While the review of Skylanders Swap Force is underway, let’s look at some of the early battle arenas, based on an evening’s play among adults and some adult beverages. These arenas might be more accurately described by their nickname: Skylanders’ horde mode.
After the jump, Skylanders has a horde mode? Continue reading →
If you read Quarter to Three, you like old horror movies and card games and the original version of Majesty. That means you are probably terrible at the action genre known as brawlers, or beat ’em ups. You may be so out of touch that you think they are called fighting games. I’m here to tell you about a brawler even you can enjoy.
After the jump, destroy hordes of faceless goons without lifting more than one finger Continue reading →
Microsoft has announced a subscription based fitness application for the Xbox One. The Xbox Fitness service will use online stat-tracking, an extensive library of interactive videos, and the Kinect sensor to run gamers through a gauntlet of torturous exercises. Grand Theft Auto V’s waterboarding scene has nothing on Shaun T or Jillian Michaels screaming in your face to do one more set of leg lifts.
Using precision Kinect technology, Xbox Fitness can read your heart rate without a monitor, see which muscles are most engaged by measuring the power, force and transfer of weight in your body, and track the quality of your performance by measuring your balance, tempo and form.
That’s not creepy at all. Xbox Fitness will be included at no extra charge with an Xbox Live Gold membership subscription until December 2014. Microsoft has not revealed what Xbox Fitness will cost after that date.
(Sometimes a response deserves to be more widely read than it would be if it were a private email or a post in a comments section. This is one of those times. The following email is reprinted with the permission of the author.)
I’m a 50 year old female gamer who absolutely loves Rockstar games, especially Red Dead Redemption. My wife and I (yes, we’re lesbians) have been playing Grand Theft Auto V since it came out. We’re slowly wending our way through the storyline, taking our time to drive around and discover random events.
On the latest Quarter to Three Games Podcast, Tom Chick talked about how Rockstar is telling a specific story and because this story doesn’t really have anything to do with women, it shouldn’t have to worry about issues of misogyny. His point was also that Rockstar and other developers shouldn’t have to rein in anything because someone might mistake the content for reality. I certainly understand what he’s saying. Since I used to work in the comic book industry, I too am a strong advocate for “just because a story/game is violent doesn’t mean that people will become violent by exposure.”
However, I just have to point out a thing or two. I think we can agree that most people in the world are taught that stealing is bad, and that killing to get what you want is out of the question, and even that lying/cheating is generally a no-no. But can you say the same about how to treat women? If society had a handle on how women were treated, there’d be no rape/death threats for Anita Sarkeesian’s exploration into gender issues within the gaming community.
For me, the complaint isn’t necessarily that Rockstar is misogynistic. It’s that in Grand Theft Auto V, and other GTA games, women are treated as one-dimensional things. Even cars and weapons have more depth than women. I’m only a bit into the game, and I haven’t gotten to the torture scene yet, but so far women in Grand Theft Auto V are airheaded new wave feminists who sound crazy (both Michael’s wife & Franklin’s aunt are in this vein) or airheaded fame seeking shits who can only scream “you’re ruining my life!” One of the best things about Red Dead Redemption was Bonnie MacFarlane. Why? Because she was a well thought out character who had depth.
Why is it okay for us to play a game where carjacking is the norm? Because the vast majority of folks aren’t likely to commit grand theft auto. But what about treating women like objects? Even my nephew, who was raised by three strong women, has enacted forcing a woman to go down on him, in my presence. At the time, he was trying to prove his masculinity to me. This is why in boy toys like Grand Theft Auto, removing content like touching strippers without consent might be better for the world. Yes, it’s okay to have dark humor regarding things that we know are wrong. The problem is, within the current boy culture, treating women like shit or like an object isn’t a wrong thing. So in this case, excusing misogynistic content by calling it dark humor is the ol’ boys club creating a wall.
What I know about MirrorMoon can be pretty much summed up in a single phrase, which is on the game’s main screen when you boot it up: it’s a “recursive space mystery”. I don’t even know what that means, which is no surprise given that I don’t know what I’m doing, where I’m doing it, or even whether I’m doing it. But here’s a picture of a planet I found with some sort of funky swirling thing going on. It seems like it’s this planet’s version of weather.
The basic concept — I have no idea if this constitutes a spoiler, because I have no idea whether there’s anything deeper down this inscrutable galactic rabbit hole — is that you fly a ship with unlabeled controls to a planet, where a hovering miniature version of the planet serves as a map/control panel, which you then use to activate something to let you do something that somehow involves going to other planets something something something. I think the miniature planet map (a mirror moon, perhaps?) is the recursive part of the game. Everything else is the space mystery.
MirrorMoon is available now on Steam. Let me know if you figure it out.
A version of this post appeared on the Quarter to Three forums. It has been reprinted here with the gracious permission of the author.
The currently available version of Incognita, a tactical stealth/hacking game from Don’t Starve and Shank developer Klei Entertainment, is one of those early pre-release alphas. What’s there right now is really limited. It’s essentially a procedural office building generator. You take a two man team into the office building to rescue a captured agent. That’s it.
But, after the jump, I’m really happy with the promise shown at this stage. Continue reading →
When I started playing Grand Theft Auto V, I thought this was where the review would go. But somewhere on the way to Monday morning, it became clear that wasn’t going to happen. Not because I couldn’t get to the end of the story. I probably could. But because I didn’t want to get to the end of the story. I like this game too much to not let it take as long as it wants to take. In fact, I’m not even sure a review will appear this week. I’m pretty far along, but in the tension between wanting to find out what happens next and wanting to luxuriate in Rockstar’s richly realized San Andreas, the luxuriating tends to win out. If there’s one thing Rockstar’s games deserve, whether I like them or not, it’s seeing them through to the end at their own pace.
After the jump, not a review Continue reading →
I don’t know what stage of what chapter I’m on and I don’t know how many times I’ve tried it. I lost count when it got above twenty. I can’t even remember which mask I have on. Is it the one that makes dogs ignore me, the one that lets me absorb one bullet, or the one that lets me kill instantly with thrown weapons? All I know is that I’m in a closet. More like a vestibule, really. And beyond this door there’s a man with a shotgun. I need him dead and, more importantly, I need his shotgun.
After the jump, see how well that works out. Continue reading →
There’s this continent known as Valoran. The people of Valoran have, for centuries, settled their disputes via warfare and, in particular, magical warfare. This tore the land apart and made certain areas uninhabitable, forcing the ruling powers to form the Institute of War. The purpose was to give the summoners a place to settle their disputes without destroying the land. With this in mind, the Institute of War created the first battleground for summoners to settle their disputes. Up in North Valoran, nestled between Freljord and the Serpentine River lies Summoner’s Rift – home to many of the greatest battles in history.
Having seen so many wonders and terrors, the woods around the Summoner’s Rift are home to many oddities. Fairies and reapers, centaurs and robots, but one creature in particular stands out. Among the trees lives Rammus.
After the jump, this is all about League of Legends, of course Continue reading →
One of my favorite things about Rayman Legends, and the Rayman series in general, is that it’s not so in love with its weird little mascot that it’s going to rub my face in it constantly. As a character design, I don’t really get Rayman. Why is he missing his limbs? Why do his extremities float in midair? What is he? A dog? He looks like a dog. Why is he so cheerful? I don’t think I trust him. He seems to want something from me, like he’s about to ask if he can crash at my place for a while. Granted, it could be worse. He’s no Mario. I can’t stand that guy. I’d rather have playable Donald Trump in a platformer. Rayman is only in the Jak and Daxter range on the “look, I just don’t like you” scale.
So I love that the Rayman games pretty much let me play whomever I want. Teensies with their diminutive stature and exaggerated honkers are who I want to play. What I like about being a teensy — Goth Teensy, of couse, because the goth perfectly offsets the precious — is that it creates a narrative of self-determination in the Rayman world. Instead of a weird limbless dog-thing or a fat Grimace wanna-be liberating the teensies from captivity and restoring teensy royalty to its rightful place, a teensy is freeing his own people. That’s the political message of Rayman.
Okay, not really. I just think they’re pretty darn cute. They’re like a more bulbous version of the spies in Spy vs Spy.
There’s nothing quite like getting blindsided by a new release. The Wonderful 101 is the latest from Platinum Games, the folks who made Bayonetta, Vanquish, and that weird recent Metal Gear game where the albino cyborg slices up watermelons and whatnot. Wonderful 101, which comes out in North America on September 15, is exclusive to the Wii U for some very particular control reasons, including using the touchscreen for gesture controls, playing interior areas on the gamepad while you watch what’s happening outdoors on the big screen, and five-player coop where everyone else has to waggle a Wiimote. You do have a Wii U, right?
After the jump, the best reason since Lego City Undercover for a Wii U Continue reading →
It’s pretty clear that Capcom and developer Spark have no idea why those of us who liked Lost Planet 2 liked Lost Planet 2. So they have instead decided to tell a linear story (side quests excepted) about blue collar busywork along the corridors of Hoth. The busywork — I presume this will become shooting at some point — apparently stretches over fifty years, because the game opens with an eighty year old man pinned in rubble reminiscing about stuff that happened fifty years ago, at which point you’re playing Lost Planet 3. While I’ve been chipping ice off things, unsticking frozen valves, and enduring the three loading screens it takes to get to the guy who gives me the quest to kill 20 spiders, I’ve been pondering why Lost Planet 3 has the hero it has (pictured). What went into the thinking for a character design like that? How does a game made by a developer here in the Valley and published by a company in Japan settle on that dude? Then it hit me:
He’s a combination of Toshiro Mifune and Nicolas Cage! He’s the uncanny marriage of Hollywood and Japan. Kurosawa would be proud. Or creeped out.
Fallen Enchantress’ latest patch, which focuses on making the AI players less passive, has just been released. Go here to read the changes in version 1.3, dubbed the “empires” patch. Or read on for an account of the AI doing things I haven’t seen before.
After the jump, cleaning up the Scrapyard Continue reading →
Karla Zimonja, one of the Gone Home developers, explains those SNES carts you found in the game. I bet you didn’t know they were created by famous people.
Torn Banner Studios has announced Chivalry: Deadliest Warrior for Chivalry: Medieval Warfare. It’s based on the Spike TV show that features odd match-ups like cowboys versus Zulu and asks viewers to guess which would win in a fight. This is decided by way-too-serious guys measuring the effects of the hypothetical combatants’ weapons on dead pigs or blood-filled dummies. Chivalry: Deadliest Warrior adds samurai and Spartans (with more fighters coming later) to the base game so people without access to dead animals can have their shot at judging the warriors the way they were meant to be analyzed – in a multiplayer video game.
