Back when I was a kid, in addition to walking to school barefoot, uphill and in snow, BOTH WAYS, I also had the responsibility for keeping the Galaxy safe from the Kilrathi menace in my Rapier II.
Now you can relive those halcyon days of Wing Commander via The Wing Commander Saga, a free remake of the much-loved (by me at least) series.
They say the game was ten years in the making, but the most surprising aspect is that EA hasn’t squashed it like a bug. I haven’t tried it yet (it’s downloading now) but if I were you I’d grab it while the grabbing is good. EA seems to be aware of the project but they are carefully not acknowledging it, either for or against, at this time. Who knows how long that will last?
Brian Fargo is at it again, making us smile as we cheerfully hand-over a bit of cash to help him make a game we’re looking forward to. I’m proud to support Wasteland 2 via Kickstarter, (that sounds corny but I’m totally serious) and I’m really impressed by Fargo’s new KickingItForward initiative (where he asks developers to agree to apply 5% of the profits they make from a Kickstarter-funded game towards other Kickstarter-funded projects). Not everyone sees Kickstarter as a community, but I do and it sounds like Fargo does as well.
It’s still too early to have real info on the game, but Fargo’s already having fun and giving us a laugh:
The last time GOG (Good Old Games, in case you’ve been living under a gaming rock) was ready to make a big change, they masked their downtime by announcing the site was shutting down. It was meant as a kind of prank/practical joke that didn’t sit too well with some gamers.
Now it’s time for another big new announcement and it seems they’re taking a different tack this time. Rather than spring the change on us next Tuesday they’re going to be releasing a series of videos. So here’s the first one.
The video implies GOG is going DRM-free, which would be great except…isn’t GOG already DRM free? So what could be happening? I guess we’ll have to wait to see what the next video shows us.
This is a new idea I had; it’ll probably be of most interest to me over time, but who knows? The plan is to do one of these every Friday.
Purchases This Week
I picked up 4 new games this week, three of them due to sales.
Amazon had a $5 BOGO deal on Ubisoft PC titles last weekend so I got The Settlers: Rise of an Empire Gold Edition and Call of Juarez 2: Bound in Blood both for $5.
Steam had a daily deal for Spellforce 2: Gold Edition for $3.74 so I snagged that.
Finally, I bought Ys: The Oath of Felghana from Steam for full price ($14.99) just to send a message to the developer to please keep localizing these kinds of titles for PC!
Played This Week
Minecraft snuck up and sunk it’s fangs back into me this week due to the discovery of Minefold which I wrote about at ITworld. It was my most-played game this week, but I wasn’t tracking in on Rapt over the weekend. I’m guessing I spent 10 hours playing it, at least.
I’ve been spending my lunch hours playing The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, a PSP game I’m playing on the Vita. I guess I’ve squeezed in 3 hours or so on that. Still very early in the game but I’m really enjoying this old-school turn-based RPG a lot.
I also put 3 hours into Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, an hour into Vessel and half an hour into Star Trek Online. [Sadly, once again my brain has emptied of any and all knowledge of how to play STO.]
Plans For The Week To Come
At this point my ‘playlist’ is way too long. I need to start finishing some games before I start any new ones. But here’re the games in rotation at the moment:
SWTOR (still have some time left in my sub)
Star Trek Online
Minecraft
KOA:Reckoning
Vessel
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky
Mass Effect 1
Uncharted: The Golden Abyss
Yeah, clearly I’m trying to play WAY too many games at once!
Saw this on PC Gamer and it doesn’t seem to be spreading as quickly as most Notch News does.
The quick hit is that Notch (of Minecraft fame) has started working on a space trading sandbox game “that’s more like Firefly” and he invokes that holiest of space games, Elite, when talking about it.
PC Gamer says Notch is planning to begin work on it this summer but Shacknews followed up the story, linking to a tweet where Notch says work has already begun.
While I’m excited any time a game developer mentions Elite, some of what Notch mentioned (“I want to run around on my ship and have to put out a fire. Like, oh crap, the cooling system failed, I have to put out the fire here.“) immediately started me thinking about the Kickstarter-infusedFTL.
But that’s OK…there’s room in the world for 2 new space-based sandbox games!
Last night I decided to spend a half hour watching Funcom’s The Secret World video from GDC. I’m not really sure why; I’ve finally come to accept that MMOs aren’t a good genre for me, but I guess old habits die hard. I’m sure I’m going to keep buying these games, playing them for a few weeks and then becoming disgruntled about them. I’m just too curious for my own good and I still long for a virtual world to call my own. Not that most of today’s MMOs are virtual worlds, but that’s a discussion for another day.
Anyway, I haven’t been paying much attention to The Secret World to be honest. The setting, or at least what I thought was the setting, wasn’t all that compelling to me. That much, at least, changed last night. The game has instances that feature “time travel” to crazy situations. The one they show in the video is of Native Americans and Vikings banding together to drive off a Mayan invasion! How awesome is that? [The Mayans sure have been getting a bum rap lately; wasn’t it their neighbors, the Aztecs, who were the bloodthirsty ones? Perhaps my understanding of history is flawed, but let’s get back to the game.]
The low point of what I saw was the combat; there was just nothing very compelling about it to me. That’s not to say that it was bad…until I play it I won’t actually know. But it just seemed ‘safe’ to me, with mobs that had very short aggro ranges and (spell-based) combat animations that looked like avatars standing in place doing their cheerleading practice. Hopefully they punch those up a bit; this was early footage after all.
The high points were character development, which looks incredibly deep… complex, no let’s be optimistic and stay with deep. There are a ton of skills..did the dude say 500!!? Maybe I’m forgetting…it was 12 hours ago after all and I have a mind like a sieve. Anyway there are a ton of skills that you can put points into, but you can only equip 7 active and 7 passive at any one time (a bit like Guild Wars). You can change the load out at any (almost?) time though (not sure about during combat), and create pre-made sets of skills for fast switching. Anyway, it looked like there’ll be a ton of ways you can go with your character and there are no predetermined classes.
The other thing that looked cool was crafting. They’ve borrowed from Minecraft to a certain extent. You can salvage a weapon to get materials, then (this is the Minecraft-y bit) you lay those materials out in a particular pattern to make a particular item. You can then tweak the item by attaching “prefix” and “suffix” enhancements to it. The hope was that people will not only make their own weapons and stuff, but would be creating thise prefix and suffix enhancements and trading those among the populace. We’ll see.
Just a few final thoughts. At this point The Secret World didn’t give off the vibe of an AAA title; the polish just wasn’t there yet. Maybe it’ll get there, but then I almost hope it doesn’t. I’ve been having more fun with games that have a few rough spots and some personality than I’ve been having with games that are so polished that they have neither high nor low points.
I also found myself thinking about The Matrix Online while watching the video. I’m not sure why…maybe because the female character they created started in Seoul and was slinking through the streets rolling her hips like they were on ball bearings? In fact, the overt sexualization of the female characters really felt kind of dated. Y’know, the low-slung jeans with the T of a thong pulled up above the waist? It did look like that was a choice the person running the demo made, though, and that there were outfits where the outerwear actually covered the underwear. Imagine that!
Anyway, if I’ve piqued your interest, get comfortable, grab a beer or a cup of coffee, and check out the video:
Ubisoft just sent out a press release detailing their plans for PAX East, coming up in Boston on the weekend of April 6-8th. Thank you Easter Bunny!
Fanatical Dedicated Far Cry 3 fans can get a (permanent) tattoo on the show floor, choosing from several tribal designs inspired by the game. Slightly less fanatical dedicated fans can get a mohawk like the one worn by Far Cry 3 villain Vaas. Getting either a tattoo or a mohawk will also garner you a Far Cry 3 tank-top.
Assassins Creed III will not be playable but will be shown-off in an enclosed theater (which sadly means long lines, but I imagine it’ll be worth it for fans). In addition to seeing some gameplay footage you’ll get some ACIII swag for your efforts.
If you’re going to PAX East to play games, Ubisoft has you covered with playable versions of Far Cry 3, Mad Riders™, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Future Soldier™, I Am Alive™, and the free-to-play PC game Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon® Online as well as a few iOS games: Babel Rising, Monster Burner, MotoHeroz® and Prince of Persia® Classic HD.
You can also buy your way into some swag by pre-ordering a few titles on the show floor:
Assassin’s Creed III – Official T-shirt or SteelBook™ designed by award-winning comic artist Alex Ross
Far Cry 3 – Bloodied pint glass
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Future Soldier – Free limited-edition bandanna designed by Penny Arcade and a personalized lenticular photo print-out from Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Future Soldier
Ubisoft will be in booths 824 (next to the Xbox booth) and 836 (across the aisle form 824 and next to Square Enix). here’s a link to the show floor map [pdf].
Over at the Playstation Blog, Sony and Media Molecule have announced LittleBigPlanet Karting. Yup, it’s time to put Sackboy into a go-kart, and of course the game lets you customize karts, create tracks and all that jazz.
But…isn’t that what Mod Nation Racers is all about?
Does the Playstation ecosystem really need two “Play, Create and Share” karting titles?
It does look a bit more flexible than MNR (the tools I mean, and I base that on some of the 2D levels we see in that video) and we can hope that load times are a little better, but I can’t help but think the MNR creators are going to feel vaguely betrayed. [Edit: I think I should clarify that I’m referring to the fans who’ve spent so much time learning to create awesome tracks in MNR, not the actual developers of the game, who’re actually working on LBP-K.] I’m not one of them, so maybe I’m just projecting.
Bitch of it is…I’ll dutifully go out and buy LittleBigPlanet Karting when it releases. I cannot resist the Cute of Sackboy.
Kindly old Dr. Earnhardt is there to help you feel grooooovy in Farcry 3.
Creepy stuff, eh?
Here’s the old boy’s official bio:
Dr. Alec Earnhardt basks in an artificial glow of life generated by the pills he takes daily. He hails from Oxford and went sailing around the world after a personal tragedy. This is how he discovered Rook Island and all of the wonderful chemicals growing in the local flora. He set up a lab on the island and now makes his living selling drugs on the black market.
Sony just put up a new Starhawk post on the Playstation Blog that talks about the ways of playing Starhawk with other people. The game had a split-screen option that lets each player log into his or her Playstation account:
Dual Log-In: Yes, two players can sign into on one PS3. You can sign in using your PSN ID on the same machine and retain the XP you earn at your friend’s house. And you can still take that hard-earned XP home with you and apply it to your character there. Although, if you’re Player Two, you can’t earn Trophies or character customizations (outfits, paint jobs, decals) as these are saved directly to the PS3. It’s not perfect, but it’s way better than Warhawk where Player Two couldn’t level up at all. You can play Co-op off-line as well, but no stats get recorded.
This is the first time I’ve heard of a game letting players log into two accounts on one console, but then I don’t follow multiplayer that much. So my title isn’t rhetorical: does anyone know if this is a first?
Also kind of refreshing to read “It’s not perfect…” in a post like this. Honesty…what a refreshing concept!
