General gaming

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• OP-ED: Zynga Wise to Expand to Its Own Platform
• The 1UP Community on Mass Effect 2
• Mass Effect 2 and the Advent of the Mainstream RPG
• Mass Effect 2: Shepard vs. Einstein
• How Max Payne 3 Could Be 2012's Most Cinematic Shooter
• Journey Review: The Most Exciting Nature Walk You'll Ever Go On

OP-ED: Zynga Wise to Expand to Its Own Platform Posted: 01 Mar 2012 02:29 PM PST Zynga today revealed plans for the Zynga Platform and Zynga.com, details of which we first learned about this past October. Put simply, Zynga's new website will grant players access to a number of games available on Facebook while providing additional features that could make playing much more pleasant. Playing games on Zynga.com -- when it launches later this month CastleVille, Words With Friends, Zynga Poker, CityVille, and Hidden Chronicles will be playable -- will require a Facebook account and purchases will be made using Facebook Credits thanks to a deal Zynga has with Facebook running through 2015. That means Facebook isn't being abandoned as a home for Zynga games; this is merely an alternative (and a potentially more attractive one at that) for playing the company's games. Any progress you've made in CastleVille or any other game will be present when playing on the Zynga Platform as it is not a separate instance of the game being run on Zynga's website.

The 1UP Community on Mass Effect 2 Posted: 01 Mar 2012 02:21 PM PST We've had plenty to say this week about Mass Effect 2 as we've dissected the game through blog posts, retrospectives, and critical analysis. But we're not the only ones who love the game and want to see how Commander Shepard's tale comes to an end -- you do, too. Today, we're highlighting your thoughts on BioWare's RPG smash.

Mass Effect 2 and the Advent of the Mainstream RPG Posted: 01 Mar 2012 02:20 PM PST Feature Share it: Tweet Mass Effect 2 and the Advent of the Mainstream RPG BioWare completely changed the Mass Effect series with its second chapter... and by extension changed the entire genre. By: Jeremy Parish March 1, 2012 In 1987, Nintendo developed Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, the sequel to the incredibly popular and wildly influential NES hit The Legend of Zelda. It was in many ways a dramatic departure from its predecessor: An action-oriented platformer built on the success of a quest-driven proto-RPG. Its determination to buck expectations resulted in a slightly uneven title which, in hindsight, is broadly regarded as the black sheep of the entire series. Nearly a quarter of a century later, we had Mass Effect 2, which did something remarkably similar to Zelda's first sequel. A series that was in its first installment a numbers-driven RPG dressed in the trappings of a squad-based shooter has all but abandoned those RPG mechanics to become, unabashedly, a squad-based shooter. It's an uncannily deep shooter to be sure, but it represents a dramatic change of genre nevertheless. Yet the transformation of Mass Effect is much less obvious than Zelda's was; the advance of technology has made it easier to hide such substantial mechanical shifts. Zelda went from a top-down Adventure derivative to a side-scroller that seemed more akin to Dragon Buster or Castlevania with its emphasis on reflex-heavy conflict and a reliance on action concepts like lives. Meanwhile, aside from its streamlined HUD, Mass Effect 2 still looks like the same basic game its predecessor was. Underneath that surface, however, RPG-based dice rolls and randomness have been abandoned in favor of direct point-and-shoot action. And unlike Zelda, it's been met with nearly universal critical acclaim for so elegantly bucking expectations. You can chalk that up to any number of factors -- changing tastes, maybe, or perhaps the fact that the original Mass Effect was a godawful hodgepodge of ill-fitting elements that mostly got by on sheer chutzpah and desperately needed reinvention -- but nevertheless it's interesting to consider that one of the most dramatically divergent video game sequels in recent memory earned its plaudits by stripping out many of the role-playing elements that made the first game so unique. Meanwhile, Final Fantasy XIII took largely the same approach to its design, yet it was incredibly divisive: A virtual line in the sand across which different schools of fans lob complaints and epithets at one another. Again, you can spin this however you choose -- FFXIII botched its attempt, possibly, or then again maybe its fans simply aren't as accepting of evolution -- but the fact of the matter is, the role-playing game is changing.

Mass Effect 2: Shepard vs. Einstein Posted: 01 Mar 2012 02:20 PM PST Feature Share it: Tweet Mass Effect 2: Shepard vs. Einstein He can take on the Reapers, but what about the laws of physics? By: Ryan Winterhalter March 1, 2012 Science-fiction fans maintain a love/hate relationship with Albert Einstein. The German scientist demonstrated that the universe and its physical laws behave far more strangely than even the most fantastic stories would have predicted. At the same time, his insights revealed a much more ho-hum future for humanity than many would otherwise have envisioned. Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, the traffic cop of the universe, will keep humanity quarantined to the immediate vicinity of our star and its eight planets. As if resigning humanity to our pleasant if somewhat dull galactic neighborhood wasn't bad enough, Einstein's laws present an even bigger challenge for Commander Shepard, who wants to save the other 100 billion stars in the galaxy from the Reapers. What would Mass Effect look like if it followed the laws of Special Relativity? Could Shepard and the Normandy battle back an invasion? Let's find out. Light travels at around 186,000 miles per second in a vacuum, which sounds fast, but even at that speed the nearest star to Earth lies four years away. In some cases, the stars we see in the night sky with the unaided eye discharged their light two billion years before our sun began burning. In other words, space is really, really big and any fiction set in it, like Mass Effect, needs to invent a quicker method of travel. Though the games take great pains to explain away the tech behind the mass relays and the ship's faster-than-light engines, the fact remains that humans will never travel faster than light-speed, because nothing else in the universe can do it, either.

How Max Payne 3 Could Be 2012's Most Cinematic Shooter Posted: 01 Mar 2012 09:00 AM PST Most video game cut-scenes are pretty terrible; they tend to be static shots of two characters yammering at each other with occasional arm waves or somesuch. Rockstar games, especially the more recent ones, at least tried to emulate movies -- in that the camera moves around, or the characters actually pace around or engage each other during a conversation. While previous Max Payne installments featured comic panels as a storytelling device, the newest installment, Max Payne 3, opts for an interesting fusion of traditional in-game engine cut-scene and said comic panels. It's a fusion because rather than use either cut-scenes or comic-panels-with-voiceover, these storytelling moments unfold as cut-scenes that get divided into panels. During an early sequence where Max discusses the kidnapping of Fabiana Branco (the wife of Max's new boss, Sao Paulo real estate mogul Rodrigo Branco), the conversation would unfold like a traditional cut-scene, but then the visuals would pause and undergo a quick color shift. That moment then gets locked into a panel on left side of the screen while the rest of the conversation continues forward uninterrupted before another pause, or color shift, or camera change gets locked into another panel. In addition to slicing and shifting a conversation from cinematic to on-screen comic page, the game also emphasizes key points by telegraphing words and sentences on the screen (which reminds me of the way Tony Scott played with subtitle usage and placement in his movie Man on Fire). It all results in a distinct visual style that hasn't been explored very much (the closest analog I can think of is the Ultimate Spider-Man game, and that was much more cartoony and resembled traditional comic art), and makes what would be a normal cut-scene stand out as something

Journey Review: The Most Exciting Nature Walk You'll Ever Go On Posted: 01 Mar 2012 09:00 AM PST At its simplest level, Journey is a game about walking. You start in a desert, controlling a character without a name or a backstory or even knowing if you're human. Your only objective comes from the camera angle pointing towards a mountain in the distance. So you walk up a small hill and start to learn this is how it's going to work. The game isn't going to tell you anything. It's going to give you a vague sense of direction and let you go there when you're ready. There's no challenge. You move slowly. And your only abilities are to jump and shout, or whatever you call it when your character emits a sonar bubble to interact with the world.

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