Silver Medal: Rayman Legends (Wii U, PS3, Xbox 360, PC)
While single-player is fun, it’s the multiplayer co-op that makes Rayman Legends such a wonderful, chaotic, hilarious game. I could keep throwing adjectives in there: beautiful, clever, creative, challenging, etc. etc. etc.
Basically, Legends takes everything wonderful about Origins and makes it better. The frenetic, musical gameplay is all that much more frenetic and musical.
The 2D hand-painted graphics look more three-dimensional than most 3D games.
Every stage and every world in this platforming gem offers up something new and different, from underwater stealth to parachuting toads to magnificent boss fights.
There’s so much going on here, it’s hard to keep track of it all, and playing with a friend (or spouse, or kid, or whoever) is a tremendously satisfying experience, especially on the Wii U with its innovative use of the touch-screen gamepad for co-op.
Bronze Medal: The Legend of Zelda Wind Waker HD (Wii U)
The Legend of Zelda Wind Waker HD is simply delightful. Even if (or perhapsespecially if) you’ve played the original, you’ll be happy to play this gorgeous remake.
A Zelda game has never looked so beautiful, but everything here from faster sailing (ergo less tedium) to tighter controls makes this more than just a repeat of a decade old game.
Rich graphics, some truly excellent game design, and a beautiful soundtrack all conspire to make this a nearly perfect game.
Like the other Wii U games on this list, you can play it on the gamepad itself, leaving the TV open for someone else.
The Wonderful 101 (Wii U)
Nintendo continues to impress with its unique games and the unique gameplay the Wii U’s touch-screen gamepad facilitates.
The Wonderful 101 is not a game for everyone.
It’s somewhat opaque, for one thing, meaning you’ll need to really work to gain an understanding of its systems.
To become really good at the game requires patience, and it’s helpful if you have some experience with action games (and developer Platinum Games’ titles, especially) if you want to do well.
The colorful, almost plastic visuals are bright and beautiful, taking full advantage of the Wii U’s hardware.
It’s challenging, funny, and overall a really great, innovative game that never takes itself too seriously.
Killzone: Mercenary (PS Vita)
The hype for this handheld shooter built to dangerous levels in the weeks before its release. This was going to be the Vita’s killer app. This was going to be the Best Game Ever on Sony’s still-struggling handheld system.
And the hype was right for once. Killzone Mercenary is an exceptionally tight shooter with a remarkably good multiplayer and surprisingly good controls and graphics.
I still find the Vita’s (and really all handheld systems’) controls a little unwieldy compared to a gamepad or, better yet, a mouse and keyboard, but this is one handheld shooter that actually works. It’s fun, fast-paced, and challenging, even if the story leaves something to be desired.
Multiplayer is very basic, but what’s on offer is as solid and as fun as they come.
Rockstar has already made an absolutely insane amount of money with Grand Theft Auto V across only two platforms, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, but now fans are pushing for a third. PC players desperately want their own version of Rockstar’s massive game, and are organizing to make their case.
They’ve set up a Change.org petition that has racked up 580,000 signaturesas of today, implying that there’s a pretty significant playerbase out there would wants to play GTA 5 on their PC. And that’s only the people who care enough to actually sign a Change.org petition, there are probably plenty more who haven’t.
While I’m skeptical about online petitions actually getting anything done, Rockstar would be wise to not ignore the PC community in this case. Rockstar has a hit and miss relationship with PC ports. GTA IV and LA Noire eventually got them, but Red Dead Redemption never did. Hopefully GTA 5 will fall into the former category rather than the latter.
Why does GTA 5 need a port so badly? Because quite simply, this new San Andreas/Los Santos map is one of the most vibrant video game maps ever created, and the resulting possibilities for mods are almost endless. You only need to look to the last most impressive video game world over the last few years, Skyrim, to see what mods can add to a game.
Skyrim was a fun game to begin with, but for years now, dedicated players have been making their own mods for the game, dramatically expanding the game’s content with both zany and serious features. And lots of nudity, but that comes with the territory.
Imagine the possibilities with GTA 5. The game would get countless visual upgrade mods for starters, and if the ones from GTA IV are any indication (as seen above), they would be absolutely gorgeous. Current issues with the game like the fact that almost every building is unable to be entered could be solved by mods. New cars, weapons, clothes, missions, anything really could all be added. They could truly make use of one of the best video game sandboxes to exist in some time, because Rockstar simply didn’t have time to make it any bigger or deeper.
None of this would affect DLC which Rockstar is obviously planning to make. Despite the fact that it would sell well, PC is still a relatively small market compared to the consoles. And Skyrim released a ton of DLC amid all the mods, and that worked out just fine.
Obvious I’m not privy to the amount of work it would take to port GTA 5 to the PC, but it would seem like a hugely wasted opportunity if it went the way of Red Dead Redemption instead of its predecessor, GTA IV. Aside from PC players who want to play the core game, there’s just so much potential for further expansion of Los Santos through mods, Rockstar owes it to their own game to see what fans can come up with.
'Chainsaw Warrior' Review - A Solitary Pleasure Remade For Touch
Zombies, chainsaws and a ticking clock dominate this remarkably faithful recreation of Games Workshops’ solo board game.
When I heard that Auroch Digital was working on a conversion of the Games Workshop board game Chainsaw Warrior, I confess to being more than professionally interested. Although best-known in the US for the Warhammer 40,000 universe, which has spawned a brood of games ranging from the peerless Dawn of War to the decidedly peerful Fire Warrior.
On the other side of the Atlantic, however, Games Workshop has long been the dominant force in specialist tabletop games retail, for better or worse, and launched the careers of Ian Livingstone, until recently life president of Eidos, and Lionhead cofounder Steve Jackson. Before it became a marketing powerhouse driven by the intense accessorisability of Warhammer 40,000′s Space Marines and their increasingly picturesque enemies, Games Workshop offered a wide range of their own and third-party tabletop wargames and boardgames, and were often the only specialist gaming retailer in town – literally, before online shopping.
Chainsaw Warrior was one such, and an interesting experimental step, as it was designed purely for a single player – in my case, a tween in a small British town without many friends interested in playing board games and parents who, on reflection, should maybe have paid a bit more attention to what I was reading and playing.
The game played out very much like patience, but with zombies. You, the titular Chainsaw Warrior, are a retired cyborg veteran in 2032, called back into action for one last job. A shadowy being from another dimension has taken over a New York tenement block, and will drag the city screaming into some sort of central casting Hell if not stopped. You are the only one who can et cetera.
It was actually a neat implementation of, in effect, a computerless roguelike. The player rolled the Chainsaw Warrior’s statistics, bought equipment (because apparently the military will happily fly our hero to New York, but cannot stretch to giving him more than a dice roll of points’ worth of equipment), and then explored the building by turning cards over. Each room might contain a zombie, a radioactive mutant, a chaos-worshipping zealot, a trap, a treasure trove of supplies, or nothing at all. The big bad lurks in the second deck, ensuring that the player does not turn him over on the second card-flip,, and will only meet him wounded, irradiated, envenomed, and low on ammo and time.
Die cut with a vengeance - the original board game
Chainsaw loser
Eagle-eyed readers might have noticed that I have spent a long time talking about Chainsaw Warrrior, the 1987 Games Workshop board game, rather than Chainsaw Warrior, the 2013 videogaame by Auroch Digital for mobile devices.
This is because they are the same game. Compared with, say, Inkle Studio’s conversion of Steve Jackson’s Sorcery!, this is an incredibly faithful adaptation. The dice are virtual, but the equipment, the mechanics – even the gorgeous Brett Ewins card art, which exudes the biopunk stylings of the 80s incarnation of 2000AD, still going strong as Britain’s most successful sci-fi comic book. Barring a smaller surface area, the game plays out exactly as it does in its cardboard incarnation.
This is both good and bad. On the good side, Chainsaw Warrior has held up pretty well. In a gaming culture where the roguelike is most certainly resurgent, this is a fascinating piece of game archaeology – a pre-PC roguelike.
On the other hand, it also brings over the limitations of the board game – conflicts are largely resolved by dice rolls, which slows process. Often, less powerful enemies are despatched effectively as a formality, but one still has to tap through the process – a corner that could have been painlessly cut. It also limits the deck to the physical cards included in the original game, which places an artificial limit on variety of opponents and random encounters.
Roll saving throw against BECOMING CUTLETS (the "it's" for "its" is apparently being corrected)
If you want the experience of playing a 1980s Games Workshop game, but in a mobile format, this iis absolutely the game you have been wauting for. It feels like a perfect game to be played on journeys – self-contained, with little need to remember preceding events – but battery drain is currently an issue; Auroch is working on updates.
A hard chain’s a-gonna fall
One intriguing survival from the social darwinist 80s is just how hard the game is. Auroch has given in to modernity by including easy and medium difficulty levels, which reduce the level of randomness in the character creation process, leading to a tougher, faster, more lethal and better-equipped warrior. The hard mode – which represents the setting of the original game – is gloriously infuriating.
Thứ Năm, 3 tháng 10, 2013
'Forza 5', 'Driveclub' And 'Mario Kart 8' Epitomize The Next Gen Battle
Sometimes a particular game or game character comes to epitomize a platform. Whether this is Mario and his explorative nature for Nintendo, games like Lego Marvel with its cross platform fun or Sonic and his fast action reflexes with Sega we see video-game consoles through the lens of the games we play on them.
Last week I had my first proper hands on with three racing games. Forza 5 on Xbox One, Driveclub on the PlayStation 4 and Mariop Kart 8 on Wii U. My plan had been to use the experience to pit the platforms against each other. However, to my surprise these were such distinct experiences that I found myself seeing the benefits of each for different reasons rather than one standing out as the winner.
Forza 5 Xbox One
Let’s look at Forza 5 first. Here we have another iteration of Turn 10′s racing game for a new platform. Although the technology behind the experience was all new, I was instantly at home with the familiar look and feel and the Xbox One controller in my hands.
The familiar soon turned into something fresh though as I hit the first turn and felt the triggers juddering under my fingers with the Impulse Rumblefeature. This small evolution of the controller experience made a surprising amount of difference not only to the physics of driving but to how it felt. Something about this contact between the road-rubber-finger-tip made an emotional connection.
It’s the same commitment to evolution you see with the new Xbox One Kinect controller. While other platform holders may have thought twice about doubling down on this potentially unpopular technology with core games, I’ve been impressed to see Microsoft go all in once again on Kinect — and even when it hurt in terms of their headline price.
Forza 5, like the Xbox One and its controllers is the epitome of evolutionary design. It’s the next step forward in the familiar world of Xbox, and one I’m very much looking forward to making.
Driveclub PS4
Turning our attention to Driveclub and the PlayStation 4 we find a different story, but one that is no less compelling. Far from the iterative approach of Forza, this is a brand new offering from the studio behind the PS3 launch title Motorstorm, and the series that followed.
Squarely focusing efforts on the modern player it takes driving into the social space so you are not only racing against the track or artificial competitors but other players in your social graph. Glancing down as I played and glimpsing the Share button on the PS4 controller I couldn’t help but notice the synergy between game and hardware here.
While Driveclub might be less obviously showy than Motorstorm, it matches the PS4′s new found understated tone and desire to put gamers and games first. This is extended further by the ability to construct teams of drivers to contribute to a common purse of experience and points, again underlining the front and center nature of PlayStation Plus in the PS4 ecosystem.
Talking to Chris McCann from Evolution it was interesting him to broaden this appeal beyond the core gamers. “People are able to pick up the game and play, you don’t need to be a hard core racer.” As you can see in the video he went on to talk about some children coming into the studio and getting on very well with the game.
First Impressions Of 30 Minutes With Skylanders Swap Force On PS4
First impressions of 30 minutes with Skylanders Swap Force on PS4, as Wave 1 of the game approaches and pre-orders mount.
With only 10 days to go until Skylanders Swap Force hits stores, families I work with have been getting their pre-orders in, both online and at retail. With the Wave 1 figures largely revealed (a quick browse of Amazon is very telling) it’s time to decide which of the figures you want to own. As my kids saw in Giants, the ones they missed out on originally were then hard to get later in the year.
In case you hadn’t noticed, Skylanders figures are released in Waves as stores can’t keep the full range on the shelves all year round. This means that once the figures from Wave 1 are sold out and Wave 2 starts to arrive the only way to get those original characters is often second and paying over the odds.
Along with the arrival at retail I also had some better access to the game itself. Having played through some snatched sections at Gamescom it was good to be able to take my time and fully investigate the available levels at Eurogamer. I also managed to find a quieter time to play so that this video gives the best impression of not only the look and feel but also how Swap Force will sound — I’m really enjoying some of the voice work in particular.
Played here on the PlayStation 4 you can see why this latest version of Skylanders continues to attract interest from outside its traditional family gamers. The visuals and audio really add polish to an experience with plenty of creativity and opportunity for physical on the carpet play as well as in game with the new mix and match figures.
Perhaps the biggest question mark here is how many special edition characters there will be. After Disney pushed the retail envelope with their blind foil pack collectible upgrade tokens I hope that Activision aren’t tempted to bleed the family market to hard.
Then of course there is the Skylanders Dark Starter Pack available at certain retail stores. Unlike some special editions this actually offers quite good value with the increased price offering not only limited edition characters but also a wider selection to get you started.
My hope is that we don’t see too many of these as they potentially push the price up for collectors. Families I think are in safer territory as they are unlikely to try and get the whole collection. Instead my advice is to buy theSwap Force Starter Pack and play through that to completion (possibly a couple of times) before investing in more figures.
If there are other characters you think you may want it can be good to take advantage of services like Toys R Us “Lay Away” offer where customers can set aside products to be paid for at a later date. Either way go for a few favorites rather than collecting the full set.
EA Says Battlefield May Return to Bad Company
EA has their hands full recently, having secured an exclusive Star Wars license before the world starts going crazy over the advent of new films. In August, they said that their latest plan for shooters was a constant rotation between Battlefield, Star Wars: Battlefront and Titanfall, their main three proprieties in the genre. Battlefield creative director Lars Gustavsson recently spoke to reporters at an event for Battlefield 4, and expressed a desire to return to the Bad Company variant of the series.
“My feeling is that I would love to do it. For me, when we started the company with 1942, it was really a work of passion,” said Gustavsson. ”And then we worked our way through the era of different wars, and I loved them all, like my little babies. When it came to Bad Company, it was creative freedom; don’t take yourself too seriously. So I love it. I want to see it again. Whether it can happen [right] now with the newly announced Mirrors Edge 2 and Star Wars: Battlefront… but we’ll see.”
So obviously this isn’t a top priority, but Gustavsson says Bad Company “isn’t forgotten, just on a long vacation.”
Honestly, I think it would be a smart move for Battlefield to return to Bad Company as a way to further distinguish themselves from other shooters on the market, namely Call of Duty. It’s a series with real personality to it, something that COD is in short supply of, despite its other successes. Obviously many concepts and features from vanilla Battlefield could transfer over, but Bad Company is brand with more fans than EA might imagine.
Titanfall is shiny and new and will likely be pretty big for EA. Star Wars: Battlefront 3 is a concept that has been lusted after by fans for years now, and they’re going nuts now that it’s finally happening. But now with the upcoming release of Battlefield 4, I don’t really see all that much excitement for the series comparatively speaking. It looks like an improved version of Battlefield 3, but it needs to do more to set itself apart. A return to Bad Company could be the answer to that. But hey, at least EA slimmed down by retiring the even more generic Medal of Honor.
It will be interesting to see which long-running series continue to thrive on next-gen consoles, and which might fade away. It’s too early to tell for Battlfield yet, but for now it seems like it might be getting overshadowed by other titles both at EA and elsewhere. I’ll be watching this launch with great interest to see what kind of numbers the series will put up this time around.
Battlefield 4 Minimum System Requirements:
OS: Windows Vista
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 3.0GHz or AMD Athlon II X2 260
'Rain' Review - Not Splashy, But A Quiet, Artistically Composed Fable
Rain beguiles with its aesthetic and novel mechanic, but suffers from a lack of variety.
Rain is a product of Sony'sSNE-1.37% PlayStation C.A.M.P program, where ideas can be submitted and, if successful, see them converted into a game. In this case, Acquire, known for the Tenchu and Way of the Ninja franchises, were brought in to help realise the creator’s vision. Previous C.A.M.P games such as Trash Panic and Tokyo Jungle have shown an offbeat sensibility, and Rain, although orthodox in much of its execution, brings its own peculiarities to the PlayStation platform.
Claire de lune
Rain begins in a slow, quiet, dreamlike and oddly European way, with the story of a boy leaving his sickbed in the middle of the night after seeing a translucent girl pursued by a monster, only to discover that he has himself become invisible. This introduction is told in splashy, raindropped watercolors as accordion music plays in the background. The city the boy is exploring feels initially French, but as you proceed it becomes clear that it is a mashup of European elements – gothic cathedrals, Italian graffiti, English warning signs. In essence, the game takes place in a sort of atemporal Ghibliverse – somewhere in an indefinable decade in a Japanese confection of European elements.
The arches and passageways of the city provide meaning to the game’s core mechanic. The boy, and the frightened and equally invisible girl he is chasing, are being hunted by strange beasts. In the unending rain, they are visible, so they can escape their pursuers by finding cover. However, those pursuers also become invisible without rain falling on them, so an unwary trip through a covered area can be fatal. The player has to watch for footprints – their own and those of their pursuers.
Throughout each of eight levels, the hunt is led by the Unknown – a terrifying, overlarge humanoid with one sharp, extended finger, used to sense the air for the children, and a huge, clublike arm to crush them. As the game goes on, the boy can find ways to fight back against the monsters, although there is never an attack button – running and hiding is nearly always the best and only plan.
The monsters are beautifully designed – dog-dinosaurs with whirls of bone for bodies, and the genuinely frightening Unknown. Hiding in a locker when it opens the door and stares at the empty space where you are standing is a nerve-wracking experience. The game in general does an excellent job of connecting mood and design: the labyrinthine city’s mix of elements and languages has a dreamlike quality, and the boy and girl, despite their translucency, are as winning as a pair of children in peril in a video game should be. Little animation touches – the boy stumbling as he runs, or steadying himself against a wall, or raising his arms against the rain – are neat pieces of emotional design.
The core mechanic also feels genuinely fresh, although really it is only swapping darkness for cover in a stealth mechanic. Throughout the game, blocks can can be moved or boards lowered to create spots of shelter and emergency hiding places.
Wet through
The problem is that the same shelter and the same hiding places recur, within the game and from game to game. There is a right way to solve the puzzles in Rain, and it is always the same way. The splash caused by running through a puddle will lure a hunting beast away from an entrance. The scaffolding always has to be smashed by leading two of the bone dogs head-first into it. The block always needs to be moved to create a bay of shelter. The Unknown can only be distracted by playing the church organ. Combined with this is the fixed camera, which is necessary but gives the impression that what you see is not only what you get but all you get.
When the girl joins your character, around halfway through the game, it opens up a new, collaborative element, just when the game was starting to lag. However, although she add a number of options, the implementation feels familiar. You may be pressing the circle button to boost her up to a high ledge so she can drop a ladder down for you, but outside its animations this process differs little from jumping and climbing a lower ledge. The sense of cooperation works in some more set-piecey areas – such as a spooky circus tent stalked by the Unknown – and there is an edge to being separated from your companion and having to run parallel to her, trying to reach her as the Unknown stalks after her. However, the artifice is too easily seen through – if you keep pushing the stick in the right direction, you will meet up with her again, in time to drop a board to allow her passage or concealment.
Put simply, Rain is very linear. Played in bursts, this should be less noticeable, but in a single, three-hour sitting it provided a definite sense of repetition. By the last level, although the art style changed again to an equally accomplished remix of the earlier levels, I felt I had had enough, mechanically, of the puzzles, which too often involved running to the glowing object on the screen and manipulating it in the permitted fashion. The various mechanics – large, placid monsters that can be walked under as mobile cover, rhinoceros-like monsters prone to charging and ramming, puddles of mud which makes the player character visible until it can be washed of – are introduced and quickly discarded. And, since the gameplay is linear, the replay value of the game will be limited – collectable “memories” are added, but it may be a while before the urge to collect them returns.
Shower with praise?
Rain is a hard game to judge. The things it does right are often magical things, but they seem to be accompanied by a related failing. At times, it touches on the magical – conveying the confusion and anxiety of a child lost in an unfamiliar world. But that world’s assets repeat to the point that one catches oneself saying “oh, I felt that sense of anxious wonder half an hour ago, didn’t I?”. The girl, first a quarry and then a companion, is clearly referential of Ico, and the wordless, companionable child’s romance between the two characters does a little heartstring-tugging – but at the same time being paired up with her involves a lot of standing in place and boosting her up. The narrative is mysterious and evocative, but as it goes on concern grows that it will not actually evoke anything - that it will be a sphinx without secrets. The play with visibility and invisibility at the core of the game is beguiling, but trying to navigate by your own footprints, when your view is sometimes obscured by objects in front of the character in the fixed camera view, can be a pain.
Rain is a pretty, precious little game – although it is little both in play time and in variation. It is perhaps best thought of as a story to be dipped into over a few evenings, never intending to be so difficult as to slow your progress or push you out of its fragile immersion, with stealth mechanics and platforming that, while never complex, will have your heart in your mouth when the vulnerable boy and girl are running towards a jump with the Unknown chasing them down, despite the linearity of the trail you are being led down.
Rain
Platform: PS3, PS Vita Developer: PlayStation C.A.M.P, Acquire Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment Released: October 1 2013 Price: $14.99 Score: 7/10
