I forgot to post about this one when It went up about five weeks ago…
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Fallout 3 has lasted me, between the core game and the expansions, nearly 90 hours over 9 months. If I think about what keeps me coming back, it's very easy: Those little green triangles.
You know the ones I mean, the triangles under the compass that show you discovered and undiscovered locations. In such a massive game with so much to do, why does such a little design decision make such a big difference?
Few video games have been subject to as much unchecked hyperbole as The Beatles: Rock Band. If you don’t know why, here’s a hint: the freaking Beatles are in the game. One particularly empty-yet-full-of-it review was written by Seth Schiesel of the New York Times. I’m not really going to go into what’s wrong with it. Instead I’ll link to the Cripsy Gamer! John Teti’s piece is far more insightful than anything I could say would be.
[via InsultSwordFighting]
The adventure game, epitomized by classics like LucasArts' Day of the Tentacle and Grim Fandango, has been on life-support for some time. Games like Syberia and Still Life come out once in a while, reminding us that it's still fun to point and click on things, but rarely do these titles get any kind of broad attention. In the last year though, things have taken quite a turn for the opposite. Is it here to stay?
Sorry I'm late, everyone. I was too busy celebrating Dreamcast's big birthday yesterday. There was cake, soda, and of course, lots of games.
Dreamcast, for me, marks the first time I very consciously recognized that I was a gamer. I was scraping money together to buy games, anxiously awaiting releases, scrambling to read magazines. I was reading NextGen magazine, the publication that eventually put me here, writing this. Sure there were moments previous, like Metal Gear Solid just a year earlier, but with the Dreamcast I knew I was in for life.
Looking back over ten years, it's hard not to be nostalgic for a lot of games. The Dreamcast was a quirky system with a lot of truly unique games and experiments at all levels of production. It also was home to games that are still significant today and some of the best in their genre.
With so many open-world games and MMORPGs taking up our time in the last few years, the time we spend getting from one place to another in games has risen dramatically. The old adage goes, "Getting there is half the fun!" With wide open games like these, that absolutely has to be true. If going from one place to another isn't entertaining, why make the gamer go through it?
This summer's Prototype and inFamous both took that to heart. I'd argue that getting around the city in Prototype is actually the most fun part of the game. inFamous' railgrinding is entertaining and stylish and adds to the character of Cole McGrath. Both are fast and interactive ways to get around open maps. The upcoming Champions Online MMO, like City of Heroes before it, provides a variety of ways to get around: jumping, flying, swinging, burrowing all give the player a way to get around that allows them to interact with it as much as they like.
When it comes to MMORPGs, I'm that guy. You know the one; you're all having a good time discussing your latest raids and loot pickups from the land of Azeroth and I'm sitting there cursing another World of Warcraft conversation for ruining my Friday night. Yeah, I'm the guy that just loathes every MMO under the sun. Or well, the dimly-lit computer room in the wee hours of the night, anyway.
But I loved City of Heroes. I played it through the beta test and quite a bit after it went live, until my wrist started to hurt. I played it kind of a lot.
With another superhero MMO on the way from Cryptic Studios, I was quite excited, as you can guess. I wondered, is it going to be more City of Heroes, is it a totally different game? With the closed beta over and the release just a few days out, I have some answers for you.
I think this might've been the game Cryptic was trying to make all along. There's a clear lineage from City of Heroes, but Champions Online is bigger and better in just about every way. From character reaction to environments, just about everything has more options, more color, and more life.
Game Informer recently reported a super devastating survey in which they found that more than 54% of all Xboxes had red-ringed. Now, I'm not even what would qualify as an amateur statistician, but I'm going to make a reaching grab here and say the survey wasn't exactly scientific. Before the various fanboys jump on me for being an Xbot or whatever, I'd like to say that yes, my Xbox 360 died. Right before Bioshock came out. It was miserable. And obviously, the 360 has an absurdly high failure rate. I'm not arguing that.
All right everyone, I'm back on earth, safe, and with a backpack full of sweet alien guns. Like Operation Anchorage, Mothership Zeta is abundant with combat and entirely unique art, enemies, and weapons.
Mothership Zeta, (currently) the final expansion pack for Fallout 3, is available for download. Mothership Zeta takes one of the little Easter eggs of Fallout 3, a crashed alien spaceship, and makes a whole mini-story of it. Upon discovering the ship, you find yourself pulled up in a beam of bright light, waking up with nothing but your Pip-Boy and underoos. Fight your way through the Mothership to save the world (again!) and make it back down to Earth.
At this point, I think most of us can get a pretty good idea, reading a review, whether we're going to trust the writer. Sometimes, though, that writer just isn't qualified to be writing the piece. I remember reading a Neverwinter Nights review sometime ago that gave the game something like a 5 of 10. It became clear while reading the piece that the writer's problem was with the core mechanic of the game — the whole D&D 3.5 simulation thing. The review wasn't of the game itself but rather the fact that it "let you see the dice," something fans of the title expected. The same would go for me reviewing a football title. I don't know a single thing about the sport or how the games work. An interesting piece? Maybe, if I curse enough, but not an accurate review.
For some reason, whenever anyone mentions things like Wii and Natal, the first images that jump out are people jumping around like goons in their living room. Why is this? Oh, that's right: every demo ever. However, I think the real implementation has potential for far more subtlety.
While trying to throw together a list of ideas about the potential that Microsoft's Natal, one that came up was the idea of using the camera to augment — not replace — the modern FPS. No one's going to crawl around on the floor pretending to fire an invisible gun (five-year-olds don't count), and until we get 360 Degree Television or those sweet virtual reality helmets from the virtual reality machines in the '90s, using your head to look around in a virtual environment isn't going to work very well, either.
