The Enhanced Edition of Baldur’s Gate II is out for PCs this week. This is Bioware’s classic RPG with the Throne of Bhaal add-on included. It’s also got a whole mess of new content, new characters, an updated interface, new cinematics, and support for monitors you wouldn’t have even dreamed of when you first played it back in 2000. It’s also only $25. Get it here.
For something a little more latest-gen, X: Rebirth is the latest in the X series of open-world space games that are too complicated for you. XCOM’s expansion, Enemy Within, adds mechs and biogenetic mods for your soldiers. Deadfall Adventures is an Uncharted-a-like from the folks who did the wonderfully unhinged Necrovision and the Painkiller remake. It’s no Necrovision. But then again, what is. Finally, the latest Killzone will be available for $600 ($60 for the game itself and $540 or so for a platform to play it on).
Marvel Heroes gets a massive update today which adds Loki as a playable character and Asgard as a new zone.
Travel to the frozen Fjords of Norway and battle Frost Giants, Dark Elves and more! Help Reed Richards uncover the mystery of how and why these enemies from another realm are invading Earth by donating items that have been exposed to the energy of the Cosmic Cube! Doing so will unlock a brand new zone! Norway can be unlocked by bring a hero who has defeated Doctor Doom on the present difficulty mode to the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier and speaking with the transport S.H.I.E.L.D. agent near Nick Fury. Over the next 4 months, new areas of Asgard will become available, including a raid zone, PVP zone and Siege challenge.
Furthermore, Thor’s storm strike has been buffed. All this just as a new Thor movie is coming out. How fortuitous! You’d almost think it was planned!
Frictional Games’ Thomas Grip has posted a prototype of Gone Home during the early stages of its development. Designer Steve Gaynor and his team originally created it using Frictional’s Amnesia. Grip writes about it here and provides a link to download it and unpack it into your copy of Amenesia if you’d like a first-hand look.
The prototype is quite short and very basic; it is really more of a proof of concept. But it still gives a very good sense of the game, and having played the full version, I could recognize quite a bit. It does feel a bit awkward to play an early test like this though. Gone Home is a very personal game, and playing this prototype felt like a meta version of the game’s voyeuristic thematics.
Gone Home recently added a commentary mode. You can listen to my conversation with Gaynor on this podcast and read the review here.
In most games, you’d just reboot at this point. But Battlefield 4 reboots itself often enough that you have to keep playing whenever you can. You can update your drivers when it crashes before the next round.
The push-your-luck card game Dead Man’s Draw is a smart design smartly themed, even if some of the ruthlessness of the iOS marketplace is drizzled into the design. However, it’s potentially available without any of the iOS trappings via this Kickstarter campaign for a physical deck of actual analog cards. That you can hold in your hands. And shuffle. And scooch around the table. And put in cards sleeves if that’s your thing. Weirdo. I bet you have plastic covers on your furniture. Seriously, don’t be so uptight.
Developer Stardock was kind enough to send along a deck of the physical Dead Man’s Draw cards. As much as I enjoy the iOS version’s leveling up, the time-wasting casualness, and the AI that actually understands the rules, I’ve decided I prefer Dead Man’s Draw as a physical tabletop game played against a friend. In fact, I like how playing with the physical cards doesn’t track your score at every point, unless you’re some sort of card-counting point-calculating savant. On the iOS, you always see the exact score shift at any given moment. While there’s something to be said for this moment-to-moment efficiency — Dead Man’s Draw on the iPad can feel awfully mathy — I prefer it as a seat-of-your-pants game. The score fluctuates so much over the course of a match that you really don’t need to fuss with the counting until it’s all over. Playing on the tabletop is more about the tense uncertainty of the back-and-forth than the careful moment-to-moment optimization.
Of course, I lose a lot, so what do I know? The good news is that a round of Dead Man’s Draw is never going to take longer than ten minutes. At which point you’re shuffling together all those lovely cards again, coolly riffing the unsleeved edges. Just as I prefer the feel of Ascension cards under my fingertips instead of the iPad’s glass, I’ve come to prefer the physical cards in Dead Man’s Draw.
Also, all the unlockables are already unlocked in the tabletop version. The set comes with cards for each character, listing one or more unique skills for players to choose among before the match starts. Some of these seem awfully overpowered. Chez Chick has instituted a house rule that no one is allowed to play Madam Margot’s ability to collect an opponent’s busted cards because are you crazy? How is that fair? The jury’s still out on Black Bonnie and Scurvy Pete.
The physical version of Dead Man’s Draw is currently in the waning days of what looks like a failed Kickstarter campaign. But you can help by ponying up $25 for your own deck with an estimated delivery of March 2014. Otherwise, come on over to my house and we’ll play a round. Just don’t try to pick Madam Margot. Seriously, how is that fair?
State of Decay is one of the best open-world games and one of the best zombie games you can play. If you have an Xbox 360. That all changes on Tuesday, when developer Undead Labs intends to officially release the PC version. If you like open-world games, you won’t want to miss this one. If you like zombie games, you cannot miss this one. It gets certain things about zombie mythology that no one game gets (read my review here and listen to my podcast with designer Richard Foge here). Consider your wallet warned. It’ll be available on Steam for $20.
Game design seems easy when you just imagine it as a series of mechanics with names on them. Shenandoah Studio did so many things right (and almost nothing wrong) with their brilliant Battle of the Bulge iOS game that it might seem trivial to call the Allies the Soviets, draw up a new map, and send the panzers on their way to Moscow. In the world of wargame design, it’s not that easy. The switch from division level to corps/army level, from a two-week campaign to one that lasted two months, and from a battlefield that covered 150 kilometers to one that spanned over 600 kilometers in a single direction, all have the potential to wreak havoc with pacing, balance, and historical accuracy. So while gamers may see it as a quick and easy way to extend a game series, it is in no way a slam dunk.
After the jump, basketball metaphors on the Eastern Front.Continue reading →
So far, I can report that the doo-dad physics in Battlefield 4 are top notch. As you’ll see in the above screenshot, the van that opens the second of seven single-player missions that constitute the campaign — basically, an extended tech demo for the Frostbite engine’s latest ooh-la-la incarnation — has a tiny T-Rex dangling from the rearview mirror. In the PC version, on an Nvidia GTX 770 using the just-released 331.65 drivers in Windows 7, the little T-Rex bounces and twirls exactly as you’d expect while the cutscene drives you through Shanghai. We haven’t yet run our T-Rex dangling diagnostics on the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3, but we’ll keep you updated.
Are you Assassins Creeded out? Are you too fatigued to climb any more towers or parkour along one more historical city’s skyline? Who can blame you? It’s time for a vacation. At sea. I can assure you that if you’ve got Assassin’s Creed burnout, this week’s Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag is the Assassin’s Creed for you. It’s a cross between the freesailing of Sid Meier’s Pirates, the handcrafted seascape adventure of Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, and the lush production values of an Assassin’s Creed game. And at long last it has a modern-day section that isn’t terrible! Consider this a threat to your wallet.
Also, Battlefield 4 is out this week if you want to pop off some ammunition.
I have no idea what to make of Basement Crawl, an indie title created for the Playstation 4 by an unproven Polish developer. Based on the bullet points in a press release, it sounds like a latter day Bomberman with a horror motif. The developer promises more info soon. Until then, the box art (pictured) is promising.
Also, Naughty Bear was underrated. That’s right, I said that.
I’ve been on a board game tear lately. Thanks to Geek Auctions on Board Game Geek, I’ve picked up a bunch of games for next to nothing. My favorite among them is Betrayal at House on the Hill. I’m almost too in love with this game to write it up fairly, so I won’t try to do that. I will, however, tell you why I love it. From the get-go you know that one of your group is going to betray you. You and your party arrive at the house and begin exploring. Tiles flip over as you move, much like Descent or any other number of randomized maps for games, and you can run into events, items and omens. After each flip of the game’s “omen” cards, the players make a roll and, if they fail, the game begins what is known as a “haunt.” The person who gets possessed or changes sides leaves the room with a book that tells them what their specific role is in the haunt while the rest of the players read the rules out of the good guy’s book. It’s almost like Arkham Horror met Battlestar Galactica and went on a dungeon crawl with Descent.
Crap, now I have to design an Event Horizon game. Wonder what Sam Neill has going on?
See that? If you’ve played Battle of the Bulge by Shenandoah Studios before on the iPad, that screenshot might seem a little odd. You might not be able to put your finger on exactly what is different. The combat boxes don’t look like that, do they? Sure, they are clean, well designed, and a model for conveying information to the player in a stylish and meaningful way. But did they patch the game or something? Well, yes they did.
Battle of the Bulge was a revelation in wargaming when it came out just about ten months ago, but it was restricted to the iPad. The new Battle of the Bulge 2.0, which you can just call Pocket Bulge, adds support for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It also demonstrates that Shenandoah is capable of getting every bit of efficiency possible out of a small screen. It bodes well for their future designs, and because I’ve been playing a lot of their upcoming game Drive on Moscow, I can tell you (spoiler!) that the lessons Shenandoah is learning about optimizing their interfaces are being well applied to future products.
Bulge plays pretty well on the iPhone, which actually surprised me, because after playing it on the iPad, I couldn’t really imagine it getting much smaller. Shenandoah is designing their new Gettysburg game with the iPhone in mind from the start, which I have to admit worried me at first. The way in which Shenandoah was able to adapt Bulge to the much smaller form factor gives me some reassurance. Shenandoah is sponsoring a tournament befitting a pocket-sized Bulge, using the pocket-sized Race to the Meuse scenario. As of this writing there are a few spots left. And if you go to the in-app purchases, you will find a free Player’s Guide* to help you with strategy, as well as a design guide describing the game’s development which — if you’re interested in game design — I have to say will be some of the best $2.99 you ever spent. And it’s on sale for $5.99 until October 24th.
I’ve spent a lot of time writing and thinking about Battle of the Bulge. And I’ve also spent a lot of time and energy thinking about and playtesting Shenandoah’s upcoming El Alamein and Drive on Moscow games. So when it comes to impartial observers, you probably need to take me off that list, although given my voluminous (internal) comments during the playtest, I still like to think I can tell the difference between good and bad ideas and implementation when I see them. But for the most part, I think that Shenandoah has got a lot of things going right now regarding traditional wargame design that are exciting to anyone who enjoys this type of game. What I’m trying to say is that if you’re following the future of wargame development, you should probably be following the progress of Shenandoah Studio.
*Full disclosure: I contributed to the Player’s Guide, so you’ll be reading some of my strategy tips. For free, though, so you don’t get any money back if you read them and lose anyway.
There are a few things missing from Grand Theft Auto V. A playable ingame MMO, for instance. Why can’t Franklin sit in front of a computer to grind away at some fictional fantasy world? I’m not at all joking. I am 100% serious. After all, he spent enough time and money with an online self-help program he found in GTA V’s fake internet. You guys did that bit, right? I can’t be the only one who fell for it. Spoiler: I got a T-shirt for my trouble.
But the main thing missing from Grand Theft Auto V is the ability to run a drug empire, similar to what you could do in Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars. Trevor has the equipment, material resources, and personnel to cook meth and I’m sure some of those layabouts in Shady Shores would be eager customers. Furthermore, the TV show Breaking Bad means cooking meth is something we all want to do. But for whatever reason, Rockstar has denied us. Maybe with DLC.
Until then, there’s Clicking Bad, a full-blown meth empire simulation that doesn’t quite offer the same level of graphics as Grand Theft Auto V.
Among the many changes to Marvel Heroes since I last played — Why couldn’t it have been this way when it came out? — is the addition of some new heroes. One of them is Emma Frost. With a name like that, I was assuming she could shoot icicle blasts and invoke a frost aura. Stuff like that. Boy, was I wrong.
After the jump, Emma Frost is way too cool for mere iceContinue reading →
