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"The 3 E's: Electronic, Entertainment, and Erithmatic"
Posted by MAtt Dujnic - 07/21/2010 - [permalink]
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We are a little late with our E3 musings. But that's all right. We find that we're much more trenchant at 9 am. If trenchant is what you are looking for, have at it.
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Nethack has been conquered. Final Fantasy XIII, not so much. And Red Dead Redemption, the single best Old West video game, and arguably the best of the year, took us to new heights of drunken joy. Our collective orgasm is actually a little embarrassing, but I took a fine editor's knife to it, chopping half of our drunken ramblings into a tight 50 minutes. Call it Grand Theft Auto on a Horse (which is fine in a way), but Red Dead could (and, likely, has) fueled a thousand podcasts. We could have talked forever.
Go listen. And, if you would be so kind, y'all... leave us a positive review on that thar yonder iTunes store.
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There's a little less than a day left to acquire the Humble Indie Bundle. For the next 20 hours or so you can get a total of six (6!) indie games, for the price of your choosing. Yes, you get to choose, and as a bonus, you can even direct some or all of the money to charity.
I actually already paid $20 for World of Goo a while back, but the other five are all new to me. WoG alone was worth that much money though, don't be deceived thinking it is just a puzzly physics engine and...goo.
I took the others for a test drive and here's some first impressions:
Aquaria: A laid-back, underwater, Metroidvania game. Use songs to activate abilities, collect items for power-up recipes, help a mer-type-person explore her past (or existence?). I hope the story picks up a bit, although the pace may be partly my own fault: This type of game drives me nuts because I'm compelled to explore every nook and cranny.
Gish: Platforming as a lump of tar, you can stick to walls, slip through cracks and condense yourself to smash things. A weird platformer that downplays jumping in favor of special abilities. Pretty original though, it's a peculiar challenge trying to get a viscous liquid to travel across the ceiling.
Lugaru: 3rd-person hand-to-hand combat. Classic revenge story. With rabbits. I'm going to have to set it to easy for best results, these bunnies are kicking my ass.
Penumbra Overture: First Person Horror Adventure game (Action to come?). This game scares me. They give you flares and glowsticks and flashlight batteries, but it will never be enough. There's a cool type of cover system for hiding from enemies, which will just make the game more tense as I wonder which direction death is coming from. I'm looking forward to this game giving me a heart attack.
Samorost 2: The first thing I thought of was The Little Prince as a point-and-click adventure/puzzle game. Elements of Dr. Seuss stylings seem to be present as well, the game is beautiful. Like all point-and-clicks you risk getting frustrated searching for active elements, but for you cheaters there's always TAB.
Overall you can't go wrong. There's huge amounts of variety here, so even if they aren't all your favorite genre you can pick your price and enjoy.
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Imagine 3-on-3, turn-based, cube-based soccer. This is Qoccer. You and your opponent take turns tuning three cube-peoples' trajectory, and then all six combatants are launched around the arena simultaneously. Pass, shoot, block, push, fly, screen, break away, score. Two goals to win.
Qoccer is pure and simple fun with endearing physics, understated gameplay, and a charming art style. The blank looks on the faces of your Qoccer players belie their intensely competetive spirit though. Setting up a play and watching it execute is entertaining in itself, but a player soon finds that victory demands plotting and merciless shoving.
Planning multiple moves ahead becomes necessary as good defense often foils good offense. Constructing a decent offensive play is a calculated affair, like setting up a combo shot in pool with three cue balls. Qoccer's creator Victor Ortega has a good sense of humor about how difficult it can be to score, with in-game text asking: 'Hard to score? Try playing real soccer.'
Playing against a friend is definitely the way to go, but the CPU is adequate for learning and quick-play. There are ideas that simply don't occur to the CPU opponent, for instance it is reluctant to launch a Qoccer player too high in the air, preventing it from taking advantage of various death-from-above strategies. Try to get another human to sit down and play, it's exceedingly easy to learn (although an option for inverting the Y-Axis would have been nice).
Qoccer is solid fun for a buck on Xbox Live Indie Games, go check out the Gamer: Dig Deep trailer here.
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Just when you thought I'd only be playing indie games, Episode 4 of Gamer: Dig Deep comes out and it's for Just Cause 2. Less a review than...yeah, I'm not sure what to say about the video, it's better to just watch it. The cut scenes are really that terrible though. Throughout.
You may have heard me express the opinion on the podcast (or in these newsposts) that what Just Cause 2 needed was to just go balls-out crazy and make the story completely ludicrous. They tried, but what ended up happening is that they put you the player in weirder and weirder gameplay scenarios, and for a game that routinely violates Newtonian Physics, this was not enough for me. The main campaign is bland and predictable with little exception (repetitive too). There are a couple side missions that have you do something off-beat or weird, but the main storyline is pathetic and often hard to watch, as you can see in the snippet from the opening cut scene I included in this week's episode.
BTW, I don't have the budget to review a lot of $60 games, so fully expect the next G:DD episode to come back to indie games.
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We cover video games from 2600 to 360. Original video, t-shirts, features, cartoons, and podcasts. MAtt Dujnic and Daniel Dujnic at the helm. Sign up for the mailing list!
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