I’m sitting in the starting area of Karelia in my KV, waiting for the battle to begin. Karelia is one of my favorite battle maps. One team (mine, this time) deploys in the northeast corner on a two-tiered hill that looks like a short, wide wedding cake. The other team starts on a similar hill to the southwest. A road with very little cover runs directly between the two, but most players decide early in their careers that it’s explosive suicide to venture down it.
The northern and southern edges of the map offer much better avenues for attack. The northern axis boasts a number of large boulders that provide shelter from enemy fire, and some of them are even tall enough to block arcing artillery projectiles. The southern route is dominated by a high ridgeline with sheer cliffs on its northern face that can be skirted to the south. The team that commands this approach can move tanks to the top of the ridge and fire down on large portions of the battlefield. Both axes eventually lead to the enemy base which, when captured, ends the fight.
After the jump, choosing and losing Continue reading →
I’ve been known to hold forth on how annoying compulsory deaths are in these community levels. Deaths that are impossible for the player to avoid. Deaths that occur because the level designer was incompetent or lazy, or showing off. I almost wrote this week’s level–Desert 5.0–off and deposited it into that file. Glad I didn’t. Because there’s a difference between an arbitrary death, and a death that teaches you something…namely the rules of the game. This isn’t a great level, by any means, but it taught me a lesson. How to learn the rules through dying and not bitch about it.
Much like how you learn to win a good RTS by losing a few rounds.
Wait…did I say a good RTS?
After the jump, I meant great Continue reading →
“What are you doing?”
As I turn around to face my wife, I hit the small button on the bridge of my guitar. The lightshow on the television screen freezes, and my avatar halts in mid-sneer. The music that had been blasting from the speakers goes silent. The cooing of my son in the bouncy chair next to me becomes the most prominent sound in the room.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“I thought it was no TV until they’re two?” she replies with a pointed but amused expression.
She’s referring to one of the baby books we had read while she was pregnant. In it, the author makes a case for no television before the age of two based on studies that show a worrisome impact on babies’ attention spans later in life.
“This isn’t TV,” I say.
“That’s not a TV?”
“Yes, that’s a TV, but this isn’t TV. It’s Rock Band.”
“I can see that,” she says. “What’s the difference?”
After the jump, the worst possible answer. Continue reading →
The original Section 8 didn’t really have a single player mode. It was a multiplayer skrimish mode tied together with a few cutscenes. This time around Section 8: Prejudice boasts a full-featured single player mode called the Campaign.
After the jump, how the Campaign stacks up (or doesn’t) Continue reading →
See that tank up there? That’s me. No, not the sexy US T29 in the foreground, with the sloped armor, twin aerials, and muzzle-braked cannon. I’m the one behind it. The big olive drab thing that looks like a square box perched on top of a rectangular box. That’s my KV, and I love it. It’s kind of like a bulldog: ugly as sin, tough, loyal, dependable, and the last thing you want to see leaping for your throat.
After the jump, meet the KV, terror of the early game Continue reading →
In the course of my tomb raiding, Link has recovered all manner of potent artifacts. Completing the Palace of Darkness earned me a magic hammer. Other excursions have netted me gloves which confer the strength of a giant, the miraculous hookshot, and a cloak of invisibility. To get these, I’ve heroically slashed through legions of carnivorous plants, helmeted lizards, and leaping skeletons.
After the jump, it’s all about the milk bottles Continue reading →
Take a beautiful woman. A classically beautiful woman, not some latter day slattern. Convince her to stretch out on a big fluffy bed. Nothing raunchy. Something tasteful enough to paint on the nose of a bomber. Now send her home. Carefully analyze the topography of the bed where she has just lain. Calculate a track over that topography. Now you have the Glendale Raceway.
After the jump, Shift 2’s greatest track Continue reading →
One of the main themes that has run through this series is that time is precious. Therefore, it’s fitting that the most precious thing in my life — my family — takes up almost all of my time. But as the earlier entries have shown, there are still fleeting moments when I can play a game or two.
But for how much longer? Much to my dismay, I’ve discovered three adversaries that are conspiring to take all of my remaining time and consign me to a game-free life.
After the jump, the villains revealed. Continue reading →
One of the writers for this site, Christien Murawski, claims to be color blind. I’ve always suspected it was a ruse to explain why he’s terrible at shooters. But then I saw this piece from BBC journalist Dave Lee, who claims to be colorblind. Or “colourblind”, as he puts it. A short video shows how Call of Duty: Black Ops looks to colorblind folks. That explains a lot! Fortunately, Black Ops is one of a handful of games with settings that help colorblind players. In Lee’s article and video, Nintendo plays the role of the insensitive publisher who can’t be arsed to the accommodate colorblind players.
I remember how this was a big issue in Alpha Centauri, a strategy game where the location of pink fungus, which is invisible to colorblind players, is hugely important. That game also got a patch to enable settings for colorblind players.
(Thanks, Peter!)
The new Mars table is out for Pinball FX 2. Well, “new” if you haven’t already been playing it for a year on the Playstation 3 as part of Zen Pinball. In terms of sci-fi tables, it’s not quite as lively as Earth Defense Force, but it’s got its own sexy near-future cool. You’ll discover fancy gravity tricks, a fat space shuttle that sits in the middle of the table when it lands (I’m playin’ here!) and occasionally deploys a robot arm, a satellite that literally orbits the table, a cute little spider robot helpfully retrieving your ball (am I the only one who remembers AMEE from that Val Kilmer Mars movie?), scanning beam missions, and a mysterious pyramid. And, of course, a weird face peering out at you. It wouldn’t be Mars without that face.
I like Mars for how hard it is to lose the ball. I think it’s safe to say this is the most generous Zen Studios table in terms of letting you play longer. Mars is the table for those of us averse to failure.
And courtesy of the folks at Zen Studios, we have two free codes for Mars. It’s an add-on to Pinball FX 2, so it won’t do you much good unless you already own the core game. Post in the comments section below and make sure you’ve entered your email in the sign-in box when you post. In 24 hours, I’ll draw two names from a virtual hat and the lucky winners will get Mars for free. The table, not the planet.
At some point first person shooters and I parted ways. I was there at the beginning, playing Wolfenstein and downloading the DOOM preview off of the campus network. I learned the ways of WASD and circle strafing. I followed the evolution of the genre. I even jumped over to consoles to learn how to twin stick with Halo. But somewhere after Battlefield 2, sometime around Medal of Honor and Call of Duty, I began to drift away. My brief dalliance with Modern Warfare confirmed my feelings that I was no longer a “mainstream” FPSer. So I slunk off to strategy games. At least I didn’t fall all the way into wargaming.
Fortunately with a mature genre like FPSs, plenty of games will excite an almost 40-year-old father of a sub-2-year-old, homeowner, and mouselook inverter. If you’re willing to look past the multi-million dollar ad campaigns and dig around the edges you’ll find some gems.
After the jump, I “drop in” on Section 8: Prejudice Continue reading →
Most Wanted Entertainment is excited to introduce Defenders of Ardania, a tower defense game built out of Majesty 2. In this developer diary, designer Andras Klujber explains that this is tower defense, but with a twist. We all know that you can defend in a tower defense game, but what Defenders of Ardania supposes is…what if you could attack?
If the enemies and us both have a base, and “good will” is spewed forth against us in endless hordes, why shouldn’t we return it in kind?
This is how it came to be that Defenders of Ardania put a little twist in the tower defense style and smuggled in the possibility of sending units…Just think about it! The enemies attacking us in waves are still there, but being forced to defend is now extended with the possibility of striking back.
Defenders of Ardania also has three playable races, hero units, spell powers, unit upgrades, multiplayer, and a storyline. It sounds to me like Most Wanted has inadvertently made a real time strategy game.
I don’t mean to be a jerk, since I’m looking forward to whatever Most Wanted decides to do with Majesty 2. Tower defense games have plenty of room for new ideas. For instance, the recent Warzone Anomoly tasks you with managing a convoy working its way through defensive towers.
But the supposed unique twist in Defenders of Ardania is in no way unique. Allow me to again mention a really cool game on the Playstation Network called Comet Crash. It seems at first blush like straight-up tower defense, but it introduces the mechanic of building barracks that gradually accumulate an offensive army. In addition to the usual tower defense gameplay, you have to decide how much to invest in barracks, what sort of counterattack you’ll assemble, when you’ll loose it, and what you’ll do to manage its attack path. Comet Crash even has multiplayer, and it works particularly well for two players in the same room, playing on the same screen.
So, yeah, Most Wanted, that’s a cool idea for Defenders of Ardania. I’ve been enjoying it for the last few years.
We resume Link’s quest in the middle of the game’s fifth dungeon, the Palace of Darkness. Something about it must have pissed me off, because I am in a sub-basement with no inkling of how to progress. Zelda games are nothing like bikes — they’re nearly impossible to pick up again. Each dungeon requires the player to assemble a mental map and the few skills necessary to solving its puzzles. After not playing for a year, I remember none of these tricks. I’m stuck in a room with a locked door and three giant, bipedal rats — two green and one red. Experience with the series tells me that if I clear the enemies from the room, that door will slide open.
After the jump, easier said than done Continue reading →
The movie that finally made us figure out how to pronounce “Saoirse”. If you haven’t seen Hanna yet, fast forward to our 3×3 of the worst villains, which begins at the one hour and 28 minute (!) mark.
Podcast (movies): Play in new window | Download
Subscribe:
When I first learned that my wife was pregnant, I knew that my life was going to change. And it has, even in the most mundane ways. Going to the grocery store now requires D-Day level planning and preparation. Buying a taco sets off an internal fiscal debate. A slight temperature deviation in our apartment means frantically dialing down radiators or cranking up space heaters.
I was less prepared for the personal changes. Sure, there are the usual things like a sense of responsibility more potent than ever and an ineffable love that swells each time I look at the twins. But the surprises come from the smaller stuff. Like the fact that my burning hatred of scatological humor has mellowed after months of my kids’ boisterous and unrestrained flatulence. Or that my rock solid faith in the medical profession has crumbled thanks to the parade of obstetric and pediatric bozos we’ve dealt with since the births.
And then there are two recent revelations that came to me through games.
After the jump, friend becomes foe and man becomes mental. Continue reading →
