The above screenshot from Dead Island looks great when it comes to rendering a wide-open Caribbean paradise with an incredibly long viewing distance. But at what price? Count the zombies in that screenshot. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Oh, you’re done already. That didn’t take very long, did it?
The Chrome engine used in Dead Island can certainly do terrain (see the ATV racing game Nail’d), but I’m guessing hordes of zombies aren’t on the menu. And with a view distance like that, wouldn’t you be able to see the zombies in the distance, even if they were in manageable packets of five or six at a time? Or will this be like an MMO, where creatures fade into the middle distance as you get closer? I don’t mean to be too hard on Dead Island. But given that the problem was solved so beautifully in the Dead Rising games, and given that shambling hordes are a core value of zombie mythology, I wonder if a year from now we’ll remember Dead Island as a trailer instead of a game.
Look. That’s me dying up there. You know whose fault it is? Not mine. Nope. To Hitman_472, designer of Waterfall Caverns, I’d just like to say, “The fault lies with thee.”
I was humming along nicely is this cool little level. I always dig the underwater cave swimming stuff; I think the bubbles that restore your sackboy’s breath are so nifty. I was on my way to a death-free round, which I really like (who doesn’t?), when all of a sudden I was rocketed upward and impaled on spikes. Now I’ve got pretty good hand-eye, but there was no way I was avoiding those spikes on the first try. It happened way too fast. I call this little trap a Compulsory Death. And I’m none too happy about it.
You’re on notice, Hitman_472. Tell _471 and _473 they’re on notice too, just for good measure. I’m sure you guys all sit together in the cafeteria.
I’m a little weirded out by the name of today’s level for some reason. Flower Face Adventures. The name…I dunno…it just feels weird to me. I suppose I’ll have to look into that.
Good level though. Especially as a follow up to yesterday’s level’s intensity. The challenge here is minimal, but the music is soothing. I also really like the rain section. It’s minor, but the visuals and the sounds work for me. This level as a follow-up just feels right. Plus there’s this weird dissonance. I loved the way I got to use the grappling hook in yesterday’s level. I hate the way I have to use it in today’s. It’s velcro-annoying.
On the whole, a lovely level.
This is mainly going to be about gushing, because I really love today’s level, Refuse Ridge. I don’t care much for the theme of the level, which is the idea that your sackboy has landed in a dump, thrown away with a bunch of other toys and license plates. A sad toy race car with a creepy blinking eye tells you to escape by making your way to the puzzle horse. I thought this was a great start, even though it took me about a thousand tries to get a snapshot of that car with his creepy eye open. It was like he could anticipate whenever I would hit the start button, or maybe hitting the button caused him to blink. I don’t know, at any rate the trashed toys theme really doesn’t go anywhere meaningful. No matter, because the playing of the level itself is just great.
Part of it is this nifty Habitrail sensibility where tubes carry you from place to place and can launch you unexpectedly into danger with the use of hidden jump pads. I wonder how my childhood hamsters would have felt about that. Added to this element is the way the grappling hook is used in this level, as a tool for slowing down and avoiding as well as swinging. I loved that twist. Even the regular swinging had a different feel in this level. It called to mind Indy using his whip, or my fantasies of being Indy using his whip to get out of jams. The above picture shows my sackboy, having been thrown by swinging under a rising platform, in mid-air over an electrified column just before I grapple hook to the next platform which will rocket me up to a much higher area. That’s a thoroughly clunky way of describing a moment when I should just have used one word: exhilarating.
I played this level several times and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Now, you’ll have to indulge me with one more picture, because taking it took me forever.
After the jump, creepy eye Continue reading →
If you’ve ever wondered what the raft escape from the crashing plane in Temple of Doom would be like, Snowboarding Down Mount Everest may be the level for you.
…football fans across the country will have the opportunity to select the next cover athlete for the award-winning Madden NFL franchise. Beginning today and continuing through April 27, fans can participate in a bracket-style voting campaign and choose among 32 candidates (one representative from every NFL team) to appear on the cover of Madden NFL 12. Fans’ votes will determine which NFL players advance through the seeded bracket, culminating in the reveal of the Madden NFL 12 cover athlete on ESPN’s “SportsNation” on April 27.
It seems to me that you’d put Jean Madden on the cover of the game named after him, but I guess Electronic Arts figured it was someone else’s turn for a change. So they’re going to have a vote so you can pick which football player (pictured) will be featured on the cover of the next Madden. I’m going to vote for Pele.
Boondock Saints director Troy Duffy seems to think there might one day be a videogame based on his movies. That’s cute. Personally, I’m holding out for Tommy Wiseau to greenlight a videogame based on The Room.
It’s a big week for EA with the release of Crysis 2 and The Sims: Medieval. I’m afraid I have no idea whether either is any good. Stay tuned for this week’s game diaries for both.
Even though I was pleasantly surprised by the Lego Harry Potter, I can’t really muster any enthusiasm for Lego Star Wars: The Clone Wars. I’m feeling a little Lego fatigue, not to mention a little Star Wars fatigue, and a lot of prequel antipathy.
I quite liked Dissidia, an open arena brawling game with an appropriately flashy anime style (pictured), given that it was supposed to be based on Final Fantasy. Not that I knew who any of the characters were. But it was a solid fighting RPG for the PSP, and I’m glad to see it’s getting a sequel, which is also out this week. Wrap your head around this title: Dissidia 012 Duodecim Final Fantasy. Good luck getting some hapless Gamestop employee to look that one up.
Getting a decent screenshot in today’s level, Eternal Abyss Platformer, was difficult. It’s a study in browns and dark textures, which is part of what I love about it, but also what makes it tough to capture in a picture. One of my favorite moments in the level, a timed jumping puzzle, ends up looking like a bunch of darkish rectangles. This is perfect for the sense I get from the level that my sackboy is working his way through the rotting wood of an old galleon, but not so good for making colorful post images.
I’m not really complaining. I like the design, in particular the sound design, and I’m never going to be able to capture that in a screenshot.
Sound design. I’m talking about sound design in a community level of a silly little puzzle platformer. It’s tough to convey how grateful I am for this fact. I can imagine, if I think about my experience in the story levels, how playing community levels might seem tedious to an aficionado of this genre. For folks with heretofore little more than a passing interest and scant experience, these levels serve as a welcome gateway drug.
Once again…grateful might seem a weird word choice. But there it is.
Someone named Reala (not his/her real name?) runs a blog focused on Holy priest healing in World of Warcraft. His latest entry includes a badge (pictured) you can stick on your blog to show solidarity with his cause. The cause in question?
For fun (but also I mean it) I’ve made a little badge you can put on your blog to certify it a RIFT Free Zone, as seen above. I know there are a few bloggers getting pretty frustrated with the amount of Rift talk on WoW blogs lately…WoW may be the lumbering behemoth of the MMORPG sphere but we bloggers are not, damnit. Many of us are experiencing tough times in WoW, we have lost friends, guildies, entire guilds have crumbed and fallen. I don’t begrudge Rift the shelf-space, but when there are more Rift posts on a WoW blog than WoW posts… well… I don’t like it.
I love his sense of frustration. The “but I also mean it” is great, but you really can’t top the apocalyptic devastation conveyed in “we have lost friends, guildies, entire guilds have crumbed and fallen”. It’s like the End of Days!
FYI, don’t be alarmed by the image of the badge. Quarter to Three is not a Rift free zone.
(Thanks Katie Uhlman!)
Simplicity. Sometimes a dopey arcade game homage is just the ticket. Especially when it reminds me to go and watch one of my favorite cartoons ever. Double bonus.
I look forward to the fiddler crab version of this level.
Homefront (pictured) and Killzone 3 are pretty different. I mean, yeah, they’re both shooters with inconsequential sleep-inducing singleplayer campaigns and robust multiplayer support. They both have a lot of leveling and unlocking, complete with gadgets and tricks and special abilities. I suppose they’re both fun, if you want to go there. Neither one has a needler, or a chainsaw-on-a-gun, or a power leash, so you could call them “realistique”.
But I’ve been playing multiplayer in both and it occurs to me that there are six ways that Homefront is better than Killzone 3.
After the jump, why I occasionally prefer Homefront’s multiplayer Continue reading →
I don’t watch movie previews and I don’t understand people who do. I like to be surprised. One of the great things about playing the community levels in LBP2 is that this sense of potential surprise is perpetual. I hate to invoke a ridiculous Academy Award winning picture about a lucky half-wit, but these levels are like a box of a certain kind of candy. A lot of the time this means you’ll be biting into some terrible orange-chocolate abomination. That’s okay though. Knowing you’re going to find the rare dark chocolate filled with caramel from time-to-time makes it worth it.
Today’s level is one of those. It totally surprised me. It started off rather snoringly, with the only slight bit of interest being jumping pads installed on a bed, which I thought was a cute development. Not terribly interesting, but cute. So I took a picture of me jumping on a bed as a safety. I went on autopilot as the level seemed a rather vanilla bubble-collection exercise.
Then I got to the water.
Surprise.
I’ve played only a small percentage of the story of LBP2 so far, so I have no idea how swimming works in the story levels, if it does at all. Today’s level was the first time I really got to explore how my sackboy would deal with prolonged submersion. I’ve got to tell you, after a few happy moments jumping on a bed, I wasn’t expecting that. Nor was I expecting to experience some of those jittery sweaty-palm moments operating the controller in a goofy community level. But I did here.
Surprise.
Killzone 3 (pictured) and Homefront are pretty different. I mean, yeah, they’re both shooters with inconsequential sleep-inducing singleplayer campaigns and robust multiplayer support. They both have a lot of leveling and unlocking, complete with gadgets and tricks and special abilities. I suppose they’re both fun, if you want to go there. Neither one has a needler, or a chainsaw-on-a-gun, or a power leash, so you could call them “realistique”.
But I’ve been playing multiplayer in both and it occurs to me that there are six important ways that Killzone 3 is better than Homefront.
After the jump, why I prefer Killzone 3’s multiplayer Continue reading →
So it’s just a lovely Japanese winterscape. In Shogun 2, that basically means don’t leave armies parked in hostile territory. Save that for the other three turns in a year. But I couldn’t help but notice a little touch Creative Assembly placed over a river wending through some useless mountainous terrain:
So nice.
And speaking of so nice, if you’ve been playing Creative Assembly’s game as long as I have, you’re probably to ignoring the multiplayer button. Who could blame you? But don’t do that if you’re playing Shogun 2. I implore you to click on that Avatar Conquest button. Yeah, that’s a pretty terrible name for whatever feature is lurking behind that button. It’s a particularly terrible name given what an awesome feature is lurking back there. But if one of Creative Assembly’s Total War games ever had a shot at fostering a meaningful multiplayer community, it’s Shogun 2 with its horribly named Avatar Conquest.
