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It’s a little difficult to describe the feeling you get when you first start playing Transformers: War For Cybertron, but it must be something akin to finding a $100 bill in an old pair of dirty underwear. It wouldn’t have occurred to you to ever look there for a $100 bill, but when you accidentally [...]
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I knew Koreans loved their Starcraft a lot but … well, the picture probably speaks for itself:
Thanks to my mate Dave, who snapped this photo on his way to Sonisphere in the UK – I’m jealous!
This week’s Australian new release list is brought to you by fair dinkum moving forward, because international readers don’t need to get all the jokes, do they?
If you can tear your attention away from the election campaign (thousands* of gamers just went “Whuh?!? Election?” didn’t they…) / Starcraft II campout queue for a while you’ll find the following new releases in Australian stores this week:
Happy Zerg rushing and we’ll see you all next week.
Are you sure we got all the key points in the box art? Did you remember to add explosions? Very good!
The camera tracks a lone Agent, clad from head to toe in cybernetic armour, as he leaps across the deserted rooftops of Pacific City. He jumps effortlessly, only seeming to graze the concrete surfaces before he hurls himself forward again. Suddenly, wings snap open between his arms and he glides down to street level, bathed orange by the light of fire and flickering street lights. Below, shambling mutants cover the ground like ants, moaning and baying in their lust for blood.
Cut camera to the ground. The Agent slams into the pavement fist first, scattering mutants left and right with the shockwave. Those unfortunate enough to break his fall explode into a green mist, the impact leaving no remnants. The Agent stands, unhooks the machine gun on his back, and begins to fire indiscriminately into the swarm. The mutants fall before the hail of bullets like wheat before the harvester, green blood spraying everywhere and staining the asphalt.
The scene continues for a few minutes, the only pause in the carnage comes when the Agent needs to reload. When the last mutant falls to the ground, and the final tinkle of shell casings has echoed away, we hear the Voice of the Agency.
“Good work, Agent,” he says in a confident, authoritative tone, “now how about we see how many rings you can drive a car through?”
I’ve been struggling to write a review of Crackdown 2, because I’ve found it a little difficult to work out just what the game is trying to present to the player. On the one hand it’s a very simplistic, fairly enjoyable sandbox game with a focus on exploration and experimentation. On the other hand, it appears to want to imply a very deep, immersive experience that just isn’t there … and charge you accordingly.
Your Kinect unit will travel to you in style, international gamer!
Microsoft Australia today delivered the official pricing plans for their upcoming motion controller Kinect (nee Natal). EB Games have had the RRP estimate at $199 AU for a while now, and this announcement now makes that number gospel. Still no release date available, but as the press release makes a big deal of talking about Christmas trees, so you can probably assume November/December sometime.
The standalone Kinect bundle will include the Kinect Adventures game, which is good news considering I’d have expected to pay a lot more for a game that lets you go anywhere you want.
America have lead the pricing announcements, stating that Kinect will retail over there for $150 US. Which I guess leaves only one question for us non-US gamers to ponder:
Why the fuck is it so expensive for us?
Apparently Microsoft care so much about the release of Kinect later this year that they’re going to be shipping each Kinect unit in it’s very own air-conditioned shipping container covered in solid gold. Or at least I assume that’s what they’re doing, because how else do we explain the ~$30AU price hike that seems to have attached itself to each Kinect somewhere over the Pacific Ocean?
I guess we should be used to it by now. After all, we are the continent that’s expected to pay ~150% of a game’s original US RRP. I suppose at the very least we can be thankful that we’re not the UK, who’ve been given the stunningly inflated RRP price of 130GBP, the equivalent of around $200 US.
So with prices this artificially inflated consumers better take heed of Xbox AU’s David McLean advice, and “will definitely want to pre-order at their retailer of choice to secure their Kinect”. Unless of course we discover there is no region locking for the Kinect, in which case I’m sure we can always find less lavish ways to ship ourselves a unit from the States.
Check out the full announcement over at InsiderX, and don’t forget to pre-order! We don’t want to all gouge ourselves stupid at once and cause a shortage!
New and improved, Colin McRae: Dirt 2
I’ve been thinking for the past few months that I don’t have enough decent racing games and I could really do with something to tide me over until F1 2010 finally rears its head. I was tossing up a few options when Matt solved all my problems by shipping me half a dozen different racing titles on Steam. Colin McRae: Dirt 2 is the first cab off the rank, so to speak.
One of the first things you’ll notice is that the game probably could’ve been called Ken Block: Dirt. Colin McRae died tragically in 2007 so he obviously played no active role in the game. Respect is paid to him at various points but it’s the current stars of the X-Games circuit that you’ll be racing and interacting with: Tanner Foust, Dave Mirra, Travis Pastrana, a bunch of others and of course everybody’s favourite sideways shoe salesman, Ken Block himself. That’s right, there’s hardly a Finn in sight and it’s almost like the WRC doesn’t exist which makes you wonder, really, just how serious a rallying game this is? We’ll get back to that question later.
I’ll get the main gripe out of the way first. I had a lot of trouble with bugs in this game. For the first couple of days it’d take half a dozen or more attempts at starting and then restarting the game to convince it to run without crashing in the first race. This issue eventually sorted itself but ever since there’s been regular visual glitches and random crashes. I consulted the forums, couldn’t find any reasonable fixes but did note with interest that plenty of other people were complaining about all sorts of different bugs of their own.
The whole thing is a massive pain in the arse, to the point where I almost chucked the game in. I’m glad I didn’t though because once you’re finally behind the wheel of a car this game is a hell of a lot of fun.
This week’s Australian new release list comes with a public service announcement rather than a sponsor.
If you’re Australian and over the age of 18, make sure you’re on the electoral roll by 8:00pm tonight. If you’re not you won’t get to have your say on important issues like the world’s dumbest internet filter and which is the lesser of two evils: having a ginger or a conservative in budgie smugglers as prime minister.
Right. That’s gotta meet our serious content quota for the year, so on with the releases! The following titles are due out this week:
And don’t forget, Starcraft II is due out next week. Until then!
Grab Fractal for $5!
… TO A BIGGER OFFICE. Yes, the groovy team at Cipher Prime are making their way into a bigger and better building, and to offset the cost of packing, shipping and hiring lazy teamsters they’re having themselves a fundraiser sale. From now through until the end of July you can get your hands on both the award winning Auditorium and the recently released Fractal for just $5 apiece.
Having played both games (Fractal review coming soon, I promise I’ll get around to it), I can tell you this is a great deal for puzzle game fans.
People picking up the games during the sale will also recieve one song off the soundtrack off each game: “Iterate!” from Fractal and “Autumn” from Auditorium. If you already own both titles, you can buy each track for a dollar to help raise funds.
It’s a worthy cause, readers, so if you’re yet to try out either game then head over to the Cipher Prime site!
Marine, gun and gimmick? Check.
I’ve always had a little bit of a soft spot for Raven Software ever since they released Heretic, the fantasy inspired Doom clone. The game established Raven as a company who weren’t afraid to make something original in an unoriginal format. The Star Trek nerd in me enjoyed Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force too, another of Raven’s creations, which turned out to offer not only a good fan service but also a highly decent Quake-inspired shooter.
So I was fairly optimistic when I picked up a copy of Singularity, Raven Software’s latest first-person shooter, as it seemed to tick all the boxes for an interesting game. First-person shooter, with temporal puzzles and effects, set in a mutant infested Russian military research facility. Unfortunately, upon playing the game, I was left with the lasting impression that ticking boxes was all Singularity did in the hopes of creating an imaginative new title.
The story surrounds Captain Nathaniel Renko, your typical US space marine Black Ops soldier, who’s been sent on a recon mission to the supposedly abandoned Russian island of Katorga-12 after reports of a massive electro-magnetic pulse. After crash landing, Renko finds himself thrown back through time to 1955, where the facility is self-destructing. While in the past he saves a scientist from a burning building, and after returning to the present day finds that time has altered radically. The scientist, Nikolai Demichev, has used the power of Katorga-12′s experimental Element 99 (or E99 for short) to overthrow the government and has proceeded to conquer the globe.
Previously titled (Gears of) War for Cybertron
It’s a little difficult to describe the feeling you get when you first start playing Transformers: War For Cybertron, but it must be something akin to finding a $100 bill in an old pair of dirty underwear. It wouldn’t have occurred to you to ever look there for a $100 bill, but when you accidentally find it you’re so happy that you don’t mind the company it’s been keeping. The entire Transformers property has fallen on hard times recently, with some questionable movies and some truly hideous games based on those movies. That’s why it’s such a delight to pick up War For Cybertron, a game I’d only been vaguely aware of up until the week of it’s release, and find out that here is a Transformers game that doesn’t suck.
Set before the original animated series, the game chronicles the ongoing battle between the Autobots and Decepticons over their home planet of Cybertron. Although players can choose to play either the Decepticon or Autobot campaign first, the narrative begins with the Decepticon’s rise to power and concludes with the Autobot’s scramble to defend themselves. You can play the game solo or online co-op, with each level offering a selection of three Transformers to control. Transformers are split into different classes, each of which have their own vehicle form and selection of special skills.
The game plays out as an over-the-shoulder shooter, and to say that this game shamelessly plunders elements from Gears of War would be putting it nicely. Many elements of the control scheme are identical, as is the feel of both movement and shooting, and both games share a penchant for oversized bosses. During the section of the Autobot campaign where you take on a corrupted cyber-slug, all I could think was: “Hey! Sure is Robo-Corpser in here”. But the brilliant thing about War For Cybertron is that you won’t care. The Unreal Engine works so perfectly in the Cybertron setting that it’s almost impossible to feel any ill will towards recycled mechanics. Personally I felt like they could have borrowed a little more, in fact, like at least a basic cover system.
The game to pilot the pilot system
Before I spilled booze all over the perma-link management system we mysteriously encountered technical difficulties last week, Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent was to round out the tureen (possibly even bain-marie by now) of puzzle games I had to review. Although it might not be the most replayable of the bunch, or even the best by score, I think it’s my favourite of the three.
Developed by Telltale Games and designed by artist/animator Graham Annable, Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent is the first game to be released under Telltale’s new TV-style pilot approach. Obviously wanting to safely diversify their catalogue, Telltale have begun producing single episode “pilot” games to gauge their reception before commiting to a complete season of episodic games … presumably to avoid making themselves another Bone.
But it’s hard to see how Puzzle Agent could avoid being green lighted after seeing what’s on offer.
Coming into this game I was only familiar with Annable’s art via the comic Dank/Dunk that he creates for the Telltale Games website, but once I’d sat down and browsed the Grickle Channel for a good half hour, seeing his angular, charcoal edged work come to life in a video game is actually quite impressive. The game is presented almost completely in 2D, with three dimensional objects textured to look like cartoons at their edges. The animation is also somewhat minimal, which gives the game a hand-made feel that works quite well.