The colourful cast of Poker Night at the Inventory

All of us here at Armchair Diplomat have spent some time playing poker, at varying levels of seriousness.  While the others have all moved on to other, more interesting hobbies I still play regularly and Matt decided that meant I should be the one to review Poker Night at the Inventory.  Keeping in mind it’s a casual game I’ll do my best not to get all VPIP balanced ranges on y’all… here goes!

The premise of Poker Night at the Inventory is simple.  The Inventory is a club, it’s poker night and you’re there to play.  Your opponents are Max (from Sam and Max), Strong Bad (of Homestar Runner fame), the Heavy Weapons Guy (from Team Fortress 2) and Tycho (from the Penny Arcade series).

Each game has a $10,000 buy in and the winner takes all.  You never run out of money so you can play as many times as you like.  The game keeps track of how far up or down you are and each game shouldn’t take much more than 30 minutes to play.  Forget about all that though because, as we’ll discuss in a little bit, this isn’t really a poker game.  It’s actually a vehicle for getting the abovementioned characters together to engage in some witty banter.

Your opponents never stop talking.  Sometimes it’s prompted by the game and sometimes they just talk among themselves but they’re always jawing away.  Max is the deranged bunny rabbit we’ve come to know and love over the years, Strong Bad is Strong Bad-y, Mr Weapons delivers a good deadpan Arnie-esque line and Tycho’s dry nerdy wit balances things out nicely.  You don’t have to be a fan of their respective franchises to enjoy it but there are some in-jokes there for those in the know as well.  It’s reasonably clever too, and if for some reason the cards interrupt someone’s story they’ll wait until the distraction is over and then resume their story.  They’re not just responding to what’s happening on the table.

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Tier 1: Here Be Hirsuitism

While I’m thoroughly sick of first-person shooters constantly returning to World War 2 for inspiration, I have to admit to feeling slightly hesitant when EA first announced they would be rebooting their Medal of Honor series and setting the first new installment in the modern day War On Terror.  After all, you only have to look at the still-definitely-being-released-oh-my-yes Six Days in Fallujah by Atomic Games to gauge the public sentiment about creating games set in current military campaigns.  What I can appreciate, however, is the gargantuan pair of cojones it must have taken both the developer and publisher to say “fuck it” and run with the idea anyway.

The new Medal of Hono(u)r represents EA’s first attempt to wrestle back it’s share of the modern shooter genre, a genre that Activision is still managing to dominate with Call of Duty.  Obviously not wanting to leave anything to chance, they split the game’s development in two, giving the single player to in-house studio Danger Close and entrusting the all-important multiplayer to it’s DICE studio, creators of the addictive Battlefield series.

The fact that EA split the game in two just to allow a “proven” studio to handle the online component should already tell you where the real focus of the game is going to be.  But being a traditional type of lad, I’ll begin with the single player.

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F1:2010 - fans have been waiting years, has it been worth it?

November 3, 2008.  4:30am AEST.  My beloved fiancé is woken by muffled shouts of “Yes, yes, yes… what?!?  Oh you fucker!!!!  No!  No!!!  Eat shit and die Glock you incompetent twat!  Fuck!!!!”

Why begin this review with such a display of rampant retrospective profanity, I hear you ask?  It’s all in the name of context.

Y’see, the above was my reaction to the moment that decided the 2008 Formula 1 driver’s championship.  Ferrari’s Felipe Massa started his home race in Brazil, the final race of the season, seven points behind McLaren’s cocky young upstart Lewis Hamilton.  To win the championship Massa would have to win the race and have Hamilton finish outside the top five.  You’re right in thinking it was a long shot but Massa had pulled it off – he dominated the race, finished in first a full 13 seconds ahead of his nearest rival with Hamilton in sixth.  Until the very last corner, that is, when Toyota’s Timo Glock let Hamilton past to take fifth and victory in the championship by a single point.

The animated gif that’s probably still getting around of Massa’s father celebrating in the Ferrari garage, only to have a mechanic tap him on the shoulder and deliver the bad news, is both hilarious and heart breaking.

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LeChuck's Revenge is a dish best served cold

A year or so ago when I reviewed The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition, I tacked a little comment on to my suggestion to purchase saying that we should all buy ourselves a copy to ensure that LeChuck’s Revenge: Special Edition was made.  Given LucasArts’ fine tradition of recycling their IPs I’m not sure what inside me ever considered that they wouldn’t deliver a special edition of the sequel, but a little over a year later and here I am sitting in front of a spectacularly re-rendered version of Monkey 2.

The game begins with Guybrush Threepwood (purveyor of fine leather jackets) stuck on the lawless Scabb Island, continuing his search for the mythical treasure of Big Whoop … but then you already know that story, and I’m sure almost 95% of people who end up buying MI2:SE do too.  The Monkey Island games are undeniably pure genius, but their continued creation relies on the fact that nostalgic gamers like myself will shell out the cash unquestioningly.  Luckily the brand new Monkey 2 will only set you back ~$10 however, a price that more than equals it’s value in lingering nostalgia alone.

But if the nostalgia isn’t enough then what you’ll be paying for is a completely voice acted, re-rendered, re-orchestrated, widescreen version of the original game, with a couple of neat little extras thrown in.  If you played Monkey Island: Special Edition then you know just what to expect … and if you haven’t played Monkey Island: Special Edition then why are you even considering buying it’s sequel? (more…)

Johnson the albino merc gets a bad feeling...

Our regular readers will all know by now what a giant Mass Effect fanboy I am.  Despite that, I’ve found most of the game’s recent DLC packs a tad underwhelming.  What then can Lair of the Shadow Broker, the latest add-on for Mass Effect 2, offer us?

The story begins, as usual, with a message from Charlie / the Illusive Man.  Somehow he’s managed to find information that could lead someone to the Shadow Broker, and there’s no someone in the galaxy more interested in finding him than your old teammate Liara T’Soni.  So you trot off to Illium to share the news with her and thus begins another merry adventure complete with mercenary battles, hostage negotiations and lightning rods.  That’s right – fucking lightning rods, kids. (more…)

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Ready for some four dimensional puzzle gaming?

Second on my platter (perhaps even tureen?) of puzzle games to review this week is Puzzle Dimension, the debut game from Swedish team Doctor Entertainment.

The object of the game is simple.  Scattered around each level are a number of sunflowers.  You roll an ornate orb over any flat surface to reach these flowers, and once collecting them all make your way through the exit portal.  It sounds simple, but the reality is far different.  There are a host of different obstacles the game will place in front of you, and gravity is multi-directional.  This means that is just a few movements you can find yourself rolling underneath the surface of any puzzle, much like the old figure eight optical illusion … or David Bowie in Labyrinth.

In fact maybe the Labyrinth analogy is more apt, considering you treat each level like it’s own maze.  Each level requires a great deal of forward planning, logic and experimentation to complete.  Some levels have multiple ways in which to complete them, some levels have a very specific path you’ll have to discover for yourself.  The difficulty ranges from the easy to the fiendish, and could easily inspire the occasional rage-quit.

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