Gaming Today |
- iRequiem Review
- GameFront 2010: The Year’s Funniest (And Best?) User Created Videos
- Get Limbo for $10 on XBLA Today
- Buy a Windows Phone 7, Get an Xbox 360 Game
- N.O.V.A. 2 Review
- GameFront 2010: The Year’s Most Shocking Gaming News
| Posted: 31 Dec 2010 02:47 PM PST
Things start out pretty slow with iRequiem, and at first the iPhone game seems like it might not be very fun. A side-scroller set on a stationary background, you’re basically just hacking away at several different kinds of enemies. But as iRequiem goes on, the enemies become more varied and difficult and you can gather more weapons and abilities, taking what could have been a pretty boring title and making it a strategic and addictive hack-and-slash experience. You’re battling your way through hell in order to reclaim your soul, but “through” isn’t really the word for it. There are 50 levels in the campaign mode, spread across five locations, but they’re all actually the same place with a slightly different look. Each level contains a church and a shop: the former is a place where you can activate special magic spells, the latter is your safe zone in between levels. Both are always in the same places, and you can move back and forth on the stage. Each level’s goal is survival. You’ll hack through something like 23 total different kinds of enemies, each with their own strengths, weaknesses and combat patterns. A timer runs down during each level, and when it depletes completely, you get to head back to the shop to purchase new weapons and abilities. The money to pay for said items is procured from gold drops and treasure chests that show up as you do your killing. Once you’re able to start buying new weapons and items, things pick up. You start with a pair of claws as your melee weapon and a slow-firing bow, but you can upgrade to better items for both. The ranged weapons each have several upgrades, as well as different available kinds you can switch to on the fly — a shotgun is one of the first, but you’ll wind up with a fully upgraded rocket launcher in your repertoire by the third or fourth areas. You can also buy spells that use up magic power (replenished by item drops), amulets that give you passive abilities, and health items between stages.
The depth of combat items and customization is what saves iRequiem. The game is pretty thin, though it can be addictive — each level sees new enemies or different combinations of old ones, forcing you to change up your strategies and weapons to deal with them effectively. You’ll also be playing against your ammo counter — 400 shotgun shells won’t last long if you make it your primary weapon, for example, but a heavy reliance on ranged weapons has a trade off of leaving you less vulnerable to attack. Deciding which weapons to use based on ammo, range, effectiveness and enemy type keeps the potentially repetitive combat fresh. You also get access to different chargeable abilities, which breaks up the action even further. As you kill enemies, their bodies dissolve and leave behind souls that you can collect to fire a big spell from the church. These spells are available to you as soon as you learn how to use them, while other abilities and spells have to be earned or purchased. They all have different effects, like restoring your health and magic or making you invisible to enemies, and last for a limited time. Depending on what you need, the church spells can tip the balance in a level, or give you the boost you need to reach the end of the timer. Dealing and taking damage also charges your adrenaline meter, which eventually gives you access to an ability called your Dark Power. Like the church spells, these last for a limited time but can seriously help you — while spells cast from soul power tend to be defensive or at least related to your character, Dark Power spells are generally offensive and super-powered. They can even help you best a boss that might otherwise kill you, so saving up adrenaline and accessing Dark Powers at the right time is crucial to success.
There are a few other elements, as well. You have access to limited use magic you can doll out any time, there are often explosive barrels spread around the map at intervals that you can tap to ravage enemies, and every so often you’ll get access to a vehicle that makes you invincible and thrashes enemies for a short amount of time. No one element in iRequiem is anything to scream about, but taken together, they make for an easy to play but still deep and engrossing combat experience. Graphically, the game isn’t bad, but don’t expect iRequiem to wow you as far as its capabilities. There are some cool-looking enemies mixed in, and the game is generally pretty bloody as you hack through demons, but it’s fairly cartoonish in its style. This isn’t a game whose gore is going to turn your stomach, as some people have made it out to be, but if you’re not a fan of digital monster guts, you might want to look away. As far as style is concerned, it’s difficult to tell if iRequiem’s little elements like its main character’s one liners are intentionally campy or just totally out of touch. He spouts lines like “born to be wild,” which is…well, goofy. He’s sort of a low-rent, demonic Duke Nukem, but certainly less funny and weirder. The bad translation of some of the text dialogue makes the lines even more questionable. That’s a minor complaint, though — the awkwardness of the hopefully intentional camp doesn’t really distract from the actual gameplay. And overall, iRequiem is a decent iPhone game: addictive, easy to play and pretty fun. It’s not going to take the App Store by storm or anything, but iRequiem is a worthy download at $1.99. Pros:
Cons:
Final Score: 78
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| GameFront 2010: The Year’s Funniest (And Best?) User Created Videos Posted: 31 Dec 2010 01:17 PM PST A great entertainment product takes a LOT of time and people. Techies, artists, writers, investors, and an insanely large number of specialized, very specific taskers, work for years just to make something intended to be fun. It also takes enthused customers, the kind of people who don’t just love something but want to declare the thing they love to be a religion. Nowhere (aside from comics) will you find more distilled versions of any of these factors than in gaming, particularly when it comes ot enthused customers. That enthusiasm leads to some hilarious , and sometimes, staggeringly awesome outcomes. Do something right and endless rivers of praise flow to you. F-ck up and the outrage will hurt your ancestors’ feelings. Someone who spends their childhood playing Tetris might one day grow up to make something like the final video in this list. Someone without a personal filter and an internet connection might broadcast their deepest thoughts to the world, heedless of the potential cost to themselves. Either way, tribute and dissing are best when they come in the form of fan created videos, and here are GameFront’s most hilarious (and simply best) user created videos from 2010. Super Mario MinecraftMinecraft has been the source of so, so much WIN in 2010 that we already gave it its own best of 2010 category. But we’d be remiss if we didn’t also include some of the best hilarity ever that didn’t make that list. Here’s the best use of anyone’s time ever – someone created their own Mario World using Minecraft.
StarCraft 2 Lord of The DanceThis is so incredible it ought to become an expansion pack. Watch through to the very end for maximum hilarity.
The Ultimate Post-Breakup F*ck YouAnd speaking of StarCraft 2, I don’t know what this guy did but I’m guessing a combination of cheating, stealing and STD transmission because his ex girlfriend delivered the most painful, and hilarious, retribution ever. WARNING: As is often the case with breakups, there’s a lot of F-bombs. Turn the volume down.
Street Fighter HighIt’s Teen Mom crossed with The Secret Life of the American Teenager crossed with the Street Fighter series. I particularly love how Hadouken is nothing more than two bromeos shouting at each other.
Crazy Profane GamerThis obsessive Pokemon fan amused the internet like crazy when he put out this video proclaiming his love of the upcoming Pokemon game. WARNING: he drops N-bombs like Lil’ Wayne.
Ohhhh, wait, except it seems he’s also obsessive about Mass Effect 2, too. I smell comedian working the viral angle. Even so, that Pokemon video is, in fact, off the chain, so I don’t care. Kabuto The Python – Those MineralsThis tribute/dis track to Mass Effect 2′s obligatory mining minigame is f-ck-ng hilarious, but also kind of good. WOW Guy Angry About WOW And Irate About Star Trek OnlineJust watch it.
Blizz Con’s Red Shirt GuyThis guy rules. Not only because this guy is trekkie than the trekkiest Trek nerd ever, but also because he schooled Blizzard about their own game.
He also recorded an even more awesome follow up addressing his unwitting internet notoriety. Best Football Announcer Ever Playing Madden NFL 11 VideoWARNING: Inexplicable N-bombs galore.
Pixels!We’ll leave you with the best of the lot. PIxels is so high quality you can’t believe it isn’t a viral marketing campaign for a very high budget film. But nope, no deception. Watch as New York City is gradually converted to 8-bit graphics by marauding hordes of classic gaming characters.
H/T Earnest Pettie.
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| Get Limbo for $10 on XBLA Today Posted: 31 Dec 2010 12:53 PM PST
Jump on Xbox Live today and download Limbo for just 800 Microsoft points — the equivalent of about $10, and a third cheaper than the usual price. The discount is part of Xbox Live’s Countdown to 2011 promotion, which has a bunch of other things on sale, as well — although Limbo is probably the most noteworthy. If you don’t already have this one, now’s the time: we gave Limbo a nod for one of the year’s Best Game Stories, for being one of its Hardest Games, and as one of the most Violent Games of the Year. So yeah, Limbo’s cool, and it’s available for a great price for a limited time. You can haz it. Via Joystiq.
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| Buy a Windows Phone 7, Get an Xbox 360 Game Posted: 31 Dec 2010 12:24 PM PST
Thinking about getting a Windows Phone 7? No? No idea what a Windows Phone 7 even is? Guess what — you’re the target market for Microsoft’s new phone promotion. In the battle for smartphone operating system supremacy, Google and Apple might be duking it out, but Microsoft is totally in the picture, too. But in the background, off to the side, and much smaller. But in order to at least try to tap into its Xbox 360 customer base, the new promo will hand out Xbox 360 games along with the purchase of a new Windows Phone 7 smartphone. The deal is only valid through AT&T and T-Mobile, and you can check it out here. Four games are available to snag along with your phone: Kinectimals, Kinect Joy Ride, Halo: Reach and Fable III. Both Reach and Fable are both available for $39.99 on Amazon.com, with the two Kinect titles parked at around $45 — which kind of torpedoes the whole “$60 value” bit of the promo, but hey, free is free. And speaking of free — apparently any time you buy a Windows Phone 7 device, you get a second one free. So hell, maybe it is worth it to start looking into iPhone alternatives. You lose out on Infinity Blade, but apparently you get a lot of Xbox Live connectivity.
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| Posted: 31 Dec 2010 11:59 AM PST
It’s tough to do first-person shooters on Apple’s iOS devices, mostly on account of the fact that a phone is not a controller. Most entries use some combination of virtual joysticks and swiping at the screen, which, along with being totally, is really not very intuitive. It’s hard to match the fast-twitch experience of a console or PC shooter on a phone, and while there are some games in the iTunes App Store that are fun, they usually fall a little short of being amazing. Gameloft’s N.O.V.A. 2 does iPhone FPS about as well as it can be done, and while it’s not of the quality of full-size games on bigger platforms, it comes pretty close. It utilizes the a combination of swiping and gyroscope controls to create a more intuitive targeting experience, but necessities like really sticky auto-aim make N.O.V.A. 2 a little too easy. The N.O.V.A. series is compared pretty routinely to Bungie’s Halo games (Gameloft tends to take winning console concepts and turn them into iPhone vehicles), and that’s a fairly accurate description of what’s going on here. Set six years after the first N.O.V.A. installment, the game picks up with former Near Orbital Vanguard Alliance operative Kal working running missions to stop an alliance of humans and aliens from eventually enslaving humanity — or something. Story isn’t important — what’s important are the various instances of blasting away at enemy Volterites, and there are plenty of those. N.O.V.A. 2 gets a lot of moments right: Gameloft has piled on a lot of varying environments, ranging from open jungle to a staging yard for giant mechs. Each level has you pounding through enemies with what eventually becomes a huge compliment of weapons. Some are pretty standard — rocket launchers, sniper rifles, assault rifles and shotguns — but they all have different strategic uses and feel strong and useful. For the most part, the gyroscopic aiming works well in all respects, except that it takes some getting used to. You’ll wave your phone around in front of you, as every motion translates to a movement of your reticule in the game; if you’re not familiar with the process, it kind of emulates moving a camera around in order to shoot different objects in the room. It’s not exactly a new development for FPS games on the iOS platform, but it’s utilized well here. Once you’re used to moving your phone in physical space to adjust your virtual aim, it becomes a pretty immersive way of fighting. But in order to compensate for the inherent lack of accuracy with this method — it’s not like using a mouse or a controller, after all — Gameloft has installed an auto-aim system that helps out quite a bit. It’s adjustable in the options menu, but starts out at the highest level of assistance when you load out the game. It’s both good and bad; the auto-aim makes it easy to get used to N.O.V.A. 2′s aiming mechanics if you’re not already familiar with them, which is nice, but it also takes away a lot of the challenge of being a sharpshooter, which is kind of what the FPS genre is all about.
Challenge is a little bit of an issue for the game in general. The hardest difficulty isn’t accessible until after you’ve cleared the campaign mode once, and on its default setting, it’s hard to fail or die in most circumstances. Like Halo, you’re given an energy shield to protect you from enemy fire, which is represented by a meter that depletes on the top of the screen. Once that’s gone, you can take a few more shots before you’re dropped. Avoid fire for a few seconds and you’ll get both damage counters back up to full strength. Especially early in the game, it takes a lot to kill Kal. You won’t really start to feel the hurt until the last few levels of the game. So between the auto-aiming and the overprotective shield system, you’ll have a tendency to waltz through a large portion of the game without having to really worry about it. It also doesn’t help that enemy AI is lacking in intelligence, although it’s by no means broken. Enemies are smart enough to dive clear of fire or drop behind cover, but don’t expect them to do much more than stand up and shoot you, or charge at you and shoot you, or circle whatever obstacle is in their way and shoot you. More often than not, you’ll find yourself just going toe-to-toe with whatever enemy you’re facing, waiting for them to drop first before you move on to your next human roadblock. But while the combat doesn’t always stretch your abilities, Gameloft has come up with a few ways to make sure you’re always engaged. On-foot levels almost always direct you to your next objective with a guide arrow, which makes it impossible to get lost, and there are lots of points where you’ll hop into a vehicle or be tasked with defending a fixed position. At one point, you’ll find yourself piloting a giant mech and tearing through everything in your path, and while it’s not the most amazing sequence ever, it’s definitely a satisfying one. One of the best ways that N.O.V.A. 2 keeps its players interested is with its beautiful visuals. Gameloft has put together a very solid-looking game — one of the better available on the iPhone, period — and that helps a lot with drawing you in and making trying to shoot bad guys on your phone easy and enjoyable.
In addition to the very capable and pretty lengthy (especially for an iPhone game) single-player campaign, N.O.V.A. 2 also packs an online multiplayer mode that can support up to 10 combatants at a time. It requires a Wi-Fi connection to run (unless you want to play locally via Bluetooth), but with a good connection it functions extremely well. What there is is pretty standard — free-for-all and team-based death matches, mostly — but again, we’re seeing a standard of quality on iOS here that isn’t usually achieved. N.O.V.A. 2 won’t replace any FPS you’ve played on a more traditional platform, but it is the top of the line in terms of what’s offered on the iPhone. With top-notch graphics and sound, great multiplayer support, and a strong and varied single-player campaign, you’re getting a whole lot for your $6.99 price of admission. Gameloft’s FPS follow-up also demonstrates what’s in store for iOS owners; first-person shooters might not be on par with what you’d get on your Xbox 360 or Playstation 3, but as N.O.V.A. 2 demonstrates, they’re not far behind. Pros:
Cons:
Final Score: 88
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| GameFront 2010: The Year’s Most Shocking Gaming News Posted: 31 Dec 2010 10:00 AM PST
Hey, you know that Duke Nukem game that’s been stillborn since, like, forever? Well, supposedly it’s being made by Valve. Oh, and Activision and Infinity Ward have been having a slap fight for most of the year over what alleged slave drivers those Activision guys are. It certainly wasn’t a slow year for game news, and a few stories had our eyes shooting out of our heads like Roger Rabbit. Okay, that’s probably an overstatement, but you could certainly have caught us looking like our little cat friend here. We got together and looked back at the stories from 2010 that most took us by surprise. Spoiler alert: Duke Nukem Forever is on here. Sorry if that diminishes your shock. What Floor Phil Owen:
Duke Nukem Forever lives!When I got on a plane to go to PAX, I did not imagine that in less then 24 hours, Gearbox would announce that they had resurrected this long-joked-about title, much less that I would get to play it. But Gearbox did make that earth-shattering announcement, and I really did get to play it. Gameplay-wise it was not exactly spectacular, but it was entertaining as f–k because it has an honest-to-god personality. I don't really know if this news was actually that big of a deal beyond the "OMG itz DNF" aspect, but the 30 minutes I spent in that Gearbox booth were beyond surreal, and nobody's going to forget that story any time soon. Project Natal becomes KinectSo Microsoft's controller-free thingie getting an official name isn't, I guess, that big a deal, but it was pretty surprising that it would be something that fucking stupid. "Kinect" is a really bad name for a thing, because when you say it out loud to all the mamas out there who buy shit for their kids, they didn't have a clue how to spell it. And it's just a bad name on its own. It's not quite as bad as, say, Leaders and Legends, but damn if it isn't awkward as hell. Phil Hornshaw's two cents: At least it wasn't called "Wii." What blew Ross Lincoln’s mind:
The Matthew Crippen Case is abruptly dismissed
I wrote pretty much everything I have to say about it here: The dismissal is shocking for a few reasons. A) because typically, particularly in the last 30 years, the courts are both VERY business friendly and VERY amenable to the idea that IP is more sacrosanct than individual privacy; B) because of the brazen misconduct by the prosecution and prosecution witnesses; C) because the presiding judge seemed to have ruled out the only available defense several weeks prior to dismissing the case, then reversed himself; and D) because I fully expected that the outcome would be a ruling in favor of the idea that even if you purchase something, you don't really own it. It's also worth noting that by dismissing the case, the issue isn't resolved. Companies can still claim that their customers don't have a right to modify the hardware they've legally purchased regardless of the circumstances or intent. But at least they don't have a favorable verdict backing them up the next time someone tries to sue a law-abiding, if perilously close to the black market, customer, who is simply exercising the same rights that iPhone users have. What startled Phil Hornshaw:
Infinity Ward v. ActivisionThe bad blood between developer Infinity Ward and mothership Activision over the making of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 just kept getting more and more ridiculous. The whole thing resulted in lawsuits and counter suits, with Activision publicly calling out IW on more than one occasion. It was the kind of scuffle you’d expect to see between no-talent brain-dead celebrities, and it was hilarious. Kotaku made a great rundown of the whole situation, because it gets confusing. Suffice it to say, all the noise that came out of the situation was interesting, and some of it was ridiculous. The founders of Infinity Ward left the company to create Respawn Entertainment and signed on with Electronic Arts, but not before claiming they’d been overworked by Activision in what they called “police state” conditions. They also claimed Activision held hostage money it owed IW from Modern Warfare 2. For its part, Activision moved Call of Duty over to Treyarch, which created Call of Duty: Black Ops — which was even bigger than MW2. It also claimed insubordination on IW’s part, among other things. All in all, big changes to the games industry with lots of people calling each other names in the press don’t show up too often. We won’t see how the whole thing shakes out until May, so hopefully we’ll get a few more fun developments, like both companies claiming secret assassinations or espionage or aliens or something.
Microsoft lets hackers run wild with KinectAt first, Microsoft was a little pissy about people appropriating its newly released Kinect hardware to do things like drive cars and let people play with lightsabers and lay the groundwork for the eventual robot uprising and the overthrow of Mankind. The company even threatened to respond with lawsuits against hackers in the early days of Kinect's release. How awesome was it, then, that Microsoft stopped in its tracks when it saw some of the amazing things that people were doing with its hardware, and instead of going all Huge Evil Corporation on us, actually signed off on letting programmers and scientists see how far they could push the hardware? Answer: extremely awesome. It might have something to do with the fact that there's nothing cool to play on Kinect just yet if you're not a five-year-old girl, but it's great that Microsoft is seeing potential for its peripheral beyond petting pretend animals and throwing pretend bowling balls. The hardware inside the machine is actually pretty slick, and people have been able to do some very cool things with it. Yes, Kinect is probably version 1.0 of the eyeball of future Terminators, but at least right now, a gaming machine has expanded into the real world and is actually have an affect on real science. That's pretty cool.
Now if Microsoft would just get some hardcore games together so I have a reason to buy the damn thing.
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