General gaming

General gaming

OP-ED: Netflix's Failures Highlight Steam's Strength

Posted: 28 Feb 2012 04:00 PM PST

Netflix subscribers will find their movie selection gutted tomorrow, as the service removes thousands of movies and TV shows due to the end of its contract with the premium cable movie network Starz, which, while providing only around 5% of the overall Netflix library, just happens to offer some of the more popular content.

The same thing happens to online game providers, from Netflix-like streaming services like OnLive, to more traditional digital distribution platforms like Xbox Live or Steam. With all this uncertainty one might be tempted to simply stick with physical media, but despite what its ardent defenders will tell you, the physical media sold by normal retail channels comes with a finite lifespan. Regardless of whether you stream, download, or buy optical discs, no game you purchase will last forever, and any streaming service will face periodic mass delistings like Netflix as contracts change every few years. Meaning downloadable game services may offer you the best chance of playing your favorite game thirty years from now.

SSX Review: The Former King of the Mountain Returns

Posted: 28 Feb 2012 02:30 PM PST

The past year has found gaming in the midst of a PlayStation 2 renaissance that, while a bit premature, has been embraced with open arms. With copious amounts of HD Collections, PSN remakes, and franchise reboots like Twisted Metal, gamers are able to re-experience all that the early aughts had to offer. EA has never been one to shy away from an industry trend, so it's not surprising that we find ourselves with a new installment in the SSX series. The early PS2 entries in the franchise helped define the extreme sports genre with their blistering speed, environmental hazards, and otherworldly tricks. This new addition brings back all of these elements and more, but is it enough to reignite gamers' love affair with the series?

SSX has you globetrotting on a mission to survive nine of the gnarliest mountain ranges the planet has to offer. There's some semblance of a story regarding you trying to recruit new members to your team, but you're better off not worrying about that. Instead, concentrate on the fact that you'll eventually cut through powder on all seven continents. While EA has touted that each of the locations in the game were created using data gathered by NASA, the courses themselves play out more like a battle-zone of rubble with the sole purpose of destroying your rider. This minefield of destruction isn't helped by the fact that the way your character reacts to an obstacle tends to differ from time to time -- causing a distinct lack of confidence between the player and their avatar. Add to that unreliable physics that lead to far too many instances where your only option is to restart a challenge. In a game rife with as many environmental dangers as SSX, not knowing whether you'll bounce off a tree unscathed or be thrown into the air in a mess of flailing limbs creates countless moments of frustration. While there is a rewind function that allows you to reverse time, you're only given a limited number of uses on each run. In the early Tony Hawk titles, which arguably represent the pinnacle of the extreme sports genre, seasoned players were able to enter a sort of zen-like mode of play where they felt at one with their character as well as the environment. Sadly, this unity is never allowed to be fully realized throughout the course of SSX.

Our Mass Effect Voice Casting Wish List

Posted: 28 Feb 2012 01:43 PM PST

Feature

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Our Mass Effect Voice Casting Wish List

All the Hollywood stars BioWare forgot to cast in their latest game.

By: Bob Mackey February 28, 2012

Yes, BioWare got your letters. Due to unprecedented demand, Mass Effect 3 will feature the voice of early-aughts dreamhunk Freddie Prinze Jr.; so now, all of you closet Delgo fans can rest assured that a CGI movie starring a cast of nauseating monkey lizards did not sink his promising voiceover career. The one problem, though, is that Prinze's voice lacks character -- possibly due to the silver spoon that's been lodged in his mouth since birth.

Great voice acting comes from vocal chords with a bit more seasoning, be it from decades of decadence, the sheer struggle of breaking out in the business, or nightly gargling of whiskey, broken glass, and sea water often known as the "Tom Waits Cocktail." Just listen to the baritone rumble of Martin Sheen and tell me he couldn't immediately voice-act any Teen Choice Award winner into complete submission. Unfortunately, this secret Estevez is one of the few Mass Effect cast members with such a legendary larynx, leaving we as a people to wonder what could happen if BioWare welcomed more actors with the same degree of distinctiveness.

Apple Set to Announce iPad 3 Next Week

Posted: 28 Feb 2012 01:20 PM PST

iPad 3 event invite

Without confirming any of the specifics, Apple today sent out invites for an event where it will be making an iPad announcement of some sort. The heavily-rumored iPad 3 is expected to be revealed during the March 7 event in San Francisco, and based upon the teaser image above, it will come equipped with the same Retina Display technology seen in the iPhone 4 and 4S.

Retina Display support has probably been the most popular rumor over the past six-plus months, and with good reason -- the screen on the two most recent iPhone models is absolutely gorgeous, and the idea of bringing that to a much larger screen is exciting. 4G LTE has also been cited as a possibility for the device, support for which is still absent even in the most recent, high-end iPhone.

OP-ED: It Takes More Than Hollywood Talent to Tell a Story in Games

Posted: 28 Feb 2012 11:26 AM PST

I can only imagine that providing your voice for a video game is akin to acting in a silent film. This may seem like a stretch considering that the film requires pure pantomime whereas a video game asks the opposite from a performer. Yet both forms of acting require an artist to direct their performance towards an audience who can only accept it with a singular sense. Yes, voice actors in video games are given an avatar to inhabit, but the actor rarely has a hand in creating this visage. They instead have to rely solely on their vocal theatricality to create a character through cadence, timing and a true ability to imagine and understand the virtual world that isn't quite around them.

As games have matured throughout the decades, it's become more and more commonplace for titles to feature a litany of high-caliber Hollywood names. When a remarkable thespian like Ben Kingsley appears in Fable III, it's obvious that video games have the ability to draw in the highest of talent. If you need more proof, look no further than the call sheet for Mass Effect 2. The second act in Bioware's sci-fi trilogy features the notable voices of Academy Award winners and science fiction royalty. But it takes more than a litany of successes to excel in voicing a video game. It isn't their prior achievements that elevate the game's narrative, but rather the actor's ability to wholly realize the story that they each inhabit.

Mass Effect 2 By the Numbers

Posted: 28 Feb 2012 11:22 AM PST

For our week of Mass Effect 2 analyses, I thought it might be interesting to look at data on how people played the game -- what percentage of players imported save files from the first game, the ratio of those who played a male Shepard vs. female, etc. And then I remembered BioWare already did that, putting out its own statistics in 2010 (check out IGN's summary graphic above). But that doesn't mean we can't have our own fun. So I poked around on the Internet a bit, polled 1UP readers/coworkers, and came up with the following list.

Binary Domain Review: What Happens When You Add Robots to Gears of War

Posted: 28 Feb 2012 11:00 AM PST

One could dismiss Binary Domain as a "Gears of War clone with robots" and call it a day. But while some games find themselves locked in development for years with vast ambitions, other titles function on a smaller scale and can still shine -- even though their scope might be much smaller. Binary Domain seems to fit in the latter; it explores plenty of familiar territory, and while its attempts to innovate within the cover-based shooter genre aren't executed exceedingly well, I'm left with fond memories of playing it.

The game puts you in control of Sergeant Dan Marshall, who then gets tasked by the International Technology Robot Agency (ITRA) office to infiltrate and investigate the Amada Corporation -- said robotics manufacturer is suspected of producing "hollow children," or robots that imitate humans. This Blade Runner-style premise gets paired with visuals reminiscent of I, Robot. Though, your first contact with a robot has it attacking, rather than speaking to, you, and within two minutes dozens of robots assault you from all side. Which is something I actually appreciate in Binary Domain -- how it doesn't waste time during its nine hour campaign. The campaign does an excellent job of slowly filling the player in on the backstory, and overall there's a great balance of action and dialogue to keep you engaged.

Devil Survivor 2 Review: As Addictive as It is Formulaic

Posted: 28 Feb 2012 09:05 AM PST

Three teenagers -- a mutable boy with headphones, a nervous and slightly nerdy boy, and a busty girl they barely know -- are hanging out in Tokyo Shibuya's ward one day. Suddenly, disaster strikes! A massive earthquake rips the city apart, knocking out the power grid, phone service, trains, utilities, everything. The city's harried survivors huddle together in parks and other open spaces as the trio, brought together by this disaster and unified by their possession of mysterious cell phones that still work, find themselves responding to eerie predictions of their own deaths by summoning demons -- pixies, ogres, kobolds, and more -- with their phones. Soon, they become embroiled in a much larger tale as the vanguard of humanity's battle against an incursion of otherworldly monsters that threatens the whole of the world, facing off against ever more powerful invaders through turn-based combat with grid-based deployment.

If all of this sounds familiar, that's because this is the premise of 2009's Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor for DS (and last year's slightly tweaked 3DS remake, Overclocked). It is also, to a word, the premise of Devil Survivor 2. You'd be forgiven for writing off DS2 as a copy-and-paste rehash of its predecessor, because the similarities between the two games' opening are downright uncanny. It's not until you've invested a couple of hours into the game that it begins to spiral away from what's come before and take on its own shape and identity.

Posted by Shri Krishna

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