Gaming Today |
- Infinity Blade Review
- Insanity Involving Zelda Music and Wine Glasses (VIDEO)
- Coolest Gaming Protagonists of 2010
- Uncharted Movie Going On the Backburner?
- David Jaffe’s Curse-Filled Response to Kratos Being in Mortal Kombat
- GameFront 2010: The Essential Civilization V Mods
- iTunes, Game Prices, and Publisher Arrogance
- EA Wants to “Make Games a Broader Idea with Online Services”
- Kratos Kameo Konfirmed in Mortal Kombat, PS3 Exclusive
- Wolfenstein Faithfully Recreated In Little Big Planet 2 (VIDEO)
- Dead Space 2 Demo Coming December 21
- MSN Posts Exclusive Batman: Arkham City Teaser Trailer
| Posted: 09 Dec 2010 04:40 AM PST
Let’s get something out of the way up front: Infinity Blade is beautiful on the iPhone 4. It’s gorgeous. It’s the best-looking game on the platform and it helps prove iPhone and iPad apps can be serious contenders in gaming. Okay, are we over that now? Good — let’s talk about how the thing plays. If you can stop drooling over the graphics for a second, you’ll discover that Infinity Blade is a fun addition to the lineup of thousands of titles on Apple’s iOS platform, but it’s not exactly groundbreaking. In fact, Infinity Blade plays a whole lot like a portable Playstation Move game. That might be a neat trick if you’re not paying a ton of attention to mobile gaming, but if you’ve played through a few touchscreen games, you’ll see that Infinity Blade is slick but not quite groundbreaking. As a nameless warrior, you arrive at a somewhat ruinous tower on a cliff side, and soon find it protected by sword-wielding monsters. You’re here to slay the God-King, an immortal tyrant sitting on a throne at the top of the tower, waiting for you to come challenge him. As your warrior moves through the tower, you’ll fight each guardian in turn in a one-on-0ne duel to the death. Each battle is fought in pretty much the same way. As you step up to challenge your opponent, he starts swinging away at you. At first you’re on defense: you have to anticipate your enemy’s sword strikes and parry them with directional swipes on the touchscreen, dodge them by timing presses of one of two virtual buttons, or block with your shield using a third button.
After defending against enough attacks, you’ll catch your opponent with an opening and get a chance to strike back, slashing away by swiping the touchscreen. A few seconds will pass in which you get to damage your enemy with sword combos, after which he’ll pull up his defenses again and you’ll have to wait to counter more of his attacks. The whole operation becomes a bit of a rhythmic dance. Timing and direction of your touchscreen actions is key to avoiding hits, so you’ll have to read what kind of strike your enemy is sending your way and quickly determine whether you should parry, dodge or block the blow. It can get intense, as different enemies have different fighting styles, and learning your foes’ attacks is key to avoiding getting squashed by in tougher battles. Fighting your way through the tower, you’ll battle several versions of three types of enemies: quick ones who are about your size; middle-sized ones that deal more damage but move a little more slowly; and huge ones with heavy weapons and slow movements. Each one will require you to adjust your fighting style slightly — although principally, you’ll want to get good at dodging, because it’ll be your go-to action in all situations, and you could get by in almost every fight without using the other two actions at all. After every battle, you’re rewarded with experience and gold. Experience goes toward leveling your character, but is first filtered through each piece of your equipment, bringing it closer to “mastery.” So as you earn experience, it’s divided up and divvied out to your equipment, which all gets closer to maxing out, before going back to your character and pushing him toward another level. When you max an item, you gain additional skill points to spend on different stats, the same as if you reached a new level. However, once you’ve maxed an item, you can’t earn experience on it any more, so the portion of your total experience that goes into that item is lost. The idea is to get you trading out your weapons frequently to keep your mastery going, and that keeps you buying new junk from the in-game store. The store, where you can spend your gold on armor, weapons, shields, helmets and magic rings, is accessible just about any time except during a fight, so you can change your equipment on the fly before any entanglement.
Your equipment all has different abilities — most of them are passive, like increased experience payouts or loot drops from enemies. Magic rings, however, give you the ability to charge up a magic spell by dealing and receiving damage, then execute it by tracing a pattern on the touchscreen. This breaks up melee combat a little bit, but not a lot. There are a wealth of rings, which is nice because together they contain all the standard RPG spells you would expect to see, like Fire, Ice, Poison and Heal. Magic helps add an additional level to strategy when you get to the point where you can deal out or heal a lot of damage, especially since you can only heal with potions between fights. Healing magic becomes necessary as you progress through the game, especially when you finally get to take on the God-King. While you start the game at level 1, the God-King is always level 50, so beating him is a mix of grinding through battles to increase your character’s stats, and increasing your skills as a player to beat the much faster final boss. But the story of Infinity Blade is that the God-King wants worthy opponents to come challenge him, so he can slay them and absorb their life essences. Within the first minute or two of the game, your warrior is killed — you only start to really play after reading a card that says “20 years later,” and a new warrior wearing your old armor steps onto the plain. Your lineage is fated to attempt to defeat the God-King and avenge each father’s death over and over, and you retain your abilities, equipment and money each time you’re killed by the God-King. That basically means that you kill everything you can in the tower until you’re murdered at the top, only to start at the bottom a little stronger, and facing stronger enemies. This is where Infinity Blade starts to fall down. The concept is interesting, and the one-on-one, boss-fight style encounters coupled with the art style of the tower conjure up a distinct ICO/Shadow of the Colossus feel. Mobile games are best when they offer small tidbits of exciting gameplay, as well, and Infinity Blade does that. But you’re basically repeating the same actions over and over, and even the same battles against the same enemies. Infinity Blade randomizes the encounters slightly — you’ll always face big enemies or small enemies at certain points, but whether they’re Trolls or Executioners, Storm Paladins or Assassins is anyone’s guess — but each of the enemies has a set number of moves that they always go to. Each enemy type basically fights in the same way, so after a couple generations, you’ve seen all their tricks. You’ll grind through at least three or four trips up the tower before you finish the game, but even that doesn’t take much time. Even so, it gets a little repetitive. The action retains its twitchy, strategic fun, but that’s just about all you’re doing, and it loses a lot when you can easily read each attack from each enemy. The path through the tower also is always the same, with a few divergences that ultimately lead to the same places. And you’ll get new equipment, but the game always boils down to the same dodge, dodge, slash mechanic. Worse, it forces you to replay it over and over and over — so whatever enjoyment you might get out of exploring the tower and taking on different monsters is lost as you start to see the game recycling. Even the dialogue given by the God-King every time you show up to fight him, which happens several times, is exactly the same. All that fighting does get broken up slightly. Infinity Blade’s extremely cinematic nature means you don’t actually walk around the tower — rather, you click marked destinations to advance to new rooms. This means you sometimes get choices, and those choices will occasionally take you to side battles where you’ll find chests or other goodies. You’ll also need to pay attention, as hidden throughout every scene and animation are items you can tap to grab: bags of money and life potions, namely, which are important to your progress.
But Infinity Blade’s major problem is a lack of content. Three times through the tower and you’ll know where every chest is. Five times or so and you’ll probably be close to beating the God-King, if you haven’t already. After that, the game becomes a question continuing to slog through to unlock more achievements. That can be fun, too, definitely — it’s just not very novel. When it comes right down to it, Infinity Blade is a very impressive iPhone game. Graphically, it’s unsurpassed, that much is definitely true, and the gameplay makes great use Apple’s touchscreen controls. It also is smartly broken up so that you can play for five minutes or 50, depending on where you are and what you’re doing. Gamers both casual and hardcore will enjoy what ChAIR has done here. But know that you’re getting into a game that really only has one trick, and you’re going to be performing that trick a lot. Don’t expect to get a lot of marathon sessions out of Infinity Blade, and don’t be surprised if you play it heavily and then leave it alone — at least until the next big content update, when multiplayer and new areas and enemies are introduced. Pros:
Cons:
Final Score: 80/100
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| Insanity Involving Zelda Music and Wine Glasses (VIDEO) Posted: 08 Dec 2010 08:23 PM PST
It’s not unusual to arrive at a kind of strange moment in life where you just need something (not to be confused with something), and you don’t know what that something is and so you can’t seek it out. That something can be anything, such as this sublime picture. If you’re lucky, you and that something will have a nice run-in and everything will be great for a moment. That’s what today was like for me; I needed something, and we happened to find each other. That something, in this case, was a video of a guy playing Song of Healing from Majora’s Mask while also enacting some cute visual trickeration. Here you go:
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| Coolest Gaming Protagonists of 2010 Posted: 08 Dec 2010 06:17 PM PST |
| Uncharted Movie Going On the Backburner? Posted: 08 Dec 2010 05:22 PM PST
David O. Russell’s last movie was I Heart Huckabees, which came out in 2004. His new movie is The Fighter, which has legit Oscar buzz this year. His next movie, according to the crazy Roger Friedman, is The Silver Linings Playbook, which is based on a “book” of the same name and will star Anne Hathaway and Bradley Cooper. Wait. Isn’t he was on the Uncharted movie? Why, yes. Last we heard, Russell told the LA Times he had completed half the screenplay and was revving that bitch up. Mark Wahlberg was cast as Nate (bad) and they were trying to get De Niro and Pesci on. What the hell does this mean? Maybe Roger Friedman is missing something? Hmmm.
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| David Jaffe’s Curse-Filled Response to Kratos Being in Mortal Kombat Posted: 08 Dec 2010 03:50 PM PST
What is God of War creator David Jaffe best at? The logical answer is “making games,” but I think “cursing” might give that a run for its money. After news broke today that Kratos will be making a cameo appearance in the new Mortal Kombat, Jaffe took to Twitter to throw out some gems. He’s since deleted the tweets, but I’ve saved a couple for your pleasure:
Oh, and he does like that Kratos is in the game.
There you go. Funny that he mentions hearing about it at E3, because that’s also when the rumor about this started. Further validation. Keep up the good work on the bad words, Jaffe.
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| GameFront 2010: The Essential Civilization V Mods Posted: 08 Dec 2010 03:50 PM PST
To be frank, Civilization V is not – yet – perfect. The massive changes to the series’ conventions have been met with everything from outrage to acclaim, but whatever your opinion of the final product (and I like it a lot), it should probably still be considered a work in progress. There’s a long ways to go before we get to Beyond The Sword levels of awesome, and this is particularly true when it comes to gameplay changes such as the one-unit-tile rule, or the omission of beloved aspects of earlier games (whither religions! Or Corporations!). So while you’re waiting for the almost-certain-to-be-massive expansion packs that have come to define the experience of playing a Civilization game, we suggest you familiarize yourself with the many mods available to enhance, alter or drastically transform the game. To help, here are GameFront’s staff picks for the most essential Civilization V mods of 2010. Ben Richardson* A Civ of Ice and Fire
When you play the Game of Thrones, you win or you die. Fortunately, the Game of Thrones Mod for Civilization V allows you to test your mettle with slightly more forgiving rules, faithfully recreating the conflict-wracked world of Westeros, and enabling you play as one 6 powerful factions: Stark, Lannister, Baratheon, Targaryen, Greyjoy, or The Night’s Watch. If your hackles have been raised by the tantalizing preview recently aired on HBO, this is just the Mod you’ll need to dull your fervor for George R. R. Martin’s gripping fantasy series. Get it here. Ross Lincoln* The World of Tamriel
Perfect for those of you still writing love poetry about Oblivion, The World of Tamriel throws Civilization 5 into the Tamriel from Elder Scrolls. It’s still very much a work in progress, but it already has the correct Kingdom and ruler names, new units, and a Civ V game lasting from Ancient to Medieval times. More updates are on the way, but it’s already worth your time. Download here. http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=15968 * Greek World Civ V
This mod makes my nerd glands throb with glee. Greek World Civ V is a map that accurately approximates Hecataeus‘ map of the world as it was known to the Ancient Greeks. Additional details from other sources, including Homer, Ptolemy, and Herodotus flesh out the map considerably and create something that feels very much like how the ancients viewed their universe. If you majored in History or just nerd out with your words out over Greco-Roman goodness, this is a required download. NOTE: You’ll need the Babylon DLC to operate. Greek up your life here. * Total Mod V.6
Stop what you’re doing right now, and grab Total Mod V.6 immediately. It vastly expands the scope of Civ V, adding 2 new eras (Prehistoric, and Digital), 27(!!!) new technologies *(including genetics and cloning), and fantastic new units, particularly the Caveman. As you’d expect, this one’s ongoing, and there’s lots more to come. For those of you who feel (rightly) that Civ V, while excellent, also leaves much to be desired, this is the perfect way to pass the time while we wait for the inevitable expansion packs. Download link. * Legions
Last but not least, I’m repeating myself here, but I cannot recommend Legions highly enough. Civ V’s one-unit-per-tile rule represents a gigantic break with the series' conventions, and the more I play it, the more annoyed by it I’ve become. It simplifies combat to the detriment of game play, and is an annoying eyesore to boot. Frankly, I miss the Stacks of Doooom, and Legions brings them back to Civilization V by removing the one-unit-per-tile restriction. There are other great things about Legions, but Stacks Of DOOOM are what you need. It’s available right now from the Mod Browser in Civilization V.
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| iTunes, Game Prices, and Publisher Arrogance Posted: 08 Dec 2010 03:00 PM PST
It’s common enough knowledge that indie games struggle to get press, attention and sales when compared to the big retail games. For every Castle Crashers and Limbo, there are dozens of other cool, interesting and unique titles that get swallowed by obscurity and overshadowed by the likes of Halo, Call of Duty and Uncharted. Of course, many indie games are garbage, but there are some good ones out there that just won’t get the attention they deserve. With the irresistible rise of mobile gaming, however, the tables have started to turn. Major publishers are faced with a new market in which they are gaining very little traction, and for all their marketing dollars, they are routinely humiliated by the exact type of people they’ve been stepping on for years — the small fry independent developers who work in tiny teams, have few resources, yet now find themselves raking in tons of cash while their significantly larger counterparts tread water.
The simple fact is this — the mobile gaming market is vastly different from the videogame retail market. It’s a totally fresh ball game, but major publishers like Electronic Arts and Sega are trying to play by old rules. In order to see the problem, you have to understand the mindset of the mobile gamer, how they’ve been conditioned, and what they expect from their games. This mindset is something that established publishers just don’t get, and this is why iTunes is the domain of Chillingo, Halfbrick and Popcap. It’s really not rocket science, either. In fact, it’s so obvious that anybody who doesn’t get it’s an idiot — mobile games are cheap. That is what makes them so appealing, and what makes it so easy for consumers to purchase them without a second thought. iTunes and similar app stores are the promised land for impulse buyers. I’ve fallen prey to this many a time, dropping a buck or two for any game that catches my eye. It’s incredibly low risk, with customers more than happy to take a chance on a game since it costs mere chump change. As I write this, the iPhone gaming top ten has NINE games in it that cost $0.99. The one anomaly is Pictureka!, which is still remarkably cheap at $1.99. It’s no coincidence that the hottest selling games tend to cost less than a dollar. Many of the games in the chart are pretty good, but it’s the cost that got them where they are more than anything else. Major publishers can’t handle this. Just look at Konami, trying to sell Metal Gear Solid Touch for $7.99, or Sega thinking it can shift a billion copies of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 for $5.99. Major publishers bring with them a certain arrogance, a belief that they deserve to charge a premium for their games, simply through virtue of their pedigree. Not on iTunes. Many iPhone gamers aren’t regular gamers. Names like EA, Activision and Sega mean very little to them, if they mean anything at all. Square Enix can get away with selling Final Fantasy ports to hardcore gamers for any amount of money. Selling Final Fantasy for $8.99 to the iPhone crowd, however, is nothing but a display of ego, and it’s not really working. Mobile gamers don’t give the first shit how big a name you are in the games industry. This is a different world, and Square Enix is nothing here.
Publishers are starting to understand the situation, but you can tell how much they hate it. Why do you think EA bought Chillingo? Because Chillingo understands how to make money from iTunes. SEGA recently had a permanent price drop on most of its titles, which demonstrates that the company is starting to “get” it. However, the price drops still aren’t good enough. An inferior Sonic 2 port remains too much at $4.99, while Sonic the Hedgehog 4 clings onto a premium rate at $6.99, and it’s suffering for that. Consumers don’t want to spend more than a few dollars on most of their games. You may think that, as a big corporation, you deserve to charge what you want, but this isn’t your industry, and you’re only punishing yourself. Mobile gaming is the great leveler. It’s brought international corporations down to their knees so that they have to meet independent developers eye-to-eye. Small studios own this market. They have dictated the prices, and they’re not the kind of prices that your traditional game producer likes. While they rigidly attempt to stick to their old way of business, new blood is reigning supreme. Licensed games and established franchises are failing to compete with Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, Bejeweled and Doodle Jump. Simple, innovative and fun games that are, above all things, cheap. Publishers are being humiliated by their indie brethren, and rather than fight it, they could stand to learn a few things. Perhaps if they applied the iTunes model to their wider ranging business practices, we’d see a far healthier games industry overall. Just look at the shock success of Deadly Premonition. A $20 game that was reduced even further on Amazon, and went on to become a chart breaker. Sure, the viral marketing and word-of-mouth helped, but the MSRP was a big deciding factor. Price is important, and price needs to be set according to demand. Less established IP should be released at a budget price, like Namco Bandai did with Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom. If more brand new games were launched at $40, maybe they’d sell a lot better and we wouldn’t be stuck with publishers who only want to promote major franchises. This doesn’t happen though, because of this aforementioned arrogance. It’s perfectly possible for publishers to sell games for cheaper, but they simply cannot comprehend doing it. That kind of attitude is only harming smaller games that need all the help they can get. Mobile gaming is a brave new frontier, possibly representative of the future of gaming. Times change, and those who don’t evolve will die. Major publishers risk falling to natural selection if they can’t get their minds out of the past.
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| EA Wants to “Make Games a Broader Idea with Online Services” Posted: 08 Dec 2010 02:40 PM PST
A few years ago, Atari said Alone in the Dark would be their last offline-only game. Nobody cared, because it’s Atari. Now that EA’s Frank Gibeau is saying something similar, however, folks perk up. EA owns Mass Effect, Dragon Age and Dante’s Inferno, and they’re publishing Alice: Madness returns, all of which are solo games. Let’s examine Gibeau’s comments, from an interview with Develop, to see if we can figure out what he’s talking about here. The most eye-catching portion of the interview is right in the middle. Here’s a taste:
On the surface, that’s a bit disturbing considering the very popular single-player properties EA is responsible for, but there’s an important term in there we must pay attention to: “online services.” Elsewhere in the interview, Gibeau says multiplayer is just one type of “connected gameplay.” Online services probably refers to significant DLC, which is a good thing. What Gibeau is getting at, here, is that for all the games EA makes, they will be doing something or other to encourage you to keep your games rather than sell them. Mass Effect 2 is probably a good example here. It came out in January and its most recent DLC hit in September, and there probably is more still on the horizon. I’d highly encourage folks to read the rest of Develop’s interview with Gibeau. It’s quite enlightening in regards to EA’s long-term strategy.
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| Kratos Kameo Konfirmed in Mortal Kombat, PS3 Exclusive Posted: 08 Dec 2010 01:00 PM PST
But now it’s kind of official, as in PlayStation: The Official Magazine-official. The gaming rag’s January issue has confirmed that Kratos will appear exclusively in the PS3 version, with a full move set, fatalities, his own level, almost full integration. Almost, because Kratos won’t figure into the game’s story mode at all. He’s just an illogical cameo appearance. Normally, I would be fine with that. WB/Midway tried to shoehorn the DC characters into the Mortal Kombat universe’s story, and it was pretty silly. But Kratos is different. His over the top violence, anger and ruthlessness fit pretty logically in Mortal Kombat. It’s kind of a bummer they couldn’t find a simple reason for him to be there. He’s just there, ready to kick ass, kind of like Yoda and Vader were in Soul Calibur IV. Possible Kratos Moves?How, exactly, Kratos will kick ass is not yet clear. Back in March when Break.com caught up with God of War 3 combat designer Adam Pool, he kinda-sorta hinted at the fact that Kratos wasn’t completely finished as a “character.” But he also said his favorite Kratos move was the Combat Grapple, “…the ability for Kratos to stick his blade into any enemy, pull himself in and perform a shoulder ram.” Sounds very MK-ish, wouldn’t you say? Just a thought. New MK Characters?But there’s still more MK news, folks. Mortal Kombat fansite TRMK unearthed hidden audio files deep within the official Mortal Kombat website, which appear to be for the following characters:
Xbox 360 Exclusive Character?The mere existence of Kratos as a PS3 exclusive character begs the question: will the Xbox 360 get its own exclusive character as well? Giantbomb’s Jeff Gerstman doesn’t think so, since Sony has kicked down development money for WB to include 3D support and stuff. Sony would naturally want to find a way to recoup their investment, so the Kratos exclusivity makes total sense for them. But I wouldn’t rule it out. Microsoft is going to hate hearing this, and they’d be silly not to even try to work something out with WB. Sargeant Johnson? Marcus Fenix? Alan Wake? Cortana? Work with me, Microsoft! Mortal Kombat will come out spring 2011 for Xbox and PS3. [via NeoGAF]
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| Wolfenstein Faithfully Recreated In Little Big Planet 2 (VIDEO) Posted: 08 Dec 2010 11:06 AM PST |
| Dead Space 2 Demo Coming December 21 Posted: 08 Dec 2010 10:39 AM PST
Dead Space 2 was one of our favorite games of E3, so we can’t imagine a better Christmas present than a chance to play the Dead Space 2 demo. Thankfully, EA has announced today that their Christmas gift is exactly that. According to the press release EA sent out today, the demo will take players to the Church of Unitology. Here’s the quote:
The Dead Space 2 demo will be released on December 21 on XBox Live worldwide and PlayStation Network in North America. It will hit PSN in Europe the day after. If you like the demo, the game will be coming to PS3, XBox 360, and PC on January 25, 2011.
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| MSN Posts Exclusive Batman: Arkham City Teaser Trailer Posted: 08 Dec 2010 09:29 AM PST
If you’re one of the many looking forward to Rocksteady’s upcoming sequel to Batman: Arkham Asylum, here’s a little something to help tide you over. MSN Games has posted an exclusive teaser trailer for Batman: Arkham City. It’s less than 30 seconds long, and appears to show a SWAT team of some sort attempting to take Batman down. You can imagine how this ends up. Enjoy!
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