This week sees the release of the first THQ property of the post-THQ era. Metro: Last Light (360
In other releases, Dust 514 does the free to play thing on the PS3, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance gets the Blade Wolf DLC and Anomaly 2 does the tower offense / RTS thing.
Me, I started Deadly Premonition last night. It’s very weird. I’m also enjoying the hell out of Nolan North’s performance in Spec Ops: The Line, even if the combat is somewhat generic and the Heart of Darkness allusions are a bit thick. Etrian Odyssey IV has been shown the back burner in favor of Eclipse and Transformer: Legends with the latter occupying more and more of my time. Card management is hell!
As if the sheer, overwhelming power of my writing wasn’t enough to leave you punch-drunk, staggering across the page with confusion, this week I’m going to serve up short reviews of two totally unrelated expansions. First is Power Up for the acclaimed family game of giant monster ultraviolence, King of Tokyo. Second is the Slave I ship for the acclaimed geek’s game of small fighter ultraviolence, X-Wing. So if you own one and not the other, please do skip accordingly.
I would have liked to play Soul Sacrifice
Far Cry 3 continues to impress, mostly for all of the brainless mayhem but occasionally for being able to take out an entire outpost by letting a tiger out of a cage and having it do all of the hard work for me. Funny story: I warped to a completed outpost, heard a tiger growl, went outside and promptly got mauled to death. The tiger giveth and the tiger taketh away. That being said, I’m all in for Blood Dragon so yeah, Ubisoft, go on with your bad self.
The first time you fire up Hotline Miami, you’ll swear your PC has gone wrong. It’ll likely hang for what seems like an age, and then take you to a title screen burnished with blocky text in Russian against an eye-straining dayglow backdrop. It’s the 80’s. It’s Acid House all over again.
What happens next most assuredly isn’t. An ugly, bearded man will swear at you repeatedly as he teaches you the basic concepts of the game. Sneak up on people by using the building topology to keep out of sight, then eviscerate them or shoot them, or just punch them to the floor and then brain them by smashing their heads repeatedly against a door frame.
Eclipse is a wonderful boardgame from designer Touko Tahkokallio. Basically, it’s a Eurofied version of Master of Orion and it won a slew of awards after its release in 2011; it’s generally considered one of the better games of the past few years.
I like Eclipse. But it’s a beast of a game, takes up a lot of room and is one that you need to play several times in order to get a feel for how it works — Eclipse takes practice in order to learn how to play well. And when it comes to boardgames, that can be a slight problem. For some, playing a 4 hour game as a “learning” experience is frustrating because gamers, whether they be inclined to video or cardboard, are not a terribly patient lot.
This is precisely why I can’t wait to play the iOS app of Eclipse, which is ready to go and awaiting approval from Apple ($6.99). Now, you can play the game, test some strategies, generally learn what the hell you are doing and THEN take that experience to the table. This is also from Big Daddy Creations, who know how to port a boardgame to the app store — Neuroshima Hex, anyone?
I’ll keep you posted when it’s ready for your money. Until then, screenshots!
Yet another glorious spring week is upon us. Well, it’s upon me. Other people may not be in a spring time state of mind, or state of the world. Sorry about that. Spring is rad. You should try it.
This week brings Dead Island: Riptide (360
I don’t like rating games, video or board. A good review should manage to encapsulate how you feel about a game without stamping a score at the bottom. Numeric ratings attract attention away from the writing, and have neither the subtlety or nuance to express wider ideas about the value of the game beyond its play, or the reviewer’s tilt.
But I don’t always have the pleasure of writing just as I’d like to, and many of the editors I’ve worked for want scores. Out of five, ten or, worst of all, a hundred. So I dutifully assign a number and try to move on. But I remain haunted by past scores. Is game X really two stars better than game Y? Was I really right to give game Z that score out of a sense of quality, even though I, personally, disliked it?
Hey, you know what’s not much fun? Running cable, that’s what. Thankfully my basement is still unfinished so that I could run network and phone cables to various rooms on the first floor. Plus, I got to learn how to terminate cat-5 cable which will help me out, well, never but I saved about five hundred bucks by doing this myself rather than hiring an electrician, so there’s that.
Oh, right, games. Another superhero fighting game comes out as does a “new” Shin Megami Tensei game for the 3DS. Seeing how I’m about a battle or two away from completing Fire Emblem, I may have to play that one. Then again, Etrian Odyssey IV is first in line, so it may get the nod. As for couch time, I’m in the middle of Gears of War: Judgement. People Can Fly have made some interesting choices with this game, including a nice selection of new weaponry and a scoring system that allows you to take on mission modifiers that makes things more difficult so that you can obtain stars more quickly. Stars unlock things I don’t normally care about, except for an additional campaign mission, but the modifiers are usually interesting enough to be worth it. Plus, People Can Fly know that colors other than brown and grey exist, so they use a more vibrant color palette. Still, in the end, it’s a Gears of War game, with all of the baggage that comes with it. I’m enjoying it, but I’ve certainly played this game before. It’s not a total waste though, as it makes me want to keep seeing work from People May Fly and I’m always down for having developers to keep an eye on.
Inconveniently Wizards of the Coast decided to release five sets for their modular miniatures game Dungeon Command, and I covered the first four in batches of two. So now we’re left with an odd one. However, the good people at WotC informed me this is the last release currently planned, so it seemed a good idea to cap the whole thing off with a series overview.
But first, the new set. It’s called Blood of Gruumsh which, for anyone passingly familiar with the Dungeons & Dragons multiverse in which the games belong, will signal orcs. For some reason the orcs in this box are a peculiar shade of blue-gray rather than the green which is universally assumed in other fantasy settings. But aside from that oddity they’re the best figures in any of the Dungeon Command sets: solid, detailed sculpts with pretty reasonable paint jobs.
Dishonored in Review
XCOM: Enemy Unknown in Review
Borderlands 2 in Review