Thanks to the largess of folks on Kickstarter, Tom vs Bruce will be starting up again in about two weeks. Unfortunately, we won’t be doing Diablo III despite my best efforts. I was hoping we could set up a hardcore game to see who could live longest, and I had every intention of luring Bruce into a deathtrap. I doubt he would have even made it to the Skeleton King.
But we’ve still got a few surprises in store. If we can reach a stretch goal, we’ll be collaborating with three very special guests. We’ll be announcing them over the next three days, as well as dropping hints about our first Tom vs Bruce. So keep an eye on the updates at our Kickstarter page and help us spread the word!
If you’ve been holding off for Age of Empires Online to finally gel, now’s as good a time as any to try it. The latest update, dubbed the Summer Update, just went live, completely revising the game’s long-term economy and tech tree, and introducing its new endgame stuff. This is the last step in a dramatic overhaul the game has gotten over the last few months.
After the jump, some hands-on time with the particularsContinue reading →
Quantum Conundrum is from Kim Swift, one of the designers of Narbacular Drop, the puzzle game that inspired Portal and eventually led to Portal when Valve hired her. She has since left Valve. Quantum Conundrum is her first post-Valve game. As someone who didn’t play Portal for the puzzles — the genius of Portal is in the writing wrapped around a serviceable puzzle game — I’ll be curious to see what happens when you take a Portal designer out of Valve. Wallet threat level yellow.
Civilization V: Gods & Kings is the expansion for Civilization V. I’ve been playing it. Wallet threat level green.
A new version of Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers is out this week, giving folks a digital look at cards that won’t be out for reals until later this summer. Given how good the Magic videogames have been, and given how they’ve added gimmicky but effective new ways to play, this escalates the wallet threat level to yellow.
Pokemon Conquest for the Nintendo DS is a Pokemon strategy game from Koei. Let me write that again: a Pokemon strategy game from Koei. I’ve been playing it a bit, and it’s exactly what you’d expect. It reminds me a bit of the Devil Survivor games on the DS, but with squealing chirping Pokemons instead of devils, and with kidding Japanese warlords instead of Japanese school kids. Wallet threat level uhhh.
I heartily recommend half of the table in the Avengers Chronicles pinball tables from Zen Studios. Tune in tomorrow morning for specifics. And good luck trying to beat my high score on the Avengers table. I had one of those “OMG I Will Never Get This Lucky Again” balls in which the Avengers and I rocked that helicarrier. Suck it, Loki! Wallet threat level yellow.
Steel Battalion 2, also known as Steel Battalion Kinect, also also known as Steel Battalion No Thanks, is out this week. Wallet threat level green.
I haven’t played a Lego game since dinking around with one of the Harry Potters, but Traveller’s Tales sure knows how to get the most out of the formula. You might think Lego Batman 2 is just Arkham City for kids, but it looks like more of an open-world playground for DC Comics’ cast of superheroes. Wallet threat level yellow.
Babel Rising, an upgraded version of a tower defense game for the iPhone, is about using god powers to kill little dudes trying to build a tower of Babel. It was a pretty simple game on the iPhone that involved a lot of jabbing and swiping, so naturally this upgraded version features support for Move on the Playstation 3 and Kinect on the Xbox 360. I’ve been playing on the 360 with a gamepad, since I don’t live in a Kinect enabled household.
There are some important differences between those of us who play videogames and normal people. For instance, when a normal person browses this gallery of breathtakingly beautiful photographs from Timothy O’Sullivan’s 19th century survey of the American West, he probably thinks of Westerns. Movies like, I dunno, Stagecoach, The Searchers, and Young Guns. I don’t know a lot of Westerns.
But when I browse these pictures, the more immediate touchstone for me is Red Dead Redemption. I look at the picture of that settlement and think of a particular area in New Austin. I don’t think of watching a movie. I think of running down there among those buildings. I think of climbing to the top of that building in the background, to the left, and getting a commanding view of the little town. I think of playing a videogame.
I’d normally think that’s a little pathetic, but in this case, I think it’s a testament to the amazing work done by Rockstar’s San Diego studio, which created one of the most vivid virtual places you will ever visit. Go ahead, browse those survey pictures (here’s the link again) and tell me you don’t think of Red Dead Redemption.
Any self-respecting fan of action RPGs knows that you don’t have to play the AAA titles to get an immensely satisfying action RPG fix. In fact, the games made by Steven Peeler’s Soldak Entertainment offer things you can’t get in Diablo, Sacred, or Torchlight. Depths of Peril features a cool political system and Din’s Curse features dungeons that fight back. Soldak’s upcoming Drox Operative will bring these sorts of elements to a dynamic, open-world, sci-fi, space-based action RPG.
According to the game’s website, Drox Operative will be released either in the first quarter of 2012 or “when it’s done”. You can see how that turned out. But now you can check out Drox Operative for yourself by pre-ordering, which will let you play the beta.
In a Gamesindusty.biz interview to talk about Epic Mickey 2, Warren Spector made a general observation about violence in games that will pretty much upstage everything he has to say about Epic Mickey 2. That’s why PR folks like to shepherd interviews. It keeps guys like me and Gamasutra from ignoring all the stuff Spector says about Epic Mickey 2 to instead focus on this comment:
The ultraviolence has to stop. We have to stop loving it. I just don’t believe in the effects argument at all, but I do believe that we are fetishizing violence, and now in some cases actually combining it with an adolescent approach to sexuality. I just think it’s in bad taste.
After the jump, how about that camera control in Epic Mickey 2?Continue reading →
One of the cool things about the replays in Dirt Showdown is that you can upload snippets to Youtube. That’s me banging up that black and red drag racer looking thing. It belches blue fire from the pipes when I hold down the boost button. Pretty nifty. But one of the coolest things about the replays in Dirt Showdown is that you don’t have to listen to the announcer.
“They just rammed them!” he bellows as I hit another car.
Let’s consider this for a moment. I can see into the cars. Each one has a driver inside. There’s no one in the passenger seats. Unless there’s someone under a blanket in the backseat, each car carries only a single person. Yet the announcer is using plural pronouns. They just rammed them. Dirt Showdown does this constantly. They crossed the finish line! They’re in first place! They’re in the lead! They’re catching up with them!
I know this is a widely accepted way to wuss out of having to commit to a gender specific pronoun. Saying “he just rammed him” would imply that the drivers of both cars are male. That might alienate the women who play Dirt Showdown. And based on the list of nicknames you can choose for your driver, Codemasters clearly wants women to play. Sweetie. Muffin. Honey. Kitten. Stuff like that is in there. Grammar Nazi or Uptight Writer aren’t in there. Codemasters’ priority is clear.
I’ve tried turning down the announcer’s voice. But whereas all the other volume sliders range from 0% to 100%, the voice slider only goes down to 50%. It’s like being in the backseat of a car with windows that only go halfway down so unruly children can’t leap from the car while it’s moving.
Good news! This week’s wallet threat level plummets with the release of Lollipop Chainsaw. I can’t post the review until midnight tonight, but suffice to say your wallet can sleep safe and sound. Wait a second! The red phone is ringing! Hold on.
Oh dear, it seems the wallet threat level has elevated substantially with the release of Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion. Since its release, this epic sci-fi RTS has gotten cool add-ons that fold in new bits of gameplay. But Rebellion remixes the entire experience for the better. One of the best RTSs you can play just got better.
Krater is an oddduck from Fatshark. Based on the beta, I’m not convinced it works as a direct competitor to Diablo III and Torchlight 2, the games it most closely resembles. But I’m intrigued by its touch of real time strategy, party-based RPGing, and characters who can actually die. It goes live tonight, so stand by for more detailed impressions this week.
Sony releases a new game for the PSP Veeta called Gravity Rush. I did my term of service with gravity rushing in last week’s stinker, Inversion. Which I didn’t have to play on a $300 handheld boondoggle. Furthermore, Konami ports a few old Metal Gear Solids to the Vida. Meanwhile, Atlus shows some love for the PSP Regular with a nifty tactical RPG called Gungnir. From playing a few levels, I can plainly see the same colorful charm and exhaustive detail of Jean d’Arc, Tactics Ogre, and Disgaea.
Finally, Dirt: Showdown is out. And by out, I mean it’s out on the platform of preference for those of us who take our arcade racing in the living room.
E3 loves screenshots. But is it really safe to trust screenshots from games you don’t know? So here are some screenshots from a game I do know. The Rebellion add-on for Sins of a Solar Empire, which will be out next week, is full of white-hot space porn.
But since you might be browsing from work, the above picture is an unassuming Vasari colony ship on its way to settle a planet somewhere past the blue sun of Quirari. This is nothing you won’t see in the basic Sins of a Solar Empire game. Everything after the jump is stuff unique to Rebellion and potentially NSFW. Depending on where you work.
After the jump, don’t let your boss see you looking at these picturesContinue reading →
Before I make a sheepish confession about Defender Chronicles II, let me show you the new map added in yesterday’s update. That’s Sanctuary up there. Brightly lit, lots of room for your halflings to poison monsters as they wend their way to the top, plenty of chokepoints for your warriors and berserkers to pin down enemies while archers and mages rain down arrows and lightning. Defender Chronicles II is never really about the map, but it’s nice to have a pretty backdrop.
The update also rejiggered the economy. The most conspicuous change is that you get more than a token or two for selling your useless reward loot. You can also jump more quickly to the harder difficulty level if you want to push the risk/reward equation a little harder to make more tokens. Still, barring a microbuy with real-world money, it’s still going to take for-frikin’-ever before you can unlock the new archer or cleric hero.
After the jump, how I unlocked the cleric hero in five minutesContinue reading →
Katy Perry’s Sweet Treats* excepted, this is no time to actually buy or play games. What’s the matter with you? This is the week to try to pick out bits of information from all the noise of E3. Stay tuned to Qt3 for exclusive coverage of E3 2012, starting tomorrow!
It’s 4:00 AM. I’m not yet asleep because I have a bit of a cold and slept too much during the afternoon. I take a swig of some NyQuil and check out the Rockstar Social Club, my mind turning to bed. Then the phone rings. Like most people, when I get a late night phone call, I expect bad news.
If you’ve played Midnight Club: Los Angeles or Red Dead Redemption, you’ve probably got a Rockstar Social Club account. In Midnight Club: Los Angeles, the Social Club was a great way to admire your screenshots, and it also had some unlockables based on driving tests. Red Dead Redemption used a confusing but suitably atmospheric old-timey newspaper, The Blackwater Ledger, as a way to track achievements, challenges, unlockables, and events.
But with Max Payne 3, Rockstar is using the Social Club to lay groundwork for a persistent crew system that will carry over into Grand Theft Auto V. I’m sold.
My entire career as a writer has been based on talking about games as a shared experience. We play games, singly or in groups, and then we talk with each other about them. In that way, they are no different than movies, music, or books. In that way, they are more than the self-contained experience of actually playing them. In that way, they are clearly art. Ugh, I just said that, didn’t I?
I was fortunate enough to get to write about games collaboratively with Bruce Geryk for many years in Computer Gaming World. The series was called Tom vs. Bruce. It started out as a way for me and a buddy to do strategy guides together, but it turned into something else entirely. You can find out a lot about a game from listening to one guy talk or write. But what about two guys, turning their experience with a game into a story?
Bruce and I would like to keep writing Tom vs. Bruce. And we’d like your help. If you’re not Kickstartered out — and who could blame you if you are? — go here to find out more. With your support, we expect to start monthly episodes of Tom vs. Bruce starting later this summer.
Also, T-shirts! We promise they won’t be black and they’ll be designed by someone who knows what she’s doing.
