Part of what keeps me going in the superlative Lego City Undercover is small touches like this boat, which you’ll find cruising the waters around the city. If you need me to explain it, the reference isn’t for you. And, yes, you can totally drive it.
The above screenshot is how Starcraft II’s Heart of the Swarm introduces itself. Pretty cool. Then you get into the actual game, where you get this:
Why do developers like Blizzard continue to make cutscenes so awkwardly out of sorts with the experience of the actual game?
So here’s what the folks who made Bastion, my favorite game of 2011, are doing next. I now know all I need to know until it’s out in 2014. See you then, Transistor!
I’m mostly uninterested in the ongoing SimCity furor, partly because I’ve been playing a really good EA citybuilder instead, but also because the furor is focused on the wrong things. The issue I care about isn’t the launch problems (those tend to go away) or that EA lied (for politicians and videogame publishers, that’s called “talking”) or the inherent evil of always-on DRM (we’ve long since lost that battle, because while everyone was beating up on Ubisoft, Diablo III sneaked into our rear) or that the simulation isn’t simulating an actual city (abstraction isn’t just for boardgames anymore). The issue I care about is the one getting the least internet furor mindshare: the fundamental design of tiny interconnected box cities lending each other a hand doesn’t work as it’s supposed to work. And furthermore, assuming it will work in a later update, it’s not implemented very well. But because everyone else is gnashing their teeth about one of these ancillary issues — Server instability! EA lied! Down with DRM! Sims should only sleep in their own houses! — there’s little incentive for Electronic Arts, a publicly owned company that changed the ending of Mass Effect 3, to actually make their potentially good game that already sold 1 million copies work the way it was designed.
But the good news is that EA, the publicly owned company that changed the ending of Mass Effect 3, is going to give you another game! In a press released titled “SimCity make nice”, which sounds like poorly translated forced cheer from across the Pacific, Electronic Arts announced that players will soon receive a free game of their choice from the following list:
Battlefield 3 (Standard Edition)
Bejeweled 3
Dead Space 3 (Standard Edition)
Mass Effect 3 (Standard Edition)
Medal of Honor Warfighter (Standard Edition)
Need For Speed Most Wanted (Standard Edition)
Plants vs. Zombies
SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition
That’s definitely a make nice list, since it has only a single stinker. Care to guess which one?
Why should Terran Ghosts have all the fun?
(Thanks, Luke and Michaelangelo!)
From the press release for Mayday! Emergency Landing:
Landing is that part of the flight, where an aircraft returns to the ground. Easier said than done: sometimes it’s not that trivial to pilot an aircraft through strong winds, a deep fog or a roaring thunderstorm. Mayday! Emergency Landing…challenges players to overcome the fiercest difficulties and have their planes touch the ground safely all by keeping the passengers as happy as possible.
I have no idea whether this iOS game, which includes “heartbreaking airplane failures”, is any good. But I love that the stewardess — I think I should be allowed to call her that if she’s going to dress so old school — is giving directions. Take that, George Kennedy!
I’ve been playing SimCity for several days now. Electronic Arts was kind enough to set up pre-release press servers. However, I wouldn’t dream of reviewing the game based on my time with those press servers, which gave me almost no inkling of how SimCity is supposed to play. I instead got a look at a game in which a few editors from places like Kotaku and Destructoid casually shuffled around pieces without any sense of purpose.
I also wouldn’t dream of reviewing the game based on my experience with the launch, which is an unfunny comedy of gameplay errors, frustrating login queues, and botched social networking hooha. I can understand some of the errors as matters of server stress. Not everyone can launch a popular online game. So here I am waiting on the mandatory 20-minute timer to count down to the next server error message before resetting the timer. Just 14 minutes to go!
But it’s harder to understand why the fundamentals of the game design are broken. The design is based on cities existing as tiny — yes, they’re tiny — interconnected boxes that exchange resources, including people, services, and goods. It’s a sound concept and a pretty good justification for the tiny city chunks in lieu of the usual citybuilder sprawl. Just as the islands in the Anno games are cramped and incapable of self-sufficiency, so too are SimCity’s city boxes. Furthermore, what’s going on in each box is a lot less interesting than what’s going on when you string several of them together, whether they’re played by you or your friends.
But here’s where SimCity gets tripped up by all the information it helpfully provides. I can clearly see how much power my coal plant is producing. I can then sell it to my neighboring cities for a precise sum of money. And I can then see that the money isn’t going back to the powerplant city. I can tell that the city next door has extra sewage pumping capacity because I built it. So when the game tells me no nearby city provides sewage services, I know it’s wrong. Furthermore, I can send a gift of $50,000 to a neighboring city so it can build a hospital. I can then watch the money truck arrive, load up the money, drive across the map to the recipient, and vanish. And I can then see that the $50,000 deducted from my first city is nowhere to be seen in the destination city. If the basics aren’t working among the cities, who can trust the later and more complex interactions?
SimCity does not work yet. And anyone who has reviewed it favorably at this point is reviewing it entirely on its promise. If that’s how you want to evaluate games, have at it. There is pretty much no reason any game shouldn’t get a stellar review. The industry should be grateful for your enthusiasm.
But the fact of the matter is that as of now, about midnight on the game’s first day in the wild and after about five days of press access, SimCity is a shamefully broken game that does not live up to its design goals. Hopefully, these are launch issues and we’ll soon be playing the game EA intended to design, because that’s the game I’d much rather review in about a week.
I was already back on board with what Ubisoft is doing with the Assassin’s Creed games, but all I need to know about the newly announced Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag is in that screenshot up there. October 29th marked on my calendar.
Does any game have better patch notes than a Sims game? From the notes for v1.50:
New air conditioning units and electrical box decorative objects.
Worst. Decorations. Ever.
Pillow Fight wishes will appear much less frequently.
Hopefully they’ll fix this for sorority houses in the upcoming University add-on.
The Heckle interaction is no longer available [to] Sims swimming in the ocean.
Great news for beach comedians.
Ice sculptures from The Sims 3 Ambitions no longer melt in sub-freezing temperatures.
Physics, man.
NPCs that throw parties in the winter will no longer select Swimwear as the suggested clothing.
EA disavows Kate Upton’s latest appearance in Sports Illustrated.
The frequency of alien abductions has been lowered.
XCOM FTW!
Hot Dog and Pie Eating contests can no longer ironically cause a Sim to starve to death.
If there’s one thing better than a playfully inserted adverb, it’s correct use of the word “irony”.
The frequency of umbrellas breaking has been lowered.
As Warren Spector supposedly said, “Anytime reality gets in the way of fun, fun wins”.
A community manager on Blizzard’s forums explains that the characters I’ve spent dozens of hours playing in Diablo III, with even more dozens of hours potentially ahead, won’t be accessible in the Playstation 4 version.
While we think cross-platform play would be awesome, there are currently no plans to allow connectivity between PlayStation Network and Battle.net (this is pretty standard for most games that have PC and console support). As a result, the characters on your Battle.net account and PlayStation account will also remain separate.
In other words, Valve’s Portal 2 can do what Blizzard can’t.
There’s a certain point where you invest enough in a game that you’re not going to start over just because the developers have adapted it to a gamepad and your couch is comfortable. Diablo III has gone well beyond that point. Still, a Playstation 4 version will be great for people who can’t play Diablo III because they don’t have PCs. If you see any of them, tell them for me.
Skullgirls proves that a fighting game doesn’t have to be part of some long-running franchise to be exceptional. One of the greatest strengths of this game is the character design (Peacock was my pick for best character design of last year). And now the developers at Lab Zero have a new character on the way. Squigly is an opera singer with a fire-breathing cyborg snake sticking out of her head. Her unique ability is to literally change the boundaries of the game. From the developers’ description:
Squigly’s jump is floaty, her dashes take some time to build momentum, and her normals can’t reach across the screen. So how does she get close enough to do damage? By singing. As an opera star, when Squigly sings all eyes focus on her, forcibly shifting the game’s camera towards her. This naturally moves the edge of playfield with it, dragging her opponent towards her. No other game has a move like this, and it should open a number of interesting tactical possibilities.
Squigly is the focus of Lab Zero’s kickstarter campaign on Indiegogo. If if passes — actually, when it passes, based on how much it’s made on its first day — Squigly will be a free update for Skullgirls on all platforms. “If we actually manage to make her,” Lab Zero says in their video, “then anyone in the world can get her, so long as you have a copy of Skullgirls.”
Go here for more info or to support the campaign.
In what videogame inspired movie will you find the following plot, which I read at Empire Online?
Aaron Paul plays a street racer who goes into business with a rich arrogant car supplier played by Dominic Cooper, only to find himself framed when another friend dies during a race. Sent to jail, Aaron Paul’s character wants revenge and, once released, signs on for a cross-country race for a chance to strike back. But the rich arrogant car supplier learns about the scheme and puts a bounty on his head, forcing him to go up against various illegal drivers in powerful vehicles. Michael Keaton plays the reclusive oddball host of the event who invites the best racers from around the world to compete. Also in the cast is Imogen Poots as an exotic car dealer who connects rich clients with supercharged rides.
Guess the videogame license that inspired this storyline. If you guessed any driving game other than Need for Speed, you’re wrong.
Need for Speed, due out next year, will be directed by the guy who made Act of Valor, which could easily be a Call of Duty or Medal of Honor tie-in if it changed its name.
One of the unique features of Path of Exile is leagues. When you create a character in Grinding Gears Games’ action RPG, you select your character’s league. Currently, there are default and hardcore leagues. Default is default. Hardcore means you get one life. If you die, your character suffers a fate worse than death; she is kicked downstairs to the default league. Oh, the ignominy!
However, as of tomorrow morning, Grinding Gear Games will offer additional leagues. 109 of them, to be exact. It’s the start of what they’re calling “season one”. This is a series of temporary leagues. They’re events, really, over the next month and a half, starting with a one-hour solo play league tomorrow morning at 9am Pacific. This means you start a new character and play solo for an hour to get as far as you can. Then your character is demoted to one of the permanent leagues and your account is credited with prize points based on how you ranked, whether you were first to clear a quest, what level you reached, and so forth (scoring for S01E01 — season one, event one — is listed here). Other leagues last varying amounts of time, they allow grouping, or they have superfast turbo speed monsters. You can click on upcoming leagues in the schedule for specifics.
So what’s the point? Prize points are the point. As you accumulate prize points, you work your way up a list of unique items, available only this season and listed on the season page. Maybe I can get Redbeak, a fast, hard-hitting, life-sucking sword that does more damage when you’re hurt. Could I possibly get Wanderlust, a pair of speedy, mana-charging, wool shoes that make you immune to freezing. I’d love to see what the “extra gore” trait does on those Facebreaker gloves. I’m guessing it’s something like Fallout’s “Bloody Mess” perk. But do I like Path of Exile enough to play 240 points worth of league events in the next month?
I’m thinking.
Frankly, given the way the scoring works, I’ll be lucky to have my own Redbeak by the end of season one. But I love that Grinding Gear Games is doing this sort of thing.
Firaxis has added multiplayer support to Civilization Revolution on the iPad. What a great idea! I enjoyed it on the Xbox 360 when it came out, and then I bought it on the iPhone before I had my iPad. Bad AI doesn’t seem so stupid when it’s on an iPhone. How smart can a game be on such a tiny screen anyway? But I haven’t played Civilization Revolution in a while. Assuming it supports asynchronous play, what a great way to enjoy its sleek boardgameyness.
Since I already own it, I go to download it on my iPad. And I see that a separate iPad version is available for only 99 cents. Okay, it’s worth a look. What else am I going to do with a dollar? I buy it, download it, and tap on the multiplayer option on the main menu to see how it works. Can I challenge my friends? Will it work asynchronously? Can I get away with playing Spain in a multiplayer game and running roughshod over my land-bound friends while I explore the seas and their wonders? And what are these two multiplayer modes listed on the game’s “what’s new” page on iTunes?
Oh, look what’s behind the multiplayer option on the main menu:
The fine folks at Eugen Systems, one of our latest greatest hopes for real time strategy, have been awful at thinking up names for their games since their debut with Direct Action, which was clearly not about fighting wars through proxies. I would be hard pressed to come up with a more generic and uninteresting title than Wargame: Airland Battles, their next game. All I can deduce from that title is that there won’t be any naval units.
The main bullet point for Airland Battles is the addition of aircraft (pictured) to the same basics from Wargame: European Escalation. Which is another awful title for how all it tells you is that you won’t have any battles on continents that begin with the letter A.
But for me, there’s something even sexier in Airland Battles than the sexy airplanes. European Escalation appealed to me partly as a collectible game in which you unlocked awesome Cold War units. But one of the problems with that game was the “deck building” that followed the unlocking. There were no meaningful rules about how to arrange your deck. You just chucked stuff into the box. There. Deck built! There was no incentive to use the less useful units. Of all the toys in that very generous toybox, most of them go unplayed with.
Eugen has a very different idea with the deck building in Airland Battles, which gives your deck bonuses if you restrict your cards — err, units — to certain themes.
For example, if you create a Marine infantry Deck from 1980 with 100% Russian troops, you will receive very high bonuses, compared to a Deck made up of little bits from all nations on your side.
Read more here, where the developers spell out in detail what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. Airland Battles is due out this spring. It’s not soon enough.
