Valve’s Steam sale has begun. Read it and weep, then duck and cover, because all those games you didn’t get when they came out are laying siege to your wallet.
This is just the opening salvo in what will be a sustained assault. Looking at today’s deals, I can understand Modern Warfare 3 for thirty bucks. A reasonable deal. But it’s very nearly a crime against humanity to get Shogun 2 and Crusader Kings II for less than $10. The one that confuses me is Ridge Racer Unbounded for $25, situated in the middle of the grid as if to give it credibility by proxy to so many other good deals.
Something Awful’s latest Photoshoppery imagines dogs in unlikely places. Of course, I’ve spoiled it for you by showing you the leader of the pack by someone called “Dork457”. You can browse the runts of the litter here.
I keep thinking that I really like A Valley Without Wind, but then designer Chris Park overhauls some aspect of it and I realize that, oh, wait, now I really like it. The moment to moment gameplay hasn’t changed much since the game was released. This is still an infinitely large, procedurally generated world that you explore by playing a latter day version of Castlevania. But what’s changing dramatically is the gameplay that pulls you through this infinitely large world.
After the jump, we built this city on rock and role Continue reading →
An Assassin’s Creed movie seemed dead in the water after Ubisoft failed to interest Sony in a deal last year. But now, according to Variety, Ubisoft’s newly formed movie division has signed a deal with Michael Fassbender and his production partner’s development company. Now an Assassin’s Creed movie has a little of the star power it needs to get underway.
This doesn’t mean an Assassin’s Creed movie will happen. It just means Fassbender’s name makes it a lot more financially viable. But until more and bigger players are attached to the process, it’s got a long way to go. Note this bit from the Variety article:
Ubisoft execs now plan to stick to their initial plan and develop the film independently in order to maintain greater creative control. Last year, Ubisoft invested in launching [Ubisoft Motion Pictures], headed by [Jean-Julien] Baronnet, former CEO of Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp, to adapt the company’s games into films, TV shows and digital projects. While Sony could still wind up distribing the films, UMP will package the project with a writer and director before resuming talks with the studio.
“Develop the film independently in order to maintain greater creative control” is shorthand for “couldn’t get funding”.
Movies are huge slow beasts that take a long time to slouch to your local theater. Most of them lose steam along the way. Many of them lie down and die. Some of them limp onto DVD. An Assassin’s Creed movie still has a long way to slouch. Note that bit in the article about Ubisoft resuming talks with Sony once a writer and director are attached to the project. Fassbender’s involvement is a nice bit of leverage, but there’s still a long way to go before we get neck-stabbing in the theater. Which we probably won’t get, because there’s no way an Assassin’s Creed movie will be rated R.
Are you ready for some football? Some college football? Some videogame college football? Some NCAA 13 from Electronic Arts? If not, your wallet is safe, because that’s pretty much the only game out this week.
Happy Independence Day to everyone in the United States, and happy 4th of July to everyone in the rest of the world! We’re going to take a long weekend to shoot fireworks, hum our national anthem, and mock British people for not being the boss of us. But mostly we’re going to log some serious Secret World time for next week’s game diary. Stay safe, have fun, and we’ll see you on Monday!
Activision knows one of the best ways to celebrate America’s birthday is with some good old fashioned global hegemony. In China, for instance. And they have just the game to do it. Unfortunately, World of Warcraft is already really big in China. So they’re making a go of it with a second game!
The new game Call of Duty Online for China will capitalize on the rich multiplayer experience that the Call of Duty franchise is known for and introduce a new gaming model designed specifically for the Chinese market. This new model will allow players the ability to personalize their weapons, characters and equipment like never before in a Call of Duty game. Using an in-game store, players can enhance their weapons, gear, and perks built specifically for the Chinese market. The new game will also bring a variety of game modes and maps and features an original story told through a series of Special Operations missions based on the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare universe.
Don’t think we didn’t notice the use of the verb “capitalize” in that first line, Activision. Well played.
If you bought the Xbox 360 version of Dragon’s Dogma — you did buy Dragon’s Dogma, didn’t you? — then you have access to Capcom’s Resident Evil 6 demo today. Here’s what you get:
Play as Leon S. Kennedy alongside Helena Harper and explore the dark confines of the Ivy University campus and the zombies that fill its hallways. Select Chris Redfield’s mission and head to China for an intense encounter against the deadly J’avo with BSAA colleague Piers Nivans on the rooftops of Lanshiang. The third mission shifts the action to the war-torn Eastern European state of Edonia and sees Jake Muller and Sherry Berkin trying to escape the relentless pursuit of the Ustanak, one of the new B.O.W.’s being introduced in Resident Evil 6.
Helena Harper, Piers Nivans, Jake Muller, and Sherry Berkin? The J’avo? An Ustanak? One of the hallmarks of a Resident Evil game, clearly demonstrated in that screenshot above, is that I have no idea what the hell is going on.
This week sees the release of two games arguably not ready for release. Funcom’s X-Files meets Lovecraft meets Stephen King MMO Secret World is suffering the usual teething pains you’d unfortunately expect from an MMO launch. And the sexycool, superdumb, weirdly clunky/weirdly sleek sci-fi strategy game Endless Space has moved up from its August 24th release date, apparently for financial reasons. I like each game — a lot — but I’m also keenly aware that they both need work, and that it’s a sad state of affairs when games this potentially good are pushed out the door untimely with promises of patches to follow. On the same note, world peace remains elusive.
Spelunky might be old news to some folks, since it’s been out for more than three years as a freeware game on the PC. But how good can a free game be? Right? If it was any good, it would cost a few bucks. So I’ve held out for the $10 downloadable version, available this week on Xbox Live Arcade. Holy cats, I had no idea such a seriously punishing, side-scrolling, dynamically generated dungeonplumb existed. With multiplayer! Spelunky may very well be the 8-bit equivalent of Demon’s Souls, but harder. It hates me. I think I love it. So far, we’ve got a very dysfunctional thing going.
The real wallet threat for me is mostly an unknown. You’d think Test Drive: Ferrari Racing Legend is just another cash-in for a set of fancypants supercars licensed by Atari. I can’t tell one fancypants supercar from another, so why should I care that this game is specifically about fancypants supercars from Spanish car-maker Ferrari? But the developers at Slightly Mad Studios made two of the best racing games I’ve ever played, Need for Speed: Shift and Need for Speed: Shift II. If they can bring to Ferrari Racing Legends just half of the attention to physics, graphics, gameplay progression, and just plain energy level that make the Shift games great, I don’t care if it’s a game based on driving Hyundais.
Finally, Max Payne 3 is getting three new maps for multiplayer, which is the hands-down best part of the game. I’d be tempted to get three news map, but it looks like these are two smaller deathmatch maps, with only one that supports the superlative far-ranging gang wars mode. After the awesome DLC for Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption, it’s a shame to see Rockstar taking a page from the Call of Duty playbook.
It’s not only official that Tom vs Bruce will begin again early next month, but it’s also official that we’ll be working on articles with Kelly Wand, Stefan “Desslock” Janicki, and Erik Wolpaw, three of the most talented writers I know. Although Tom vs Bruce is a lot of work, it’s the best kind of work a person can hope to do: alongside someone he knows, likes, and admires. And by helping us meet our stretch goal, our Kickstarter supporters basically let me do this three times over.
We’re particularly grateful for our three full sponsors, one of whom is going to basically crowdsource his choice of game. Which should terrify me given all the jokes folks have made about what games they’d pick. Desert Bus. Pokemon: Conquest. Deus Ex. Lollipop Chainsaw. But I can safely say there is no game I wouldn’t enjoy playing with Bruce Geryk. And that’s why our final stretch goal is a bit selfish. If we can reach another $1000 in the next two days, we’ll fly Bruce to Los Angeles to stay with me, specifically so we can do an in-person Tom vs Bruce on video, most likely based on a boardgame.
If you haven’t wondered whether it’s wise to support two writers making a video, you should. Wonder, I mean. And support us, too. But you should definitely wonder whether it’s wise. I know we did. We initially dreaded doing the mandatory introduction video for Kickstarter. And even though it’s, uh, a bit rudimentary, it’s miles and away better than it was when we first put it together. We got feedback from some friends, Bruce did a bang-up job figuring out how to edit it, and then how to edit his edits, and then how to do those goofy videotoaster tricks with scans of our articles. We can’t claim professional quality, but we can claim that we care enough about what we create to fuss over it long enough that it won’t suck as much as it did before we fussed over it. If that’s not a testament to the kind of video you’ll get if we meet our last stretch goal, I don’t know what is.
Oh, and that picture up there? It’s relevant. You’ll just have to read our latest update to find out how.
The Sword of Islam add-on for Crusader Kings II is out today. When Crusader Kings II came out, I thought it was an oversight that you couldn’t play Muslim dynasties in a game about the Crusades. But it turns out Paradox wanted to either a) take time to do it right because the systems in place to game European dynasties wouldn’t be a satisfying representation of medieval Islam, or b) make money from DLC. Probably a little of both. And frankly, given that they’re right about a) and given the quality of most of their DLC, I can’t complain.
In the list of main features, alongside things like the new decadence concept for Muslim rulers, more countries, culture specific interface elements, the addition of Shia and Sunni Islam, and reworked combat, you’ll find this:
Wife wants to become first wife
That’s a “main feature”. Sure, you wanna-be caliphs can have four wives, but don’t think it’s going to make your life any easier.
How extended is today’s Extended Cut DLC for Mass Effect 3? Nearly two gigabytes, that’s how extended! Electronic Arts says they’re not actually changing the ending. According to the download page, here’s what upset fans get:
Additional scenes and an extended epilogue reveal the impact of Shepard’s choices on the future of the galaxy.
In other words, speaking more slowly and explaining more stuff about things that were intentionally ambiguous. Everything I needed to know I learned while playing Mass Effect 3. But the thinking is that more middling writing is just what this otherwise good sci-fi RPG shooter needs, which says a lot about the fans, the writers, and now the publisher.
I’ve lost interest in the whole issue, but I wonder if angry erstwhile fans will find any satisfaction in these two gigabytes. They’ve done very real damage to a series they supposedly loved, out of all proportion with their complaints. It’s shameful how they’ve hijacked Mass Effect on so many levels: as a story, as a franchise, and even just as a darn good standalone game about an alien invasion. But I’m mostly disappointed that Electronic Arts legitimized their complaints with this DLC. The ending of Mass Effect 3 was no better or worse than the ending of most videogames. And while the Extended Cut may not actually change the ending, it certainly changes the narrative.
It’s time for your annual Spider-Man game! The Activision Quebec studio making these games for the last few years has done a decent job with mission-based Spider-Mannery, but now they’re breaking out into an open world. Can they capture the glee of Spider-Man’s previous open-world web-slinging? Is there anything left to capture? Or will this just be another mandatory movie tie-in?
Spec Ops: The Line is 2K’s attempt at their own Call of Duty. I have it on good authority there are no zombies. There’s new DLC this week for Battlefield 3 and Skyrim. “The PC version of an Ubisoft game” is usually a punchline. This week, it’s also part of the release schedule, as we get a PC version of Ghost Recon: Future Soldier.
If you were to ask someone playing A Valley Without Wind what he’s doing at any given time, and more importantly why he’s doing it, you’re likely to get a multilayered answer, a set of goals like a Russian nesting doll. For instance, here in the world I’m playing now, why am I pushing blindly down through the levels of an undersea cavern, wading through dark acid water, dropping balls of light as I go?
After the jump, let me explain Continue reading →
In his exhaustive, frank, and informative write-up of the long journey between versions 1.0 and 1.1 of A Valley Without Wind, designer Chris Park begrudgingly concedes that maybe players will want to name their own characters. So that’s one of the many new features in version 1.1. But Park seems pretty proud of his random name generator. As he notes, it came up with the name “Judge Glass”.
I was all, like, yeah, whatever, Mr. Developer Man. I know game designers are proud of the effort they put into their fancypants randomness generators. I’m sure Valley Without Wind knows what it’s doing when it comes to terrain, because it makes really cool places for me to explore given the infinite breadth and depth of its world. But I think I’ll just stick to my own character names, thankyouverymuch.
At which point the following character name came up randomly:
Yeah, okay, you got me. Not only is that one going to stick, it’s probably going to make it’s way into other games. Well played, Valley Without Wind.
As for the 1.1 update, boy, it’s a doozy. If you played AI War, Chris Park’s last game, you know how drastically it was overhauled based on post-release feedback. That overhaul just happened in Valley Without Wind and I couldn’t be more delighted with how different it is. It went from being a game I respected more than I liked to a game I really like. No caveat needed.
