Microsoft wins the summer. Again.
(I wrote this last Wednesday — well before Microsoft's announcement this week that they're kicking off "Game Feast," another multi-week promotion with a killer lineup of games, at the end of this month. Over at Sony? Crickets. But hey, you get a discount on your PS3-protection plan if you sign up for PSN, so there's that.
Anyway, SUPER MEAT BOY, Twisted Pixel's very promising COMIC JUMPER, HYDROPHOBIA and the like are anchoring the Game Feast calendar. Just something to keep in mind as you read on.)
The Hotshots vs. the Icemen! Transcending history and the world, a tale of laser turrets eternally retold. (Uber Entertainment)
If a layman judged this summer’s video game offerings based purely on retail, he or she would be rightfully disappointed. As boxed titles go, the last three months have been dreadfully bare — typical for June, July and the first half of August, but disappointing nonetheless.
Remember the heady days of May, which gave us “Red Dead Redemption,” “Super Mario Galaxy 2,” “Alan Wake,” “Blur,” “Split/Second” and other blockbusters within days of each other? Since then, there’s been “StarCraft II,” and then there was everything else.
Fortunately, we’ve nearly turned the page on all of that archaic brick-and-mortar nonsense. With few exceptions, this summer’s best games have been downloadable — either exclusively or as a companion to their boxed cousins — and priced at $15 or less.
The results have been heartening.
Though I’m as console-agnostic as can be, Microsoft gets the gold star this year. Their third annual Summer of Arcade promotion packed a lot of polish and diversity into five timed exclusives, starting in July with LIMBO (reviewed in this space last month) and wrapping up last week with the sublime LARA CROFT AND THE GUARDIAN OF LIGHT, which I’ll discuss here shortly.
Summer of Arcade dropped a clunker in 2008 and 2009, and 2010 doesn’t buck that trend. CASTLEVANIA: HARMONY OF DESPAIR, with its charmlessly dated visuals and slipshod multiplayer getup, is to this summer what GALAGA LEGIONS and the remake of TURTLES IN TIME were to the summers before it.
But four out of five ain’t bad.
That isn’t to suggest that the PlayStation Network has been totally worthless this summer, despite Sony’s best efforts to make the thing unusable. PSN got a two-week jump on Xbox Live with the video game adaptation of SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD, a nostalgia-throttling 2-D brawler that owes more to Bryan Lee O’Malley’s comics than it does to Edgar Wright’s wonderful movie.
As of this week, that title is available on both services.
And DEATHSPANK, the silly-ish hack-and-slash from Hothead Games and Monkey Island co-creator Ron Gilbert, debuted in July on the Xbox 360 and PS3 simultaneously. That likely will be the case next month, too, when the game’s surprise sequel, announced just this week, hits servers everywhere.
Same goes for SHANK, the hysterically violent side-scrolling brawler unleashed on both services Wednesday.
It’s Sony’s lethargy about locking down down exclusives (not to mention those innumerable, lengthy updates that cut off your PSN access) that keeps the PS3 from being truly competitive summer after summer after summer.
Sure, they’ve got the bead on Q Games’ great Pixeljunk titles, and they’ll probably get the exclusive on JOURNEY, thatgamecompany’s follow-up to FLOWER. There are also those wonderful, barely announced oddities, like space-spelunker GRAVITY CRASH.
But four years after Sony launched PSN, it still trails Xbox Live and Steam as a destination for digital content. I’m not insisting that the company line up more exclusives, but until Microsoft stops throwing money at publishers, Sony’s going to have to find a way to get in the game.
That said, here’s my pick for the best downloadable title of the last three months:
LARA CROFT AND THE GUARDIAN OF LIGHT
Available only on Xbox Live until late September, Crystal Dynamics has put together an attractive, robust action-adventure title that borrows the twin-stick shooting of GEOMETRY WARS and the isometric perspective of DIABLO.
It’s an unsettling blend at first, but it grows on you quickly. Jumping feels great, the physics-based puzzles are satisfying to solve, and the shooting is legitimate fun — something that’s never been true of Lara’s TOMB RAIDER games.
The game also makes a great argument for abolishing the artificial cap on trophies and achievements in downloadable titles. As officially sanctioned Microsoft achievements go, LARA CROFT offers a handful of inventive challenges — catch your co-op partner with your grappling hook, beat a boss, jump off your partner’s shield — but they pale in comparison to a bevy of in-game tasks that reward exploration and reflexes with new guns and other goodies. Unlocking them all requires multiple playthroughs and a commitment of a dozen hours or more.
(Your partner, by the by, is an English-proficient, cartoonishly brawny dude native to the tombs you’re raiding. As things stand today, you can play him only as a local co-op partner, though Crystal Dynamics has pledged to integrate online co-op by the end of next month. Until then, so much for those co-op achievements!)
In other words, there’s more than enough content here to justify the full 1,000-point treatment. So how about it, Microsoft?
This article appeared first in the York Dispatch.
Review: Patience pays off in second ‘StarCraft’
I was born with a competitive streak, but it doesn’t manifest in the ways you’d expect. I’m at once obsessed with fitness and terrified of team sports. I love video games but refuse to get serious about online play.
The chance that I might lose is paralyzing. And losing in front of other people, what with the spectating and replay features packed into so many games today? Forget it. Get out of here.
So I approached STARCRAFT II: WINGS OF LIBERTY last month’s sequel to Blizzard Entertainment’s 1998 strategy landmark, with some serious performance anxiety. I remembered the first game as a neat single-player experience with great voice-acting, but to the millions of people still playing it 12 years later, the game’s multiplayer suite has become a lifestyle — or, worse, a spectator sport.
In parts east, professional STARCRAFT players are bona fide celebrities, swimming in endorsement money and actions per minute and barely ironic nicknames. South Korea recently lost its collective marbles after a betting scandal rocked the country’s professional StarCraft community.
Horrifying. I would use exclamation points if our in-house style guidelines allowed as much, such is my disgust.
But part of my brain always knew not to worry. For as long as Blizzard has been making games, the company has expertly juggled the interests of casual and hardcore players — see “World of Warcraft,” where I self-destructively reactivated my account last week — and Wings of Liberty is no exception.
Love yourself: The multiplayer functionality, powered by Blizzard’s recently overhauled Battle.net matchmaking service, is the main draw here, and it’s the thing that’s going to give StarCraft II legs until 2029, when the first chapter of STARCRAFT III will enter a closed, three-year multiplayer beta. Or something.
But because I flip my lid at the mere suggestion of human opponents, I plunked down my $60 mostly for the single-player content. And I’m happy to report that this is a perfectly satisfactory way to experience the game. The full campaign is spread over 26 missions, each of which can take as long as 45 minutes to complete. There are a few additional missions scattered about as well, but you’ll have to interfere with the adventure’s narrative momentum if you want to see them all in one playthrough.
About halfway through the game, for instance, you’re forced to choose between two special ops units to add to your army. The Ghost is a professional, long-ranged sniper unit. The Spectre is an unhinged, short-ranged bruiser. Both have cloaking devices and can paint targets for nuclear attacks, which is the only thing you’ll use them for anyway.
But because Ghosts and Spectres hate each other, you can choose only one. And in so doing, you get a unique mission.
You’ll make a handful of such choices throughout the campaign, and though the manichean outcomes feel a little obvious at times, the extra missions greatly extend the game’s solo playability.
The same goes for the bevy of upgrades, secrets, varying difficulties and achievements that litter the single-player side of things. There’s simply an overwhelming amount of content exclusive to the campaign, which makes a fine argument for the pricetag on its own. Many Terran standbys from the first StarCraft — Wraiths, Goliaths, Vultures, science vessels — are back in slightly upgraded form, but they’re only found in the campaign.
Blizzard’s storytelling always leaves something to be desired, but the experience here is exceptional in spite of itself. Plotting is dense but strangely paced, thanks mostly to the freedom the game affords you when choosing missions. Several important characters are teased early on but don’t appear in earnest until the last few hours of the tale.
But the eye-raising ending, which concludes an important arc from the first game, is absolutely killer.
And if you’re chomping at the bit for the first of two expansion packs already announced for the game, you’ll have some pretty big questions at the end of Wings of Liberty. To say anything else would be to tiptoe into spoiler territory, but take my word for it — they’re intriguing questions.
Okay, fine: Because the missions are so fun and so varied, you’ll likely tear through them more quickly than you mean to. And if you aren’t inclined to do all of that a second or third time, you’ll have no choice but to try the multiplayer.
Because it will sit there, softly mocking you from the unknowable depths of your hard drive platter. Teasing your loved ones, calling you names and threatening to corrupt your iTunes library unless you man up.
Fortunately, Blizzard has gone out of its way to make the online experience more palatable for wimps like me. A series of nine solo challenge missions teaches you the basics — counters, hotkeys and whatnot — of the three playable factions, measurably improving your performance.
After messing about with the Terran challenges, my early-game Marine / Marauder / Medivac build can withstand feints from Sentry / Zealot raiding parties and most Zergling / Hydralisk rushes. If that means nothing to you, congratulations. To me, it means survival.
And though I’ve yet to to officially take my game into league play, I’ve tried enough custom games and watched so many YouTube and Justin.tv matches that I feel comfortable praising Battle.net’s stability and matchmaking. Blizzard said months ago that Wings of Liberty had been delayed so long because of improvements to its online service, and after poking at it for two weeks, it’s clear that the finished product was worth the wait.
As good as Battle.net has become, though, the best news about multiplayer matches in StarCraft II is that they are entirely optional. You can buy this game, never step online and feel completely confident about your purchase. There’s a lot of game here.
This article originally appeared in the York Dispatch
Review: ‘Singularity’ tears up space, time
You'll be facing all manner of mutated Russians in Singularity's many shiny, Unreal Engine 3-powered corridors.
As the MC of "Cabaret" once said, "You know the funny thing about Herman? There's nothing funny about Herman."
That basically sums up my feelings for SINGULARITY, a first-person shooter from veteran action developer Raven Software. The great thing about the game, released on HD consoles and the PC this week, is that there's nothing truly Great (capital "G") about it.
It doesn't aspire to some sort of literary permanence, a la HALF-LIFE 2 and its rudimentary multiplayer getup isn't the tent-pole spectacle of MODERN WARFARE 2.
Instead, Singularity revels in the silliest, schlockiest corners of science-fiction gaming, tasking your American avatar with an investigation of Cold War experiments on a secret island off the coast of Russia.
In pursuit of an edge over the tyrannical West, the Soviets in 1950s apparently created a time-space anomaly on said island, inadvertently mutating its inhabitants and screwing things up in 2010. Your character might or might not have participated, thanks to some time-travelling shenanigans. Awkward!
The game offers you the standard complement of FPS weaponry -- shotguns, rifles and explosive stuff -- as well as a few less conventional items. The Seeker, which you find only during scripted moments in the 1950s, lets you guide your bullets in slow motion; another gun fires darts that detonate a second after burrowing into their targets.
Each gun, save for an utterly useless pistol, is fun to fire, and all can be upgraded tokens you find hidden throughout the game.
But Singularity doesn't really take off until about 90 minutes in, when you find a mysterious robo-glove (called the Time Manipulation Device, or TMD) that lets you stop time, instantly age enemies by hundreds of years and, of course, throw heavy objects great distances.
If that sounds familiar, it's probably because you played BIOSHOCK or its sequel. Magic in your left hand, gun in your right, dispatch meanies as you please.
But where combat in BioShock and BIOSHOCK 2 never inched past serviceable, Singularity feels genuinely good. This is the DOOM of modern-day shooters, throwing plenty of ammo and nine or ten enemies at you at once. The game is not about conserving bullets; it's about shooting time-travelling zombies in the head and telekinetically chucking explosive barrels at them, counting your remaining health packs after the fact.
Puzzlingly, you're constrained here by the Halo Rule. Where Doom, QUAKE and their successors allowed you an entire arsenal of destruction, today's shooters limit you to only a handful of guns at once. This presumably is done in the name of realism -- how many rocket launchers, plasma rifles and BFGs can one man carry, after all? -- but when a game trafficks in the absurd with as much gusto as Singularity does, the size of your war chest seems like a silly place to draw the line.
Still, the fighting is usually very satisfying, particularly once you pick up the Deadlock power about one-third of the way through the game. The ability lets you create a sphere inside which enemies are frozen and bullets move at a snail's space. That trick, coupled with the sniper rifle's slow-motion zoom, lets you watch rounds actually rotate out of the chamber on their way to your target's face.
The single-player campaign (no co-op here), shiny and diverse though it is, lasts about eight hours on normal difficulty, and once it's over, you're at a crossroads. You could slog through the first hour or so again on the harder difficulty, armed with naught but your terrible pistol and dodging enemies who steal nearly all your health in one swipe.
You could try the game's two class-based multiplayer modes, which pack a few thrills but currently suffer from awful connection issues and terribly net code.
If neither of those sound appetizing, you're done. At $60 for the console versions (and $50 on the superior PC version, though the game performs like a champ on all platforms), that can feel like a tough sell. And that's totally fair.
But the single-player content here is as cheeky and exciting as FPS campaigns come today. Even though story isn't something you'll be quoting years or even days from now -- there's no "would you kindly" moment here, folks -- Singularity is packed with enough memorable sequences and tight gameplay to merit any action junkie's attention.
Steam is selling stuff! I suck!
When you know you have a problem.
Steam's "Perils of Summer" sale has messed up my life. Here I was, ready to hide out and squirrel away some money for a mid-July bachelor party in Austin, Texas, when the digital download service announces that it will be slashing prices on PC games through July 4.
Some of the discounts have been ridiculous. For 24 hours Sunday and Monday, you could pick up CIVILIZATION IV and all of its expansions (including COLONIZATION) for $10. DAWN OF DISCOVERY and its expansion, VENICE, are still available for $20.09, originally priced at $30. If you like lush, rewarding, incredibly complicated city-building games set in the 15th century, I advise that you act now.
I also bought THE WITCHER: ENHANCED EDITION (read: functional version) for $6.79, marked down from $29.99. I originally got this game through Direct2Drive in late 2008 and aborted it as soon as I finished the introductory sequence, such were its technical problems. But it showed so much promise and stunning weirdness that I'm more than willing to give it another go.
And the bargain-bin items — the up-to 90 percent discounts on old or commercially disappointing titles, or ones that were cheap-ish in the first place — have helped me rack up a nearly $90 haul only four days into the sale. GHOST MASTER, ALTITUDE, EVE ONLINE: TYRANNIS ($1.99!), all of the OVERLORD games, last year's weird GHOSTBUSTERS thing, INDIGO PROPHECY, both MAX PAYNEs. They're all mine. I might never install most of these, but at $5 or less, it would have been stupid not to buy them, right?
Nod if you love me. Now.
Okay, I literally just bought KING'S BOUNTY: THE LEGEND and KING'S BOUNTY: ARMORED PRINCESS because I saw that Gameosaurus alumnus Peter Rambo bought one of them. I don't even know what they are and never heard of them until three minutes ago. They came in a pack for $10. There's a steampunk robot in one of the trailers.
I have a problem.
Here's the thing: we're talking about $90 — nay, $100 — that could have been applied to ... something else. Anything else. I love games and the fun I have playing them more than just about anything in this world. They come below my dogs and above my family on my ladder of caring.
But I have brothers in arms who are doing amazing things right now. Pat Himes, who has been one of my best friends for half of my life, is days from returning to the United States after two nearly uninterrupted years of Peace Corps service in Kyrgyzstan.
Himes outside some Kyrgyz village or another.
High school buddy Andy Keller, who studied in China in college and has been living there since, is in the final months of a yearlong bike ride around that enormous country, and, per my last conversation with him, is set to come back to the states for good sometime this fall. He and fellow insane person Evan Villarrubia have been documenting the entire trip in exquisite, crazy detail — check out a recent interview, the map of their trek, their blog and an amazing flickr stream.
And those are just the people I keep in touch with. Another high school friend posted a throwaway blurb on Facebook the other night about her moon party in a crater in New Mexico. Or something.
These are amazing, life-changing accomplishments, the sorts of things few people of my privileged suburban upbringing have tried or will try or could imagine even wanting to try. I don't envy the legion of proud retards who moved to big cities after college and continue to brag about it — they're good and fucked and probably miserable — but I'm pretty jealous of people like Andy and Pat, who will launch their careers in earnest with these wild mental touchstones locked in.
But why the achievement anxiety if I'm relatively pleased with the trajectory of my life? And why should I be jealous? I had every opportunity to do something just as wild. These guys weren't whisked away on their transcendental adventures by sheer luck or on the bankroll of some wealthy benefactor; they've taken them on because they had the gumption and the interest, and they were willing to sacrifice a lot of creature comforts along the way.
I simply can't imagine giving up my stuff for any substantial length of time. On my trip to Texas, for instance, I'll probably bring my PSP, my DS and a 700-page book I'm loving in chunks. I'll bring my laptop and its external hard drive, stuffed with episodes of JUSTIFIED and SONS OF ANARCHY and that HBO miniseries THE PACIFIC (all of which I'll buy when they become available, people). I'll have my ratty old 3G iPhone, soon to be replaced by this marvel of modern engineering, and I'll probably leave my home PC on so that I can access my music library remotely. I won't use any of it.
And if I can find room in my backpack, I'll probably stuff some clothes and a toothbrush in there or something.
I'm not embarrassed by my obsession with this stuff. Indeed, I wear it proudly, like a tattoo that's taken on new meaning after an initial shame spiral. Sure, I wish I could talk about the majesty of DEADWOOD or BATTLESTAR GALACTICA or BREAKING BAD more often than the occasional Google chat with my college roommate, who's having his own twentysomething adventures in our nation's capital (see: Facebook updates about getting drunk with Ezra Klein).
But that's the burden I carry for knowing everything about everything, right?
This feels as ridiculous to type as it surely does to read, but I can't help myself. Sometimes I think I've accumulated a vital, valuable body of pop-culture knowledge, a starting point for an assuredly brilliant future in arts and entertainment criticism. The trouble, of course, is that I'm the only one who sees it that way, and that no matter how hard I try or how credible my resumé becomes, I'm never going to break in to writing for the A.V. Club or Joystiq until I move away from here and start making connections.
And I'm not willing to do that until I put together some money and find a quiet, safe, affordable home in the outskirts of a happening place that accommodates my dogs. Executed properly, that's going to take years.
I pointlessly imagine what it's going to be like for Andy and Pat when they get back. Andy spent years in Beijing before hitting the road, and he's been to the states and back a couple times for various reasons. When Pat steps off the plane, he'll have lived in relative desolation for two years to the day, excepting a two-week vacation in York (ha!) over Christmas of last year.
How joyous for them! How lucky they'll feel to be enveloped in the suffocating embrace of instant-gratification-buy-take-break-throw-it-away culture, which I sincerely love! How ever did they manage? Surely they don't dare to be anything but happy to be home, lest they breach my impregnable fortress of feelings!
No, I don't imagine it will be like that. They'll have left a piece of them in their respective countries forever. Andy has walked among and broken bread with every type of Chinese person imaginable. Pat has spent all this time learning bits of two languages and becoming part of a hard-working agrarian family and community, only to watch ethnic violence tear the southern part of Kyrgyzstan a new asshole, right at the end of it all.
I, meanwhile, have this:
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go buy SIN AND PUNISHMENT: STAR SUCCESSOR and try to remember that I bought PUZZLE QUEST 2 on Saturday.
Review: ‘War for Cybertron’ has real spark
Like every playable Transformer in "War for Cybertron," Bumblebee has a retractable melee weapon. Duh.
After umpteen efforts across a variety of platforms, the Transformers finally have a game they can be proud of. Free from the narrative shackles of a TV show or movie cash-in, developer High Moon Studios has built a sturdy shooter and terrific multiplayer experience in “Transformers: War for Cybertron,” out this week on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.
The game is set before the events of the 1980s cartoon, giving you one company’s look at the civil war that ravaged the Transformers’ home planet and sent the dastardly Megatron and the heroic Optimus Prime into deep space. They’ll eventually scrap in our solar system, crash-land on Earth and take a 4-million-year dirt nap before waking up in 1984.
But as “War for Cybertron” begins, Optimus is not yet a “Prime,” a title bestowed upon the leader of the Autobots (the good guys). He’s not even a proper truck. Because the robots haven’t yet encountered our 18-wheelers and Volkswagen Beetles and whatnot, they transform into space-age versions of the same things. Optimus, for instance, is a strange sort of hover-barge.
The narrative is strung together over 10 missions (five each for the Autobots and Decepticons), which can be tackled solo, cooperatively or competitively. The levels are beefy, occasionally overstaying their welcome but never leaving you with less than your money’s worth.
There are collectibles to hunt down, of course, and a handful of inventive achievements will give you a reason to go through some of the stages a second time. But by the time you’ve cleared the single-player campaign once or twice, you’ll be glad to say goodbye to it.
Not because it isn’t good, but because the multiplayer is so much fun.
Though it can feel a bit like a checklist (gradually unlockable abilities, a la “Modern Warfare” and “Blur”; a cooperative mode that pits players against waves of computer-controlled enemies, a la every modern shooter), High Moon pulls off the online component with panache.
The class-based competitive multiplayer, with its points and levels and challenges, is a serious timesink.
So “War for Cybertron” has the game part covered. But be honest, you’re here for the license. So how good is the Transformers part?
Pretty great, actually. The voice cast is superb — faithful to the franchise’s roots where it matters (Peter Cullen as Optimus) and fittingly histrionic elsewhere, too. Megatron is still a screeching nihilist bent on getting his way; Optimus, in Cullen’s rumbling baritone, still gives long-winded speeches about honor and sacrifice. It isn’t SAG Award-caliber stuff, exactly, but it’s more or less what you remember from the cartoon.
The sound effects work deserves special mention, too. Transforming is a crucial component of the game, and the accompanying rattle in “War for Cybertron” is rapturous. It blends the cartoon’s classic “ruh-rut-Rut-RUT” with a more sophisticated hydraulic whine, admirably approximating what an alien robot transforming into a jet might actually sound like.
The same goes for the game’s substantial library of weapon noises, from the heavy thud of a laser gattling gun to the sickening, satisfying crack of truck-on-robot violence.
The visuals, though solid, don’t always fare as well.
Giantbomb.com lists 91 games powered by Epic’s flexible Unreal Engine 3, and “War for Cybertron” is one of the most unremarkably shiny among them. If you’ve played “Gears of War 2,” “Mass Effect 2” or any other shooter from a third-person perspective in the last few years, you’ve already seen the best of what’s on offer here.
The problem is rooted mostly in the game’s title and setting — the Transformers’ home planet of Cybertron. Per franchise lore, the entire planet is one big robot foundry, and a Transformer in its own right. I think. That means everything is metallic, angular, mildly reflective and a little boring.
It’s not that any one part of the game looks especially bad; in more than a few instances (the levels that involve low orbit, open air and lens flares, usually), it actually looks very nice. But if you’re tired of corridor crawls, this isn’t going to change your mind.
In some ways, though, keeping the action on Cybertron makes a lot of sense.
By setting the game before the events of the TV shows, High Moon wasn’t beholden to the burdensome, muddled, often pointless history of whatever the Autobots and Decepticons did on Earth.
And because Cybertronian environments are understandably built to spec for these enormous machine-people, the game steers clear of the scale issues that have plagued the franchise elsewhere (Is Optimus as big as an Earth tree or an Earth building? If Megatron turns into a big Earth gun, why is he as tall as Starscream? Such are the things that keep me up at night).
Fortunately, the character models themselves look quite good, each with their own glowing and moving parts. Some of the Decepticons can be tough to tell apart, as is the case with Michael Bay’s live-action “movies,” but by and large, the Transformers are sharply-designed bits of engineering.
Also worth noting — each robot credibly collapses into its vehicle form. Unlike the movies and cartoons, all of the interlocking pieces appear to end up somewhere in “War for Cybertron,” even if they don’t.
Though not without some issues, including a few day-one bugs that have yet to be ironed out, this game is easy to recommend. The online community is there, too, so you won’t want for teammates.
If you’re looking for something to string you through the summer, you could do much worse.
This article originally appeared in the York Dispatch.
Review: ‘Ambitions’ refreshes, complicates ‘Sims 3′
I've got loads of hobbies -- eating while lying down, exaggerating how much I can deadlift, etc. -- but one of my all-time favorite pastimes involves giggling privately about my depraved computer people.
I mean, American culture warriors are always fuming about the casual violence in the latest "Grand Theft Auto" or the wonderfully aggressive diversity in FOX's "Glee," but if they knew what was happening inside my PC, they'd run me out of town.
In my pretend neighborhood in the "The Sims 3," the newest installment in EA's people-simulator, I've created a gay secret agent who home-wrecked an ostensibly happy, heterosexual marriage between a supermodel and a former high school quarterback.
"Ambitions," the expansion pack released for the game last week, gives you six new professions -- stylist, firefighter, ghost hunter, private investigator, doctor and architectural designer -- and a handful of other goodies to play with.
To tease fate just a little more, I signed up my ill-gotten quarterback as a stylist.
Though physiology and gender politics in "The Sims" are generally flexible, the game sensibly insists that gay couples can't conceive, so my same-sex videogame spouse and I phoned an adoption service and took in a baby girl, for whom we recently purchased a Teddy bear we named Achiever.
We've taught the infant to walk and talk, and we anticipate a generally successful upbringing. Especially given that we've locked her in a dark room every night and forced her to practice her xylophone until she's demonstrated an elementary understanding of music theory.
We call her Barbaria.
Also, her crib is in a closet.
Of course, people have been constructing these twisted, emergent scenarios since the "Sims" franchise took home computing by storm 10 years ago.
The newer incarnations have refined the formula by helping you sculpt a more satisfying long-term arc for each of your Sims, but the basic premise hasn't changed much -- your people grow up, pay bills, fall in love (or don't), hopefully accomplish something and die.
It's what you do with your discretionary time, then, that makes the difference, and that's where "Ambitions" comes in."
At $40, it's a bit of a hard sell at first. The expansion, which requires a "Sims 3" installation, does little in the way of introducing new environments, and the six interactive professions feel a bit superficial at first.
Take my sexually ambiguous stylist lifemate, for instance. The first tier of the stylist job tree requires you to offer makeovers to a handful of virtual people and take photos of the success stories.
This is well and good the first and second times, but then you'll realize that you're essentially dressing up paper dolls for virtual cash, and you'll want to reformat your hard drive, if not abandon video games altogether.
Payoff: Fortunately, your professions become more interesting as you spend more time with them. The ghost hunter gradually unlocks better tools for investigating the paranormal; private investigators gain access to fingerprint-dusting kits if they work hard enough.
And if the professions don't interest you, the core game's entertaining but hands-off "careers" are complemented by the new education track, which takes you from playground monitor to district superintendent.
These changes, coupled with a raft of satisfying under-the-hood adjustments (the new inventing skill is almost a career unto itself), make that $40 pricetag a little easier to swallow. "Ambitions" likely complicates the many bugs already found in "The Sims 3" -- my entire computer family stopped moving when Barbaria learned to talk; the only way to keep them alive was to evict them all -- but it goes a long way to keeping the franchise fresh, too.
Is it for you? That's hard to say. I knew the game had me Tuesday night when, days from death, my avatar mounted a frantic, eleventh-hour quest for "ambrosia," the in-game fountain of youth that grants your Sim eternal adulthood.
If only actual immortality were as easy as getting your cooking and fishing skills to level 10.
This article originally appeared in the York Dispatch.
Review: ‘Red Dead’ redeems western games
By any measure, May was a bountiful month in gaming. But when comparing it to previous Mays — a historically dry month at retail and the traditional start of the summer dry spell — it was absolutely astonishing.
Week after week, gamers’ checking accounts — still reeling from an unusually strong start to the year — were pelted by dazzling releases from Nintendo, Rockstar, Remedy, Bizarre Creations, Black Rock Studio and other proven corners of the industry. Let’s take stock of some of that greatness and prepare for what looks to be a quiet, affordable June.
If you buy one game from May, make it “Mario Galaxy 2” for the Wii, which was reviewed in this space last week. But if you get two, pick up “Red Dead Redemption,” the spiritual successor to a competent but unremarkable open-world Western from the PS2 and Xbox era. “Redemption” builds on that game’s ideas and applies the same polish Rockstar Games typically reserves for its “Grand Theft Auto” titles, emerging as a strong contender for game of the year.
It would be disingenuous of me to tell you precisely how faithful “Redemption” is to the tenets of classic-westerndom. In that respect, I can offer only this — I’ve seen “Tombstone,” I’ve seen “The Wild Bunch,” and one of my favorite TV shows of all time is “Deadwood,” a sprawling, 36-episode dissection of frontier life as civilization creeps in.
Set about 40 years later, when telephones and power lines are making cowboys irrelevant, “Redemption” touches on many of the same concepts. And while Rockstar’s prose is hardly the flowery genius of David Milch, it does the job.
But how’s the shootin’ and stuff? Well, the game was put together by some of the fine people at the developer’s San Diego studio, which builds sturdier, better-looking games than its cousins do. The vistas and weather are absolutely the graphical stars of “Redemption,” lending real credibility to virtual sunsets and thunderstorms.
Guns carry real kick, too, adding some gravity to how you decide to dispatch the desperate, thirsty schlubs that litter the land. Do you lasso and hogtie your bounties, returning them to lawmen for due process? Or do you administer some frontier justice, blasting them off their horses and watching them flail about as they get caught in their own stirrups?
Thanks to some fancy software, people gyrate and stumble believably. If you shoot a guy in the shoulder while he’s running at you, his momentum will carry him forward even as he whips around and falls down. In “Redemption,” bullets hurt.
There’s an absurdly generous amount of content here. Aside from the entertaining and varied narrative missions, which take you from Mexico to the mountains and all points between, you have scads of sidequests, jobs and collections to complete, all at your leisure and in any order you please. Treasure-hunting, which forces you to rely on faded clues drawn on in-game maps, is my favorite distraction of the bunch, and it’ll last you five hours or so on its own. Provided you don’t cheat by looking up all nine treasures on YouTube, of course.
Know that the game is stacked with technical quirks — some graphical, some more serious — but they’re as forgivable as they are eye-popping. The gunplay, for one, is functional enough, but “Redemption” occasionally calls upon you to brain bad guys more quickly than is possible.
For instance, while going about your business in Armadillo, Chuparosa or one of the game’s other towns, a prostitute will scream for help as a scorned client tries to knife her to death. This all happens before your eyes, and if you train your sights on the attacker quickly enough, you’ll get the good lady’s thanks and a few bucks for your trouble.
If you’re too slow, or if you can’t be bothered, you watch a hooker die in the street. And if you try to shoot the bad guy after the fact, you’ll confuse the game’s morality system, which decides you’ve committed a crime.
Hardcore, hardly appropriate, hilarious, or a little of all three? In any case, it’s not a dealbreaker. “Red Dead Redemption” is a true milestone for sandbox gameplay, and it cements Rockstar’s reputation as one of the best in the business.
This article originally appeared in the York Dispatch.
Exploring Mountains of Abandonware: Four Freebies and One For Purchase
I've got loads of respect for true-blue PC gamers. Heck, two of my favorite people in the world (Gameosaurus Rex and Gamegnathus) still have high-end PCs and continue to partake in great PC gaming experiences.
Once upon a time, I had a machine that was on par with the consumer high-end. It was from 1994 to 1997. Ever since then, I've been below the curve and have generally put consoles and handhelds in higher esteem than my rotting PC(s).
But during those glory days, I played some fantastic games. And I'd like to use this opportunity to tell you about five in particular that, as far as I can tell, fall into the category of "abandonware," where the copyrights have either been voluntarily revoked or else have become so vague that it's safe to freely download them without any pain of conscience.
MENZOBERRANZAN
Released: 1994
Developer: DreamForge Intertainment
Publisher: SSI
link to download (google)
In an early episode of Jurassic Radio, I'm sure I brought up what I see as the holy trinity of old D&D RPGs. There were dozens of them, and they definitely varied in quality. But the three from DreamForge really left a huge impression on me. There were two titles in the Ravenloft universe: RAVENLOFT: STRAHD'S POSSESSION and RAVENLOFT: STONE PROPHET. Sandwiched between these two releases was a Forgotten Realms title: MENZOBERRANZAN.
All three games operate as a first-person real-time Action RPG, where you have a party and you click on the appropriate enemy in range over and over to have your party members (up to 4) attack. In Menzoberranzan, your direction of travel is quite different from the two Ravenloft games. You see, in Menzoberranzan, you see an opening cut scene fighting a dragon on a snow-covered mountain, and then the game starts at a small town on the surface. Your party (starting at just two people) is chased underground. Along the way you meet the ever-popular Drizzt Do'Urden and other characters who will join the party. And you travel down, down, down, (occassionally up), and finally to the Menzoberranzan, the "City of Spiders," a home of the Drow people (including Drizzt).
I think new players to this game would be surprised to see just how colorful the depths of the earth can be. I have fond memories of this game's graphics, primitive as they are.
Menzoberranzan offers multiple endings, all depending on your choices in the final hour(s) of the game in the underground city for which the game is titled. As you travel through the layers of the earth, you'll encounter many puzzles, difficult passages to navigate, and some very interesting characters. Like many PC games of this era, it can be buggy, and as far as I know it's never been patched (even by fans). The rule is to save often and always create new saves (a crash during a save overwrite leaves you with nothing).
Also, check out YouTube user Elanarae for some Let's Play videos of this game!
SHIVERS
Released: 1995
Developer/Publisher: Sierra
link to download (google)
I know we have at least one frequent reader who remembers this game as fondly as I do. Taking cues from games like MYST and THE 7TH GUEST, SHIVERS is a puzzle-solving point-and-click adventure. The setting is an abandoned museum where the museum's curator and two teens mysteriously vanished over a decade ago. You play the role of a curious teen who, alongside your friends, decide to break in to the old museum to see if you can solve the mystery. You get separated from your friends, and for the entirety of the game, you'll be unraveling the mystery and capturing evil spirits.
Yeah, that's right. You're not alone in this museum. Though most of this crazy museum is portrayed in-game as still images (which, I would argue, are still beautiful in their own right), there are about a dozen spirits from some ancient civilization that can be found in a few set locations throughout the museum, and they appear as these colorful, cartoony-animated 2D blobs (often with eyes and mouth). If you have your sound on, you can usually hear some strange noise associated with them. And that's important, because the true goal of the game is to find two pieces (top and bottom) to each sacred jar that used to hold these spirits. Once a jar is completed, holding it out and making contact with the corresponding spirit will seal the spirit. If you don't have the right jar out and you are approached by one of these spirits, you can actually lose health. Lose enough health and you die. Health bars aren't very common in P&Cs, which is part of this game's charm. The challenging puzzles, many of which are single-screen "game puzzle" affairs (anyone who remembers that accursed pinball machine knows what I'm talking about), is also a big attractor.
The final part of the game's charm is its powerful mix of factual cultural history, "conspiracy theory" history (example: aliens helped build ancient structures around the world including Egyptian pyramid and Stonehenge), and fiction written particularly for the game. There's plenty of audio and video interlaced into the game, but even just reading the text on the display panels next to a museum exhibit is quite interesting. The player will run into some crazy, creepy, and even downright terrifying areas of the museum (the "Man's Inhumanity To Man" exhibit always scared me).
I should also note that the soundtrack, by Guy Whitmore, was awesome. This game had great music.
HERETIC
Released: 1994
Developer: Raven Software
Publisher: id Software
link to download (google)
Though many gamers are quick to remember the sprawling levels and "hub zones" of HEXEN, many forget the original game from Raven Software that would lead to the creation of Hexen. That game was HERETIC. Based on the DOOM engine, Heretic took place in a dark medieval fantasy world. Its weapons were pretty much carbon copies of the Doom weaponry (in terms of effect) though they had a medieval style to them. An inventory system was added, the ability to look up and down was added (remember when you couldn't do that in Doom and would get angry?), and they even added the ability to fly.
Most FPS games are set in a time frame that is modern or futuristic, hence fitting the "shooter" in the genre name. But medieval/magic-based shooters are a horse of a different color, and to me, Heretic was the one that paved the way. The environments were awesome, the levels were scaled larger than those in Doom, and the boss fights were straight up crazy.
Both Heretic and Hexen would go on to have their own sequels, but the original Heretic has long been my favorite to return to. I know there's a huge community of fan-based levels for Doom (series) and Quake (series), but not so much for the Raven Software games (Heretic/Hexen). To me, that's fine. the original level design is enough to keep challenging me to this day.
THE ELDER SCROLLS: ARENA
Released: 1994
Developer/Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
link to download (Elder Scrolls official site)
I think during the early days of the Jurassic Radio podcast I talked about this game so much that it got "pantheon'd" for our top five / top three segments. And that was entirely my fault. To this day I can't stop talking about the game.
Why? I have no idea. The game was buggy as all get-out at the time of its release, and it remains buggy to this day (even with some patches applied). Bethesda made THE ELDER SCROLLS: ARENA (the first game in the long-running series which currently runs up to THE ELDER SCROLLS IV: OBLIVION) a free-to-download title from their own website in 2004. But it comes with a word of caution: paraphrased, they say the game is rudimentary and is also likely to crash on you.
Yet, I've gone back to this game once every 2 or 3 years, even though I'm not a huge Morrowind or Oblivion fan. Arena calls to me despite its super-ugly graphics and cheesy MIDI music, despite the stupid riddles and the frequent freezing/crashing. I guess I like the game because it was the first game of its time to be so thoroughly open, and as a result, so thoroughly exploitable.
The first time I learned I could create my own spells, some of which with dungeon-altering capabilities (remove walls, create stairwells, etc), my mind was blown. When a friend showed me how to cheat the spell system by designing an insanely powerful AoE spell that cost almost no mp, I was hooked. There would be no stopping my battle mage.
Robbing houses and palaces was also plenty of fun.
If you're willing to take a risk on a glitch-filled adventure with DOSbox and/or you want to see the foundation for what has become a defining experience in computer RPGs, get this game.
STONEKEEP
Released: 1995
Developer/Publisher: Interplay
link to purchase (good old games)
Well, I *thought* this game would have been abandoned, considering Interplay died ages ago. But it looks like the copyright holders actually got STONEKEEP listed on GOG. In digging up info, I also learned that Black Isle had been working on a sequel to this game until 2001 and then canceled the project, and that Alpine Studios intends to release a sequel for WiiWare later this year. I guess I didn't realize how well-loved and well-remembered this game was by the industry.
Anyway, this is another first-person real-time Action RPG. You control the disembodied soul of the protagonist, Drake, but instead of having free-roaming motion (like in the DreamForge games), all movement is tile-based. You walk square to square, defeating enemies, pressing buttons and pulling switches, and collecting loot. Your path takes you through a descent into deeper and deeper underground realms (I guess I have "a type" when it comes to these kinds of games; this is sounding strikingly similar to Menzoberranzan). Along the way, you must collect orbs representing the planets of our solar system, some of which have special magical effects that can help Drake.
(It's worth noting that two of the planets can be easily missed by skipping the Faerie Realm, a place whose entrance is part of a cryptic puzzle that also inconveniently contains a glitch. Patches and save states were released in the '90s for gamers, myself included, to gain access to the realm. If you move on without doing the Faerie Realm quests, you will reach a "point of no return" where you're at the last boss without all the planets and cannot win.)
The game had tons of voice acting (for its time), lots of fun and interesting characters, some cool FMV sequences, and it sticks out in my mind as one of the hardest PC RPGs I ever beat. I'm certainly interested in the WiiWare sequel.
The first hour: "S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat"
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: CALL OF PRIPYAT, the most recent entry in the Stalker franchise was released last Friday, but only on Amazon. The earliest delivery date would have been Wednesday, but the end-times snow storm made that date less likely.
So in my despondency, I put off the purchase. I'm glad I did. Call of Pripyat came out on Steam a week after the official release date, and it's a bargain. The collector's edition is all that's available through Amazon, and it's already priced pretty low at $40. But Steam has it at $30, and they're running a loyalty promotion that drops the price to $20 if you have either of the two previous games, Shadow of Chernobyl or Clear Skies, in your Steam games list. I think that's a promotion that developers or distributors should run more often.
Call of Pripyat is far more stable than either previous game was at launch. It hasn't crashed on me yet. It's not the prettiest game, and it still has some odd bugs, but I'm glad to return to the irradiated Russian back-country. So let me take you on a tour through the first hour of the game.
Warning, there are a lot of images after the jump.
This Black Friday, I'm Thankful for Free Indie Games
While everyone else is out there dropping mad dollars on mega deals, and because there's little interesting coming out till after the holidays, I've been checking my indie sources for stuff that's worth playing. Here are two that stole some of my weekday hours this week.
WE WANT YOU
We Want You is a procedurally generated platformer, which means the levels are generated as you go along. Or fall along, in this case. You play an unnamed soldier who's dropped in a war zone. Your goal is to survive. As you fall towards your ultimate destination, a friendly base, time passes. The longer the war lasts, the more dangerous the enemies strewn across the landscape become. At the start they just sit there waiting for you to pass through their crosshairs, but after the first year they start coming after you.
Not looking too healthy.
As you play, headlines from back home appear on the screen, letting you know which generals are involved in scandals and how many men you've killed so far. The game isn't quite as polished as Spelunky, another procedurally generated game, but it's controls are a little more forgiving. You have unlimited mines, which are used to destroy terrain. You can pick up armor and a lot of weapons, though you'll still spend most of the game bleeding on your pistol.
LEVEL UP
Another 2D platformer for the list. Level Up is inspired by UPGRADE COMPLETE, a vertical shooter where everything, from the weapons to the title screen, have to be bought with points earned in the game. Level Up applies that idea to a lesser degree. The main character's attributes, jumping, running, healing, all improve through use.
Yay! Now I heal better.
At times the game feels like simplified Metroidvania. Large parts of the map are only unlocked after you max out your jump skill, and you can learn a double jump from one of the two tribes populate the world, elephant people and square people. Each group sells upgrades for your main attributes. The square people sell the attributes for full price, while the elephant people sell them for cheap if you can pass a test. But I only completed one quest for the elephant people because gems aren't hard to come by and the challenges were pretty tough.
NEWS
Gaming Day at libraries was a big success, though I guess it's not surprising that games are a good way to get boys in the library. In other library news, Sony donated a thousand PS3s and copies of LittleBigPlanet for Game Changers to libraries and community organizations so kids can make content that uses science, engineering and math skills. Game Changers is a competition that's part of Obama's Digital Learning Initiative.
Square Enix thinks the network is the future of home gaming, though, the guy with the download-only system says otherwise.
Nintendo is really popular with the ladies.
And finally, cactuar!