Category: Gaming

Friday fun requires you to buy a PS3

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If I told you my favorite game so far this year featured me as a flower petal swooping through fields of grass collecting more petals by colliding with other flowers, you’d think I was nuts, but it’s true: Flower is completely awesome. Few games manage to elicit any emotional response from me aside from anger (ie, ‘how the frack did that guy shoot me from way over there!!!!BS!!!*@#*!!!!’ in a FPS), but Flower is this wonderfully positive emotional experience. I don’t want to spoil anything so I can’t give too much in the way of details, but the gist of it is you save the world with the power of flowers. The graphics, musical score, audio, gameplay, and controls (featuring almost completely motion-based controls) are all perfect. There’s no downside here, it’s even cheap ($10)…but it does require you to have a $350+ PS3 to play on, and a decent surround sound system to enrich the experience.

As fruity as this game sounds, everyone I’ve shown it to so far has loved it. Here’s a gameplay video to give you a sense of it:

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Friday Fun: Gothic II for cheap

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I’ll never pass up an opportunity to praise Gothic II – it’s one of the finest CRPG‘s ever made. GOG.com, a DRM free digital game portal specializing in older games, just announced that they’re carrying it. For $9.99 you get the game and it’s expansion plus a few extras. There are few better bargains in gaming – Gothic II is an epic fantasy adventure with arcade combat and an absolutely huge world to explore. There really have been very few games as good as this one. I played through and solved it along with it’s predecessor and recommend them to anyone who has an interest in CRPG’s. A bonus is the fact that these games are old enough now that they’ll run on older hardware. I’ve bought things off of GOG.com a few times now and really like their service. Anyway, check it out, it’s this week’s Friday fun link. Oh – windows only, sorry folks, though it will run fine under boot camp if you’ve gone that route. Here’s the link to the gog.com product page for Gothic II.

A little gameplay to give you a sense of it is below.

Friday fun: Triangle Wizard

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Take one dose rogue like, one pinch of 80’s vector graphic arcade game aesthetic, a smidgen of diablo II rpg action, mix up in Wouter van den Wollenberg’s brain, and you get Triangle Wizard, a real time arcade rogue like:

Free, a tiny download, and worth checking out if you’re a fan of any of the above genres. My only real complaint is the walking speed of your wizard is on the slow side – I wish the action was a bit faster paced. Then again, I keep getting whomped at low level so maybe it’s for the best –

Game finished: Lego Batman

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Susan and I finished up Lego Batman this week. We had previously played through Lego Star Wars together. Lego Batman is more of the same, basically, but set in the Batman universe instead of in Star Wars. It’s a bit shorter than Lego Star Wars, though both are almost endless games in that there are a ton of achievements and hidden items to collect from levels even after you’ve beaten them. We both felt Batman was a bit easier, especially in the vehicle missions, and that this was a good thing – some of the Star Wars vehicle missions were pretty annoying. The game engine still has issues with perspective and jumping – sometimes you find it really hard to move along a narrow ledge or jump from one platform to another because you can’t gauge your position on the 3d plane – the developers could do more work here. Despite this, I’d recommend the game to anyone who’s a fan of the other Lego games, or who’s looking for a coop game to play with their significant other or kids – it’s great lightweight fun, not too challenging, and often funny.

I’ll probably pick up Lego Indiana Jones next, plus there are rumors of Lego Harry Potter coming this christmas, which seems like a natural fit for the series. I’m not sure what to make of the other rumor, which is that a Lego Rock Band game is coming. Meanwhile, check out the video below if you’re not already familiar with the Lego games:

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Friday Fun: A New Zero

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If I told you someone’s managed to build elements of the Battlefield series of FPS along with elements of combat flight sims into a tiny ~400k executable, you wouldn’t believe me, so instead make your way over to Cryptic Sea’s page for their upcoming game A New Zero. It’s in public beta right now, is a tiny download, and has fun multiplayer in a tiny download. It’s all a bit spartan right now but they plan for much more and it’s worth checking out even if only to marvel at the achievement. This is Windows only at present, sorry mac folk. Here’s their trailer to give you a sense of the gameplay:

Game finished: Defense Grid

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image courtesy of Kotaku - check out the their coverage of the game

image courtesy of Kotaku - check out their coverage of the game

Defense Grid: The Awakening is fantastic. 2008 was definitely the year of the tower defense games, at least for me. I played and enjoyed a ton of them, most notably PixelJunk Monsters, Desktop Tower Defense, several Warcraft III mods, and now as the coda to the list, Defense Grid. This is a commercial release you can pickup off of Steam and later this year on your Xbox360 via XBLA. It’s $20 for the PC and worth every penny. It distinguishes itself from the pack with excellent graphics and audio, a really well designed UI, great unit and tower balance, and a healthy dose of replayability. I’ve listed this as ‘finished’ because I’ve beaten every level now at the default difficulty level, but there’s a ton more to do, including replaying the levels at a higher difficulty level and medaling in each level. The developers have more planned for this game if it sells well, so please consider it if you like tower defense games – there are few better ones than this and it’s a bargain for what you get.

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The day the 1up died

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Actually it was yesterday. This is a pretty major bummer. Craptacular web portal ‘ugo’ purchased 1up.com yesterday, shuttered EGM, laid off a significant percentage of the staff, and canceled all 1up podcasts and the 1up Show video blog. This has been rumored to be in the works for a while, but the extent of the changes is surprising. EGM was one of the longest in-print gaming magazine and one of the few remaining ones published in the US, and while I was never a regular reader I was a huge fan of the podcasts and video blog that it spawned – I was listening to at least 5-6 hours of 1up audio content a week and I’m really sad to see them end. Here’s hoping they land on their feet in this down economy. Meanwhile, this is further evidence of the death of print, which seems to be happening faster than most folks, myself included, thought it would. There’s a good piece over here by Clay Shirky that talks about this and other media-related subjects.

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Technolust, December edition

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Check out this unbelievably cool motion simulator rig for racing sims:

No price listed, and I’m sure it’s out of my range, but damn isn’t that cool? Now to convince Susan it’s an acceptable alternative to buying a sportscar for my pending mid-life crisis…