THE HIGHS
Tim Clark: FIFA 16’s feminine side
The negative response to EA’s decision to include women players in the next FIFA game—ranging from tedious ‘banter’ about stats to the weirdly inexplicable fury the Internet specialises in—could easily have made this my low, but bollocks to that, I’d rather focus on the feelgood.
I’ve seen the move dismissed as easy tokenism, but it’s something the developer has been thinking about since before last year’s game. I’ve also seen it described as a feature no one actually wanted, and that won’t sell any more copies. As if that’s the sole reason for ever doing anything! To that complaint one person in our comments responded: “Actually, my daughter now wants to play it, so you are wrong there.” Will I play with the women’s teams? Probably for novelty, I used to watch Arsenal ladies occasionally, but let’s be clear this isn’t for me. There were over 600 teams in the last FIFA. Almost all of which I never touched. The addition of 12 female ones in the next game will mean more people will feel welcomed by the choices available when they fire up FIFA. To suggest that’s some sort of disaster is preposterous.
Phil Savage: Wild and free
Wildstar is going free-to-play. This is good. Let me explain the reasons why it is good. Reason #1: Wildstar is good. Reason #2: Wildstar is going to be free-to-play.
That's about it, really. Wildstar struggled after it launched, partly because new subscription MMOs always struggle, but also because, as it turned out, there wasn't enough appetite for such an old-school MMO template. It's been tweaked quite a bit over the last year, though, and the sense I get from the community is that it's in a much better, broader and more welcoming state. Now all it needs are people to populate those servers, and a free-to-play switch will almost certainly supply them.
I've seen a few people argue that it should retain a one-off cost, Guild Wars 2 style, rather than go fully free-to-play. I'm not sure it matters, so long as the free experience isn't overly restricted in an attempt to push people towards a real-money store. Or, to put it another way, as long as it's more Rift than Star Wars: The Old Republic. If that's the case, then more people will get to experience all that Wildstar does well.
Chris Livingston: Hey! My eyes are down here!
I'm enjoying The Witcher 3, and even getting into the story a bit, which is a surprise to me since I'm a both a newcomer to the series and not a major fantasy fan. As much as I'm digging the world, the exploration, and the characters, I think my favorite moment came when I used the free camera supplied by a mod to see what NPCs do when Geralt isn't around. Interestingly, their faces melt and their arms and heads pop off.
I know it's just a quirk of the game—there's no point in faces and animations being simulated perfectly when you're not around to see them—but I like to think it's the personal choice of the NPCs to let their faces melt when you're not around. I admit that it real life, when I'm around very fit people, I find myself, y'know, sucking in my gut a bit as the result of some combination of insecurity and vanity. Maybe these NPCs are a little self-conscious about their looks when a handsome Witcher is around, and suck in their faces in the same fashion.
After Geralt rides off, they finally get to relax and their faces come pouring down. "Is he gone?" "Yes." "Whew." *FLORPPPP*
Samuel Roberts: Zeroes to heroes
Everything comes to PC eventually. I’m not overly blown away by the news that Resident Evil Zero is probably coming to PC, since it’s largely considered one of the series’ weaker entries, but it’s an interesting sign that publishers are more keen than ever to get previously console-only games onto our platform. Look, Capcom, if you need any hints on what to port next, we made a whole list. Okami. God Hand. Make it happen.
This week I was talking to someone about how every publisher needs to be a bit less precious about what console games they bring to PC. How games like Mario 64 should be sold on GOG, as a way to counter people emulating them. Hardware-driven companies like Nintendo are unlikely to ever see the potential of doing that on PC with their older titles, but something like Resident Evil Zero shows that third-party publishers are more keen than ever to get their games onto a platform where they can be sold forever. That’s only a good thing.
Tom Senior: Invisible Inc is ace
Invisible, Inc is a turn-based espionage game that puts you in charge of a spy agency devastated by corporate attackers. You have 72 hours to strike back by taking on a choice of missions scattered around the world map. Steal corporate tech, break spy teammates out of jail, rob corporate vaults or steal data from the brains of high-level businessmen. As you guide your super-spies around each randomly-generated level, the alarm state escalates to increasingly unmanageable levels, spawning tougher guards wielding high-tech spy-busting gadgets. All is rendered in an exquisite, angular art style that sells a world of colourful corporate futurism perfectly without ever obfuscating the critical placement of cover, security cameras and other dangers.
It's brilliant. Your spies are vulnerable, but capable of moments of satisfying operational cleverness that wouldn't look out of place in a heist movie. Hack a camera, mug a guard and then pass the key-code you just palmed to your fellow agent, who can run off to scope out the rest of the facility. Put an agent in harm's way, and then laugh as the guard walks through a doorway and is tasered by your other operator. Apart from the randomisation that goes into generating levels, there are no dice rolls; you must own every decision. Areas in enemy vision cones are highlighted in bright red. You always know exactly what you need to take a guard down. The result is a tense and challenging procedurally generated puzzle game that your agents attack with fabulous panache. I love it, and I've only just cleared the first difficulty tier. It's my personal GOTY so far.
Tom Marks: Rediscovering Diablo 3
Diablo 3 has been half price for the last couple of weeks, so I bought it for my girlfriend on a hunch we might enjoy playing it together. I beat it once-through when it first came out and had pretty much not gone back to it since. We loaded it up around 8pm and began hacking at zombies and skeletons. Suddenly, I checked the clock thinking it was around 11 to find it was past 1am. That game may have some issues, but I forgot how zen it could be to mindlessly cut through waves of enemies in a snowstorm of numbers. Especially after coming off of a co-op game like Divinity: Original Sin—which is an absolute masterpiece, don’t get me wrong—the change of pace was refreshing.
THE LOWS
Tom Marks: Unsupportive
Over the past two weeks, Blizzard has been releasing a slew of Overwatch gameplay videos, each showing off a full match from the perspective of a different character. From what I’ve seen, Overwatch looks great, having the same level of detail and polish we expect from Blizzard. The game itself is not my low, nor is the fact that they’re finally showing us exactly what we’ve wanted to see. My low is that we’ve now seen all three of the currently revealed support characters, and they’re all pretty dull.
I am, for all intents and purposes, a support main. I was a priest in WoW. I mained Janna, Sona, and Thresh in LoL. I have twice the hours logged as Medic than any other class in TF2. Healing, buffs, and backup is one of my favorite things to do in competitive games, but the supports’ abilities in Overwatch look bland and uninteresting compared to the rest of the game—and even compared the vibrant personalities of the characters that wield those abilities.
Mercy has the stereotypical heal beam with a slight twist in that it can change to a damage boost, Symmetra has a point and click shield and tiny turrets that seemed to blow up as easily as they were placed, and Zenyatta—my favorite of the three—has a debuff orb and a healing orb that you drop on someone then forget about. Their personalities are unique and cool, but their abilities follow bland archetypes with seemingly very little room for complex play. Even a game like Evolve, which has a whole host of problems, shook up the standard “medic” and gave the position a more engaging role to play.
I suppose I was just hoping for more unique support ideas from what is looking like a unique game overall. I am a bit disappointed, but will have to hold off full judgement until I’ve actually had a chance to play them for myself.
Tim Clark: The undead just won’t die
Our review this week of Telltale’s latest Game Of Thrones episode reminded me that, despite it being entirely relevant to my interests, I have not played any of the prior Game Of Thrones episodes, and now it seems too late to start. And that’s mostly because I stopped playing The Walking Dead right before the last episode of the first season, and despite buying the entire second season, I haven’t plucked up the courage to go back to see the end because I know it’s going to be baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad.
Pretty much everything leading up to the climactic cliffhanger had been bad, and even the spoiler-free reaction from my friends and peers made it abundantly clear that more badness was inbound. So I left it frozen in digital aspic, with everyone on the verge of imminent trauma, but, crucially, still alive. And the odd side effect of that choice has been that I’ve felt paralysed about playing any of Telltale’s other games without finished off The Walking Dead first. Do any of you do that with games? Leave them at a key point because you don’t want the resolution to play out how you fear it will? Or… Have I gone mad.
Samuel Roberts: FTL hurt me bad
I’ve been getting back into the phenomenal FTL: Advanced Edition this week, having taken a few months off from the intergalactic roguelike following a particularly aggressive bout from March to September last year. I’ve finally mastered how to use all of the Kestrel’s systems in the game, using an even mix of hacking, mind control and most importantly cloaking to absolutely conquer the opening seven systems. It was going so well—full crew, barely dropping health bars on the journey to the last system in the game.
But apparently I don’t know FTL as well as I thought. Despite managing to beat the first form of the final boss without dropping many health points, in the second stage, where it unleashes a ton of drones upon you, my ship was almost instantly wiped out. It was a pretty heartbreaking loss, to be honest, but it just shows how in-depth the strategy of FTL is, and how much careful thought it takes to actually beat the thing.
I absolutely love this game to bits and I will never stop playing it.
Phil Savage: The definition of "exclusive"
This week, we got an early taste of how unbearable E3's console conferences will be for those of us not waving a flag for either Microsoft or Sony. Again, it's about the word exclusive, and what that word means. Sony Computer Entertainment's CEO, Andrew House, told investors how the Playstation's first-party lineup was “a little sparse”. Then, attempting to put a silver lining on things, he said this: “I will admit that [third-party exclusives] are, in the current publishing landscape, few and far between, but we were able to announce a full exclusive around a franchise like Street Fighter so that Street Fighter 5 is a complete exclusive for PlayStation 4.”
Last E3 we were treated to tortuous phrases like “coming first to consoles on Xbox,” used to imply exclusivity where none existed. Now we're just straight up misusing words. A “complete exclusive?” Tell that to the letters 'P' and 'C' that are sat next to each other on the official Street Fighter 5 website. I've already seen multiplatform gaming sites reprint this statement without mentioning the inconsistency. This is why it's so essential to give PC a space at E3, so we can challenge this attempt to remove the PC from the broader gaming conversation. We're here, we number in the millions, and you can't bury your head in the sand and pretend we don't exist.
Chris Livingston: Dissonarrative Ludonance
You're probably familiar with the concept of 'ludonarrative dissonance', the fancy-pants term coined by Clint Hocking for when your actions in a game run contrary to the game's story (for examples of this, see almost every game ever made). I encountered what is perhaps the opposite phenomenon this week, a situation in which I couldn't perform actions that would make perfect sense in the game.
The game was New York Mysteries: Secrets of the Mafia, a Myst-like puzzle/adventure game in which you must solve the mystery of mafia goons who are being melted into puddles of goo by butterflies (don't ask). The first puzzle came as the detective visits a dinosaur museum where a mafia don melted (seriously, don't ask), and finds the doorbell to be broken. I'm instructed to fix it, a puzzle which involves using scissors to cut wire from a broken light and use it to rewire the doorbell. What else could you possibly do in that situation besides DIY electrical repair?
Gee, I dunno. Knock on the door, maybe? Did it never occur to my detective, who is an expert at detecting things, that knocking on a door might be a solution that didn't involve tampering with live electrical wires? Later, I come across a cardboard box sealed with tape. Naturally, I can't open it with my hands (despite happily playing with live wires earlier), but I do have a key. As a member of Amazon Prime, which I order from constantly to justify being a member of Amazon Prime, I know the only way you ever cut through tape on boxes is with a key, because who the hell can ever find scissors? And yet, the key I found in the museum doesn't cut through the tape. As for the scissors I used earlier? They're gone. Having used them to cut a wire, I apparently then chucked them into the street. No, I need a third object to solve The Case of The Taped Cardboard Box That Cannot Be Opened For Some Reason.
Yeah, it's sometimes weird in games when you wind up doing things your character wouldn't logically do, but it's also weird when you can't do things your character logically should do.
Tom Senior: The nightmare game
The word "nightmarish" is overused, but absolutely applicable to Axiom Verge, which seems to have wormed its way deep into my brain without me realising. An uncomfortable dream that spawned me in a convoluted office building with walls made of flesh seemed standard, as nightmares go, but it was only on waking that I realised my brain was borrowing textures from the walls of Axiom Verge's odd alien planet. The texture—grey, dappled flesh with bursts of mechanical wiring and flasks of unknown pumping liquids—reappeared in another dream, which formed the substance into a series of randomised capital letters for reasons we will never know. I can only credit the subtle strangeness of Axiom Verge's pixel art for fuelling the imagination, to the extent that my brain felt the urge to play with it at night like putty.
Axiom Verge, by the way, is a very capable Metroid callback that serves as both a nostalgic hug and a nightmare-inducing psychic assault. I'm very fond of it for both reasons.
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