The first Shift did a great job tracking your friends’ performance in different races. It compared your best time to the best time from your friends list. Using these times, it assigned “ownership” to an event, and then it tallied the number of events you owned in any group to assign ownership to groups of events. When you played Shift, it provided an immediate visual cue to how well you were doing compared to your friends playing the game.
But Shift 2 uses Electronic Arts’ Autolog, a Facebook-inspired bit of social bloat bolted onto the side of the game.
After the jump, I will try really hard to hate Autolog Continue reading →
You spend a lot of time alone in Stalker: Call of Pripyat. It’s a lonely world, with wide expanses of abandoned land, ruined buildings slumping slowly into the swamps, and strangely mutated creatures running in packs through the tall and rustling grasses. I’ve been running back and forth for a while now, completing standard tasks for an assortment of indistinguishable hardasses. Go find his missing tool chest. Place these detectors inside of anomalies. Kill all the mutants in this lair. And I’ve been doing it mostly alone.
So when I get to team up with people, it’s pretty exciting. Hanging out with Grouse, as described in a previous entry, wasn’t that great. But a mission to rescue a stalker hostage from some bandits was surprisingly fun. I had the option to convince his buddies to help me attack the bandits, negotiate with the bandits, or deal with it my own way. I chose the latter option.
After the jump, me and my new buddy eff some bandits UP! Continue reading →
Usul, we’ve got wormsign the likes of which even God has never seen.
This week’s community level is my favorite non-pinball pinball level I’ve played so far. You know what? Include actual LBP2 pinball levels in that, because I’ve yet to play one of those that works. This one is easy. It’s clever. And it’s worlds beyond any of those. The level is called Magnetic Fields. Isn’t my little magnetic spaceshippy thing up there nifty?
Now then, ready to have your mind blown with a full-on essay-length breakdown of this sweet little level?
After the jump, now for something completely different Continue reading →
I have a favorite character in every Final Fantasy game. I think everyone who plays a Final Fantasy game has a favorite character. They stay in the party all the time, they get the best weapons and armor, and they get all the top abilities. Your least favorite character is lucky to even get a seat on the airship before you take off, let alone get in the active party. If you look carefully at that picture, you might be able to figure out which of those characters I like and which I hate.
After the jump, maybe he’s a lion. Continue reading →
Finland’s involvement in World War II includes one of the great David vs. Goliath stories of all time. Invaded in November 1930 by Stalin’s Red Army, the woefully outnumbered and outgunned Finns humiliated the Russians, inflicting heavy casualties, and initially thwarting all their objectives. The lightly armed Finns conducted a clinic in mobile winter warfare, typified by the Battle of Suomussalmi where two entire Soviet divisions were annihilated while trapped on a forest road. Finnish casualties were fewer than 500. The war introduced the world to the untranslatable Finnish word sisu: a national strength of will that exemplified the performance of the country’s military. The Red Army eventually overcame this heroic resistance through a combination of improved leadership, coordination, and mostly just overwhelming numbers. But the Peace of Moscow signed in March 1940 fell far short of Stalin’s initial goal of the conquest of the entire country. The war captured the world’s imagination (although secured virtually no material assistance) and has been recounted in multiple books in many languages. Former PC Gamer columnist and wargaming guru William Trotter wrote an excellent account, Frozen Hell, almost twenty years ago, and a classic popular history, White Death by Allen Chew, was recently reprinted after initial publication way back in 1971.
After the jump, the darker side of the story Continue reading →
I am not a highly trained soldier. You can tell by watching me play a shooter, where I tend to shoot all around my target and hope it has the courtesy to step into the line of fire. But the first Modern Warfare made me feel like a highly trained soldier by lining up my gun for me. I squeeze the gamepad’s left trigger and my weapon points at a bad guy! Then it’s up to me to either finesse the aim for a headshot, or pull the right trigger to fire. From there I learn that awesome move where I pulse the left trigger to drop a cluster of bad guys one-by-one, with nary a wasted bullet. Years of virtual military training, sidestepped with an interface tweak.
After the jump, I’m not a professional race car diver either Continue reading →
I bought the game when a mod called Call of Pripyat Complete had just been released. It’s a huge mod with tons of new high-definition textures, expanded view distance, enchanced vegetation, and a ton of small changes to the AI, NPC behavior, UI, and soundscape. Apparently a similar mod has been released for the previous two games to great acclaim. Lots of people like this mod. And I want to, too!
After the jump, addicted to mods Continue reading →
These days, any shooter is two separate games: the single-player and the multiplayer. So when you read one of the recently written reviews of SOCOM 4, which doesn’t come out until next week, it’s more useless than normal. Particularly given how the SOCOM games have put so much emphasis on multiplayer.
To Gamepro’s credit, they’re letting me write two reviews. The review of the single player was just posted. Find out how awesome it is when your shooter includes stealth missions!
Remember when you thought you’d never again read the words “you have been detected” followed by the words “mission failed”? According to SOCOM 4, you’ve got another thing coming.
Thumbs down for SOCOM 4’s single player.
I can’t really get worked up for Resistance 3, partly because it looks like any other competent unremarkable shooter. But mostly because it’s going to be missing my favorite feature: the cool co-op mode from Resistance 2.
However, one of the most encouraging things Resistance 3 will do is bring back the weapon wheel, which lets you carry an unlimited number of the game’s crazy guns. This is a reversal from Resistance 2, which limited you to two guns at a time. In other words, the next game will be more like Ratchet & Clank, and less like Halo.
On 1up, I’ve written a list of completely new things you’ll be seeing in Resistance 3.
I’ve played almost every Final Fantasy game released in the United States. I bought Final Fantasy VI a second time just so I could play it at work on my Game Boy Advance. There’s an army of Final Fantasy action figures on my desk. I have twenty-nine versions of the chocobo theme on my iPod. I have a plush tonberry doll. I named the plush tonberry doll.*
And even I think the Dissidia story is completely bonkers.
After the jump, Final Fantasy fanfiction Continue reading →
While talking to someone recently about real time strategy games, I was trying to explain the distinct appeal of Company of Heroes as opposed to Starcraft II. They’re both excellent games, they both look fantastic, and they both reward skilled gameplay. But they’re hugely different in an important way.
Starcraft II is designed as an e-sport. It rewards skill above all else. It’s based on the placement of a sentry shield, the crucial seconds spent moving drones between resources, and the timing of a chronoboost. It’s a gorgeous game, to be sure, but it was built primarily for its long and arguably infinite learning curve.
Company of Heroes is a war movie game to end all war movie games, and it captures the feel of World War II action as well as any shooter. You can’t help but be awed by the destructible terrain, the animation, the voice acting, the explosions, and the spectacle of it all. It requires skill, to be sure, but it’s one of those rare RTSs that lives in your gut more than your head.
This idea of a skill vs. spectacle is a spectrum. I can’t think of any RTS that doesn’t appeal to both skill and spectacle. It’s just that some lean one way or the other.
After the jump…wait, did you paste the wrong text into this entry? Continue reading →
Stalker Call of Pripyat is a gorgeous game. All the graphical elements are top-notch, but of particular note is the art direction, which evokes an incredibly bleak environment and still manages to be mysterious and beautiful at the same time. Sure, the grass sort of appears around you as you walk, and some of the objects in the world are a little chunky, but overall the game is totally gorgeous. Most importantly, it does a fantastic job of placing you in the blasted, worn out world of the Zone, making it feel lived in and picked over and rusted and real. It’s a gorgeous game.
After the jump, something may or may not happen Continue reading →
At one point in the co-op action game, Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One, the players drift down a river on a round raft. The raft has four motors on the edges. When a player uses one of the motors, the raft drifts in the appropriate direction. This being a raft floating on water and physics being physics, it is liable to turn as it moves. So that can get messy. Then there are the other three yahoos on the raft who might have their own ideas about where the raft should go. I once went canoeing with my buddy Kevin when I was a kid. I was awesome at paddling the canoe. But he kept screwing us up by paddling different from me. Canoes, man. It’s a wonder humanity ever made it across the Bering Strait.
Anyway, while you’re spinning and drifting down this river, you’re trying to pick up flaoting loot boxes. And did I mention that there are bombs floating all over the place? Also giant turtles with spiky shells. I suspect it will be one of those levels I’ll be driven to finish solely because I never want to have to play it again.
During a demo of the level, the game’s developer, Chad Dezern, calls the raft “an extremely democratic vehicle”. And, yeah, I’d say that’s a pretty good approximation of the contemporary political process.
(In case it’s not clear, the raft represents Barack Obama, the port motor is Harry Reid, the starboard motor is John Boehner, the turtles are Rush Limbaugh, and the bombs are Glenn Beck’s tears. The river itself is stuff Fox News says. The loot boxes are the state parks that didn’t have to close this past week.)
Sims Medieval was a real revelation to me. I expected some sort of cheap EA add-on. Instead, I got something brilliant. Just when I think I’m over The Sims, it’s pulls me back in.
Thumbs up. Way up.
Dissidia 012 [duodecim] Final Fantasy is the sequel to Dissidia Final Fantasy. That might be a little hard to figure out at first glance, because generally, a 1 is not followed by a 012. The title refers to something that makes (some) sense in the story, but it’s yet another entry in a long line of confusing Square Enix game names. It’s also not the last time you’ll be forced to make sense of numbers in this excellent fighting game.
After the jump, why two life bars are better than one Continue reading →
