Developer 82 Inc pegged it when they named their last game New World Colony. That game plays pretty much as you’d expect, what with the hexes and lumber and villages and victory points. But then they name their next game PWN, which doesn’t do much to put me in mind of cyberspace and hacking. Fortunately, it’s got the subtitle “combat hacking” so that you know this isn’t about 13-year-olds showing each other up through stunning feats of juvenilia.
Combat Hacking — I’m just going to pretend it’s not called PWN — is a nifty exercise in fingerwork and brain power. It looks like a puzzle game, but it’s not. It’s actually a head-to-head real time strategy game focusing on territory control, maneuvering, and the careful application of special powers, all lovingly cyberpunk themed. It’s too fast to be simply brainy, and way too brainy to be simply an action game. The matches are short and eventually decisive, but they allow for plenty of dramatic give and take, and there’s even a campaign mode to unlock characters with special abilities, dopey names, and individual leaderboards.
It’s a good enough game that it could have supported some sort of narrative beyond “and now Cipher fights Prime on the Megacube map”. As someone who’s been steeped in Fantasy Flight’s excellent Netrunner card game, I really dig how Combat Hacking hits that cyberpunk sweet spot where gameplay and theme overlap. If it had just gone a tad further and given the action some sort of strategic context, I’d be in cyberpunk nerdvana. It turns out this is what I wanted from the hacking interface is the last Deus Ex.
The 3D maps are an unfortunate bit of busy work that lend plenty of cyberspace theming — cyberspace is totally 3D, duh — but they don’t lend themselves well to the touchpad controls. I meant to de-virus my nodes, but I accidentally spun the matrix around so now I can’t see what’s going where. The action is too fast for accidental map twirling. And although you can play multiplayer, you can only do it with people in the same room. But until a new Neuromancer game comes along, this will do just fine.
The battle between Tom and Bruce in Nemo’s War might be over, but the war rages on! Nemo’s War creator Chris Taylor joins Tom Chick and Bruce Geryk for an in-depth (get it?) discussion of Jules Verne, boardgaming, and more boardgaming. Join us for a very special Tabletop Edition of the Quarter to Three Games Podcast.
In 1842, the United States and Britain both colonized Seattle at the same time. This didn’t go over well. The world sat up and took notice. Would future Washingtonians call the trunk of a car a trunk or a boot? Would they think Mr. Bean movies were funny? And how good would they be at acting? It mattered. So the Great Powers were given the opportunity to weigh in. Spain decided to wait and see how everyone else was going to vote. And when the issue broke into war, Spain had forgotten to vote and was therefore dinged five prestige points.
I was in charge of Spain back then. You may not remember this from the history books, but it’s true. My bad. I was trying to figure out something else. Sue me. It’s not easy running a whole country. So we lost five points of prestige. This isn’t normally be a big deal, but at this particular point in history, Spain was low man on the totem pole of Great Powers. By losing those five points of prestige, Italy qualified for Spain’s Great Power slot. Spain had a little over a year to stay Great by earning more prestige. So she declared war on the Ottoman Empire, who had defaulted on Spanish loans some years earlier. Spain figured she could sink some Ottoman ships, sue for peace, rake in a little prestige from the victory, and hold her place in the geopolitical sun.
But Spain forgot to check that the Ottoman Empire was allied with Austria, which meant the 11 Spanish ships that weren’t policing Cuba and Indonesia were up against about 30 Ottoman and Austrian ships in the Mediterranean that had nothing better to do. Oops. Spain’s attempt to bully the Ottomans into renewing interest payments — “This is a nice empire you have, Ottomans; it would be a shame if something happened to it…” — resulted into the loss of Spain’s home fleet and a subsequent blockade of Spanish ports. What should have been a prestige gain turned into a prestige loss.
And that’s how the Brits and Americans bumping elbows in Seattle lead to the fall of the Spanish Empire in 1844. But as you also may recall from your history book, Spain didn’t give up! The invention of pressure chambers for thorax surgery — this is an actual thing is Victoria II, bless it’s historically detailed heart! — in 1848 gave the Iberian peninsula just the boost to prestige it needed to qualify again for the Great Power club. Take that, Italy!
We all agree that The Place Beyond the Pines, the latest movie from Ryan Gosling and Blue Valentine director Derek Cianfrance, is no Blue Valentine. At the 57-minute mark we focus on our favorite lasers for this week’s 3×3.
When you talk about Moon, there’s no reason to point out that Duncan Jones is David Bowie’s son. But when you talk about Antiviral, you can’t very well not point out that Brandon Cronenberg is David Cronenberg’s son. The younger Cronenberg channels his father’s body dysmorphia with scalpel precision, stark insight, and the same dreamy malaise of David Cronenberg’s best movies.
The subject of Antiviral is celebrity obsession, but not in the obvious way. This isn’t a satire, but it makes the same point as satire in the context of futuristic biopunk noir, with disease as a metaphor and McGuffin, with the subject matter being the unlikely intersection of disease and beauty, blemish and perfection. The world it presents is new, imaginative, and unsettling. It’s impossible to get through Antiviral without wincing several times. It’s not gore so much as squick factor, which is far worse than mere gore. I can watch Michael Ironside’s head exploding till the cows come home. But the early simple medical procedure in Antiviral will put you off your lunch. It’s only going to get worse.
Antiviral wouldn’t work without the fascinating Caleb Landry Jones in the lead role. His performance, which consists largely of lurching, is a thing to behold, every bit as integral to Antiviral as Jack Nicholson is to Chinatown.
Boy, does that screenshot bring back memories. Castle of Illusion, the 1990 Sega Genesis game, was a seminal platformer back in the day of Mario’s hegemony. I vividly remember hopping Mickey Mouse from leaf to leaf and just being gobsmacked at how beautiful the damn thing was, even though I couldn’t care less about Disney’s frontmouse.
I don’t know how well Castle of Illusion will hold up after 20 years, but Sega and Disney Interactive intend to show me with an HD update due out this summer. Maybe the best way to do a Mickey Mouse game is to go back to a time less Epic?
Lovelorn mindfucks aren’t what they used to be. I mostly blame Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Jesse Armstrong’s fiercely insightful The Entire History of You from the British series Black Mirror didn’t help (watch it before the mostly likely toothless American remake arrives, courtesy of Robert Downey Jr). So it’s a bit late for Danny Boyle’s lightweight Trance, a mindfuck oddly jammed into a movie about an art heist by some lovable thugs. Don’t read too much into the early torture scene. It’ll pass. The real substance of movie is after the fact, when hypnotist Rosario Dawson helps James McAvoy recover his memory about the $27 million stolen Goya he misplaced. Oops. The solution comes down to Dawson’s shaved pubic hair. I’m not making that up. It’s particularly disappointing that this is what we get when Boyle rejoins Shallow Grave and Trainspotting screenwriter John Hodge.
At least Boyle knows how to shoot dreamlike energetic sequences that weave and build and crescendo spectacularly. The aforementioned reveal about Miss Dawson’s grooming, for instance. Anthony Dod Mantle’s lurid realer-than-real supersaturated cinematography is as gorgeous as ever (you can see Mantle’s work most recently in Dredd). And Trance has a sexy finale that makes me want to watch Boyle’s Sunshine again, which features fiery crescendos on a larger scale. But Trance ends with an unsatisfying “gotcha!” resolution that does more to sell iPads than elicit a-ha’s. Where’s my Eternal Sunshine DVD and Sunshine Blu-ray?
What Defiance does well, it does well enough. This is basically a wide open playground dotted with activities, almost of all which come down to shooting a bunch of dudes, and sometimes pressing a button once you’ve shot them. But lots of shooting. Gratifying shooting with as many different guns as you like. Light machineguns, assault rifles, sniper rifles, shotguns (three flavors!), pistols (as if), some lasery things, rocket launchers, grenade launchers, a gun that shoots bugs. Guns, guns, guns! It’s very nearly mindless.
The shooting activities are scattered widely enough, and the world is big enough, that you’ll often have to zip around on your vehicle, enjoying featherweight simulated driving physics along the way. Say what you will about these vehicles, but they’re ten time better than any MMO horse I’ve had to ride. You can do races, but they’re just a brief distraction from the shooting. Defiance is a game with focus. 85% shooting. 15% driving.
Before Mortal Kombat’s latest surprisingly good reboot, there was Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe, which was not surprisingly good. Or so I’ve been told. I myself never explored the implications of who would win in a fight between Superman and Johnny Cage. I’m pretty sure there is no version of that match-up where the answer shouldn’t have been Superman, but I’ll reserve judgment until I’ve seen Zack Snyder’s upcoming biopic.
And now this week, the team that made the Mortal Kombat reboot so good, NetherRealm, releases Injustice: Gods Among Us, which reboots only the DC Universe portion of Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe. The box cover poses the question, “Who would win in a fight between Superman and Batman?” and implies that the answer is “The Joker”. Well played, box cover.
I just hope it’s not too difficult to unlock Aquaman.
Speaking of heroics at sea, Jetpack Joyride developer Halfbrick will mostly likely release their next game this week (the release date isn’t yet official). Fish out of Water for the iOS, in which you throw fish like you’ve never thrown fish before, is every bit as addicting and adorable as Jetpack Joyride. But wait, there are more naval shenanigans! I’m really excited about Victoria II: Hearts of Darkness, which revamps naval battles and colonization in Paradox’s brilliant strategy game. As you can deduce from the title, the focus is on Africa, often overlooked in favor of the sexier America when it comes to historical strategy gaming and real life.
Sacred Citadels is a side-scrolling brawler not from the folks who made Sacred 2. It’s supposed to be a sort of prequel/appetite whetter for the upcoming Sacred 3, which is also not from the folks who made Sacred 2.
Finally, there’s DLC for Dishonored, in which you play the jerk responsible for the main character getting dishonored, and Black Ops II, in which you play a guy who gets shot a lot by other people online.
You don’t maintain a 0.46 kill/death ratio in Black Ops II by just logging in from time to time and playing. It takes a certain type of innate skill. 9.77% accuracy with your gun of choice isn’t something that just happens. It takes concentration and nerves of steel to bring wild spraying to bear on your target. Be the bullet, I tell myself. The one that’s going to connect with the dude you just stumbled into and who is now about to kill you. I enter a zen-like state. Time slows. I see all possible outcomes, drawn before me in a luminous web of possibility. Fear me, IKillzU_420. 4.6 times out of ten, I prevail.
Black Ops II is having a double XP weekend. It’s always gratifying to see a double xp tag pop up from time to time during a match. I feel like I’m getting away with something. Like double coupon Tuesday at the store.
My intention was to quickly boot up Black Ops II so it could patch itself after months of inactivity. I meant to get ready for next week’s Uprising add-on, which consists of four news maps and a new zombie mode. But then I thought I’d just check and see what level I was. Then a quick look at my loudouts. Ah, right, that gun with that attachment. Yes, those tactical grenades. Hmm, that perk? What did I think that was going to do? What was Tom Chick thinking last December when he was still playing this? Let’s hop online real quick and take it for a spin.
At which point Xbox Live decides to barf out for several hours. Microsoft’s servers went offline for the Black Ops II double xp weekend, which demonstrates why there’s no way the next Xbox is going to be as always online as some supposed Cassandras are claiming. Because even though I wasn’t able to work on my 0.46 K/D ratio, I was able to poke around at the campaign, checking my high score, considering ways to replay missions for a higher score, or to do the challenges that unlock more stuff, or maybe even to work on a hardened or veteran level playthrough, which would not only improve my scores, but would unlock the achievement. And, perhaps most imporantly, I would beat podcast co-host Jason McMaster’s mission scores, and thereby unlock something more precious than any achievement: gloating rights.
And while I’m still looking forward to Uprising’s new maps and new zombie mode, the overall takeaway for me this weekend is that Black Ops II holds up, even without the DLC (although the last DLC pack includes a skatepark map (pictured), which is the best skateboard-related thing Activision has made in years).
Read the original Black Ops II review here. Uprising will be available on Tuesday for $15 or as the second of four downloads included in the $50 Season Pass.
After an Easter hiatus, Vickie’s Tomb Raider let’s plays, posted on YouTube under the name Owlsighs, have resumed! I love how Crystal Dynamics is playing her like a violin. For instance, her reaction to Dr. Whitman. And these:
“Is there someone singing in the background?”
“Oh. That’s open now. That wasn’t open the last time.”
“That’s disgusting! That would smell horrible!”
“What language is this? What is that symbol?”
“What’s with the creepy music if these are our friends?”
“Oh my god, no frickin’ way. Oh for Pete’s sake, really? Oh, frick.”
“Hmm, looks like we could jump up there. Let’s try it.”
I was fortunate enough to be part of Jason Schreier’s thoughtfully written and incendiarily titled article on Kotaku, Metacritic Matters: How Review Scores Hurt Videogames. I enjoyed Schreier’s article for the diversity of sources he used, and I’m grateful that he invited me to participate. But I can’t help but wonder that he introduced me as “well-known for aberrant scores”. That’s far more of a statement about the state of videogame criticism than a statement about me. As a reviewer, I believe strongly in two things and I don’t feel either of these things should be “aberrant”: 1) I believe in using the entire range of a ratings system, and 2) I believe in rating games based on my experience with them rather than pretending I have some objective insight into their level of quality. We’re talking about entertainment here, not toasters, cell phones, or automobiles.
Schreier concludes that the system — Metacritic aggregating someone who uses the entire range with someone who doesn’t use the entire range — doesn’t work. I couldn’t disagree more. I would argue that what doesn’t work and what’s hurting videogames is how many reviewers pretend ridiculously towards objective insight measured on a bell curve that spots a game 60 points for just showing up, but deprives them of 100 points for not being perfect.
I’m grateful to be on Metacritic because it’s a fundamental part of the modern conversation about entertainment. People like to gauge the consensus on their entertainment. People like numbers, statistics, math, lists, favorites. It’s part of nearly any hobby. And I’m the same way, as a guy who plays games and as a guy who writes about games. Unlike a lot of writers — Adam Sessler really unloaded on Metacritic in Schreier’s article, implying that it keeps food from game developers’ families — I don’t hate the aggregates. On the contrary, I consult them frequently, and I feel they provide a valuable if sometimes flawed service.
My issue is with the data fed into Metacritic. An aggregate is only as good as its individual components. The system that doesn’t work is the perception that videogame scores are somehow an objective measure of a game’s quality. They aren’t. They’re a measure of how much a reviewer liked a game. Any other perception of a rating is fundamentally broken. It’s not Metacritic’s fault that so many reviews treat videogames like toasters, cell phones, and automobiles.
It’s also not Metacritic’s fault that so many of the larger sites are so cowardly about how they rate games. I don’t believe that what IGN and Game Informer do has to be the norm, any more than I believe that what Fox News or The Daily Sun does is the norm. Big media isn’t the same thing as right media. The solution is for more critics to use the full range of their rating systems, and for readers to recognize that three stars at Quarter to Three isn’t the same thing as a 6.0 at Gamespot, which isn’t the same as a 6 at Eurogamer. Tom Chick is not the same person as Kevin VanOrd, who is not the same person as Tom Bramwell. We have our own perspectives and methodologies, and none of those perspectives or methodologies gets to dictate the norm at Metacritic. That’s the point of an aggregate. It should be a variety of voices pulling in a variety of directions, and not a bunch of non-committal uncritical mumbling huddled under a drab tent pitched between the 70 and the 90. Personally, I feel it’s a failure of games criticism that I’m so often at the bottom of the page on Metacritic.
And as for how this data supposedly deprives game developers’ families of food — seriously, Sessler, if that’s your priority, put down the microphone and break out a pair of poms poms — I love the games industry and what it does. I want it to succeed. I want every studio to remain open and every employee to get a bonus and every game to make every publisher rich. I write about videogames because I’m an enthusiast. But more importantly than wanting games to succeed, I want games to be good, to get better, to grow up, to offer unique and meaningful experiences, to speak to people in the same way that books and movies and music speak to people. Recognizing when that happens and calling it out when that doesn’t happen is more important to me than making sure someone gets his bonus. I told Schreier in our conversation that my main obligation was to my readers. But upon reflection, I’m not sure that’s true. My main obligation is to the medium.
Tom Chick and Nick Diamon call out Linden Lab CEO and erstwhile Sims developer Rod Humble for that weird Second Life game. Not pictured, by the way. That’s a screenshot from the lovely but inchoate Patterns, also from Linden Lab. We discuss what the studio is up to, and then talk about the non-news for the new Xbox, the upcoming TRONny shooter from Timegate, the Defiance MMO, whatever Timber and Stone is, military codes of conduct in the ARMA 3 alpha, and solo wargaming in a custom built warbarn.
I don’t get sports. I just don’t. Why do people care so much about teams of dudes who aren’t even from the city they’re representing engaging in excessively formalized, heavily regulated, and ridiculously overpaid contests of athleticism? And why do people who watch sports care so much when most of them certainly don’t play the game they’re watching? Is it just for the cheerleaders? That I could understand.
I do, however, get e-sports because I actually play the games I’m watching. I know the rules, I understand completely how the players feel and the dilemmas they face, and I enjoy the tension and drama of a game without necessarily being inside it. But I feel like a prerequisite for enjoying e-sports is knowing the game at hand.
For instance, Netrunner, a masterfully designed card game of bluffing and asymmetry, with a superlative sense of theming. Listening to a cast of the game really plays up the theming. Experiential Data, Datasuckers, Account Siphons, and Heimdall ICE! “That is a rather mighty server!”, “I’ve seen this before, the old ‘don’t care about tags’ strategy”, and “He has not been lucky running the centrals!” are all proclamations in the above Netrunner cast.
These casts for Netrunner’s clunky but serviceable OCTGN module are narrated by a friend of mine with an actual British accent. He goes by the name Mr. Skinny as he Britishly commentates on the cyberpunk proceedings. A generically bitchin’ techno soundtrack plays discreetly in the background. I don’t know if folks who aren’t hip to Netrunner would get these, but if you’re going to watch a bunch of dudes kick a pigskin around, wouldn’t you just as easily enjoy this weird cocktail of Hugh Grant-a-like, William Gibsonism, and faux Daft Punk?
Timegate is a fantastic developer when it comes to the hard work of actual game design. Kohan was one of the boldest innovations in the history of RTS innovation and Section 8 was one of the cleverest Tribes variations I’ve played. But both games had a tough time creating any sense of identity, starting with Kohan’s weird word soup mythology (Give yourself ten Timegate fanboy points if you can tell me what a Kohan is and 20 Timegate fanboy points if you can tell me the difference between a gauri and a haroun!) and going up through Section 8’s generic space marines with their usual arsenal.
But based on the announcement trailer, if there’s one thing you can’t say about Minimum, Timegate’s newly announced shooter, it’s that it lacks personality.
