PLAYSTAPOCALYPSE 2011!: New Releases for the Week of 04-24-11

Jack Shit  (PlayStation Network)

Been playing quite a bit of this in the last few days. Not as engaging as the gritty, aggressive-sounding name might lead you to believe.

Darkspore (PC)

A spinoff of the 2008 Electronic Arts/Maxis 2008 game Spore. Sadly, however, Darkspore is not some sort of evil mirror-universe counterpart of the original Spore, developed by an evil bearded mirror universe Will Wright. Instead, it's an action RPG in a science fiction setting that incorporates a character editor based on the Creature Creator from the original Spore.

It does, however, come equipped with evil bearded mirror universe digital rights management software intended to improve upon the controversial DRM of its predecessor. It works much like the SecuROM DRM in Spore, requiring online authentication when the game is installed and limiting a copy to a maximum of five installations. The chief difference difference is that, in this version, attempting to install the game a sixth time will awaken the pitiless machine intelligence governing the game's patented AgnonizeROM anti-piracy program, which will neutralize the potential threat to EA's intellectual property by killing you and anyone else in the vicinity with a series of increasingly painful electrical shocks. It also eliminates most of the compatibility problems SecuROM sometimes ran into with Windows Vista, which is a plus.

The Robot Geek American Staff Podcast is here

Over at Robot Geek, I'm part of the first episode of a new regular feature: The Robot Geek Podcast:: American staff edition! Join me and cohost Nick Nguyen for rambling, awkward discussion of video game topics including:
Bulletstorm!

Marvel vs. Capcom 3!

Classic PC game manuals of yesteryear!

Bewhiskered musclemen committing horrific acts of animal cruelty!

Other stuff I can't remember off the top of my head because it was recorded over a month ago!

All of it delivered in my golden G-Man-from-Half-Life-meets-Daffy-Duck-on-barbituates tones! Don't miss it!

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh E.T. Alamogordo, New Mexico wgah'nagl fhtagn: New releases for the week of 04-10-11

Magicka: Vietnam

(PC) An expansion to the action-adventure fantasy game. Like the original, you play as a wizard using his sorcerous might to battle hordes of foes, except that instead of the original's Norse myth-inspired fantasy world you're in... Vietnam.

Remember a few months ago, when I referred to Kingdom Hearts as the “Game Premise Most Likely to Have Been Originally Conceived at 3:00 AM By People Sitting In a Huge Cloud of Marijuana Smoke”? I don't think Magicka: Vietnam displaces the current title holder, but the contest is sort of the first Rocky Balboa-Apollo Creed bout of bizarre video game premises: Magicka: Vietnam doesn't win, but it gives the champion a run for his money and proves it has what it takes to go the distance.

 

World of Tanks

(PC) Massively multiplayer online team-based action game built around tank combat, featuring American, Russian, and German armored vehicles from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. I'm not into MMOs, but what I've read about it sounds pretty cool. It's just unfortunate that the game has a name that makes it sound like a place you'd find at the mall between Spencer's Gifts and one of those fancy scented soap stores I go to when I need to buy a female friend or relative a present and can't think of anything else.

Yar's Revenge

(Xbox Live Arcade) I was sort of hoping that this would be about Tasha Yar from Star Trek: The Next Generation somehow returning to have a rematch with that evil talking oil slick that killed her in the first season, but no such luck. Instead, it's a remake of an action game for the Atari 2600. More specifically, it's a remake of an action game for the Atari 2600 that was programmed by the same guy who programmed the legendary E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial for the same system. To be fair, the original Yar's Revenge was reputedly much better than E.T., though being better than a game so universally abhorred that millions of unsold copies were encased in concrete and buried in the desert like nuclear waste or the dead-but-dreaming corporeal vessel of some malevolent elder god isn't a terribly exacting standard.

New article at Robot Geek

This site was silent last week, but for once it wasn't just me being lazy. I've been busy at the recently relaunched Robot Geek, a fine gaming website that I recommend to all of you. If you're one of the threes of loyal Pointless Side Quest readers out there, fear not: this site is very much still a going concern as well.

My most recent Robot Geek posting was this article, inspired by the recent release of Homefront. It's gorged to bursting with:

• Actual, meant-to-be -taken seriously thoughts on suspension of disbelief in video games!
• The logistics of large-scale cross-Pacific invasions!
• Astonishing discoveries by revisionist historians on the role of wisecracking Japanese shape-shifters and giant nuclear-armed robots in 20th-Century Russia!
• Completely gratuitous abuse directed at Ben Affleck over a movie that came out nearly a decade ago!
• Hundreds and hundreds of words that weren't interesting enough to justify additional bullet points describing them!

So, check it out.

Still haven't gotten around to the first Dragon Age: New Releases for the Week of 03-06-11

Phantom Brave: Heroes of the Hermuda Triangle

(Sony PSP) Port of Nippon Ichi's 2004 strategy RPG for the PlayStation 2. This version will include all of the additional content added for the Nintendo Wii port released in 2009, as well as some new stuff specific to this version. I'm not sure what the “Hermuda Triangle" subtitle is all about; I guess whoever oversaw the localization at Nippon Ichi Software America thought the essence of the game was best captured by something that sounds like a really unimaginative name for a nautically-themed porno movie.

It's in the same vein as other Nippon Ichi games like Disgaea with lots of huge optional random dungeons, secret bosses powerful enough to swat the final boss of the main storyline like a fly, and the ability to level up both your characters and their equipment until they're all inflicting octovigenuple-digit  damage every turn, though this one is the oddball of that group in some ways. (At one point back when I was playing it, one of the most powerful weapons wielded by any of my characters was a flower pot.  That could fire lasers, for some reason.)

I had a lot of fun with Phantom Brave way back when, so if you like strategy RPGs and missed it the first time around I'd recommend checking it out.

Pokemon - Black Version and Pokemon - White Version

I know very little about Pokémon, so it wasn't until I read up on these games that I discovered how they work. Like Sith, they always come in pairs- that much I already knew. What I didn't know is that they're basically the same game, except that each has a few items, battles,  Pokémon- or Pokémons or Pokémen or Pokémonim or whatever the plural form is- and maybe a bonus area  not present in its counterpart.

Thus, in order to catch 'em all- which I understand is encouraged in Pokémon circles- you have to either know someone who also owns a Gameboy/Gameboy Advance/DS and the complementary version of your own game in order to trade via the multiplayer feature, or buy what is essentially the same game twice. I take my hat off to whichever diabolical marketing genius came up with this; it's not often I find myself switching back and forth so rapidly from being impressed and being appalled.

(There are things I could say about the unfortunate implications of an installment in the Pokémon game franchise in which some of the Pokémon are restricted to the Black or White version of the game instead of being allowed to freely intermingle, but it's probably better for the blog to gradually work its way up towards “jokes about systemic racism” levels of offensiveness instead of just rushing there headlong.)

On the Genealogy of Downloads: New Releases for the Week of 02-27-11

Beyond Good and Evil (Xbox Live Arcade)

Upgraded high-definition rerelease of the 2003 action-adventure game. The game will also be available for download on PlayStation Network at some point in the future.

Beyond Good and Evil was one of those games that had the sad fate of gaining an intensely enthusiastic cult following that still speaks fondly of the game almost a decade later while bombing with the general public. Though well-received by critics, the game was a commercial failure when it was released,  the victim of the limited appeal of the game's premise, poor marketing support by Ubisoft, and a faltering market for games named after books by Friedrich Nietzsche that had already been oversaturated by prior 2003 releases Xenosaga: Die Wille zur Macht and the critically acclaimed The Birth of Tragedy: A Barbie Horse Adventure.

Rift: Planes of Telara (PC)

New MMORPG. Honestly, the only reason I'm aware of this is that the developers, Trion, had a legal battle over trademarks with Kevin Siembieda, owner of Palladium Books and creator of the long-running tabletop RPG Rifts. Which Trion really should have seen coming, since Palladium has long been notorious for continuously emitting IP-related cease-and-desist notices in much the same way that you or I exhale carbon dioxide. (Though, to be fair, Palladium's complaint was actually a lot more reasonable than the sort of thing they're often known for.)

Vagrant Story (PlayStation Network)

(PlayStation Network) Square Enix continues to mercilessly taunt me with reminders  of why Square used to be my favorite developer with this classic action RPG from the original PlayStation, released as a downloadable game. Check it out if you missed it the first time around.

Chuck E Cheese's Sport Games (Nintendo Wii)

I don't really have anything to say about this game, since any joke I could make about it is less amusing to me than the simple fact of its existence.

Now, I suspect that this will tempt some people  to sneer that a Wii game based on the animatronic mascot of a chain of children's restaurants/entertainment centers is an example of how far Nintendo has fallen from its once-glorious heights in pursuit of the casual gamer market. So allow me to point out that, back in the halcyon era of the original Nintendo Entertainment System, when men were men and games were games and your mom didn't understand that the NES couldn't play Colecovision cartridges, the NES had games about McDonald's, the Noid  from Domino's Pizza commercials, and even a game starring the red dot on bottles of 7-Up. (Though, tragically, Fido Dido's moment in the sun would be forever denied him.) We had everything short of Procter and Gamble's Adventures in Brand Management Land, so it's a little late in the day to complain about this sort of thing.

Buy me Bonestorm, or go to Hell: New Releases for the Week of 2-20-11

Xenogears (PlayStation Network)

The classic Square RPG, now available for download. This is one of my favorite games of all time, and if you like RPGs I can't recommend it strongly enough. If you play only one game about badass martial artists, giant battling mecha, sci-fi Euhemerism, flying cities, reincarnation, love that spans millennia, lost ancient civilizations, dissociative identity disorder, and harvesting people to use as spare parts in a giant interstellar biotechnological superweapon this year, make it this one.

Bulletstorm (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC)

Gleefully over-the-top first-person shooter. I'm looking forward to this one; I enjoyed the demo so much that I preordered it, something I almost never do.

(Though it also helped that I was able to get a $20 rebate on a future purchase for my preorder, effectively making it cost only $40. Also, after repeated exposures to the demo, I'm sort of afraid that Steven Blum will find out where I live, hunt me down, and bludgeon me to death with my own sundered limbs if I don't buy the game as soon as possible.)

Like my beloved Vanquish, it has something that I hope will become more common: a score. I like the idea of a game that pushes me as a player to play levels again and again so I can become quantifiably more badass each time, instead of just treating its main campaign as something to push through to see all of the game's content or as a glorified tutorial for multiplayer mode. I'm not a huge fan of multiplayer gaming, so it's nice to see games that will have to live or die according to the quality of their campaign.

Killzone 3 (PlayStation 3)

Continuation of the first-person shooter series. I played the demo for Killzone 2 and didn't much care for it. I haven't played the demo for this one yet, so maybe that will change my mind, but as things stand now I'm not really interested.

Also, while I'm aware that a “kill zone” is an actual concept in military tactics*, that doesn't change the fact that “Killzone” is probably the dullest, most generic-sounding name of any popular video game franchise. It's just barely a step up from calling it Game Where You Shoot People.

*(Albeit one that doesn't appear to have any particular relevance to Killzone's story or gameplay; the series seems like it could just as easily have been named Encirclement or Bounding Overwatch or Guys Standing in a Square Formation and Stabbing People With Huge Fucking Spears.)

I know that a lot of people really loved the last one, though, so your mileage may vary.

Dreamcast Collection (Xbox 360 and PC)

At long last, you can once again experience the magic of Sega's beloved but ill-fated Dreamcast with... 5 games that were already available as separate downloads, or soon will be. One of which is a game about fishing. Lucky for Sega that I just can't stay angry at the company that released Vanquish.

Radiant Historia (Nintendo DS)

RPG from Atlus, with a story based on time travel and the ability to change history.

I think I'm going to have to bite the bullet and actually buy a Nintendo DS soon. Atlus has made some of my favorite games of the past five or six years, and there's a finite number of times the words “Another  Atlus RPG I can't play” can echo through my neocortex before a fuse blows and I wake up one morning with a bunch of inexplicable gaps in my memory and the words YENRUOJ EGNARTS IESNET IMAGEM NIHS written in blood on the ceiling.