About ten to fifteen hours into Final Fantasy XIII-2, you’ll finally come to Serendipity, the casino dimension (pictured). It features chocobo races, slot machines, and card games. One of the employees tells you more activities will be added later, which is par for the course for this game. New stuff is constantly being folded into Final Fantasy XIII-2.
I can’t make any sense of the chocobo races, in which big slow chickens take far too long to trot around a track. I’m supposed to bet on them. Presumably I should bet on the one I’ve entered into the race. Having accumulated three chocobos over the course of my travels, I proceed to run them into the ground. Each chocobo has so many races in him. They come in last place every time. Short of searching time and space for faster chocobos, I think I’ll stick to the other minigames.
The slot machines are, well, slot machines. I know better than to throw money into those things. Which leaves the card games. Ooh, I like card games! The room of slot machines has card tables on one side, and a hostess offers to explain how the card tables work. Okay, let’s give this a shot. I select the “Learn about the card tables” option.
To be unlocked with future downloadable content.
Now I wouldn’t normally mind if these minigames weren’t all present and accounted for. If there’s one thing I can say after about twenty hours in Final Fantasy XIII-2, it’s that the economy is absurd, pointless, and very likely broken. I don’t really need to race chickens, yank a lever, or play cards to earn FinalBux. But I’m here in Serendipity because one of the characters just told me that he can make me a super paradox-fueled uberweapon if I bring him a Chaos Crystal. And guess what’s at the top of the list of prizes that you can only get by cashing in your casino chips?
I’ll be over here at the slot machine with a bucket of coins.
An elevated wallet threat level has been issued for die-hard fans of JRPGs or fighting games due to the release of Final Fantasy XIII-2 and Soulcalibur V. I’ll have full reviews soon, but at this point all I can say for sure is that one of them is terrible.
On the completely unknown front is Neverdead (pictured), a shooter from the developers of the forgettable but decent Rogue Trooper five years ago and the forgettable but terrible Aliens vs. Predator two years ago. And if you’re a sucker for iPhone games and Cthulhu, make a sanity check against the five-dollar Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land, a tactical combat game about fighting Shug Nigguraths and whatnot.
Remember in Resident Evil 5 how cool it was to have Sheva by your side? She was exotic and sometimes competent and, most important, she had personality. Those were the days.
In Resident Evil: Revelations on the Nintendo 3DS, you get new partners. When you’re playing as Jill Valentine, a character whose cleavage you literally wrestled with in Resident Evil 5, your partner is a rather, uh, portly European fellow. Would husky be a more polite word? I’m not sure if he’s French or Spanish or what, but I get the impression that he reeks of cologne and has a bunch of candy bars in one of those pockets.
But that’s not the worst of it. When you’re playing as Chris “Derp” Redfield, your partner is a woman named Jessica who seems to have been inspired by the Shit Girls Say Twitter feed. Within the first five minutes of the game, she’s complaining about being cold and her feet hurting. Then she starts nagging you about whether she’s better than your last partner. At the end of your first mission with her, you fall down a pit and get attacked by a bunch of zombie dogs. You have to survive the zombie dog onslaught while she makes her way to you. At one point, I thought she said, “Me and my sweet ass are on the way!” That’s what it sounded like and I was too busy reloading my dog-killing popgun to check the subtitles for what she had actually said. But the main point is Jessica is so annoying that’s what I thought she said.
But then I died and had to replay the zombie dog sequence again. Sure enough, that’s exactly what she says. “Me and my sweet ass are on the way!” In this day and age, are you allowed to talk to your coworkers that way? It’s enough to make you long for Ashley’s cries of “Leon!”
One year ago, a fellow in Sweden writing under the name rasmadrak announced that he was going to blog his attempt to make a pinball machine in his living room. The blog continued apace, often with a lot of technical details about electronics and woodwork and circuits and various other things that pinball fans care about nearly as much as movie fans care about emulsion techniques. Several months later, he announced that it would be a Fallout themed table. Ooh, that’s pretty cool! Maybe not cool enough to actually make me want to go to Sweden and knock on his door, but still pretty cool.
But you know what’s cooler? He changed his mind shortly thereafter and now he’s building it as a Bioshock themed table.
It’s really the perfect “replacement” for the original theme – the art deco is there, the decadence and all the major game elements could almost directly be translated into a Bioshock feature…The old theme was based on the early Fallout games! Also a setting very dear to me, but it was really hard to find high resolution images to use and the color palette was mostly brown-isch. With Bioshock, I’m allowed to use blue, red, green, pink, purple etc without it getting weird. It all fits together really nicely.
He still hasn’t tipped his hand about the table layout, but you can see he’s got a Big Daddy figure with a rotating drill and green, yellow, or red lights depending on its hostility state. From bits of the table art, it also seems to have a reference to Big Sisters, Rapture’s disastrous New Years Eve celebration, and the option to harvest or rescue Little Sisters. Rasmadrak read my mind! Or vice versa.
Anyone know where I can get a cheap plane ticket to Stockholm?
(Thanks Robert Bjarmyr!)
If you’re not into niche strategy games, this isn’t your week yet. Instead, this is the week for A House Divided, the American Civil War add-on for Victoria II, a fascinating historical strategy game in dire need of one of Paradox’s trademark add-ons. You can also pick up an indie tower defense game called Oil Rush that looks just as pretty as Anno 2070, but presumably won’t suck up dozens of hours at a time.
UPDATE: The Victoria II expansion was pushed back to February 2nd, making for a strictly monochromatic wallet thread level this week.
Many sites on the Internet have gone black. They are either shut down or somehow showing their protest for the SOPA and PIPA acts that our Congress is currently debating. If you haven’t done so, please take a moment to learn about what’s happening and how you can get involved.
That’s not Richard Garriott up there, but I can’t show you a still from the sci-fi movie he wrote, directed, and starred in. No one can. Because NASA has put the kibosh on it, unlike the movie Apollo 18, which accuses NASA of spreading sentient moonrocks around the world in a bid for, uh, world domination? I’m not clear on that part of the movie Apollo 18, which wasn’t written by, directed by, or starring Richard Garriott, but it did take place in space. The difference is that Garriott’s movie was actually shot in space during his $30 million stint as a space tourist.
Garriott’s space movie is news to me. I know he was promoting whatever that MMO was at the time that had his name attached. But he also made an eight-minute short, starring himself and some local talent (i.e. astronauts). However, NASA hasn’t given him clearance to, I dunno, post it on YouTube or whatever he would do with it. Garriott insists NASA doesn’t have ulterior motives, and he speculates that it’s just a matter of the levity not being appropriate. But that’s exactly what he would say if he was trying to deflect suspicion from an organization spreading sentient moonrocks in a bid for world domination that didn’t want their plot inadvertently exposed by something you might be able to see in the background of Garriott’s footage.
Hey, look, the Writers Guild of America has selected its annual nominations for best writing in a videogame!
In the category of video game writing, the teams behind Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, Batman: Arkham City, Brink, Mortal Kombat, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception were all nominated.
The WGA awards are kind of weird, because they’re limited to WGA members. That’s just how guilds work. But I actually lied about one of those nominees. I’ll bet you dollars to donuts you can’t figure out which one without clicking on the link.
One of the most valuable lessons for videogames to learn is that they aren’t movies. I love this Gamasutra interview with Ken Levine about working with actors for Bioshock Infinite, partly because it digs deep into a process that eludes too many videogames: how to effectively use actors to capture the human element. But I really like the following anecdote, which gets to the heart of the matter that videogames can’t just do things the way movies, comic books, or TV shows do them. Understanding the limitations of a videogame is a fundamental part of the design process.
You gotta work with the tools that you have. You also have to make sure you’re not trying to do things that you can’t support. I think one of the first lessons I learned in the game industry, in my first few weeks, I was working on a Star Trek Voyager game that never shipped, and I wrote an opening cutscene for the game. I was a writer on it.
The last part of the opening cutscene I wrote in the stage directions, “The camera pulls in on Janeway’s face, and we see her eyes widen in terror.” Now this is 1995. Janeway’s face was a bitmap that was approximately maybe 32 by 32 pixels.
And my lead programmer said to me, “Dude. You’re not pulling in on Janeway’s face, and her eyes are not widening on terror. She’s sitting there, 32 by 32 pixels, you know, doing nothing.” And I was like “Ohhhh. Okay. I need to figure out different ways to get these emotions across.” That was a very valuable lesson.
Too many videogames are still trying to “pull in on Janeway’s face” in some manner or another. As Levine puts it at the end of the interview, “Whenever you find yourself fighting against your toolset, you’re not going to win that fight”. And now I will resist the temptation to reel off a list of recent videogames that should have known better and still lost that particular fight.
What the heck kind of MMO doesn’t have crafting? DC Universe Online. Until today, that is. The latest update added “Research & Development”.
…decide what kind of item you wish to create. Equipment Mods can be socketed into gear for powerful benefits, and various Consumables will lend you bonuses for short durations of time. Plans for the creation of either can be found throughout the world or purchased at new Research and Development vendors.
Once you have learned the appropriate plan, collect the necessary components, including Exobytes, and assemble the new item at a Research and Development station. Equipment Mods come in various colors which, when matched with similarly colored sockets on your gear, can provide even further bonuses and power.
As a fan of DC Universe Online, I think this is a great idea. One of the strengths and weaknesses of this game is that you can get to the level cap pretty quickly. This means it’s relatively easy to get to the endgame content. But it also means that satisfying sense of advancement comes to a halt and you’re left grinding instances for bits and pieces of raid gear. A good crafting system, especially when it relates directly to the player’s equipment, is a great alternate track of advancement once character leveling slows or stops. See, for instance, the legendary items in Lord of the Rings Online or the modular weapon system in Star Wars: Old Republic.
The new R&D system is part of Update 8, which went live today.
As much as I’d love to revisit Lord of the Rings Online, a writer who goes by the name of Revious at Kill Ten Rats details exactly what I know will happen:
When I logged back in I was beset on all sides by system mailings, announcements of new achievements I had somehow started, resets to all my legendary weapons, and a new trait / stat regime. It was bad enough that I was in the middle of a book, with tons of other quests already started, in the beginning of a region I didn’t remember while staring at a virtual cockpit of skills. Like a strange, albino gangle creature emerging into sunlight, I just blindly stumbled around for awhile until I found something to kill. It took me way too long to kill the enemy (as I, in the madness of things, had forgotten to up my legendary weapon’s DPS because it had been reset), and frustrated I logged off.
I don’t mean to engage in duelling MMOs, but this is exactly why I instead jumped back into Rift, which is atypical among MMOs for how it’s generous with respecs. One of Rift’s unique selling points is that every character class is, at any time, eight different character classes. Actually, that’s not quite true. A character is technically a mix of skills and abilities from any three classes at once. That’s not even quite true. A character can have several of these set up at once, and can furthermore toggle among them at any point. This lends Rift a lot of variety in terms of how it plays, but it also makes for a relatively painless re-entry. Don’t understand your character build? No sweat. Tear it down and build a new one from the ground up. Build a few. That’s how Rift works.
But I recommend Ravious story, because it actually has a happy ending. Spoiler: you can get by with a little help from your friends. In the end, the main draw of an MMO is the social element.
My first paid videogame review was in 1994 for c|net’s Gamecenter. I’ve been writing reviews as a freelancer ever since then. By my math — hold on, gimme a second… — that’s either 16 or 27 years of experience as a freelancer. Today, it comes to a close.
After the jump, why you won’t be seeing my byline out there anymore Continue reading →
Far be it from me to question the genius of Will Wright. The guy has more insight into the art of game design in his little finger than I have in my twenty years of leveling up clerics, Forza cars, and FAMASes. But when he reveals his latest project, HiveMind, as follows:
…a group of cross-platform, cross-media online applications…designed to turn a gamer’s everyday life into part of the interactive experience by building upon Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) and tapping into streams of personal information on phones, tablets, social networks and computers.
I have no idea what to make of that. My brain shuts down about half way through the description. Whatever a buffer overflow is, I think that’s what happens in my head when I try to read through those words. You’d have better luck trying to explain the third law of thermodynamics to my cat.
You can read more in this perfunctory Q&A, but I don’t recommend it. It’ll just confuse you even more.
Happy holidays from all of us at Quarter to Three to all of you on the other side of this monitor! Here’s me hanging out in front of one of the holiday decorations sprung up around the world of Rift. You’ll even find Christmas trees smack dab in the middle of swirling rifts spitting out monsters. I don’t want to be all bah humbug, but how long are those going to be there? At least in Space Pirates and Zombies, I can turn off the Santa Claus who flies around and drops candy-filled presents.
We’ll be back next week with a couple of new contributors doing game diaries for games that I guarantee you aren’t expecting. Seriously, go ahead and guess. You’ll be wrong.
Here I am, nearly a year after first hearing about it, finally giving Minecraft a shot. My first attempt didn’t go so well. When night fell and the zombies came out, I retreated to the back of a cave to hide until dawn. Of course, it’s dark in caves, and even darker in caves at night, and zombies are persistent. So when I heard zombies coming and I was unable to see anything, I did the only thing I knew how to do: I attacked the darkness. My inventory consisted of 8 flowers, 3 mushrooms, and 9 blocks of dirt. Of those three things, I figured the blocks of dirt would make for the most powerful projectiles. So I equipped them and right-clicked to throw them in the general direction of the moaning. I threw them until I didn’t have any more to throw.
I don’t think I killed any zombies. But I did succeed in walling myself in so I couldn’t move. Or see anything. I tried jumping, right-clicking, punching, crouching, to no avail. There’s apparently no crouching in Minecraft. Having Cask of Amontillado’ed myself, I think my only recourse is waiting until I starve to death and respawn. So, yeah, game one of Minecraft. So far, so good.
My second (and final?) game, after the jump Continue reading →
