The day of the big date comes and…OH SHIT SON are you wearing a dog collar outside the collar of your frilly lavender shirt? Really?
[Ed note: Angie Gallant is doing the unthinkable in this thread, in which she plays through and thoroughly deconstructs something called Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side 1st Kiss. I cannot recommend the thread highly enough.]
So, the Tokimeki series is a huge series of dating games…The Girl’s Side games have you playing a girl through 3 years of high school. This is not a visual novel where you read/listen to lots of dialog and then choose from a couple of options to navigate the story. This is a life sim where you need to choose your classes, afterschool activities, clothes, and friends, go on dates and attend special functions, have a job, compete in mini-games
This isn’t just a game about wooing high school boys. This is a game about touching high school boys. You are periodically given opportunities to use the DS stylus to stroke your 2D boyfriend and watch him blush and object while hearts fly out of him. It’s possible to touch him too inappropriately and make him mad, so you have to really think about the ways in which you are going to molest each high school boy.
Part two of my DC Universe Online field report for Gamepro covers customization, character builds, game balance, and the age-old question of whether to PvP or not to PvP. On this last subject, I’ve had a powerful change of heart since I started playing the game.
DC Universe is only putatively an MMO. More accurately, it is a multiplayer open-world action game in which villains and heroes fight it out in a besieged city.
In other words, you’re not playing DC Universe Online unless you’re playing PvP.
By the way, that picture up there is me taking a flamethrower to Nightwing, who tricked me into playing as Robin.
The two big releases this week are actually little! First up is Atom Zombie Smasher, a $15 strategy game about zombie apocalypses. I’ll be reviewing it later, but here’s an example of how it plays.
The other great release this week is the PC version of Monday Night Combat, which has been available as a beta for a while, and on the Xbox 360 for an even longer while. Now it’s on the PC for real and for only $15. It’s like Team Fortress 2 met Demigod and had a baby. A smart, funny, in-depth, accessible, team-based shooter/RTS baby.
If bigger budget releases are more your thing, I expect lots of elaborately rendered stuff will jump out at you in Dead Space 2. Two Worlds II is a big RPG from the developers of Two Worlds, who insist they know Two Worlds I was bad and they’ve fixed whatever was screwed up. Finally, Lord of Arcana isn’t just the most generically named game in all of history. It’s also a Square/Enix Monster Hunter sort of game for the PSP.
Okay, you know Batman’s sidekick, Chris O’Donnell, or “Robin”, or “Burt Ward”, as your parents might know him? He’s in DC Universe. If you spend 10 legendary marks, you can play as him in the arena battles. Ha ha, who’s going to voluntarily play as Robin? That’s a good one. DC Universe certainly has a sense of humor.
I cleverly sidestep the humiliating experience of showing up for an arena PvP battle as the Boy Wonder by saving up my legendary marks. I save up 35 of the silly things. And I spend them unlocking some sort of bad-ass ninja dude named Nightwing. He’s got a black-and-blue theme going, kind of like Quarter to Three. He hits people with two sticks about the size of rolled up magazines, a la Jason Bourne in Bourne Supremacy. I install this wallpaper on my computer. When I spawn into an arena battles, I figure I’m one of the cool guys instead of one of the losers who blew his first 10 legendary marks to role-play Chris O’Donnell in tights.
Or so I thought. I just found out via a cutscene that Nightwing is Robin. He grows up, ditches Batman for some sort of solo tour under the name Nightwing, and then promptly fails to protect the city when it’s devastated by a chemical warfare attack. So not only am I playing Robin, I’m playing an adult Robin who has done the exact opposite of saving people. I feel so…betrayed.
According to 2K Games, you have until May 3rd to make jokes about how Duke Nukem Forever will never come out, at which point they will put out a game by that name.
It’s August 1961 in Nuevos Aires, during the eighth month of a zombie outbreak. We’re going in to Los Chuvoi, which is virulent enough that’s it’s liable to spill over into neighboring territories if we don’t contain it. The objective is to evacuate at least 60 people, and hopefully some of the scientists. It won’t be easy. Pandemics, man.
After the jump, how the Saviors of Los Chuvoi got their nameContinue reading →
I don’t… What the… How did… I should have just stopped trying to understand once they stuck a XIII-2 at the end. It’s like trying to watch an episode of Lost. People hugging each other, sappy music, then something, then something else, then something, then it ends.
In case you still don’t believe me that Tidalis is a truly great puzzle game — thinking man’s Bejeweled, yadda yadda yadda — and you’re just too lazy to download the demo to find out for yourself, then you have one more chance. Arcen Games has created a web version. Click here to try Tidalis Lite in a web browser.
Hold on a sec! Since you’re too lazy to download a demo, I know you’re not going to play the tutorial. So let me tell you what you’re doing. When you left click on a square, it fires a beam of that square’s color three spaces in the direction the arrow is facing. Your objective is to turn arrows so that the colored beam, which will trigger another beam from any similarly colored block it hits, triggers a chain of at least three blocks. So unlike many match-3’s, you can jump blocks.
To turn arrows, right click a block (notice that all the blocks of that color are now highlighted) and drag your mouse. This will drop a marker (M) on the initial block. Now, holding down the right button, you can drag the mouse along several blocks to turn their arrows. Then, when you’ve got it all set up, go back to the original marked block and left click on it. See? Enjoy the little musical tone based on the color and number of blocks you’ve Tidalized.
It may sound complicated, and it kind of is. A little. But whatever you do, don’t start messing with all the different game styles and special blocks until you’ve wrapped your head around the basics. Tidalis is a pretty generous package, but take it slow or you’re just going to blow a cerebral fuse.
Nintendo finally announced a release date and a price for the Nintendo 3DS.
On March 27, Nintendo introduces portable entertainment in 3D – without the need for special glasses. The Nintendo 3DS system will be available in either Cosmo Black or Aqua Blue, and will have a suggested retail price of $249.99.
That’s $250 of ouch for us, and $250 of great for Nintendo. But considering all the buzz this thing has gotten — I know first-hand that it really works, and it looks great — Nintendo isn’t going to price itself out of players’ hands, Sony style. Instead, I predict they will continue to win videogaming. As I’ve said before, it’s Nintendo’s world. We just play in it.
Dingus posted a fantastic Gamespotting relating to Sophia Coppola’s father/daughter tale, Somewhere. The movie shows Guitar Hero (and the Nintendo Wii, in a separate scene) as an activity that brings families together. It’s an important bit of insight into how videogames can cross boundaries.
Now along comes The Green Hornet to also pay homage to Guitar Hero (well, Rock Band, but who’s counting?).
The latest add-on for Eve Online, Incursion, is currently being rolled out in stages, with the culmination being next week’s eponymous incursions by some kind of spacepirates or something. But today’s installment of Incursion added the revamped character design. Eve Online always let you make a detailed face (above, left) that didn’t matter one whit, since you were promptly put into a game where you played a spaceship. But now the superfluous character creation system is even more detailed (above, right).
We really wanted you to feel like you were sculpting the face yourself and tried to limit the amount of sliders as much as possible, putting sculpting of the face and body and posing of the face into the character model. In sculpt mode, you grab onto the nose and move the mouse to make it a bigger, push in the chin, pull the forehead and so on. Once you’re done sculpting and picking clothes, hair and such, you use the same method for posing. You grab your eyes and move them to control where your character is supposed to look, you grab the mouth to make him smile, and pull on the eyebrows to make the smile look a little mean.
The new character creation system is the first step to this summer’s Incarna add-on, which lets you get out of your ship and walk around in space stations like you can do in Star Trek Online.
When I first started DC Universe, I just rolled up a punching character, slapped the default Superman template onto her, and started playing. That’s her up there. Superchick.
But something funny happened on the way to 10th level. Things changed. Or didn’t, in the case of my other character.
After the jump, let me show you how DC Universe handles customization.Continue reading →
I already did my term of service with We Rule, a charming free-to-play social boondoggle for the iPhone. I don’t regret planting all those strawberries, saving up for that griffon nest, or badgering my friends to come buy potions from my wizards’ tower. I don’t even regret all the time I spent carefully arranging a white picket fence around a house with meticulously situated pink and red flower beds just behind the mailbox on the road to my kingdom’s main thoroughfare.
But when I’m done, I’m done. And I’m done. Oh, hey, what’s this new stuff just added to the We Rule follow-ups, We Farm and We City?
We Farm is going pre-historic! If you’ve ever fantasized about building your own version of “Jurassic Park,” you’re in luck. This week, ngmoco is releasing a Jurassic pen, complete with a Brontosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex, tar pits with Sabertooth Tigers, bone decorations, and a pre-historic museum. Now is the perfect time to upgrade your farm from “just alright” to “DINO-mite!”
Very cute. Nice try, Ngmoco, but it’s going to take more than a dinosaur theme to get me back into one of these things. I’m spending my gaming time these days in DC Universe, so you’ll just have to– Wait, what?
After just releasing much-requested water tiles to We City, this week’s invasion of We City sees superheroes swooping into the fold. Steel Hawk and his Tower of Justice set up shop to do battle with Dr. Disaster and his Factory of Doom, while the Angel Archer watches on from her Winged Haven.
In addition to the expected PC version, Portal 2 will be out for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 this April. But look what version is getting cross-platform play and special Steam treatment:
Marking the debut of Steam functioning on any next generation console, the features shipping in the PS3 version of Portal 2 include cross platform play (PC/Mac vs. PS3) for multiplayer games, persistent cloud-based storage of PS3 saved games, and cross platform chat (PC/Mac and PS3)….In addition, those who purchase Portal 2 for the PlayStation 3 may unlock a Steam Play (PC & Mac) copy of Portal 2 at no additional cost by linking their PSN and Steam accounts.
Note to the DC Universe Online developers at Sony Online Entertainment, who actually work for the folks who make the PS3, but still split their player community between PS3 players and PC players, never the twain shall meet: that’s how you do cross-platform support.
