Now that I’m a bit further into Dead Rising 2: Off the Record, I think I understand what Capcom is doing. This is an alternate Dead Rising 2 timeline, in which Frank West shows up where Chuck Green was originally. I didn’t quite understand this until I met Chuck, which is one of the highlights of Off the Record. And while I appreciate this sort of narrative shuffle in a game where the narrative is so unimportant that you can entirely ignore it if you want, is it enough for a standalone product? Certainly not, which explains the new sci-fi-themed area of Fortune City and the (slightly disappointing) sandbox mode. Overall, I can’t help but shake the feeling that this should have been downloadable content.
Consider Rockstar. The Undead Nightmare add-on for Red Dead Redemption, the South Central add-on for Midnight Club: Los Angeles, and the Ballad of Gay Tony add-on for Grand Theft Auto IV were about the same amount of new content and re-used content as what you’re getting in Dead Rising 2: Off the Record. And while it’s not my place to guess how readily you’ll spend $10 instead of $40, I can’t help but notice the dramatically different asking prices.
Not to mention that I had to deal with Gamestop to get Dead Rising 2: Off the Record. The store had three disks, but none of the salesfolk could find a box. They offered to sell me just the disk.
“I’m not paying full price for the game without the box or manual,” I had told them.
“Sometimes the boxes get stolen,” one of them confided. As if Dead Rising 2: Off the Record boxes were so in demand among shoplifters that three of them had been filched within a week of the game’s release.
“Sir, I can give you 15% off,” another salesperson said in a hushed tone, as if he didn’t want the guy in line behind me to hear. I ended up going elsewhere to buy my copy. If Off the Record had been DLC, it would have saved me both trips.
Of course, the separate DLC for Off the Record was announced today. Next week, for $2, Frank West can don a Terminator skin and do extra lightning damage when he attacks. While I really appreicate what Capcom has been doing creatively, I hate how they’ve been packaging it. And I hate even more that I just spent $40 to support their business practices.
After nine months, one $40 follow-up, and DLC for the $40 follow-up, Marvel vs. Capcom 3 will get something Mortal Kombat had the instant it was released. The downloadable Heroes and Heralds add-on, which will supposedly be available when Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is released in November, is a mode where you can earn special abilities for your team as you fight your way through a series of battles. In other words, a series of battles with nifty tweaks and modifiers to vary the challenge level. Capcom takes their sweet time, and when they finally get around to it, they come with their hand outstretched and asking for a few ducats more.
On a related note and against my better judgment, I bought a copy of Dead Rising 2: Off the Record over the weekend. I understood that it would recycle Fortune City, but I had no idea it would also recycle the missions, the bosses, and the survivors. As near as I can tell, I’m replaying Dead Rising 2 a fourth time, but with a $40 Frank West skin that can take pictures to earn xp. It takes real chutzpah to make Electronic Arts’ business practices look charitable, but Capcom manages.
I suspect this will be known as the week Batman: Arkham City came out. But don’t forget that it’s also the week the surprisingly good Dungeon Defenders came out. Not since Renegade Ops has such a great game with such excellent multiplayer support and such long legs at such a low price had such a terrible name. That’s a lot to parse, so suffice to say Dungeon Defenders is easily one of the best tower defense games you can play.
Speaking of Renegade Ops, Sega promises that it’s finally coming out for the PC this week. Sony also promises that Payday: The Heist will finally come out this week. Sony also hopes to release Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One this week. Ubisoft hopes you’d rather learn to play a real guitar instead of playing Rock Band, hence this week’s Rocksmith.
Finally, there’s a new Professor Layton game out for the Nintendo DS, but how can there be any puzzles left after the previous Professor Laytons? Seriously, how many variations can you come up with on getting a chicken and a bag of grain across the river with one boat? From here on out, it’s got to be all mazes and sliding tile puzzles, right?
Rift is free this weekend, starting right…about…now through 9am Monday morning (California time). If you’re an erstwhile player interested in seeing what’s new (for instance, this mondo update just went live), there’s no time like the next few days. I won’t be there, as I have other grinding engagements at present, but I post this in the hopes of being able to vicariously enjoy Rift through you.
I’m one of those people who avoids information about the games I want to play. Rage was one of those titles. Despite seeing it at two different E3s, I had paid so little attention that I had no idea how the story even began.
Among certain scientists*, it’s a known fact Quarter to Three readers are smarter, better looking, healthier, and win more stuff than the average person. Just ask Jens Genberg and Habbaku, the recipients of free copies of Space Pirates and Zombies, and Land Murphy and Abruzzi Ridge, who get their choice of free T-shirts from 604 Republic. Congratulations!
One thing I have in common with Eric Bana is that we both share a fondness for a line of Fords manufactured in Australia under the name Falcon. Do not confuse the Australian Ford Falcon with the boxy American Ford Falcon your grandma drove to church on Sundays. Australian Falcons are for mischief, including the sort of hard driving you have to do after an apocalypse. I know this because I’ve seen Mad Max and The Road Warrior, where Ford Falcons were cast as “the last of the V8 Interceptors”.
However, unlike Bana, I have never driven a Ford Falcon. Until today. I almost didn’t even notice it. Forza 4 drops cars into your garage like a pinata drops candy. No, seriously Forza, I don’t need any more cars. I haven’t even gotten around to driving the last ten you gave me. I don’t need any– Hey, what’s this? A 1970 Ford Falcon? Well, well, well, don’t mind if I do.
I immediately went to paint it, hoping I could dress it the matte black it wore in The Road Warrior. No such luck. In fact, I couldn’t even figure out how to override the two-tone color scheme and the GT351 logo on the side. So I went online to check Forza’s catalog of player-made designs, which is one of the unique strengths of this driving series. Guys who wouldn’t dream of fussing over what their sims wear will spend hours perfecting and uploading paint schemes for their Forza cars. I found plenty of black Mad Max schemes, complete with the gold badge on the side of the car. But even better, I found some of the colorful pre-apocalypse police schemes from the original Mad Max movie. Pictured, by the way. Gorgeous, huh? It just needs the police lights on top. The guy who made it didn’t even charge me any of my ingame Forzabuck credits.
Since you so rarely get to hear me on a podcast, you might be interested in the latest episode of Roleplayers’ Realm, Gamepro’s RPG podcast hosted by Kat Bailey. We talk about Big Huge Games’ upcoming Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning in a bit more detail than I was able to go into with my preview. As soon as I leave, everyone breaks out into a Dark Souls conversation. Typical.
Check it out. That’s my Honda Fit tearing it up at Tsukuba in Forza 4. Pretty awesome, huh? I don’t know why you don’t see more Honda Fits in the racing world. Like, say, the Annual Honda Fit Invitational at Nurburgring.
Paramount’s 2003 remake of The Italian Job was a love letter to (i.e. product placement for) BMW’s new Mini Cooper. I think it’s time for a similar movie featuring the Honda Fit. Paul Walker will star as the hero who assembles a plucky band of heisters, each with a different colored Honda Fit. Daniel Day-Lewis will play the villain, who drives a Humvee. In the big finale, our heroes will save the day because Day-Lewis has to pull over at a gas station to fill up, while the Fits merrily drive away, getting nearly 40 miles to the gallon.
Disclaimer: I drive a Honda Fit. This post may or may not be a desperate bid to convince myself my car is, in fact, cool.
The Hail to the Icons Parody Pack add-on for Duke Nukem Forever is now available! It offers three new multiplayer game modes, four new maps, as well as new weapons. As an early member of the First Access Club, you get it for free!
To get the code for your platform of choice, head over to http://www.dukenukemforever.com/access/
– Your friends at 2K Games & Gearbox Software
I vaguely remember talk of an expansion pack for Duke Nukem Forever. So, what’s this thing all about? Oh man, it’s called the Parody Pack. When I first saw that, my reaction was similar to the reaction of the reels guy having to load the Hulk running in Modern Romance. This isn’t looking good.
In this pack, you get access to a few new modes, including the Hot Potato one where you kidnap a woman. The other big draw is the release of four new maps, all of which are parodies of other games. There’s Call of Duke (Call of Duty), Sandpit (Halo?), Inferno (Doom), and 2forts1bridge (Team Fortress 2) all available for download in the new pack. Each map includes a special weapon, most notable the DFG on Inferno. In Doom, BFG stood for Big Fucking Gun. What does DFG stand for? Duke Fucking Gun? Probably.
Good luck to the 12 of you trying to play online tonight.
I didn’t realize it at the time because I was just a kid, but the 80s began on December 14, 1979 with the release of London Calling. The Clash’s masterpiece of focused punk rage was varied, catchy, and smarter than any mere punk rock. The rest of the 80s had a tough act to follow.
London Calling was added to the Rock Band catalog earlier this year when Harmonix released the entire album. But as far as I’m concerned, The Clash’s contribution to the 80s isn’t fully represented without a single from their album Combat Rock, released two years later. Rock the Casbah. I was never a big Clash fan while growing up. Silly Brit musicians, thinking they’re playing punk rock when they sound nothing like Black Flag or The Dead Kennedys or even The Sex Pistols. But I remember everyone playing Rock the Casbah when the Gulf War began in 1991. If you listened to the lyrics, which were mostly easy to parse except for some line about being “fundamentally caught naked”, the song was about repressive Islamic governments cracking down on Western culture. It was probably a response to the Islamic revolution in Iran, something kind of weird for a punk band to get bent out of shape about, particularly a punk band with an album called Sandinista. If you overthrow puppets like the Shah and Samoza, you’re going to get what you get. But it was the Cold War, so the rules were more about ideology than consistency. “Fundamentally caught naked” indeed.
So thematically, nearly ten years later, Rock the Casbah had nothing to do with an American-led coalition responding to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, which I would argue was the end of the 80s, as we found a new post-Cold War place in the world. But there was some stuff in the song about jets dropping bombs between minarets, so it would have to do. And because it was a very English song, it folded nicely into Operation Desert Storm’s international flavor. Just as The Clash played us into the 80s, here they were playing us out of the 80s as we made our way into the 90s.
Rock the Casbah is available today, along with some Blink 182 stuff that I’m sure the other kids in your dorm would enjoy.
I had forgotten how beautiful Wipeout HD is. Not just the course graphics, but — THOOM — pretty much everything about it. The looks of the different vehicles. The design of the fictional product placement around the tracks. The color and activity. In the background of the — THOOM — above screenshot is a milling crowd I’d never noticed. Even the interface before you’re into the game proper is beautiful. The animated folders for the — THOOM — Fury add-on. The icons for each individual track on the game settings screen. Wipeout has always been an aesthetic feast.
I had also forgotten that every race seems to take place over an underground mining colony hard at work with their, I dunno, rock pounders or whatever they’ve got that makes such a racket. I’ve never seen them, but by golly I can hear them. THOOM. Erratic but constant, deep and resonant. It drove me crazy. I never understood it. A perfectly sublime game — THOOM — ruined by its inexplicable proximity to invisible industrial machinery. Surely that can’t be how the game is supposed to sound. Was it some problem with my sound set up, maybe a — THOOM — crossed wire sending the wrong signals to my subwoofer? I even asked other players if they noticed it. No one knew what I was talking about. Like the pipes that heated my college dorm*, I learned to live with it.
Until now.
After the jump, the mystery of — THOOM — Wipeout HD’s pounding diversion solvedContinue reading →
Stalker 2, a sequel to a game that people thought would never come out in the first place, has released its first bit of detail. Instead of telling you about the setting or a new enemy, GSC revealed that the sequel will require a live internet connection and will stream bits of the game off of internal servers. Recently, after being asked about their copy protection plans, studio director Sergey Grigorovich had the following to say:
Protection from piracy? Part of the content will be located on the server and downloaded as the game progresses. Permanent internet access is required. Text information, code and quests will be loaded through that connection.
This was brought to the attention of the GSC forum users who weren’t overly fond of this move. As far as I know, this is a first. I’ve never seen a company announce their DRM before telling anyone anything at all about their game. Luckily, GSC has since backed off of the claim, stating on twitter:
DRM was only mentioned as a possibility, not a choice. We’re still looking for a method that is acceptable for both GSC and the community!
Here’s hoping they come down on the side of the gamers.
If you have small children and a Kinect, two things that aren’t conducive to videogaming as we know it, this is your lucky week. Doublefine’s Sesame Street game, Once Upon a Monster, is out this week.
Aliens: Infestation for the Nintendo DS is a 2D game in the tradition of the Castlevania/Metroid games, set aboard the Sulaco immediately following the events of the movie Aliens. As you explore, your squad of Colonial Marines will have to contend with a permadeath mechanic that also ties into the aliens’ lifecycle. Will we see the most meaningful chestburster gameplay since the multiplayer in Monolith’s Aliens vs. Predator 2? Based on what I’ve heard about Aliens: Infestation, Sega seems to be sitting on something special.
Dead Rising 2: Off the Record marks the re-return of Frank West and his camera, after the disappointing Case West add-on. Do I really want to play revisit the same area I’ve already played through a couple of times in Dead Rising 2? And hasn’t the meaty combat in Dead Island upstaged Dead Rising’s inconsequential zombie mowing? Will Off the Record’s sandbox mode be enough to sustain another trip through Fortune City?
Heroes of Might and Magic V is out this week. Oops, I meant VI. Heroes of Might and Magic VI. I’m sure they’re totally different games. Another totally different game is Ace Combat: Assault Horizon, which is the technical title of Ace Combat 15. I’m not exaggerating. There have been 14 Ace Combat games. Number 15 is out this week.
If you turn your nose up at console games and therefore missed Renegade Ops, now you can get Avalanche Studios’ superlative vehicular mayhem RPG for the PC. It will be available on Steam, with a Gordon Freeman buggy thrown in for good measure.
Finally, Forza 4 is out for those who want to use the Kinect to look at their cars in the new Kinect-driven “autovista” mode. Well, some of their cars. Kinectlook is only supported on certain cars. But I’ve been told you can also race in Forza 4, so keep an eye out for that if you’ve exhausted your copy of Shift 2.
