Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes is the add-on that makes the game that made Elemental better even better. That might sound convoluted. For good reason. But if you want meatier tactical combat and more character development in your Fallen Enchantress, Legendary Heroes will deliver. This is the strongest leg in the three-legged renaissance of fantasy strategy gaming consisting of Fallen Enchantress, Warlock, and Eador.
The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing is an action RPG from Neocore, the Hungarian developer who made the King Arthur RTS/RPGs. King Arthur featured some clever gameplay in what was mostly a Total War-a-like, so it’s entirely possible this Diablo-a-like might have a few tricks up its sleeve. For instance, this on-the-fly skill tweaking looks promising. Van Helsing is out this week for the PC, with an Xbox 360 version to follow later this year.
Donkey Kong Country Returns is ported to the Nintendo 3DS from the Wii. Resident Evil Revelations is ported from the 3DS to the Xbox 360 and WiiU. It looks a bit, well, chintzy on the 360, but it’s a good game. Here’s my review of the 3DS version which I presume will mostly apply to these latest gen versions. But you should probably keep in mind this was a far more relevant description of my experience with the game.
Ubisoft goes back to the basics — or at least the Old West — with Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, in which a cowboy shoots stuff. I don’t have any inside information on whether it’s any good, but I have a mental image of two interns in a back room making this game to fulfill Techland’s obligation to Ubisoft while everyone else was working on Dead Island stuff.
Activision is publishing a Fast and Furious branded racing game. Paul Walker isn’t in it. I bet you didn’t know there have already been a whole mess of Fast and Furious games. I hadn’t heard of a single one of them. Paul Walker wasn’t in those either. Quod erat demonstratum.
This week it’s a two-fer, with The Great Gatsby discussion for the first 31 minutes, followed by a Star Trek Into Darkness discussion until the 1:14-minute mark. At that point, we drop into this week’s 3×3 for a discussion of horrific falls in movies.
Next week: The Fast and The Furious 6
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Like the previous Metro, Last Light is characterized by the unforced mellow melancholy of a post-apocalypse some people call home. This is not the apocalypse we know and love. The Fallout games could never shake Bethesda’s penchant for fantasy quests and character builds and elaborate inventory subgames and dialogue trees and hearty faithful sidekicks. But Last Light has the somber sense that an apocalypse is not fun. It can be sad, small, dim, and lonely.
After the jump, mayday over Moscow Continue reading →
We regret to inform you that The Great Gatsby podcast will be assimilated into the Star Trek Into Darkness podcast. Or that the Star Trek Into Darkness podcast will be borne back ceaselessly into The Great Gatsby podcast. Tune in next week to find out!
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This week’s wallet threat is dire. Metro Last Light is every bit as good — and unique — as Metro 2033, and far more gorgeous than any game about a grey wasteland should be. The five-star review — spoiler! — will post later tonight.
Also out this week is Anomaly 2, the sequel to the tower defense game that’s actually a tower offense game. The first Anomaly was clever enough, although it was still “just” a tower defense game. Anomaly 2 has a nice twist — all the units have two forms that you can shift at any time — but what cinches this one for me is the potential of the new multiplayer mode, in which one player sets up towers and the other player wends his convoy around the map trying to take them down. Also this week, you can download Dust 514, a free-to-play shooter for the Playstation 3 made by the developer of Eve Online that intends to take the MMO planetside. See what I did there?
It’s a good thing Pinball FX 2 is so good, because I have a few complaints about its recent arrival to the PC. Imagine that. Someone complaining about the PC port of a fantastic console game.
After the jump, tilt? Continue reading →
I played Metro 2033 on the Xbox 360, so maybe that’s why I don’t remember is looking nearly as good as Metro Last Light, which is often “why is this running at such an acceptable framerate??????” gorgeous. For instance, could Metro 2033 fit this many Nazis onto the screen at once? Not that I remember.
Sins of a Solar Empire developer Ironclad isn’t just working on Sins of a Dark Age, their upcoming contribution to the League of Legends genre. Today, they announced more DLC for their sci-fi RTS, which features equal parts smart gameplay and shamefully hot space porn. Okay, maybe it’s a 60/40 split, but I’m not sure which way.
Forbidden Worlds — a perfect name for more space porn — includes “four new planet types to colonize and exploit (Barren, Ferrus, Greenhouse, Oceanic), each created with beautiful high-res textures”. This will nicely round out the Earth, Hoth, and Tatooine planet types currently in the game. Settling the new planets types will require new techs, since you can’t very well build a city on the ocean without consulting scientists first. This means more techs on the already crowded tech trees. Science is hard work and boy, is there a lot of it!
But here’s the one that caught my eye.
New Planet Specialization System: Dedicate your worlds to either social or industrial output. Devoting your planet to social improvements will increase its population and culture, at the cost of trade income and ship production. Choosing an industrial path will limit your growth and culture, but make your planet a trading and ship building powerhouse.
Sins of a Solar Empire is mostly a fleet-based game of sci-fi naval combat. But if you want to get finicky (i.e. good), you have to master a touch of empire management by setting up trade routes, refineries, and culture centers. Planet specialization could fit neatly into that element of Sins.
And then there’s this:
Discover 40 new planet bonuses during your exploration of the galaxy, unlocking the dark past of the Sins’ universe.
New bonuses are great for empires who can spare the resources to explore worlds. I love that Sins expects me to decide whether to build a bigger fleet or buy another roll of the dice for an artifact. But what’s that bit about “unlocking the dark past”? Valley Without Wind was a mostly story-free game in which you unlocked rare shreds of backstory as you played. The universe of Sins of a Solar Empire is rich with gameplay; it’s about time the developers at Ironclad dribbled in bits of lore.
Forbidden Worlds will be available for $5 on June 5th.
That’s obviously a dog, right? Or is it? Uncle Misha’s shadow puppets are one of the early domestic scenes you’ll come across in Metro: Last Light. Well, as “domestic” as you can get given the survivors of an apocalypse huddled in subway tunnels. Since the Metro games largely take place in these tunnels, they get more of a pass than the usual corridor shooter for carefully parading you past scenes like this. A game like Mass Effect or Bioshock Infinite pretends to afford you the freedom to miss them.
I’m glad I didn’t miss Uncle Misha’s shadow puppets and particularly the reaction of the kids watching. Kids who don’t know what a bird is. Lovely bits of writing like this are part of what makes the Metro games worth playing. But then I watched the variety show just down the corridor from Uncle Misha. Two thumbs down. And I gave a stripper about twenty of my bullets to see if something interesting was going to happen. It didn’t. Not all domestic scenes are created equal.
This week we consider the finer points of not starving in games like Minecraft, Terraria, and Don’t Starve. Then we discuss the latest and not-so-greatest in tower defense, why people are mad at Warren Spector, Diablo III’s Black Tuesday, how close we are and aren’t to getting to the heart of Peter Molyneux’s latest gimmick, who would win in a fight between Robin and Aqua Man, and why Victoria II is one of the Most Important Games of the 21st Century. Also, you haven’t heard Maureen Dowd’s name pronounced until you’ve heard it pronounced by Jason McMaster in this week’s message from our sponsor.
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The latest Diablo III patch just added a few cool new elements like re-tuned incentives to play cooperatively, some class changes, and a gold duping loophole. I’m personally most excited about the new incentives to cooperative play, which include a boost to experience points and the likelihood to find valuable magic items, as well a few interface improvements that make it easier to keep up with your buddy when he invariably runs after one of those treasure goblins. But a quick glance at Blizzard’s forums — something I would almost never recommend — reveals that many of the players over there seem most excited about the gold duping.
I have no idea how it works, and frankly, there’s enough inflation in the game that I couldn’t care less about it. It’s trivially easy to undermine the loot chase, even without a gold dupe, which will only make it easier to undermine the loot chase. Why should I care if the latest patch further dings an already gimped economy. I might as well fret about about a half point drop in the unemployment rate in Nigeria.
As much as I like Diablo III, I’m constantly reminded that the folks who made Path of Exile did the exact right thing by removing cash from their economy.
UPDATE: This looks like it actually might be a middling to big deal! The auction house has been taken down and some players who used the gold duping exploit have been banned.
This weekend, Baz Luhrmann takes a crack at interpreting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby seems to already miss the point, but given how sexy the trailer is, I couldn’t care less.
While we wait for the movie to open, there’s always the Great Gatsby videogame. Like Gatsby himself, you can’t really be sure where this NES tie-in came from. One version of its backstory is that a guy named Charlie Hoey made it. The backstory I prefer, supported by a magazine ad not nearly tacky enough for videogame ads from the 90s, goes as follows:
I found it at a yard sale. I bought it for 50 cents and went home to try it out. After dusting off my NES for like, 20 minutes I got it working, and jesus. So weird. Apparently it’s an unreleased localization of a Japanese cart called “Doki Doki Toshokan: Gatsby no Monogatari”
Whatever its true origins, The Great Gatsby videogame has not been gunned down while floating on an air mattress in its pool. Instead, it is fully playable here. I can’t get past the Valley of Ashes myself, which is probably for the best where Myrtle Wilson is concerned.
Kiss of the Damned has a promising pedigree. The director, Xan Cassavetes, is the daughter of John Cassavetes, so it’s no surprise that she gets how to do an homage to movies from the 70s. In this case, Italian horror. But she’s also the daughter of Gena Rowlands, so you’d think she’d know the importance of casting good actresses, particularly in a movie about three female vampires.
Unfortunately, this occasionally intriguing homage can’t bear up under the weight of its three awkward performances. It opens promisingly enough with Josephine de la Baume, unconventionally lovely in the way that people are lovely in movies made 40 years ago, as a vampire who reluctantly falls in love because sometimes guys are just so darn persistent. There’s enough style and sexual heat in these early scenes that you might think you’re in for an adult version of Twilight (pictured). Sounds good! Remember that scene in Coppola’s Dracula movie when all the naked vampire chicks writhe invitingly around Keanu Reeves? I sure do.
But then Roxane Mesquida shows up as the bad sister vampire. In the surreal horror movie Rubber, her nearly impenetrable accent lent a touch of hilarity, particularly when she tried to coax the killer out of a house by voicing a booby-trapped mannequin. But here her accent just makes her hard to understand. I suppose bad English in an English-language movie is another way to represent the exotic, timeless, and worldly quality of a vampire.
Finally, there’s Anna Mouglalis as the mother figure standing between the sisters. Mouglalis has a long list of credits, which includes playing Coco Chanel to Mads Mikkelsen’s Igor Stravinsky. But by the time she’s called in to lend some gravity to these squabbling vampire sisters, Kiss of the Damned has long since left the realm of the sexy and stylish and wandered into a maze of camp and bad acting. I suppose it is an adult version of Twilight after all.
Kiss of the Damned is available to watch instantly at Amazon.com.
This week your wallet is entirely safe from new releases, because there aren’t any. So what better time to sample something you might have otherwise overlooked, like Sang-froid, Monaco, or Don’t Starve (pictured)?
We might be too cool for Thor, Dark Knight Rises, and Elektra, but we’re not too cool for Iron Man 3. Maybe these comic books aren’t so silly, after all. You can skip this week’s 3×3 about lip syncing as soon as you hit the 1:20 mark.
Next week: The Great Gatsby
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