Ironically, a role-playing game inspired me to write this entry. I won’t tackle it until Dragon Age is an afterthought, but the reviews suggest the soon-to-be-legendary Mass Effect 2 is akin to “Borderlands, this is how you do a role-playing shooter.” However, I had an allergic reaction to one review snippet:
Gears of War fans should feel right at home with the cover mechanics and controls. Thankfully, there is still a huge emphasis on tactics and RPG stats – Modern Warfare 3 this is most definitely not.
Four years since Gears of War popularized cover mechanics, and as good as Uncharted 2 worked the flavor, I’m already sick of hiding behind walls.
It’s been a decade since Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena were the creative heights of twitch shooting. Since then, developers have gone out of their way to prevent pinball wizards from permeating the new pay-to-play shooter culture of X-Box Live and beyond.
I’ve come to tolerate it. Twitch shooters didn’t die because they were an inferior format; the business of gaming changed. My problem? We’re still hailing and deriding “Doom clones” that embodied nothing Doom and its successors were about.
I’ve followed the blog Modern Warfail 2 since a similarly-named product came to market. It’s best described as “There is no reason one blog dedicated to the failings of one game on one platform should be so wildly entertaining”.
In the eight years since its release, Warcraft III has never truly endured a gauntlet of game-breaking hilarity But as long as we’re in the “final stretch” leading to Starcraft II, why not start now?
Shortly before dealing with the latest crash hack, Blizzard responded to “spambots that say ‘meow’” by “banning people who say ‘meow’”. The week after? The legendary “buildover farm hack” has company.
The first hack allows towers to fire while constructing. In addition, cancelling a structure allows it to stand and fight for several seconds while your worker moves on to something better. And should you be so bad that you lose with this hack, you have the ability to create untargetable buildings with no hit points. Best summed as “Highperching for Pussies”, these glorified doodads cannot be killed, so enjoy your seven-hour race to see whose internet craps out first.
The second? (Note: These pictures are NOT Kodos_Forsaken from the Battle.net forums, only continuing proof he is the most hated man on Battle.net.)
It lets players choose “Neutral (Passive)” as their playable race. Yes, the game grants you twelve sheep on your quest to taking over the world. Really, what the hell is there to say? Maybe it’s time to start that Warfail III blog.
Credit to the Warcraft III General Discussion Forum for supplying the links.
Sony has revealed the contestants that will compete for a spot as a game tester on The Tester, a reality show on PlayStation Network.
The company held an open casting call last September, and on Thursday it revealed the 11 contestants, who range in age from 22 to 36. In addition to the contract with Sony, players are competing for a $5,000 “signing bonus.”
The show, hosted by Meredith Molinari, is produced in collaboration with 51 Minds, creator of The Surreal Life and Rock of Love. Over the course of eight episodes, the contestants will compete in physical and mental challenges.
Yes: Ten human beings (and Ciji) are competing for five-thousand dollars and the RIGHT to earn a career in gaming’s entry-level soul-crusher.
I can only think of one way hypothetical scenario where this could ever be topped:
Starcraft fan site Teamliquid.net has revealed that American professional gamer Greg “IdrA” Fields will star in his own reality show.
Few details have been revealed about the nine-episode mini-series, but anonymous sources claim the show will follow a set formula: He will argue with people on the internet while simultaneously playing Starcraft. He will “alt-tab” to discover his “base” has been overrun. He then calls the opponent a hacker and punches a hole in a wall.
“We had a much different concept for the show with an actual plot structure, but he did this about eight or nine times and then the producers ran out of film,” the anonymous source said.
But hey, I suppose a redux of World Cyber Games: Ultimate Gamer is a solid consolation prize.
Continuing my quest to never get laid, I spent a Saturday cross-checking GameRankings review scores against VGChartz sales numbers. As of January 15th, 213 games have sold one-million copies on the three seventh-generation consoles, reception ranging from dreadful to legendary. Armed with this data, I ask: What can we learn about the seventh generation of video games with this data?
Bad games can be purchased for any console. Many sell. But never have so many sold irrespectively of “quality”. And the majority of this business is taking place on the Nintendo Wii.
Yeah, reviewers have biases. They enjoy Microsoft’s wallet. They would have married Grand Theft Auto IV if they were allowed to. But on a “compiling thousands of reviews for hundreds of games” basis, I’m willing to hear the opinion of those who enjoy the medium for a living.
I believe that if the human races makes contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life, our species will be at nuclear war in a day. No, it won’t happen because the aliens pull an Independence Day on us. I think everything will be going great. Then the leader of the aliens will shop at Wal-Mart. As the greeter begs him to show his receipt, the leader will realize the human race has no redeeming value and deserves to be obliterated.
How did I come to such an impulsive conclusion? During the last several months, Warcraft III has witnessed a rash of cyber-warfare. As nerds spam the chat channels of people on the internet that they don’t like, one tough guy houses his idle weaponry in Clan PK on Azeroth.
Meow, meow, meow, meow…
Clearly, Blizzard is under shareholder obligation to curtail spambots in their seven-year-old, financially-irrelevant video game. Forget that the last two weeks of ladder play have been under siege by a new disconnect hack, the fantastic story of using a macro to queue illegal building commands and crash the game (Author’s Note: This issue is now patched as of January 20th); someone at Blizzard logged out of World of Warcraft to try and defeat this spammer. How did he attempt to do this? By forcing Battle.net to impose a two-week IP ban on any person who says “meow” in Clan PK. Seriously.
Remember how Bayonetta was supposed to ride word of mouth towards redefining the genre? Tough to do that when your opening week in the Western World is summed as “We got outsold by Darksiders!?”
What to blame? Examine the sentiments scribed by Gus Mastrapa of Wired:
Playing Bayonetta made me feel genuinely embarrassed, and not for the pushy sexiness. It was everything else: the sounds, words and scenery draped all around the woman. The tired biblical allusions, the feigned trench coat cool and the towering, but ultimately hollow architectural wonder didn’t just bore me to tears — they offended me.
I don’t care how brilliant Bayonetta’s button mashing is. It doesn’t matter to me that Chris was pleasantly surprised by the way the game plays with conventions. I gave Bayonetta her chance and now I know where I stand: I don’t want to be seen in public with her, let alone her tacky friends.
Know how Starcraft fans hate Warcraft’s vivid colors? How long-time Zelda fans hated The Wind Waker? Well, Bayonetta’s sexuality wouldn’t be out of place in Pink’s music. She careens through sixteenth-century architecture with firearms strapped to her feet, and mauls the larger baddies with her hair. Welcome to another edition of “This is gay, yo.”
Remind anyone of another Japanese title that mocked its genre while employing deeper gameplay than the norm, was well-reviewed, and sold poorly like Bayonetta probably will?
Earthbound: The game that mocked your struggle against pallete swaps of Pack Rat by boasting a cup of coffee as one of its most feared enemies. When it was released in 1994, Final Fantasy VI had just become the benchmark for storytelling in a console game, the crown in a Super Nintendo role-playing lineup that was setting the system apart from the Sega Genesis. And here was Earthbound tearing apart a genre that had gone unchanged since Dragon Quest.
And despite selling poorly, Earthbound was right. We just managed to roll through a decade that the Japanese Role-Playing Game embraced its clichés a bit too tight.
Meanwhile, Bayonetta is a scathing criticism of modern beat ‘em ups, a mess of Dragon Ball Z characters who use quick-time events to slam a garage door on a dragon’s head. And people are embarrassed to play Bayonetta? Anyone notice that God of War II’s opening level pits you against the Colossus of Rhodes? A bronze statue that slams his foot through a building onto Kratos, only to be thrown flat on his ass because the player pressed Circle fast enough? Nobody laughed at that? It felt like the baby steps in a bad horror movie, an axe murderer putting holes through the top of a getaway car when it seemed the good guys made it out.
Gaming needs titles like Bayonetta and Earthbound to remind us of our complacency. Why? Played a first-person shooter lately? Most of the characters wouldn’t be out of place on the front cover of a bodybuilding magazine. Seen the latest one? It’s called Quantum Theory. No, it is not the Japanese-developed sequel to Gears of War.
Anyone up for eviscerating the first-person shooter? I’ll buy three of any game you put out.
New Super Mario Brothers Wii
Nintendo Wii
Developed and Published: Nintendo
Released: November 15, 2009
It’s the return of the most pathetic three-way triangle in video games: An Italian-American stereotype saving a clueless princess from a metaphor for the French military. This time, Mario is a testament to the law of diminishing returns, an experience offering the opportunity to shout profanities at loved ones as “four-player excitment” becomes code for “this would be easier without you morons”.
Following a barbaric venture for Mario on the Nintendo DS, Shigeru Miyamoto returns to save the two-dimensional platformer that loaned him god status and he delivers on it. The only shortcomings for this terrific spin on the Nintendo meal ticket are the business practices behind it.
Peter Tomarken: And Dustin is out of the game, and that means Mary Lowell from Wichita, Kansas is our winner! Congratulations to all of our contestants, who will be going home with a wonderful prize package, and tune in next week for another exciting round of terrible terrible action on Press Your Luck!
