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How About a Crusader Kings II Contest?

By on October 24, 2012 with 35 Comments

Why yes, that sounds lovely.

Crusader Kings II is a wonderful game. I played the hell out of it when it was released — a month of non stop Crusader Kinging. With the release of the 2nd expansion, Legacy of Rome, I need to get back in the swing as I love that period of history. This isn’t Glory Days Rome but rather the Eastern Empire — Leo, Justinian and the boys.

In celebration of said expansion we are giving away five (5) Steam codes for Crusader Kings II. This is just the base game and not the add on. So if you skipped it last time around, now’s your chance to score a freebie.

To enter the contest reply to this post and tell us why you should win a free copy. Seriously. Why should I give YOU a free CK2 code? It’s that simple.

Winners will be chosen at random. Or maybe not.

Good luck!

Confessions of an XCOM Cheater

By on October 24, 2012 with 22 Comments

The new XCOM, if you haven’t played it yet, is a stone masterpiece. It’s exactly the right way to modernize and smarten up (as opposed to dumbing down) a classic but aging brand. I haven’t played an X-Com game in years, but it’s definitely not a nostalgia trip even though it feels familiar and flips all of the right “hey, remember this?” switches. It’s hardly an example of the over-romanticized sort of retro-gaming that has become popular over the past several years- it is very much a 2012 title, an example of evolutionary progress and a possible future for classic, turn-based strategy games.

But I’m not here to review the game, I haven’t played it enough to make it official like that. I’m here to confess that I, Michael Barnes, am a dirty XCOM cheater and today I am bearing the burden of guilt for reloading saves in mid-mission. And I didn’t do it just once. I feel awful. Continue Reading…

Walking Dead: Around Every Corner in Review

By on October 24, 2012 with 3 Comments

Part of the reason I find myself drawn to watching television series on basic cable channels, as opposed to the big networks, has to do with the decision to make shorter, more densely packed seasons. Sure, the level of quality comes into play, but as much as I love Justified (and I deeply, deeply love Justified), I’d much rather watch thirteen excellent episodes of Justified in a season than thirteen excellent ones, five good ones, three passable ones and two that flat out suck.

The point I’m trying to make here, is that sometimes, less is more, something I thought about frequently while playing Episode Four of Telltale’s Walking Dead. It’s the weakest episode of the series, by a long shot, mostly due to a narrative that provides a whole lot of set-up with very little payoff.

Continue Reading…

Borderlands 2 in Review

By on October 17, 2012 with 18 Comments

So there we were, the Hyperion Circle of Slaughter, Round 5. Petey and I had been handling ourselves pretty well for the first three waves. He’d cover the right, I’d cover the left. Our corrosive weapons made short work of the loaders, helped out with the judicious use of Petey’s turret, its rockets and bullets pointing out enemies, its shield giving us temporary respite from the hail of bullets while at the same time allowing our Bee shields to add as much damage to our shots as possible. When flyers or more mobile soldiers showed up, I’d pick ‘em up with my phaselock and together we’d knock ‘em down.

Everything was going to plan, until the Super Badass Loaders showed up.

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And Now, Your First Bit of Borderlands 2 DLC

By on October 16, 2012 with 1 Comment

Captain Scarlett and her Pirate’s Booty, the first of four planned Borderlands 2 expansion packs drops today and I couldn’t be happier. I just finished the main game yesterday morning and am in the midst of mopping up the last side quests while at the same time, going back through the game in True Vault Hunter mode. Yeah, I have Dishonored. Yeah, I have Sleeping Dogs. Yeah, I have Walking Dead Episode 4. I don’t care. I want more Borderlands 2, whether it be DLC or redoing the main game just with harder enemies and better loot. Those other games aren’t going anywhere and level 50 is a loooooooong way off.

Old School Rules

By on October 12, 2012 with 13 Comments

Old School Rules

My second favourite place to read articles about gaming (NoHighScores being the first, obviously) is Edge Online. And it was there that I learned the news that two well known names in video game design history, Brenda Brathwaite and Tom Hall, were joining forces on a kickstarter campaign to fund an “old school” RPG. The modern incarnations of the genre being apparently, in spite of being “epic” and “wonderful”, in need of some competition from the aged paradigm of stat-crunching. The article from which I learned this asked the pertinent question of what, exactly, the label meant. That pushed my nostalgia buttons sufficiently to make me want to try and answer the question for myself.

I grew up with both computers and with pen and paper role-playing games and I can’t recall a time when the link between the two was not obvious. Gathering other gamers together for role-playing sessions is hard and if you want the full effect of slowly developing a group of characters they suck in immense quantities of time. Computers promised a solution to both issues, allowing you to get your fix any time you wanted and speeding up the campaign arc.

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X-COM: Enemy Unknown – Not a Review

By on October 11, 2012 with 55 Comments

I have X-COM and it’s glorious. (As a reminder, yes, I do use the hyphen as twas intended by God itself.) That screenshot up there? The one where you can’t hardly make out any detail because it’s zoomed so far out? That is beauty. Dear Bioware, when you release the next Dragon Age, if I can’t pull back on the camera like I can do here, then you have utterly failed. I don’t care if the story is the second coming of… uh… something really good, but not as cliche to list here as Lord of the Rings. Just say’n.

Oh, right. X-COM. Ahem. It’s going to be awhile before I’m comfortable reviewing the game, so in lieu of that, I’m going to offer this quick impressions post and then, in forthcoming posts, document my progress, diary style, as my crafty crew of squaddies face off against gruesome death and dismemberment at the hands of an alien menace bent on world domination. Woo!

To set a baseline here, I think there are generally two kinds of X-COM players: Those who like the light strategy and emergent storytelling that the series hangs its hat on and the deep strategy folks who like wide open spaces they must navigate, moving carefully forward, spending hours micromanaging every facet of their squad. The original X-COM had a way of sating both these crowds and there’s nothing wrong with either track, but this game was built to appeal to the former much more than the latter.

Like any good alien-smashing squad, let’s take this point-by-point, starting with the stuff that will likely bother some folks…

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Dark Souls Prepare to Die Edition Review

By on October 4, 2012 with 42 Comments

I’ve said this before and after playing the PC version of Dark Souls my position hasn’t changed one iota: Dark Souls is the best game of its generation.

Sure, you can say, “Yeah, well, you know that’s just like, your opinion, man.” It is. Dark Souls is the epitome of masterful game design by almost every conceivable measuring stick. It’s not just what is in the game, and Dark Souls is stuffed with so much goodness it could fill an Estus Flask, it’s what’s not in the game that makes it such a seminal role-playing experience.

There are no dialogue trees. No awful voice-acting. No faux-sexual tension between party members. No ‘famous’ cameos. No beating you over the head with prose, trying to make you care for things you don’t need to care about. No hog-tying you into a “class” and making you play a certain way based on the choice you make during character creation. There’s no hand holding, no invisible walls preventing you from falling off a cliff, and there are no cool down timers.

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Quick Take on the X-COM: Enemy Unknown Demo

By on September 26, 2012 with 19 Comments

To dismiss with this point first, I know Firaxis calls the game XCOM and not X-COM. Screw that noise. We all know better. As for the demo, there’s not a whole lot that can be said about it. It’s very, very brief, taking you through two largely scripted missions and then depositing you at the menu. This isn’t a demo so much as it is a guided tour, so there’s a lot we don’t know (at least those of us, like me, not on the golden ticket list for preview code), including just how much freedom of play the actual game will offer. This was extremely restrictive, but it hints at a world of promise. Here’s what I can tell you based on the 50 or so minutes it took to go from beginning to end on the PC…

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Darksiders II: Argul’s Tomb in Review

By on September 25, 2012 with 3 Comments

B. B. King famously wrote that he was paying the cost to be the boss and while his sentiment was aimed at a woman who was less than thrilled with how King spent his time, the phrase kept sticking in my head when thinking about Argul’s Tomb, the first piece of Darksiders II DLC. In my game, Death is the Boss, capital B: level 30, almost the entire Harbinger skill tree maxed out, a pair of scythes that steal health faster than I can lose it. Like I said, Boss, capital B. In this case, the cost of being such a high level boss is that dungeons like Argul’s Tomb hold very little challenge and even less reward.

Is this going to be an issue with other people who were less dedicated to making Death the very best horseman he can be, or those still playing the game? Certainly not, but I can’t be the only one with a high level character and while Argul’s Tomb may have some clever puzzles and an explosively entertaining rail gun section, I think it’s still better suited to those just starting out Death’s adventure, an unfortunate situation given that the game came out a month ago.

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