The various sprite packs Paradox has been selling for their games — basically skins for the units — is one thing. That stuff is silly and if anyone wants to buy it, he and his money deserve to be parted. But charging for basic personalization options? It’s not unlike THQ charging you for cheat codes in Saints Row 3.
With the new Crusader Kings II: Ruler Designer DLC all these are in your hands. Customize your character your way. Tweak and change any aspect of the character or even create an all new character and dynasty to play with. Create your portrait, change the name and dynasty and even customize your coat of arms. Change traits and stats at will and decide the size of the immediate family. The game that lets you choose your goals will now let you choose your character.
In my day, we could name our dudes in X-Com whatever we wanted and we didn’t have to pay $5! If I want to do things to customize my experience in a game, I shouldn’t have to pay extra. DLC should be content, not options that already belong in the core game.
The Ruler Designer will be available for $5 in a few weeks. Don’t buy it. You’re just encouraging them.
That headline is misleading in a couple of ways. First, the game Echo Bazaar, a cannily uncanny union of writing, RPGing, and world building, is no longer called Echo Bazaar. Now it’s called Fallen London, after the name of the place where it’s been set all along. Good move.
Second, they didn’t really ditch Facebook so much as make it optional, which is a great move considering the developers have always been suitably sheepish about hitching their work to social networking. Now you can play Echo Bazaar…err, I mean, now you can play Fallen London by simply registering an email account here. However, the optional social elements of the game — the multiplayer, if you will — are still tied to Twitter and Facebook. Perhaps as the developers develop Fallen London’s nascent clique system, it will make Facebook and Twitter even more optional.
And because it wouldn’t be Fallen London without some great prose, here’s the little snippet of lore that appeared on the side of my screen while I risked scandal by gossiping with the Melancholy Curate’s servants to get information on his Enigmatic Sister.
You can study many things at the University of London. The Department of Cryptozoology studies the small, hidden creatures of the Neath. Creatures that have never been seen, but almost certainly exist. Under the right circumstances. Hopefully. Otherwise, the Department might lose its budget.
Not enough games have armored zeppelins. Gettysburg: Armored Warfare (pictured!) intends to address that by going back in time and making the Civil War less boring. Unfortunately, it’s one of those team-based multiplayer only shooters with RTS elements that will confound your average gamer and probably leave the servers sparsely populated. For your less boring Civil War single-player needs, you’ll have to be content with Darkest of Days. Go ahead and Google that.
Also out this week is the option to twist a little metal on the Playstation 3 with Wheels of Destruction, a downloadable car combat game. Gears of War 3 gets new maps. Someone hasn’t told Namco that Ridge Racer has been played out for ten years. That guy who cheated on his supermodel wife with a Denny’s waitress has a new golf game.
That is an actual thing and it’s comming soon according to the website.
Enjoy one of the most popular sports in the world from the comfort of your home on PS3, or enjoy it anywhere on PS Vita and challenge your friends in a local multiplayer for up to four players and online multiplayer and leaderboards. Running in astonishing FullHD resolution, 60 frames-per-second graphics and with support for PlayStation Move controller on the PS3 and supporting the innovative features of PS Vita, like rear touch pad and accelerometer-powered controls, Foosball 2012 is the supreme experience for any PlayStation owner.
If foosball qualifies as a sport, so does pinball. Which makes me a virtual athlete.
While a group of indeterminate size but unmistakable volume complains about the ending of Mass Effect 3’s storyline in the single player game — first the Tea Party, then the Occupy Movement, and now this? — I’d like to gnash my teeth about the multiplayer now that I’ve resolved not to play it anymore.
After the jump, I am done. Do you hear me? Done! Continue reading →
In the latest round of server shutdowns from Electronic Arts, Boom Blox Bash Party’s online support is on the chopping block. One of the best games you can play on the Nintendo Wii will no longer work online as of April 13th. It’s bad enough to shut down games like Burnout: Revenge, The Godfather II, and Saboteur because there aren’t many people playing them online, which means there aren’t many people who would care. But it’s another thing entirely to shut down a game like Boom Blox Bash Party that’s partly based on players creating content for other players to download. So get online levels while you still can, because they won’t be there in a month. Imagine if Sony shut down Little Big Planet. Which Electronic Arts is effectively imitating by also shutting down support for Create, a decent puzzle creation kit based on player-made content.
Space Pirates and Zombies gets a hefty update today. Previously, the galaxy consisted of two main factions vying for control of each system. The civilians and UTA factions were more of less interchangeable and always self-contained. Cozy up to the civilians in one system, cozy up to the UTA in another system. But today’s update adds bounty hunters, a whole new faction with a long reach, the resources to hunt you down, and their own currency. You can compete in bounty hunter arena challenges for special crew members and you can even earn ten entirely new ships.
The update will work with your current game, but developer Andrew Hume recommends a fresh start to really appreciate the bounty hunters.
This patch will integrate itself into an existing save game, but we recommend finishing your current play through of vanilla SPAZ and starting a new one with Bounty Hunters on March 19th. Progressing through the galaxy with this new menace completes the game and should adjust the feel enough to make a new playthrough worthwhile.
More details are available here.
When you see the From Software logo, you probably associate it with Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls. But there was a time that logo meant something else to a select group of people. There was a time the From Software logo meant an almost absurdly complex, elegant, strategic, and online only giant robot game called Chromehounds (pictured) that never found an audience. That time is here again. You may not have known this about Armored Core V — I certainly didn’t — but it is From Software’s Chromehounds mulligan. I say that with equal degrees of enthusiasm and trepidation. Stand by for the review later this week, because this is a game that will live or die (sadly, the latter is most likely for a variety of reasons) based on the multiplayer community.
Sine Mora is just a 2D sidescrolling shooter. Or is it? Actually, it pretty much is, but it’s a really good one with just enough weirdness and beauty that I recommend it even if you don’t normally play 2D sidescrolling shooters. Stand by for the review later this week.
Then there are Capcom’s Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, Nintendo’s Kid Icarus: Uprising, and Tecmo’s Ninja Gaiden 3, all out this week, and all arguably big releases. Consider this week an elevated wallet threat all around.
When I played Saints Row 3, I eventually set up a custom mix tape consisting of my favorite songs from the various radio stations. Thanks, game, for letting me assemble from your licensed music my own personalized soundtrack!
So after my first few runs in SSX, unimpressed by the random tracks that played — Who knew Foster The People has a song that isn’t Pumped Up Kicks? — I went into the custom music option to pick which tracks would accompany me down SSX’s glorious mountains. And what a surprise to discover they’d licensed Daft Punk’s soundtrack to Tron. What a great idea. That’s perfect snowboarding music!
But as I went down the list, I was surprised to find so many Doors songs. I mean, I’m a big Doors fan, but is that appropriate snowboarding music? Or did they just get it really cheaply, because there are a lot of obscure Doors songs in here. Scrolling down…wait a minute. Heart? What? Who snowboards to Crazy For You? Besides me, I mean. Am I in the classic rock section of the soundtrack? Apparently not, because they also have Kesha’s first album. The whole album. What is going on here?
Oh, wait, has SSX gotten into my Xbox Live media center. For one brief shining moment, I thought Electronic Arts’ taste in music was as bad as mine.
The good news is that Pinball FX 2 is getting four new tables this spring. The bad news is that it’s a bunch more dippy superhero stuff, timed to tacitly tie into Joss Whedon’s Avengers movie. Marvel Pinball: Avengers Chronicles is a set of four tables — available for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, or Vita — featuring a collection of superheroes like, I dunno, Superman and Aquaman and that little monkey and those kids with magic rings and maybe that Green Lantern guy from the Seth Rogan movie and whatnot.
Actually, the World War Hulk table (pictured) sounds just weird enough that I want to play it. From the press release:
After the Hulk’s banishment to outer space, he returns to Manhattan to seek revenge against the Illuminati and wage war against the X-Men, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four and Doctor Strange in World War Hulk.
Hulk was banished to outer space? By the Illuminati? So he trashes Manhattan? Man, I don’t remember any of that stuff from the Lou Ferrigno TV show. And I am intrigued by this bit about a table called Fear Itself, even if the table is supposedly about Anthony Hopkin’s character from that goofy Thor movie:
Featuring a table design unlike any to date, Fear Itself utilizes magnetic energy in ways no one has ever before experienced on a pinball table:
“Unlike any to date”? “Ways no one has ever experienced before”? Okay, you got my attention. I mean, what am I going to do, not get the new tables? But I’m still holding out for one of these.
I don’t normally care much about release dates — they get here when they get here — but Diablo III’s release on May 15 is too big to not care much about. It’s no October 16th, of course, but it’s still big.
To announce the Mi-24 Hind add-on for Take On Helicopters, executive producer Lukas Milacek cites the following axiom about helicopters:
If it’s ugly, it’s British. If it’s weird, it’s French. And if it’s ugly and weird, it’s Russian.
How dare he! Just look at that regally hulking thing with its bulbous twin canopies and stubby death-laden wings. I suppose Milacek even thinks the A-10 is “ugly”. Harumph.
The new Hind DLC is $13, which seems a bit steep, but you can blame all those $60 scenery add-ons gobbled up by content-starved flight sim enthusiasts over the years.
I’m not very well versed in the Mario Party series, but based on my brief time with Mario Party 9, I can safely say it’s a great game for kids or drunk adults. If your household is host to either of those, consider this a minor wallet threat.
I feel the Silent Hill series has lost its way since the first game, but that doesn’t stop me from being curious about the latest, Silent Hill: Downpour. Still, is it a wise idea to name your game after a heavy rain?
Journey, the next game from the creators of Flower, is out this week. It has some sort of online functionality so that I don’t intend to play it until it’s out and you guys are playing it as well. But if the words “from the creators of Flower” aren’t a wallet threat, I don’t know what is. Finally Yakuza: Dead Souls brings to the clunky Japanese crimelord series exactly what it needs. Zombies.
I’m sitting on a bench outside my local MMA gym. My brother just knocked me out in sparring then drove off and now I need my mom to come pick me up. I’m pretty sure all I need now is Michelle DeStefanis – my eighth grade crush – to show up and declare that I’m a loser and I’ll have a new lifetime low.
After twenty minutes, my mom rolls up in her minivan and honks the horn at me, drawing even more attention. I can’t wait until I’m a parent, so I too can have the ability to make an awkward situation even more embarrassing for my child. I don’t turn around to check, but I’m sure the entire gym is now watching as I get in.
After the jump, why I (sorta) deserved to get beat up Continue reading →
I really like the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, but you have to play with four players. Trust me. This is a lesson I learned the hard way.
Last Tuesday I stopped by Best Buy to pick up two copies of the game, one for me and another for my friend Chris. I walked in when the doors opened and asked the guy if they had a collector’s edition. He laughed in my face and told me I should have pre-ordered. I replied with “I had no idea this was Gamestop.” I hate that guy.
After the jump, saving the galaxy can get pricey. Continue reading →
