Category Archives: Previews

Could multiplayer be Mass Effect 3′s saving grace?

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I hate multiplayer. Unreal Tournament 2004 with my college buddies was the most recently I’ve enjoyed playing with other people. I tried games like Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead and didn’t particularly enjoy them. Borderlands was fun, but I preferred playing by myself—it was sad and depressing, but I hated having to deal with other people.

Mass Effect 3′s multiplayer, though, is different. To use a sad, tired cliché, I had to force myself to stop playing it to write this up.

I complained quite a bit about the demo’s single player portion. And sure, the plot felt old and tired, but what surprised me was how differently the game played. It felt more like a corridor shooter than one of Mass Effect 2′s firefights, where you had a number of options at how to take out the opponent. I was worried that Bioware had forgotten that because we had all these exciting powers we didn’t want the game to become a run and shoot. Rather than guns and conversation, we should call it “Hit target with 1200 newtons of force and send him scuttling off a balcony” and conversation. That’s where the game is fun: when we’re pulling absolutely …

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Obligatory: Mass Effect 3 Ex Machina, Michael Bay, a demo

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I’ll preface this post immediately: I am not Aram, writer of our many lists about things wrong with Mass Effect 2. Of the forty five items on those lists, I probably disagree with about thirty five of them.

That being said, and I’m sure the full game will change my opinion, but ugh. This demo.

Here’s the thing: both Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 felt like they were games designed for specific audiences. Sci-fi RPG fans loved Mass Effect because it was complicated, crunchy, and had enough Star Trek epicness to be one of the greatest RPGs ever. Mass Effect 2 flipped the script and alienated a lot of fans, sure, but it was trying, unrepentantly, to be guns and conversation. It wasn’t trying to be an RPG except in conversation.

Mass Effect 3 is trying to be both games. It’s trying to make love to the world, and (to lean on an old standby) it feels like it has syphilis.

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Everything old is new: Diablo 3 beta impressions

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I have to admit, I expected something with more panache. With access to Diablo 3′s vaunted beta I expected something daring, something world-shaking. What I got was, well, Starcraft 2: a game of incremental improvements.

This is not to say I didn’t love it. When I think about Diablo 3 my palms get shaky now, even after conquering the beta with two characters, and I want to play with a third, a fourth, a fifth. I’m thinking of interesting skills I could unlock, the wonderfully simple but deep system behind them, and how I could make incredibly broken armor for my character. I keep fiddling idly with the skill set generator, thinking about synergies and how to break the game.

Blizzard games have always been gaming’s comfort food. With the lone, startling exception of Warcraft 3 their games are a sort of non-evil proto-Zynga: they take good ideas other people have and make them better. Warcraft and Starcraft codified and improved upon every Real Time Strategy cliché. Diablo took the roguelike and made it for everybody. And World of Warcraft made Everquest even more addictive; it removed the inconveniences that kept you from playing all day.

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“Kingdoms Of Amalur: Reckoning”: Demo Impressions

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I’ve been looking forward to the release of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning (KoA:R) since I first heard about it, not least of all because of the names associated with it’s production. There’s Ken Rolston, lead designer on two of the Elder Scrolls series; R.A. Salvatore, a prolific fantasty writer, perhaps best known for creating Drizzt Do’Urden; and Todd McFarlane, famous for the Spawn series of comics. Even before I had seen any sort of gameplay, I couldn’t imagine KoA:R being anything less than a stellar title. With the recent release of the demo, I took the opportunity to take it for a spin.

I’d forgive someone for drawing comparisons to the Fable series, but not as an excuse for passing it up. While it draws things like flashy combat moves, skill trees and townsfolk with exclamation marks above their heads from other action RPG’s, it blends them in a way that offers something distinct.

In the interests of getting a full idea for the game, I played through it twice. The first time, playing a wizard/rogue hybrid who sought to helpfully complete side quests and respect the tranquility of typical NPC life, and the second time playing an armored melee …

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Final Fantasy XIII-2 Demo Impressions

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Although I ultimately could not finish Final Fantasy XIII, I saw a lot of potential in its world and characters who I was actually starting to like right when the game became too frustrating for me. That’s why I was actually excited to try out the sequel for myself to see if the improvements were enough for me to revisit Cocoon and its surrounding territories.

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Demo Impressions: Fortune Summoners

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Recettear, Carpe Fulgar’s first import project for English speaking audiences, succeeded in large part because of its demo. A massive slice of the game, the Recettear demo worked so well because it was immediately apparent why we’d want to play it: Recettear was a snarky, action-packed shopping JRPG with a lot of cuteness but also with jokes that appealed to older players. We played the demo, got past our first impressions (“Otaku gibberish”) and bought the game en masse.

Fortune Summoners, their newest offering, isn’t quite as helped by a meaty demo. Not that I don’t appreciate it, but it won’t change your mind.

I’ll put my biases on the table, so you can compare your own: I’m not a huge fan of magical girls being cute and endearing. I love Japanese mechanics, but I prefer my RPG turn-based. I love schools. These are all what Fortune Summoners is: a cutesy, magical by way of not being magical girl moves to a new town and goes to a new school, a magic school. She fights monsters with her sword in a 2-D plain reminiscent of (but worlds from) Zelda 2. She has a stuffed animal she talks to at night, and …

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Purge Preview

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Warning: This preview contains moderate mechanical spoilers but no narrative spoilers.

Purge is Mirror’s Edge. No, it’s not like Mirror’s Edge, Purge IS Mirror’s Edge. A less polished version mixed with Borderlands-esque aesthetics and questionable stealth elements, but still Mirror’s Edge. Even at this early stage, it’s evident that there are very similar overtones of oppression, desperation, and parkour as a way of life rather than merely as a mode of transportation.

Purge does an excellent job of implying backstory and putting you into the Mirror’s Edge mindset from its very first moments.

Unfortunately, what’s currently available seems much closer to a proof of concept than a formal demo as much of its content is still very rough around the edges. The most obvious issues involve the controls and player character animations. While commendable for the progress made already, they’re still stiff, clunky, and only viable for novice-level platforming tricks. Other issues include a malfunctioning pause feature, a dearth of audio enhancements, some cringeworthy writing, and one of the most earsplitting sirens I’ve ever heard in a video game, but those are all things that can be fixed in due time.

ZOMFG! I suddenly find it …

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Preview: Defender’s Quest

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So hard to know what to do with these indie games. Defender’s Quest is a tower defense/RPG hybrid we covered a couple months back, and it’s set to be released soon in the traditional “Indie Beta”, which means it’ll be done and available for purchase but not quite done. I’ve given a poke at a late alpha version. It’s got the whole game inside.

Call it what you like, then. But I’ll call Defender’s Quest a damn good time, a triumphant marriage of two genres that should have always been together and a compelling yarn to boot.

Pretty much everything I said before about the game’s demo remains true in the full version, but they bear repeating: Defender’s Quest is a fairly standard tower defense game at heart, expanded upon by making the towers persistent, customizable characters. Each of the game’s six classes are surprisingly useful (well, one becomes redundant by the end, at least at this point of alpha) and feature fully fleshed out skill trees which enable you to specialize how they fight. Level up low level skills on characters and they’ll be useful to you no matter what; level up high level skills, and you’ll have to use mana …

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Predicting the nature of the Syndicate remake

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My prediction is that the upcoming FPS Syndicate will be a failure as a remake of the original game. The most succinct reason I can give for this is the remake doesn’t seem to include drivable cars.

There is one segment of the announcement trailer for Syndicate-remake that hints at vehicle riding. It shows the player riding the back of a hover-cycle while shooting down other hover cycles in a narrow alley. On EA’s official Syndicate-remake website there is one screenshot taking during this sequence which corroborates that, yes, the player is riding a hover-cycle through a narrow future alley while shooting other hover-cycles. The player is shooting behind himself so presumably someone else is steering the vehicle, presumably an NPC. The mission from which this footage is taken seems like an on-rails, vehicle, survival level where you don’t have any control of where you’re going and you can’t get out. There is no hint that you are able to drive. Every other screenshot and video shows the player traveling on foot while blasting away enemies with guns, punches, and slide kicks.

Syndicate, the one published in 1993, the one considered a classic in the lineage of video game history, it has …

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Gobbowl Impressions

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Since my current job gives me free reign over an Internet connection, I tend to avoid browser games for fear destroying my productivity. Even still my previous coverage of the game left me excited, so I was very happy to be given the opportunity to preview the game. The game was developed by Ankama games, whose previous credits include MMOPRG’s Dofus and Wakfu. After making my way through the game’s humorous tutorial and several games against other players, I’ve emerged with a lot to say about this bizarre game.  I’ve played all kinds of games across many genres of ridiculous combinations, but I can safely say Gobbowl is the first turn-based tactical sports game I’ve played. Up until now I’ve avoided sports games even more so than browser games, but Gobbowl proves you can combine two things you dislike to form something awesome. I never expected to enjoy a game like this as much as I have, in spite of thus far not being very good at it.

Set in the same world as its RPG brethren, Gobbowl simply involves choosing one of over ten preset teams and playing matches against other players. You can either choose to have an opponent …

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