At the beginning of Shelter, a game about being a badger mom caring for her badger babies, one of the badger babies is unmoving and greyed out. The other four badger babies snuffle around and follow you as you try to figure out what you’re supposed to do. You can left click to bark pitiably. You can pick up a turnip. Invisible walls stop you from leaving. Indie games can be brutal! But who knew the Shelter developers — previously known for a ruthlessly puzzly platformer called Pid — were this brutal? What a harsh statement about the life of badger moms. Here you are, trapped by invisible walls to mourn a dead baby for all eternity. Maybe it’s a bug. I emailed the developers with one of those annoying “Hey, there’s a bug in your game” emails that must frustrate developers to no end, because sometimes a bug is just a player too dumb to know the greyed out badger isn’t dead, but just faint from hunger and waiting to be fed the turnip lying conveniently beside him. I appreciated the developer’s patient reply.
From that point, Shelter seems like a laidback exploration game to teach you stuff about nature, like how badgers headbutt apple trees to knock the apples loose. I should watch more nature documentaries. Then comes the badger stealth sequence, where you move from cover to cover to avoid an eagle. At least I think it’s an eagle. Whatever it is, it’s terrifyingly big. But I know stealth. I’ve been playing a lot of Splinter Cell. So I wait for the eagle to pass and then I dash to the next– Oh god, no, the baby badger is being carried away by the eagle, WHERE’S TEH ATTACK BUTTON THIS IS THE WORST THING TO EVER HAPPEN IN A VIDYAGAME!
So there are four badgers left. If it’s any consolation — it isn’t — I’m back where I started when I thought one of the baby badgers was dead in the beginning. Now we’re in a dark cave at night and I feel like the surviving badger babies are judging me when they look at me. Dudes, it’s not my fault! I blame The Last Of Us for conditioning me to think stealth rules only apply to the player character.
The artwork is fantastic, stylized and slightly twisted, but washed out for some reason. Is it because badgers live mostly underground and don’t see color well? Or is that moles? I should watch more nature documentaries. But I don’t mind the washed out color because I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more lovely videogame interpretation of a night sky. Check it out, little dudes. I’m sorry your brother/sister isn’t here to see it. I blame Ellie.
Shelter: God Hates Badgers is out next week. You can pre-order it on Steam or directly from the developer for $10.
For my second playthrough of Saints Row IV, I have to get the character just right. But after faffing about in the character builder, I could’t get anywhere near what I wanted. I don’t know what to do with sliders for temple depth and jowl height and rear neck width and so forth. But then it occurred to me that I don’t have to, because the player community does. And they’ve probably created exactly what I need.
Sure enough, I typed “palin” into the search box and there it was! Thanks, bsnead79, whoever you are. Although I don’t appreciate that you made her so old. And why did you figure she wouldn’t wear underwear? This was a potential Vice President of the United States! Do you think Keith David goes commando? Actually, don’t answer that.
Anyway, it’s nothing a visit to the plastic surgeon and my wardrobe can’t fix. Then apply a stylish blunderbuss model for her shotgun. Now to find someplace that sells a red power suit with the skirt and blazer. After that, here I come, Zinyak. Again!
Note: Phantom Leader designer Dan Verssen asked if I would take a look at a prototype version of a game he’s publishing, which is in the middle of a successful Kickstarter campaign. Since the game is basically finished in terms of the design, and since this sort of thing is definitely in my wheelhouse (i.e. horror, tabletop, solitaire!), and since it’s H.P. Lovecraft’s birthday, I happily took him up on the offer. Fortunately, it didn’t suck, so I’m happy to also write about the game here.
The Cards of Cthulhu is a solitaire game with a healthy amount of die rolling as you try to keep the boards from filling up with nasty Lovecraftian creatures. The overall vibe is holding back evil tides pouring through dimensional gates. Anyone who’s played Fantasy Flight’s Arkham Horror knows the feeling. Plug one hole and two more pop open. Before you know it, you’ve got byakhees in your basement, old ones in your attic, and Cthulhu dragging himself out of the Pacific. It’s not easy holding back elder gods. It’s even less easy holding back four of them. This is what happens in The Cards of Cthulhu and I’m pretty sure it’s not realistic. There is no HP Lovecraft where four gods come knocking at once. But I suppose I can make an allowance for a fantasy tabletop game.
After the jump, full house, deep ones over fungi from Yuggoth Continue reading →
Over at Tap Repeatedly, Amanda Lange shows how to write videogame reviews in her Dragon’s Crown review. She doesn’t list features. She doesn’t hold forth about whether the game is fun. She doesn’t try to gauge whether I’ll like it, or whether you’ll like it, or whether the game playing public will like it, or whether the enthusiast media will like it. She doesn’t focus on how it runs on one platform vs another platform. She instead focuses on her own experience and her reaction to Dragon Crown’s distinct style. She writes articulately, she includes scads of context, and she puts at the forefront her unique insight. She doesn’t even focus on gameplay, just as some movie reviews might not focus on acting or special effects or cinematography. She has her own priorities.
Furthermore, Lange is slyly funny. How can you resist this lead-in, acknowledging the controversy about the game’s sexy and/or sexist portrayal of women?
…it’s impossible to separate Dragon’s Crown from its visual art. I think we should go ahead and gaze into the cracks here; let’s stick our faces in and motorboat the hell out of this controversy.
There are plenty of other quotable tidbits. But unlike reviews that just string together a list of bon mots without any meaningful insight, Lange has an important point. The crux of her review is that Dragon’s Crown illustrates — quite literally — the difference between intentional hypersexualization and ignorant hypersexualization.
And like all great reviews, it doesn’t matter one whit whether I agree with it. As a videogame, I don’t care for Dragon’s Crown. She loves it. That difference of opinion has no bearing on whether her review is good (it is) or whether it’s of any value to me (again, it is). If more people wrote reviews like that, I’d read more reviews.
(Thanks, Mr. Wheeljack!)
Comedian John Hodgman calls himself “D&D adjacent”, claiming he bailed on RPGs as a kid because they had too much “dumb math”. So the latest Judge John Hodgman podcast, in which he adjudicates various types of disputes, might seem outside his bailiwick. The dispute is between two players in the same long-time RPG group. One player wants to spend more time RPing, exploring lore, and engaging in banter. The other player wants to rush into combat to raise the stakes in a gaming group he feels has become too safe and cerebral. They’re each appealing to Hodgman. It’s a recipe for the usual ridicule. Take a drink every time Hodgman makes a joke about them living in their mother’s basement or not having girlfriends.
Fortunately, no such thing happens (I think there’s a single basement joke). Instead, Hodgman graciously hosts a discussion about the tension between gameplay and the social dynamic, a familiar topic to anyone who plays RPGs or tabletop games. I’d even argue it’s a relevant issue for videogames, where we talk about the tension between gameplay and narrative. It’s a fascinating discussion, partly for how articulate the two men are in presenting their case. And I couldn’t agree more with how Hodgman eventually rules.
(Thanks, Dingus!)
I haven’t played the Skylanders money-printing factory, but the resident Qt3 authority on the subject speaks highly of it. And I can’t help but admire the immense kid appeal every time I see the displays in a Gamestop. The idea is that the game comes with a stand that you plug into your console system. When you play the game, you play with whatever figures (mostly sold separately) are physically placed on the stand.
So I can only imagine how much Disney is going to clean up with their own Skylanders, which comes out this Sunday. It’s aptly named Disney Infinity, which seems appropriate given the wealth of characters available from all things Disney and its extended family at Marvel, Star Wars, and ABC. Power Rangers, Ty Burrell from Modern Family, Sandra Oh from Grey’s Anatomy, Hurley from Lost. The possibilities are — dare I say? — infinite.
So when I was last at Gamestop, I asked the dude at the counter about the Disney Infinity figures available at launch. He referred me to a display with a sad little collection consisting of three Pixar properties (The Incredibles, Cars, Monsters Inc) and two Bruckheimer movies (The Lone Ranger and Pirates of the Caribbean). Really, Disney? That’s how you’re leading? Not even a lowly Boba Fett, Wolverine, or Donald Duck?
Since Paradox no longer includes Quarter to Three in their first round of review copies — they’re one of the many folks unhappy with our ratings system and given how most other sites limit themselves to the usual 7-9 ratings, who can blame them? — I’m only just now getting started with Europa Universalis IV. Which means reading the manual, dinking around with the tutorials, booting up a game as Austria and admiring the map but chickening out and then booting up another game as Venice and then chickening out again and considering some more remote corner of the world like Poland. Wait, no. What was I thinking? The Aztecs. Still too many potentially dangerous neighbors. Maybe the Incas.
One of my favorite things I’ve read in the manual is this: “Iron man mode is the only time when Steam Achievements are active.” Iron man mode means that you can’t save the game, see how your war against Burgundy goes, and then reload the game to take a year to build a bigger army if it goes poorly. Iron man mode means you only get a single save when you exit the game, and it’s saved on the Steam cloud, so you can’t spirit away the file someplace safe and load it later to redo your disastrous attack on Burgundy. Iron man mode means only a monthly autosave, so if you want to kill the game from the task manager and pretend it crashed, you can never go back more than a couple of weeks. It simply means you can’t call do-overs or takebacks. It means your decisions matter in a way they don’t matter when you can freely save and reload.
Iron man mode uniquely fits Paradox’s strategy games, which aren’t about prevailing over everyone else, like most strategy games. A Paradox game is about surfing history, riding waves of data, cresting its peaks and sliding helplessly down into its valleys, taking it in stride when it sucks you underwater and spits you up on the beach sputtering and hobbled. History isn’t a linear progression up a power curve to the number one spot. It’s about ebbs and flows. And if you want to be an achievement whore — you do want to be an achievement whore, don’t you? — Europa Universalis IV expects you to ride those waves, come what may.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSe3jeOzp3k
A good video is usually worth a thousand words. But sometimes the words are pretty nifty, too. So here is the announcement for Foul Play:
Playing as the Victorian daemon-hunter Baron Dashforth, prepare to smash, strike, banish and beat your way through hordes of wildly costumed extras as you recount your incredible life story live on stage — watch awe-inspiring scene changes play out before your eyes, fires will rage, pyramids will rise, castles will crumble, and deadly monstrosities will burst forth… NO expense has been spared in bringing this scarcely believable, but ENTIRELY ACCURATE story to the stage.
THRILL the baying audience with your incredible presence! Perform shattering takedowns, throws and reversals so perfect you’d swear they were choreographed backstage. String together awesome attacks as the Baron, or have a friend join as your loyal companion Scampwick. Electrify the spectators with linked and special attacks — win the audience with flair and showmanship, and use every stage-trick you know to bring the house down.
Prepare for DRAMA as the Baron’s tale unfolds, from the harsh deserts of Cairo, to the shady streets of Victorian London… and beyond. The finest actors and actresses of the day have been employed to ensure the ABSOLUTE authenticity of the story. Prepare to play out the most spectacular and explosive moments of the Baron’s life; improbable beasts, astonishing villainy, and at the heart of it all — the mysterious Foul Play.
A vaudevillian tale of daemons, disaster, deadly risks and duplicitous dealings two-player online co-op with special team takedowns and linking attacks crowd-pleasing battles, where style matters above all.
The show opens on September 18th for the PC and Xbox 360.
Pick-up groups are a sometimes harsh reality of Payday. But the irony of the above screenshot is that the guy turned out to be really nice. He bumbled around the nightclub a bit while me and the other two guys chatted at him to get the last bag of money. Jerk, get the last bag of money, we typed. Someone finally spoke into voice chat. “Jerk, go upstairs and get the last bag of money”. At that point, a fella is just as likely to drop out of the game as he is to go upstairs and get the last bag of money. Fortunately, Jerk went upstairs and got the last bag of money. Then, in the post-game lobby, he thanked us for our patience and explained that he was “so fuckin high”.
Darkest Night is Victory Point Games’ take on an Arkham Horror style co-op game. Each player gets a character with unique abilities. He moves around the map trying to hold back the tide of baddies and retrieve the relics needed to defeat the main baddie. But instead of the Arkham Horror glut of tiny Ameritrash bits and the requisite hour-long set-up, you’re playing a more Euro-ish game with broader simpler rules that make ample room for interesting character interactions. And instead of fighting Cthulhu, you’re fighting a generic necromancer. I don’t even think he has a name. In the above screenshot, the four hero characters are poised to move out from the monastery on the left. The necromancer is the guy in the ruins on the right. Can you see him? He can be hard to distinguish from the heroes. “No, that’s not my character, that’s the necromancer” is something you’re liable to hear if someone asks you to, say, reach over and move his dude to the swamp.
I mostly don’t believe in modding boardgames. I’m not big on house rules. I tend to trust the developers. Sometimes I’ll make an exception.
After the jump, Darkest Night is one such exception. Continue reading →
While rummaging through the closet of my parents’ house back in 1995, I came across this boardgame. I want to play it. Unfortunately, it says 2-6 players and no one is home. Where is everyone? Where is my sister? And what’s with the the elliptical references to time travel, sci-fi, insanity, and dark family secrets? What is Steve Gaynor, the writer of the Minerva’s Den DLC for Bioshock 2, setting me up for in Gone Home, a darkly atmospheric first person exploration game developed by a small team in Portland and available later this week?
Valve’s The International Dota 2 Championship ended on Sunday night with Alliance beating Na’Vi in a 5-game match-up to take the winner’s spot. There’s a video of the winning match, if you want to set aside an hour to watch it. The commentary is full of stuff like “multiple rax” and “push on the ancient.” Our resident MOBA expert, Jason McMaster, will need to translate it for me between his League of Legends games. In the meanwhile, I guess the summary from the Dota 2 team will have to do.
Game 5? It’s too soon to put into words maybe. In a Tournament filled with great games, it was the greatest game we have ever seen. Not one single action by one team went uncountered by the other. It was a slug fest of team fights.
So there you go. For winning the greatest game, Alliance will take home a $1.4 million winner’s prize, while the second place team will get $632K. The prize money increased from Valve’s initial $1.6 million to over $2.8 million via crowd-funding from Dota 2 players. I need to start learning this game if I want to snag next year’s money!
Microsoft’s Xbox One will allow digital game sharing with the Home Gold program. Marc Whitten, Chief Product Officer, posted the announcement that clarifies game sharing and the Home Gold system. Digital games and media purchased on your Xbox One can be played by anyone who signs in on your console with their gamertag. An “unlimited” number of people can create accounts on your Home console and benefit from your Gold membership while they use your hardware, including multiplayer gaming. Additionally, the accounts will remain separate for recommendations and friends lists.
With Xbox One everyone in your home has a personalized account, which will enable powerful and personal experiences, and that’s one of the reasons why we wanted to create Home Gold. It means that your account and your gamertag are truly yours. You don’t have to share your gamertag for multiplayer gaming with others in your home, or see recommendations for your kid’s cartoons next to the recommended first-person shooter for you. It also means that you can introduce new games and enjoy multiplayer with friends while they are at your house. Last but not least, it also means that when you buy one Xbox Live Gold membership, multiple people can enjoy the best benefits of Xbox Live Gold on your Xbox One at no additional charge.
On the Xbox 360, multiple people in a household can share digital games on a console, but must purchase separate Gold subscriptions for multiplayer gaming. Microsoft used to offer a Gold Family Pack but this program was discontinued in March.
In the world of special editions, Saints Row IV just hit level 9,000. There’s only one of the Super Dangerous Wad Wad Edition, exclusive to GAME, so act fast before some other spoiled trust fund party baby snaps it up. At only $1 million, it’s a bargain to someone who drinks Dom with every meal and owns a golden yacht.
