Giant Bomb's Site Mashup

Time Trotters: Night Trap

Vinny — Fri, 25 May 2012 15:55:00 -0700

Thought to be lost in a pile of Jaz disks, we unearth this never finished episode of Time Trotters.

Worth Reading: 05/25/2012

patrickklepek — Fri, 25 May 2012 15:51:00 -0700

Dragon's Dogma doesn't look nearly this good when you're playing it, but it's pretty damn fun.

There are a couple of reasons I decided to review Dragon’s Dogma. One, the game showed up, Brad threw it on my desk and said “you should review this.” So, well, there’s that--that’s definitely important.

But when my stack of need-to-play games begins to run dry, I (try to) fill that with a game I wouldn’t necessarily play, or a franchise I missed. It’s important to have personal experiences to confirm or disprove your expectations, and Dragon’s Dogma fit that well.

Hitman: Blood Money and The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings were the same way, too. Since I’ve played both of those games, I’m now super excited for the next games from IO Interactive and CD Projekt Red. I couldn’t have said that with any confidence before--my options for future playing are now much wider.

Dragon’s Dogma has not turned me into a Monster Hunter fanatic, but it provided a window into what makes zealots out of those who do love Monster Hunter. Maybe Capcom has now tricked me into trying the next one? Hmm.

Hey, You Should Play This:

Reprisal by Jon Caplin

Despite being a big ol’ fan of Peter Molyneux, I’ve never played Populous. Or Syndicate, really. This isn't about me, though. Stop it! That hasn’t changed since writing this sentence, but I’m one step closer, since I’ve played a game that doesn’t seem far off. Reprisal is a pixel-tinted Populous-style game from graphic designer Jon Caplin that is, if nothing else, really stylish. The game’s tutorial doesn’t do the greatest job of explaining what the hell is going on by the time the tutorial disappears, but click around enough and it’ll all start to make sense. Plus, it sounds so good!

Amnesia: The Dark Descent by Frictional Games

I’m finally going to play Amnesia: The Dark Descent this weekend. Or so I've told myself. Pray for me.

You Should Read These, Too:

Respawn's West And Zampella Sound Off On Upcoming Activision Lawsuit by Andy MacNamara for Game Informer

No, I will not be attending the trial between Activision and former Infinity Ward employees. Plans were discussed, but the logistics of hanging out in Los Angeles for a month didn’t make sense for a great many reasons, and while I’d been lead to believe there might be a stream for media to watch, that doesn’t appear to be the case. Ah well. There will be plenty of reporters at the trial, however, and if you’re looking for how former IW leaders Jason West and Vince Zampella will be handling themselves, read Game Informer’s interview with them that’s...mostly with their lawyer.

Editorial: 38 Studios and the Dunkin Delusions by Alexander Sliwinski for Joystiq

It’s weird to be the reporter at the center of a big story. That was the case for me with the implosion at Infinity Ward, and it seems Joystiq reporter Alexander Sliwinski found himself in a similar position with 38 Studios. He’s written a heartfelt story about his time hanging out in a Dunkin’ Donuts near the 38 Studios offices, providing the emotional perspective of the reporter that’s often left unsaid. Sliwinski may assume a little too much about the psychological state of the 38 Studios employees he’s observing, but what he witnessed is fascinating. A sad tale from all angles.

And Some Other Stuff:

Someone has presented their ultimate theory on LOST. I haven't read it yet, but LOST!
Microsoft's former director of policy and enforcement for Xbox Live, Stephen Toulouse, criticizes Blizzard's public statements regarding "hacking" of Battle.net and Diablo III.
Our friends at 8-4 are working on the Japanese version of Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP.
There is a working calculator in Minecraft, and it's totally insane.
The Masters Voice is a wonderful short film. Can't wait to see how it's turned into a feature.
Folks have asked about my blue shirt with the purple skeleton--it's made by a guy named Max Capacity. You should buy his stuff. All of it is rad, and his Tumblr is really entertaining.
There's a growing number of in-game photographers, and they're producing beautiful material.
Hideo Kojima is giving interviews again, and The Guardian has released some excerpts.
Nobody thinks this Shadow of the Colossos movie is actually going to get made, right?

PAX East 2012: The Indie Mega Booth

drewbert — Fri, 25 May 2012 11:00:00 -0700

Ryan once again tours PAX's independent games showcase, except this time it goes to 11!

Ubisoft Gets Cute With This Mad Riders Launch Trailer

Alex — Fri, 25 May 2012 10:45:00 -0700

Because video game trailers. Right, guys?

Agent 47 Sneaks His Way Into NASCAR

Brad — Fri, 25 May 2012 10:35:00 -0700

I'll never, ever get tired of seeing video games on stock cars.

Quick Look: Men in Black: Alien Crisis

drewbert — Fri, 25 May 2012 09:00:00 -0700

Jeff and Patrick would never make it as MIB agents. Their facial animation is too good.

Quick Look: Sorcery

drewbert — Fri, 25 May 2012 06:00:00 -0700

Ryan uses the magically magical crystal ball atop his Move controller to zap bogeys into submission.

Thursday Night Throwdown: 05/24/12

drewbert — Thu, 24 May 2012 19:00:00 -0700

Jeff turns manic once again and this time the Internet does all it can to keep him from going over the edge.

Dragon's Dogma Review

patrickklepek — Thu, 24 May 2012 18:00:00 -0700

The game is at its best when fighting and climbing beasts.

You have to admire Capcom’s ambitions with Dragon’s Dogma. Monster Hunter, a series that’s single-handedly kept the PSP alive in Japan, just hasn’t caught fire anywhere else. Dragon’s Dogma feels like Capcom taking the most outwardly appealing part of Monster Hunter--big, meaty fights against monstrous beasts with a team of friends--and putting that into a sprawling world that goes on and on for miles.

The bummer: Capcom built this huge place to run around in but didn’t fill it with anything interesting. The saving grace: Capcom’s expertise in building robust, customizable, and super fun combat systems pays off.

The game opens with a promising enough premise. A dragon has suddenly appeared in the land of Gransys, and attacks your quiet, idyllic waterfront town. Pretty stupidly, you pick up a sword and “attack” the dragon, who responds in kind by tearing your heart out keeping it for himself. You’re still alive, though, and are now one of the Arisen, which means you're special and technically alive but not quite whole. The dragon says your heart can be reclaimed if you defeat him, and so your journey begins.

You gain some pretty sweet powers by becoming the Arisen, including access to Pawns, a human-like race of beings charged with following the Arisen. Pawns are AI support characters, and their roles are crucial in dealing with the game's endless supply of mobs. It’s probably possible to solo Dragon’s Dogma, but I wouldn’t recommend it--you need these guys and girls. You have one main Pawn, who you design early in the game. The other two are (largely) created by other Dragon’s Dogma players, which makes for some goofy allies (I had a high level mage named Ladypants with me for most of my 37 hours) but makes the experience enjoyably personable. For me, my daggers-n-arrows focused archer was balanced out with two support mages--one attacking, another buffing--and a fighter who largely focused on drawing aggro. All of the Pawns can be customized with equipment, but since all but the Pawn you created does not level up, it’s not worth it--it’s better to just recruit new Pawns every few hours.

The system is perfectly set up for other human beings, but Dragon’s Dogma doesn’t feature multiplayer. It’s an unfortunate omission, especially since you have very little influence over the Pawns themselves. This leads to more than a few frustrating scenarios where, say, healing spells are badly needed but everyone is focused on casting lots of fireballs. There are some built-in solutions to help address this, such as potions that temporarily change the attack patterns of your Pawns and the ability to set some generic action recommendations ahead of battle, but there’s nothing as simple and elegant as pulling up a menu and asking Ladypants to cast a holy spell on your daggers to help in crippling the undead.

The real core of Dragon’s Dogma is combat. Thirty-seven hours later, a pile of bodies the size of a mountain in my wake, I was still having fun slicing up goblins and direwolves. The game has a terrifically fun and dynamic combat system that constantly encourages players to experiment. Tapping shoulder buttons brings up adjustable modifiers that give you plenty of options in battle. You gain experience and level, but rather than worrying about assigning points to strength and other attributes, that’s in the background, with the focus on earning and assigning new skills. Like Monster Hunter or Dark Souls, many of the skills lock players into animations (though there is a skill for some classes that can actually break the animation), so combat becomes a shifting risk/reward proposition. Do you enable your supremely powerful dagger attack but chance missing and being stuck flailing in the wind for a few seconds?

Dragon's Dogma's world is certainly big, but big isn't enough.

And though you choose a class upfront, it’s only a few hours before you can swap to something else. There are even advanced and hybrid classes, such as the magic archer I ended up playing, that aren’t available upfront. It’s easy to switch classes, and if you come to regret the change, it’s a simple matter to go back or try another one. Some skills are even compatible across classes, which means you can begin to craft your own super hybrid that brings the best of several classes under one roof. By the end of my 37 hours, I’d maxed out two classes for both myself and my Pawn, opening up a robust set of skills. Combined with the other Pawns that have their own powers and magic and combat options are vast.

The big payoff is when Dragon’s Dogma introduces its slew of screen-filling creatures--dragons, hydras, griffins, ogres, etc. It looks a little goofy, but the key to defeating them is climbing on their backs and stabbing them in the face/neck/eye. It’s a brutal, bloody Shadow of the Colossus, and it’s intensely satisfying. There’s nothing quite like hitting a griffin mid-air with fire-infused arrows, watching it crash to the ground, straddling its neck just before it manages to take off, being lifted thousands of feet into the air and stabbing the hell out of it, as it maniacally tries to shake you off. It’s these moments, with you and your Pawns working in tandem to take down these towering enemies, that Dragon’s Dogma shines. It never gets old, and the ability to perpetually switch around your set of combat skills means fighting the same enemies manages to feel fresh, since your approach to it changes.

It’s a good thing the combat holds up, too, because that’s the biggest thing Dragon’s Dogma has going for it. Dragon’s Dogma doesn’t do much with its premise until the very end, at which point the game unloads an hour of completely unexpected, totally batshit crazy exposition. It almost makes the entire story better in retrospect, but such feelings only come after the insane revelations the ending brings, and not a moment sooner. Prior to crazytown, the story is utterly banal. None of the quests have captivating stories behind them, and add zero color to the world at large. Characters are introduced but never given any substance. Bizarre plot twists are wedged in and then completely forgotten, as if they never happened. At one point, you’re jailed for witnessing something very bad, but moments after escaping, the world forgets you were ever jailed. Even when you talk to the character that put you in jail--no response. The utter lack of consequence is littered throughout, and applies directly to the game world, too. Nothing has permanence. The same set of goblins and bandits just outside the main capital are there every time you leave. Every. Single. Time. There is no variation. No matter how often you kill them, they all come right back. Building a world that feels as alive and random as Bethesda Game Studios did with Skyrim certainly isn’t easy, and while it’s easy to respect Capcom’s ambition in what it tried to create with Dragon’s Dogma, the bar has been set so high, and Dragon’s Dogma isn’t close.

The most imposing enemies can take you out in a single swipe.

Compounding the issue is how often Dragon’s Dogma asks players to experience the same locations over and over again. There is fast travel in the game but it’s not very useful. Players can purchase magic stones that enable teleporting back to the main capital, though it’s not until halfway through the game that it becomes possible to transport out of the capital. Even then, you can’t choose a location and be whisked away--you have to physically go to a location and lay down a “portcrystal.” It’s especially infuriating when the game asks you to spend 20 minutes running to a quest location, then come back to the capital, and immediately asks you to head to that location again. It’s one thing if the game had dropped a “hey, maybe you should drop the portcrystal here--wink!” hint but it never does.

There’s so much to like about what Capcom gets right with Dragon’s Dogma that it makes the missteps utterly heartbreaking. The combat has enough depth and variety to keep you interested for the duration of the story and beyond, but in terms of what might have been, what should have been, Dragon’s Dogma falls gut-wrenchingly short.

Report: 38 Studios Lays Off Entire Staff [UPDATED]

Alex — Thu, 24 May 2012 13:31:00 -0700

UPDATE 3: According to Chafee, 38 Studios took a turn for the worse due to poor sales of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.

“The game failed," said Chafee.

38 Studios founder Curt Schilling announced on Twitter yesterday that Reckoning sold 1.2 million copies. Chafee said the game needed to sell closer to three million.

The state also just published a bunch of documents related to its loan.

UPDATE 2: A press conference with Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee is happening now.

“It’s not a good situation,” he said. “I’m not here to share good news. I wish things were different.”

Chafee said there were discussions between 38 Studios and the state about giving more taxpayer money to the developer, but the state declined.

“I would gladly extend the life of the company if I had confidence it would lead to profitably,” said Chafee. “We were not given that confidence.”

When the state was talking to 38 Studios, there was no mention of layoffs. In the press conference, the state has not acknowledged whether there have been mass layoffs, which appears to be the case.

The state is unaware whether 38 Studios will file for bankruptcy.

UPDATE: According to WPRI, here's the email that was sent to 38 Studios employees today:

The Company is experiencing an economic downturn. To avoid further losses and possibility of retrenchment, the Company has decided that a companywide lay off is absolutely necessary.

These layoffs are non-voluntary and non-disciplinary.

This is your official notice of lay off, effective today, Thursday, May 24th, 2012.

Both Polygon and Joystiq are reporting based on sources familiar with the situation that 38 Studios has laid off its entire staff. This includes both the main 38 Studios office, as well as all employees at Big Huge Games, which 38 Studios owned.

Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee had commented as recently as yesterday that all attempts were being made to rescue the studio from closure. He also stated that 38 had yet to find additional outside funding. Reports coming from inside the studio stated that employees had not been paid since May 1, and that all employee health benefits ran out as of today.

Details on this situation are still being investigated. We'll update this story as soon as we know more.

Johann Sebastian Joust Clone Disappears, Developer Responds

patrickklepek — Thu, 24 May 2012 13:03:00 -0700

Johann Sebastian Joust may see a proper release eventually, but it's still a bit off.

Amidst allegations of cloning, Papa Quash is no longer on Apple's App Store.

Papa Quash had an uncomfortable similarity to indie gaming darling Johann Sebastian Joust from developer Die Gute Fabrik, and the resulting criticism has prompted Papa Quash to disappear.

Die Gute Fabrik addressed the issue in a lengthy blog post last night, but never called out Papa Quash specifically.

The company said it never gave permission for developer Ustwo to make a Johann Sebastian Joust-style game, which Ustwo originally claimed. In the same vein, Die Gute Fabrik pushed back against the notion of copyrighting mechanics, and cautioned people from drawing too many lines.

“We believe that it’s more productive to focus on making the best games possible, and giving them the unique ‘feel’ that only we can provide,” said the company in a statement. “That said, we do hope the community will continue to push back against cloning as a general development practice.”

The studio said negotiations about Johann Sebastian Joust are ongoing, and several publishers are interested in bringing the Move-driven motion control party game to a larger audience. There’s no real news to report on that front, however. Die Gute Fabrik is also prototyping their own iOS version, but, again, nothing concrete there, either.

“We also hope to develop a smart phone version of J.S. Joust in the future,” said the developer. “We’ve already discussed some ideas about how we’d tailor the game to such a platform.”

There has been no mention of the change to Papa Quash’s availability on the game’s Facebook or Twitter pages, but if you do a search for the game on the App Store, nothing comes up--poof.

Quick Look: Sega Vintage Collection

drewbert — Thu, 24 May 2012 12:00:00 -0700

Including Revenge of Shinobi, Super Hang-On, Alex Kidd, and one game that's never been in English!

Blizzard Says Battle.Net Hasn’t Been Compromised

patrickklepek — Thu, 24 May 2012 10:56:00 -0700

The launch of Diablo III has been a series of highs and lows. The game seems pretty great, but the always-on online requirements have come under scrutiny, and allegations of account hacking surfaced a few days back.

Blizzard did issue a statement earlier this week regarding compromised accounts, but I didn't run the studio’s comments yet because I was waiting for the company to answer a series of questions, which are below:

"We'd like to take a moment to address the recent reports that suggested that Battle.net and Diablo III may have been compromised." -- Does Blizzard's analysis of the situation suggest there has been zero compromise of Battle.net and the subsequent "hacks" are 100% the result of outside interference?
In a follow up post, a community manager wrote: "We have yet to find any situations in which a person's account was not compromised through traditional means of someone else logging into their account through the use of their password." What exactly are "traditional means"?
In the same post, the same community manager said: "[We] have done everything possible to verify how and in what circumstances these compromises are occurring." Can you outline what these circumstances are to help players combat against it?
If the authenticator is the best way to keep an account secure, why not make that a requirement for play?

Blizzard public relations told me the answers to my questions lay within an update this morning. That's mostly true.

Blizzard claims Battle.net has not been compromised, and the number of customers who have contacted the company about compromises has been “extremely small.” An actual number was not disclosed, and Blizzard said it has not received reports of account issues from any customers using the company’s authentication services.

For more details on those authentication services, click right here.

The issues in question have arisen from accounts being accessed using a user’s login and password, which Blizzard characterizes as a “traditional” mean of compromising an account. Blizzard outlined ways to protect yourself:

“The best defense against account theft still includes smart password management (e.g. using a unique password for every site/service and keeping your password to yourself) and scanning for malware and viruses regularly, as well as following additional preventative steps found here. In the end, while no security method is 100% foolproof, the physical Battle.net Authenticator and Battle.net Mobile Authenticator app are great ways to provide your account with an extra layer of protection.”

Additionally, Blizzard claims to have found no evidence of account spoofing after players join a game.

“We’ve determined the methods being suggested to do so are technically impossible,” said the company.

In other Diablo news, Blizzard is looking into restoring lost achievements for some players, and the real-money auction house has been pushed back to an undetermined launch date.

Take a Tour Through Hong Kong's Underworld Courtesy of Sleeping Dogs

Alex — Thu, 24 May 2012 10:08:00 -0700

After a hard day of chopping dudes' faces off, there's no better way to relax than with a bit of karaoke.

The Cave Is Ron Gilbert and Double Fine's Newest Adventure

Alex — Thu, 24 May 2012 09:09:00 -0700

A knight, a monk, and a time traveler walk into a sentient cave, and the monk says...wait, have you heard this one already?

Quick Look: Joy Ride Turbo

drewbert — Thu, 24 May 2012 09:00:00 -0700

Now your avatar can kart-race without Kinect! Your controller IS THE CONTROLLER!

A Live-Action Look at Metro: Last Light

Jeff — Thu, 24 May 2012 09:00:00 -0700

Ever wonder how Metro: Last Light's take on Moscow got into this mess in the first place?

Quick Look: PixelJunk 4am

drewbert — Thu, 24 May 2012 06:00:00 -0700

Grab your glow sticks, DJ Jeff Feat. PlayStation Move is about to pump beats through your Internet.

Game of Thrones Review

Alex — Wed, 23 May 2012 12:00:00 -0700

Political intrigue, brutal, unflinching violence, hardscrabble characters that range from flexibly moral to morally bankrupt, and, of course, boobs; these are some of the hallmarks of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series of fantasy novels, which you may be a tad more aware of these days thanks to the hit HBO series Game of Thrones. Beyond those facets, there is also a wry sense of gallows humor to Martin's writing that takes a bit of the poisonous edge off of what is generally a deeply unsentimental story full of people you might possibly like generally getting fucked over again and again until they either end up dead, raped, otherwise bloodied, or some combination of the three.

A lot of terrible things are going to happen to Alester over the next 20 or so hours.

It's this sense of humor that is altogether absent from Game of Thrones, developer Cyanide Studio's detailed, if somewhat misguided attempt at turning Martin's fiction into a palatable role-playing experience. Taking mechanics largely inspired by BioWare's various RPGs and combining them with selected story elements of Martin's first Ice and Fire novel (and by proxy, the first season of the TV series), Game of Thrones has no shortage of aspirations. Unfortunately, Cyanide wildly overreaches beyond its apparent capabilities, turning in a depressingly lackluster effort that is a mere skeleton of its potential.

Before we go any further, know that you can play Game of Thrones sans any foreknowledge of the books or the TV series, but it's far from recommended. Cyanide has constructed a game that is absolutely rich in subtle and obscure details from Martin's books. The stories of Game of Thrones are self-contained, but for newcomers, many of the references and concepts tossed around by the characters and codices of the game are bound to go well over your head.

Those self-contained stories tell the concurrent tales of Mors Westford and Alester Sarwyck, two characters previously unknown to the world of Westeros. Mors is an almost comically grizzled ranger with the Night's Watch, the black-clad guardians of the massive, perpetually iced-over wall that separates the Seven Kingdoms from the barbaric mountain regions on the other side. Sarwyck is a former heir to the Lordship of Riverspring, a territory invented wholesale for the purposes of this game. After spending 15 years in the Free Cities of the eastern continent, Alester returns as a Red Priest of R'hllor to pay his last respects to his recently-deceased father, who may have died under suspicious circumstances.

The set up and narrative structure of the game is one of the things Cyanide nails, insomuch as it feels very similar to the way Martin tells his stories. The game moves back and forth between Mors and Alester's lives as they unknowingly investigate opposing sides of a mystery, which pertains to a strange woman being hunted by rival houses and even Queen Cersei herself. Eventually these two stories do converge, and do so in an intelligent way that genuinely qualifies as a very cool and cathartic moment in a game that tragically has precious few of them.

It's not that Game of Thrones lacks the grotesque violence or the heartbreaking double-crosses or the abject misery generally experienced by Martin's characters; it's that there isn't really much else beyond those things. Growing attached to any one character probably isn't a good idea, because the writers of this game are even more capricious about killing them off than Martin is himself. As for Mors and Alester, neither is exactly a cheery fellow. Alester's emotions range between forlorn and sleepy, while Mors is such a coarse and uninviting creature that just being around him can feel like a slow, agonizing suicide by sandpaper. And they both suffer indignity after indignity as the game goes along, to the point where you start to wish it would just end, already, if only to spare them some needless suffering. By the end of Game of Thrones, you'll think Ned Stark got off comparatively easy.

A lot of terrible things are going to happen to Mors, too. But at least he has a dog.

With all this misery and skulduggery and relentless stabbing comes none of the wit inherent to the books and the TV show. The Game of Thrones TV series works especially well because there are so many clever personalities so brilliantly portrayed by actors like Peter Dinklage, Charles Dance, Maisie Williams, and the like. Those personalities are essentially absent in this game. Major characters like Tyrion Lannister, Littlefinger, and anyone from the Stark or Baratheon clans are nowhere to be found, and the supplemental characters created for the game aren't suitable replacements. Lord Varys, the bald-headed eunuch and master of spies is on hand (and voiced by TV series actor Conleth Hill), but his scenes lack any of the witty repartee he's so well known for on the show and in the books.

From the TV cast, he is joined only by James Cosmo, the actor who plays Night's Watch commander Jeor Mormont. Sadly, Cosmo's performance is brought down by the same trap that snags pretty much every other voice actor in this thing: the script. Game of Thrones is an exceptionally wordy game, filled with long-winded strings of purple dialogue that has no right coming out of a human mouth, even in this high fantasy world. The actors struggle endlessly to try and emote these needlessly engorged strings of expository text into something that sounds vaguely human, but it never quite works.

Regrettably, dialogue dominates much of Game of Thrones' progression. In gameplay, Cyanide has implemented elements of player choice into the dialogue, which can have distinct effects on how later sections of the game play out. The choices you're presented with are generally interesting ones, but the problem is that they're sandwiched between lengthy sections where you're just listening to characters explain to one another the stuff that you just saw happen five minutes ago. You can, thankfully, skip most dialogue sequences, but you're going to be hitting that skip button a lot before you get to the next mission.

The tech and art that make up the foundation of Game of Thrones do little to make up for these shortcomings. Game of Thrones is not an attractive game, even by the admittedly bleak standards set by the show's depiction of the world. Characters are stiffly animated and poorly rendered, environments are bland, blurry, and blocky, and at no point do characters engaged in combat look like they're even aware of one another, let alone actually engaging one another.

It's a shame, because the combat and character-building systems as designed aren't half-bad; they're just not executed particularly well. At the outset of the game, you choose from one of three different combat stances that each character will use throughout the game, which determine your proficiency in different weapon types. Additionally, you'll have to choose equivalent strengths and weaknesses. Strengths are the expected stuff, like leadership bonuses that help rally your party members, or agility bonuses that make you more nimble in combat. Weaknesses, however, drag down your abilities a bit. For instance, you might choose the hemophiliac weakness, which causes you to bleed (and thus lose more hit points) during combat, or you might have a fear of fire that makes you more susceptible to fire damage.

It's a neat little balancing act that sadly is rendered less-than-thrilling by the dearth of interesting abilities you're afforded. You'll gain new attacks and abilities at a reasonably rapid clip, but only a handful of them are particularly useful in battle. This essentially means you'll find yourself spamming the same three or four attacks through every single combat sequence, a fact made all the more tedious by the general lack of enemy variety in front of you. Sometimes the combat challenge level will violently spike, but it's not because you're fighting new or more interesting characters. I hope you enjoy killing dumb guys with swords, bigger dumb guys with swords, and really dumb archers (they clearly don't understand the concept of "ranged" attacks), because that's about all you're going to get.

Combat tends to devolve into a mess of repetitive attacks and lazy, flailing animations.

Mors and Alester each have their own character-specific abilities as well: Alester's priestly powers give him control over fire magic, while Mors is a skinchanger, meaning he can enter the mind of his trusty dog, whom Mors hasn't even bothered to give a name. The fire magic stuff adds a bit of depth to Alester's combat sequences, but it's ultimately unneeded depth, since again, the same few attacks are easily relied upon for the duration. In addition to being able to send the dog after attackers, skinchanging gives Mors an extra stealth ability, since the dog is less noticeable and can sneak through smaller spaces. Unfortunately, the dog sections tend to drag on far longer than is fun, especially when you end up doing the same button-mashing minigame every single time you want to murder someone quietly.

That's pretty much the whole of Game of Thrones. Sad dialogue, combat, sad dialogue, combat, sad dialogue, more sad dialogue, something outright horrifying happening, sad combat, and so on repeated in varying orders for a bit more than 20 hours. I'll admit that as a fan of the source material, I did find myself increasingly willing to put up with Game of Thrones' mediocre mechanics and ass-ugly graphics for the sake of pushing forward in the story. At points, its tale can be quite gripping. But between its healthy dollops of bloated dialogue, its endlessly embittered tone, and its perhaps unsurprisingly bleak conclusion--no matter which of the multiple endings you end up with, mind you--I ultimately found Game of Thrones too soul-draining to enjoy. There is fan service to be had here, but the trade-off of what you have to endure to experience it isn't balanced in your favor.

ShootMania Storms Onward

Jeff — Wed, 23 May 2012 11:34:00 -0700

Nadeo's next release trades cars for guns. Seems like a fair deal to me.

Diablo III Sells 3.5 Million Copies In its First Day Alone

Alex — Wed, 23 May 2012 08:10:00 -0700

Can you even imagine the stat numbers for enemies killed and loot collected thus far? In the parlance of Carl Sagan, it's got to be in the "billions of billions."

The server issues that plagued Diablo III's first 48 hours or so were certainly unfortunate, but it turns out that Blizzard really did have a good reason for not quite anticipating the server load it endured. After all, who could possibly have predicted that the game would sell 3.5 million copies in its first 24 hours? I mean, I'm sure we all thought it would do well, but that number is something else entirely.

That 3.5 million number doesn't even take into account the 1.2 million who received a copy of the game through the World of Warcraft Annual Pass program. All in all, that means 4.7 million people were at least capable of playing Diablo III on day one. Which is a lot, really.

All in all, 6.3 million copies have been sold/acquired in the week since the game's launch, which, according to Blizzard, breaks the "all-time record for fastest-selling PC game." I don't have my list of the fastest-selling PC games of all time handy, but I'll just assume that Blizzard did its homework before making that claim. Otherwise, they should be expecting a nasty phone call from Guinness.

Records or no records, Diablo III is unequivocally a massive, overwhelming success, and it's only been a week. I mean, I haven't even bought my copy yet. That's at least one more coming! Eventually! When I actually have time to play it...

Quick Look: Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier

drewbert — Wed, 23 May 2012 06:00:00 -0700

In the near future, soldiers will use active camouflage. Soon after, simultaneous shooting will be developed.

Diablo III Review

Brad — Tue, 22 May 2012 19:00:00 -0700

Action-RPG combat has rarely ever been this addictive.

Blizzard made no attempt to reinvent the wheel a couple of years ago when it revitalized StarCraft after its decade-long absence, choosing instead to simply modernize and spit-polish that franchise's well-known fundamentals until they reached the company's trademark high-gloss sheen. They've taken the same tack in reviving Diablo after its own 12-year hiatus, and once again the result hews to the nostalgic strengths of its antique predecessors while also managing to feel like it belongs on a release list in 2012. And it's a hell of a lot of fun to play, with hooks that keep you playing longer in one sitting than you might have wanted to. I'm not the type to often play through a game more than once, so I guess it's saying something that after more than 35 hours with the game--first playing all the way through with my primary character, then playing through a bunch of it again on the next difficulty, jumping into numerous dungeon runs with friends, and dabbling with several other classes (all of whom I'd love, time permitting, to take to high levels themselves)--I really just want to keep playing more Diablo III.

This new game's staunch adherence to its loot-driven action-RPG conventions might tell you right off the bat if you should even be interested or not. Do you like loot? Not just a little bit of loot, but ubiquitous, shiny, delicious, stat-increasing loot everywhere you look? Just like its predecessors--and perhaps even more so than them--Diablo III is a game about constantly building and rebuilding your character with new gear and abilities to meet the challenges that are constantly increasing in front of you. It's also a game where the extent of your interaction with the world entails clicking to move, and clicking and tapping some number keys to kill everything in front of you. You play it entirely from a fixed overhead camera angle, and the story, aside from a handful of lavish CG cutscenes, plays out exclusively through small character models gesticulating a bit while their dialogue comes out of speech bubbles. In short, it rigidly assumes the form and structure of the old Diablo games, so if you already know you're burned out on that specific formula, you may move along.

The social features get you playing with your friends easily... you know, if you have any.

If that sort of game does it for you--and there are plenty of you out there--you'd have a tough time finding one that's better put-together than Diablo III. A game where you spend 98 percent of your time killing stuff (and the remaining time performing upkeep on your ability to kill stuff) would get old pretty fast if the combat weren't a ton of fun, so it's a good thing Diablo III's is. I think it's the hardest-hitting I've ever seen in the genre. There's something about the interactions between your fighter and enemies, the visual and sound cues that go along with every strike, that just makes the combat feel, for lack of a better word, right. So often you feel like an unstoppable whirlwind of destruction when you wade into a dozen or more enemies and juggle your skills back and forth to control the crowd, focus down a single tough elite monster, or kite a bunch of enemies around as you frantically try to heal. The action is just tightly designed in a way that seems like a lot of designers spent a lot of time tuning it to perfection. Fighting enemies in this game never gets old, which is a good thing since finishing the story once sends you straight back to the menu with an urging to begin again on the next difficulty, where the loot is much better and the enemies don't just hit harder but also change up their tactics, forcing you to change up yours. I can't stress enough how enjoyable it is to keep playing after you see the credits the first time.

The game's classes cover all the bases you'd want, from the pure burly melee of the barbarian to nimble and arcane DPS courtesy of the demon hunter and wizard, respectively, to the horde of sinister pets that accompany the witch doctor into battle. My personal favorite, the monk, is like a martial paladin who can effectively heal up in between roundhouse kicks and a blur of fist strikes. Each class' skills are split across a variety of categories, and almost every skill has a long list of "runes" you pick from to add some ancillary effect that further differentiates them. The breakdown of skills into those different categories initially seems constraining, but there's actually a dizzying number of ways to build the skills of a given class to fit different play styles and challenges. Why the game hides the full ability to mix and match your skills behind the optional "elective mode" checkbox in the options, however, is completely baffling to me. Elective mode is absolutely essential to getting the most out of the game's combat, so it's a shame there isn't some tutorial tip that goes out of its way to let you know how much freedom to customize you actually have. Once you click that single checkbox, the gameplay really opens up.

Seriously, play a monk.

If this were purely a combat game, I guess it could be conducted with stick figures and primary colors, but of course it's worth addressing the world and story Blizzard built up to propel your loot grind along. The plot proceeds with equal parts gravitas and cheese, about like you'd expect from a story about a literal war between heaven and hell, but that setup does make for some truly epic, screen-filling boss encounters and sieges for you to fight your way through. It's also fun to revisit some memorable old locations like Tristram (which comes with just a hint of the discordant acoustic guitar that practically defined that first game) and catch up on the continuing events of familiar characters like Deckard Cain and the skeleton king Leoric. Much more impressive is the expertly considered art design that bathes the game in exquisite detail and makes excellent use of color choice and lighting to create unique mood specific to each location. Don't think that the tiny character models and bird's-eye view of the action somehow make this game outdated from a visual standpoint. The art is so strong that each scene takes on a painterly effect that almost transcends its polygonal makeup, and I kept noticing how much detail was crammed into the periphery of each map, like a collapsed bridge here or some old statuary there, in places you can't even explore. There's a liberal use of ambient animations, like birds flying at the camera or old architecture crumbling when you run by, that make the environments feel more lively, and the game's excellent use of ragdoll to send enemies flying over ledges or into the water is always amusing.

But again, it's about the loot, and how much fun the fighting is that gets you more of it. The game changes dramatically when you join up with other players, since the monsters get harder and you're able to settle into a more specialized role while other classes cover their own roles, allowing you to change up the way you play and what combination of skills you're using. The game isn't incredibly difficult your first time through, but I found it doled out new equipment and better drops at a good, steady pace as I got a handle on all the things my class could do, so that by the time the next difficulty rolled around, I was jumping at the chance to get in there with some friends and explore a range of new combat possibilities under much greater duress. It's when three or four high-level players are all in there doing their thing at once, with the action devolving into a high-speed orgy of colored lights and particle effects, that Diablo III is at its best. The game makes the elegant choice of distributing separate loot to each player, so you don't have to worry about some jerk grabbing the spaulders or daibo you wanted, but so far I've found there to be a nice spirit of sharing among all the players I've played with as we pass loot around that suits other people's classes.

The auction house is certainly capable of saving you some time.

It's too early to say what eventual impact the game's persistent auction house will have on Diablo III's economy and the value of rare items, especially since Blizzard hasn't rolled out the ability to sell stuff for actual dollars yet. It's safe to say that launch will have a profound effect on the way items are bought and sold, but even now the transactions being conducted with gold are providing an interesting case study in the ebb and flow of in-game economics. It's been amusing to see comparable items being listed right next to each other with an order of magnitude disparity in their pricing, leading me to believe some players are listing items as high as they can to see what they can get away with, or others are trying to sell gear without knowing the value of what they actually have, or both. Who can even say what the absolute value is of a one-handed sword with 100 damage per second and a bonus to attack speed? More practically, the game's auction house gives you so much control over search filtering that it's almost embarrassingly easy to specify the exact type of weapon or armor you're looking for, the level range, the stats you want, and exactly how much you're willing to pay for it. At the moment, there are enough people selling great loot at bargain-basement prices that too much time in the auction house can sort of trivialize the gear you find in the game itself. Whether that's a problem for you probably comes down to personal preference, and given that the auction house exists only at the game's main menu, it's easy enough to ignore if you want to maintain some sort of loot-lust purity as you make your way through. If you don't have a ton of time to grind through dungeon runs in an endless search for more loot, though, it can be a real time-saver.

Speaking of multiplayer and that auction house, you could scarcely know about Diablo III at all without having heard about the game's always-online connectivity that requires you to be constantly in touch with Blizzard's servers to play it at all, even by yourself. That approach to maintaining the sanctity of the in-game economy (and making sure a bunch of people don't hack and/or pirate the game) comes with plenty of ups and downs. On the upside, the level of integrated connectedness is pretty impressive, letting you chat with friends while you're playing alone, seamlessly invite them into your game or join theirs whenever you feel like it, and even inspect their characters and see their achievements popping up in real time. On the downside...if you can't connect to Battle.net, you can't play the game, no matter whether you want to play it with other people or not. That has real, unfortunate consequences when Blizzard doesn't have its act together, as evidenced by the calamity that ensued in the first 36 hours of release when I frequently had a hard time getting into the game at all, and latency-related issues messed with performance and booted me out a couple of times. It's been smooth sailing in the week since then, though, and given Blizzard's experience running large online networks for long periods of time, I'm hopeful those problems were an isolated incident under massive launch-day stress and not something we can expect to see again.

I can't stay mad at Diablo III for long, anyway. It's such a rare thing that my interest in continuing to play a game keeps increasing not just toward the end of the game but past the end, yet somehow the more Diablo I play, the more Diablo I want to play. It doesn't do anything especially new with the action-RPG genre, but it does all the old things very, very well, and sometimes that's more than enough.

Giant Bombcast 05-22-2012

Ryan — Tue, 22 May 2012 15:45:00 -0700

309 - Giant Bombcast 05-22-2012

The Other XCOM Isn’t Coming Out Anytime Soon

patrickklepek — Tue, 22 May 2012 13:40:00 -0700

How much will XCOM change between now and its release? Hard to say. It's going dark again.

2K Games has been playing hot potato with its shooter-tinged reboot of XCOM since it began development, and today pushed it back again, confirming it won’t show up until at least April 1, 2013.

No, this does not impact the strategy game. That game was just given a release date: October 9. You can breathe easy.

Specifically, parent company Take-Two Interactive announced XCOM is scheduled for release during fiscal year 2014, which lands between April 1, 2013 and March 31, 2014. So, a ways away.

The company adopted a similar strategy with the soon-to-be-released Spec Ops: The Line, choosing to delay and significantly retool it, rather than just releasing what it had. It’s unclear whether the extra time will prove valuable for Spec Ops: The Line, but at least Take-Two gave it a shot.

XCOM looked significantly different between its original showing in E3 2010 and E3 2011, and to be honest, I liked both versions. It’s a radical departure from its strategy roots, but we’re getting that, too. Everyone wins!

Johann Sebastian Joust Is Latest iOS Cloning Victim

patrickklepek — Tue, 22 May 2012 12:00:00 -0700

Cloning is not a new issue for Apple’s iOS marketplace, but the hell hath no fury like a beloved indie scorned. The latest victim is Die Gute Fabrik’s Johann Sebastian Joust, a game we featured in last year’s Big Live Live Show Live!

Gamasutra noticed developer Ustwo had just released Papa Quash for the iPhone, which looks an awful lot like Die Gute Fabrik’s own creation. The video tells the story better than words.

In Johann Sebastian Joust, players walk around with Move controllers and attempt to knock around the other Move controllers, as music plays in the background. The music determines how fast or slow players can move. The faster the music, the faster you can move. Move too fast or get knocked by another player--boom, you’re out.

In Papa Quash, it’s the same idea, except swap Move for iPhone.

Johann Sebastian Joust has been in perpetual development, despite endless positive press, for a while now, and it’s still unclear if it will see a proper release on PlayStation 3 or otherwise.

Thing is, Ustwo even admits Papa Quash took direct inspiration from Johann Sebastian Joust. The studio told Gamasutra that ex-Big Brother UK contestant Sam Pepper contracted Papa Quash from Ustwo, and Ustwo was reportely told Die Fubrik Gathe had been contacted and signed off.

"We're not into cloning,” said Ustwo's marketing director Steve Bittan to the site. “We genuinely care about what we do and out reputation in the indie community."

Die Gute Fabrik claims that never happened.

"We've been getting a lot of inquiries lately. We're working on an official response - hopefully by tonight,” said the company this morning Twitter. "Just to be clear, we have never and would never approve, give permission, or encourage anyone to clone of any of our games."

Today In Useful Release Info: XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Devil May Cry Have Launch Dates

Alex — Tue, 22 May 2012 08:20:00 -0700

You'll be strategically killing alien scum this October.

Adding to the deluge of release dates we've been getting in these couple of weeks prior to E3--because apparently there's no point in saving any of this for the show--2K Games and Capcom have revealed the launch dates for some of their bigger upcoming releases in XCOM: Enemy Unknown and the Ninja Theory-developed Devil May Cry reboot, respectively.

First up, Firaxis' update of Mythos Games' classic turn-based alien killing strategy series, which is now scheduled to hit stores on October 9. The announcement came with a gaggle of pre-order information pertaining to the game, which I won't reprint in its entirety for brevity's sake. You can read about all the pre-order goodies and doodads on 2K's official blog, if you like.

As for Devil May Cry, you can expect to take control of a newly revamped Dante as of January 13. Ninja Theory has been working on this reboot for the last few years, and this is Capcom's first official launch date set for the game. This, of course, means it could still slip a few more times, given the way these things generally tend to go, but for now, let's just pretend that this sounds like a very solid date that has no chance of moving whatsoever. It's less stressful that way.

It's worth noting that DMC will join a host of other major games, including BioShock Infinite, Tomb Raider, South Park: The Stick of Truth, and Aliens: Colonial Marines in an increasingly crowded first quarter of next year. Perhaps it might be prudent to set aside a little bit more of your holiday moneys than usual this year. Come January and February, it looks like you're gonna need that extra cash.

Activision Lawsuit Has Details on Bungie’s Next Game

patrickklepek — Mon, 21 May 2012 18:40:00 -0700

Bungie and Activision have said very little about Bungie's next project. This is our first look inside.

The last thing one would expect to learn from the ongoing dispute between Activision and former Infinity Ward employees was the first concrete details on Bungie’s next game, but, well, we have 'em.

Bungie’s agreement with Activision for its next franchise is the latest document to be unsealed in the march towards the trial date for the clash, and reveals some interesting details on “codename Desiny.”

The details come courtesy of the LA Times.

Per the agreement, Destiny would be an Xbox 360 exclusive released in fall 2013, with a sequels arriving on new hardware platforms from Microsoft, Sony, and a version on PC. It specified four games, with sequels coming every other year.

In the contract, Microsoft’s next console is referred to as “Xbox 720” but I wouldn’t read into that very much.

The contract may have also changed--this went into effect in April 2010.

Bungie was also contracted to release four downloadable expansions, codenamed Comet, starting in fall 2014. If Destiny is a persistent online world as rumored, yearly expansions between major retail releases would make sense.

The agreement also makes mention of Bungie developing a reboot of Marathon, the stipulation being that “no more than 5%” of the studio’s staff could be assigned to the project.

Bungie’s contract has been brought into question because of the creative control former Infinity Ward leads Jason West and Vince Zampella gave up per its own agreement with Activision. West and Zampella’s lawyers are arguing the duo should be owed more money for giving up that control.

The case goes to trial on May 29.

Wii U’s Controller May Have Seen Some Changes

patrickklepek — Mon, 21 May 2012 10:57:00 -0700

Nintendo’s said very little about Wii U since its public debut at last year’s E3, but that should change at this year’s E3, in which the company is expected to answer most of our lingering questions. (Price will not be one of them, though).

Whether or not Nintendo has modified the Wii U hardware has been a topic of intense speculation. While the Wii U’s internal specs will remain a mystery for a little while longer, it appears the controller has undergone changes.

Games Radar picked up on a (now deleted) tweet from a Traveller’s Tales employee, which included a shot of the Wii U controller. Compared to our last look at the tablet-like controller, there’s one major change: proper analog sticks. There were 3DS-like Circle Pad sticks on the last iteration. The start and select buttons have been moved to the right-hand corner, and there’s a mysterious square on the left--it wouldn't surprise me if that was for syncing.

The Traveller's Tales connection should not be surprising. The Grand Theft Auto-style LEGO City Stories is a Wii U and 3DS exclusive, and it's likely Wii U will be added to the lineup of platforms for future LEGO games.

Nintendo declined to comment on the changes.

“We do not comment on rumors or speculation,” said the company in a statement.

Prototype 2 Review

Jeff — Fri, 18 May 2012 15:00:00 -0700

Heller. He hates computers.

Prototype 2 is a game that deals in moderate swings. It starts out a little slow as your protagonist, the gruff and painfully stupid James Heller, gets his bearings and starts to earn multiple powers. Once it gets rolling, it's pretty fun to lay waste to everything around you as you unlock arm swords, arm whips, claw arms, and so on. But once you get most of the powers and move into the game's back third, it turns into a monotonous chore. I had unlocked almost all of the meaningful upgrades, and all that remained was to trudge through the remaining story missions to see how the story ends. But the story in Prototype 2 is filled with one lame character after another, making Prototype 2 a much better game when it just shuts up and lets you break stuff.

This sequel flips the original game on its head by making the protagonist of the original, Alex Mercer, the bad guy here. At the opening, Mercer infects your soldier with his crazy virus, giving you the same abilities Mercer had in the original game, such as gliding and air dashing, which makes floating around the city pretty easy. You can also run up the sides of buildings, pick up cars, and all sorts of other superhero-style stuff. The thing that gives Prototype its hook, though, is the way you can "consume" other humans and steal their shape. This gives the game an occasional stealth edge, as you'll sometimes need to consume the commander of a base and assume his identity to make your way past locked doors and such. The game won't let you eat people in front of other people without causing a full alert, so you'll either need to take out the enemies that are looking in your direction--which the game helpfully points out--or just cause an alert, eat your target, then run away until the alert dies down. You can swap between your real form and the most recent person you've eaten at will, and switching when enemy troops aren't looking in your direction cancels that alert status almost immediately. So the stealth side of Prototype 2 is light, at best.

The backdrop for your cannibalism is a quarantined New York City, which has plenty of regular civilians around mixed in with evil military guys, even-eviler Blackwatch troopers, monsters caused by the infection, and a group of "Evolved" humans that are just like you... but evil. Each enemy requires slightly different tactics at first, but as you level up and unlock new abilities and complete side tasks to get bonus mutations, the opposition isn't a significant threat. Enemies that originally require you to dodge or counter their attacks early on in the game are defeated by simple button mashing later on. While that ties in nicely with the way your XP is constantly giving you more and more power, it makes the back third or so of the game feel like a formality, from a gameplay perspective.

Some of the enemies you encounter are decidedly less than human.

So much of Prototype 2 and your enjoyment of it hinges on you enjoying the way Heller moves. As with Mercer in the previous game, Heller can run up the sides of buildings, glide, and air dash his way around New York, and upgrades you earn along the way make all of those things work better, as well. Combining your various movement abilities to quickly get around the city is probably the best part of Prototype 2, but it still has some clunky moments, like the way Heller seems to want to run upside-down whenever you're dashing up the side of a building with an awning. When you're attempting to complete one of the game's time-based challenge missions, those little glitches become pretty frustrating. But you'll only run into a few of those if you stick to the main path.

Sticking to the story path will get you through the game faster, but you'll miss some of the cooler upgrades. In addition to earning experience points and leveling up, completing sets of side missions gives you access to various mutations that can alter your character in some interesting ways. One, for example, lets you simply ignore all hits from small arms fire. When bullets just bounce off of you, you can focus on the larger threats, like the big mutant beasts that want to rip you in half, tanks, choppers, or dudes with rocket launchers. Other mutations give you more mobility, and so on. The side missions also tie into the old "Web of Deceit" concept from the first game, where you hunt around the city for specific individuals and consume them. This gives you a look at their thoughts, which helps fill in a bit of backstory, and it also gives you the computer access required to learn about enemy troop movements and other intel that turns into missions where you travel to a location and, generally speaking, destroy everyone that gets in your way.

If you purchase a new copy of the game (or pay for separate access, which I wouldn't recommend), you'll get access to another tier of missions. Some of these are more like little minigames, where troops are set up in formations and you have to figure out the right way to dive-bomb and take out as many of them as possible. Others are more achievement-like, asking you to rack up a set number of kills with a grenade launcher. Completing these sets of time-release missions gives you bonus material, like an Alex Mercer skin for use in the single-player. Boy, that sure doesn't make any sense in the context of this game's story. Some of them make for interesting diversions, but as a whole, there are already more than enough side missions in the game, and filling it out with even more turns the game into busywork.

That's probably the biggest problem with Prototype 2. Its cooler moments are offset by a long list of missions that aren't engaging at all. You're a man with an ever-increasing list of insane powers, but the tasks you accomplish with those powers are usually pretty ho-hum. Add to all that a script that makes you want to turn the sound down and a dose of awkward control quirks and you've got a run-of-the-mill open-world game.

Giant Bombcast 05-15-2012

Ryan — Tue, 15 May 2012 18:15:00 -0700

307 - Giant Bombcast 05-15-2012

Max Payne 3 Review

Ryan — Mon, 14 May 2012 09:00:00 -0700

A harder Max for harder times.

Rockstar Games faced no small feat in taking on Max Payne. With nearly a decade since Finnish developer Remedy--long since busy exploring the dark wilderness of the subconscious with Alan Wake--parted ways with the series, the challenges were manifold. After that much time, did the John-Woo-inspired gun ballet still play? And what of the comic-book-noir aesthetic, which leavened Max’s blackstrap pathos with fleets of self-reference and absurdity? Rockstar, of course, addresses both of these issues with no small amount of its own usual panache, discarding large swaths of Max’s established aesthetic and asserting its own set of influences in the process.

Rockstar held publishing duties on the first two Max Payne games, but Max Payne 3 really feels like a modern Rockstar game, with the grimy creative fingerprints of the creators of Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption all over it. To trot out a hoary old line that Max Payne himself would probably mutter to himself and then sneer at, this ain’t your grandaddy’s Max Payne. And in a way, that’s kind of a shame, since there hasn’t really been anything quite like Max Payne since Max Payne. Max Payne 3 is definitely a different kind of cocktail, but it still packs a pretty good wallop.

Even for Max, a lot of time has passed since Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, to the point that the dramatic, traumatic events of the first two games are little more than old scar tissue now. Having long since ruined anything worth ruining in New York with booze and pills, Max has retreated from his own life and taken up reluctant employment as a personal bodyguard for the wealthy, powerful, and treacherous Branco family in São Paulo, Brazil. For as comfortably as Max and his black jacket fit into the shadows of New York’s underworld, he’s a stranger in a strange land here. His leathery American frame sticks out like a sore thumb in the washed-out sunlight of both São Paulo’s rich playgrounds of privilege and its rusted favelas, which he fumbles through with as little grasp on the local language as to why he’s really in São Paulo. Max has never been a particularly sunny soul, but here he regards his idle rich clients with about as much simmering contempt as he does for his own half-drunk, careless ineptitude as family members get kidnapped and his bad situation continues to find new ways to get worse.

Max on Fire.

Rockstar has never been particularly shy about its specific influences, which are often cinematic in origin. With Max Payne 3, the setting, character situations, and overall look of the game make comparisons to the Tony Scott movie Man on Fire inevitable, and apt, though there are strains of director Michael Mann’s slick latter-day crime dramas in there as well, all of it spiked with a spare synthesizer score and shocking moments of extreme violence. Though it’s not couched in the caricatured satire of GTAIV or the bleak revisionist period trappings of Red Dead, that same authorial voice still rings like a gunshot.

There’s still plenty of internal monologue from Max, but like the rest of the game, the language is less flowery and more nihilistic than Remedy’s work with the character. It’s still every bit as stylish, but in a completely different way, replacing Max’s old static comic-panel storytelling devices with flashy multi-frame cutscenes that are jumpy and dynamic, often popping up key bits of dialogue on screen for added punch. It’s a distinct look and feel that, in some ways, reminded me more of the blown-out neon and cheap digital noise of IO Interactive’s Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days than the previous Max Payne games, but there are times that it overindulges in its own sense of style, distracting from the plot’s serpentine double-crossing and Max’s near-constant self-flagellation.

Max may be greyer at the temples than when we last left him, and far more emotionally handicapped by drink and drugs, but he’s no less capable than he ever was when leaping through the air in slow-motion with a pair of guns while facing down armies of thugs, crooked cops, and worse. Tapping into Max’s hallmark ability to drop the action into slow-motion for fleeting moments of time is still fundamental to the game’s third-person gunplay, and he still relies on found painkillers to manage his health--a grim fact he’ll regularly make glib reference to--but both have been tweaked in significant ways.

When nothing else makes sense, open fire.

There’s no on-screen indication other than the silhouetted life meter in the corner of the screen to let you know when Max is near death--a point that feels oddly archaic--though should you take one too many bullets, you can cheat that last gasp by targeting the enemy that got you, provided you’re holding onto at least one painkiller. Max’s basic shoot-dodging abilities remain intact, though now when you clear a room of enemies, you’re given the opportunity to continue pumping the last man standing full of lead for no apparent reasons beyond gory style and a vicious vindictiveness. The experience is also punctuated throughout with orchestrated slow-mo gameplay set-pieces that usually involve Max leaping through the air while killing as many men as possible.

In bringing the action of Max Payne into 2012, the addition of a cover mechanic is perhaps both the most subtle and significant change in Max Payne 3. Being able to slide into cover to control the tempo of the action is almost a given in a post-Gears-of-War third-person shooter. Combining that with Max’s literal ability to control the tempo by slowing down time might make him seem invincible. Instead, Max is made more fragile to make up the difference, a choice that makes it more challenging to use the slow-mo in a cool, stylish way and undercuts one of the fundamental things that has defined Max Payne in the past. Aside from the addition of some hard- and soft-lock targeting options, the actual gunplay doesn't feel too radically different, and yet for all of the chaos around you, it's an experience that feels much more controlled.

As in GTAIV and Red Dead Redemption, Max Payne 3 features a competitive multiplayer mode that runs parallel to the single-player; it takes place in the same world, with familiar locations and players, but it’s a very different experience. You can trigger the slow-motion effect in multiplayer, and though it’s in more limited quantities than in the single-player, it has the added impact of affecting everyone in the game. Beyond that ability, though, there are few surprises to be had in the multiplayer. There are deathmatch and team deathmatch variants, as well as an objective-based Gang War mode, and you’ll earn money and experience that you can use to unlock new weapons, gear, and abilities. Adding to the persistent side of the multiplayer, you can choose to join a crew, which can provide additional bonuses. It’s all pretty well thought-out as far as these types of modes go, but it feels kind of common, watering down the elements that make Max Payne cool.

Rockstar has taken a lot of risks in the ways it has reshaped the series with Max Payne 3, and there’s something to be said for opting out of the easy route. The aesthetic overhaul is certainly the most noticeable, though there's no understating the impact that certain gameplay modernizations have had on the experience. While fans might have a hard time processing the dramatic change in tone, it’s approached with a seriousness and conviction that I respect, and frankly, have come to expect from Rockstar.

Minecraft Review

Brad — Wed, 09 May 2012 13:00:00 -0700

Enough hours and elbow grease will turn this...

It's hard to imagine you've kept up with video games this long without becoming at least passingly familiar with the Minecraft phenomenon. But if you're like me, so far you've managed to avoid actually diving pickaxe-first into that blocky landscape and wasting dozens of hours building... whatever it is a person builds when they have access to a wide range of tools and no specific directives as to their use. For you and me, the new Xbox 360 Edition of Minecraft is a fine introduction to the world of tunneling to the center of the Earth in a desperate search for precious minerals, and constructing castles that take you weeks to build. Veterans of the far more robust PC version, however, more than likely won't find anything worthwhile in this scaled-down port.

If you don't actually know anything about what Minecraft is at this point, there are untold thousands of hours of YouTube videos out there to educate you. Let it suffice that it's a retro-lookin' open-ended sandbox where you harvest raw materials like dirt, wood, and stone, refine them into slightly less raw materials like glass, and then... well, you figure it out. As this was my first experience in any sort of Minecraft world whatsoever, I was terrified by the game's lack of direction for a couple of hours, until I finally decided that I was going to build myself a gigantic castle, which ended up presenting a series of small architectural and process-oriented challenges that I found pretty satisfying. This version does include a nicely paced (if poorly written) tutorial that smoothly introduces you to the steps required to make basic tools, build structures, and so on. It's also a rare case where the included Xbox achievements actually provide you some specific structure and guidance above and beyond the goals the game itself gives you, which are few.

...into something more like this.

That said, this "Xbox 360 Edition" is a strange beast that comes with what seems like an equal number of pros and cons when compared to the PC original. In the negative column: individual worlds are quite limited in size, considering the PC version will generate endless terrain for as long as you want to explore it. There's also no option for a persistent world that anyone can join at will; instead, the host has to be running their game and have it set to "online" for anyone else to join it, and all other players are dropped when the host quits. Naturally, you won't have access to any of the legion of mods that have been produced for the game. And most damningly, the 360 game is based on a year-old PC version that lacks a huge list of features like a hunger meter, new biomes, and randomly generated towns. The developers of this version hope to expedite Microsoft's typically onerous update process and bring it closer to parity with the PC game on a bimonthly basis, but whether or not that will happen--and whether they'll charge extra if it does--remains to be seen. The short version of all this is that if you've already spent a ton of time with the "real" Minecraft, or you want to delve straight into the most mature and feature-rich version of the game on the market, this isn't the one you want.

The 360 game isn't without its own improvements, though. Chiefly, the crafting interface is fast and largely automated, presenting you with an easy-to-browse list of recipes and allowing you to pop out axes and shovels, stairs, workbenches, and so on at the touch of a button, rather than forcing you to memorize ingredient lists and manually drag those ingredients into slots to make stuff. And while the persistence of your worlds is limited, the game offers an elegant way to view and join all of your friends' games while they're in progress. Most importantly, the game offers local splitscreen co-op that makes it an ideal casual experience for multiple people hanging around the house on a lazy Saturday afternoon. For me, the local co-op rapidly went from a mere bullet-point feature to the most valuable aspect of this whole game in the space of one of those afternoons. The game works really well on the 360 controller in general, and if you use the lowest difficulty, which disables monsters (like the infernal creepers who are constantly blowing up all your carefully constructed stuff), the game can be an awfully pleasant, lean-back sort of way to pass a few hours. Or more than a few.

The worlds are limited in size, but still plenty big to build some dumb stuff in.

In the multitude of hours I've put into this version of Minecraft so far, I had no trouble editing multiple worlds across multiple Xboxes, and playing any combination of local and online co-op with various friends. Though, there was one maddening experience where the game crashed when I used the save-and-quit option, failing to save in the process and obliterating all my work since the last save. Based on anecdotal evidence, I'm hardly the only one who's had that specific problem, so you're advised to use the regular manual save option frequently to make sure you don't lose any hard work until the game is patched.

In the future, this version of the game will live and die by the frequency and robustness of those promised updates and the extent to which they catch the game up to the progress of the PC original. The 360 Edition is a bit steep by Xbox standards at $20, though the PC version now costs a bit more (and some outlets seem to be selling this one for less, anyway). If you're reading this review at all, you probably own at least one platform, ranging from PC to Mac to the iPhone or Android, that Minecraft already runs on, but here and now, the 360 game offers enough value for block-building neophytes to justify its existence in a world where Minecraft has already seemingly been wallpapered everywhere you look for the last couple of years.

Giant Bombcast 05-08-2012

Ryan — Tue, 08 May 2012 12:51:00 -0700

306 - Giant Bombcast 05-08-2012

Giant CODcast: Black Ops II

Ryan — Tue, 01 May 2012 21:00:00 -0700

304 - Giant CODcast: Black Ops II

Mortal Kombat Review

Jeff — Tue, 01 May 2012 20:00:00 -0700

See, you can tell this is for the Vita version of the game because there's a hand model involved!

The Vita version of Mortal Kombat is the same fantastic and content-loaded fighting game that appeared on consoles about a year ago. But this portable version of the game actually has even more to do. The four characters released as downloadable add-ons for the original game are already present, and there are even more costumes to choose from. It's gone through a year of patches and balance changes, ensuring that the version of the game you're getting on day one for the Vita has been fight-tested and tournament approved. In short, if you're a Vita owner that's open to the idea of a fighting game, Mortal Kombat is an amazing value.

I'm not going to just rehash everything I said a year ago, but 95 percent of that old review still applies here. The single-player story mode is still astoundingly deep and the challenge tower is an exciting and maddening climb. Let's talk about the differences. The Vita version gets a new challenge tower that's largely built around the Vita's touch and shake features. It's a little silly, giving you an MK-themed take on Fruit Ninja, minigames where you tap rockets with your finger before they can reach your fighter, and so on. But it's a solid change of pace that, for the most part, handles the Vita's additional control options pretty well. In fights, you can use the touch screen to perform fatalities, if you like, and you can also unleash X-ray attacks by tapping your super meter when it's full.

If you start directly comparing the Vita version of Mortal Kombat to its console counterparts, you'll notice some cutbacks. While the frame rate is perfectly smooth during the fighting, that seems to come at the expense of some of the original game's character detail. When the game zooms in close for fatalities, win poses, or pre-fight talking (which happens all the time in the game's story mode), you'll notice that the character models look a little grungy and decidedly flatter than they did on consoles. That's obviously not the end of the world, and it's surely insane to expect a handheld to perfectly match a console, but hey, consider yourself aware of the difference. Some backgrounds look a little static, as well, but overall, it's a really nice-looking Vita game. Also, the game's online mode is limited to fights with one other player, so all the chat lobby and avatar-based spectator stuff from the other versions has been cut in favor of basic splits between ranked/unranked and one-on-one/tag battle. It appears to work just fine, though I had a few games drop out after character selection had been completed and it occasionally takes a little while to match up with a player and get a game going. Once you're connected, though, fighting and voice chat (which is on at all times once you're connected) work great.

Even if you're not near a Wi-Fi connection often enough to take advantage of the multiplayer side of Mortal Kombat, there's more than enough stuff for you to do by yourself to make it worth its $40 price tag. If you're at all warm to the idea of a portable fighting game, you should absolutely pick it up.

Giant Bombcast 05-01-2012

Ryan — Tue, 01 May 2012 14:55:00 -0700

303 - Giant Bombcast 05-01-2012

Bloodforge Review

Alex — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 11:00:00 -0700

There's no shortage of rip-offs in video games. This is, after all, an industry largely based on iteration and building on concepts laid down by those that came before. Sometimes developers stray a little too close to their inspirations for comfort, and get branded with the scarlet letter that is the "rip-off" label. I certainly wouldn't argue with most people's definition of a video game rip-off, but in the case of Bloodforge, I think an entirely new distinction is in order. Rip-off, as we know it, barely covers this hackneyed hack-and-slash snoozer from Climax Group (Sudeki, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories). There is no obfuscation here, no attempt to mask the brazen thievery from Sony's God of War franchise and Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian series. It is a Transmorphers-level mockbuster of a video game.

Who would have thought someone could create an anti-hero more one-note than Kratos?

How blatant does it get? Well, for starters, the lead character's name is Crom. Granted, in this case, Climax isn't so much riffing on the god of Conan lore as the original Gaelic deity that Howard loosely based his god upon. Much as God of War used fixtures of Greek mythology as blade-fodder for its angry hero, Bloodforge pulls figures from pre-Christian Irish and Anglo Saxon mythology for Crom to cut his way through. Not that there's much of a history lesson here. What Climax does with these figures is even less historically relevant than God of War's various storylines. Basically, there are gods, and you hate them, so you kill all of them over the course of roughly four hours.

The reason you hate them is nearly identical to the reason Kratos hated his own gods. At the outset, you're betrayed by an unseen god for unknown reasons and tricked into killing your own wife. Crom, being the shouty barbarian that he is (he shouts everything), immediately sets out looking for vengeance, while a mysterious and sultry witch in a totally not evil-looking mask guides him by telling him things that most certainly are true and totally won't lead to some absurdly telegraphed plot twist down the road. Certainly not.

At least if you've played God of War, you'll know how this is all going to play out. Gods are slayed in order of least-hated to burning rage of a thousand suns, and in between you murder a gaggle of grunt soldiers and vile-looking creatures while using a few different weapon and magic types. It's literally the same formula, except employed with almost impressive levels of ineptitude and apathy toward making any of this fun.

The first problem (and there are many) is the combat. Crom has multiple weapons, but none of them are particularly pleasurable to use. The swords, hammers, and hand blades you're offered are hamstrung by sluggish-feeling combat animations that make trying to use a specific combo or maneuver all but fruitless. Of course, you don't need to use any of the combos. Just mash on the two attack buttons and periodically dodge out of the way of enemy attackers, and you'll do just fine. Unfortunately, unlike God of War, which does a decent job of masking its sometimes button-mashy combat with responsive controls and animations that make you look like a bona fide bad-ass, Bloodforge's combat is just a slog. It's not fun to look at, and it's not fun to engage with.

The effectiveness of this crossbow borders on hilarious.

The enemies you're presented with do little to alleviate this. I'm not just talking about the usual three-hit-kill grunts, but even the big guys. The giant-sized grotesqueries and more tactically minded bad guys are just as one-note as the first guys you kill in the game. Their attack patterns don't vary in the slightest, and every attack is telegraphed by a big honking animation that practically screams, "HEY, USE THAT DODGE BUTTON BECAUSE I'M TOTALLY GOING TO ATTACK YOU NOW, OKAY?" at you. The only thing that makes later enemies more challenging is that they take forever to kill. That's it. There is a huge difference between making an enemy tough and making an enemy a laborious chore to kill. Pretty much every bad guy in Bloodforge skews toward the laborious chore category.

To make matters worse--or better, or both, I don't know--the combat is also just a wee bit broken. You see, in addition to blades, Crom has a crossbow he can use to nail enemies from afar. It's a bit of a chore to use, in that you have to at least be sort of facing an enemy to fire it off, but the benefit is that it never runs out of ammo. In a game that wasn't kind of awful, you'd expect your foes to be smart enough to navigate a devious plan such as, oh, I don't know, running around in a circle forever with only periodic moments to stop and shoot your crossbow until everyone is dead and you haven't taken a single hit, but in Bloodforge? Oh my goodness no. Most of these guys will just keep running around in a circle right with you, letting you shoot them over and over again until they're stunned and you can run up and deliver the final, incoherent deathblow.

I say incoherent because Bloodforge's camera is the worst. This camera, not any of the in-game enemies, is your greatest foe in Bloodforge. It's bad enough when you're just running around and the camera starts bobbing back and forth behind you like it's being held by a drunken film student, but when you're actually trapped in one of those circular bad guy arenas that you can't escape until everyone's dead, just trying to keep the camera at a reasonable angle on whatever it is you're trying to kill is a severe hassle. And I'm not just talking about using the aforementioned crossbow trick. I lost complete track of Crom in the thick of a group of monsters I was trying to stab so many times that I eventually stopped keeping count. I topped out at 23.

While the camera can shoulder a good bit of the blame for that, Bloodforge's monochromatic art style doesn't do much to differentiate what's on screen, either. Crom's sole defining feature is an animal skull he wears as a helmet. It's white-ish, which stands out a bit from the black and brown tatters he's draped in. Unfortunately, it doesn't stand out enough from the black and brown tatters every other character is draped in. When you're surrounded by a group, it's basically just a giant blob of black and brown with spurts of red popping up whenever something gets stabbed.

Look at the pretty color!

Even worse, you and your enemies barely stand out against the world which is, yup, you guessed it, frequently very black and/or grey. Usually each individual world will be tinged with a bit of green or blue or whatever to signify how totally different it is from the other worlds, but ultimately none of it pops. There are some decent character designs here (even if they do look ripped straight out of everything from modern Conan adaptations to Frank Miller's 300), but the entire game's color scheme is just too bland to make any of its halfway decent art stand out. I get that the game's artists were probably going for a kind of bleak stylishness, but it just doesn't work.

Look, it's not as if God of War is some wholly original property that doesn't crib from its own mechanical and narrative inspirations. But there's a difference between "inspired by" and "outright stolen from." Bloodforge falls squarely in the latter category, and to make matters worse, it can't even craft a halfway competent action game out of the myriad things it stole from much better action games. You can cobble together all the great ideas in the world, but if you haven't got a clue what to do with them, then all you're going to end up with is a creatively bankrupt mess like Bloodforge.

Giant Bombcast 04-24-2012

Jeff — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 18:51:00 -0700

294 - Giant Bombcast 04-24-2012

The Pinball Arcade Review

Jeff — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 16:00:00 -0700

Hit the genie to start multiball!

Forget about pelicans or fish or whatever stupid animal out there is "going extinct" or "can only be viewed in a zoo these days." The endangered species that I care about is the pinball machine. It wasn't even 20 years ago that you could expect to see a healthy flock of pinball machines gathering at local bowling alleys, laundromats, and, before their native habitat was destroyed by careless hydrofracking, actual video arcades. These days, the best that most of us can do is to visit virtual pinball machines via packages like Pinball Hall of Fame or downloadable front-ends like Pinball FX2. The Pinball Arcade from FarSight Studios combines both of those things, taking the licensed, real-world tables from the developer's previous work on the Pinball Hall of Fame discs and bringing them to a zillion different downloadable formats, from Vita to Android, in an updatable package that starts with four tables and will expand to more via regular downloadable (and paid) updates. If you have ever connected with pinball, real or virtual, in the past, Pinball Arcade is quite awesome.

On consoles, the base package goes for $10 and includes four tables: Tales of the Arabian Nights, Ripley's Believe It or Not!, Black Hole, and Theatre of Magic. These four tables are notable for presenting a good deal of variety in eras and manufacturers, representing the titans of pinball manufacturing like Bally/Midway/Williams, Gottlieb, and Stern, the only manufacturer still creating real-world tables today. With that in mind, the developers should have a healthy number of tables to choose from for some time to come, and around a dozen additional tables have already been announced. On some platforms, like iOS, the first set of additional tables--The Machine: Bride of Pin-bot and Medieval Madness--have already appeared as a $5 bundle.

Perhaps the most important thing in a pinball simulation is its ability to handle the physics of an actual pinball machine. Here, The Pinball Arcade does quite well. The tables feel about as fast as they should, and the action on the flippers also just feels right. The ball itself carries an appropriate amount of weight, and in multiball situations, colliding balls careen around the table with angles that feel wholly appropriate. Personally, I think it plays a better game of pinball than Pinball FX2 does, mostly because FX2's balls feel a little light, causing them to rocket off the flippers in ways that just feel a little strange.

Black Hole should be nice and dark, like this.

But physics only really tells one side of the story. Pinball Arcade also benefits from including some very sharp table designs. Black Hole has a really neat lower playfield that lights up when you send a ball down there. Theater of Magic has a rotating magic trunk that uses magnets to steal the ball away. Tales of the Arabian Nights has a huge, spinning lamp to aim for. Ripley's, as the newest table in the lot, has a little bit of everything, from shrunken heads to an abundance of penguin noises.

Control-wise, the Xbox 360 version lets you choose between the shoulder buttons or triggers for flipper control, both of which feel pretty natural. The analog stick makes nudging the table around pretty easy. On touch devices, like the iPad, you tap the lower quadrants of the screen for flippers, and your left/right nudge control can either be done by tapping the upper quadrants or by shaking the device itself, which is a neat idea that doesn't work particularly well. Overall, I found that I was in better control of the action with a gamepad, but the iOS version doesn't lag very far behind on either iPad or iPhone. For owners of "The New iPad," the game takes advantage of the higher-resolution display, making table art easy to see and read. But that visual quality comes with a trade-off, because the lighting on the iOS version looks awfully flat. Black Hole doesn't look as dark as it should. The Xbox Live Arcade release presents much nicer lighting, but the visuals aren't quite as sharp as an iPad 3 is. Minor stuff, overall. It's a great-looking pinball simulator on either platform, and both offer numerous camera options that let you get a few different angles on the action.

The real tables go a long way, showcasing some expert design work and grounding The Pinball Arcade as a real-feeling document of pinball's past, right down to the sales fliers used to sell the machines to arcade operators and a bit of additional historical data. With a long list of already-confirmed tables waiting in the wings, The Pinball Arcade stands out as a great counterpart to Pinball FX2's more fantastical take, though it lacks the more prominent leaderboards and competition that make Pinball FX2 stand out. If you're into pinball, you should probably own both. But if you're like me, and you're interested in something that more closely simulates real pinball, The Pinball Arcade just barely edges out the competition.

Trials Evolution Review

Brad — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 15:00:00 -0700

If you want to pop a wheelie on Stonehenge, this is your game.

True to its name, Trials Evolution is the biggest, baddest version yet of RedLynx's brutally tough physics-based motorbike racing-platforming thing. The heart and soul of Trials hasn't changed one bit; it's still all about forcing you through the most complicated obstacle courses you could conceivably navigate on two wheels. Considering all I really wanted after playing Trials HD was more Trials, that's a great thing. And this time, the trimmings around that core conceit are so robust and the sheer content so plentiful that it's hard to imagine Trials getting much better than this for 15 bucks.

I won't deny frequently wanting to throw the controller at the TV while playing Trials Evolution. Come to think of it, this wouldn't be a Trials game if I didn't feel that way, but it's not like the game goes out of its way to maliciously abuse you. It's harsh but fair. After all, the gameplay in Trials hinges on a grounded, plausible physics model where even the slightest throttling or braking or leaning has great significance to the way your bike handles, and there's always a way to get over the most absurdly angled ramp or crazy-looking jump, even if you haven't figured it out yet. As frustrating as some of the later courses can be, there's always room for you to improve with a little more practice and a little more finesse. Blaming Trials for being too hard is like getting mad at gravity when you fall down.

The good news for casual Trials fans or newcomers is that Evolution offers a gentler learning curve than Trials HD did, which wasted no time getting stupid hard and not offering you much else to do if you weren't interested in going really in-depth with the gameplay. There's a huge list of courses in Evolution and they're broken up sensibly, with a more gradual ramp in difficulty that's punctuated by occasional license tests which actually offer some good tutorials on how to do things like drive up an almost sheer incline. Make no mistake, there's still a point where the late-game courses get so technical that they're no longer intuitive and you have to inch your way through them slowly, failing a bunch of obstacles over and over until you master them. But by the time you get that far, there's a better chance you'll have at least some idea of how to tackle those crazy ramps and jumps without pulling out all your hair.

A little dirt skiing, anyone?

Other than a user-made track feature that was hamstrung by limited sorting features, the main course progression and a few wacky minigames were pretty much all there was to occupy you in Trials HD. So it's great that RedLynx has fleshed out the peripheral features so thoroughly in Evolution. The big story here is multiplayer. There's a rollicking four-player mode, ideal for talking trash, that works locally or online, where you compete through a series of rapid-fire tracks and earn points based on your time and number of faults. You can also compete through a more serious, by-the-numbers race where you only see ghost-style representations of the other players moving through the course at the same time. The game lets you rack up a bunch of money playing the single-player tracks and then buy a bunch of cosmetic gear for your rider so you can look unique when you compete, and I really appreciate that there's a straight-up color wheel that lets you colorize your outfit any way you want. More games should have that.

The short list of minigames from Trials HD has morphed into a veritable circus of skill games that have you largely leaving the bikes behind so you can ski on dirt or try to fly across a long jump field by flapping a pair of makeshift wings made out of boards. Even the ones that stick to the motorbikes are pretty ridiculous; one of them suggests that your brakes are broken and challenges you to get as far as you can with the bike's throttle pushed all the way down. The skill games are a great change of pace from the more seriously technical main levels. And since every level in the game is hooked directly into leaderboards and ghost data for your friends, it's a cinch to start competing with each other for better times, even indirectly.

Evolution's expanded user-generated content features may well be its most valuable feature, after some time passes and more great levels get made. The game makes the simple but extremely necessary improvement over Trials HD of letting you view user courses made by everyone, not just people on your friends list, and there's a wide variety of ways to search for and sort new levels, with some curated by the developer and others categorized by type and rating. There's--count 'em!--two level editors in here, one that makes it pretty easy for almost anyone to make simple courses that hew close to Trials' obstacle-course format. Then there's the "pro" editor, which lets you dig so deep into the engine and game mechanics that it's capable making things like a first-person shooter and an overhead-scrolling Raiden clone (which already exist). How is it possible this game quietly shipped with LittleBigPlanet in it? It's nuts.

Right? Right?

This game also goes way, way over the top with the visuals in a way that Trials HD could only dream of. That game took place entirely in a pretty bland industrial warehouse sort of environment. By contrast, Evolution seems to have lost its damn mind. There's one course that takes place in a warzone, with planes dropping bombs all around you as you go, and another that seems to be set in Stonehenge under a blood-red sky. The pitch-perfect tribute to Limbo stands out as another memorable course, and most of the levels end with some kind of ridiculous animation that sends your rider flying into the moon or headfirst into a toilet. Something always seems to be blowing up nearby because, why not? There's a ton of variety in the art design and a general irreverence that pervades the entire game, down to the hilarious rapping about riding motorbikes that you hear when you boot the game up. It's hard not to feel some affection for a game that gets so randomly silly.

It's also hard to stop playing Trials Evolution for very long. The action is as tight and demanding as it ever was, and this time around it's such a fully featured and attractive package that you shouldn't miss it if you have any interest in this style of game at all. It's one of the best games to hit a downloadable service in a good long while.

Giant Bombcast 04-17-2012

Ryan — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 09:28:00 -0700

293 - Giant Bombcast 04-17-2012

Fez Review

Jeff — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 10:00:00 -0700

You'll find this boiler room early, but how long will it take you to figure out what it all means?

With Fez, you get as much out of it as you're willing to put in. That is, the game works on multiple layers. On the surface, it's a breezy little platformer that you should be able to cruise through without much difficulty. After all, there are no real enemies, and very few spots along the main path through the game that require actual skill with a controller to complete. As a result, you're given a flashy little ending and the ability to go back into the world and find anything you may have missed. But if you just collect 32 cubes and "finish" the game, you're barely seeing what Fez actually has to offer. And the puzzles you must solve to get everything else are occasionally inventive, often maddening, and always interesting.

Fez is short on story and long on atmosphere. You wake up as Gomez, a 2D boy in a 2D world. After being granted a fez of your own, though, you gain the ability to rotate the world by 90-degrees, letting you use perspective shifts to see the world from four different angles. Typically, this means you'll climb as high as you can, see a platform that seems to be out of reach, and rotate the world until you find an orientation that closes the gap between where you are and where you want to go. It's stylish, but there isn't really anything too tricky about navigating the world. So if you're looking at Fez in hopes of finding a perspectively-minded puzzle game along the lines of Crush, you're probably going to be disappointed. It'll probably only take a few hours to rotate the world around and collect the minimum number of cubes required to complete the game that way.

It's the rest of Fez that makes it something special. As you dig beneath the faux-retro aesthetic, Fez reveals all sorts of hidden elements. It forces you to pay attention to everything, from the paintings in a room to the scribblings left behind on classroom chalk boards. It never comes right out and says what's what, but as you explore the world and start to recognize what you're actually seeing around you, it creates a set of magical moments. On the downside, once you've made this realization (or, more likely, once you've looked up the main secrets), the game quickly devolves into using your map to figure out which areas still have secrets in them, heading there, and quickly collecting yet another anti-cube, which is the game's main hidden item. Between regular cubes and anti-cubes, you'll find 64 cubes in the world of Fez. And to open the game's final door, you'll need them all. You'll also have to finish the game once to unlock an additional ability that's absolutely necessary if you're looking for secrets. While the uncovering of keys to the game's secrets and learning how to interpret the world around you leads to some astoundingly revelatory moments, the way the game boils down to doing the same sort of task over and over again to collect most of the hidden items is disappointing.

Warp gates help you hop around the world.

Exploring the world of Fez is wonder on its own. Despite its deliberately simple look, the world has a collection of vastly different areas to explore, and I was continually surprised by the number of different-looking areas to uncover. What starts as a collection of villages in various states, each connected by a sort of core or hub quickly expands to reveal sewer systems that glow with the monochromatic flair of an original Game Boy, an observatory, an enormous bell tower, an equally huge clock, forests, caves, and plenty of even more surprising areas that play around with deliberate glitches and other great-looking effects. There are tons of things to simply see and study in Fez. They all warrant close inspection, too, both because they're worth examining for their artistic merit and because finding the hidden secrets that lie beneath Fez's outer layer requires you to go in with sharp eyes and an even sharper mind.

At times it seems like every single piece of Fez's world is deliberately placed in order to teach you something about the world. Picking up what Fez is putting down is something that many players may completely fail to do, and those players are likely to come away from the game feeling like it's an easy, dumb adventure with zero challenge. Consider this your chance to lord superiority over those people, whether you figure it all out on your own (which seems pretty unlikely for most folks) or consult message boards and FAQs in search of pointers in the right direction.

While parts of Fez deal in cute, deliberate video game glitches, these are undercut by several very real issues. On multiple occasions, I've had the game simply quit back to the Xbox 360 dashboard without warning. Thankfully, the game auto-saves quite regularly, so I never lost much progress. It sounds like some other players are experiencing more dramatic problems, such as loops that prevent their save game from loading, and so on. Additionally, the game's frame rate often bogs down when you first load into an area, causing stuttery transitions from one zone to another as well as slowdown once you get to where you're going. Some of these problems are more crippling than others, but it all combines to make Fez feel like a product in need of some further clean-up.

Here's Gomez's place, complete with sick drum kit.

Fez really caught me by surprise. On my initial playthrough, the game was downright maddening because it was impossible to know if I should be paying attention to all the symbols and items around the world as I hunted around for enough cubes to finish the game. Then, as I started to figure out what it was actually asking me to do, I started dreading the idea of busting out graph paper and attempting to piece the mysteries together for myself. I ended up taking the coward's way out by visiting a message board or two to get me pointed in the right direction, but once I was over that initial hump, traversing the world and decoding the "real" world of Fez was intensely gratifying. And going to visit the puzzles that I allowed a message board to solve for me to see how the game's developers intend for you to discover this information is unlike anything you've seen in recent history. It's just the right mixture of charm and insanity. Even if you end up letting a collective of Internet sleuths guide you by the hand as you work your way through the game's cubes, anti-cubes, artifacts, and other items, Fez still somehow manages to be worth seeing, if only to marvel at how much weird work went into making what we all thought was just a retro-styled perspective-shifting puzzle game into something decidedly more mind-bending.

The Splatters Review

Alex — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 13:00:00 -0700

The evolution of the digital console marketplace over the last six or seven years has really been a sight to behold. At its inception, Xbox Live Arcade seemed like a promising enough concept, offering a mix of simplistic, sometimes addicting original downloadable titles with remastered retro games (presumably) polished for modern consumption. XBLA may have looked like little more than a trifle early on, but as the years went on and developers became more and more aware of what kinds of things could actually be done via a digital platform, innovative, provocative, and straight-up brilliant games began to evolve out of the digital primordial ooze. Now, even the most simple and easily digestible games coming to the platform often feel worlds beyond the games that helped put the service on the map in the first place.

The Splatters' blob-splashing gameplay is interesting for a few hours, and not much more.

Having seen this evolution first-hand, I find the existence of The Splatters altogether bizarre. This puzzle game from SpikySnail Games Studio feels like some lost XBLA title from 2006, like it just wandered in from the cold after years adrift at sea, totally unaware of what's happened in the six years that transpired since. Its insubstantial puzzle mechanics and generally bare-bones presentation are the stuff of yesteryear, somehow transplanted into a time that's all but forgotten that games like it ever existed. I don't say this to accuse The Splatters of being a terrible game, because it certainly isn't. But it's hard to get too excited about a game that feels more like it should have been collecting dust on your hard drive alongside Cloning Clyde and Marble Blast Ultra for the last half a decade, as opposed to appearing in 2012 for a $10 price tag.

That antiquated feeling permeates every aspect of The Splatters. The cutesy visuals don't offer much beyond a few adorable blobs and some peculiarly inconsistent level art--like, why is there a giant shoe on this one level, while another features a giant soccer ball embedded in the geometry? The music and audio effects sound culled from the bottom of the license-free barrel. And the mechanics, momentarily interesting as they are, fail to evolve into anything beyond a halfway interesting physics demonstration.

The Splatters takes its premise from the "death in service of awesome" concept more or less created by the Lemmings series, and used time and time again in modern downloadable games, including recent titles like Swarm and World Gone Sour. The titular Splatters are colorful, sentient blobs, whose sole purpose in life is to be flung at gooey strings of "bombs" that explode when contacted by the blobs in their liquid form. In order to blow up these gooey bomb strings, you launch the Splatter folk at them, aiming to make them explode into a slimy mess all over the bombs, which then explode.

Think of it like a mix between Angry Birds, Puddle, and PAIN, if that simplifies things a bit. You're killing these blob dudes to create stunts, which are long chains of maneuvers that allow your blob to destroy vast strings of bombs in one fell swoop. In order to do this, you've got a few different moves at your disposal. You can re-launch yourself mid-air to change direction, double-tap the A button to send your blob flying like a laser-guided missile (and creating a massive burst of Splatter goo in the process), and even reverse time/physics to bring wayward bombs back toward your perpetually raining goo.

At best, The Splatters is a minor amusement. At worst, it's an expensive trip back to when XBLA games were usually just diluted echoes of better games.

It's these mechanics, and the unpredictable (in a good way) physics that give The Splatters some legs. If it were just about shooting blobs at weird looking things that lightly explode, then it would literally be the dullest game currently on XBLA. Messing with these different maneuvers gives the gameplay a bit of variety and a moderate amount of satisfaction. It is legitimately kind of cool when you shoot a blob in one direction, have it fly back in another, and then reverse the physics a few times to nail some extra bombs you wouldn't otherwise hit.

Unfortunately, the number of maneuvers you're given to play with runs out pretty quickly, and that variety dwindles. For a few hours, The Splatters is a decent amusement. Playing through the various stunt- and combo-oriented stages is fun for a few hours, but after that it wears thin. There is the option to keep pushing for crazier and crazier stunts, which you can then post up on the game's equivalent of YouTube for Splattering, but even the most ludicrous stunts on there aren't quite ludicrous enough to justify spending hours trying to generate them.

Back in the day, The Splatters would have probably made for a decent little $5 amusement. $10 is a bit too steep a price for a puzzle game as rooted in antiquity as The Splatters. Maybe wait for a price drop, and a particularly empty weekend schedule to pop up, and you'll wring what fun there is to be had out of The Splatters.

Giant Bombcast: The Walking Dead

Ryan — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 17:45:00 -0700

292 - Giant Bombcast: The Walking Dead

Giant Bombcast 04-10-2012

Ryan — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 11:36:00 -0700

290 - Giant Bombcast 04-10-2012

Giant Bombcast: PAX East 2012

Ryan — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 04:14:00 -0700

291 - Giant Bombcast: PAX East 2012

Kinect Star Wars Review

Brad — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 15:00:00 -0700

Hey, the gang's all here! Great!

I'm what you would call a lapsed Star Wars fan, someone who holds those three old movies in the highest possible regard but really hasn't cared one bit for anything with "Star Wars" slapped on it lately. In fact, my love of Star Wars starts and stops with that hallowed original trilogy, a handful of memorable games from the '90s, and one halfway decent series of books. I've had well over a decade now to accept the modern reality of Star Wars as a pandering, dramatically bankrupt cash grab, so there's no good reason I should find Kinect Star Wars especially disappointing. It's not like I expected much from it in the first place. Look at the name: it's just two disparate brands lazily shoved into a single logo that screams "THIS IS THE THING WITH THE LIGHTSABERS AND IT USES THAT EXPENSIVE CAMERA YOU BOUGHT."

Still, with the two halves of this game so clearly identified right upfront, you'd hope this might at least be a good Kinect game or a good Star Wars property, if not both. But it's neither. Some argue that the game isn't for adults, but just because it's clearly targeted at younger ages doesn't mean it can't also appeal to people of all ages if it's made well. And sure, most kids will gleefully waggle their hands in front of whatever crap you put in front of them, but that doesn't mean you should put crap in front of them. Kids deserve to have their intellects stimulated, not insulted. Kinect Star Wars fails to tell an engaging or original story in the Star Wars fiction, instead opting for the path of least resistance by cobbling together a clearinghouse of familiar characters, places, and events into a bland amalgam that resembles the movies in structure but doesn't even try to approach them (the good ones, at least) in emotional resonance.

There's been plenty of slack-jawed bafflement at the footage of the game's dancing mode that's been making the rounds. But in my mind Kinect Star Wars' chief offender is the story-based Jedi Destiny mode that casts you as a nameless padawan, slashing and Force-pushing your way through five hours of battle droids and Trandoshan lizardmen, because those seem to be the only bad guys worth fighting in the Star Wars universe. There's nothing remotely interesting about this mode. On the story side, you simply jump from one familiar prequel locale to the next, every few minutes meeting with Yoda or jumping between skiffs over a Sarlaac monster or teaming up with a rakish vagabond who sure dresses and acts a lot like Han Solo. Not far in you'll take control of your own ship, which is practically a dead ringer for the Millennium Falcon and is manned by a silver-skinned C3PO facsimile and a Wookiee pilot just like Chewb... wait, that is Chewbacca.

The Jedi duels aren't nearly as cool as they should be.

That ramshackle assembly of Star Wars cliches might be easier to tolerate if the gameplay were any good, but it merely recreates what would be the most simplistic of third-person action games if you were playing it with a controller. In addition to swinging your trusty saber you can Force push and lift stuff, and kick enemies when they're in your face. Since a lightsaber cuts down everything in its way, the game quickly rolls out a variety of enemies who can block your saber swings, but a quick hop will make your Jedi somersault over them so you can hit them in the back. Cue five hours of jumping over guys and hitting them in the back, then one of the least climactic final battles with a nameless Sith warrior, then an underwhelming awards ceremony that looks to be lifted shot-for-shot out of the end of A New Hope. The occasional Jedi dueling that punctuates this mode could have been interesting if you had direct control over your saber, but instead it's a block-by-numbers affair where your enemy attacks high, low, left, or right, and you have to respond a few times, then slash them a bit. Then repeat three or four times. Fighting with a lightsaber is practically what motion controls were made for, so it's especially disappointing that this mode turned out to be so rote and boring.

The podracing component is actually the closest thing in Kinect Star Wars to a traditional video game, mainly because it directly apes the format of that old arcade podracing game from years ago. Each of your outstretched hands controls one of the two pods, and it's genuinely impressive how quickly your hand movements correspond to the steering controls. Most Kinect controls seem plagued with at least a little latency, but the steering here feels almost one-to-one with your movements. Unfortunately, all the other controls--jumping your pod, repairing, using weapons--use those same two hands, and the game is bad about making you use a power-up and steer in that direction at the same time. The racing action is rudimentary to begin with and doesn't really benefit from motion controls anyway, once the novelty of the steering wears off, and the whole six-race story mode here only lasts about 90 minutes anyway.

Noooooo comment.

There's not actually much else to round out the Kinect Star Wars package. You can unlock Count Dooku and Darth Vader as opponents in a standalone duel mode, and there are quick play options for the story and podracing modes. The dancing part... is what it is, and you're either going to be disgusted at the sight of Princess Leia dancing to a Christina Aguilera song in Jabba's palace, or you'll be totally delighted at the absurdity of it all. Then there's the mode where you rampage around a populated environment as a Rancor, which is, somehow, the most appropriate piece of content in this whole package simply because it embraces the silliness of flailing your arms and stomping your feet and puts it to use by letting you pick up and eat people, and barging through and utterly obliterating the buildings around you. It's basically Rampage for Kinect, and that, in itself, is not a bad idea at all.

That's hardly enough to make Kinect Star Wars worth playing for anyone short of the most diehard Star Wars fan or the youngest player with the lowest standards. It doesn't matter who you claim Kinect Star Wars is for, it's a shoddy product on almost every level. There are a few glimmers of what could have been in here, but this is not the game that legitimizes Kinect as a game-playing device, nor does it do a single thing to restore any vibrancy or value to the Star Wars license. Fans of Star Wars, Kinect hopefuls, and little kids all deserve better.

South Park: Tenorman's Revenge Review

Alex — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 12:00:00 -0700

Somewhere in between my roughly dozenth try at one of South Park: Tenorman's Revenge's later-game levels and the soul-crushing realization that I had nowhere near enough "time cores" to unlock the next level--not because I had been lazy about collecting them, but because that was the developer's intent all along--I tapped out. I gave up. I threw in the pot-smoking towel and said "no more."

There are pieces of Tenorman's Revenge that could potentially make for a good South Park game...

This is not something I like to do very often. Even the worst games often have the potential somewhere within them to eventually do something cool (even if they rarely ever make good on that potential), and it's always struck me as unfair to judge a game until you've seen at least a taste of everything it has to offer. It takes a special kind of haphazardly designed junk to get me to throw down my controller out of frustration and outright hatred, and South Park: Tenorman's Revenge is such a game. Unless the endgame of Tenorman's Revenge suddenly repairs its busted controls, atrociously laggy netcode, and straight-up awful level design, I have a hard time imagining anything positive coming out of whatever chunk of this game remained untested by my hands.

I'm not sure why it's so remarkably difficult to turn South Park into a playable game. Other developers have tried and failed many times over, though Tenorman's Revenge deserves a special place in Hell for its outright butchering of the material. Things start out promisingly enough, with an opening preamble from an elder of the hyper-intelligent sea otters featured in the "Go God Go" episode describing Eric Cartman's sort of epic battle with noted ginger and accidental cannibal Scott Tenorman. Through this animated intro, we learn of Tenorman's plot for revenge, which includes stealing Cartman's Xbox 360 hard drive, and also unleashing hordes of ginger-haired robots on the world. The animation of this stuff immediately pops out as a positive point, doing a fine job of emulating the look and feel of the show. Unfortunately, that's the only thing developer Other Ocean Interactive got right.

Tenorman's Revenge is not funny. Not even a little bit. Even the worst licensed games usually find some way to tap into the core appeal of what people like about the thing that's been licensed, but the way Tenorman's Revenge tries to emulate South Park's sense of humor is by mailing it in with a bunch of lazily tossed together references. Hey, remember Mr. Hankey? Manbearpig? Towelie? They're all there, and you're supposed to laugh at them...um, being there? I guess? I can only assume this because there aren't any jokes here. Sometimes Cartman says something about Kenny's poor family. Sometimes Cartman makes a crack about Jews. Sometimes Cartman says "motherfucker." These are the things that you're theoretically supposed to chuckle at, but you don't, because they're not funny. They're badly timed, completely lazy, and frankly so overly familiar that you can't help but wonder if the developers wrote this script purely based on whatever South Park clips have the most hits on YouTube.

Without a solid story to care about or at least jokes to laugh at, Tenorman's Revenge is forced to rely on its gameplay to hook players in. This is borderline tragic for a couple of reasons. First off, this is a platformer in which the jump button does not work properly. Yes, it does make you jump, but it does so with just the slightest hint of delay, and features such floaty, bizarre physics that it's damn near impossible to land on any platform that's even a little bit awkwardly placed without multiple tries. I could see this being acceptable if Tenorman's Revenge were a relatively straightforward, no-frills platformer that mostly involved running to the right and occasionally jumping on bad guys, but this is not the case. If anything, Tenorman's Revenge is a convoluted nightmare of alternate paths, constantly moving platforms, endless collectables, and gobs and gobs of bad guys that like to spawn right on top of your head.

...but badly designed levels, shoddy controls, and a ludicrously awful campaign progression kill this game dead.

I'm not really sure what Other Ocean was going for here. There are glimmers of other classic platformers from the 8- and 16 bit eras here, so one can surmise that the idea here was to craft something that felt "old school" challenging. A delightful notion, except for the fact that the best games of that era demanded perfection while also providing you controls that felt correct for the challenges at hand. The lackluster control mechanics of Tenorman's Revenge aren't merely inadequate, they work aggressively against you. And then you have all these ginger robots to contend with. They're not overly difficult on their own, but they're hardly ever on their own. The game tosses piles of them (again, sometimes directly over top of your head) and expects you to somehow balance jumping on their heads over and over again without accidentally landing somewhere close to another one without getting hit. Fun fact: that never happens. The best bet is to use one of the few random weapons often floating around the world, though that gets pretty dull pretty fast.

Instead, whatever character you choose is beaten, pummeled, dunked in acid, dunked in human pee, and whatever the hell else over and over again until you just can't take it anymore. What makes it even more insulting is that the boss fights that come after all this abuse and torment are insipidly easy. Every boss I ran into operated on lazy, easy-to-recognize patterns and required only a modicum of effort to defeat. All that effort for so little payoff is just brutal on top of brutal. It's like surviving horrible trial after horrible trial just to survive, and then finding out all you have to do is kick a handicapped person in the shins to move forward.

That is, of course, assuming you've collected enough time cores to do so. Time cores are the game's currency for progress. If you collect enough, you can just move straight on to the next stage. If you haven't, you're stuck going back and replaying earlier levels until you have enough. The issue isn't really that lack of exploration ensures you won't find enough of them. In fact, you can explore all you want, but if you're playing solo, or frankly with anything less than four total players, you're hosed, because several cores in every level are hidden behind character-specific sections. You see, each character has a couple of unique abilities that let them do things like bust through walls (via Cartman's stomach) or jump really high, because apparently Kenny can do that. There are also bits that allow specific characters to turn into the superhero versions of themselves (The Coon, Mysterion, and so forth). Again, if you are playing solo, that means you will have to play through multiple levels multiple times as at least two or three different kids in order to collect more time cores.

So, here's the thing about this. This is always a terrible design decision. Always. I don't care how good your core gameplay is. If you have to force players to go back through your game multiple times over just to get to the later levels, you have fucked things up beyond any measure of repair. It's fairly obvious that Other Ocean paid no real mind to the notion that people would roll through Tenorman's Revenge with less than three friends at all times. The co-op has no easy drop-in/drop-out functionality, and playing solo ensures that you'll have to repeat levels a minimum of two more times just to get enough time cores to succeed. It's even worse because often the cores are hidden behind a 30 second side-section of a level that you haven't seen before, ensuring that 99% of what you're slogging through is something you've already done (and probably hated) before.

Good games inspire you to go back and play them again because they're fun. Tenorman's Revenge forces you to replay levels to even progress.

As if Tenorman's Revenge weren't already enough of a cruel joke, the co-op doesn't even work particularly well. Online, the netcode is a disaster. Players seemed to randomly drop in and out, and lag made the already unwieldy jumping controls about a thousand times worse. Offline co-op negates the lag, but it still suffers from the other fundamental issue: the camera. The developers tried to rectify the absurd amount of zoom required to fit all characters on screen by having players off-camera for too long respawn next to whoever is further along, but it's only half a fix. The camera still zooms out way too much, and does so in kind of a chuggy way that sometimes leaves your character and the pit/enemy/laser beam/whatever else in front of them totally obscured. It's a recipe for accidental death in a game that's already an accidental death smorgasbord.

Maybe my inability to soldier on through this half-busted garbage to its laborious conclusion puts an asterisk on this review for you. I don't mind, because I'm comfortable with my decision to abandon this thing in favor of doing literally anything else with my time. I'm comfortable with the notion that a game can be so fundamentally busted that there is no point in continuing on past the point of peak frustration. I'm comfortable in saying that South Park: Tenorman's Revenge is a gigantic middle-finger extended in the direction of anyone who might actually want to enjoy a game featuring the myriad memorable characters and storylines of South Park in video game form. And because of all of that, I'm completely comfortable declaring that you should stay the hell away from South Park: Tenorman's Revenge.

Giant Bombcast 04-03-2012

Ryan — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 18:00:00 -0700

289 - Giant Bombcast 04-03-2012

Giant Bombcast 03-27-2012

Ryan — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 13:02:00 -0700

288 - Giant Bombcast 03-27-2012

Ridge Racer Review

Jeff — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 13:00:00 -0700

Hey, remember this track?

The best thing you can say about Ridge Racer on the Vita is that if you buy it digitally, it's $25. But even at that lower-than-average price, Namco's latest feels like a con. It has a criminally low number of courses that have all appeared in previous Ridge Racer games, no interesting career structure whatsoever, a new car customizing feature that somehow manages to make the "machines" feel less unique, and a bunch of music that also appeared in the old games. You'd have to be extremely hard up for any form of ridge racing for this to add up to something worth purchasing.

OK, very quickly, let's go over what Ridge Racer is for people that might not have played it before. It's a driving game with an emphasis on drifting around sharp corners, but it has a handling model that automatically takes over most of the steering when you drift, so as long as your tires are squealing, the game will automatically whip you around corners with little input from the player. Much of the game, then, turns into properly timing the release of the accelerator, which causes you to lose traction and start a drift. Then you must attempt to correct your course as soon as possible once the turn is complete, so you can regain traction and start properly accelerating. It feels nothing like real driving and it's a system that probably made a lot of sense when the franchise debuted in arcades back around 1993. These days, with racing games becoming both more realistic and more nuanced, whether they're attempting to simulate real driving or not, Namco's franchise feels like a relic. That's not inherently good or bad--I actually quite like Ridge Racer's core tenets of "Always Be Drifting" and "If You Have To Hit The Brakes, You're Doing It Wrong." But you should know that it's a very specific flavor of driving that will probably baffle newer players.

On the Vita, Ridge Racer doesn't stray far from its past. In fact, an overwhelming majority of the available content is ripped right out of previous Ridge Racer games, from the PSP and PS3 releases. The tracks are old, most of the music came out of a previous Ridge Racer game, and the car design is, well, directly in line with what you'd expect from previous games in the series. It's one thing to evoke a sense of Ridge Racer's past, but much like many of the recent Ridge Racer releases, this Vita version simply lifts things from the other games and dumps them on you again. So even at its relatively low price, this doesn't feel like a good deal. It's worth noting that the US version of the game comes with a "gold pass" for a limited time that gives you access to a handful of DLC add-ons for free, but these extra tracks are also old, and the additional music and vehicles you can acquire this way don't really add much to the overall package.

How about this one?

It's a shame that the content is totally lacking, because there's a trim, but effective set of options in the game that show that at least someone on the development is thinking about the future of Ridge Racer. Rather than dragging you into a huge list of single-player events that form some sort of career mode, Ridge Racer gives you access to everything right away. You can set up spot races that pit you against the traditional collection of AI racers, but the main bit of Ridge Racer is the ability to download ghosts of other human racers and attempt to beat their times. If you do, you can upload your ghost back to the server, letting other players take you on. There's also an interesting, but sort of half-baked team system that has you pick one of four teams when you first start. A daily mission system lets you know which of the other teams are your direct enemies on that specific day, giving you an incentive to seek out ghosts from those opposing teams. The game also has direct online play, allowing up to eight players to unite over the Internet and race on the same anemic selection of tracks again and again. This is another way to gain victories over the opposing teams. But those victories don't reliably funnel into more funds for upgrades or anything, so it doesn't feel like there's enough of a payoff for jumping through the hoops and fighting the right players.

The upgrade system is a flowchart of annoying boxes that let you change the way nitrous works on your car at first, but eventually you can get slipstream add-ons and other abilities. This is where the now-standard Ridge Racer systems like Flex Nitrous and Ultimate Charge come into play. You can equip three upgrades at once, but each upgrade is tagged to one of three groups, and you can only equip one from each group. This, presumably, is how the developers hope to maintain some sort of balance in the system. It's fine, but the upgrade tree is saddled with lame hints that must be paid for and unlocked before you can advance along the tree and get actual upgrades for your vehicles. Also, with the upgrade system and a slider that lets you make any car a "mild" or "dynamic" drifting car, the differences between vehicles are essentially nonexistent. Given the past of unlocking various special cars with unique abilities, this manages to make all the cars feel a little plain.

Visually, the game looks decent, with a frame rate that's smooth enough to convey a solid sense of speed. There's also a nice depth-of-field effect in place that makes distant objects appropriately blurry. But that's still not enough to make this feel like a worthwhile package. As a fan of Ridge Racer, the way the past few games have just rehashed existing track designs is borderline offensive. Packing up an even smaller list of old content and selling it at a "discount" price doesn't make this Vita version any better. I suppose there's a case to be made that lapsed Ridge Racer fans who haven't seen these tracks a million times already might find the Vita release to be more appealing, but... that's a pretty narrow group.

Giant Bombcast 03-20-2012

Ryan — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 18:13:00 -0700

286 - Giant Bombcast 03-20-2012

Giant Bombcast 03-13-2012

Ryan — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 17:13:00 -0700

285 - Giant Bombcast 03-13-2012

Giant Bombcast 03-06-2012

Ryan — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 21:18:00 -0800

284 - Giant Bombcast 03-06-2012