I had a great time hanging out with Rob Zacny and some dude named Soren Johnson — if that is his real name — on the latest episode of Three Moves Ahead. Neither of them took me up on my offer for coffee. Instead, we got busy talking about Age of Empires Online.
I could lie and say that I don’t really pay attention to my gamerscore on Xbox Live, and that one of the reasons I prefer playing games on my 360 instead of my PS3 isn’t because the achievements add to my gamerscore, and that I just happened to notice that I topped 50,000 points when I got the “Stealing is wrong, kids!” achievement in Bodycount for “diminishing the scavenger population”.
But none of those things is true. I can’t help but follow achievements and my gamerscore. It’s an insidious system because it’s effective. And I do gravitate to games on the 360 partly for that illusory feeling that I’m contributing to a body of work. And I noticed the exact moment I topped 50,000 because I was waiting for it to happen.
I was at 49,987 when the “achievement earned” sound dinged and that little box popped up on the screen. I checked the list, but the achievement was only 5 points for killing ten enemies with mines. I was still 18 points away from 50,000. Shortly thereafter, the sound dinged again. It was a 20 pointer for killing some indeterminate number of the guys who run around the levels picking up the scattered tokens that power your special abilities. “Stealing is wrong, kids!” it read. “Diminish the Scavenger Population”.
So here I sit, after six years, with a gamerscore of 50,002. I wish I could turn that feature off so it would stop distracting me from more important pursuits. Like finally getting a platinum trophy on the PS3.
In the most blatant forward-looking videogame product placement (i.e. advertisement) since Aaron Eckhart fought aliens under a Resistance 3 billboard in Battle: Los Angeles, Breaking Bad went to bat for Bethesda this past weekend. The opening scene in the latest episode featured Jesse pretending to play Rage with some sort of fake gun peripheral that doesn’t have the courtesy to superimpose a reticle over the canned footage that passes for gameplay. Meanwhile, the character supposedly relates the gameplay to his own misdeeds involving a gun. Shooters, man. They take you to dark places.
Frankly, I prefer it Breaking Bad is shilling for the new Dodge Challenger.
Hey, look, it’s time for Madden 12! Unleash your inner Pele with this year’s football simulation game from Electronic Arts, the fine folks who brought you Monopoly Streets, Deathspank, and Army of Two.
Am I little crazy to be looking forward to Bodycount, an unsung shooter from Codemasters? Have I been tricked by Fear 3 into expecting to be pleasantly surprised by what should be just a throwaway shooter? Do I just want to collect a whole mess of whatever those little collectibles are that scatter around the map like confetti when you shoot bad guys? Am I just a sucker for co-op modes?
Speaking of being a sucker, the Pirates and Nobles expansion for Sims: Medieval is out this week. I don’t care if it’s awful. It only takes a tiny nudge to push me into a little more Sims: Medieval. They could sell me a Stevedores and Chambermaids expansion.
The biggest joke in gaming is sadly not “Funny Ha Ha.”
Lately, the uproar has been about GameStop opening copies of the PC version of Deus Ex: Human Revolution and removing coupons for a free copy on the OnLive system. They weren’t really in the wrong on the point that Square/Enix shouldn’t have included coupons for a possible GameStop competitor without their knowledge. However, instead of holding the game back and discussing it with the publisher, they just opened them up, removed the piece of paper and then sold them as new. Is this legal? Maybe. Is it the right thing to do? I personally don’t believe so.
Though the Deus Ex thing is the latest hoo-haa for GameStop, it’s far from their first and certainly not the worst. With that in mind, lets take a look back at some of the other reasons you shouldn’t shop with GameStop.
After the Jump: GameStop, I Hardly Knew Ye
Last weekend was the end of the 1,000,000 dollar tournament that marks the official reveal of gameplay for Defense of the Ancients 2, or DotA 2 for short. Valve chose the tournament route to coincide with the large European games convention Gamescom, hosted in Cologne, Germany – a show in which many game developers release post-E3, pre-holiday news for the gaming industry. The tournament, The International DotA 2 Championships, ended Sunday. The entire tournament was streamed from dota2.com and the matches are available afterwards via SD or HD videos, some with commentary, from YouTube. I’ve spent a good deal of my time over the last few days watching these matches and I’m now ready for the Beta. In fact, the more I watch, the more I want to play.
After the jump, I can’t wait to get my hands on DotA 2.
One of the nicest things I can say about most of the frippery that passes for content on Xbox Live is that it’s miles and away better than Playstation Home. But sometimes I’m paging idly among those little panels on Xbox Live and I’ll duck into one, only to immediately wonder what I think I’m doing. For instance, I couldn’t help but duck into a panel promising the “Top 10 Racing Games”. On the list, among seven perfectly cromulent racing games available for download, I found Dark Void, Tranformers: the Game, and Tron: Evolution.
Still, calling Tron: Evolution a racing game is better than anything I’ve ever seen on Playstation Home. Is that thing still going?
If you only have a PC, that means you haven’t played Bastion yet. I’m a little jealous because that means you can play Bastion for the first time. It’s an experience you’ll treasure and it’s available to PC gamers this week. When you’re done, listen to this interview with writer Greg Kasavin and then buy the fantastic soundtrack here.
If you have an Xbox 360, you’re also in for a treat this week! Toy Soldiers: Cold War on Xbox Live Arcade is an energetic tower defense game every bit as good as the original Toy Soldiers. And then some! I’ll have a review posted tomorrow. Suffice to say, I’m a little bit in love. Unless you’re allergic to tower defense games, you’re going to want to fork over the requisite Microsoft space bucks. The only reason Bastion and Toy Soldiers: Cold War don’t merit an elevated wallet threat is because they’re relatively inexpensive.
If you’re bound and determined to play From Dust, that’s also out for the PC this week. I’m guessing the PC will be the platform of choice, given the graphics and interface problems I had with the 360 version. However, you have to be willing to play an Ubisoft release on a PC, which is a bit like contributing to a Tim Pawlenty Presidential campaign.
On the unknown front, El Shaddai is out this week. It’s…uh…I don’t know. I got nothing. I saw posters for at E3 and thought they were for Assassin’s Creed. I guess it’s some sort of anime thing about the Old Testament.
Finally, Age of Empires Online goes live this week. I feel strongly about it and I’ll have a full review posted tomorrow.
One of the things they teach you in actor school is never appear on stage with animals or children. Apparently that dude in the background, who’s cosplaying some Chinese railroad worker superhero with no sense of color coordination, didn’t take that class.
Click here for more awesome Amaterasu cosplay pics. Fortunately, there is no Chibiterasu cosplay, as that would likely melt the internet with its cuteness.
Thanks, Charles!
It was a bit of a chore to play through the early single-player bits of Rage, the upcoming next-gen shooter from Id.
The pistol sucks. The ATV sucks. The mandatory driving sucks. The rote missions through corridors suck. The checkpoints suck. Matching up the right bits of junk to build stuff sucks. But don’t give up! Rage seems like a classic example of “crawl before you can run” design.
Click here for other stuff you (probably) didn’t know about Rage.
You know you’ve been playing too much Alpha Centauri when you watch the news and think, “Well, I know what I’d do”:
So I got to play Skyrim. Actually play it. Jump in and run around and do whatever I want and stuff. I can’t verify anything about dragons, but I can assure you “here there be giants”.
Read all about it here.
I don’t make games; I just play them. Which is too bad for you, because if I made games, I would make the perfect real time strategy game. Not that I have anything against turn-based games, but the perfect one of those has already been made. Several times, in fact. Brian Reynold’s Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, Imperialism II, and Civilization IV, for instance.
Fortunately, most of the hard work for the perfect real-time strategy game has already been done. It just hasn’t been done in the same game. All I have to do is clump together bits from other games, do some quick testing to make sure it doesn’t crash, and, voila! The perfect RTS!
Read Of Hydralisks and Phalanxes here.
At QuakeCon, during one of the panels, Matt Hooper from id mentioned the Kinect. A very vocal young fellow seated behind me barked, “Lag!” This guy in the audience had been saying things very loudly and very inappropriately, so for a brief moment, I thought he’d called Hooper “fag”. I think — no joke — he might have had Tourrette’s Syndrome. When someone mentioned Zelda, he declared, “Navi!” as if it were the answer to an unspoken quiz show challenge (i.e. “name the sidekick in the following videogame franchises…”). At a reference to Half-Life, he hollered, “Oh yeah!”, almost exactly matching the intonation of the Kool-Aid pitcher busting in through a brick wall.
But when the Kinect was mentioned, he announced, “Lag!”. That one word, that one syllable, is the chief characteristic of the Kinect for many of us. And now, this week, here is the Kinect resorting to a port of the iPhone game Fruit Ninja. Here it is, hoping to insinuate itself among better games in XBLA’s Summer of Arcade series, like NBC sticking episodes of The Michael Richards Show between Frasier and Friends. But the truth of the matter is that no matter how responsive Kinect becomes, the greater issue is that it’s solving problems that don’t exist. If I want to play a casual colorful finger slider like Fruit Ninja — I don’t, actually, but if I did — I’ll play it on the iPhone instead of waving my entire arms around in the living room.
So, anyway, not much of a wallet threat this week.
OK, so, Star Wars: The Old Republic is on its way this year and I’m trying to work myself into a MMO frenzy by starving myself of social interaction. For instance, before our podcasts, I only speak to Tom through grunts and clicks. My wife, Sarah, and I communicate through a psychic link. (The psychic channel we use is the one I usually reserve for REALLY wanting Doritos, which has reduced my nacho cheese intake to close to zilch.) The idea being that I’m so starved for human contact that playing a new MMO will be a “rad social experience.” The downside is that now I have to wait for it to come out.
Or do I? Find out after the jump… Continue reading →
