After killing a horse, I pick flowers for a bit on my way back to not-vikings town and then decide to just fast travel. This town is really kind of a pain to get around, but I find my way back to the throne room in time to hear all about how a dragon has been seen, blah blah, I’m supposed to go help. No thank you, sir! Instead, I think I’ll wander around taking everything I can find that’s worth something and/or food. For whatever reason 99% of the stuff in here is free to take! That is awesome! I have a particular penchant for taking foodstuffs, so I load up on potatoes and carrots. You never know when you’re going to need to break out a really awesome stew in the wilderness, but to my dismay I keep getting overloaded and have to drop kettles in hallways. Even though I can take most things freely, I still decide to steal the things that are off limits in display cases. I’m pretty damn good at that unlock game.
Eventually I’ve bankrupted the people that live there and I head outside where I run immediately into a little girl that tells me in a really snotty tone that she’s not afraid of me even though I’m her elder.
After the jump, I punch the brat in the face. Continue reading →
I just can’t get enough of these awesome gun models. Pictured is the fully upgraded AR-55, which fires three-round bursts to teach you control and is mighty enough at long range that it has obsoleted the sniper rifle. Plus my new outfit. As you can see, I even got my nails done.
After getting my assignment I decide to hit the local shops to see what’s up with them. I’m a bit short on gold since these people apparently don’t know brooms are the shit but I meet a nice girl smith who won’t stop talking about her father. Whatever. I am not here to be your therapist. She instructs me on how to use a couple of the equipment-things around, basically by giving me free shit and then being like ‘return to me when you have done something useful!’ Where ‘useful’ is ‘create a bunch of leather strips’. I don’t know what they do for fun in this town and now I really don’t want to.
After the jump, time to get out of here! Continue reading →
All this could be mine. Will be mine. I’ve been busy doing other things, so I haven’t gotten around to actually taking over Steelport just yet.
Unlike the previous games, Saints Row 3 decouples the story from the city conquest. You can approach both at your leisure. And given how good the storyline is, don’t be surprised if you “beat” the game and still have a lot left to do. You can save Steelport without turning it purple.
The basic stats on your profile divide completion into four sections: storyline, collectibles, activities, and neighborhoods controlled. My own completion is at 96% of the storyline (you can replay the final mission to see the game’s other ending, which I kind of don’t want to do for reasons you’ll understand when you get there), 44% of the collectibles, 41% of the activities, and 6% of the neighborhoods. I’ve got my work cut out for me. Yet here I am hanging out in my crib, trying on different outfits, and customizing the color of the anime kitty backback to match my real-life cat. I would make a terrible gang leader.
Anno 2070 lets you know when something goes wrong by posting a message in the alert queue and sticking a floating icon over the troubled area. For instance, when citizens get sick, a red cross hovers over the afflicted building. If a hospital is in range, it will dispatch an ambulance hovercar thingie and all will be well soon enough. If a hospital isn’t in range, well, you should probably build one or suffer the population reduction.
Furthermore, Anno 2070 will almost always reward you for taking a closer look. The above screenshot is what you’ll see if you zoom in and look at a building under one of those hovering red crosses. You can see officials in hazmat suits have posted barricades around the afflicted buildings while they wait on an ambulance hovercar. Good work, guys. So why has the sickness spread to three buildings? Let’s get there sooner next time, okay?
I am dismayed by the lack of hair style options. If The Sims could offer zulu knots, why can’t these people? Eh, a ponytail is functional enough. I have fixed my face, my hair, my chin, and the millions of other weird options and now..
After the jump, on to Skyrim! Continue reading →
Sometimes when your car matches the neighborhood, you just have to pull over for a quick picture.
When you start a city in Anno 2070, you choose either the corporate faction or the eco faction. Basically, you decide whether you want progress, or a bunch of layabout tree-hugging hippies whinging about pollution. Not that I’m trying to color your choice in the periodic online elections that determine ingame bonuses.
When you choose the corporate faction, you get your power from coal power plants. Yeah, sure, they’re dirty. But that’s no big deal. Corporate citizens don’t fuss about pollution. They understand that you can’t build a city without cracking a few ozone layers. The bigger problem with coal power plants is that I kind of need that coal for iron, tools, steel, weapons, and so forth. So one of the important early shifts is to nuclear power, which uses uranium and frees up all that coal.
Nuclear power is great. Mostly. I think. I hope. Every now and then I get a little pop-up message like the one in that screenshot, which reads:
Accident at the Nuclear Power Plant! Nuclear power plant in Omicron reports minor incident. Situation under control, no radiation leaked, production unaffected.
So everything’s peachy, right? Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that message is a veiled warning? I mean, I know there’s a small chance of mishaps in nuclear power plants, but it’s so small as to be a non-factor, right? Should I be eyeing the option in my Academy to research increased nuclear safety?
I should have played the eco faction and used windmills.
Up next: down with the sickness
Before I start to play, let me tell you what I want from this game, having read nothing about it and having avoided almost all commercials for it:
I want to be friends with dragons and kill the fuck out of horses.
Before everyone is like “oh no horses are majestic, gentle creatures of wonder” let me remind you that horses can’t a> fly, b> breathe fire or some other thing, c> get out of the fucking way when you’re swinging a sword. Whereas dragons can a> fly, b> breathe fire or some other thing, and c> who cares if they get out of the way, they’re fucking dragons. They have scales and a way higher AC.
My character will be Isabelle, the Horse Assassin of Imperial City who was run out of town because she was so good at her job that it led to a horse shortage. She was run out instead of locked up because all the fast walking people had to do between towns meant that their cholesterol levels went way down and due to wolf, bear, and bandit attacks over-population no longer is a problem.
So she’s off to Skyrim to make friends with some dragons and kill some motherfucking horses.
Tomorrow: the more brooms you have
When not killing horses, Marley enjoys fixing computers, digging up ancient civilizations, acting in terrible webisodes, and cats.
At some point when I had my nose buried in Skyrim or Anno 2070, THQ finally flipped the switch to activate Saints Row 3’s online stats tracking and screenshots. Now, if your friends have registered their Saintsrow.com accounts and if you know their profile names, you can check their stats. For instance, this guy is in the top 95% when it comes to total kills. Pretty good. That’s an A+ on most grading scales.
Now that I can finally post the screenshots I took while playing on the Xbox 360, you’re going to have to humor me, much the same way you might humor someone showing you his vacation pictures. For instance, in the above screenshot, witness the power of a fully upgraded and operational Grave Digger shotgun. Well, maybe not the power, but certainly the aesthetics. Suffice to say I sank enough money into that gun that when I shoot things, they burst into flame.
Sometimes an intersection is jammed with the smoking wreckage of cars and swarming with cops and gang members just because. Shots were fired, things got out of hand, chaos descended. Any good urban open-world game works this way. Stuff happens and then more stuff happens and then all sorts of crazy stuff has happened.
But sometimes there’s a reason for it all (pictured). And sometimes it happens to the accompaniment of a Finnish chick in a French band called The Do singing a song called Queen Dot Kong that makes me think of rioting clowns taking shotguns to each other.
It’s a little messed up round here, round here, round here…
It’s a little messed up round here, round here, round here…
It’s a little messed up round here, round here, round here…
No one told me to dress up
Well, you, wow, how
This is pretty damn queer
Oh shit, now we’re stuck
We’re stuck together for real
After the jump, well you wow how, indeed Continue reading →
When is a review not a review and instead the sort of sloppy love letter a mooning teenager might write in the hopes that no one but his intended would read it? Go here to find out. Needless to say, thumbs up.
Up next: making the Emu an endangered species
(Click here for the previous Saints Row 3 entry.)
In the second season of Louie, there’s a long scene of Louis CK in the car singing along with The Who. Anyone can relate to the scene. We all know what it’s like to rock out in the car. But it’s brilliant for its couple of extra layers of meaning. This is a middle-aged man digging on The Who as if he was a teenager in his first car. It’s a scene about how some songs connect us with other parts of our lives, like childhood. But there’s still more going on here. The scene, which has no dialogue and runs the entire length of Who Are You?, starts out being about Louie. But he eventually involves his daughters, who are riding in the back seat, in the action. Before the song is over, it becomes about him sharing his enthusiasm with them, singing to them, playing with them in the mirror, nerding out while the roll their eyes. It is the arc of a man’s life in one song, from youth to fatherhood.
Okay, maybe I’m reading too much into the scene. But it’s great for a reason, and not because I want to watch Louis CK listen to songs by a band I don’t even like.
In Saints Row 2, if you drive long enough while a certain song plays, your character will sing along. What a wonderful touch. Saints Row 3 ups the ante. There’s a longish drive early on, just after the basic mission about how to customize your car. If you’re like me, you couldn’t resist spending all your money. In this case, my otherwise boring four-door sedan is now candy pink, with bright gold rims and yellow tinted windows, with a cool vent in the hood, and a slight boost to the engine power. If you’re like me, you’re now in a car you love because you got to make very particular choices about it. Fancy pants videogame commentators will call this “player agency”. I call it a bitchin’ ride.
As you drive to the next waypoint with Pierce, one of the new gang members who will be along with you for much of the game, he takes control of the radio. Sublime’s What I Got starts playing. Even if you don’t recognize the name, I guarantee you know the song. And the two of you sing along. Together. But you don’t just sing. Developer Volition let the voice actors have a great time just messing around while the song played. They talk to each other. They make comments and joke around. They’re buddies. They connect. It’s a wonderful bit of personality, and if you aren’t in love with Saints Row at this point — as an entire enterprise and not just a single game — it will never work for you.
Up next: Okay, but how good is the actual, you know, game? On a scale of 1-10?
I’m sorry, Dark Souls. It’s not working out. You’re too demanding, and too obscure, and too moody. I don’t get you. I don’t have time for you. It’s over.
After the jump, it’s not me, it’s you Continue reading →
Sometimes when you’re playing D&D — so I’ve been told — the dungeonmaster feels sorry for you because you’re doing so poorly. So maybe you kill a kobold and find, hey, it was carrying a Vorpal Blade. I’m pretty sure that’s what just happened to me in Dark Souls.
After the jump, only pity can explain why I found what I found Continue reading →
