General gaming |
- Why Assassin's Creed III Perfectly Fits the War of Independence
- Xbox Patent Ruling Could See Console Imports Banned
- New Super Mario Bros. 2 Reveals Love for a Black Sheep
- The Walking Dead Episode One Review: Giving Zombies Their Bite Back
| Why Assassin's Creed III Perfectly Fits the War of Independence Posted: 24 Apr 2012 02:42 PM PDT Quick, try and think of a good game about the American Revolutionary War besides Assassin's Creed III. Partial credit if you picked Empire: Total War, even if it's more about imperialism in general. I'll also accept this gem of a Flash game, which plays like Hogan's Alley with a machine-gun musket. Fact is, the Revolutionary War is a difficult setting for a game. It suffers from the same problem as any game set before World War II: In the mind of the average person, all of the fighting was done single-file with muskets that had to be reloaded after every shot. It was also a war that was fought well more than 200 years ago, making it hazy at best in our collective memory. Put it this way: World War II has Band of Brothers, The Pacific, and Saving Private Ryan. The American Revolution has a great History Channel mini-series, a musical, and a middling film starring a certified crazy person. Thankfully, the people behind Assassin's Creed III appear willing to think outside the box. Consider creative lead Alex Hutchinson's comments on the topic of settings: "We've had versions of the assassin... people have thrown ideas around for probably literally any setting that people would think of. But when you get right down to it -- when we're doing the actual nitty-gritty of spending the time on it, spending a couple years making something -- we wanna go to a setting that other games haven't." Given its scarcity in other games, you can understand why Ubi looked to the Revolutionary War for ACIII. |
| Xbox Patent Ruling Could See Console Imports Banned Posted: 24 Apr 2012 01:33 PM PDT Microsoft may find itself banned from importing Xbox 360 consoles into the United States later this year if a judge's ruling is upheld. Motorola Mobility has won a ruling by U.S. International Trade Commission Judge David Shaw regarding several patents the company claims Microsoft is in violation of, Bloomberg reports. Microsoft had previously filed claims alleging Motorola was infringing on its own patents with the latter's line of Android phones. |
| New Super Mario Bros. 2 Reveals Love for a Black Sheep Posted: 24 Apr 2012 10:59 AM PDT Nintendo announced New Super Mario Bros. 2 for 3DS over the weekend, seemingly separate from the recent trademark filing for a "Super Mario Bros. 4"... yet surprising no one, given the insane sales of the original NSMB and its Wii follow-up. As often happens when news of a guaranteed best-seller hits the Internet, social media chatter about the game has been resoundingly negative; Mario fans willing to go to bat for the game or speculate that NSMB2 won't be a soulless cash grab destined to disgrace the franchise/the platform/the entire concept of video games at large seem almost overwhelmingly outnumbered by cynics convinced it will do all of that and worse. You know how the ancient Mayan calendar ends in 2012? Possibly because the world ends? Yeah. New Super Mario Bros. 2's fault. Reddit said so. This negativity makes a certain degree of sense, as web forums and game-centric aggregator sites are dominated by avid gamers who follow the news closely but aren't necessarily the target audience for the mass-appealing NSMB games. The warm reception originally afforded to the first DS entry has largely been reconned out of existence by people who found the dynamic and inventive Super Mario Galaxy titles more to their liking; they look back and realize that they were simply happy to have classic Mario in any form yet have come to find Galaxy's fresh new ideas better match their expectations for a Mario game. Add to that the fact that the Galaxy games sell only a fraction of the NSMB titles -- disturbing the perpetual chip on the nerd collective's shoulder -- and you have an us-versus-them tempest brewing in a Super Mushroom-shaped teapot. |
| The Walking Dead Episode One Review: Giving Zombies Their Bite Back Posted: 24 Apr 2012 09:03 AM PDT At one point in time, the concept of a zombie apocalypse stood as a genuinely terrifying idea. But, over the years, zombies have begun to serve a different role altogether; for the most part, they've become meat pinatas, assisting us in acting out our creative ultraviolent fantasies. Dead Rising and Dead Island may give us the chance to take out thousands of zombies with patently ridiculous weapons, but the badass protagonists of these particular games barely bat an eye at the moldering hordes trying to get a taste of their sweet innards. When compared to these exaggerated experiences, Telltale's The Walking Dead feels much more like a documentary than Dead Alive; each and every undead encounter is meaningful (and horrible), and taking down a single zombie amounts to much more effort than tearing your way through wet tissue paper. This grounded approach meshes well with the typical slower pace of the traditional adventure formula, and also makes for one of the more atypical and interesting zombie games seen in quite some time. After Telltale's dreadful Jurassic Park, the company looked to be headed in a dangerous direction; JP's QTE-based gameplay might have been highly approachable, but it removed most of what we've come to expect (and love) from their brand. The Walking Dead doesn't return completely to the mechanics seen in the later Sam and Max seasons and Tales of Monkey Island, but it gives the player back some much-needed agency, rather than forcing them to undergo neverending series of button prompts. Make no mistake: the interface can't get any simpler. The ways you can interact with objects and people have been reduced to their absolute basics, and old-school adventure game fans may be disappointed to find that the main character doesn't have a pithy comment for every piece of background scenery. You can definitely feel Telltale's hand guiding you throughout, though the developer has provided just the right amount of wiggle room to allow their story to be told effectively. Horror relies entirely on tension, which can easily be broken if players are allowed to meander for minutes, poking at puzzles and exhausting their character's knowledge of everything in his pockets. |
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