Games

Warehouse and Logistics Simulator is out now. For serious.

Comments

As if Diablo III wasn’t already unrecognizable from the state of its release, Blizzard has given it another dramatic update, paving the way for next month’s Reaper of Souls add-on. The latest patch doesn’t just rework every character, which is sort of what you expect in patches for action RPGs. It even reworks the basic character stats, which are the building blocks for your character builds. In addition, it has completely overhauled the economy. New uses for gold, a phased out auction house, a new currency, hooks for the upcoming new adventure mode, a new role for crafting, gems reworked and expanded, and new ways to adjust the difficulty to level up faster and get better loot. The oddest thing is that I’m now picking up every single thing that gets dropped, even if the text is white. And in about an hour or so of playing, I’ve found three legendary items, which is as many as I’ve found in my entire time with the game before the patch. Suddenly, Diablo III on the PC looks suspiciously like a game with a meaningful economy.

Read the highlights here and the full notes here.

Comments

One of the downsides of convenient digital distribution is that kids today won’t grow up with a treasured copy of Sacrifice, Brian Reynold’s Alpha Centauri, or Unholy War signed by Fred Ford and Paul Reiche. When a game exists only on your Steam account or in your Good Old Games download folder, it will never include a worn box, a creased manual, or that huge honkin’ three-ring binder for Falcon 4.0. It will never show its age and therefore the love that has sustained it as part of your collection for so long.

But then there’s boardgaming. There is no danger of boardgames escaping the ravages of time and love. Any boardgame that you care about enough to keep for a long time will show some sign of how much you love it. I don’t care if you sleeve your cards, or deny your cat a place in the boxtop while you’re playing. Something will happen in the physical world to designate the passing of time. Card edges ding, box corners blunt, colors fade. If you play your games instead of curate them, they will show how much you love them.

The above image is Mark Geusebroek’s copy of Carcassone. Geusebroek started a thread on Boardgame Geek called “A celebration of your well worn/well loved games”. I love how his name is written on the box cover, as if his mother had written it there before he took it with him to summer camp. He shows photos of some of his more cherished games. Among my favorite contributions to the thread is a comment from a fellow named Brian Lucid talking about his copy of Up Front.

I love this game, started playing it when I joined the Army, literally. My buddy Dale Martin and I drew CQ together and we’d play it all night. I visited him in Detroit and bought a copy for $20 at some game store. That copy has made every move and deployment I’ve had over 20 years. I think I take it along becasue it always feels new, each game is tense, I can teach new players easily and they have fun and most of all it makes me happy when I’m feeling low. I’m retired now, made it through the Army with my Up Front and my family intact.

Lucid includes a picture of him and his friend hunched over a table playing Up Front. That picture, along with the picture of Geusebroek’s worn Carcassone box, say everything that needs to be said about what makes boardgaming special.

Comments

I’m twelve years old hiking through the desert east of San Diego. “What kind of modules?” I ask. We’re on a scouting trip and I spend a good chunk of the long trek interrogating a fellow scout about a game called Project Space Station. The possibilities were amazing. Which labs do I build? Are there enough Solar Panels? Which scientist to send up and what projects do I start? Where do you go after you achieve orbit? My adolescent imagination lit up.

After the jump, one small step for a twelve-year-old Continue reading →

Comments

I love the sailing in Assassin’s Creed IV. My fleet is fully stocked with the ships I’ve captured. I have fully upgraded the Jackdaw into a sailing fortress. You’d think that would mean I don’t need to take down random ships any more. But I can’t stop. I see a ship and I take it. I pick a spot on the map to investigate but then I see ships. So many ships! I have to have them. All of them! And why bother going on land for more uninteresting parkouring when I can’t hear sea shanties. I love the sea shanties so much that learned to play “The Drunken Sailor” on my ukulele.

After the jump, meet my favorite crew member Continue reading →

Comments

You might have guessed how some of the sound effects were created in Paradox’s Europa Universalis IV. Of course lettuce is used for the conquistador. I mean, duh. But until you watch the above video, you’ll never guess how they recreate the sound effects for turning pages and clinking coins.

Comments

That’s my little township of Belch in Shining Rock Software’s Banished. It’s a city builder that pits the player’s colonial planning skills against the inevitable stranglehold of slow starvation. Imagine a Settlers game except mother nature wants to turn your town into another Roanoke Colony mystery. Bad weather, bad harvests, and breakable tools will kill your people faster than any native hordes. Anyway, that screenshot is from the third version of Belch. Belch Uno’s townsfolk withered during a cruel winter and starved to death. Belch Part Deux stupidly ran out of wood due to rampant deforestation and the townsfolk were unable to move forward. Belch the Third seemed to be doing just fine, but there was a problem. A major one.

Find out what terrible secret Belch hides after the break! Continue reading →

Comments

The Order 1886 makes for a terrible demo at this stage in its development. It looks like a Gears clone with a Steampunk skin. The demo showed a cutscene where you tap out Morse code, then a QTE melee (press triangle to grab the knife!), and then some lackluster covershootering. Then we get to another cutscene to find out all the fuss was about a crate. Yep, a crate. What’s in the crate? We’re about to find out. It must be important. The crate gets opened. What’s in there? Here we go!

It’s a gun. There’s a gun in the crate. All that for a gun. We just saw dozens of them in action and here’s one more, in a crate. QTEs, covershootering, and a gun in a crate, coming — exclusively! — to a Playstation 4 near you later this year.

So why am I eager to see how The Order turns out? Find out after the jump. Continue reading →

Comments

Sometimes, but not often, we here at Quarter to Three have to kill a story. While we are 100% committed to you, the reader, we have to weigh the outcome of our investigative reporting and the effect it can have on the industry, the public, and ourselves. Following is a few stories we had to drop and some excerpts.

After the jump, hold the presses Continue reading →

Comments

Just as you can’t judge a book by its cover, you can’t judge a game by its carefully presented February Sony Showcase. So take these pre-impressions of Infamous: Second Son with a grain of salt. A grain of bright pink and purple salt.

After the jump, neon wonderland. Continue reading →

Comments

Nintendo wants to remind us that children, famous and otherwise, love new Nintendo games. They’ve shared the above picture of Rico Rodriguez, who plays Manny on Modern Family, doing his trademark “what are you gonna do?” Manny shrug at a table of chilled bananas. It’s as if he’s conceding that, yep, kids love Nintendo and there’s nothing you can do about and, by the way, a new Donkey Kong game comes out February 21st. Which is nice and all, but I’m holding out for a picture of Julie Bowen playing Wonderful 101.

Comments

Recently, publisher Electronic Arts and developer Respawn allowed people to participate in an “alpha” test for Titanfall. But calling it an alpha was a load of crap, since we all know the game has been finished and tested for several months. They just haven’t released it yet so that Sony can get a head start. EA is super fair like that. But when the Xbox One images hit the internet, the gaming public vomited into their consoles in disgust. EA claimed the lower resolution textures and graphic settings were to make the download small enough for the average tester, but we shouldn’t believe all that shit. They are obviously just going to repackage Crusader: No Remorse and sell it to you, the consumer, for 400 dollars American.

In order to save you from yourself, I’ve compiled a list of screenshot comparisons featuring Titanfall on the XBox One. Please, remove children and the faint of heart from viewing distance of the monitor.

After the jump, it’s about to get real. Continue reading →

Comments

When Shenandoah Studio’s Drive on Moscow came out last November, the AI was, shall we say, primitive. People playing their first game reported wiping out every enemy unit on the map. The previous release, Battle of the Bulge, had left a lasting impression of a revolutionary and flawlessly implemented interface with a game system that fit it perfectly. Drive on Moscow, despite its many merits, had a bit of a sour aftertaste.

After the jump, time for a palate cleanser. Continue reading →

Comments

My first few turns with Neo Scavenger are like the opening of 28 Days Later. I’m literally stumbling around an abandoned city, wearing a hospital gown, carrying a plastic shopping bag that contains some drinks and pills I found. But then I found a crowbar. And then I encountered a bandit. And then it was less like 28 Days Later and more like Mad Max as directed by Lars von Trier. The turn-based combat is basically a lot of inelegant fumbling around. But after several turns, I think I’ve got the upper hand. The bandit is vulnerable, bleeding, coughing up blood, in shock, and he has a crippled left arm. I’m none of those things, so it seems to me I’m winning. Also, he’s barefoot and I’m wearing one left shoe that I found in a storage shed. So I’ve got that on him.

Oh, did I mention he’s unconscious? I think I’m supposed to keep kicking him in hopes that I’ll have the option to search him and take his stuff once he’s even more defeated. He does have stuff, doesn’t he? What kind of bandit doesn’t have stuff? I kick him a few more times, occasionally hitting him with the crowbar for good measure. This is tiring activity, as I can tell by my rested bar, which is currently telling me I’m “weary”.

Eventually, I get the following messages:

Player demolished the bandit’s lower chest with a crowbar.
Bandit has died due to acute bleeding in the lungs.

Jeeze, way to make me feel bad, game. A simple message about his hit points being reduced to zero would have been fine. Also, where’s my loot? I didn’t get any loot. Normally, being a total dick to an NPC until it dies means you get loot. Or at least xp. I got neither of those things. Neo Scavenger sure is a stingy game.

The next bandit I see has a hunting rifle. In the process of rushing him, the buckshot “shreds my lower stomach”. Come on. Is that really necessary? A message about -10hp or something would have been just fine. After another extended tussle, I get knocked out. The bandit apparently runs away, because I wake up bleeding profusely but still alive. Later that night, I find a sleeping bag in the back seat of an abandoned car. I try to sleep in my new sleeping bag, but I freeze to death instead. Neo Scavenger, a brutal indie survival game currently available on Steam featuring meticulous detail instead of fancy graphics, tells me I lived for 17 hours.

Comments

That’s a screenshot of the first thing you see when you start the training level in Insurgency, the new shooter from New World Interactive. As a rookie player, I was curious to see if the tutorial would make me go through another ho-hum plywood walled kill house. (It did.) Before it made me run there, crouch here, and shoot that, Insurgency showed this to me.

The trainer actually had the audacity to growl “Beautiful country, huh?” You’re going to plop that scene in front of me and ask me to agree that it looks beautiful? It’s got all the realism and craftsmanship of a set from a middle school play. It doesn’t look much better once you start moving either. Thankfully, the game is better than the inauspicious start, but what a way to wow the newbie.

Comments