The argument about whether or not games are art is often just a plea for games not to be ridiculed, and instead to be treated as serious endeavors. I usually avoid it, because I think it’s a misplaced argument, and far too defensive a posture to take about something that shouldn’t cause anyone any embarrassment in the first place. But there must be something to it, because I keep running into it, sometimes in the weirdest places.
After the jump, I run into it in a boardgame about Colombian cocaine trafficking.Continue reading →
Tonight’s Presidential candidate debate will be the first of three. The focus of this one, broadcast from Denver, will be domestic policy. Are the closing of Guantanamo and outsourcing jobs technically domestic issues? Listen to find out! Next week is the VP debate that no one cares about, followed by two more Presidential debates. A catch-all town hall format debate is on the 16th and a foreign policy debate is on the 22nd. You can watch or hear them pretty much wherever you want — television, radio, or the online stream of your choice — but Xbox Live is hoping to entice you by pestering you with questions while you watch.
Throughout the debate, the Xbox LIVE community (Xbox LIVE gold membership required) will be able to weigh in with their opinions by responding to real-time poll questions about the candidate’s performances, their responses to questions and views on issues. Participants will be able to view poll results of the Xbox LIVE audience throughout the evening…. Xbox users can access and participate in this interactive television experience directly through the Xbox LIVE dashboard.
Some of the polling questions were submitted via Twitter by random joes like me. I sent in “Whose Bad Lip Reading Video is funniner, Barack’s or Mitt’s?” Which is a trick question, really, since Obama has only one Bad Lip Reading video, but Romney has two. Why do you think that is?
But wait, if that sort of intelligent commentary isn’t incentive enough, there’s more!
As a bonus, Xbox LIVE users who watch three of the four debates will be awarded with a Halo 4 Warrior Armor avatar.
Since hogging the sheets and dragging people across the floor can only get you through so many sequels, the Paranormal Activity series has to find new gimmicks. Kind of like videogames in a post-Wii world. Hence, the Kinect’s appearance in Paranormal Activity 4. According to the teenage monster fodder in the trailer:
You guys want to see something really cool with the Kinect that you can do? Kinect projects tracking dots.
Note that the trailer for last year’s Paranormal Activity 3 had all sorts of devious misdirection for including scenes that didn’t appear in the actual movie. So for all we know, the demon in Paranormal Activity 4 might be more of a Wii U or Playstation Move kind of demon.
I just started a weekly Guild Wars 2 column at Gamespy, because lord knows, I haven’t talked enough about my latest favorite game of all time. This week, how Guild Wars 2 is like Helen Hunt: it makes me want to be a better man.
Until proven otherwise, every avatar in other MMOs is potentially hiding a shrill socially awkward loser getting Doritos on his keyboard who a) sucks at the game, b) is good because he plays way too much, and/or c) is every bit as much a misanthropic a-hole as I am. Fine, I’ll be in your pick-up group, but only because I need this dungeon.
But every avatar in Guild Wars 2 is a confederate.
Craig Reynolds at The Paranoid Gamer explains who that guy is wandering around Sanctuary handing out sweet guns, asking for nothing in return.
Michael John Mamaril was big fan of the original Borderlands who was diagnosed with a terminal illness. He and his buddies enjoyed a special companionship, and played Gearbox Software’s game together every day until Michael passed away in 2011, aged 22 years old.
In honour of his memory, close friend Carlos contacted Gearbox to ask if a short eulogy could be read by smart-mouthed robot Claptrap. It was a touching speech, during which voice actor David Eddings promised that Michael would live on forever in the Borderlands. One year on, he does in Sanctuary, a name given to a sacred place that offers refuge, asylum and safety.
Be sure to check out the Claptrap euglogy here. Classy stuff, Gearbox.
A surefire way to tell great voice acting from not great voice acting is to consider how annoying the dialogue would be if you were to read it. Take Tiny Tina, the murderous 13 year old girl in Borderlands 2. If someone were to hand me the script to her dialogue, I would be filled with the desire to take a red pen to it. “Do me a flava and lure the guest to the party or I’ll eat your babies.” What? How could that sound anything other than grating?
Let Ashley Burch demonstrate exactly how that’s going to happen (embedded). Burch is an actress with an awkward enthusiasm that reminds me of Gilda Radner. She’s also related to one of the developers at Gearbox, so it makes sense that she’d have a unique appreciation for Borderlands’ humor and how to make “do me a flava and lure the guest to the party or I’ll eat your babies” funny. She’s furthermore a videogamer with her own popular show and fan base. She is exactly the right way to do what Electronic Arts has tried to do with Jessica Chobot and Felicia Day. You hire an actor for his or her talent, not celebrity.
A lot of Gearbox’s humor is awful on the page, but perfect with the right voice actors. Fortunately, Gearbox is really good at nailing the second part of the equation. Hence Claptrap, Scooter, Ellie, Tannis, and especially Tiny Tina. Here’s hoping for more Tiny Tina and Ashley Burch in whatever DLC Gearbox has planned.
During a Reddit Q&A, Cabin the Woods director Drew Goddard mentions plans for a Left 4 Dead 2 tie-in that never happened.
We actually were going to do a downloadable L4D2 expansion pack, where you’d fight in the Cabin world, but then MGM went bankrupt so the delay squashed it. But the people at Valve were still cool enough to let us use some of their monsters to fill the cubes in the background (I had a lot of cubes to fill.)
By the way — the game was gonna be amazing. You were gonna be able to play in both the upstairs “Cabin in the Woods” world and the downstairs “facility” world with all the monsters. Believe me, I HATE all video games based on movies, they always suck, but porting Cabin into Left For Dead felt like the right fit. It pains me that it didn’t happen.
Goddard also earns videogame cred with his sign-off.
Thank you for all the questions. I’ll remember this text-based chat forever. It was like playing Zork, but with more me.
After a brief exclusive period for some of our Kickstarter supporters, the rebooted Tom vs Bruce is now officially live for everyone. Our first game is the Civilization IV mod Dune Wars, in which we take turns playing House Atreides against the AI.
On turn 202, a rumor spread throughout Sergeybrinograd that Tom and Bruce were using their terms of service as the heads of House Atreides for some sort of bizarre internet contest sponsored by a grassroots movement of questionable repute called Kickstarter. House Harkonnen couldn’t be directly tied to the rumors. But when a city suddenly acquires a trait called “misinformation” that reduces production by 20% and causes unhappiness to four points of population, you can blame it on espionage. And where there’s espionage, House Harkonnen can’t be far behind.
This was the beginning of the Harkonnen Wars, a valiant period in Atreides history when Tom Chick demonstrated his considerable prowess as a cunning diplomat, an importer of fine luxury goods, a brilliant military leader familiar with the tenets of Civilization IV warfare, and a lover. On that last count, suffice to say Princess Irulan was often seen leaving the Atreides palace in Arrakeen during the early hours. The shrewd observer might note that she was in a disheveled state and often carrying her heels. That she would later agree to trades advantageous to House Atreides can’t have been a coincidence. I mean, who ever heard of just giving away techs like Protected Trade and Defensive Armaments?
Funcom’s Joel Bylos narrates a short video promoting the newest Secret World content in the latest episode, “Digging Deeper”. Apparently, as of today, everyone gets a rocket launcher just for doing a new rocket launcher mission. Rocket launchers are featured in classic horror such as Steven King’s Maximum Overdrive.
The “Digging Deeper” content is free, so long as you’re paying your subscription fee.
Look out! Zombies! Oh, wait, they’re friendly. They show up to help me every now and then. In fact, they show up every two minutes, like clockwork. How did this happen?
In Electronic Arts’ press release for Dragon Age 3: Inquisition, Bioware general manager Aaryn Flynn notes:
…we know we need new technology to truly make this vision become fully realized. And we’ve been working with DICE to make Frostbite 2 the foundation for the engine that is going to power Dragon Age 3.
Mass Effect 3 pushed Bioware’s traditional “connected shoeboxes” level design as far as it was going to go, and it did it long after it should have gone. To see the Frostbite 2 engine in action, boot up Battlefield 3. And now imagine how it will look in a game scheduled for late next year. That’s what Bioware is finally working with.
Dune Wars is probably the finest Civ IV mod I’ve ever played. I’m certainly fond of Fall from Heaven for how it’s wildly inventive and cleverly put together. But the AI seems less inclined to fall apart in Dune Wars. Furthermore, Dune Wars is such a unique and thorough expression of Frank Herbert’s fiction, which is second only to Star Wars in terms of the hold it had on my adolescent imagination.
So I was pretty disappointed when Bruce Geryk and I couldn’t get the multiplayer to work. I was keen to play the Harkonnens to his Atreides, or maybe to let him run roughshod over the early game with the Fremen while my House Corrino ferried Sardaukar from offworld for an imperial endgame, or perhaps I’d try my hand at the Bene Gesserit to cultivate a Kwisatch Haderach. But we hit on the idea of a succession game, the same way people pass around saved games for Dwarf Fortress. I’d play fifty turns, then he’d play fifty turns, then I’d play fifty turns, and so on, until we won.
You can read about it in the first new Tom vs Bruce, which is online now for the folks who supported us at the second tier or higher on Kickstarter. Alternatively, you can donate to our PayPal link at tomvsbruce.com. Or you can just wait until it goes public on Wednesday morning. Whatever the case, we hope you enjoy reading about our Dune Wars game as much as we enjoyed playing it.
Normally when you go underwater in a game, you have a breath meter that determines how long you can stay down there. This helps level designers design their oceans by limiting how far down the player can go. After all, not all games are Endless Oceans. It also keeps your character’s fingers from pruning.
Guild Wars 2, however, has some pretty wide ranging underwater exploration. When the level designers need to keep you from just heading out into the empty seas, they cite “currents” as the limiting factor. I would have also accepted “undertow”. But when it comes to briny depths, there’s some awfully amazing stuff in the water. And since all characters have rebreathers with unlimited air capacity and magical defenses against nitrogen narcosis and the bends, you can explore freely! The only drawback is that you look like a certain ridiculous villain in a certain recent movie.
As much as I skip over the lore while I’m playing Guild Wars 2, I can’t help but admire what an imaginative world ArenaNet has made. Ever see a frog in heavy armor? Well, you have now. Pictured. Left.
I recall another MMO called Vanguard having various dog and cat people, and as near as I can recall, they were just human character models with dog and cat heads stuck on top. It’s just like how all the aliens on Star Trek are bipedal humanoids with prosthetic noses or ears or whatever. One of the things I really like about playing a charr in Guild Wars 2 is that it’s not just a human character model with a cat head. The charr have an entirely different posture, size, and movement animation. Similarly, the various non-human races around the world — I don’t just mean the monsters, but the NPC civilizations — have a distinct look. In addition to the frog people, there are polar bear people, platypus people, rat people, and bird people, and not a one of them uses the basic human character model. In fact, with all these NPC races, with all the charr, with all the diminutive asura, it sometimes seems that human character models are the exception rather than the rule.
