There’s a certain comfort food quality to God of War: Ascension. It’s all very familiar, even though it’s pretty much run out of recognizable mythological trappings. The stuff I recognize is straight-up repeats from the previous games; the best of the rest of the stuff achieves a gratifying “WTF?” quality. The opening boss is named something like Heckle Donkies. He’s just a bunch of arms and a gross face that seems to have dropped in for a visit from Bayonetta. He’s funky, but ultimately no different from any other God of War boss. X X X X X X, circle circle circle circle, circle, square, X.
But what I like best about this newest God of War is how it’s willing to concede that Kratos is no longer what makes these games good.
After the jump, triangle, triangle, triangle. Continue reading →
The last corporate partnership (i.e. product placement) in a SimCity game was with British Petroleum in SimCity Societies, which was before the Gulf oil spill. You can see the BP logo here, standing out from the rest of the city’s simlish signage.
Since then, BP isn’t really a great way to express consumer friendly green sentiments. So Electronic Arts has sold your eyeballs to Nissan instead. Now Nissan billboards appear around your city, just like Nissan ads appear in Origin. If you click on them, you can download a special Nissan electric car recharging station which spreads happiness. It’s basically just a park. For cars. A car park. Cute.
Frankly, I’d rather have McDonald’s logos, like in The Sims.
I still don’t much care for Shifts, a rather dry spaceship crew management game, sort of like FTL minus combat, exploration, and charm. But I have to commend the developers for adding a scoring system to give the brief expeditions some replayability. As of the latest update, as you play, you earn points, which are displayed at the top of the screen. Like some of Shifts’ other features, the score is undocumented. As near as I can tell, the best way to earn points is to settle planets, which is incidentally the overarching goal. Makes sense. But I can’t tell whether there’s an effective correlation between playing harder difficulty levels and getting more points. That sort of thing is important in a game with a score list.
And, yes, there is a score list. You’d never know this from the fact that it’s inaccessible from the main screen. Instead, you have to start a game and then check the menu you would normally use to quit the game or turn off the music. Ah, there’s your score screen.
I used to read specific publications for news. These days, out of laziness, I just swing by Google news on the way to checking my email. All the news that’s fit to print — and then some — is arranged in handy categories. World, U.S., sports, health, technology, entertainment.
But why is everything relating to videogames clustered under technology? What does a Bioshock Infinite review or a GDC announcement or Diablo 3’s success have to do with technology? Or, more precisely, why does it have more to do with technology more than any given movie, which is where it belongs under entertainment? Don’t movies use even more technology than videogames?
To many people, videogaming is a facet of the platform on which it’s played. The news isn’t about videogaming so much as it’s about Xboxes or PC or iPads. Which is absurd and a far greater obstacle to meaningful videogame discussion than the idea that videogames are for kids. At least other stuff for kids — The Croods, for instance — is evaluated on more dramatic terms than the latest cell phones. For me, the next milestone in public acceptance will be when videogame news lives where it belongs next to TV news, movie news, and music news. Videogames are entertainment, not technology.
But maybe I shouldn’t complain. Entertainment is the same category where I found out that Justin Beiber’s monkey was confiscated by German customs agents. That uses up a space in my brain where I could instead know the capital of Latvia.
(The answer to the question in the headline is “both of them”. Yahoo, which includes esoteric categories such as fashion and theater under entertainment, has everything videogame related under technology.)
One of my favorite talks at GDC this year was from Stone Librande, the lead designer of the latest Sim City. Lebrande shared with the audience the one-page design documents he created to express Sim City’s gameplay to the development team. These pages — they’re diagrams, really — stress elegance and simplicity. They look great. They’re drawn with a degree of charm that you can see in the game’s graphics. And the ideas they express should be instantly familiar to anyone who’s played Sim City enough to know how thoroughly, miserably, heart-breakingly broken the game is.
Listening to Lebrande talk reminded me that I really want to play the game he designed. I hope one day Electronic Arts finishes making it.
For an April Fool’s Day joke, I considered pretending that Super Black Bass 3D for the Nintendo 3DS, out this week, is an awesome game. But I’ve never been able to pull off April Fool’s pranks. Speaking of which, maybe Trion’s online shooter/Syfy series tie-in, Definance, is awesome. I wouldn’t know. But it’s worth noting I would have been similarly dismissive of their previous game, Rift, until I played it.
Cities in Motion 2 is the sequel to Cities in Motion 1. Before you get visions of a Sim City that works, I should warn you that these games are strictly about public transportation. I live in Los Angeles, so I have no idea what they’re on about.
Also out this week is Sang-Froid, a werewolf-themed tower defense/action game for the PC. It seems to share gameplay DNA with Orcs Must Die. I’m eager to hear people try to pronounce the name. I’m pretty sure it’s “sang-fwaa”, which is something I’d never attempt to say in public. The latest add-on for Borderlands 2 will raise the level cap and add a super badass difficulty level for your third playthough. In other words, it is of no use to me whatsoever and likely won’t be for a long long time, but I wouldn’t dream of not owning it. Just in case.
Finally, Electronic Arts will release a free patch that makes Sim City work exactly as intended, along with an offline mode for people without reliable internet connections or any interest in playing with others.
In Spring Breakers, Harmony Korine explores the moral depravity of today’s youth, or something like that. We’re a bit confused. At the 43-minute mark, we talk about American flags in movies.
Next week: Evil Dead
Podcast (movies): Play in new window | Download
Subscribe:
Bioshock Infinite is aptly named. It’s an ambitious and sometimes dazzling story far too big for the too familiar game that holds it. It contains multitudes and they’re all pinned under the boots of an unseen protagonist in a two-fisted first-person shooter, plasmid in one hand, rivet gun in the other. It is beautiful in the way that a snow globe is beautiful. Small, ruthlessly bounded, a little precious and silly, but its intricacy undeniably lovely in that diffuse light. I admire it more than I like it. I’m glad I played it, and although I’m pretty sure I’ll never play it again, I’ll be talking about it for a long time to come.
After the jump, let the talking — spoiler-free — commence Continue reading →
Today’s update to Guild Wars 2 adds a whole mess of new content, including a revised World vs World system for its massive battles. Furthermore, ArenaNet has officially eliminated culling, the technique they used to get so many characters onscreen in PvP battles without bringing everyone’s framerate down. They basically cheated by just not drawing some of the characters. Which works, but then you can’t see who you’re attacking or — worse — who’s attacking you. It’s like a random invisibility spell for characters who aren’t even thieves!
Today, culling is gone. It’s been replaced with, well…I don’t know what it’s been replace with. Aggressive LOD technology? Higher system requirements? Faerie magicks? Whatever the solution, culling is the best thing removed from Guild Wars 2 since bots!
Need for Speed Most Wanted is one of the finest driving games of this generation, on any platform. If you play it on the WiiU, you’re going to get a grand driving game. This review applies, and these ten cool things are fully in effect.
But what you’re not going to get is any meaningful added value from the WiiU.
After the jump, driver side gamepad Continue reading →
The Nintendo 3DS gets a couple of major releases this week. Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon is a nifty adventure/exploration game. I really enjoy the playful haunted house production values, the gradually unfurling gameplay mechanics, and the chaotic ghost wrassling. It helps immensely that I don’t find Luigi as annoying as Mario. I don’t know what my problem is with Mario. Maybe because Luigi is a ridiculous character played for comedy, yet Mario is a ridiculous character played as if he wasn’t ridiculous. Why does that guy annoy me so much? I’ll have to explore that further with my therapist. But since Mario isn’t part of Luigi’s Mansion, it’s that much easier to enjoy.
I’m less fond of the latest Pokemon Mystery Dungeon game, subtitled Gates to Infinity. I’m still mired in the interminable Pokemon exposition, with squealing Pokemon imparting life lessons in colorful unskippable cutscenes. The ratio of squealing Pokemon to mystery dungeon is, at this point, about 3:1. I’m running out of steam. I can’t take it much longer. I know from playing the first Pokemon Mystery Dungeon that there’s going to be a deep and involved dungeon crawl deeper down in here. I just don’t know that I have the endurance to reach it, particularly since there are so many other alternatives for deep and involved dungeon crawls. The first Mystery Dungeon, for instance, which was entirely free of Pokemons.
The Nintendo 3DS release that I’m most enjoying is Harmoknight. I don’t know what to make of that name. It’s clunky at best, and misconstrued as a slur at worst. But this rhythm based game is friendly, colorful, enthusiastic, and carefully perched at the intersection of simple and challenging. I’ve also tried to play a bit of Gaijin Games’ Bit Trip Runner 2 recently, which is similar to Harmoknight, but often more frustrating. Harmoknight feels more cinematic, more catchy, like a bona fide musical crossed with a platformer. Runner 2 is just a straight up platformer that has no compunction about making me do stuff over and over again. Harmoknight is seeing Les Miserables. Bit Trip Runner 2 is reading the Victor Hugo novel.
Xbox Arcade gets a port of Terraria this week. I’ve sampled Terraria on the PC, and I can’t help but feel it would be right at home on the Xbox 360. Electronic Arts is releasing a new Tiger Woods game. I follow just enough sports to know it’s probably a dating sim. Electronic Arts is also releasing a new Army of Two game in case your army of two in the latest Dead Space isn’t enough.
Also Bioshock Infinite is out this week.
This week we see this year’s first White House under siege movie, Olympus Has Fallen. Who’s better at rescuing besieged Presidents? Gerard Butler or Channing Tatum? We won’t know the answer until June. If you want to avoid spoilers, skip to this week’s 3×3 at the 58-minute mark for our favorite meet cutes.
Next week: The Place Beyond the Pines
Podcast (movies): Play in new window | Download
Subscribe:
I just starved to death on level 6 of Brogue, an old-school ASCII dungeon crawler available for the iPad. It takes a very particular dungeon crawler to let you starve to death. A real man’s dungeon crawler. Not some easy mode dungeon crawler where you can mosey about as long as you want because you never have to eat.
Here are the things I saw before I starved to death: a pontificating zombie, a crying toad, a skipping spider, a laughing unicorn, a quivering goblin mystic, a dancing troll, a whistling phoenix egg, a humming centipede, and a spinning will-o-the-wisp. It might have had something to do with that lavender potion I drank.
The story of Amerikatown is the story of what makes SimCity Societies unique. Amerikatown began as a city hall at a crossroads, staffed by a handful of people from nearby apartments who drove to work every morning, stopped off at the grocery store on the way home, and then spent weekends at the baseball field. Where it went from there is unlike anything you’ll find in another city builder.
After the jump, I violently oppressed 20,000 people and all I got was this lousy monument? Continue reading →
After some sort of split between the developer and publisher of Ascension — I couldn’t care less about the particulars — the game will stop working online after next year. You’ll be able to play against the AI, which is missing a setting that I’m guessing will still be missing when the game is switched off next year. But as a multiplayer game, it will cease to exist. It will be effectively EA’ed. From a press release you can read here:
When Stone Blade Entertainment launches Ascension Online on iOS (currently scheduled for July of 2014), Playdek’s Ascension iOS app will be removed from the app store, but Playdek will continue to support online play through the remainder of 2014.
In other words, the developer (Stone Blade Entertainment is the new name for Ascension developer Gary Games) will sell you their game a second time, but the game you already bought will no longer work online. Yet another nail in the coffin of the olden days when you could buy a game and be reasonably assured that it was yours to play in perpetuity.
