Time was a protest was an easy thing. You just showed up at the designated spot and it sort of happened. Then you went home and waited for the US to get out of Vietnam or whatever. But these days, you have to take a more active role, such as posting on message boards or signing online petitions. Let’s say you want a better ending in Mass Effect 3. If you want to join the latest demand that Electronic Arts, uh, fix the ending — whatever that may mean — you need to turn on your copy of Mass Effect 3 on a particular day, and then turn it off, and not turn it back on for at least a day. I think you also have to Tweet a Tweet. You’re also supposed to claim you’re not going to buy the DLC, no siree!, even though you know you will. It’s a pretty involved process. The details are available here. Oops, wrong link. I think this is the right one.
Since I was okay with the ending of Mass Effect 3 — it was about as good as the rest of the series! — I’m instead going to protest the beginning of Mass Effect 3. On May 7th, join me in not playing Mass Effect 3 to send a message to Electronic Arts that we demand they make that toy spaceship look more fakey.
Risen 2 (pictured) is the other RPG from the folks who made Gothic. This one has pirates. Prototype 2 is the other open-world series from the folks who made The Hulk. This one has — stop me if you’ve heard this one — tank punching. Bloodforge, the only game out this week that I’ve actually played, is a bantamweight God of War clone for Xbox Live Arcade. All in all, it sounds like a pretty good week to play The Witcher 2.
Call of Cthulhu is the $3 in-app purchase that adds a new campaign to Elder Sign: Omens, along with some new gameplay mechanics. This gameplay is most prominent during the second half of the campaign, when you sail out into the Pacific Ocean on the cargo ship Ultima Thule. There you’ll encounter an entirely new set of adventures and tasks, often with new gimmicks. Thrilling heartbreaking new gimmicks.
After the jump, what Bob found — and lost — in the PacificContinue reading →
Hey, look, Elder Sign: Omens gets an update, including new elder gods, new monsters, new heroes, bigger icons for those of us without iPads, and even some new rules. Basically, a whole mess of new playing pieces to flesh out an already great (deep breath) dice-driven, single-player, single-session, score-based Lovecraftian adventure.
Previously, you had to fight — ha, “fight”! — Azathoth. He was the game’s sole victory condition. Azathoth had a set number of spaces on the competing victory and failure tracks. But now you can set up an easier game by taking on Yig. He’s a sort of junior elder god. It’s like going up against an intern. His victory and failure tracks are shorter, and he isn’t accompanied by nearly as many monsters. Yig comes with the free update to the game, which also adds options to skip more quickly through transitions. Basically, the free update lets you make Elder Sign faster, easier, more of a lunchbreak game than it already was. How the strange eons fly!
But if you want the main event in Elder Sign: Omens — the Big C himself — you’re going to have to fork over three bucks. The add-on lets you take on Cthulhu, which starts out familiarly enough. You’re still faffing about the Arkham Museum, tackling adventures, risking bodily harm and insanity, grabbing cigarette cases, copies of the Nameless Cults, or Swords of Glory. You deal with the occasional cultist in the koi pond or Byakhee in the gift shop. Along the way, you’ll discover some cool new game mechanics. Maybe it’s not so easy to take a stab at a risky task. Maybe your inventory isn’t so safe anymore. Maybe the new monsters have a surprise in store. But even after all this, if you think Cthulhu can be arsed to show up at some rinky-dink college town in New England, you’ve got another thing coming.
So half way though the game — assuming you’ve made it that far — you board a ship called the Ultima Thule and hit the high seas. Now Elder Sign: Omens plays on a new map, with new adventures, and even new rules for what it takes to beat the game. You have to find three relics. You have to bank precious clues from your adventures. You still need to accumulate elder signs. And then…well, I don’t know what happens then because I keep failing. The Cthulhu campaign is the hardest difficulty level. It even unlocks a new investigator. I’ve already unlocked the new investigator you get for beating Azathoth, and like many of the investigators, I’m not convinced she’s useful, until suddenly the stars align and I’m convinced she’s the best one.
Fantasy Flight, a company with an enormous and diverse catalog of boardgames, is doing a heck of a job with their debut on the iPhone. Elder Sign: Omens was a smart choice for their first port, and they’re doing a great job supporting it with this latest free update and this bountiful $3 add-on.
Did you play The Witcher 2 last year? You should have. If you didn’t, or even if you did, this week you can play the Enhanced Edition on the PC or the Xbox 360. Because isn’t it time we all moved on from Mass Effect 3?
Also “new” this week is Deadliest Warrior: Ancient Combat, the suitably subtitled re-release of two previous Deadly Warrior games. The Playstation Vita gets Disgaea 3, which was already released for the PS3 and is the only option for Vita owners who want their portable Disgaea. Thanks to Sony’s approach to backwards compatibility (i.e. “What’s backwards compatibility?”), your UMDs of Disgea 2 are no good here. Trials Evolution for the 360 is the sequel to Trials HD, which doesn’t seem to have a lot of wiggle room for new gameplay. Isn’t the latest-gen Excite Bike market on the 360 tapped out since Trials HD and Joe Danger?
The really new thing this week is Botanicula (pictured), the new and squishier game from the folks who made Machinarium, an adventure game about robots.
After spending literally dozens upon dozens of hours to get to the culmination of this epic RPG, I am disappointed to discover that all the time I put into advancing my characters; all the personal feelings of investment; all the various story arcs; all these myriad worlds; all the sacrifice, betrayal, romance, and camaraderie; all the sophisticated themes about the nature of organic and synthetic life; all the hard work I did — yes, hard work, that I paid good money to buy a game to do — all came to this.
There’s a scene in Fight Club when Brad Pitt and Edward Norton are stealing human fat from a liposuction clinic. They have to get a plastic bag of the stuff over a fence with bobwire along the top. The plastic bag catches on the bobwire and rips open, spilling lumpy viscous goo everywhere. The Splatters, a game in which you fling lumpy viscous goo for points, is like that, but with a more candy colored sensibility.
The Splatters is available now on Xbox Live. Based on slogging through a few poorly explained levels, it’s as appealing as it sounds. Maybe The Splatters 2 can recall that scene in Dead Alive with the pus in the tapioca.
Like a bunch of dudes my age, Carl Sagan’s PBS series Cosmos had a huge effect on me as a kid. One of the things I remember was Sagan explaining how we can conceive of interdimensional travel, or wormholes, or the fourth dimension, or something like that. I don’t really remember what he was explaining so much as I remember the explanation. He suggested we imagine creatures who live on a flat plane — say a piece of paper — with no concept of elevation. Basically, a 2D life form. To get from one point on the paper to another, these creatures assume they have to cross that distance by moving in a straight line. But since we live in a 3D world, we know it’s possible to fold the piece of paper so that the points are right next to each other. We know how to eliminate the distance by folding space. And just as those creatures couldn’t conceive of folding a piece of paper, we can’t conceive of interdimensional travel.
As I explore the world of Fez, I keep thinking back to how that blew my mind as a kid.
One of the problems with dynamic environments like changing weather and time of day is that they’re dynamic. For instance, during one of the cutscenes in Xenoblade Chronicles, a character looking out over a landscape observes that it’s so peaceful. Meanwhile, she’s being pelted with rain. The wind whips the trees and grass into a frenzied dance. Thunder crashes overhead. Lightning tears through the sky, illuminating ominous shapes in the distance.
“It’s just the calm before the storm,” says Shulk, as perceptive as ever. You’d think a guy who could see into the future would make a better weather man.
This week will be a test whether updated versions of classics are as good as they were in the olden days. Legend of Grimrock is an old-school, tile-based, first-person dungeon crawl in the same vein as classics like Bard’s Tale or Eye of the Beholder. But with better graphics. Similarly, Naval War: Arctic Circle is a latter day version of Harpoon, the classic dispassionate wargame that modeled SIGINT-based C3 warfare. In other words, a real-time spreadsheet battle of lines and circles. But Naval War: Arctic Circle has 3D graphics that will supposedly let you watch things blow up. Will these games play today as well as their precedents played ten years ago? Find out at your wallet’s peril.
Nintendo’s Spirit Camera is a cute gimmick-based game that adds ghosts to what you see in the camera, kind of like that bit in Disney’s Haunted Mansion ride where you go past a mirror and see a ghost sitting in the car with you. Actually, you can probably strike the word game from that description. Skullgirls, the 2D fighting game which was supposed to be out last week, will be out this week instead. Tribes: Ascend, the free-to-play shooter/skiing sim, transitions from open beta to no-foolin’-we’re-actually-official.
Mass Effect 3, Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, and Uncharted 3 will all get DLC this week at the cost of free, free, and $10, respectively. Mass Effect 3 gets two new maps, as well as new characters, weapons, and consumables you can keep your fingers crossed for as you’re grinding for booster packs. Operation Raccoon City gets a new mission playable as the Spec Ops characters from multiplayer matches (i.e. the good guys). It will be followed over the coming weeks by additional levels — these won’t be free — that tell a new story for the Spec Ops team. Finally, Uncharted 3 gets four multiplayer maps.
Jon Shafer, currently at Stardock and formerly of Firaxis, has a great article on his blog about why limits are good things. It also explains briefly why boats (pictured) are awesome.
Game design is the art of providing enjoyable frustration (credit to Andrew Meyer for that phrase) and the frustration part is something that often has to be tiptoed around or hidden from players. Most players think they’re just in this for the power fantasy of it all. Shafer gives a few examples of how limitations and scarcity create value. Read the article here.
Electronic Arts, declared the worst company in the world by people who vote in online polls, has announced that the current ending of Mass Effect 3 is not the ending of Mass Effect 3.
Through additional cinematic sequences and epilogue scenes, the Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut will give fans seeking further clarity to the ending of Mass Effect 3 deeper insights into how their personal journey concludes. Coming this summer, the Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut will be available for download on the Xbox 360 videogame and entertainment system, PlayStation 3 computer entertainment system and PC for no extra charge.
Note that Electronic Arts insists they aren’t technically changing anything by pandering to fans seeking further clarity. Instead, it looks as if they’re just talking more slowly and using shorter words.
You can tell Political Machine 2012 is a fantasy game by the fact that California isn’t a soothing shade of deep blue. Also, what is Obama doing in Texas? Dude, get out of there. Get your ass to Mars. I mean, Florida. Same difference.
I love the Political Machine games for how they distill Presidential politics to a manageable and simple strategy game in which I can model myself as a candidate and beat Bruce Geryk. I don’t love the last one for how useless the AI was. But fool me once, we can’t get fooled again, etc., etc. The point being that I can’t very well not play a Political Machine game. Political Machine 2012 will be out this summer for $10.
The latest trailer for Steel Battalion: Kinect sure does look nifty for a game I’ll never play (the Qt3 offices are Kinectless). But what an awful way to cut together game footage. It’s like those scenes in Lost when a hapless Desmond is yanked around in time. You’re looking down a quiet country road, but as soon as you fire your guns, you’re in a raging battle. Pop the hatch and now you’re in a narrow alleyway. Raise the binoculars and you’re raiding a depot. Shift into high speed and it’s suddenly night time. If the message is that Steel Battalion: Kinect is going to be confusing, mission accomplished!
My favorite part of the trailer is my own little inside joke. At one point, the narrator explains the escape hatch by saying, “We don’t want a repeat of last time”. I think I speak for all Steel Battalion fans when I say, no, we sure don’t.
Okay, let’s see what’s out this week. Star Wars Kinect (pictured). A niche 2D fighting game called Skull Girls on Xbox Arcade (UPDATE: which isn’t out until next week). More cars for Forza 4. An add-on for the PC version of Tropico 4. Not much of a wallet threat this week.
Except, of course, for Xenoblade Chronicles. If you’re into RPGs, or even into just good games, you won’t want to miss this one.
