One Mr. Tom W. Chick has been known to say “Fuck Star Wars” as his reaction to the new films, games or, well, anything. I don’t even think it has to be Star Wars related any more. While I don’t hate Star Wars as much as Tom (though I do hate it quite a bit now), I discovered that, after playing Dead Island, I’m done with sewers.
This quote from Adaptation sums up my feelings nicely:
John Laroche: Look, I’ll tell you a story, all right? I once fell deeply, you know, profoundly in love with tropical fish. Had 60 goddamn fish tanks in my house. I skin dived to find just the right ones. Anisotremus virginicus, Holdacanthus ciliaris, Chaetodon capistratus. You name it. Then one day I say, “fuck fish”. I renounce fish. I vow never to set foot in that ocean again. That’s how much “fuck fish”. That was 17 years ago and I have never stuck so much as a toe in that ocean. And I love the ocean. Susan Orlean: But why? John Laroche: Done with fish.
While reading the manual for Sengoku, Paradox’s latest strategy game, I came across some good news and some bad news. First the bad news. In the section on a character’s age statistic:
Death becomes more likely every year after age 40.
Way to cheer up your older demographic, Sengoku. Now the good news. Under the section on relationships and spouses:
In feudal Japan, men were not limited to one wife, so it is possible for your character to marry up to four women.
Sweet! Although that might explain the shorter life span. Also, way to pander to male gamers, Sengoku. History is so dude-based.
In Sengoku, a primary resource is your character’s honor, which is sort of like his mana, except that instead of casting fireballs, he spends it to do history stuff. Honor isn’t easy to come by. You can buy it by giving gifts to the Emperor in the form of your hard-earned cash, or you can buy it by handing out land to your vassals. Also, you can play as a devout Shintoist, which earns your character an honor income. Shintoists get honor, Buddhists get warrior monk reinforcements, and Christians get guns. Even feudal Japan had red states.
However, there is one more way to earn honor. Each province can build various types of manufactories for special bonuses. If you build a pottery manufactory, you earn honor. I have no idea what this is modeling, since my frame of reference for pottery manufactories is 1) that time my girlfriend dragged me to Color Me Mine, and 2) that canoodling scene in Ghost with Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze. Probably not what the creators of Sengoku had in mind.
The above trailer for Kirby Mass Attack starts out innocently enough. At about the thirty second mark, I started to feel uneasy. A minute in, I was pretty sure I was watching something without quite understanding that it was dirty, like when you see a video of two people in animal costumes prancing around and then it gets a little weird, and before you know it, you’re dragged into an unwelcome new awareness of a fetish you didn’t even know existed. That’s how I’d describe the psychological journey I took watching so many little Kirby’s doing things I didn’t understand. Part of it is that Kirby himself is so weird. Ten Kirbys are ten times as weird. Ten Kirbys doing indeterminate things to various objects and creatures is exponentially weirder.
Double Fine’s lively, charming, and polished tower defense/action game, Trenched, should be every bit as good as Signal Studio’s lively, charming, and polished tower defense/action game, Toy Soldiers: Cold War. But it’s not. And the simple reason is that there are too few ways to play Trenched. There is no survival mode. There is no head-to-head option. There are no minigames. There are no set-ups for different types of games. There are no challenges. All the great things that give Toy Soldiers: Cold War such incredibly long legs should be in Trenched, but they aren’t. It’s no longer enough to just make a good game. You have to give us different cool ways to experience that game.
Fortunately, Trenched is getting a survival mode at some point in the future. It’s only one map, but at least it’s one step closer to making Trenched as good as it should have been.
Oh, also, it’s not going to be called Trenched any more because of a legal brouhaha with some Europeans who have something called Trench. So later this month, Trenched will forever after be known as Iron Brigade, which sounds like something turn-based and with hexes.
On this week’s Joystiq podcast, I’m part of a panel of dudes who played Deus Ex and have a few things to say about it. I’m also on this week’s Gameshark podcast, where there’s a fair bit of Deus Ex talk. It seems odd to me that I’m talking Deus Ex: Human Revolution on two podcasts this week. I should probably step aside and let people who feel more passionately talk about it. Having some guy go “eh, it’s fine, I suppose” isn’t really interesting.
But since I didn’t care for the original Deus Ex, I’ve been asked by some folks what I think of this latest sequel. And that’s actually an interesting angle to me, because I think a lot of Deus Ex fans really appreciate what Eidos Montreal has created. I do as well. Partly because Eidos Montreal gets what made Deus Ex work, but also because they get what didn’t make Deus Ex work. Human Revolution address many of my complaints about the original game, including the AI problems, the problems at that time with the Unreal engine, and what I felt was a sloppy and mostly irrelevant mishmash of conspiracy theories in lieu of a story. Probably my favorite thing about Human Revolution is its timely and relevant theme of society’s ambivalence about technology. I couldn’t care less about those Illuminati goofballs.
Hard Reset, which is so very Painkiller meets Deus Ex and doesn’t bother with stealth or hacking, is out this week for the PC. I love what I’ve seen of it. I’ve been told it’s short, but it’s also half the price of a regular release, so do your own math. It’s also entirely missing any sort of multiplayer, so be sure the carry the two.
Red Orchestra 2, a World War II shooter in which you can’t even play as the Americans, is out this week. However, it’s not available for the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3. In fact, but you can’t even play it with a 360 controller. You’ll have to get your mouse and keyboard out of the closet.
King Arthur: Fallen Champions is the standalone sequel to King Arthur, a very scenario-based strategy game that plays a bit like one of Creative Assembly’s games, but with more magic than usual on account of Merlin and company. It’s only on PCs because it’s an RTS. Duh.
One of my favorite RTS developers, Petroglyph, is trying trying again, this time with a free-to-play MOBA called Rise of the Immortals. It goes live this week. Only on the PC, of course.
Finally, Sengoku from Paradox is out this week, and it has way too much math for any console gamers to figure out. It’s also got enough Japanese names to really confuse a gaijin like me. But I love how it takes the more personal, character-driven approach of Crusader Kings to convey the ebb and flow of feudal Japan. For all the glorious armies and rich artwork of Shogun 2, sometimes a guy just wants to concentrate on the strategy game parts of his strategy game.
You might guess from this screenshot of an iPhone game that you’re looking at some actioney shooter thing in which a little dude shoots monsters. Not quite. That’s no monster. That’s a Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath. And while there’s certainly shooting involved, check out those stats on the right side of the screen. SAN? As in “sanity”? But of course. What sort of Cthulhu game doesn’t have sanity?
What’s more, look a little closer and you’ll see the AP and hit% figures at the bottom of the screen. Action points and die rolls? Like you’d find in a turn-based game? Yep.
Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land is a turn-based RPG, and it’s set in the early 20th century, like any Cthulhu game should be. Your dudes — you’ll control up to six of them — might lose sanity when encountering monsters, but you’ll also spend sanity to cast spells.
The Wasted Land is based on the Chaosium pen-and-paper RPG, so in addition to the usual combat skills (it’s still basically a combat game), you’ll also have a Cthulhu mythos skill that determines how well you can use spells, and a psychoanalysis skill that lets you restore lost sanity. There’s no announced release date yet, but find out more here.
Victoria 2 is one of Paradox’s greatest games partly because it’s great, but partly because it has such a unique sense of identity. No game models the interplay of population and politics quite so cannily as Victoria 2.
However, the last time I played, it had a couple of frustrating issues that killed my interest. The first is that I was able to max my spending on bureaucrats just long enough to optimize their effect, at which point I could lower the spending to zero with no apparent detrimental effect. My society would run smoothly with an unpaid bureaucracy. Wisconsin would be so proud.
The other problem I found was a global shortage of liquor, which made a lot of production difficult. You need liquor for artillery, for instance. It may not seem like a good idea to mix liquor and heavy firepower, but them’s the rules. If you want artillery, you gotta get your men liquored up.
So during a recent trawl through the Paradox forums to see what’s up with patches, I was pleased to discover the following in the notes for the latest beta patch.
– Beuruecrats will demote quicker to farmer and labourers if no current spending.
– Increased liquour output a little bit further.
I’ll refrain from putting [sic] in there, since I’m American and therefore have trouble distinguishing between the Queen’s English and a typo.
I don’t envy Atari having to promote their upcoming game for the Wii and DS. Thanks to Dutch filmmaker Tom Six, I mentally put the word “human” in front of the word “centipede” whenever I see it. It’s his fault the last feature in this paragraph is so unintentionally creepy.
Centipede returns as an updated version of beloved gaming classic. Explore an expansive new world with seven different environments and 40 stages. Defend Maisies [sic] garden from waves of nasty creepy crawlers with an arsenal of over 20 weapons. Test your power and skill against five devious bosses. Team up with a friend for maximum fire power for nail biting two player co-op action.
New content goes live for DC Universe Online today, including a new set of superpowers and some more instances.
Introducing DC Comics legend The Green Lantern and the game’s seventh power set (Light), the “Fight for the Light” pack allows players to join the Green Lantern Corps or Sinestro Corps as reservist members while helping to restore balance to the universe.
Along with interactions with Green Lantern based favorites and foes, players will be launched into multiple action-packed scenarios, including an epic battle for control in S.T.A.R. Labs, a light-to-light showdown with the Red Lantern Corps in Coast City, and chaotic prison break at Sciencells Prison.
I really enjoyed DC Universe Online, and if I had time to jump into an MMO, it’s on the very short list of MMOs I’d like to get back to playing. But I wish the developers at Sony Online would find a way to get players out into the cities of Gotham and Metropolis. When the game launched, these cities were full of players zipping to and fro, getting into skirmishes with each other, and generally bringing the places to life while they did quests on the short trip to the level limit. At which point they all retreated into instances to grind for raid gear. Last time I checked, Gotham and Metropolis were ghost towns.
And Sony Online seems content to keep them ghost towns by continuing to shunt players into places like S.T.A.R. Labs, Coast City, and the Sciencells Prison. What about Metropolis and Gotham City, which are already in the game and in dire need of things to do and players doing them? And when is Sony Online going to unbottle some of those buildings and let us fight over them?
I couldn’t tell you the first thing about the storyline in Bodycount, which is all about the gunplay like a shooter should be. However, throughout the game, an obligatory female voice is talking you through the missions. She’s your handler or narrator or Cortana or whatever. This is how you’re supposed to figure out the story, but I was only half listening. Near the end of the game, she gets attacked and you have to mumblemumble data cores mumblemuble nexus mumblemumble cyber program mumblemumble to save her. And that’s when I realized the voice actress is a dead ringer for the host of NPR’s Fresh Air, Terry Gross. Who I’d much rather rescue than Neal Conan or Robert Siegel.
I’ll have a full review of Bodycount posted later this week. Until then, suffice to say Bodycount doesn’t close nearly as strong as it opens.
Gamespy has printed my field guide to Banoi fauna. Which is also a sort of advisory FAQ for anyone considering whether to travel to Banoi, the New Guinea island where Dead Island takes place. For instance:
Are my children in danger?
Despite what you may believe based on the 2010 promotional video for Dead Island, children on the island of Banoi are absolutely safe. You will not encounter any child zombies, even though they’re a fundamental part of zombie traditions ranging from 1968’s Night of the Living Dead to 2010’s The Walking Dead. Thanks to the diligent efforts of the ESRB, the zombie apocalypse will not affect anyone under the age of 18 in anything that isn’t called Dead Rising 2. And even then, it occurs tastefully off-screen.
Welcome to the holidays. Your wallet is now officially under siege.
Dead Island is the only release this week that I’ve actually played for any meaningful length of time. The review is under embargo, but I think you know where I stand: in a puddle of blood, amid hacked-off zombie limbs, clutching one of those knives you use to cut down cane sugar, with a few of my friends at my side*.
But this week would still be a potentially dire wallet threat even if it weren’t for Techland’s zombie masterpiece. I really like the car-hopping conceit that Driver: San Francisco brings to multiplayer. Resistance 3 is out this week. Disgaea 4 (pictured). Space Marine. The Starfox remake for the Nintendo 3DS. The cute rock-rolling tower defense game Rock of Ages. The Xbox Live Arcade action RPG Crimson Alliance. Rise of Nightmares for your Kinect.
I’m sorry, I tried. I really tried. I tried to mention that last one with a straight face, but I just couldn’t.
* i.e. wandering away to look for loot, even though they know they’re just going to get jumped again
Well that was unexpected. Another TOY STORY. This week’s community level. Should be sickeningly cute and childish, with annoying music. Nothing too taxing. Just enough to remind me why I love those movies so much and should steer clear of movie levels when playing this game.
Wrong. Another TOY STORY is challenging and gorgeous with a nifty sound design. Did I mention it was challenging? I can think of at least three spots where I thought I’d have to throw in the towel. I didn’t. I figured it out, and was pleasantly surprised. A movie-themed level that is smart and difficult. Not to mention evocative. Didn’t expect that.
I also didn’t expect to learn a lesson in gaming strategy from National Public Radio.
After the jump, the ants go marching in formation, hurrah hurrahContinue reading →
Above are some of the guys in the town hub for Cladun x2, the sequel to last year’s thoroughly charming and even more thoroughly addictive Cladun: This Is an RPG! They are, from left to right, Harry Potter, the Witchmaster General, and I think some guy from Marvel vs. Capcom. I can already tell I’m going to love Cladun x2, and it’s gratifying to see the new stuff emerge. I’m enjoying a series of “Ah, so they’re going to add that!” moments.
However, I have one very important question for those guys up there: Where’s Pudding? I can’t bear to think I’m going to play dozens of hours of this intricately configurable dungeon crawl without the first game’s brash but sympathetic heroine along for the ride.
