’ve played this game a couple of times already, and here you are shelling out another sixty bucks to play it all over again, with only minor improvements, and with the same shortcomings it’s had all along. The word that keeps springing to mind as I play is “competent”. When it’s all over, the reaction is a shrug. When it’s sitting on my shelf, I might as well reach for Gears of War 2. Or a shooter with some creative energy like Hard Reset, or Lost Planet 2, or Fear 3.
Thumbs down.
(Update: there was some confusion about the rating which has been resolved; the current C+ is the intended score)
“I should play what?”
I hear you. At a press event a few months back, this game was idling on a monitor in the corner. I probably wouldn’t have given it a second glance if I hadn’t been waiting for a demo of the remastered House of the Dead: Overkill for the Playstation 3. But as soon as the guy demoing it told me the name of the developer, my ears perked up. And by the time the demo was over, this was probably the upcoming Sega game I was most looking forward to.
I only wish Sega shared my enthusiasm. I didn’t even realize they’d released the game last week.
After the jump, what is Renegade Ops and why you should play it Continue reading →
Late in Gears of War 3, someone will say, “Bloody hell, they found the UIR! It’s a Gorasni ship!” The line is delivered as if it’s something that matters, but Gears of War 3 hasn’t told me what a UIR is or who the Gorasni are. The line might as well have been “Bloody hell, they found the Boop-i-dee-bop! It’s a Whamble-di-dee ship!” It’s an example of how Gears 3 cares about itself far too much to be arsed to care about me.
But my favorite scene is after the jump Continue reading →
…as Bodycount goes on, it resembles an Agatha Christie murder mystery in which the cast of characters begins to disappear one-by-one
Read the review here.
I’ve been told Hard Reset is a short game. I’ll have to take people’s word for it. It’s taking me quite a while to work through it, as I have to play many of the sections over a few times. I usually just need to work out which weapons are best for a given area, and then try a few times to get it right. On the normal difficulty level, this is turning out to be more challenging that I expected.
As a result, this isn’t a game I sit down to play for a few hours at a time, like Gears of War 3, which I powered through with nary a hitch, sometimes barely paying attention. Hard Reset is more like a short sharp dose of spectacular shootering, akin to a shot of espresso (to extend the metaphor, Gears of War 3 is a Big Gulp cup full of day-old 7-11 coffee). I partly blame/credit Hard Reset’s checkpoint system. This isn’t a “save anywhere then reload if you die” game. It’s a game about getting from checkpoint to checkpoint, which leaves the difficulty tuning up to the developers who made the game. I can respect this. They know the game far better than I do when I’m asked to choose easy, normal, or hard. Frankly, even those three choices are a bit much to trust to the average gamer.
If this is supposed to be a four hour game, a lot of my four hours are looping back over themselves, dancing circles around that line between challenge and frustration. Each section of Hard Reset is a challenge in making do with whatever resources I can grab, dealing with the weapon upgrade choices I’ve had to make, and testing my skill at old school Doom style shootering that laughs at the prospect of a reload or crouch button. Either that or I suck at shooters. Probably a little of both. But whatever the case, as soon as it gets to be too much, I can drop the difficulty level to casual. It’s tough, but fair, and the underlying gameplay is good enough to sustain it. The checkpoints that some PC gamers might bemoan as a console convention are sometimes actually game design.
I do wish Hard Reset did a better job encouraging replay by making the scoring clearer and more prominent. Most recently, Fear 3 is the best case example of how a clever scoring system can add a lot. Before that, The Club was unparalleled in this regard. Less successful attempts include Halo: Reach and ODST, Gears of War 3, Bulletstorm, and Bodycount. Without being at least as good as those games at scoring, I don’t see much of a future for Hard Reset. When I’m through with it, I’ll probably be through with it, which is a far more damning way of a game being short than by merely not taking very long to get to the end.
