There are two kinds of boardgamers in the world. When they play a card, one kind reads the name on a card before they read the card’s effects, and the other kind just reads the card’s effects. I have always been the first kind. Furthermore, I have always wanted my friends to be the first kind.
“Okay, so now my attack is +2,” one of my friend’s might announce as he slaps a card onto the table.
“What’s the card?” I’ll ask.
“It’s +2 to attack.”
“No, no, what’s it called?”
“Oh.” My friend looks down at the card, since it never occurred to him to read that part. He’ll tell me it’s called Heroic Attack, or Eldritch Blade, or Stimpak, or Unceasing Fury, or something. I realize it’s sometimes annoying that I ask this, but I believe games are better if you let them lead with as much theme as they want to provide. As I played Legends of the American Frontier, I first thought it was for people who read the names of cards. However, I’m not so sure anymore. They might actually be the ones it’s not for.
After the jump, Poor At Farming, Failed At Business, And Bewildered By Life In General?Continue reading →
Ubisoft has revealed Watch Dogs 2. While the sequel plainly follows the template started with Watch Dogs, it’s also obvious that much has changed. It’s not a reboot, but in the words of a famous tech support guy, “Hold on to your butts.” You’re still hacking and using a magic smartphone to fight the forces of control, but the open-world setting has shifted from Chicago to San Francisco and new protagonist Marcus Holloway is younger, more athletic, and more stylish than humorless Aiden Pearce. Marcus can freerun! Not like an assassin, but more like someone that doesn’t pay attention to rules or posted warnings. Tumbling, rolling, and leaping over obstacles like a YouTube stuntman. Marcus has cool youth-oriented clothing that shows he’s not like every other young man rebelling against authority. No trench coats for him! He shops at Zumiez or Urban Outfitters, and wears a carefully slung messenger bag. Iconic!
Frontwire Studios has announced that their unofficial Star Wars game will be published on Steam for free. Frontwire, a small Russian development studio lacking any advice from legal experts, has reportedly secured permission from Valve to distribute Galaxy in Turmoil, their fan version of Star Wars: Battlefront 3 using recreated assets in Unreal Engine 4. What began as a legally gray fan project to independently finish the canceled Battlefront 3 from Free Radical Design, has grown into a questionable full release that will most assuredly not come under the scrutiny of the licensing lawyers of Disney or Electronic Arts.
People have been expressed their concern as of late, saying they expect us to get a Cease & Desist from Disney. I’ll be honest I’ve had mild concerns myself from time to time. However Valve clearly lacks that same concern.
Frontwire’s president, Tony Romanelli, has even published a rebuttal of sorts to people questioning the legal viability of the project. Surely, Galaxy in Turmoil will enjoy a successful launch without interference from copyright watch dogs. What objections could a legitimate license holder have?
I ducked into Anno 2205 to check out today’s update. A few screens explain some of the changes in broad strokes: a global stock market, trading corporate shares, a new resource called influence, espionage, counter-espionage, disasters, monopolies, unique sector traits that modify your economies. Once I was past those screens, there were the familiar cities that I had spent so much time cultivating, shaping, renovating, tweaking. In a temperate archipelago, in a frozen waste, on the moon. Not in the tundra yet, since that’s a $12 add-on. But the tundra is there on the map when my $12 are ready for it.
Unfortunately, my economy was in a freefall given all the new additions to the game. Something about new administrative costs? This is what happens when you come back to a complex game after a major update. Things fall apart in entirely new ways. And this is definitely a major update. Entirely new systems, new gameplay dynamics, new challenges, new tools, new goals. Free. This is the sort of update that will draw a fellow back in.
Anno 2205 is a game with a hard failstate. If you run a negative balance for more than thirty minutes, then…well, frankly, I’m not sure what happens, but I suspect it isn’t good. Since this is a game without a save/reload option, I have no intention of finding out. Fortunately, when you apply the update, it makes a backup of your corporation. There’s a lot to process here. A lot to adjust in order to pull up out of an economic nosedive. Ubisoft rightly figured I might want a mulligan.
The Big Five Pack — it’s a reference to the five corporations competing on the stock market — is available today for free.
Volition and Deep Silver have announced their newest game, Agents of Mayhem. From IGN‘s exclusive reveal, Agents of Mayhem will be a single player open world game in which the player controls three different characters fighting the cartoonish forces of evil. Check out the announcement trailer for some hints at ties to the popular Saints Row franchise. Will it equal the six-star triumph of Saints Row IV? We’ll presumably know more by next week’s E3 event.
Shane Black follows his stint with Marvel Comics’ Iron Man by making another comic detective pulp neo-noir with an unlikely pair of lead actors. How does it hold up next to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang? At the 59-minute mark, we hammer on the topic of hardware store scenes in movies.
From the journal of Nick Valentine, synth private eye:
I was hanging out with all the loose companions at the Red Rocket Truck Stop like I always do, when my buddy the Sole Survivor hit me up for some business. Seems my secretary put the word out to track down a missing girl and the Sole Survivor needed a partner to help with the search. All of us poor neglected companions shuffled uneasily as the Sole Survivor decided who to take. Eeny meeny miny moe. The job came down to me or the dog, but I have better dialog. Sorry, Dogmeat.
After the jump, Nick Valentine is on the case in Far Harbor.Continue reading →
APB Reloaded, the resurrected thugs versus cops MMO from K2 Productions, has hit the Xbox One. The free-to-play game has always featured a bevy of in-game purchases to fund its development and support, but the console version boasts a transaction offer that the PC game cannot match. For $199.99 in real money, you can get 20,800 of the G1C in-game currency. G1C is used to purchase “sweet” in-game items like cosmetic accessories, guns, and vehicles. You could go the cheap route and buy 400 of the in-game cash at a time for $4.99, but why not take advantage of the $60 in savings offered with the maximum bundle of points? You can have all the G1C you need until you run out and need to top up with another $199.99 purchase. Sweet!
APB Reloaded started as subscription-only APB: All Points Bulletin by Realtime Worlds in 2010, following their success with Crackdown. The studio was shut down shortly after the game launched and the property was purchased by K2 Productions. APB was relaunched later that same year as APB Reloaded, a free-to-play title. Although it was not well received critically, the free-to-play title has operated with a dedicated core of paying customers.
(The following article is reprinted without the permission of the site where it orginally appeared, because they never paid me, so I can do whatever I want with it. The article is relevant now because I’ve been playing weekly Age of Empires III matches against my good friend, Jason McMaster, and I’m hoping this will help him out of his 4-to-1 losing streak.)
There are different levels of playing RTSs. Like chess. In chess, the first step is knowing how the pieces move. Once you reach that point, you can theoretically play a game just fine. But then there’s a deeper level where you know things likewell, likeokay, I’ve never gotten further than learning how the pieces move in chess, because I’m too busy playing RTSs. But I know there’s a deeper level where you use phrases like “Sicilian opening” and “Queen’s gambit” and other stuff referenced in the titles of spy novels.
So maybe that’s where you’re at with real time strategy games. In which case you’re probably not reading this article. So send the link to this article to all your friends who suck at RTSs. Because I’m going to give them ten tips to make them better. Note that some of this applies to MOBAs, which are just RTSs for people who can’t handle the challenge of actual RTSs.
Mojang doesn’t want advertisements in Minecraft, at least not the ones they didn’t have a hand in creating. Mojang has added language to their commercial guidelines that forbids promotional material made by corporations, businesses, advertising agencies, non-profits, and governments within or associated with Minecraft. No more commercial Crystal Pepsi servers or Red Man tobacco mods allowed unless you’ve worked out a deal with Mojang.
We want to empower our community to make money from their creativity, but we’re not happy when the selling of an unrelated product becomes the purpose of a Minecraft mod or server.
The studio noted that individuals not receiving payment may still create fan-related Minecraft material with branded themes. If you’re just a nut about Adidas, and not affiliated in any way with the company, go right ahead and build that giant redstone sneaker.
You mostly notice it in the Fallout series, which has always intended the freedom to be utterly immoral. In the original Fallout, you could kill anyone. Men, women, children. In fact, the developers at Interplay knew you might do it, so you got a unique title if you killed children. But that was the pre-Columbine apocalypse. In the post-Columbine apocalypse, when you go into Little Lamplight, Fallout 3 loads a separate section where you can’t use your weapons. If you want to kill adults in Fallout 3, that’s fine. Have at it. But not kids. This limitation isn’t unique to Fallout. How many hapless child pedestrians died while you figured out the driving controls in Grand Theft Auto V? None, because there aren’t any child pedestrians. You won’t find children in the streets of Saints Row, Assassin’s Creed, or Hitman, either. Because children aren’t allowed to die.
I don’t have a single opinion on the subject, because it depends on what type of game you’re making. I don’t mind that Snake has to use nonlethal tactics against the child soldiers trying to kill him in Metal Gear Solid V, because it’s a character choice. Snake wouldn’t kill a kid, pre- or post-Columbine. But I think it’s a bad call that there are no zombies under the age of 18 in Dead Rising, Left 4 Dead, or State of Decay. Child zombies are a significant part of the mythology, as you’ll see in Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later, and the Walking Dead. But in videogames, they’re a casualty of Columbine. The post-Columbine videogame sensibility delivered a headshot to child zombies.
This War of Mine got its share of attention when it was released a few years ago because it claimed to be an authentic recreation of the experience of civilians in a war zone. Yeah, whatever, This War of Mine. You’re a survival game — a decent one, to be sure — trying to stand out in a glutted genre. You’re not the politically conscientious arthouse game you’re pretending to be. You’re another furniture crafting game, but with stealth platformer sequences. That you’re so serious about it doesn’t make you special.
But today, the developers at 11 Bit Studios raise the stakes with DLC called The Little Ones. It adds kids. Who can die. Now, as you’re crafting furniture, you might have a waif running around the house. Her portrait blinks in the lower right hand corner of the screen. Her current state is “sad”. She’s going to be hungry tonight. It obviously depends on how much of a paternal instinct you have, but for me, this is the kind of pull a game lacks when it lets the violence at Columbine sanitize content. And while I think This War of Mine taking itself so seriously isn’t half as meaningful as its press would have you think — good lord, this video — the DLC makes a difference. Furthermore, 11 Bit Studios deserves credit for supporting War Child, a charity based on helping children displaced by war. They’re donating a dollar to War Child for each copy of the DLC sold.
The Grand Canyon State. The land that refuses to fall back or spring forward. Joe Arpaio country. Arizona. American Truck Simulator, which is pretty much Californian Truck Simulator with big plans, now has an early version of Arizona available for your driving and delivering pleasure. Just enable the beta in Steam, download version 1.3, and explore an in-progress build of some brand new desert real estate. It’s as if the American West was a wild frontier all over again!
The beta also lets you simulate having sex in various parts of your truck. From the list of features:
Physically simulated truck and trailer coupling
So far, that’s the series’ second most hardcore nod to realism, after being able to not use your blinkers when you change lanes.
The standard trailer coupling allowed for quite some room in the relative positions of the kingpin and the fifth-wheel. You could also “cheat” it by approaching the trailer from an angle. The new trailer coupling option uses full physical collision simulation for the kingpin and fifth-wheel – you will be faced with the same challenge as a real truck driver. Expecting this precision from a newbie player may be too intimidating, so we are keeping the standard simple coupling as a default…
When a new map comes out for a shooter, I’m usually all, yeah, whatever, wake me when you’ve got some single-player content. So you’d think Electronic Arts releasing a new map for Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 wouldn’t be of any interest to me. But remember there’s nothing in Garden Warfare 2 that isn’t both single-player and multiplayer, offline against bots or splitscreen with my friend, all going into the same character progression, loot grind, and quest system. Garden Warfare 2 won’t judge, limit, or segregate how I play. It’s all good. So when EA boast a big new city map, it’s not just a new place for online matches. It’s a new place for pretty much everything Garden Warfare 2 does.
The map is part of today’s free update, which includes a balance overhaul leaving no plant or zombie untouched (read the specifics here) and 1200 (!) new customization items. Because everyone’s plants and zombies weren’t already gaudy enough.
Microsoft closed Lionhead Studios in April, but the Fable franchise remains active despite Fable Legends being canceled shortly before the studio shut down. Fable lives! A group of ex-Lionhead folks have licensed the Fable name and started a Kickstarter for Fable Fortune, a concept that came out of the Pub Games project. Now separated from Microsoft, the game needs crowd-funding assistance to get finished.
Microsoft have helped us by giving us the license for Fable Fortune, but they are no longer investing in the project. We need to secure the remaining funds ourselves to complete development.
Fable Fortune from Flaming Fowl Studios will be a free-to-play collectible card game that leans heavily on the good versus evil morality system present in the Fable games. It may not be a full-blown action roleplaying game, but it looks like Flaming Fowl has the essence of Fable in it. You get all the British humor you’d expect from the series including bad puns, silly mustaches, and bodily functions.
You know it’s summer when there are this many comic book movies in a row. This week’s 3×3 begins in the middle of next week’s podcast, so tune in then to hear our favorite scenes in hardware stores.
