My diary informs me that I’ve come to Atom-city to face my fears and then return. It never goes into what those fears might be, but presumably they involve the natural fear anyone would have about staying in the company of a city of high-energy physics zombies. That kind of living situation presents various problems that you don’t have to deal with outside of it, so anyone would have some fears about whether or not they’re up to whatever they turn out to be. There is a certain amount of inference and interpretation in appreciating Clutch’s story.
Like any game, Clutch presents the player with a variety of problems and teaches them the tools and approaches to solve them through a combination of handholding and player exploration. One of the smaller problems and its solution is presented in the picture up above. Problem: there’s a zombie in front of your car. Solution: run over it. Problem: how do you get the maximum benefit out of hitting a zombie head-on? Solution: have the front guard grill option equipped on your vehicle, so that not only does the zombie get killed, it also gets sucked into the engine to be converted into turbo boost. You can see how this ties rather elegantly into further problems such as, how do I go faster to win this race?
After the jump, hunting problems and solutions Continue reading →
The best and most obvious way to get a head start on ingratiating yourself with a particular faction is to start there. Warband lets you begin the game in one of the six faction capitals, where you get to experience a short set of tutorial quests. These are optional beyond killing the first bandit that attacks you, but they offer an opportunity for a little bit of coin and reputation with minimal risk. After being set upon by a bandit in the streets of Jelkala, the fief of King Graveth of the Rhodoks, we are taken in by a merchant who explains that these same bandits have been plaguing the town. Furthermore, they have kidnapped this man’s brother and are holding him in an unknown location. The merchant offers some gold for me to recruit a small militia, hunt down the bandits and free his brother.
I accept.
After the jump: what’s a warband without cannon fodder? Continue reading →
That’s me in the corner of the screenshot. That’s a sad, empty, starting grid in the rest of the screenshot.
Jerry put it well Monday on Penny-Arcade: “Even as a satirist, there’s no savor in the [PlayStation Network] story anymore.” There’s nothing new to say. The PlayStation Network has been offline for almost three weeks. The jokes have been made, the questions were raised, answered, then the answers were questioned. If you look hard enough, there’s probably still some fascinating coverage. If you don’t, there’s a lot of anger. Anger at the hackers that took down Sony’s multiplayer service, anger at Sony’s mishandling of the situation (perceived and otherwise), anger at each other for being too angry or not angry enough. So I don’t have any gag headline for you (“more like PlayStation NOTwork!”), it’s just a sad situation. Not pathetic-sad, just regular sad. It’s not Motorstorm’s fault, it’s just the hand they were dealt. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter, because the best shot this game had for holding my attention isn’t available to me. Everyone loses.
After the break, I give the multiplayer my best shot anyway Continue reading →
This is my first view of Atom-city from behind the wheel. In addition to showing me that is indeed how I’m supposed to write “Atom-city,” my opening diary entry informs me that on September 24th, 2006, there was a failure at the particle collider there. As everyone in the post-924 world (never forget!) knows, when your large hadronic collider has a “White Ring” anomaly that’s accompanied by “forceful energy blowouts”, everyone around it is either going to die, or turn into a zombie. Or, as my diary puts it, they will pass into a “somnambulic state,” which really doesn’t seem like the right term even if you are a Romero purist about what exact state of unpersonhood constitutes zombieness. It may be an accident of translation, but if so it’s a happy one–the frequently bizarre phrasing adds to the sense of disorientation from the start.
Keep reading after the jump to learn the solution to all problems. Continue reading →
After the disappointing With Fire and Sword, I went back to Warband, the previous expansion for Mount and Blade. With the benefit of a fair amount of patching, it is devoid of any crippling issues and one of my favorite games in the recent past. It was only last week that I realized I had a way to write about Warband in a relatively fresh manner.
I could create a female character.
After the jump, the fairer sex Continue reading →
I hope no one ran out and bought Motorstorm over the weekend because of all the nice things I said about the courses in my last entry. It’s actually become a bit of a chore to play at this point, but maybe I just need a break. So today I’m not going to tell you about how frustrating it gets to repeat the same race half a dozen times with no sense of what you’re doing wrong, how to improve, or any alternative if you want to make progress.
Instead, after the jump I’m going to talk about that guy clinging to the side of my car, and maybe Amped 3. Continue reading →
After laying into With Fire & Sword yesterday, I found myself contemplating why I did not want to continue with the game. It’s Mount & Blade with guns. The gimmick works for Bethesda, so why doesn’t it work for Taleworlds? Unfortunately, it takes a lot more than simply having a bunch of good ideas to make a good game. You need to actually execute on those ideas and make them work within the framework you have set for yourself.
After the jump, one pace forward, ten paces back. Continue reading →
Credit where credit is due: I’m supposed to write clever headlines for my diary entries, and instead I’m lifting this one straight out of the game. It’s the name of the course in the picture above, the one with the ferris wheel coming unhinged in the middle of a tornado ripping the boardwalk out from under my tires. I’ve got some problems with the presentation in Motorstorm, but borrowing a Pixies track isn’t one of them.
My focus so far is the single player campaign, and without much choice in how it unfolds, I haven’t had a reason to look ahead to what courses are coming up next. I did look at some of my stats though, and as I glanced at my course standings, the thumbnail for Waves of Mutilation caught my eye immediately. An offshore tornado? How could that go wrong? Sign me up!
But after the break, I’ll tell you why it’s only my second favorite course so far. Continue reading →
I remember this place. Dad and I came here on business once. I can see the little common house we stayed in. The yard I played in with my temporary friend — Angela, the inn-keep’s daughter. All of that is gone now, replaced with this endless war.
A sound. Gravel slipping, cascading. Could be nothing. A rifle report. Jenkins hits the ground. I wish it was nothing. It never is.
After the jump, the greatest show on Earth Continue reading →
Mud!
Every game about the invasion of Russia includes the rasputitsa, the name for the spring and autumn muddy season when rain or the spring thaw renders the roads impassable. Something I didn’t know until I looked it up for this article is that there is a corresponding Finnish word, rospuutto, which translates to “roadlessness”. Is that true, Finnish readers? Who said wargames don’t teach you anything?
After the jump, why you should never wrestle in the mud with a Stalinist nation Continue reading →
Mount and Blade is the latest open-world, medieval action RPG by Turkish developer Taleworlds Interactive. What started out as a small independent project eventually swelled into a retail release; and then a pseudo-sequel subtitled Warband; and now With Fire and Sword. a reimagining of the Mount and Blade formula in a largely historical version of Eastern Europe in the mid-1600s. Upon hearing about With Fire and Sword, I prepared to dive into this new world by reinstalling Warband and logging a dozen hours over the last few weeks.
With Fire and Sword adds gunpowder weaponry as a departure from the franchise’s stereotypical medieval warfare. So I created a combat-oriented character, Johann Bodewig, and decked him out in some rather fashionable musketeer attire as seen above. I then launched myself into a changed world.
The question, however, is if this change is good.
After the jump, fire can’t solve every problem Continue reading →
I’m new to the Motorstorm franchise. In fact, I’m still new to playing games on the PlayStation 3. I won’t waste time with any commentary on the console wars, but my first hour of Motorstorm Apocalypse was actually an hour of turning my house inside-out, trying to remember what the cable to charge a PlayStation controller looks like, and what junk drawer I stuck it in. So as I’m jumping into a new franchise on a still-feels-new-to-me console, I’m trying not to let my expectations color my experience too much. That isn’t working.
After the break, what I expect is exactly the kind of racing game this isn’t Continue reading →
Am I the only one that finds it surreal that one of the best fighting games you can play — a full-featured, hardcore enough, content-packed smorgasbord of licensed but shrewdly designed asymmetry that doesn’t even have dated graphics — is on the Nintendo Wii? I experience a niggling cognitive disconnect every time I click my TV’s switcher box over to the Wii, knowing that I’m about to fire up a fighting game every bit as good as Mortal Kombat, BlazBlue, Dissidia 2, and Soulcalibur IV.
But the comparisons are misleading. The defining characteristic of Super Smash Bros. Brawl (and Melee before it, which has been effectively obsoleted by Brawl) is that anyone can play. Anyone. Let me repeat that: anyone. I am convinced there is not a man, woman, or child on this planet I couldn’t sway with the charms of this eminently accessible gateway fighting game.
After the jump, the first hit is free Continue reading →
The rain seems eternal, though I know it has only been going on for about 2 weeks, ripping the leaves from the trees and making the ground an ungodly mess. My feet are completely saturated and I don’t even wanna talk about the chafing. Humping it up to the top of the closest ridge, a building comes into view.
The place looks safe enough. An abandoned supermarket, though ravaged by war and time, is a better place to sleep than the woods in a rain storm. Only thing between us and it is a muddy bank and the parking lot. We slide down the embankment and double time it to the front of the building. Running on asphalt is a strange, otherworldy feeling to me now. Almost like deja vu but sadder… sweeter. The dried husks from this spring’s weeds disintegrate beneath my boot, repelling the invasion of nature into the world of man once again.
Hot Lokust action after the jump Continue reading →
The closest I’ll ever come to being a hardcore fighting gamer is knowing that Soulcalibur is one word. So now that I’ve established my credibility as a fighting game authority, let me tell you why I really like Soulcalibur IV.
After the jump, it’s all about the do Continue reading →
