One of my favorite things about Rayman Legends, and the Rayman series in general, is that it’s not so in love with its weird little mascot that it’s going to rub my face in it constantly. As a character design, I don’t really get Rayman. Why is he missing his limbs? Why do his extremities float in midair? What is he? A dog? He looks like a dog. Why is he so cheerful? I don’t think I trust him. He seems to want something from me, like he’s about to ask if he can crash at my place for a while. Granted, it could be worse. He’s no Mario. I can’t stand that guy. I’d rather have playable Donald Trump in a platformer. Rayman is only in the Jak and Daxter range on the “look, I just don’t like you” scale.
So I love that the Rayman games pretty much let me play whomever I want. Teensies with their diminutive stature and exaggerated honkers are who I want to play. What I like about being a teensy — Goth Teensy, of couse, because the goth perfectly offsets the precious — is that it creates a narrative of self-determination in the Rayman world. Instead of a weird limbless dog-thing or a fat Grimace wanna-be liberating the teensies from captivity and restoring teensy royalty to its rightful place, a teensy is freeing his own people. That’s the political message of Rayman.
Okay, not really. I just think they’re pretty darn cute. They’re like a more bulbous version of the spies in Spy vs Spy.
Are you sure you’re in the right place? The Diablo III Haters Club is three web sites over and down the forum to your right. That’s the best place to talk about this console version’s occasionally disappointing graphics, the occasionally wonky controls, and the persnickety loot management. Just tack those onto the agenda right after the grousing about the always-online DRM, the usual Blizzard story, the mismanaged ingame economy, and how unfair [insert name of the hardest mode you’ve unlocked] is.
After the jump, the agenda at this meeting is different. Continue reading →
Who’d have guessed all three of us would love a Riddick movie? If you want to avoid spoilers about how much we loved a Riddick movie, we’ve split the podcast at the 56-minute mark to talk about our favorite splitscreen scenes.
Next week: The Family
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I hate how glib this sounds, but there’s really no other way to put it: playing Rome II feels like playing a beta. It’s as if someone sent me an early build, but forgot the caveat sheet.
Okay, this is a work in progress, so you’re going to see some bugs. Also, we need to give it another optimization pass to speed up loading times and to improve performance. We don’t have a manual yet, but the ingame encyclopedia has some broad explanations (it should load more quickly after the optimization pass). We’ll be adding more feedback to improve the player experience before we release. Finally, not all the systems are working as intended yet. So again, just keep in mind this is a work in progress and is in no way indicative of the state of the final release.
After the jump, the state of the final release Continue reading →
Hotline Miami 2 used to contain a rape scene. Well, a “rape” scene. As with many things Hotline Miami, you can’t take it at face value. But now it doesn’t have that scene. It’s been cut from the demo and the developers at Dennaton have said in an interview they’re going to try to “fix it”.
Unless “fix it” means put it back and continue making the game as they intended, Dennaton is letting the wrong person shape their game. That person is writer Cara Ellison, whose PC Gamer preview presumably caused Dennaton to cut the scene.
After the jump, how not to make a videogame Continue reading →
The latest update for Marvel Heroes has just gone live. This is arguably the greatest shift in basic gameplay since Marvel Heroes’ release and it’s yet another sign that Gazillion is admirably committed to figuring out how to make this thing the best it can be. And to think I’d written it off as a free-to-play boondoggle that I wouldn’t give a second glance while I played Diablo III or Guild Wars 2! Here’s the overview for the update:
This patch represents a major step forward in the combat and item system for Marvel Heroes. With a complete retuning of survivability and defense across the board.
As our design philosophy suggests, we concentrated on identifying the most effective powers and buffing the rest of the powers and heroes to that top-damage range.
Heroes and powers have received significant upgrades as well as items. You now have more incentive and payoff for using loot close to your level and will receive greatly increased survivability from items with defense.
The update has a few hitches, but so far it hasn’t blown up or melted down, which is a first for developer Gazillion, who still owes me for eating my Punisher in a rollback. The update is technically called version 1.2, but it’s been informally known as the “August patch”. Checking the calendar, I see that Gazillion meant the adjective and we just assumed they meant the month.
Read the full notes here.
In the aftermath of PAX, which only one of us attended, we talk about the pros, cons, and cons of conventions. What makes a good convention good? Are there any conventions so bad that they caused McMaster to hurl into a garbage can? And which costumes will we be cosplaying at next year’s PAX? Games of the week features talk of Rome II, Outlast, Occult Chronicles, Saints Row IV, and The Incredible [sic] Adventures of Van Helsing.
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When Sunless Sea was announced a month ago, we listed ten things you should know about the latest game from Fallen London developer Failbetter Games. Here’s one more:
11) The Kickstarter campaign has just started.
Rayman Legends is out this week. If the sequel to Rayman Origins is half as good as Rayman Origins, platformer fans will have another must-have. However, if it doesn’t have a playable Goth Teensy, I will freak the flip out.
Now that the Total War games got really good with the last Shogun, I’m eager to see how Rome II has turned out. If you know any of the following words, you’re probably as eager as I am: hastati, principe, triarii, peltast, velite, onager, flammable pigs.
As you can see from our daily updates, Diablo III: The Living Room Edition is available now for your latest-gen console of choice that isn’t a Wii U.
Outlast is an indie found-footage horror game for the PC that isn’t very good unless you’re into jump scares. Here is the impromptu review I let slip at the first jump scare: “Oh god! JEE-sus Christ…”
Sega releases an updated Mickey Mouse platformer that only needs to clear the modest bar set by Capcom’s Donald Duck platformer from a few weeks back.
We know you didn’t see Closed Circuit, but listen to this week’s podcast for details of how you can support the podcast while simultaneously choosing a movie for our September 30 episode! Plus a little talk about Getaway, in which Ethan Hawke drives Selena Gomez around an Eastern European country with a lot of police cars to spare. Skip to 52-minute mark for this week’s 3×3 of our favorite horror movie kills.
Next week: Riddick
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Microsoft and Mojang mix some Mass Effect into your Minecraft.
…the first Mash-up Pack will feature the popular Mass Effect franchise, allowing fans to play in the stunning recreation of the Mars Facility from Mass Effect 3 or create their own worlds with special Mass Effect textures and craft-able items. The Mash-up also includes themed menus and user interface, 36 pixel-perfect Mass Effect character skins and 22 music tracks from the Mass Effect 3 soundtrack.
The $4 add-on will be available on Wednesday. The ending will be changed sometime this fall.
It’s been a long time since director Renny Harlin dropped a screaming blonde woman down a chasm, sucked Cary Elwes up into a tornado, and fed Samuel Jackson to a shark. Those were the days. And what is he reduced to now? Giving cameras to good-looking talentless actors and letting them traipse around the wilderness for yet another half-assed Blair Witch Project found-footage wanna-be. Welcome to Devil’s Pass. You might think Harlin could wring some local flavor out of the story’s attempt at a Bermuda Triangle in the Urals, where the characters ponder whether they’ll face a yeti, UFOs, or Russian secret experiments. But all you get is 90% dull travelogue — “Whee, we’re in Russia!” — and 9% Grave Encounters rip-off in which CG monsters shriek at the camera in that familiar night-vision green. The remaining 1% is a CG avalanche. At night. Dark Pass’s real accomplishment is making Chernobyl Diaries, another horrible movie about found footage in secret Russian installations, look good. You’re better off just reinstalling STALKER, where the abandoned Soviet military bases are free of annoying actors and poorly shot found footage.
Dark Pass is available on VOD. Don’t bother.
Dragon’s Crown sure is beautiful. That’s not really saying much when you talk about a videogame these days, where graphics quality is so often praised regardless of artwork. As long as the tank, dragon, or space marine is anti-aliased, some yahoo is going to call it out for “jaw-dropping” graphics. But Dragon’s Crown is artwork at its best and most distinctive. It is beautiful in a unique hyperstylized hyperdetailed hyperexaggerated way all too rare among the usual hypersexualized videogames. Sure, it’s unashamed of its breast physics and its outrageous ass swaying and the way some of its women sprawl as if they were posing for a Hustler photoshoot (you’ve never seen a wounded nun/cleric laid low quite like the one you’ll see in Dragon’s Crown and after the jump). That’s not all there is to this action RPG for the PS3 and the Vita, but it’s definitely a part of its identity. You should probably go complain about it at the same place where people who’ve never read Heavy Metal complain about Catwoman being called a bitch.
But more importantly, this is one of those game where you won’t mistake the screenshots for any other game. Visually, Dragon’s Crown has one hell of a distinctive identity. Which is exactly what it doesn’t have in terms of the gameplay.
After the jump, you’ve been here before. Many times. Continue reading →
Brandon Cackowski-Schnell and Tom Chick explain why Saints Row IV is the greatest game of all time. Which you might not understand if you haven’t played it. We’ll try not to spoil it too much.
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There’s nothing quite like getting blindsided by a new release. The Wonderful 101 is the latest from Platinum Games, the folks who made Bayonetta, Vanquish, and that weird recent Metal Gear game where the albino cyborg slices up watermelons and whatnot. Wonderful 101, which comes out in North America on September 15, is exclusive to the Wii U for some very particular control reasons, including using the touchscreen for gesture controls, playing interior areas on the gamepad while you watch what’s happening outdoors on the big screen, and five-player coop where everyone else has to waggle a Wiimote. You do have a Wii U, right?
After the jump, the best reason since Lego City Undercover for a Wii U Continue reading →
