April is almost upon us, and for the Co-Op Critics crew, the first “must have” game of the year is arriving this month–as well as a handful of others that have our interest piqued. Here’s our list of games we’re excited about for April:READ MORE
Brian recently chatted with the creator of Nelly Cootalot: The Fowl Fleet, award-winning comedian and filmmaker Alasdair Beckett-King. They talk about everything from the 2007 game that started it all, to the the appeal of adventure games as a genre.
The game arrives on March 22nd for PC, Mac and Linux. You can find out more at nellycootalot.com, and pre-order the game on Steam right now at http://store.steampowered.com/app/317320/.
Game Synopsis:
Join Nelly Cootalot in this indie adventure game, and rescue birds hypnotized by the villainous Baron Widebeard. Explore a charming, hand-drawn world created by award-winning comedian and filmmaker Alasdair Beckett-King. What is Baron Widebeard planning? Can he be stopped? In what way is a frozen volcano involved? To answer these questions comes Nelly Cootalot: pirate heroine and defender of endangered and adorable creatures. Nelly’s journey will take her from Port Rubicund in the South Seas to the lonely isle of Gloomholm in the icy north. She’ll meet outlandish characters and face perplexing challenges in her quest for the Treasure of the Seventh Sea.
This week, the folks over at Just1337 Studio were kind enough to send us over copy of their latest game, Asteroid Bounty Hunter. We took it out for a test flight, and you can check out my gameplay video and impressions above.READ MORE
As we head into March, the game release floodgates are really starting to open for the year. This month features some heavy-hitters, a slew of great indie games and at least something for everyone on all platforms. Here are some games that we here at Co-Op Critics are excited for in March:READ MORE
Seems like you can’t go three clicks on a gaming site these days without reading about broken console experiences. Games like Assassin’s Creed: Unity and Halo: Master Chief Collection have been rife with bugs and major issues since launch. The recent hacks of both Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network meant many people who got a new console for Christmas couldn’t download or play games on them.
As I downloaded the 40GB update for Assassin’s Creed: Unity on XBox One this week (because a screw-up meant the “patch” was actually a re-download of the entire game), I couldn’t help but think:
Has console gaming lost the one true edge that it had on PC gaming for years?
I don’t think I’m alone in the reason I’ve preferred console gaming to PC gaming for years now–it’s been a much smoother experience. Not having to worry about different control schemes, driver updates and compatibility issues was a major reason that I have been primarily a console gamer for most of my adult life. If there was one thing you could count on when it came to console gaming, it was that things would just work. Buy a game, put it in your console, and play.
But not only has PC gaming gotten much easier over the past few years with things like Steam’s ‘Big Picture Mode’ and the fact that most games have controller support, but PC games offer a substantial edge to console games when it comes to pricing. As I type this, you can get the Tomb Raider: Game of the Year Edition for $6 on Steam. And through sites like Good Old Games, you can play classics like the original Deus Ex for $2.50.
The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One have come out of the gate with a lot of the same problems that used to make PC gaming such a pain in the butt–constant updating, lots of bugs and in some cases, games that are broken on arrival and require multiple patches to fix. Add into that their unstable online services, and it feels like console gaming has lost pretty much all of the advantages it used to offer over PC gaming.
Most of the conversation around broken games and constant updates has centered around publishers and developers. But Microsoft and Sony might want to take a larger role in quality control moving forward, because the easier PC gaming becomes, the more likely console gamers are to jump over to the land of better visuals, better prices and a more stable user experience.
As if anyone needed to be reminded, the world of The Walking Dead is a pretty grim place. Zombies roam the earth, and the remnants of humanity fight for survival, usually at the cost of what made them human in the first place. There are no happy endings, and every single day is a struggle against the endless hordes of undead, and the scattered living who are usually worse than the zombies.
A couple weeks ago the second season of Telltale’s TWD episodic series came out, and the focus this time around is all on Clementine, the nine-year-old girl who was the co-star of the first season. In season two, she has to rely much more on herself for survival, and the first episode is an emotionally grueling tale that transforms Clementine as she loses whatever innocence she has left.
My intention was to sit down and play a bit of the episode last night, but I ended up playing through the entire thing, which took me a little over an hour and a half. I have a ten-year-old daughter, so I was immediately sucked into the idea of this young girl having to keep pushing forward in a world where death is literally around every single corner.
I’ve read a good chunk of The Walking Dead comics and have caught up on the TV show as of this most recent season. But I would have to say that Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead adventures games are my favorite incarnation of the universe. The interactivity of the games provides a level of depth to TWD universe that you just can’t get anywhere else. Whether or not that’s a universe you want to get in-depth with is a question you’ll need to answer, because this game pulls no punches. It’s not a “fun” story to experience, but it is powerful and expertly told.
The first episode of Season Two was a great opening act to Clementine’s next chapter. I just hope that somewhere out there in the dark, there are at least a few moments of peace for her.
Recently I wrote about how much the opening of The Last of Us grabbed me and got me invested in the world and story of the game.
I picked up Tomb Raider during the Steam Summer Sale and started playing it the other night. Turns out, that game has a pretty great opening as well. But where The Last of Us did a great job of keeping you in the moment during its opening, Tomb Raider constantly pulled me out of its opening.
From a story standpoint, Tomb Raider’s opening is immediately interesting. Through a series of quick-cut scenes, you see a young Lara Croft become shipwrecked on a mysterious island, where her life in put in peril immediately. As you take control of Lara, you’re tasked with trying to find a way out of a series of underground caverns, as things are collapsing around you and you run into some of the dangerous inhabitants of the island. It’s actually a great tutorial, as you learn the basic controls while navigating your way out.
But the quick-time events, man.
I’m not anti-QTEs at all–I grew up on Dragon’s Lair for crying out loud. When used well, quick-time events can be very effective. I enjoyed how the Mass Effect series had character moments (Paragon and Renegade) that could be activated by a trigger press at certain times. I enjoyed the hacking minigame in the first Mass Effect. In Gears of War, the idea of a timed button press to reload your gun faster and get a damage bonus is great. Telltale’s The Walking Dead also had some interesting implementations, particularly when fighting off a zombie that had grappled you.
In general, the QTEs that I hate have two components: (1) To fail is to die instantly, and (2) There is little to no margin for error.
Such is the case with many of the QTEs in Tomb Raider. There are a handful of points during Lara’s escape where the QTEs require exact timing. Worse, rather than a button press, they resort to wiggling the analog stick back and forth. A second too early or too late, and Lara gets killed in a horribly grisly manner.
So, as I played through the opening that featured an interesting story, there were places where I continued to die gruesomely several times, pulling me right out of the story before the title credits had even appeared. I had already lost some of my investment in the game by then.
Now, I did say in the title of this post that the game also featured the “best” of what QTEs can be used for, and there is one particularly good implementation in the opening Tomb Raider. At one point, Lara is scrambling from an underground cavern toward daylight, and you are actually using the right and left triggers to help her claw her way up a muddy, slippery slope. It reminded me of the scene in the original Modern Warfare when your chopper goes down and the soldier you control is crawling hand over hand amidst the wreckage. That kind of implementation really connects you to the moment.
When QTEs are used well, they add to the experience. The opening of Tomb Raider could have kept the QTEs,but made them much less punishing (at least during the intro of the game), and the effect would have been much more dramatic and rewarding.
You can watch the opening chapter of the game below, if you don’t mind the spoilers.
A couple weeks ago I posted about how I just don’t have the time in my life anymore to play games as much as I’d like to. As a result, I’m buying fewer games, but spending more time with those games, trying to get as much out of the experience as I can. One of the byproducts of this approach is that it has largely freed me from the “new release” cycle of gaming, where I needed to play all the new games when everyone else was playing them, just to feel connected to the conversations of the moment. Now I pick and choose, buying games that I am really interested in, and often buying them months after release, when the price has dropped, or picking them up during digital sales on Steam, PSN or XBox Live.
One of the things I’ve noticed recently is that my gaming tastes have changed over the past few years as well, and they now resemble my taste in movies more than ever. Specifically, I find myself more interested in low-budget and overlooked games than in big budget, AAA releases. And I’m not necessarily talking about indie games. I’m talking about console games that, if they were movies, would be put in the “B-Movie” category. They could fall into this category for a variety of reasons. The most common reason is that they were made on a small budget compared to their more high-profile brethren. But, they also could have had a rocky development cycle, or a really short development cycle (as a lot of licensed games have). Or maybe they’re a port of a game that was put out on another platform. Whatever the reason, I want to play these games.
But wait, you might say, you don’t even have time to play all the “good” games. Why would you spend time with games that are, in many cases, not very good at all?
I will answer that by going back to my movie analogy. My favorite genre is low-budget horror movies. The reason I love these movies so much is that I’m always fascinated to see what the director, the cast, and the special effects team do with the limitations they have. Do they set the movie in one location? Do they overly rely on digital effects, or do they invest in practical effects at the cost of something else? What things does the movie prioritize, and what does it compromise? Does the story rely on a bunch of tropes, or really try to do something different? And if it does use tropes, how well does it execute on them?
I think the same way about low-budget or “B-category” games. What did the devs decide to prioritize versus compromise? Does the game have some really interesting systems but really bad visuals? Is the story the strong point, but the mechanics are bad? What’s the game’s strongest quality? What did the developer decide to build around? What are the interesting qualities of this game, despite the fact that it might not be very good overall?
In many ways, as someone who enjoys thinking about the process behind the product, “B-games” are so much more interesting to play than most big-budget games.
Don’t get me wrong, I still play a lot of big-budget games, and many of them are awesome and very interesting. But there is something about those mid to lower-tier games that fascinates me. And the reasons I’ve been thinking about this issue now are twofold. First, I am fascinated by the discussion around Aliens: Colonial Marines, and I will be grabbing it as soon as it drops in price. Second, since we are entering the end of this console generation, there is a whole library of games that are available on the cheap. Games you would never think of paying $60 for can be gotten for under $10 in most cases.
So, over the next year I’m going to revisit some of the “B-games” I’ve played, trying to finish the ones I can and figure out why I left the ones I didn’t finish. I’m looking forward to writing about them.
I’m sure everyone out there has their own definition of a “B-game,” but here’s a list of some that I’ve played that fit my definition:
Velvet Assassin The Saboteur
Legendary Alone in the Dark
Alpha Protocol Dark Sector
Binary Domain Brink
Clive Barker’s Jericho Damnation
Deadly Premonition Far Cry Vengeance (Wii)
GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra Hellboy: The Science of Evil
X-Blades Rise of Nightmares
Section 8: Prejudice Shadowrun
Two Worlds I & II The Conduit
Wanted: Weapons of Fate Wet
Raven Squad: Operation Hidden Dagger The Club
When I first opened my restaurant, I set my definition of “success” to mean survival. After more than a week in the restaurant game, I think that I can redefine “success” to mean more than just mere survival.
|
Day
|
Customers Served
|
Perfect Orders
|
Average Orders
|
Poor Orders
|
$ Earned
|
$ Tips Earned
|
Positive Buzz % Earned
|
Most Popular Item
|
|
1
|
55
|
53
|
1
|
1
|
361
|
0
|
26.5
|
Salad
|
|
2
|
64
|
62
|
1
|
1
|
432
|
18
|
27.0
|
Grilled Chicken Breast
|
|
3
|
68
|
63
|
2
|
3
|
477
|
2
|
31.5
|
Beer
|
|
4
|
58
|
57
|
1
|
0
|
456
|
12
|
28.5
|
Wine
|
|
5
|
63
|
63
|
0
|
0
|
482
|
8
|
31.5
|
Chicken
|
|
6
|
60
|
60
|
0
|
0
|
494
|
14
|
30
|
Wine and beer
|
|
7
|
58
|
57
|
1
|
0
|
504
|
18
|
28.5
|
Wine
|
|
8
|
54
|
53
|
1
|
0
|
438
|
8
|
26.5
|
Wine
|
|
9
|
54
|
54
|
0
|
0
|
472
|
18
|
27
|
Chicken
|
|
10
|
65
|
65
|
0
|
0
|
538
|
12
|
32.5
|
Salad
|
|
11
|
58
|
58
|
0
|
0
|
470
|
6
|
29
|
Soda
|
I started with a menu of beer, wine, salad, and grilled chicken breast, but I’ve expanded my menu in the past week. The menu expansion took place a little faster than I would like, but I hadn’t expected that my clients in SherriSoda Tower would grow tired of the chicken so quickly. I have to cycle it out of my menu every couple of days. At first, I introduced a soda fountain, which I eventually upgraded to include flavor blasts. That has been a big hit, and it remains a staple of my little restaurant. I then added lasagna to my menu, and it too was fairly successful. But it was a time intensive plate, and more importantly, it’s a labor intensive dish, since it requires creating three layers and adds more dishes to be cleaned. Even worse, it suffers menu rot just like my grilled chicken breast. I’ve since cycled in ice cream, a staple menu item, as my occasional replacement for chicken.
Since my business has been steady, I’ve begun to invest in the quality of my menu offerings. I first upgraded the quality of my beer from the cheapest beer my distributor would sell me to a more pleasant and expensive microbrew. Incidentally, I was able to increase the price of my beer from $5 to $8. As I mentioned, I’ve also introduced flavor blasts to my soda fountain, and I’ve also added thousand island salad dressing as an alternative to ranch dressing for my salads. Ranch dressing remains the more popular choice though.
I am beginning to have concerns about my clients. I love them because they pay me for my goods, but I am beginning to wonder if I am feeding their alcohol addictions. Frequently, I have customers who come in at 9 a.m. for a beer or a bottle of wine. I understand that SherriSoda Tower has workers in the night shift who may come in at 9 a.m. at the end of their shifts for a drink, but I don’t vet my customers. I am becoming very uneasy about this. The law of unintended consequences is hitting my conscience.
I’m also uneasy about how simply unhappy many of my customers look when they enter my restaurant. They are all satisfied by my food and my service; the positive buzz I’m accruing and the occasional praising e-mail from customers I receive can attest to this. However, there are no smiling customers, no customers dining in groups. My only customers are lonely, possibly depressed.
 |
| A typical customer. Note the stained clothing. He dines alone, like all my other customers. |
That said, one of my customers won the lottery and gave me a $250 tip, so not all of my customers are in dire straits.
I’ve also increased my restaurant’s efficiency by investing in table foods and a better air conditioner to increase my customers’ patience, a dishwasher to cut down on the amount of time I spend washing dishes, and a garbage disposal to decrease the amount of time I dedicate to hauling trash to the dumpster. In a different time, I probably would have just more staff. Instead, I invested in technology. So much for the idea that a small business owner is the country’s job creation engine.
I’ve also passed two safety inspections. I’m grateful, but I’m not exactly sure what the inspectors are using for criteria. Thankfully, I don’t have a rodent infestation, unlike some other parts of SherriSoda Tower, and I have yet to fail to clean my toilets, take out my garbage, or wash the dishes in a timely manner.
Finally, I’ve discovered some alternate revenue streams. When all my orders are executed perfectly, my mentor rewards me with $200, which seems to me right now like a sizable amount of money. I’ve also taken bets from an eccentric fellow named Crazy Dave about my performance. I’m not sure if he’s rooting for me to fail or to succeed; he’s certainly gambling that I won’t succeed. This is why I gladly took his money on his bets that I would not be able to serve 15 consecutive customers perfectly or that I would be able to serve 20 consecutive customers perfectly while I had salads and ice cream on my menu.
I still lack a grill, a stove, or a deep fryer, so my hot food options are limited to grilled chicken and lasagna. My strategy for now is to concentrate on raising funds so I can upgrade the quality of my wine and ice cream. They’ll generate revenue so I can begin to buy meat that I can then add to my lasagna or buy toilets that flush automatically.
I wrote a series of posts recently on my own blog about how gamers on the internet (and some of the gaming press) have become a shouty mob of morons that are ruining the hobby. You may find those posts to be idiotic in their own right, but they’re my opinions nonetheless. I wrote them as more of a way to deal with my frustration at what I was seeing and hearing about my favorite hobby. And I thought I was done getting everything off my chest, until yesterday.
Because yesterday, the internet took stupidity to another level.
THQ, the struggling publisher behind such awesome games as Company of Heroes, Darksiders and Saints Row, did something awesome yesterday. They offered a “Humble Bundle” promotion, where you could pay whatever you wanted to six amazing THQ games. If you paid one cent more than the average person, you unlocked a seventh game, the fantastic Saints Row: The Third. Best of all, you could determine what part of the amount you spent went to charity, what part went to THQ, and what went to the “Humble Bundle” folks that organize these sales.
So, for a small donation, I got Metro 2033, three Company of Heroes games, the original Darksiders, Red Faction: Armageddon and Saints Row: The Third. And I helped the Child’s Play charity. Awesome, right?
Apparently not to a lot of the shouty internet gaming community, and some gaming / tech websites.
See, a lot of gamers seem to feel that because the “Humble Bundle” sales began as a way to promote indie games (they were called “Humble Indie Bundles”), having a big name publisher like THQ take part tarnishes the good name of the “Humble Bundle” brand. Worse still (according to the internet), while the “Humble Indie Bundles” have always been DRM-free downloads of games, the THQ one requires (gasp) Steam activation. So, in the eyes of the outraged, not only does the big evil publisher come along and ruin the “Humble Bundle” name, but they bring the dreaded DRM with them.
Really?
Seriously?
Are we still talking about games here, people?
I give up. I’m going to go play some Metro 2033 now. Rage amongst yourselves. When you’re done determining whether or not the “Humble Bundle” is still humble anymore, you can finally resolve whether Green Day is punk or not, and why your former favorite comic creator is or isn’t a sellout because they’re writing for Marvel now.