From the videogame-centric internet radio show A Life Well Wasted comes artist Olly Moss’ guide to some of gaming enemy-dom’s well documented weak points, from Shadow of the Colossus’ gentle giants to Metal Gear Solid’s Psycho Mantis to Genji: Days of the Blade’s super-sized crustaceans.
A 12” x 16” poster-sized version will be offered for sale starting tomorrow, when the new episode goes live. In keeping with previous posters, Help! will be limited to 200 hand-numbered Giclée prints on heavyweight art paper, priced at $25 shipped within the US and $30 shipped international.
You’d better hurry if you want to take advantage of Threadless’ Holiday Sale, as the stock for their scant selection of game-themed tees won’t last long at just $12 each. Basically, you can’t afford not to buy one.
The Tony Hawk series might be back in the limelight thanks to a certain Ride-able plastic peripheral, but what of the series that forced such innovation and reinvention in the first place? The team at Black Box has been hard at work on the third installment of their surprisingly successful non-Tony Hawk branded skate sim, Skate 3, which this time around focuses on team-based gameplay. “Team up. Throw down.” That’s the series’ new motto, and your new personal mantra as you work together with friends actual or virtual to build your own skating empire. Having already established yourself amongst the ranks of the skateboarding elite in the first two games, Skate 3 takes the next logical step by having you start your own company, building your brand and selling your boards by recruiting your own skating dream team.
Some old gameplay modes return, updated to play nice with the new focus on multiplayer - standards like the Deathrace and Contest modes now support 3-on-3 gameplay. Even Freeskate mode, where you cruise around the game world perfecting your skate skills, performing tricks and completing tasks, has been tweaked to accommodate a third team member. But what EA really wanted to show off during their Skate 3 Community Event were the game’s new features, specifically the new multiplayer modes: Race, Contest, Domination, Own The Lot and 1-Up.
But before plunging us into the new multiplayer modes, we got a chance to re-familiarize ourselves with the game’s controls in Freeskate, which remain largely unchanged from the first two games. The left analog stick still controls the body while the right controls the skateboard and the triggers control grabs. The novelty of FlickIt has long since worn off, but it remains an innovative, intuitive and incredibly deep control scheme. I still found pulling of a series of specific tricks a bit of a challenge, as I’ve never quite been able to break free of the button-mashing mentality of old, but even so the controls are surprisingly and satisfyingly easy to pick up. Add in several new tricks, like the dark slide, dark catch and underflip, and you’ve got a control scheme that feels familiar but fresh.
It also felt great to be skating in the new city of Port Carverton, which couldn’t a more dramatic departure from the depressingly totalitarian city of San Vanelona. Gone are the skater hating security guards that policed every ramp, rail and sidewalk, replaced by palm trees and blue skies. This surreal skating utopia is broken into three separate districts: University, Downtown and Industrial. All are vibrant and varied, with tons of location-specific geographical and architectural features on which to cut your skate teeth.
The change in locale allows for a sense of humor the last game sorely lacked, which means getting to do things like literally “jump the shark” - the central feature of one area was a large shark statue, which you could leap by walking a few flights of stairs, accessing a neighboring building’s suspiciously ski ramp-shaped embellishments. This was where the series’ trademark session marker came in handy, allowing for a painless respawn at the edge of the building’s balcony when I failed to connect with the ramp on the other side of the shark. I forgot to set it the first time, but thankfully a second trip up the stairs on foot wasn’t frustrating, thanks to some significant improvements in the walking. In those rare instances where you have to get off of your board, you’ll be glad to know you no longer control like a shopping cart with one wonky wheel.
From Freeskate, you can trigger a team challenge with the press of a button. Since we were playing on a closed local network, matchmaking quickplay transitioned us almost immediately into into our chosen team challenge. Race and Contest have been modified to accommodate three-on-three team gameplay, making them more chaotic versions of their former single-player selves. Domination transports you to an area filled with specific objects to control by performing tricks off of, like King of the Hill with more kick flips, with victory going to whichever team has claimed and protected the most real estate at the end of the round. Own The Lot is like a shuffled playlist, pitting two teams against each other in three randomly selected challenges that range from performing specific tricks to simply scoring the most points.
But the best of the bunch was 1-Up, an ever escalating contest in which each team has 20-seconds to score as many points as possible before the opposing team gets a crack at raising the stakes. Fall off your board or flub a trick, and your team’s turn is over. So, do you go for the big trick or play it safe? The score to beat keeps climbing until someone chooses the wrong answer to that question, earning a letter. Get 1-U-P and you lose. It’s a stand out mode perfectly suited to the multiplayer experience, and sure to be the most popular of the new multiplayer modes.
Though we were playing a “pre pre-alpha build” according to Black Box Producer Chris Parry, it’s already clear that this is going to be a great addition to an already excellent franchise. It was disappointing that EA wasn’t ready to show off Skate School, the tutorial mode that will be pivotal in getting newcomers up to speed for competition against non-bot powered players, or the Park Editor that will allow you add objects on the fly, but what they did reveal looks to be an improvement on an already solid skating sim. The ability to interact with other skaters really raises the stakes - the wins are more rewarding and the losses more crushing when you have more than yourself to impress, but that’s what makes Skate 3 such a brilliant and natural evolution. Basically, it takes the massive community that’s built around the first two games and moves it center stage, integrating it into a seamless, and sure to be successful multiplayer experience that should more than hold its own against any flashy skateboard-shaped controllers.
Some of the coolest games are the ones that never get made, at least judging by these character concepts for Mortal Kombat, drawn by Midway’s former visual creative director Vincent Proce.
GameSetWatch stumbled upon four unused designs, part of a pitch that re-imagined Scorpion as a wraith drenched in the yellow blood of the demon that resurrected him, Raiden as a hovering spiritual being who doesn’t dare soil his feet, Sonya as the deadly Special Forces-trained daughter of a Texas Ranger and Kano as a half Japanese, half US military cyborg with an unhealthy penchant for baked goods. So basically, he took the already awesomely ridiculous backstories and made them even more awesomely ridiculous.
“The basis for the idea was a re-imagining of the Mortal Kombat franchise from the original premise but mixing modern muti-player and dismemberment game design with the original fighting mechanic,” explained Proce on his blog. “The game idea isn’t going to happen now that I no longer work there.”
Though the game was not to be, Proce says he would like to revamp the remainder of Mortal Kombat’s colorful cast if he ever finds the time. Oh, how I hope he finds the time!
YouTube describes Jérémie Perin’s demented 16-bit videogame-inspired music video for Flairs’ “Trucker’s Delight” thusly: “Think Spielberg’s Duel + Russ Meyer’s Faster Pussycat Kill Kill! and Marc Dorcel’s wildest fantasies.” And just in case you try and later claim you weren’t properly warned before clicking play, let me be crystal clear - those “wildest fantasies” include feces, vomit, dismemberment, cannibalism, rape and violence against anthropomorphic hippopotami. If you can get past all that though, the animation really is well done. Hateful and horrifying, but well done.
I’ve never been one to go in for the “special edition,” as the bare bones versions of most next-gen games are already extravagant expenditures without any extra window dressing.
Not that I don’t lurv me some shiny tin packaging, miniature art books and dramatically posed figurines, ’cause I do. It’s just that all that extra cash could be better spent on another game, or worse case scenario the DLC that probably should have been included from the start, which the publishers could see if they weren’t blinded by so many millions of micro-transaction dollar signs. Still, it’s gotten especially hard to resist lately, with seemingly every other title sharing shelf space with a “Special,” “Collector’s” or “Deluxe” version of itself, but resist I have. I have successfully steeled myself against Halo 3’s Spartan helmet-sporting Legendary Edition, Fallout 3’s Pip Boy 3000-equipped Survival Edition and Modern Warfare 2’s night vision goggle-enhanced Prestige Edition.
But Bioshock 2’s Special Edition is finally going to break me. Revealed today on 2K’s Cult of Rapture community site, the $99 Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 set ($89 for PC) will include three Art Deco-inspired posters, a 164-page hardbound art book, and a copy of the orchestral score both on CD and - here’s the true collector’s pièce de résistance - on a vinyl 180g LP. Oh, and there’s the game too. All packed into a lovely 13″x13″ inch package and limited to a single production run. I don’t know about you, but my resistance faltered right around Art Deco.
Both the special and standard editions of Bioshock 2 are scheduled to release on February 10.
Valve has launched a teaser site for the fictional four man band, The Midnight Riders, whose posters appear throughout Left 4 Dead 2’s second campaign, Dark Carnival. According to safehouse scrawl, the rocking quartet managed to bribe their way to safety aboard a chopper, leaving the survivors a perfectly prepped stage for the campaign’s gripping crecendo.
Here’s hoping they play a greater role than just adding to Whispering Oak’s creepy charm in the form of some DLC - perhaps that second from the left guy’s reunion with his long lost son, Francis? I can’t be the only one who sees theresemblance.
Tofu mode is back in Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles, only this time it’s the zombies who will be replaced by the vegetarian friendly food.
Capcom’s Resident Evil series has had more than its fair share of crazy characters, but none so strange as Tofu, the heroic hunk of coagulated soy milk from Resident Evil 2. A parody of unlockable minigame “The 4th Survivor,” “The Tofu Survivor” tasked players with fighting their way to the helicopter extraction point on the roof of the Raccoon City Police Department as a knife-wielding, beret-sporting block of bean curd.
As much as I liked the original Tofu mode, I think this role reversal is even better - there’s just something about the way a 6-foot tall chunk of Tofu slithers out a broken bus window that’s more hilarious and horrifying than the undead ever could be.
Didn’t you just love the Powerade vending machines in Enter The Matrix? The Target chalet in Shaun White Snowboarding? The Doritos trucks in Ghostbusters? No? Then brace yourself for some bad news, as Ubisoft will be offering advertisers the chance to pimp their wares in Splinter Cell: Conviction via both static and video ads placed in high-density areas throughout the gameworld.
At Microsoft Advertising’s Gaming Upfront presentation, Ubisoft showed potential advertisers “heat maps” highlighting popular routes through each level, in which they will be selling both high and low profile space. Ubisoft’s Jeffrey Dickstein even reportedly said that it would be possible to advertise during the game’s torture scenes, so Sam Fisher could be bashing heads against not just any toilet, but the pristine porcelain of a genuine Kohler!
His dead daughter will be avenged with only the finest bathroom fixtures, dammit.
BioShock’s silent protagonist Jack won’t be making an appearance in the game’s upcoming sequel, but that doesn’t mean his presence won’t be felt, as the residents of Rapture are still discussing his brief (but busy) visit more than a decade later.
“His story, for the purposes of ‘BioShock 2,’ is over, in terms of his world driving narrative. That said, the things that he did are being fiercely debated by the splicers, because we wanted to support any of the choices the player could have made in the first game,” Creative Director Jordan Thomas told MTV Multiplayer. “It’s become kind of a religious question; what he did at the end of ‘BioShock 1.’”
Whether you chose to be “evil” by harvesting the Little Sisters for their sweet store of Adam or “good” by rescuing them doesn’t matter, as there’s no mention of importing save data. Rather, BioShock 2 will use ambiguously written dialogue to account for both possible choices. Personally, I don’t see how they can account for two such drastically different endings without being maddeningly vague, but then again madness is par for the course in Rapture.
“Yeah, I omitted a muscular system, but [Commander Video] doesn’t need muscles to move,” explains Ty Dunitz of his latest, and most revealing study of Bit.Trip’s mascot (after the break). “He needs only a fat beat to get his Core pumping the groove juice.”
“You may also notice I gave him an intestinal tract,” he continues. “No, a man with no mouth doesn’t eat, but as [artist Neil Anderson] put it best, ‘the rainbow has to come from somewhere.’” Same goes for marshmallows.
