General gaming

General gaming

Interview: Chris Avellone On Project Eternity

Posted: 11 Oct 2012 09:22 PM PDT

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Interview: Chris Avellone On Project Eternity

As a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign continues, the designer talks about Obsidian's isometric RPG.

By: Dennis Farrell October 11, 2012

If you'd like to know what makes Obsidian Entertainment unique, consider their first project. Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords followed up a hugely successful BioWare game, featured the Star Wars license, and made a money-printing machine seem inefficient in comparison. Obsidian could have squeaked by with a straightforward, unambitious sequel but instead, they used the first game's superfluous good/evil mechanic as part of a larger effort to question Star Wars' rigid morality. This approach presented all sorts of challenges, but it also made for a worthwhile story, so they went for it.

For the better part of a decade, the studio has continued to set itself apart by exploring fantastical worlds with complex themes. This brand of storytelling has earned Obsidian a devoted following. How devoted? With the help of these fans it took just over a day to reach a Kickstarter goal of 1.1 million dollars for Project Eternity, an original PC RPG in the style of the genre's most beloved isometric games.

Like No One Ever Was: What Makes Pokemon a Great Competitive RPG

Posted: 11 Oct 2012 06:07 PM PDT

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1UP COVER STORY

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1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF OCTOBER 8 | DEATHMATCH! GAMES AND COMPETITION

Like No One Ever Was: What Makes Pokemon a Great Competitive RPG

Cover Story: Is Pokemon really as deep as everyone says it is? We break it down.

I

 think it's fair to say that my first truly competitive Pokemon battle was a disaster.

It was 2003, and the release of Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire had prompted me to return to the series after a long hiatus. I soon found a script on IRC where I could play simulated Pokemon battles and threw together a handful of my favorites. I don't remember the exact team -- Gengar and Starmie were definitely on it -- but I do remember putting a Choice Band on an Absol with Swords Dance.

Sonic Adventure 2 Review: 2 Little 2 Late

Posted: 11 Oct 2012 05:46 PM PDT

For those who love the Sonic the Hedgehog games of two generations ago, Sega has seen fit to release a port of Sonic Adventure 2 for 2012 just as you remember it. Bless them for ensuring both SA games returned, but honestly, I could duplicate almost the entirety of my review of the first Sonic Adventure's rerelease two years ago, because the criticisms are so similar: this is a lateral port of a game that has no additions or significant improvements to it, which is only bad because it really could have used some. Sure, in terms of raw gameplay, Sonic Adventure 2 is improved over the first game (you definitely don't fall through the world as often), but that's because it always was. Regardless, credit must be given to the fact that this new port of Sonic Adventure 2 is properly fitted for widescreen rather than being stuck in a permanent 4:3 box like the first game (though cut-scenes do appear in 4:3 for some reason). And of course it's in high definition, so for the first time, SA2 is shown as crisp and clear as possible.

But that's just a drop in the bucket compared to all the lingering issues: The sensitive and imprecise control, where almost every character seems to go from a running start and can't be easily turned/aimed; the super-fast camera that you can't ever seem to get to stay in one place; the awful lip-sync animation (at the points where it's present, anyway); the occasional boss fight where you never know what you're doing but still win through brute force, and the dry English translations for almost anything that isn't spoken. I don't mean the game should've been remade to compete with Super Mario Galaxy, but more than a few little problems persist, and they could have been adjusted. So nothing was really fixed, including my biggest pet peeve about Sonic Adventure 2: the badly-mixed audio. The music consistently drowns out character dialogue (particularly Eggman, who is basically inaudible at any given moment), and more than a few cut-scenes feature characters talking over each other before they finish a thought. Note that I haven't yet said anything about the music itself, which is a mix of often-vocalized rock and hip-hop that's definitely not fit for public consumption, but nonetheless fits the whole Sonic Adventure "aura" and is pure ironic enjoyment. In that sense, it's better than ever.

Editorial: The Flip Side of Competitive Gaming

Posted: 11 Oct 2012 03:21 PM PDT

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1UP COVER STORY

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1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF OCTOBER 8 | DEATHMATCH! GAMES AND COMPETITION

Editorial: The Flip Side of Competitive Gaming

Cover Story: Playing to win is all well and good, but playing together is even better.

O

ur competitive gaming cover story comes hot on the heels of last week's Resident Evil cover, which means that I've been kind of useless as a contributor to the site I run for two weeks in a row. I've never really followed the Resident Evil series, and truth be told I don't find much appeal in head-to-head competition, either. That's not to say I haven't spent a fair amount of time with either one, but it's kind of a grudging relationship.

To be fair, I have a lot of fond memories of going up against friends in some great games. My brother and I struggled to top the other in free-play rounds of Joust in the lobby of the dormitory my grandparents supervised when I was a kid; later, we chipped in together to share the cost of an NES and would spend hours trying to shut the other one out in R.B.I. Baseball and Hoops (the novelty of scoring into the triple digits against the computer eventually ran dry). When Street Fighter II hit the Super NES, all the friends who thought I was frivolous to have bought a video game system suddenly started showing up at my home and begging me to bring the system along when I went to visit theirs. That was probably the closest I ever came to truly enjoying the competitive game: As the only one of my peer group with SFII, I had the most practice with it, and their clumsy flailings were no match for someone who had played enough to eke out a victory against M. Bison at the infuriatingly unfair top difficulty level with every fighter on the roster. (Except Zangief. That guy sucked.)
Posted by Shri Krishna

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