Max Payne 3 is officially my most anticipated game of the year. At least of games that have a definite release date in 2012. Every nugget of hype that Rockstar releases just keeps building the excitement and as a long standing fan of the franchise, it's a pre-order/day one buy for me.
While people may argue that video games can't conjure up the emotional impact of a well done movie, there's one emotion that a game can amplify more than any movie could ever hope to: RAGE. That's right, sure you can see some terrible things happen while watching Blackhawk Down, and while you may sit passively and think "Damn dude, don't drag his dead body through the streets..." you will not be throwing your TV remote across the room and side-kicking your dog through a window. No, nothing can quite get the real life murder juices flowing like a video game. Every one has experienced it in someway, and since everyone handles life differently, everyone RAGES differently as well. Let's take a look, maybe you'll recognize yourself...
Kickstarter has been around for a few months by now, and it's gotten some hype as a great way to support independent projects, but it didn't really make it to the big time until Double Fine announced their old-school adventure funding project - a project which set records within hours of being initiated, and which recently ended with over $3 million dollars contributed towards it. It was a spectacular effort on the part of the studio and the fans, and sets a new precedent for getting great games off the ground.
Unfortunately, while Kickstarter might well be a viable new tool for competent developers and dreamers to get their work funded, it's also an avenue for pipe dreams and scope bombs. Case in point: Your World, an MMO "built by Gamers for Gamers funded by Gamers." This rosy-eyed attempt to craft the perfect MMO is such a spectacularly disastrous-looking abomination that I'm still not totally convinced it's not a joke. The sad thing is, though, that I really do think that it's real - and that it will never succeed.
With GDC 2012 wrapping up this week, I'd like to take a bit of time to go over some of the news that came out of the convention: Assassins Creed Native America. Ok done. Compared to some GDCs of yesteryear this one came and went without much of well, anything really. The thing I heard the most talk about was uproar over DLC for games that are already out. But to be honest I guess this is about as much news media as we should be getting out of a conference for game developers. In fact this years pretty underwhelming GDC might be a good sign for the industry.
That's a tumbleweed. Meet me halfway and imagine the crickets.
We at NODJ are grateful for each and every one of our readers, and we eagerly pour over any piece of feedback that we receive - positive or negative, constructive or critical. Simply that you acknowledge the ongoing existence of our little laughshack here makes every message, every comment, every ThumbsUp an absolute treasure.
But this weekend I got some utterly bewildering comments on some of my articles. They seemed complimentary, thoughtful, and somewhat relevant to the subject matter of the article. But they were also.... off. Disjointed. Cobbled together by a mind that wasn't quite all there.
They're spambot comments, absolutely - I could tell that from the rapid succession with which they all appeared on the site, waiting for my administrative approval. But what's most bizarre about them is that the script that generated them appears to have trolled (the fishing kind of trolling) the Internet for relevant comments about the subject matter of each article and created a mash-up medley comment that it then used to post. What results is an unsettling combination of logical and random. It's as though Michael Bay's incarnation of Bumblebee suffers from the same deficiency at typing as he does regular speech - and inexplicably reads our website.
While the "endgame" for spammers like this is uncertain - how is it that they thought these comments would sneak through the filter? are they getting adaptively more intelligent? - some of the comments are truly bizarre. Bizarre enough that I thought I would share some of the best ones with you today.
Sorry guys, slow news day at the greatest investigative video game journalism site on the web. We're kind of in that part of the year I call the gaming drought, where there aren't a whole lot of releases or news stories to cover and I find myself playing games I missed last year. As much as I'd love to write about Mass Effect 3 and how not into it I am, I'll leave those articles for Almasy, our resident ME fan.
Instead I'll take the time to blog about one of my favorite subjects: bashing the Army of Two franchise. Thankfully, it's semi relevant as rumors and tweets have all but confirmed a part 3: Army of Four.
Not pictured: The fourth guy because the guy on the right ate him apparently.
You know how whenever the average person recollects something with fondness, the rosey tinge of nostalgia smears away any rough edges or imperfections? How if one was to recall a past love, like say Die Hard Trilogy for PS1, they would recall an amazingly deep game with jaw dropping visuals and enemies that exploded into human sized showers of blood. Ah the good 'ol days! However, the past is not always as we remember. Rewatch Thunder Cats and try not to tear your ears off, or attempt, if you dare, to sit through an entire episode of Voltron. Feel that warmness in your throat? That's vomit. Sometimes the opposite is true as well though. We can pick up a game from gaming past and get just as much enjoyment out of it now as we did then. In part one of this two part installment we will be looking at some of the games of yesteryear that have aged with grace and dignity, and are still every bit the classic today that we remembered them being.
We haven't done a review for a while since we've been hung up on games of yesteryear like Battlefield 3, Saints Row: The Third, and Amnesia: The Dark Descent. After seeing the scrolling ads over and over again on Steam, I decided to take a risk with indie title Dear Esther. It was a risk that yielded very little reward.
A while back I signed up for PSN+. At the time it was still in a slightly fledgling state, and had only just introduced cloud saving (albeit in a pretty archaic fashion). Well, that was about half a year ago, and anyone who is familiar with the Playstation Network knows, Sony continually changes the damn thing, most time for the better. So consider this a recap, and a pros and cons breakdown of my first six or so months as a PSN+ subscriber.
For all the nay-sayers and skeptics, PSN + is really OH MY GOD WHAT'S WRONG WITH HER EYES!!!!!!!!
What do you do when you've got a hit new IP on your hands? The most immediate step differs from major publisher to major publisher. EA would take the IP and get a version playable for every platform on the market (go look up Dragon Age: Livejournal Adventures and Dead Space: The PLAY-DOH Experience if you don't believe me.) Activison, on the other hand, would keep making the same product, cramming as many conceivable celebrity cameos in to justify the rebranding (get ready, kids, here's Transformers: Battle for Counting Crows, coming this fall!) before the license burned itself out. Nintendo, obviously, would immediately stuff the well-loved property into a high security vault and blot out any mention of its existence. But no matter who you are, there's an all-important step that you take when you've got a hot property like Robot Entertainment's dazzling iOS PVP game Hero Academy on your hands - LICENSE DEM MOVIE RIGHTS!
We here at NODJ figure it's only a matter of time before someone turns this game into a movie. Whether it's Uwe Boll or Paul WS Anderson is anyone's guess. But no matter who's at the helm, a casting director's gonna have their work cut out for them. So to celebrate the release of today's Dwarf team for the marvelous little mobile game, we're gonna shoulder some of the burden!
This week marks my return to Battlefield 3. I quit cold turkey, fed up with non stop losses and embarrassing kill to death ratios. I figured I wasn't cut out for the game and after dealing with the frustrating Beta's lack of configurable options, the official launch's lack of voice and squad support, and finally the game's merciless learning curve, I decided it wasn't worth the stress. Then Murdernator and I figured out the problem, my caveman computer (or more specifically the caveman graphics card) was holding me back. Now that's all changed.
So the Playstation Vita has launched in North America. As I write this, they are trickling into the hands of consumers. I feel as though we should mention a console launch to some degree here at NODJ, but alas I just can't conjure up the excitement that usually goes with the release of new gaming hardware. Instead of excitement there is a overbearing feeling of dread. Then again this wouldn't be the first time my apathy has been no indication (in fact many times it has had inverse effects) of how well a console will do. But as it stands right now, the big question circling around the PSV is simply: Why?
During my extracurricular adventures of the past couple of weeks, I visited San Francisco for the first time. Lots of my stops were of a typically touristy nature: Alcatraz, Fisherman's Wharf, Lombard Street. I rode a cable car. These were all actually pretty fun - I willfully went back to the Wharf. They have sea lions!
A couple of the friends that I'd asked before I headed to the West coast suggested that I poke my head into Musee Mechanique (warning: link has sounds of a terrifying nature auto-playing without volume controls.) This curious destination is a museum dedicated to the penny arcade machines of yesteryear - and some of the proper video game hits that got this whole crazy interactive industry going.
Like any diligent NODJ correspondent, I dutifully chronicled my trip to the museum with my camera, capturing images both nostalgic and horrific.
I finally got around to playing Saints Row 3 and I'm having a pretty good time committing insurance fraud and tornado DDT'ing gimps with my DDD cups and my zombie voice. After playing the first couple of story missions I ran into my biggest gripe not only with this game, but a common problem in so much of entertainment's marketing over these past 2 years.
So this will be old news by internet standards, but yesterday Tim Schafer and Double Fine scored a home run as they got over double the funding needed for a new project in just over 8 hours, all paid for by loyal internet fans. If this is not an example of the public putting its money where its mouth is, then I don't know what a mouth is. Coming from someone who works in the gaming industry, for an independent developer, I must say it is truly invigorating to see that there are other potential ways to make a game that break away from the shackles of publisher dependency. Of course with the good comes the bad. Let's pontificate.