NHL13, which stands for the National Hokey League 13, is out this week. In this sport, you hit a round thing with a stick, which means hokey is very similar to the sports of golf, baseball, and jai alai. If you’re into hokey, this is your lucky week.
The other game out this week is Tekken Tag Tournament 2, which is a lot more fun that NHL 13 when it comes to saying the names of a game out loud. Go ahead, try it. Saying NHL 13 makes it sound like you’re ready to take a nap. Saying Tekken Tag Tournament 2 makes it sound like you’re announcing the impending arrival of something at least snappy, if not downright exciting.
Madden NFL 13 (pictured) is out this week. Nothing but net!
Guild Wars 2 is technically out this week, but any real Guild Wars aficionado has been playing since Friday night. Can Sony interest you in PS3 collections of the God of War, Infamous, and Ratchet & Clank series? Paradox is releasing an RTS called Starvoid, which I honestly thought was about a very hungry creature. It wasn’t until I was actually typing the word just now that I thought, “Oh, star and void…”. I would have gone with Voidstar.
I recently played a few games of Fly or Die Go, an online go server running a client you can download as a free Chrome app, possibly also available on other platforms. You log into a lobby with a bunch of other players, and can challenge or be challenged to go games on various size boards, from 9×9 up to the conventional 19×19. There’s not a whole lot of chatter, games are fast, but mostly people use common courtesy in playing the game.
There’s another Transformers game out this week, if you’re into that sort of thing. This one apparently has robo-dinosaurs in it. Frankly, I’m surprised it’s taken this long for robo-dinosaurs to find their way into a Transformers game. There’s also a new iteration of Counter-Strike, called Global Operations, made by the folks who made Defense Grid. And Dark Souls is out for the PC. Please. Anyone who cares enough about Dark Souls bought a console system to play it on.
The real wallet threat this week is the pre-launch launch of Guild Wars 2 on Friday.
Unfortunately, the Hong Kong action movie open-world game Sleeping Dogs is no real threat to your wallet. More specifics tomorrow. As for Darksiders II, after a few hours of play, I’m a bit worried about some of the choices developer Vigil Games has made. Can the first game’s novelty of “holy cats, it’s Zelda’s gameplay meets God of War’s gritty combat but with World of Warcraft’s graphics!” sustain itself for a second game with “also Diablo!” bolted on? But to be fair, the original Darksiders took a while to reveal its charms. More on Darksiders II later in the week.
So what’s the real potential wallet threat this week? A JRPG on the Wii.
I never would have thought a JRPG on the Wii would be a wallet threat, much less my favorite game of 2012 so far. But The Last Story, a JRPG on the Wii, comes out this week. This is the eagerly awaited North American localization of a game by Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi’s studio, Mistwalker. Mistwalker’s previous games, Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon, were mostly by-the-numbers old-school designs. But my understanding of The Last Story — I haven’t actually played it yet — is that it has a few tricks up its sleeve, and may very well be one of those weirdly unique RPGs a la Dragon’s Dogma.
I usually handle the editorial content around my house, but in some cases, I have to call in an expert like Murray. Although he’s orange and adorable, he’s also a professional mouse killer. This is his review of Game for Cats for the iPad.
As the staff of Quarter to Three goes home for the long holiday weekend, we’ll leave you with a touch of our own fireworks in the form of an annual half-year list. What are the ten best games of the year so far?
But first, a quick mention for some games that didn’t make the list. I admire Dragon’s Dogma for making all the weird choices that other RPGs are afraid to make, but being different can only get you so far. I ended up preferring some very conventional RPGs. Warlock: Master of the Arcane and Conquest of Elysium 3 have made it a great year for turn-based fantasy. Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion for the PC, Defender Chronicles II for the iPhone, and Resident Evil: Revelations on the Nintendo 3DS are all great. However, each of these games is an iteration of an earlier recent game. Speaking of the Nintendo 3DS, Zen Pinball 3D and Kid Icarus meant the 3DS had more than three times as many must-haves as Sony’s Playstation Vita.
But, after the jump, there are ten games I liked better than any of those.Continue reading →
I pre-ordered Battlefield 3. I had to. Being a fan of the series since its inception, I felt the need to own the latest edition in all of its glory. Oddly, I didn’t feel that need for 2142.
When my copy arrived, I was in the middle of a gaming explosion – October and November of 2011 were chock full of great releases – so I set Battlefield aside. Fast forward to today and I find myself kind of bored. I’ve been playing Age of Empires III with Tom for a week straight (more on that later) and winning well less than 10% of our matches. That’s not a problem for me since I’m stubborn and will overtake Mr. Chick eventually. If nothing else, I’m younger than him, so I’ll go challenge his grave when I’m in my 80s. Hell, he’ll probably still win.
In light of the announcements that Kelly Wand, Desslock, and Erik Wolpaw will join Tom vs Bruces if the Kickstarter campaign reaches its stretch goal, I’m going to offer advice to those playing against Tom Chick in a strategy game. I spent most of E3 deathly ill at Tom’s house. In the rare hours I wasn’t sleeping or wishing for sweet death, Tom and I played games. This included Age of Empires III and Sins of a Solar Empire. I waged war against Commandant Chick for ownership of the age of discovery, the age of colonization, the industrial age, and even entire galaxies.
An online friend sent me a message after E3 asking how excited I was about the upcoming LBP karting game. I had no idea what he was talking about, but he made me miss LBP. I took a break to highlight Trials Evolution community tracks in this space for a couple of weeks, and while I love the game, it is somewhat limited in creative scope when held up against LittleBigPlanet. Motorcycles are cool, but are they really as cool as a helmet that shoots cupcakes? I’m a pie man, and even I’d have to say no to that.
Sadly, firing up LBP after a few weeks is going to mean updating. Not a problem with my Xbox, even when it has been similarly dormant. Somehow that works through the process without a hitch. But my PS3 updating LBP? That’s always going to take at least two days of various rebootings and the entire home network falling to pieces. So…
This week’s Trials Evolution track is Heavy Machinery 1.1. It was designed by Fruity Gudness. Yes, the Escher part took me about fifty tries to get past, but I love the shifty loopiness of this track. It brought to mind the orange Matchbox Car tracks of my youth. More importantly…
Oh E3, you get me every year. Something always happens that makes the experience less enjoyable than it should be. The first year I brought a hundred pounds of equipment and schlepped it over hell and back, just for my footage that was never even used. Other years have been ruined by scheduling. But this year?
Since Monday’s coverage, highly placed sources inside both 38 Studios and Big Huge Games have come forward with clarifications and new information in the ongoing story of 38 Studios’ demise. A previously fuzzy picture of an unbelievably swift collapse has come into sharper focus as a tale of two studios: one a group of hardy survivors, the other doomed by its own ambition.
E3 has always been about the people who make videogames controlling the message. Which is probably as it should be, given the financial stakes. It takes a special kind of irrelevance to ignore E3. This noisy concentrated blast of messages sprayed over a willing audience like chunks of watermelon at a Gallagher show is an important tool publishers use to sell their games. But since I’m not really in that line of work, and since my boss (i.e. me) isn’t paying me to pass along the controlled messages this year, I’m going to talk about what I did today instead of going to E3.
Because, frankly, I’d rather talk about a great ten year old game than a potentially great negative one year old game.
After the jump, I exercise my own special kind of irrelevanceContinue reading →
(Editor’s note: The sudden dramatic collapse of 38 Studios over the last few weeks has been the subject of a lot of speculation and recrimination. Chris Hornbostel lays out the facts as we know them, gives them some important context, and then draws a few conclusions.)
In October 2006, Curt Schilling begins 38 Studios as Green Monster Games in Maynard, Massachusetts. Fantasy author R. A. Salvatore is announced as creative director, and artist Todd McFarlane is art director. On this site’s message board, you can read Schilling’s comments at the time, including this telling million dollar quote: “I am not sure where revenues and subscription bases will be in a few years, but based on todays economy in the game space it’s safe to say both are going to grow exponentially right?”
Target down, this week’s Trials Evolution community track, forces you to learn how to use the brakes. Be ready for that. You have to get to know this track before you can beat it. From time to time when talking about Little Big Planet levels I’ve been known to complain about compulsory deaths. I think I whine about surprise deaths being unfair. That they violate the rules. There are no such rules in Trials Evolution. Sometimes a ramp is going to drop on your head without warning. You’re going to faceplant into a stone pillar on your first time trying some tracks. That’s just life on a motorcycle. Deal with it.
Some tracks let you buzz through them on your first run. If you get how throttle and balance coexist in the game doing well on those tracks comes down to shaving seconds off your time. Target down isn’t about shaving seconds so much as it is about eliminating faults, and doing that requires trial and error. There’s no way around that. It’s a track that makes you learn it, but not one that relies upon impossible rock slabs to up its difficulty rating. After trying to beat one called Squirrel Island about a hundred times this week, and failing, I can appreciate that.
Target down was designed by CONPExZii. Difficulty: hard.
