You have no idea.
Read the spoiler-free review after the jump.
On February 25th, Ubisoft releases the Venice expansion that adds a whole new faction with all sorts of unique goodies. But the most exciting addition is the multiplayer support.
Wait, multiplayer in a city builder? How does that work?
After the jump, I'll explain it all.
]]>Also, The Blind Side turns a blind eye to platform advocacy. The precocious kid doesn't specify what system he's getting it for. Furthermore, on the two occasions when Sandra Bullock (pictured, right) does some Academy Award-nominated hollering for her son to stop playing videogames in another room, she calls it a "Playbox". Sneaky.
* What is it with Sandra Bullock and Taco Bell? I mean, you guys saw Demolition Man, right?
]]>You'll probably also want to shell out fifteen bucks for Darwinia+ on Xbox Live Arcade, a strategy game set in a haunting cyberworld. I haven't spent any meaningful time with it yet, but I'll bet you dollars to donuts that fans of dungeon crawls will be a little poorer because of Shiren the Wanderer for the Wii. Finally, Sins of a Solar Empire gets the Diplomacy expansion, but based on my time with it, it seems like a lot of extra feature creep. I'm not convinced it fits very well, but I'll have more to say later in the week.
Also, there's some sort of Dante's Inferno thing out in case you've already exhausted all the awesomeness of Bayonetta and Darksiders.
* over 17, of course, since it's a very M-rated game
]]>A couple of things caught my eye, both examples of how adding diplomacy isn't just a way to do an end run around the usual fighting you'd do in a real time strategy game (as much as people try to tag Sins a grand strategic game, it really isn't; it's an RTS through and through). At one point, Wardell noted that there was diplomatic tension with an AI player. So he called up an information box to check why the other player didn't like him.Their fleet strength is just so much higher than mine that it's bringing down everything else big time. Their fleet is almost 4 times larger than mine.
Ah, peace through strength. Ronald Reagan would be proud.
Mr. Wardell indicated that he was going for a diplomatic victory. In other strategy games, such as the Civilization series, a diplomatic victory generally means avoiding wars. But Wardell noted that's not quite how it works when you're playing the Diplomacy expansion for Sins....based on who I set up as my opponents, I can greatly increase or decrease the ease of getting a diplomatic victory. Now, to be...ahem, honest, because I'm playing as TEC and half my opponents are TEC, I've effectively made it quite a bit easier to get a diplomatic victory since the different TEC factions are more likely to "get back together" than say my ability to get the Advent and Vasari to be friends with me.
It seems that a diplomatic victory is partly a matter of taking out factions that are hostile to you to improve your global diplomatic standing. A diplomatic victory doesn't mean avoiding war. It means choosing wisely who to exterminate.
The Diplomacy expansion for Sins of a Solar Empire comes out next Tuesday.
]]>While he's got some good points, particularly about the viability of Nintendo as a platform for third-party games, he puts way too much stock in the usual canards put forth by us hard-core gamers: the Wii doesn't have fancy graphics and online support. Now I love my eye candy and multiplayer games as much as the next guy. But all of the Wii's success has been had while it was clearly bested on both those fronts by two other consoles. Yet Hall sees this as something that will doom the Wii going forward. Furthermore, he suggests the Wii's unique advantages aren't sustainable....what the Wii was in the beginning -- a cheaper console banking on motion-controlled innovation -- becomes moot point when the other systems drop prices and add the very same. The pressure's on, Nintendo. The Wii doesn't have the stamina to finish this race.
I couldn't disagree more with Hall's overall premise. He misses the curical point that the Wii has been and will likely continue to be immensely profitable for Nintendo. If you use profitability as a metric for health, the Wii is going strong and shows no sign of letting up. Furthermore, if you use profitability as a metric for success, Microsoft or Sony are never going to rival Nintendo's success. It seems to me reports of the Wii's impending demise are greatly exaggerated.
Plus, just look at that kid up there. No one in the history of reactions has ever had that reaction to a Playstation or Xbox. By the time you're old enough to get one of those systems, you're too cool for that level of unbridled insane enthusiasm. That kid is going to buy Nintendo systems and Mario games until he's outgrown them, at which point he's going to buy Nintendo systems and Mario games for his own kids.
]]>Dear Xbox LIVE Members,He then goes on to write a few paragraphs about how awesome Xbox Live is without any indication of how cutting off original Xboxes is going to benefit the community. ]]>On April 15 we will discontinue the Xbox LIVE service for original Xbox consoles and games, including Xbox v1 games playable on Xbox 360 and Xbox Originals. I want to start by saying this isn't a decision we made lightly, but after careful consideration, it is clear this will provide the greatest benefit to the Xbox LIVE community.
But then I tried to actually play it on a LAN with some friends. Oops, no such luck. It's public servers only. And it's only deathmatch, which results in some utterly silly alien-on-alien, predator-on-predator, and marine-on-marine violence. So unrealistic. And for a fairly complex shooter, it's completely undocumented. If I hadn't spent many an hour playing the last game, I would have been lost. Well, even more lost. For instance, I eventually figured out how to toggle the predator's vision mode, which led to being jumped by aliens or gutted by predators several times because I was scanning for marines. This is a game heavy on making sure you get killed in elaborately animated ways. I look forward to being able to inflict them on other players in appropriate gameplay modes.
But straight-up deathmatch is the absolute worst way to show off Aliens vs. Predator. What a terrible introduction for prospective players. On the plus side, it sure does look nice.
EDIT: Ah, I see it's available to flummox Xbox Live users as well.
]]>After the jump, I'll tell you how I got it.
Syfy has posted a short video interview with Zachary Quinto who appears in Star Trek Online as the voice of the Emergency Medical Hologram who is not Spock at all, seriously, he's not, he's really not, even though Quinto played Spock in the movie, this isn't him in the game, seriously, it's not.
Quinto voices the character in an oddly brief bit when you first start playing. You'd almost think it was added at the last minute just to get some sort of real-world connection to the latest Star Trek movie. Quinto manages to undercut his gaming credibility with this bit:I had Atari when I was a kid. I was the last generation of Pitfall, I think. And then I sort of moved into Nintendo and Super Mario. I was always a big Super Mario fan. I definitely gamed a little bit when I was a kid. But, you know, I mean, I outgrew it. I have plenty of things to engage me in my real experience in the real world that the notion of removing myself from it in order to immerse myself in a world that doesn't exist seems a little bit extraneous at this point.
Reading that makes me arch my right eyebrow the same way Spock arches his right eyebrow when McCoy says something provocative. I'm not sure if that's a good comparison, since I don't really watch Star Trek since I outgrew it.
In March, [developer] Visceral will release Dark Forest, a prequel level that tells the story of Dante's journey home and features new enemies, puzzles and relics. In April, players can download Trials of St. Lucia, a full expansion to the game that offers a co-operative multiplayer mode, a new playable character, and an in-game combat editor. The easy-to-use combat editor allows players to create custom combat trails, and then upload and share their creations online. In addition to Dark Forest and Trails of Saint Lucia, Dante's Inferno will offer downloadable packs containing souls, skins, relics and magics to further boost players on their journeys through Hell.Did you get that bit about custom trails? That's either a typo -- I've ben guilty of those myself -- or a feature that lets you determines the color of those gratuitous tracers when something attacks (pictured). In which case, make mine pink with little purple stars!]]>
Then a message pops up onscreen. "Look at you, hacker". It's the name of an achievement I've just unlocked for killing 50 enemies with hacked security devices. Of course, it's also the catalyst for a flood of nostalgia. This is a quote from the original System Shock, which is the creative well from Bioshock 2 draws. Here's the lineage: from Bioshock 2 developer 2K Marin to Bioshock 1 developer 2K Boston nee Irrational, who also made System Shock 2 to System Shock 1 developer Looking Glass. Of course, you can kind of tell because all these games have the word "shock" in them.
The problem with playing older games isn't necessarily the graphics (pictured). Yeah, that looks terrible now. But once you start to sink yourself into a world as vividly realized as Citadel Station (if you think this is a Mass Effect reference, please hand in your Old School Gamer card), your imagination takes over to smooth out the pixels. Instead, the bigger problem is often the interface. Which is why it's great to hear that someone named Malba Tahan has managed to hack mouselooking into the original System Shock. Go here to get it.
Okay, now someone port System Shock to the iPhone and videogames will be complete.
]]>The above teaser for Fallout: New Vegas, the upcoming sequel from Obsidian, shows that New Vegas has plenty of electricity to spare. It also shows what looks like a Hellghast from Killzone 2 coming to visit in the name of California. Sinatra croons throughout. In other words, it's about as informative as any teaser.
]]>I got the traditional saucer, with two nacelles slung low underneath it and close together. Sure, I thought, whatever. Looks fine. It's a space ship. What are you going to do? Click accept.
After the jump, the ship envy begins.
The man, identified as Fabrizio R., suffered a deep cut to the throat after his 16-year-old son, Mario, attacked him during an argument on Sunday over the soccer video game FIFA 2009. Police said the argument broke out when the 46-year-old storekeeper offered his son advice on tactics to improve his play, and then turned the television off in response to his son's behavior.Of course, it's silly to connect this to playing FIFA 2009. A news story based on a police report can't begin to suss out whatever tensions have been brewing over the years or how maladjusted this boy must have been to snap when given advice about when to bunt, or whatever. Instead, the writer just fixes on whatever detail makes the story sound the most absurd. Note, for instance, how the platform is called out in the headline: "Teen stabs father in Playstation row". Reuters simply reports. It's up to you to decide whether to blame Sony or soccer.
(Thanks Peter!)
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