The Dead Space games were designed around the idea of shooting monsters in the limbs, which often flail wildly so you’ll have to use stasis to freeze them. This makes it much easier to aim for the shoulders and thighs, or whatever equivalent exists on some Thing inspired squirming amalgam of dog, zombie, and octopus you’re fighting at any given time. You can subvert this concept entirely by playing on the easier difficulty levels and just pouring ammo into the monsters. Dead Space is a perfectly viable meat circus if you want to do it that way.
But to really enjoy the combat model, and to traffic in the survival horror economy, and to get the achievements, you’re going to want to play the harder difficulties and especially the new game plus modes like hardcore and pure survival. However, you have to prep first.
After the jump, cue Eye of the Tiger for your training montageContinue reading →
To run in Red Dead Redemption, you can hold down the X button. It’s more like a determined trot. But to really run, you have to mash the X button repeatedly. Which is a distinctly Rockstar idiosyncrasy. I’m pretty sure that’s how it worked in Grand Theft Auto IV and L.A. Noire. Probably even Rockstar Table Tennis.
But other games don’t make you mash the run button. They know that’s a pain in the butt. They let you just hold down the button to go as fast as you’re going to go. Many games these days don’t even make you hold down the run button. Just tap it and you’ll keep running until you stop, freeing up your run finger/thumb to do things like reload, change weapons, slide, and bunny hop. I’m not convinced they’re doing it right.
One of the clearest indications of L.A. Noire’s ability to express human performances better than almost any other game is the above gag reel, released by Depth Analysis, the folks responsible for its facial motion capture technology. L.A. Noire and Depth Analysis set the bar nearly two years ago, so why am I still looking at a creepy Michael Rooker mask in Black Ops II and vacant plastic faces in Dead Space 3 and an Unreal Dante in Devil May Cry? Those are the equivalent of silent films in a dawning age of talkies. If you want human expression in your game without resorting to some sort of exaggerated cartoon style, it’s no longer enough to hire good voice actors and put Andy Serkis in green tights. L.A. Noire is as good as you need to get.
Do you ever have videogame dreams? Like when you’ve been playing a game so much that it burbles up from your subconscious while you sleep? For me, these are often interface dreams. I dream I’m trying to drag select a bunch of units or spend points on a skill tree. I don’t mean to get all tedious by holding forth about my dreams, but I had one last night about Virtue’s Last Reward. And it was unlike any other videogame dream I’ve had.
In cooperation with the developers at Shenendoah Studios, we’re pleased to announce a tournament for Battle of the Bulge on the iOS with $500 of prize money at stake. Some of which will go to people who aren’t even necessarily good at the game! Basically, if you play through one match, your name goes into the drawing for one of three randomly drawn $50 prizes. And these aren’t spacebucks or Qt3dollars or Microsoft points. These are bona fide US dollars.
Read the details in this thread. To enter, post in the thread or email [email protected] if you’d rather not register for the forum. The deadline is February 15th. Good luck, soldier!
Disclaimer: Battle of the Bulge may result in rethinking your perspective on wargames. No bulges were harmed in the making of this game. Do not taunt Patton. I’m pretty sure that painting up there, Battle of the Bulge by Robert Blair, is terrible, but I don’t want to be rude and maybe he was going for a state of mind rather than an actual representation of something. No states are exempt from this tournament, including CA, CO, DE, HI, GO, and WE. Employees of Quarter to Three and their families not eligible. Sorry, Mom.
That’s a witch in Path of Exile. As you can see, she’s pretty drably outfitted. I suppose the face mask looks suitably evil. But she’s way higher level than you’d expect based on the fact that she’s wearing colorless tatters and weilding a stick in her right hand and a dried vine wreath in her left hand. But that’s about to change.
With so much die rolling in Battle of the Bulge, you’re bound to hear a number of complaints when things don’t go someone’s way. It’s the case with any game where you roll dice, and you can make an argument that the complaining is just as much a part of the game as the act of rolling. “You sank my battleship!” “Pretty sneaky, sis.” Et cetera. But there are a couple of places in Bulge where the customer service seems to be particularly bad.
Things besides “fuck you” that Dante says in a boss battle against a succubus (pictured):
1) “You’re dumped.” (upon dropping her into a pool of lava)
2) “You’re all mixed up.” (upon pushing her into spinning blades)
3) “Suck on this, succubus.”
You know that moment in a mystery when the guy who has all the answers promises to explain everything and then doesn’t? Usually this is because the phone lines are cut or he suddenly dies or it’s time for a commercial. It’s cheap, but effective. It’s a vital part of pacing. It drives episodic TV. Hopefully your show won’t get canceled before it sputters to something resembling a finale.
One of the things I’m enjoying about Virtue’s Last Reward is its approach to “I’ll explain everything later” teases. This is a mystery that begins with the intimacy of Saw — two people who don’t know each other wake up in the same room with no idea why they’re there — and quickly expands to encompass, well, a whole lot more than I expected. In most mysteries, it’s predetermined when I get to know which reveal. But Virtue’s Last Reward lets me freely work my way down the various branches of a storyline that splits apart like a narrative vascular system. I won’t get the full story until I’ve traveled the length of each of these branches. In whatever order I choose.
So that guy who promises to reveal something will reveal it, but I control when. Unwittingly, perhaps. But it was I who made the decisions that shunted the story down this particular path when I learned this particular detail, which may very well color what I hear down another path. It’s lends the mystery a gratifying sense of self-determination.
Need for Speed: Most Wanted, a surprisingly good open-world driving game that made its way onto my top ten list for 2012, will feature a unique mode when it’s released on March 19th for the Wii U. From the press release:
…introducing an all new local co-op mode, Co-Driver, one player drives using the Wii Remote controller or Wii U Pro Controller, and another player uses the Wii U GamePad to provide control and navigation assistance on a fully interactive real-time map. Using just their fingertips, a partner can distract pursuing cops, switch from night to day or activate enhanced performance for any car and even control the amount of traffic on the road.
Given how hard it can be to find your way around at the speeds you have to drive, a co-driver pointing the way sounds like a welcome feature. It’s exactly the sort of asymmetrical experience that only the Wii U can do.
Remember when Vice President Joe Biden summoned various folks to Washington to consider options for the President’s response to the shooting in Newtown? As you may recall, representatives of the videogame industry were included in the group. Gamasutra spoke briefly with two of the people present at that summit, Cheryl Olsen, the co-author of Grand Theft Childhood, and Christopher Ferguson, a clinical psychologist at Texas A&M who studies violent behavior.
According to Olsen:
[Vice President Biden] said upfront that he didn’t think the evidence he’d seen showed a link between violent video games and real life violence. And he said even if the research were to show a link, it would be a tiny influence compared to the influence of the other factors he was looking at.
Is it any surprise that the Obama Administration had an entirely reasonable perspective on the issue from the get-go?
It looks as if Deep Silver is going to remove a gory bikini bust that was part of the Dead Island: Riptide collector’s edition. Which is hardly unexpected, but disappointing. Not because I want one. I don’t. It’s pretty gross. I wouldn’t know what to do with it. I still don’t know what to do with my Connor statue, Bioshock 2 soundtrack LP, or pewter Half-Life 2 box. What am I going to do with some icky horror paraphernalia? I’m a horror fan — more on that in a moment — but not the type who wears it on his shelves. My Night of the Living Dead DVD sits inconspicuously between my Napoleon Dynamite DVD and O Brother Where Art Thou? DVD. Horror is just a genre. More on that in a moment, too.
But I find it disappointing that Deep Silver is caving on this issue for two important reasons. No, not those reasons. I’m going to be mostly serious.
After the jump, two important things. Not the ones you think I’m thinking of.Continue reading →
From an epic-length state of the Guild Wars 2 address from game director Colin Johnson, commenting on plans for the upcoming months:
…we’ll make improvements to culling. We recently ran small tests on Live to help us move towards eliminating as much culling from [World vs World multiplayer] as possible. The results have been promising, and we have a number of additional culling features in development. If all goes well, our hope is 2013 is the year culling ceases to exist, or is as minimal as possible in the WvW experience.
Culling is Guild Wars’ technical trick to make it such an attractive world. The idea is that when you have a whole mess of characters on screen, the game makes a judgment call about which characters to not show you (i.e. cull) so that you can maintain an acceptable framerate. In theory, this seems like a great idea. But in practice, this often means characters right in front of you are invisible, doing things most games don’t let invisible characters do. Such as attacking you. The problem is particularly pronounced when it’s most important to see everyone, namely during crowded battles when you should be carefully picking out targets. That’s hard to do when you can’t see the target.
Johnson’s post also notes Guild Wars 2 has sold three million copies. Three million! If you were to lay those copies out end to end, you would be at a complete and utter loss when it came to the copies that were downloaded. It was so much simpler to lay things end to end before digital distribution.
(Screenshot from this post at Guild Wars 2 Junkies.)
The new teaser for Cyberpunk 2077, a sci-fi game from the folks who made The Witcher, expands on the weirdly disturbing picture of a hot chick partly dismantled to reveal some wicked looking cyber impants. Wolverine’s got nothing on this woman. And now we see that’s she’s apparently done a very bad thing and is more than a match for the cops.
It’s a lovely bit of cinematic. If you read a little deeper and get the point of the ending, it gives a nice bit of narrative foundation for the game. But it also has just enough Blade Runner and Judge Dredd to show that the developers know their roots. And the Radioheady song Bullets by a group called Archive is a perfect fit for the (in)action.
Cyberpunk 2077 is due out “when it’s ready”. Really? You guys are going to cap off a fine piece of creativity with that canard?
Hasbro is finally making changes to Monopoly, which has been scientifically proven to be the worst game ever invented (sorry, Tic Tac Toe and Daikatana). Hasbro will let people on Facebook vote one of the pieces out of the box! That’s like letting Youtube commenters decide the winner of American Idol.
You can go here to see how the various pieces are faring. Naturally, the Scottie dog is sitting pretty. Also the battleship and racecar. I would have thought the iron more likely to go than the wheelbarrow, but as anyone holding Facebook stock can attest, who can predict what’s going to happen with Facebook these days?
I know what you’re thinking: when this is all over and there are only seven pieces left, what if I want to play an eight-player Monopoly game? Hasbro anticipated that. You can also vote on a replacement piece, choosing among a cat, a helicopter, a cell phone, a diamond ring, a robot, a guitar, and a Yoda. I only made up one of those. Okay, two.
