Gaming Today

Kinect is In Super Short Supply
GameFront 2010: The Hardest F**king Games
2020: a Retrospective on Motion Gaming
Marvel Pinball Review
War of Angels: Introducing the Fighters
WOW Didn’t Start The Fire
Half-Life In 60 Seconds

Posted: 07 Dec 2010 10:53 PM PST

A few weeks back a GameStop High-up said buying Kinect and Move would be like buying a Wii back during Holiday 2006, when it was about damn near impossible to find one without making an extraordinary effort. So far, it’s not that difficult to find Move, but Kinect is another story. If you head over the the Where To Buy section of xbox.com/kinect, you’ll see they list 19 retailers at which you should be able to get a Kinect sensor or console bundle if you so choose.

But as of 1:30 am EST on December 8, not one of those retailers has the basic $149 Kinect bundle with Kinect Adventures in stock. Not Amazon or Walmart or Best Buy or Target. Not even specialty online-only retailers like NewEgg. That’s insanity. This isn’t to say you can’t order the basic package, but you’ll be paying extra for it from somewhere sketchy like this. Gamestop seems like the best option right now, because they’ve got five different bundles in stock that each come with a pair or extra games. It should be noted, however, that you save no money with these bundles as the full retail value of the extra games is included in the price of the bundle, but, hey, you were gonna buy some games anyway. Also, a few places do have console bundles still.

Have fun, moms.

GameFront 2010: The Hardest F**king Games

Posted: 07 Dec 2010 10:22 PM PST

After what we all went through last year with Demon’s Souls, discussing a game’s difficulty is almost philosophical. For our list of the hardest f**king games of 2010, then, the GameFront felt obligated to rethink what truly makes a game more “difficult” than its peers. Below you’ll find some games that are hard in the traditional sense, and maybe we’ll have one or two that aren’t, on the surface, so bad, but one thing they definitely all have in common is they made us make the face that guy up there is making now. Read on.

Phil Owen’s picks

Alpha Protocol

Because it's a Western RPG, you can take your Mike Thorton and make him be good at whatever you want him to be good at, like sneaking around or shooting guns or hacking computers and picking locks or taking bullets with a smile. But you can't be good at all of those things, and so you must specialize.

Because the combat is mostly terrible and annoying, the sneak skill naturally seems very important, and if you're playing on Hard, it's the only way to go. It's also a ton of fun, since it allows you to turn yourself invisible and run around stabbing folks in the neck with a reckless abandon that would make Detective Mark Hoffman proud.

And then you have a boss fight. the first one isn't too difficult, and so you go right on upgrading your sneak ability and not upgrading a shooting guns ability. And then you run in to, say, Conrad Marburg, and you're absolutely f**ked. You will not beat him. The other boss fights are a little easier, but they're still absurdly more difficult than the rest of the game because you can only deal with them through brute force.

Fallout: New Vegas

One of the changes Obsidian made for New Vegas was to give armored people and creatures a damage threshold. This makes the game much harder than Fallout 3, particularly in regards to the most dangerous creatures in the wasteland: Deathclaws.

I was terrified of deathclaws in Fallout 3, but that fear was tempered by the knowledge that if I got a deathclaw one-on-one, I could take it. That is not the case in New Vegas, even if you're playing on Very Easy, because their DT is extraordinarily high. My quest to take down the deathclaw alpha and the mother deathclaw at Quarry Junction was easily one of the most trying experiences I've had in gaming this generation outside Demon's Souls.

Shawn Sines’ picks

Since we're talking hardest game by difficulty and not hardest game to play, I have one stand out choice… Mega-man 10. The Blue bomber's series is renown for its difficulty. While Mega-Man 10 was not quite the thumb grinding, soul crushing activity that its predecessor proved to be, I still have nightmares of repeating level after level in an attempt to just kill the next boss and make the pain go away.

Another game I just could not handle was Monster hunter Tri on the Wii. I've been attempting to like these games since the first import on the PS2 years ago but I just can't manage to get the hang of the solo hunting gameplay. Hunting with limited teammates proves even more disastrous for me since I'm bad by myself.

The final "hardest" game on my list is not so much the game itself, but some of the creatures in it.. I mean what the heck was up with the bears and mountain lions on Red Dead Redemption? I rarely got killed by banditos, but one random bear would come out of nowhere and take out my horse and me… and then I'd imagine it just sitting on my corpse out of spite while it licked it's lips munching on old betsy.

Mark Burnham’s pick

LIMBO

LIMBO will deceive you. Exclusively on Xbox Live, LIMBO appears to be a quaint little platform-puzzle game, with a dark, and yet charming black-and-white art style. It’s simple enough, until you get about an hour in. Then it starts to melt your brain while slapping you in the face. You die. Every. Second. Once you get the very simple controls, you’re dead. If running, jumping and activating machines are like rock n’ roll, LIMBO starts playing hard bebop jazz on your ass pretty quickly. It takes simple platforming elements and weaves them into evil puzzles.

There’s all this weird stuff with gravity, for instance. You’ll need to flick switches that reverse gravity, in mid-air while you’re falling, back and forth multiple times per fall. Timing, in general, is a real bitch in LIMBO. Miss a jump, or rope swing, and you’re going down hard.

You’ll die so many times that each small victory is a stand-up-and-cheer moment of reward, which is one of the best things about LIMBO. The momentum of actually moving through its (very short) campaign is seriously rewarding, even if you tend to reload right where you died anyway.

Don’t expect to just power through LIMBO with dumb trial and error, either. Some of the puzzles are so hard you’ll have to put down the controller and think for a while–contemplate your options, think outside the box, have existential epiphanies. Stuff like that. Then you try again, and die more.

Ben Richardson’s pick

Dead Rising 2

Yeah, yeah, I know Dead Rising 2 wasn't really that hard, and it was certainly much easier than the first game. It is, however, extremely uncompromising, a quality for which I give it a lot of credit. You can't help but admire Keiji Inafune's stubbornness: his game plays the way he conceived it, and he's not about to hold your hand, or commiserate with you if you die. The save system he conceived is downright Byzantine, and when you couple it to the relative power of the various psychos the game throws at you, you end up with a lot of loading screens to look at. The game has a nasty way of enticing you to take risks, then gleefully punishing you for not saving beforehand. By the end, I was using the restroom more than prostate cancer patient at a beer pong tournament.

There's also the fact that everything works on a timer, which further rankles my coddled, modern sensibilities. Embarassingly, I had to restart my playthrough from scratch a couple hours in, after filling my allotment of three save games with a trio of unplayably procrastinated files. You told me about the the goons at the first three bank vaults, but failed to mention the fourth posse with the van! Damn you, Inafune!

Phil Hornshaw’s pick

StarCraft II

Beyond just being a difficult game to be great at playing, Blizzard knows how to stack up a challenge. StarCraft II's campaign isn't seriously difficult for the most part, but every once in a while (mostly when Kerrigan shows up), things go nuts, especially on the harder difficulties. The game's final mission — holding back swarms of Zerg while occasionally eviscerating them in a wave of energy from a special artifact — starts out okay, and quickly escalates into a full-bore race against the clock just to survive.

Granted, StarCraft II is a hard game to be good at, period, but there wasn't much else this year that challenged me so much as managing all the various forces and buildings as the Queen of Blades steamrolled through my outer defenses. Some of the old strategies from a decade ago that 14-year-old me relied upon, namely stockpiling a ton of battle cruisers and watching them go to work, failed me horribly on more than one occasion.

For somebody who doesn't often drop a console controller in favor of a mouse and keyboard, StarCraft II gave me a few hair-pulling moments that I had to come back to later. It was the kind of game that would sometimes wake me up in the middle of the night with a fresh idea for a strategy to best a mission — I can't say that for any other game this year.

Jon Soucy’s pick

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow

Not sure why but I just could not get through any boss fights without several deaths, even with the very first bosses. I can't really nail it down to either the game being "Just That Hard" or if I really just suck "Just That Hard." I will go with the latter for now although I did have the difficulty set to max. Maybe I'm not the only one who smashed their face into the controller on this game, but it was still an awesome game and worth a play through if you haven't tried it.

Ross Lincoln

Fable III

2010 is the year of games that substituted cheating for actual challenge, and Fable III is the single worst cheater of them all. By that standard, it is without a doubt the most difficult game of 2010.

Here's why:

1. You spend the first half of the game as the leader of a rebel movement to overthrow your tyrannical brother. Easy enough. But when you finally do so, you learn that he only turned into Stalin to prepare the kingdom to withstand the vague, monstrous invaders that have NEVER EVER BEEN MENTIONED BEFORE BY ANYONE, EVER.

2. As it turns out, the weapons and defenses necessary to prevent the kingdom from being destroyed will cost 6 million pounds. Money you, as king, are going to have to cough up.

3. The problem is that you made a lot of promises to your supporters, and honoring those promises costs you a lot of money. Every time one of them comes to collect, you're presented only with the choice of living up to your word, or completely stabbing them in the back. This makes sense when choosing between saving Orphanage or turning it into a Whorehouse, but it makes none whatsoever when you have to choose between no taxes, period, or TAX THE HELL OUT OF EVERYONE. Very likely you'll end up losing almost everything keeping your promises.

4. And yes, that's right, you can't do the obvious and raise taxes on the rich while not soaking the poor. Seriously, a game set in a fictionalized version of England, but the king of all the land can't hire an economic advisor who's read Keyenes or Smith? Bull.

5. Also, you can't just tell the citizenry about this threat and see if they'll chip in.

6. So instead of enjoying yourself, or rallying the people you "liberated", or anything that isn't a tiresome bore, you end up spending the entirety of the second half desperately trying to earn money, only to find you simply can't. Sure, you can go out on quests and earn some money, but it's always a paltry amount compared to the time spent. And any time you amass an even slightly substantial nest egg, the game comes up with an excuse to rob you of all of it, typically in the form of "screw, or do not screw over your constituents" choices. And don't look to the minigames for help. Whether you help a baker or a blacksmith, no matter how big the gold multiplier becomes, it will never actually generate more than a few hundred pieces of gold per sword or pie. You will literally spend days trying to overcome that restriction.

7. In the end, if you fail to earn money on your own, you either have to stab all your friends in the back, soak the poor, and save the land but pretty much lose because everyone remembers you as the worst tyrant who ever lived, or you do right by your people and they all die, and even when you defeat the personality-free final bosses, the kingdom is ruined and you're remembered as the ruler who ruined the country. It's infuriating, and is the reason you'll probably only play it through once before giving up and going back to Oblivion for the 700th time.

Managing to make a game that is, scene to scene, extremely easy while still imposing restrictions that make it one of the most difficult to complete is no small achievement. For being damn near impossible to win and still be enjoyable, Fable III is, hands down, the most difficult game of 2010.

Phil O’s two cents: After playing through the game once, I was so pissed that I wasn’t able to be a good bro and save everyone that I was dedicated to beating Peter Molyneux at his own dastardly game the second time through. I maxed out my pie-making skills as soon as possible, and then I spent about six hours of game time doing nothing but making pies and, from time to time, buying property. Once I bought every store and the really expensive houses (the cheap houses are too much of a time sink to be worth much), I resumed playing the game. I completed every possible sidequest and generally wasted as much time as I could before arriving at the final battle with 8 million gold in the treasury after having kept every promise and made all the Good decrees. Then I beat the game and unlocked an achievement called “Tough Love.” This achievement is given for saving the maximum number of citizens, and it’s called “Tough Love” because the game thinks you can’t be good and save everyone, or at least that you aren’t going to do that. That’s really dumb, guys, and that achievement really drives home what Ross said above.

2020: a Retrospective on Motion Gaming

Posted: 07 Dec 2010 09:35 PM PST

(This is another edition of "</RANT>," a weekly opinion piece column on GameFront. Check back every week for more).

As the year 2020 draws to a close, it feels strange to think about to 2010, otherwise known as The Year Motion Gaming Took Over. Microsoft touted Kinect as “the future of gaming,” and they were telling the truth; Kinect no-handedly won the console war for the Microsoft, and the eighth generation of video games is dominated by the Xbox 4πr², which was released just five years ago.

The world is a strange place now for someone who grew up in Alabama in the late 20th century. The obesity rate has fallen drastically, and I’m the healthiest I’ve been since high school. Xbox helped me quit drinking and doing drugs. I lost a bunch of weight very quickly and I’ve kept it off quite easily because I get several hours of legit exercise every day and because I only eat what Xbox tells me to eat. I now have the sexual stamina of a robot — I last exactly as long as I need to. I have more friends now because gaming has finally been adopted by the mainstream.

Thinking back is unsettling. I was once a very unsocial being who spent his days alone in front of the computer and his nights alone in front of the TV with controller in hand. I still spend my days alone, but now my nights are filled with people making finga gunz at the television. I remember watching the movie Gamer all those years ago and thinking that kid’s crazy setup in the empty room would never happen, but the Xbox 4πr² isn’t all that different from that which Neveldine and Taylor envisioned, although it is a lot more oriented toward in-person interaction than they thought.

What is the point of my writing this? Like so much of the things I write, this probably seems like an exercise in masturbation as I just ramble on and on about nothing. But there is a point to this, I promise.

Another big change occurred in the years between the introduction of Kinect and now: I became a nice person. I was once a curmudgeonly young man who liked to bitch about anything and everything, but Kinect did, apparently, change everything. When Mahmoud Abbas and Benjamin Netanyahu spent weeks playing Dance Central together before creating a unified Israeli-Palestinian state in 2011, they thought Kinect could solve any problem, but I stubbornly went on being a dick, swearing that Kinect would never change me, goddamn it. But it did, and now, years later, people tell me I’m a rather pleasant fella to be around.

I’m pleasant, everyone else is pleasant, and we all have nice homes.

F**k all this bulls**t.

You know why I didn’t have a pile of friends back in the day? It was because I f**king hate people. I hate ‘em. And it’s worse now that Microsoft has created a more attractive and much, much more smug populace. These motherf**kers thought they knew everything about everything before, and now that they don’t wanna throw up when they look at themselves in the mirror, they know even more about everything. Thanks to Kinect, I can’t get away from these assholes because Kinect games are zero fun when you play alone.

But that’s not really why I’m upset. People have always been stupid, and they always will be stupid. No, I’m really pissed because I like to lounge on my couch in the dark by myself and play games. I work from home, and I when I take breaks from my work, I like to play some games. Or I did like to. It’s not so much fun to have to stand up and move around a lot when I’m trying to chill. Sure, I could play games on my PC, but that’s not the most exciting prospect when I really just want to get away from the computer I’ve been staring at for hours.

I also really, really enjoyed being an asshole. Being nice and happy all the time feels wrong somehow, like I joined a cult or something. And people need someone like me to gleefully point out their faults all the time, or else they won’t be embarrassed for being the way they are. And I feel like I’ve got a bunch of bottled up emotion that really needs to get out. The Xbox 4πr² is great for dispersing some of that aggression, but it’s not a perfect replacement for telling a person he should travel back in time to before he was born and shoot his mother in the head.

So I say, Microsoft, give us our controllers back, and let us once again play games in our underwear while eating a pizza and yelling curses through our headsets. I’m really sick of this let’s-have-some-fun-as-a-family-and-be-friendly-to-everybody bulls**t, and I want to be me again.

Marvel Pinball Review

Posted: 07 Dec 2010 04:22 PM PST

Marvel Pinball, the newest set of downloadable tables for Pinball FX2, will make Marvel fans wish someone was still making pinball machines. For the most part, it wraps in the cool aspects of the license with some great classic pinball action.

The download will run you 800 Microsoft Points on Xbox LIVE or $9.99 on the Playstation Network, and that price might be a little steep for players who aren’t super-fans of either pinball or Marvel Comics. Yes, that is a comparable rate for Pinball FX tables — they run at 200 MS points or $2.49, and this update comes with four tables, so it works out to the same rate — but dropping $10 or its equivalent on new pinball add-ons could scare away players who aren’t die-hard.

Not that there isn’t a fair amount of value for your purchase. Each of the tables is skillfully designed, with lots of different challenges to take part in. Each has a unique look and theme, with different franchise-specific aspects: on the Spider-Man table, you’ll be bouncing exploding pumpkins around, while the Blade table switches between day mode, in which you hit ramps to power Blade up, and night mode, when you’ll be shooting at different targets to take down vampires.

The controls for Pinball FX2 are pretty standard, with nothing new showing up with these new tables: the trigger buttons control the flippers, the left analog stick can be used to tilt the table to save your ball once in a while, a face button selects things when you need it and another changes your view of the game surface. All of the Marvel tables come with lots of available views, but none of them is an improvement over the standard stationary, full-table shot as if you were standing in front of it. The other viewpoints tend to be closer to the action, with more camera motion, and I generally found it harder to play without being able to see everything and plan accordingly.

As with other Pinball FX2 tables, the graphics here are stellar. Each has the look and tactile feel of a real arcade machine, and comes complete with the level of challenge one would expect from really playing on one. In fact, all four Marvel tables are more or less awesome, and it’s a shame they only exist on your TV screen.

The four tables in the pack represent a different Marvel hero: Spider-Man, Iron Man, Blade and Wolverine. Each is designed to be specific to the character, with bits of voice work recorded for when you lose a ball or nail a challenge on each table. Tony Stark has lots to brag about when it comes to Stark Industries as you rack up points on the Iron Man table, while Spider-Man trades snarky comments with Green Goblin, Doc Ock and Mysterio. Not all of the writing for the lines is amazing — this is a pinball game, after all — but for the most part the voice work is a nice touch that conveys a little more sense of the attention Zen Studios paid to the license. But the lines can also get a little repetitive, and you’ll quickly come to loathe a computer voice decrying “Ball lost!” every single time you screw up on the Wolverine stage, but it’s nothing to really fuss over. For the most part, the audio adds to the experience, rather than subtracts.

Like the rest of Pinball FX, Marvel Pinball gets addicting in a hurry. The game is already filled with trackers for your score and achievements to keep you trying to one-up yourself and your friends, and the added bonus of clearing different “stages” on each table — taking down Green Goblin by shooting his exploding pumpkins up his designated ramp, for example, or taking on two villains at once with a flood of pumpkin bombs at the same time — adds another level to the strategy and value of continuing play. You’ll not only be chasing down a better score, you’ll be wanting to increase your skill to beat different aspects of each new table.

While you’re forced to pay the full 800 or $9.99 to get any one of the tables, the pack makes up for purchasing all four by making them converse with each other through challenges. Beating certain challenges on one table opens up a new one on another, which will help get you playing all of them regularly, if pounding your score up to new heights isn’t incentive enough (and it is). That’s a nice bit of added value that makes the price tag sting a little less.

All the tables are well-designed and balanced, too, except for the Wolverine table, which I found to make my ball drop at a higher rate than the others. It felt like that table specifically was designed with a lot of cheap kills, and while the other boards have lots of different ramps and challenges to hit, the Wolverine table seems to have fewer things to shoot, while sending your ball straight down the kill tube way more often.

Meanwhile, the Blade table is the most fun, with smaller challenges that are simpler and therefore more rewarding to complete. One spot has you buying weapons for Blade, another has you kicking through images of suspects while a timer runs out, trying to pick out the vampire from memory.

But every table has actions that need to be completed in sequence before you can access new aspects, giving the pinball action another way of drawing players in — the need to finish each table. For example, if you complete the tasks to defeat Mandarin and Whiplash on the Iron Man table, you’ll get to face off against Ultimo.

Put simply: there’s lots to do.

So is Marvel Pinball worth 800 MS points or $10 straight off your credit card? For Pinball FX2 fans, absolutely — added bonus if you dig Marvel heroes, as well. Not all the tables are created equal, but they do all offer some tough challenge and addictive score-chasing gameplay. And the Marvel license makes these levels feel like the pinball tables you remember from the arcade when you were a kid.

Pros:

Beautifully rendered, Marvel themed levels
Great, challenging table design that works well with each specific character
Cross-table challenges to get you playing on all four stages
All the benefits of Pinball Fx2, including in-game score-tracking for your own records, plus friends’ scores

Cons:

Extra view options aren’t too useful
Wolverine table design isn’t quite as sharp as the others
800 MS Point/$9.99 PSN price point is a little high for non-Marvel fanboys

Final Score: 90

War of Angels: Introducing the Fighters

Posted: 07 Dec 2010 01:26 PM PST

Every good fantasy team needs a tank right? The character who stands in front, stalwart and indefatigable against the tide of enemies while the mage and rogue do their things. In War of Angels, that tank is the Fighter.

The class doesn’t just soak up damage, but it’s also a class built to deal damage as well. Proficient in swords and axes along with armor, the fighter specializes at level 20 into one of two specialties. Warriors who deliver deadly damage against multiple foes, or the noble Knight, the skilled defender of his companions.

The game is currently in Open Beta and interested players can sign up to play and download the game on the War of Angels website.

The Fighter is one of four core classes in War of Angels along with the Mage, Ranger and Rogue. We’ll be featuring each of these classes in the coming weeks as War of Angels nears its public launch.

Here’s an exclusive video of the Fighter in action. Enjoy the embed below, or head over and download it from our fast, free servers.