Ubisoft, the company that hired Frag Dolls and Jenny “vaccinations will make your kids retarded!” McCarthy to promote their games, has hired Ice-T’s wife. She makes observations like the following about Ghost Recon: Future Soldier:
When you’re on this game, and you’re pointing, and you’re shooting, you really feel like you’re at war.
One of the best tower defense games you can play on any platform — let me repeat that, since I want to make it clear I’m putting this side by side with personal favorites like Toy Soldiers: Cold War, Unstoppable Gorg, Dungeon Defenders, and Immortal Defense — one of the best tower defense games you can play on any platform is Defender Chronicles on the iPhone. It balances neatly the moment-to-moment tower defense gameplay with a long gratifying RPG progression. If you sank as much time into Defender Chronicles as I did, leveling up the General and Melwen, you’ll probably recognize them in that goofy panel up there, which the developers at Gimka whipped up by way of announcement. And, to be fair, I mainly recognize Melwen because her face yells at me from the Defender Chronicles icon every time I boot up my iPhone. It’s a little odd to see her serenely washing a cup, or whatever she’s supposed to be doing.
The sequel will include two new heroes alongside the General and Melwen, some new units, and a whole new RPG progression system to unlock unique artifacts, all of which is geared towards beating the harder difficulty levels to progress the RPG stuff farther. It’s a vicious circle. Did I say “vicious”? I meant “delicious”. There are a few details here that will only make sense to hardcore players, but the bottom line is that it looks like Defender Chronicles II is mostly the same tower defense gameplay, but with a lot more RPG tying it all together.
Defenders Chronicles II will be out for the iPhone on May 24.
Like a thief in the night, Storm of Souls has appeared as an in-app purchase for Ascension. This sequel/expansion is a new set of cards for Ascension, the current nonpareil of deck building games. Storm of Souls addresses some balance issues in the basic game, adds some cool new gameplay concepts, and gives Eric Sabee all new canvases for his unique artwork.
Since the iPhone and tabletop versions are functionally identical, you can read my review for more specifics. New rules for events and trophies place greater demands on the screen real estate, but it’s handled as well as can be expected, even on the teensy iPhone’s screen. Ironically, it’s a bit easier to play Storm of Souls on the computer, with usable cards highlighted and a helpful end-of-turn nag reminding you when you’ve missed something. The add-on also adds Gamecenter achievements that recognize feats like defeating Samael with Adayu (called “don’t mind if Adayu”), collecting one of every trophy monster (as if!), and getting both Umbral blades into play (like I need another reason to want to make this happen).
You shouldn’t be in any rush into Storm of Souls if you’re new to Ascension. But once you’re ready to wrap your head around something more complicated, more demanding, and ultimately more satisfying, Storm of Souls is just what Master Dartha ordered.
After all those years of Playstation exclusives, it’s hard to remember that Ratchet & Clank developer Insomniac is still independent. But they’re finally stretching their wings, collaborating with Electronic Arts for a game called Overstrike, which will be playable on systems other than the one you use as a Blu-ray player.
But Overstrike won’t be their first release with EA. They just announced something imminent called Outernauts!
Combining Insomniac’s immersive storytelling with a unique art style and sense of wit, Outernauts is an adventure role-playing game that casts players as members of United Earth’s elite Outernaut force. The Outernauts are charged with capturing and training exotic alien beasts as they uncover the riddle behind mysterious “ancients” while battling pirates and evil corporations seeking to control the galaxy. Players will explore planets, harvest loot, and fight asynchronously alongside or against friends to master a wild, untamed universe.
Sweet! So when can I play it?
Outernauts is currently in a closed beta testing phase and will launch on Facebook this summer.
Oh. Nevermind.
If you consider games journalism the process of writing about games that haven’t come out yet, I’m a terrible games journalist for caring instead about the games that are already out. And I’m an especially terrible games journalist in the case of a few specific games that I don’t want to know anything about. For instance, Bioshock Infinite. I know everything I need to know to want to play it, and any additional information I get I’d just as soon get from actually playing. As you can see, I can’t even bring myself to post a screenshot of it.
So E3 was going to be a real pain in the butt, because everyone and his dog was going to be talking about Bioshock Infinite. But no more! 2K just announced that not only has Bioshock Infinite been delayed until February 2013, but it furthermore won’t be showing at E3 next month. Phew.
Warlock isn’t really a game about diplomacy any more than it’s a game about city building. There’s diplomacy in here, but like the city building, it sits in the back seat while you fling spells and command armies. City building is there as a support system for your armies. And diplomacy is there to determine against whom to direct your armies. Or to ignore and just direct your armies against everyone. Which is what I’m doing now. I’m at war with everyone.
However, none of them are being aggressive. Is that because the AI is too meek? Let’s see how it responds to an invasion. I’ve decided to pick on my closest neighbor. He’s a wizard named Rjakh, who I mainly think of as the pink wizard because he’s pink. How hard can it be to beat a pink wizard?
In a Civilization game, I would march units into his territory and lay siege to his city. If I brought enough units of the right mix, I’d prevail. That’s not how Warlock works. Because when you correctly do a one unit per hex game, the strategic level map is also the tactical playing field. That’s a whole other kind of war than marching stacks up to city walls and letting your unit mix take over.
After the jump, Warlock’s AI at war Continue reading →
This week offers three new games to help you kill time until May 15.
1) Starhawk is out for the PS3 this week. I predict another feather in Sony’s multiplayer cap. This mix of real time strategy, air and ground vehicle-based action, on-foot shootering, single-player campaign, and online multiplayer could be in the same league as Playstation exclusives like Mag and Killzone 3. I’ll have more to say about it once it’s gone live.
2) Turn-based strategy fans get Warlock: Master of the Arcane, hopefully with the day zero patch. I really like what I’ve seen in the pre-release version. It’s not quite Conquest of Elysium 3 in terms of gameplay, but not for lack of trying. And it’s certainly got the production value for those of you who couldn’t stomach Conquest’s spritely artwork.
3) Hey, look, you can play Minecraft on your Xbox 360! Which is pretty much the same Minecraft you already know and love. This console version is a lot friendlier to new players than the PC version. There is no guesswork with the crafting, thanks to extensive tooltips for inventory items and a helpful menu system in place of alt-tabbing to a wiki. While I certainly admire the game, I still can’t shake off a pervasive sense of pointlessness as I play. Where do I check my high score?
MMOs are fundamentally broken. Like the free-to-play model, they all too often put commercial demands in front of game design. Which is great if you’re a publisher. It’s not so great for those of us who play games. The good guys in the MMO sphere are few and far between: Guild Wars, Eve Online, and, uh, am I forgetting anyone?
So, anyway, Bethesda is finally making Elder Scrolls the MMO it hasn’t been for so long. Imagine Skyrim with a dozen players running in the opposite direction, another dozen players racing towards that dragon you’re trying to kill, instanced housing, everyone sporting his own Lydia, and a faction grinding bar where your title Thane of Whiterun would have been. And probably a subscription fee. Bethesda strikes me as arrogant enough to figure they could charge $15 a month.
After spending 120 gratifying hours in Xenoblade Chronicles, which offers almost everything you might want from an MMO without being an MMO, this is about as exciting a prospect as using Kinect to play Skyrim.
It’s a good time to be a fan of action-oriented tower defense games! While PC gamers finally get to enjoy the original Toy Soldiers on Steam, those of us playing the deliriously wonderful console-only sequel, Toy Soldiers: Cold War, get $10 of new DLC. For some odd reason, it’s broken into two separate $5 packages. Napalm and Evil Empire each include a three-mission campaign, a new mode for the survival missions on the old maps, a new versus map, and a new barrage attack that might come up when you kill one of the bonus targets and get a randomly determined special attack.
The new minigames are as disappointing as most of the old minigames. I can’t see playing either of them more than once to set a basic score. I mean, seriously, whack-a-mole, but with capitalist pigs? Similarly, the new survival modes are puzzling. Trauma mode just means that every time you place a turret, your base loses some health. It’s a pretty minor tweak. It’s more the sort of thing you’d see on an options screen than in a DLC package. Then there’s the commando mode, which means you’re just running around the map using a permanent supersoldier. These are the same guys you get as occasional power-ups. America gets the goofy Rambo and the Soviets get the goofy Dolph Lundgren. There’s no harm in having all of the action and none of the strategy, but it’s a bit like taking a great joke and drawing it out for too long. I can get that for free on Saturday Night Live.
The DLC campaigns each have three new missions, and there’s enough variety in the map layouts and included vehicles to set them apart from the main game’s missions. Since many of the Soviet defenses have their own unique tweaks that you could previously only enjoy in versus games, it’s nice to get more time with them in the Evil Empire campaign. However, Napalm’s Vietnam oriented maps are much livelier than the dreary Eastern block maps in Evil Empire. The new barrage attacks are probably the best thing in the DLC. The Soviet orbital beam is especially gratifying.
The biggest drawback for this $10 of DLC is that Toy Soldiers: Cold War was already such a full-featured package. Without folding any new units or defenses into the mix — this aspect of Toy Soldiers has been pretty much frozen since the original World War I setting — it just feels like new ways to play the same old game. But at least this same old game is one of the best action oriented tower defense games you can play.
According to this unsourced rumor, a Bayonetta sequel that was never announced was cancelled. Which can mean anything from someone throwing away a piece of concept art to an entire project scrapped and internal schedule reworked.
My initial reaction is the expected, “Aww, now I won’t get to play Bayonetta 2!” But it occurs to me that I’m pretty sure I don’t want Bayonetta 2. Some games are fine as self-contained entities, with no further elaboration needed, and no real need for improvements. Remember when God of War, Devil May Cry, and Mortal Kombat were fresh? That’s the same thrill I got discovering Bayonetta that I eventually lost with those other games as they trundled down their path of sequels and remakes and reboots. If any game deserves to transcend the usual franchise treatment, it’s Bayonetta. What’s wrong with a really good one-off from time to time?
Of course, time was I would have said the same thing about Bioshock. Then along came Bioshock 2 and now I’m giddy with anticipation for Bioshock Infinite.
I’m okay with the robots and hovercrafts and whatnot. But a horseback riding sequence? Oh, please no. I’ve paid my dues in Uncharted, Assassin’s Creed, and Skyrim. With the possible exception of Red Dead Redemption, I have yet to meet a horseback riding sequence that wasn’t awful.
No word on whether Black Ops 2 will have a new zombie mode, but at least its got a zombie narrator. Brains!
UPDATE: In this video, Treyarch’s Mark Lamia says, “If you like zombies, you’re going to be really happy with what we’re doing with Black Ops 2. It’s our biggest most ambitious zombies ever.”
A huge honkin’ earth elemental is blocking my expansion to the north, where I want to grab a patch of holy ground and some ancient ruins. I need the holy ground to build a temple, which unlocks powerful religious units. But I’m not going to have enough gold to afford one of those guys for a long time. More immediately, I need the ancient ruins so I can build an excavation, which boosts my magical research. This is Warlock’s closest equivalent to technology in a Civilization game.
But to grab these two resources on the map — the holy ground and ancient ruins — I need to build a city that will be in striking range of an earth elemental who keeps flinging flaming boulders at my dudes. That’s not very neighborly.
After the jump, dwarven steel makes good neighbors Continue reading →
I was pretty ambivalent about jumping into Age of Empires Online. I loved the first two games in the series, and I was on the fence about the third. But I had written off Age of Empires Online. Most of the press at launch was negative, tending to the word “grind”. If there’s one word to turn me off a game, it’s “grind”.
But then I actually played Age of Empires Online for about 16 hours. I’ve discovered four things to like.
After the jump, I get all listy with it. Continue reading →
If you need any convincing that Awesomenauts is a game to watch, I have two words for you: Swords and Soldiers. That’s the name of Dutch developer Ronimo’s last game, which managed a full-featured real time strategy game in a sidescrolling 2D world. Now they’re trying their hand at a Defense of the Ancients style strategy game for the Xbox 360 and PS3. They had me at Ronimo.
Fable: Heroes for the Xbox 360 is a simplified action RPG — do we really need to simplify action RPGs?– with an unintentionally creepy doll aesthetic and a boardgame where the skill tree is supposed to go. Having played a couple of levels, the only connection I can find to Fable is a chicken kicking minigame. I expect the farting, wiving, and dog training will be along later.
Tera Online is an MMO.
(UPDATE: Unfortunately, Awesomenauts’ publisher just went belly up. It looks like the game might be in limbo for the time being and this week’s wallet threat may, in fact, not be Awesome.)
Jetpack Joyride was already really good. With today’s free update, it’s even gooder. However, I question the entire premise of this being a “free” update. Yeah, sure, it’s free in that you don’t have to pay anything when you get it. Your copy of Jetpack Joyride will automatically update without you paying a cent.
But then you start playing and you’re confronted with two empty slots where you can equip gadgets (pictured). Go ahead and start playing anyway. In the starting room, you’ll see a pair of empty picture frames where your equipped gadgets would go. You want gadgets. You need gadgets. Gadgets are the new money sinks where cosmetic doo-dads used to go. But gadgets actually do stuff. As such, you will definitely want as many gadgets as you can get your stubby little jetpack operating hands on.
That’s not going to happen any time soon. Gadgets are expensive. Each one — there are fifteen — costs around 5000 gold. If you’ll indulge me, let’s do a little math. I tend to make 250 gold on the average run. That means 20 runs to buy each gadget. That means 300 runs to unlock all the gadgets, give or take. At which point I can now try to claw my way up from the bottom of the high score list. Or I can just buy gold as an in-app purchase. This is a cornerstone of Jetpack Joyride’s design.
The update doesn’t just add more grinding to encourage in-app purchases. It also seems to make the slot machine a more prominent part of the game. For starters, I’ve seen more slot machine tokens, which means the slot machine figures more prominently. My first run with the update was a record breaker, but not by virtue of me being better. Instead, I got a free life in the slot machine, which I promptly lost, but not before getting another slot machine token. My pull on the slot machine netted me three more tokens, one of which got me a small blast to push me a little farther down the run. Another of the free spins got me a nuclear blast to push me considerably farther down the run. New high score! Take that, you three people on my friends list who are now under my high score. Three down, about thirty to go! Seriously, how are all you people making 3000m and 4000m runs?
After the jump, browse the gadget catalog Continue reading →
