Here’s the scene, you’re gathered around the living room with you beautiful family, dad is half asleep, mom is fully asleep, and you just like to look at everyone while they sleep. In comes your family! Cousins, Aunts, Uncles, they come in with their food and their children. What are you going to do to pass time? Rock, paper, scissors? No, the answer is video games. Here’s what you should play.
I tried my hardest to come into Hydrophobia Pure, the new “extensive” update for the XBLA game Hydrophobia, with an open mind. I wanted it to fix all of Hydrophobia’s issues but I had my doubts that it would succeed. After spending a few hours with Hydrophobia Pure, I’ve realized one thing; some parts of a game cannot be fixed through just an update.
The developers, Dark Energy Digital, promised many new things in this update and they delivered. The new cover system is great. It’s fast, easy to handle, and tremendously better than the old cover in Hydrophobia. What they didn’t change is the combat itself. For example, it still takes way too many shots to take a Malthusian down. I understand that they had a different idea with the whole “the way to kill these enemies is by waiting for them to get close to an explosive canister then using the canister to kill them” but that’s not fun and Hydrophobia would’ve benefitted greatly by the removal of their kind of combat altogether.
Video games over the years have showed us many things. Brilliant worlds that don’t exist, scenarios that never happened, and heroes we wish were real. However we are not here to honor those today (maybe another time). Today we are here to honor a great invention made by a video game character. This will be a new feature that will honor great instruments for the good of science…in video games.
Go to any video game message board and you are bound to come across this phrase – “Games today are stupid! They were so much better when I was younger, back when they had more challenge/depth/length/story/nostalgia/mascots/two-dimensions!” It’s a common chorus, though those who say it often neglect how some of the changes to gaming have vastly improved the pastime.
Since this past week marked Thanksgiving as well as the fifth anniversary of the Xbox 360, I though I would take a moment to share my appreciation for a few of the things this console generation that have made our leisure time a bit easier, a bit more social, and simply a bit more cool.
In video games, an introduction can make or break your experience. This brief exposure to the characters and setting can mean the difference between giving the game a fair chance or turning the console off and walking away.
Ever since Bruce Campbell hoisted aloft his mighty boomstick, shotguns have been the premiere weapon for laying waste to our imaginary adversaries. As fiction has proved countless times, no enemy is a match for the raw strength of a bunch of tiny pellets fired at close range. Like most modern gaming consoles, the Xbox 360 has paid its dues to the most redundantaly-named of guns. Whether you’re fighting zombies, space aliens or even zombie space aliens, the following games know how to celebrate this mainstay of the gamer arsenal.
Teamwork is a big part of Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom. You take the control of a young thief who has managed to befriend a mythical beast named Majin in order to exterminate a blight called the darkness from the land. Majin is an intimating giant that looks like a cross between a rock golem and a tree. Enlisting Majin to your quest not only provides you with an intense bodyguard, it also opens up new possibilities for puzzle solving or exploration.
On your own, the thief is an agile sneak that can easily get the drop on enemies before they see him and assassinate them with one hit. The thief is a lot smaller than Majin, so getting through tight spaces is more his forte.
People who say Facebook isn’t the future of gaming have not tried out the new Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit demo. Developed by Criterion, the studio behind the Burnout series, Hot Pursuit’s most touted feature is “AutoLog,” a type of in-game social network that keeps constant tabs on the progress of other racers on your friends list.
This goes beyond just a regular leaderboard, though, and makes an earnest attempt at making a community out of a racing game. After going back to the main menu after my first race, message posts advertising my friends’ best race times continually floated past my screen, egging me on to try just one time.
It’s easy to forget that Bungie ever made games that were not Halo. Working on the same series for over a decade will do that to you, but first-person shooters were not always the core of Bungie’s creative output. Now that they’re starting anew with Activision, it’s a good opportunity to take a look back at some of their previous work.
Though the company first hit it big with the Marathon series of shooters for the Macintosh, they also created the well-regarded strategy series Myth for Mac and PC. It may surprise long-time Halo fans to learn that the company’s first foray into the console market was actually a Playstation 2 game, the brawler Oni.
Fallout: New Vegas might just be the most important game ever for developer Obsidian Entertainment. It’s certainly going to be one of their most high-profile games, but New Vegas is also their best opportunity in years for their talents to shine through.
If you’re reading this than you’re probably already familiar with Obsidian’s origins, how it’s comprised of members of Black Isle Studios, the guys who made the first two Fallout games and a couple other really great PC RPGs in the late 90s and early 2000s. If you don’t know that story, feel free to check out my feature last week on the origins of the Fallout franchise here. I see this article as a companion piece to that, building off so
