E3 is happening RIGHT NOW. If you can’t wait for the details, Giant Bomb lists the live streams of five major publisher panels over the next two days. The Microsoft panel is just about over as I type this, but the big news to my mind is the announcement of Minecraft on the 360. That’s the first console partnership for Notch and the Mojang crew, and more importantly the 360 version supposed to have full integration with Kinect. Yes, now you can punch trees… well, not quite literally yet, but closer!
(As a person who got sucked back into the Minecraft vortex for several hours this weekend, forcing me to actually jump and punch and stack will at least give a fitness value that is absent from my current obsessive careful arranging of virtual cube trees.)
If all this news and change is overwhelming for a Monday morning, don’t worry — sit back and revel in the good old days with this Let’s Play of Knights of the Old Republic 2. It’s got action, adventure, humor, and clever writing… and that’s just in the Let’s Play! If you’re in more of a visual mindset, I’m currently working my way through SuperGreatFriend’s video LP of Deadly Premonition. It’s a 100% playthrough of a Japanese survival horror title loosely based on Twin Peaks, and both the game and SGF’s comments are quite entertaining.
Okay, okay, less words and more action! Let’s end off this E3 Monday post with a hot-off-the-presses gameplay video from Mass Effect 3:
E3, arguably the most prestigious trade show in the game industry, kicks off next week and I see they’ve already started the marketing hyperbole and hype:
Oh, wait, that’s Skyrim. That’s not hype, that’s the thing that will control my life this winter.
Last week Syl at Raging Monkeys wrote an interesting article about game difficulty. It’s almost certainly on the decline in the modern era, but was the difficulty of old school games actually part of their design or just the effect of old code on old consoles? Does one’s perception of difficulty change depending on the genre of game?
I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately because I fail at Mass Effect 2. After triumphantly exploding anything that crossed my path in Dragon Age 2 I decided to give ME2 a shot again and see if I couldn’t finish it this time. I’m playing it on normal mode, and I die a lot. A lot, a lot. They’re all particularly frustrating deaths, too, where instead of making tactical errors I can’t get the controls right. (My squad are experts at standing around without cover being shot in the face.) It’s frustrating, and it makes me not want to play.
When I was seriously playing World of Warcraft, on the other hand, I craved challenge and felt like I wasn’t playing right if I wasn’t liable to die at any moment (raiding and PvP). Death and frustration and keyboard pounding waves of emotion… well that’s just part of the game, soldier, so suck it up and get over the top! I would and still do cheerfully defend the difficulty level of WoW when others said it was too tough.
Why do I find dying and difficulty more acceptable in WoW than in ME2? Perhaps I see ME2 as a story more than a game? Is it just that I’m getting older and becoming more of a wuss? I’m not entirely sure.
I will say this: “hard mode” gaming needs more defenders right now than the opposite. More and more it seems that game developers are supposed to appeal to the Farmville market and are no longer satisfied with just making a really good game for a healthy niche of game-oriented players. So I suppose in solidarity I will stop my whinging and, as the internet tells us, Learn2Play. It will feel all the better when I finally convince Garrus to be my main lizardman and kick some Reaper ass.
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While I’m talking about Bioware (yes, I know, this happens a lot), here’s a really interesting article on “bisexuality”, romances, and author intent in Mass Effect 3. It uses the phrase “Shepsexual”, which delights me to no end.
This ad is silly.
I saw this ad yesterday on what was probably Reddit and found it baffling. What is up with the weird half-squat? I feel like I should warn her that there’s no chair there before she falls over. And the way one hand is in the air and the other between her knees? With the shoulder joint that looks pretty obviously photoshopped to me? Really?
(Seriously, look at that shoulder joint. There is something unnatural about it.)
I guess Amazon was going for some off-beat “natural” American Apparel vibe, but this ad tells me that the new Amazon Juniors clothing line is perfect for when aliens try to take over society by stealing your skin except they haven’t got the hang of movement yet. I suppose intergalactic body snatchers IS an underappreciated market segment….
Witness the Evolution of April O’Neil.
I was a fan of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as a kid, but mostly based on the old NES game and the Saturday morning cartoon, not the original comics. (“When the evil Shredder attacks, these turtle boys won’t cut him no slack!”) I recall deciding that Donatello would be the turtle I’d most like to hang out with based on his sassy attitude — not this kind of sassy though — but I didn’t care one way or the other about April. She was okay, I guess. Humans are just not as cool as turtles.
At least my April, though, was firmly in the jumpsuit era and not armed with “lipstick nunchacku” and “detachable skirt”. Tee hee, I’m a journalist!
I have two two two exciting game alerts today!
ALERT THE FIRST
When does Portal 2 launch? April 19? Not so fast!
The Valve ARG kicked into high gear this week, and even company co-founder Gabe Newell got into the swing of things when he emailed a number of cryptic images to well known news websites such as Kotaku and the Escapist. (Clever marketing, guys!) The ARG fanatics worked their magic on the images and… the results are very curious.
Some people think it means that Portal 2 will launch early (so get your pre-order in now!), and there’s Half-Life 3 speculation flying around as well. Mind you, HL3 evangelists think that everything means the Third Coming is nigh, but either way it should be exciting to see what happens tomorrow morning at 9am!
ALERT THE SECOND
one of the Humble Bundle games
All of the games will play on both Mac and PC, all are free of DRM, and Steam provides a code to hook the three active games into your account.
You’re basically crazy if you don’t get this deal. That’s right. I said it.
You’ve probably heard the apocryphal story about police catching a criminal by telling him he has to come to some location to pick up a prize. Garry’s Mod author Garry Newman has almost certainly heard it before — he just caught 2100 software pirates in a matter of hours by having them report themselves to Steam!
Garry’s Mod is a fantastic sandbox game that works off of Valve’s Source, and it’s very popular for making improbable Half-Life and Team Fortress 2 screenshots. (And it’s only $10.) The latest update for the game caused an error message for some folks — something about a problem shading polygons, with an error code. It turns out only pirated copies of the software will throw that error, and the code is in fact a hidden version of the offender’s Steam ID.
Pirates posted their error to the official Steam forums asking for help, including their account ID, and in turn were swiftly banned. Nicely done, Garry!
I believe this was made in proper 3D modeling software and not Garry’s Mod, but it’s what I think about every time someone mentions customizing Valve property:
Look, I’m just going to say it: I have a PVR full of Criminal Minds episodes and I will watch them all, possibly within days. (I tend to go on TV benders and just do marathons of whatever interests me.) I should probably be ashamed to admit this in public but instead today, ladies and gentlemen, I am here to defend Criminal Minds as a guilty pleasure.
There are many reasons why I shouldn’t admit my sordid affair in public: Criminal Minds is a procedural FBI drama on network television (shock!). Easily 75% of the episodes play out like this: In the intro someone is kidnapped or killed. The body is found after the credits and the team goes to investigate. Halfway through the hour one of the townsfolk go missing. The team kicks it into hyperdrive, catches the bad guy, saves the last victim, and Hotch gives a meaningful quotation in voice-over.
The Wire, it ain’t.
But the next time you’re flipping through rerun alley, here’s why you should choose Criminal Minds:
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While the structure of each act rarely differs, the crimes are usually truly hinky. The show doesn’t stray away from the gritty, and there is usually a point in each episode where I am genuinely creeped out. However, although horrible, terrible things can happen to people each episode, the show rarely goes with the salacious sex crime angle, usually instead focusing on more unique pathologies like cannibalism.
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The guest stars. Wil Wheaton, notorious nice guy, is a crazy rapist. Keith Carradine, C. Thomas Howell, and Tim Curry are terrifyingly evil in their plotlines, while now Oscar-winner Melissa Leo, Nicholas Brendan (Eeeee, Xander!), and Jane Lynch show up at points on the side of the law. It’s a character actor heaven, and great material for playing “Hey, it’s that guy!”.
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The bromance. I love bromances! There is something just so appealing, to me, about seeing two or more people bond together and become family and fight adversity together. (I also love this aspect of Community.) Criminal Minds not only has this tight-knit group, but for most seasons three of them are women. They are smart, professional women who work their asses off and sometimes make mistakes and don’t date in the department.
I think it would even pass the Bechdel Test, at least in the earlier seasons. -
Dr. Spencer Reid. He has whimsical hair and genius smarts and is so emotionally distant that he would never, ever give me the approval I so desperately need. He’s, like, my perfect man.
Criminal Minds is available on DVD (not Instant Watch, boo) on US Netflix and reruns from the last six seasons are probably showing on your local channels at some point. As usual with television, the first three seasons are arguably the best.
female medic design, by Shaylyn Hamm
It touches on the very strong, unique silhouettes of each TF2 class, and how female characters tend to lack these distinctive features and blend in to each other. Will a traditionally male fanbase accept unique female characters in their games?
Seriously, this is a fascinating read. I highly recommend it.
Everyone who buys Dragon Age II before April 30th gets a free copy of Mass Effect 2! Yes, even folks who preordered.
I can’t imagine that anyone who enjoyed DA2 is not already an owner of ME2, but if you are that rare beastie this is a GREAT deal. I admit, all this is getting me kind of excited for Star Wars: The Old Republic, which with a “Spring 2011″ release date should be coming up any day now.
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