Since pictures are worth a few dozen of my most excellent words, I thought I’d illustrate my impressions of the Dungeon Siege III demo with some views from…whatever that country is called. As you might be able to tell, the lore in the demo didn’t make a huge impression on me. And the previous 2 games are fairly hazy in my memory.
After the jump, Wendelius’ Dungeon Siege demo travelogue begins Continue reading →
If the early reviews are to be trusted, things aren’t looking good for Duke Nukem Forever. Raise your hand if you’re surprised that a sequel to a 15 year old shooter feels like a sequel to a 15 year old shooter.
Alice: Madness Returns has the advantage of being a sequel to a more recent but middling platformer, so it doesn’t have far to go to be better than the original. The latest Transformers game is in a similar situation. I don’t have any desire to play Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time again, but if I did, I’d probably want to play it on the Nintendo 3DS. It looks great, even (especially?) in 3D. It’s enough to make me almost sorry that I don’t have any desire to play through yet another Zelda game.
But this week’s biggest wallet threat is probably Child of Eden, a wigged out puzzle game from the creator of Rez, one of the original wigged out puzzle games. With full support for Microsoft’s Kinect and Sony’s Move, this might be one of those games that makes your fancy controller a not entirely worthless investment.
Finally, hey look, it’s Wipeout: In the Zone! At last, a Wipeout game for the Xbox 360 (pictured)! I don’t remember it looking quite like that, and it seems odd to me that it’s published by Activision, particularly now that it’s available as a free “I’m sorry” download from Sony because the Playstation Network being down for so long. But it’s about time such a great sci-fi racing game has slipped the surly bonds of the Playstation hardware.
Fifteen years ago, Abel Ferrara made a low-budget black-and-white vampire movie called The Addiction, with Lili Taylor and Annabella Sciorra. I figured I’d go see it. On the way to the theater, I had one of those fish sandwiches from McDonalds. Part way into the movie — I don’t recall exactly what was happening, but it was probably some poorly lit blood-slurping — I had a funny feeling. Like I was going to hurl. I had to go out into the lobby and put down with my head between my knees. I’m not sure if it was the fish sandwich or the Abel Ferrara.
I finally got to spend some time with the Nintendo 3DS recently. Before firing up Ridge Racer 3D, I had a cup of coffee on an empty stomach. After a few racers — and man, I really don’t get why anyone tolerates these Ridge Racer games — I got a funny feeling. Like I was going to hurl. I had to dial down the 3D mode. I’m not sure if it was the coffee or the 3D.
At that point I was left with a pretty decent Nintendo DSi with an awesome analog stick. Not that I know of any game that really needs it yet. Tonight, an update will add a web browser and support for the Nintendo Store. But I’m not sure I’ll crank that 3D dial up any more than I’ll go back and try to sit through The Addiction again.
I have no idea what to tell you about this week’s wallet threat level, since I’ll be at E3 seeing various dog and pony shows. You’ll be the folks actually playing Infamous 2 and Red Faction: Armageddon, so you’ll have to let me know if they’re any good. Also let me know if the new campaign in Operation Flashpoint: Red River is any good. And plus let me know about Pride of Nations, the industrial revolution strategy game from Paradox that isn’t Victoria 2. You’ve got your work cut out for you!
Meanwhile, updates on Qt3 will be few and far between this week. Instead, I’ll be moonlighting over at Gameshark, where we’ll be doing daily updates and podcasts about the dogs and ponies.
Bonjour, pantalon interessant! Sorry about last week. Tom put me on restriction for making fun of Christian Xtein Amanpour Merzibooski Dingus’ Little Big Planet Not Really Little Big Planet columns. Apparently he actually writes about stuff not related to LBP in those! Shit, who knew! That’s what I get for only putting Bruce’s articles on my RSS feed. Ha ha, just joking! I don’t know how to set an RSS feed. Anyway I’m back and I hope this column annoys you, otherwise what the Hell is Tom paying me for?
All the way back in the 1980s a study was done analyzing 3000 top hit songs in an effort to discover what makes a hit a hit. Among the results was the fact that roughly 80% of the sampled hits began with a word repeated at least twice. Is that what gave Nintendo the inspiration to name its next-gen console the Nintendo Nintendo, to be announced at this year’s E3? Or has Iwata merely finally finished his amusing descent into money-soaked madness? We may never know. Rumors are it might even be called the Nintendo Current, because the Nintendo New Happy Time Fun You Like Box was just too silly and the Nintendo Obtuse was too on the nose. Maybe it’s all just a big in-joke from Nintendo. Assholes.
Hella in-jokes from assholes and rampant italics abuse after the jizzle. Continue reading →
When I was asked to review The Witcher 2, I told my editor I’d be happy to, but that I hadn’t played the first game. I figured I just talked myself out of an assignment. It happens. But a few days after the game was out, he got back in touch with me and asked if I’d review it anyway.
That’s how I found myself dumped into a storyline that was as confusing as a Russian novel. So many places and people! So many names! I had just started reading Game of Thrones, and I had to put it on hold to keep my brain from exploding. By the time I finished The Witcher 2, I had figured out the storyline just fine. But no such thing happened with the layout of Vergen. That small but weirdly labyrinthine Dwarven town, where nearly a third of the game takes place, defied my comprehension until the very end.
And I used to think that undead city in World of Warcraft was bad.
As for the game itself, well…I’ll have more to say when the review is posted. Suffice to say, The Witcher 2 certainly made an impression on me.
Last week, I got to play a couple of missions from the upcoming Heart of the Swarm add-on for Starcraft II. Read the coverage here.
There are three different ways to play a real time strategy game: multiplayer, skirmish, and campaign modes, which I prefer in that order. To Blizzard’s credit, they’re putting more-or-less equal emphasis on all three ways to play. However, the traditional scripted scenarios that go into a campaign mode couldn’t be less interesting to me because they’re more about the mission designer than the gameplay.
Both missions from Heart of the Swarm were typical puzzle scenarios in which you build up an army and then scrape the map clean, but with some sort of twist to supposedly make it interesting. But there’s a fine line between a “twist” and an “annoyance”. In Starcraft II, consider the day/night zombie mission and the lava mission. In the former, you had to decide when to move out against zombie lairs and how many resources to spend on defense vs. offense. The mission progressed with a sense of pulses and a delicious “here they come again!” dread. But in the lava mission, you just had to get your workers out of the way of rising lava every so often. The former offered interesting decisions and a sense of place. The latter was just busywork. I’m not convinced Blizzard has quite figured out the difference yet.
If you liked the campaign in Starcraft II, I’m sure Heart of the Swarm will light your fire as well. And although I can groove on the RPG trappings between missions, the actual missions felt like the usual scripted single-player drill: train units, drag select them, attack move, win. Furthermore, the clot of earnest storytelling is so leaden. At one point, Kerrigan delivers the following line:
Izsha, can they commune with Shakura through the Kala?
That line is so heavy with inscrutable proper nouns that I have no idea what to do with it. The who with the what in the where? A game like The Witcher 2, which I’m on the verge of finishing, can get away with that, because it takes its time laying out the players, and developing the story based on your choices, and putting you into the plot as befits an up-close-and-personal RPG. In The Witcher 2, I care about Saskia and the Pontar Valley and Phillipa’s agenda. But when an RTS tries to get me to care about Izsha and Shakura and Kala, all I can think about is whether I have the number of zerglings the designer wanted me to train to get past this mission.
I’m afraid I have no idea what to tell you about this week’s releases. Hunted: The Demon’s Forge, some sort of fantasy action thingie from a developer whose last meaningful release was The Bard’s Tale back in 2004, starring Cary Elwes and a moldy Interplay license? Another add-on for The Sims 3, subtitled Generations and consisting of a set of grasping bullet points that include bunk beds? Considering how enthusiastic I was to discover BlazBlue recently, you’d think I’d be excited about BlazBlue: Continuum Shift II, but who can get excited about a such a serious fighting game released only on the PSP and Nintendo DS, neither of which has inputs for my decidedly serious Arcade FightStick Tournament Edition S? I predict your wallet is in very little danger this week.
Unless, of course, you’ve got Bioshock 2 on the PC. In which case, you might want to have ten bucks handy.
I’m half way through a game of Six Gun Saga, a Western themed strategy game from the developer of Armageddon Empires and Solium Infernum. I’m playing as El Indio, an outlaw who can’t hire any lawmen, but whose dudes get a combat bonus for every lawman in an enemy posse. My opponent is the gunfighter Lucien Maxwell. On turn 12, I’ve got 25 victory points to his 11 victory points. The game ends at either 30 victory points or 25 turns. So I should have this in the bag, right?
After the jump, that varmint Maxwell has me pinned Continue reading →
I’ll be frank. This is version two of my Galactic Civilizations II game diary. Version one ended at the late-game slog in a large galaxy with a race of insects and reptilian slimeballs outside of my convenient alliance with the humans. The insects were small but nearly on par with my soldiering while the reptilians were the same but had more planets. This meant that hundreds of billions would have to give their lives to brutally conqueror worlds while the men and women back home would have to breed faster than rabbits to replace them. As much as I appreciate all that, I simply don’t have the patience to see it to the end of that glorious slaughter, nor try for an equally time-consuming influence victory. So here’s round two, more focused and more hate-filled.
After the jump, what I aim to accomplish and with whom I aim to accomplish it Continue reading →
The above screenshot from Shadows of the Damned is called The Big Boner. I have no idea why. I don’t know much about Shadows of the Damned, but I know enough to know that I’m psyched for its June 21st release. This is the first game jointly made by Goichi Suda and Shinji Mikami since Killer 7. My only reservation is that it’s published by Electronic Arts, who somehow managed to squeeze the joy out of Bulletstorm, a shooter created by Painkiller developer People Can Fly. Will Shadows of the Damned survive EA’s joy-wringing process?
Check out more mostly incomprehensible screens after the jump, but note that last screenshot. Any shooter that does that is a shooter I want to play.
After the jump, more Shadows of the Damned Continue reading →
Upon booting up a new game of Pride of Nations, the upcoming strategy game that models the era of the Industrial Revolution around the world, I poked around among the screens. I discovered that I can research molasses extraction centrifuges, which are represented by the above picture. Industry! These centrifuges will improve the efficiency of my sugar plantations. Also available on the research screen are standardized screws, schools of forestry, and the first synthesis of colourants [sic] and perfumes. I am simultaneously fascinated, delighted, and horrified by this level of detail. I’m not sure I need to actually play the game. I could occupy myself for hours just poring over the armies and leaders and policies and resources and cities and colonies and shipping navies, even before they get molasses extraction centrifuges.
I visited a friend of mine the other day. I walked into his house and instead of initiating the dialog for the story mission — we were going to see Pirates of the Caribbean, but there would be options in the dialog tree for Bridesmaids or Thor — I started going through the drawers in his kitchen. There had to be a junk drawer somewhere. A ha! Sure enough, I found 43 cents in loose change. I also scored some batteries, a ball of string, a screwdriver, and a roll of masking tape that I could sell next time I went to the store.
I found a key in there as well. Once I’d cleared the spare change out of the other drawers in the house (another 87 cents), as well as taking some jewelry from his wife’s jewelry box (score!) and changing into a nicer pair of pants I found in his closet, I tried the key on various doors. I eventually got into his garage. I found a bunch of tools, as well as some lumber and cloth. I did’t take the lumber since it just took up too much weight in my inventory. The entire time he was watching me, waiting for me to initiate dialog.
I understand why computer RPGs do this, and it’s a convention as old as the genre itself. The level designers have made cool locations full of nooks and crannies that you have no reason to visit, much less admire. So they sprinkle rewards around to encourage exploration. It’s part of the economy, and it makes gameplay sense. But the trade-off is that it damages world building and character development. In The Witcher 2, for instance, I can get into a groove where I’m digging on a town’s layout, and where people live, and what they do, and how they hang out and talk to each other. But the moment I open someone’s personal chest and help myself to what’s in there while he looks on? That’s the moment I’m back in yet another computer RPG. Furthermore, my Geralt in The Witcher 2 would never do something so petty as steal stuff from people. But the developers don’t acknowledge this decision I’ve made about the character I’m playing. What’s more, they punish me if I make this decision.
Looting friendly homes in an absurd RPG convention and it needs to stop. Bethesda’s games finally woke up to the fact that it’s odd to pick through someone’s possessions, so they put into their games ownership over items and whether or not people see you taking their stuff. It’s a crucial part of their world building, which allows for the concept of crime. It helps character development since it finally gives thief characters something to do beside pick pockets and disarm traps. And it also makes it harder to play otherwise solid RPGs like Dragon Age, The Witcher, Neir, and Divine Divinity.
The above image isn’t from the first boss battle in The Witcher 2. It’s just from the first one that made me mad.
There’s really no point telling you the backstory, which won’t matter to you unless you’re playing The Witcher 2. But the main point is that this guy is the same kind of guy as you. He has all your powers. Well, all the powers you’re supposed to get when you eventually level up, but you have to fight him before that happens. So he’s popping out all the spells, abilities, and inventory items that you didn’t get because you opting for other spells, abilities, and inventory items. Plus, he’s got way more hit points than you and he does way more damage than you do.
I don’t know how you’re actually supposed to get through the battle. For me, it was a matter of playing it over and over and over, giving up for the day, trying again the next day, Googling message board posts that were no help, watching YouTube videos that were equally unhelpful, and just plugging away some more. I finally beat him when he glitched and got stuck against a wall. It was at least 20 attempts.
It reminds me a bit of the Jedi Knight games. You’ve been running around totally being a badass Jedi, lightsaber and Force Powering your way through the game. Then you have to fight another Jedi who has all your powers and it’s no fair. I was supposed to be the big fish in the pond!
Woo hoo it’s LA Noire time, suckaz! Another tour de force outing for Rockstar! Aw yeah! This is what gaming is all about! Examining corpses! Trailing perps! Weird gunfights! Boring driving! Collectibles that nobody can find! Wait, what? Aw, shit. Maybe next time, fellas.
More big budget gaming disappointment (sort of) after the jump! Continue reading →
