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Microsoft Reveals New Remote Control/Cable Box Combo

By on May 21, 2013 with 7 Comments

xbox

In case you didn’t get the memo, Microsoft just revealed its new $500 (?) television remote control/cable box called the Xbox 361. It also may play some video games, according to some suit in a blazer and jeans for the special occasion.

The new Call of Duty game was shown and it will be a Durango exclusive for a couple of days. As long as you pretend that games like Thief, Vanquish, and Brink never existed it will provide innovative new gameplay experiences like the ability to lean and slide. Also, for the first time ever in a video game, there is a dog. What is most impressive though, according to the video I watched, is how the Xbox Infinity will simulate Captain Price’s arm hairs better than ever before. There were also some wireframes that show how your dudebro entertainment experience will come alive like never before with the NextBox. I thought it was pretty touching seeing those soldiers cuddling up. I hope my bros will purchase the Xbox instead of the PS4 so that we can share the man-love a couple of days early.

Steven Spielberg came on stage to say that the next Halo will have no gameplay at all, that you will just watch it. Lots of intro screens were shown for lots of sports video games, none of which I care a flipping shit about other than the soccer one, which is pretty popular. I hope that you care a flipping shit about some football, because the Xbox 720 will have lots of it. And you can scratch your groin at the Kinect and it will switch back and forth between Madden 14 and ESPN.  Without having to turn one off. That is truly amazing, the next generation has arrived.

Forza 5 showed a bunch of cars that you can’t have. But they didn’t show what it’s like to actually drive the cars in the game. So Turn 10 may have actually reached the peak of motorsports simulation by not allowing you to drive any of them. Just like in real life.

Remedy showed a game based on the popular Quantum Leap TV series with lots of human drama- the kind only a little girl can deliver-  and some multimedia CD-ROM game live action content. Stuff blew up. It looked like a summer blockbuster. But it will probably be a third person shooter that will kindly do you the courtesy of doing everything itself other than requiring a press of the X button occasionally so you can sit back and enjoy the show.

Bride of Xbox 360 features a bunch of cloud stuff, so it will always be online. Deal with it. The good news too is that you can throw your old Xbox 360 away, including everything you’ve downloaded on it. Believe me, when you see the ability to watch Netflix on this thing, you’ll never want to play Bastion again anyway. I hate old video games, don’t you?

So the takeaway out of all of this is that Microsoft, even more so than Sony, is doing us all a favor by reminding us that developing new design-level gameplay concepts and leveraging technology to create them aren’t important. We’re dumb to think that anyway, which is why the PC, Wii and iPads suck and have no legitimate game experiences. What matters in the next console generation is the ability to chit chat on the internet, watch TV shows, and marvel at 1080p arm hairs waving in the breeze at 60fps. Get with the program.

Cracked LCD- Kemet in Review

By on May 16, 2013 with 4 Comments

kemet

The first thing you’re going to want to do with Kemet is to compare it Cyclades, the brilliant hybrid Dudes on a Map (DoaM) game from a couple of years ago that impressed many gamers including myself with its stunningly economical yet baroque and flavorful design. Like its predecessor, Kemet is a big box Matagot/Asmodee release and it’s of French origin. Both games are well-illustrated and packed with great-looking miniatures and ultra-tight rules that play fast and loose with DoaM conventions of geography, resource management, and process. Both games are completely reasonable in terms of playtime, even with full tables. But whereas Cyclades was about the men, gods, and monsters of the ancient Mediterranean, Kemet goes south and presents us with a surprisingly unique mythic Egyptian setting.

To cut right to what matters most, this is a game where dudes riding scorpions fight dudes riding snakes. You might see your city’s pyramids captured by an army led by a mummy that teleported into your neighborhood and charged straight through your walls. It has a sort of Warrior Knights-derived combat system whereby you can win a battle but lose all of your soldiers trying to wipe out the other side. It’s a tremendously aggressive, fast-paced game where you’re never safe and every turn from the first one on to the dramatic finish will see the sands stained with blood. Sometimes mummy blood. I’ll just stop here for a moment and let you finish that online order that you should be placing right now. Continue Reading…

Cracked LCD- Terra Mystica in Review

By on May 9, 2013 with 2 Comments

 terra mystica 2

Terra Mystica, the new Z-Man title wherein players representing terraforming fantasy races attempt to change terrain hexes to suit their tastes and build structures on them, isn’t really about building civilizations. There is magic, but this is hardly an enchanting, mystical game. The subject matter is little more than a construct to codify its graphic design and nomenclatures. It’s a game more prone to victory point churning than charming you with its fiction with complex mechanics carrying the day over rich theming or a sense of setting. Terra Mystica is ultimately a game more about mitigating and overcoming restrictions or limitations and incrementally acquiring +1 bonuses that affect standard game procedures. This is a fairly common, high level design principle and it’s not particularly a fault of the designers to utilize it but since this is a mechanics-first game it’s immediately obvious and potentially off-putting. Continue Reading…

The Genius of Eclipse IOS

By on May 7, 2013 with 4 Comments

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Big Daddy Creations hit IOS board game paydirt a couple of years back with Neuroshima Hex, a title that remains one of the best examples of crossing the table-to-tablet divide. Their long-awaited implementation of Eclipse (a Cracked LCD Game of the Year shortlister back in 2011) has finally arrived and it’s a grand slam. It may, in fact, be the new benchmark of how to do board game apps. It level of polish is AAA-impeccable. The interface brilliantly conveys every piece of information you need at any given time and after a mild breaking in period it makes the rich complexity of the game feel like second nature. It looks great, the AI can be quite ruthless, and although the multiplayer is hampered by Big Daddy Creations going with a proprietary service rather than Game Center, the async is rock solid.

But above all, what makes Eclipse the new standard for board game conversions is, ironically, that it doesn’t seem much like a board game at all on the iPad. It looks, sounds, and plays like a very streamlined, very focused Master of Orion-descended 4x game. There are points at which its board game parentage peeps through- like a wonderful combat resolution screen that shows you the die rolls but not some silly animation of clattering dice- but you could tell someone that this was a totally new design with no cardboard analog and they’d probably believe you.

Unlike Talisman, Eclipse’s more careful, measured pacing and combination of a strong economic game with conflict and exploration make it a great fit for IOS gaming. Thankfully, unlike Ascension, there’s a chat function so you can get in some trash talk before your dreadnaughts unload plasma missiles on your opponents. I’ve had plenty of fun with the single player game against a variety of AI opponents and I’ve never had an easy win out of it. If you’re new to it all, there’s a decent tutorial and the full rulebook. The latter should be absolutely standard on any tablet board game.

For six bucks- less than 10% of what the boxed game costs- you can buy one of the best 4x space strategy games on the market today. You might ask “why don’t I just play Starbase Orion, Sins of Solar Empire, Galactic Civilizations et. al.”  and to that my response would be that aside from a game taking an hour or less to play through first exploration to final victory, none of those games are as concise or as editorial. It’s funny that a board game cuts right down to the heart of the genre, and in an implementation that’s better than some computer-bound examples. It’s a masterstroke of design sense that they just went ahead and made this a full-fledged digital strategy game that is able to compete with its forbears head-on.

Cracked LCD- A Brief History of the “Dudes on a Map” Genre

By on May 2, 2013 with 5 Comments

risk

You might call them “Risk-style” or “take over the world” games. You may even call them “garbage”. But myself and a lot of other folks writing and thinking about board games have taken to referring to those in which you control and conquer spatially arranged territories on a map with on-board pawns and engage in conflict resolution to determine placement or removal  of pieces with other players as “Dudes on a Map” or DoaM games. I’ve been thinking a lot about the genre lately since it is one of what is really a very small number of distinguishable macro-genres among board game classifications, and also because there have been so many damn good, damn innovative games in this genre over the past ten years.

Continue Reading…

Columbia Falls: Why Bioshock Infinite Sucks

By on April 25, 2013 with 26 Comments

BioShock Infinite

Last night, I was playing the much-ballyhooed Bioshock Infinite. I had rescued Elizabeth, a dead-on cross between a Disney princess and one of the kids from Akira voiced by someone that sounds straight out of drama school, from her towering monument. We wound up on a beach. Sunbathers relaxed in the warm, Maxfield Parrish-like glow that blankets virtually every visual in the game. It was a peaceful scene after a hectic action sequence. As I’ve done in System Shock 2, Bioshock, and Bioshock 2, I dutifully looted everything in sight. Right there on the beach, in a picnic basket, I found some machine gun bullets. Suddenly the world of the sky city Columbia- which is really described mostly through advertising posters and cute graphic design- fell apart and I was just playing another idiotic shooter with tedious looting, ho-hum gunplay, and pointless bloodshed that does nothing for the story but provide the player with something to do in between the movie parts. Continue Reading…

Cracked LCD- The Loneliness of the IOS Talisman Player

By on April 25, 2013 with 0 Comments

talismanLast night, like any iDevice-owning Talismaniac could be expected to do, I dutifully downloaded the long-awaited Talisman: Prologue IOS game just minutes after the download went live in the App Store. Five dollars and a few minutes later, I was finally playing a quite polished, complete and specially tailored edition of Talisman on my iPad. For years a digital version has been in the works under the auspices of many different publishers and developers including an XBLA project with Capcom at one point. But here it was in the flesh, the quest for the Crown of Command in the palm of my hand.

Continue Reading…

Injustice: Gods Among Us in Review

By on April 22, 2013 with 10 Comments

calendar man 4-15 injustice shot 2NetherRealm’s 2011 reboot of Mortal Kombat was an unexpected hit- not to mention one of my favorite games of that year- yet the follow up, Injustice: Gods Among Us has still managed to surprise me and in some ways it’s the superior game. Following on from Kombat ’11, it’s a brutal one-on-one fighting game that manages to pull off that very tricky balance between technical, skill-based gameplay and populist accessibility. It’s packed to bursting with (get this) single player content and of course a great roster of fighters including some of the biggest names in the DC Comics universe. That’s right, this is the game that will finally let you put to rest the question, “who would win in a fight between Harley Quinn and Doomsday?” Continue Reading…

Cracked LCD- Relic in Review

By on April 18, 2013 with 0 Comments

relic

The answer to your first question about Fantasy Flight’s  Relic is “yes, this game is pretty much a mildly redeveloped Talisman with Warhammer 40k illustrations and text”. The answer to your second is “Yes, in some ways it’s actually better than Talisman but not quite as expansive so both are worth having on your shelf.” Thirdly, “No, it’s not any shorter so expect to spend at least three or four hours flipping cards, rolling dice at them, groaning, and laughing.” Continue Reading…

Cracked LCD- Clash of Cultures in Review

By on April 11, 2013 with 3 Comments

Clash-of-Cultures-game-in-playBack in 2010, Christian Marcussen essentially issued a stop work order to anybody developing a pirate-themed board game. Merchants and Marauders was and still is the best pirate game ever published, a stunningly complete expression of the concept that was dynamically open-world, filled with narrative adventure, and rich with both traditional economic game elements and exciting naval conflict. Late last year, Mr. Marcussen showed up on the “Civilization lite” scene and again pretty showed anyone working on such a game the door. Z-Man Games’ Clash of Cultures is a masterpiece of judicious design, careful abstraction, and economy- it is the new standard by which all games descended from the works of Frances Tresham and Sid Meier should be judged. There’s never been such a fighting fit, slim and ready-to-rock game of civ-building. Continue Reading…

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