One of the great things about playing a bite-sized community level is that sometimes it only takes one single element of design to make it a satisfying experience. As long as there’s nothing lousy about it to bring it down, one factor can carry the day. In playing The Minty Green Factory Part 1, that one thing is the bubble hat (pictured).
It’s just a goofy little touch. Your sackdude puts on the helmet–or, to put it more accurately, he runs by the helmet and it gets put on him–and then he proceeds to shoot bubbles out of his head, one at a time. He looks at the bubble, wondering what to do about it. Is he supposed to float on–POP. Drop. Nope. Not supposed to float on it. Hmm. He realizes he probably has to get up to that higher platform over there to the right, the one with the save portal and the spermy designs on it. A lightbulb goes on. Steps! Of course! He shoots another bubble and jumps to it. Yep, it holds him. So all he has to do is–POP. Drop. Apparently only holds him for a few seconds. Back to the first platform to try again. He works faster this time. Bubble. Jump. Bubble. Jump. In no time he’s built his first bubble staircase.
Just a simple little discovery, but so pleasing.
Speaking of discovery…
After the jump, a trainer in training Continue reading →
Drassen has been successfully taken and staffed with a full complement of militia, but my team is under-geared and nearly out of ammo. Thankfully, while I’ve been training militia, the money from the mine has been building up. Time for a shopping spree!
The 1.13 patch’s most significant addition to Jagged Alliance 2 can be found at Bobby Ray’s, your online one-stop-shop for all things death-dealing. Hundreds of new weapons are added to the game, as well as a wide range of new armor, ammunition types, and other equipment. No matter how you want a merc to operate, you’ll find equipment perfectly suited to their needs.
After the jump, get your tickets to the gun show Continue reading →
That guy at 2K Games who said strategy games are “not contemporary” picked the wrong week to trash talk nerds like me who love our hexes and build queues. Because this is the week Of Hydralisks & Phalanxes goes live.
What is Of Hydralisks and Phalanxes? Glad you asked. It’s a monthly strategy gaming column I’ll be doing for Gamespy. And, yes, that’s the actual title. The first column is here and I hope that guy at 2K reads it, because I give him the what-for. I read him the riot act. I dress him down. I take him out back to the shed. I bend him over a barrel and show him the 50 states.
Actually, not really. Because I kind of understand what 2K president Christoph Hartman was getting at in his interview. It’s just that us strategy gamers don’t often get the opportunity to get mad without looking ridiculous for kvetching about a missing hotkey or bad AI or whether a phalanx could beat a battleship. which it totally could.
So I hope you enjoy my first column, Mr. Hartman! Because there more where that came from. One every month, in fact.
On this week’s Qt3 Games Podcast, we get into issues like the pros and cons of potions, the weirdest way to level up your dude, and the role of pornography in videogames. Also, just how good is Bastion? And what’s going on at Bioware and Riot Games? And how did Tom manage to accidentally nuke the world? And when will McMaster make his triumphant return to North America? Listen and find out.
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After a surprisingly successful noontime operation at the farm, the Dispensables rest up for the push onto Drassen. Ira has some medical skill, so she patches everyone up while Chopshop repairs what he can before night falls.
In the wee hours of the morning, I move the team onward to the Drassen airport. It’s the very next zone to the east. It’s time for my first night op, and time for Mantis to really hit her stride.
After the jump, the drink will flow and blood will spill Continue reading →
Two things I loved early on about The Abadoned are how it looks — this is a gorgeous production design, smartly shot by Nacho Cerda, yet another Spanish director with a great eye — and a title card that reads “40 years later”. The movie opens with a pair of little babies showing up out of nowhere. So once the title card flashed onscreen, I knew this was going to be a movie about a forty-year-old. Now I like good looking young people as much as the next WB viewer, but you can only get so much mileage out of good looking young people. They’re dumb, they’re inexperienced, and they’re going to mope a lot about the other good looking young people. At some point, you’re going to need the cast of The Thing, or Andromeda Strain, or Jaws, or Don’t Look Now, or Burnt Offerings, or The Shining. I can only take so many Insidiouses and Amityville Horror remakes and Saws. So when the stately middle-aged stage actress Anastasia Hille showed up, The Abandoned earns major points.
So far, so good. But let’s talk for a second, horror movie. First off, please stop using that trick where someone walks across the foreground of the shot while the main character’s back is turned so that only the audience sees it. Making something scary only by virtue of camera placement is cheating.
Second off, horror movie, I will give you no more than ten minutes of the protagonist walking around a creepy locale while nothing happens. Ten minutes. That’s it. A lot of you go longer and some of you seem to consist mostly of people walking around in, like, the woods or a poorly lit house. Especially the woods. Over the course of an average horror fan’s lifetime, do you know how much footage we see of people walking around in the woods? Far too much. There’s a thin line between suspense and tedium. That line is now ten minutes long. The Abandoned very nearly goes over its limit.
But then something really freaky happens and I’m all, like, “ahhhhh!” and then Karel Roden shows up and all is well. I saw a Polish-language Western once in which Karel Roden sustains a head wound and cauterizes it with the gunpowder from his own bullets. He basically flash sears his own skull. That’s bad ass. He does something nearly that bad ass to a leg wound in The Abandoned. Dude is like the best field medic ever.
You can’t overestimate the value of some Karel Roden. Karel Roden is in exactly one scene in Orphan, and he’s not even really in it. He’s literally phoning in his scene. But he’s Karel Roden and Orphan is already a great movie by that point. But if Karel Roden had played the Tcheky Karyo part in Gravedancers, that movie would have been 45% less stupid. So The Abandoned has got that going for it. Together with Miss Hille’s gracefully carried years and Mr. Cerda’s keen eye and fantastic production design, The Abandoned turns out to be a memorable haunted house romp and very nearly the arthouse version of Evil Dead.
The Abandoned is available on DVD (Netflix link here).
Denny Atkin just got back from witnessing history (pictured, in a photograph he took himself). He talks about it, as well as his technique for making Just Cause 2 a family-friendly game, in this episode of the Quarter to Three podcast.
(Apologies for the quality of my voice as the podcast progresses. Just pretend I’m some freaky robot. Rest assured that Denny, the guy saying the stuff that matters, comes through loud and clear throughout.)
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When we last left our heroes, the Dispensables were on their way to liberate the town of Drassen. It’s not far, but getting there turns out to be a bit more difficult than I expected. I very quickly spot one of Queen Deidranna’s patrols in the woods. Shouldn’t have stuck to the road, I guess.
The woods encounter has the potential to be a slaughter. My mercs don’t have nearly the weapons range to confidently take on a patrol in a relatively wide-open zone like these woods. Fortunately, the Dispensables sneak along the edge of the woods and make it to the next zone, a small farm on the road. No, it’s not particularly heroic, but don’t worry. We’ll be seeing this patrol again.
After the jump, a bloody harvest Continue reading →
I think I may have just played one of my all-time favorite levels in a platformer. And not because it did anything necessarily spectacular. It was more about the way the gameplay, tone, and a specific song came together (the song isn’t listed in the credits, which is a really odd oversight). I didn’t want the level to end. I just sat there at the exit letting the music play with the wind blowing softly under it. Since when did platformers get so wistful? Actually, I know the answer to that. Trace a sad lovely line from Ico to Flower to Braid. Keep following that line and you’ll come to Bastion, the game I’m currently playing. The level is Prosper Bluff. You’ll know it when you get there.
In a way, Bastion is “just” a platformer with RPG elements. But like Ico and Flower and Braid, it’s more than its genre. Bastion knits familiar gameplay into a neatly playable package, with the design acumen of something like Darksiders or some umteenth Ratchet & Clank; it makes the familiar feel fresh. The graphics are cheerfully colorful and tastefully lively, but there’s a sullen mood underneath it all, expressed mainly through writer Greg Kasavin’s story and actor Logan Cunningham’s gravelly basso narration. It has the economy of a children’s book and the poignancy of poetry. And I wish to heck I knew what song plays at Prosper Bluff, because it’s going to be floating in my head for at least several days. Probably longer.
Bastion is the creation of a teensy indie developer called Supergiant Games, but it’s published by Warner Brother Interactive. It’ll be out next week on Xbox Live, at which point I’ll have quite a bit more to say.
A dictatorial queen has an iron grip on a small island in…um…actually, I have no idea. Not that it matters. Let’s say it’s in South Ameurafricasia and leave it at that. What does matter is that I’ve been given a fat contract and 32 grand to go in there and take Queen Deidranna out of power so the people of Arulco can be free at last.
This is a job for…the Dispensables.
At their disposal is the Jagged Alliance 2 v.1.13 “patch,” a user-created mod that adds new features, new tactics, and new guns. Boy howdy, does it add new guns.
After the jump, meet the Dispensables Continue reading →
Since the alternative was Transformers 3D and since we thought Colin Farrell was pretty funny in In Brugge and Alexander, we decide to see Horrible Bosses this week. Find out how that turns out or skip ahead to this week’s 3×3 discussion at the 43-minute mark. We try to have an erudite discussion about great examples of production design, but we’re not entirely up to the erudite part.
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Panzer Corps comes out on Monday. You might think Panzer Corps is some serious hardcore wargame from Matrix Games. You’d be partly right. It is from Matrix Games. But it’s not serious, hardcore, or a wargame. It’s just an appropriately breezy remake of a 1994 beer-and-pretzels strategy/puzzle game called Panzer General. Which, yeah, was a classic back in the day. But now?
After the jump, why would you ever want to play a remake of a game from 1994? Continue reading →
Okay, it’s time to do some serious upgrading. Time to stock up on healing potions, grab a bed, and head back to the underground jungle. Time to explore the surface at night for fallen stars. Time to max out the health, get some mana going, and get some more great items. Because soon, it’s time to head to the Dungeon.
After the jump: it’s just a harmless old man, right? Continue reading →
After last week’s experience of finding the best level evar, I suppose a letdown was inevitable. But damn! Nuthin’ but mediocrity this week. That’s what I get for going back to “Cool Levels” in the hopes that lightning would strike a second time so soon. Next week it’s back to Mm Picks, those levels the folks at the developer, Media Molecule, have played and “deemed awesome.”
I don’t particularly recommend the level pictured above, Paradise Mountains. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s fine. Out of the other choices of okayness that included an inscrutable exploding penguin game, a strange FPS test, a somewhat broken zombie-killing exercise, and an almost inspired dash through what looks like a ruled-paper world, it stood out as most playable. And photogenic. The best thing about it was that I achieved the top score. Every time I played it. I was always number one.
Now that I think about it, I achieved the top score every time I played every one of these levels. How about that? Pretty cool huh? But then, why should I care about scores? I’ve evolved way beyond that.
After the jump, if you’re scoring at home, or even if you’re alone Continue reading →
Whew. For a while there, I was worried that Sims: Medieval was just going to be a one-off. Fortunately, Electronic Arts hasn’t forgotten about their wonderful fantasy-themed gameplay-infused iteration of The Sims.
…new exhilarating quests expand upon the original adventures like finding the fountain of youth or protecting the kingdom from an evil sorcerer. The war between Tredony and Aarbyville creates a new ambition and opportunity for players to suit up their kingdoms. Players can choose to be anyone from a king or queen to a knight or blacksmith, and with that, prepare for voyage accordingly. Treasure hunting is an exciting new gameplay feature in the pack with maps, shovels, rare treasures and surprising dangers, while challenging players to find hidden objects and search for desirable rewards that will benefit their Hero Sims. Other new items include birds that you can name and train, and interrogation chairs.
The Sims Medieval: Pirates and Nobles has a range of pirate and nobility-themed items that players can use to revamp their creation of legendary swords or embellish their customized royal weddings with new fashion pieces. Bold new signature items can be used as rewards or punishments. As a treat, Hero Sims can now be accompanied by companions such as pet falcons or parrots. If Sims have been more naughty than nice, players can subject them to extreme punishments such as the interrogation chair.
After the jump, a few screenshots and useless observations. Continue reading →
