The Independent Games Festival is due to hold its’ 13th annual awards ceremony in the Spring of 2011. The IGF is a mainstay of the gaming calendar, and in the words of Kyle Gabler (World of Goo) ”is the biggest showcase for indie games”.
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We are changing servers today! Don’t worry, you won’t have to update bookmarks or anything like that, we’ll still be at the same address.
I just want to keep everyone informed in case things go a bit haywire and we hit a bit of town time. Apologies for any inconveniences that this may cause, I promise to get things settled soon.
Thanks!
Call of Duty: Black Ops looks as though it may go on to become one of the best-selling games of all-time. This is a worrying statistic.
Black Ops is not a disaster, it’s not the searing exposé of Treyarch’s failings as a developer many thought it would be. It’s well put together, slick and at times accomplished. The core package offers you a 6 hour single -player campaign, Easter eggs, zombie modes and the latest instalment of the ever popular multi-player component. But there is nothing exceptional about it. If the Modus Operandi of the early COD games was excellence, immersion and realism, then the MO for Black Ops was to insert enough explosions and cool shit like people bursting through windows on a grappling rope to make a bad-ass trailer. Consequently the single-player feels a bit like a Michael Bay film, with eye-candy, over the top set pieces and about as much depth as a toddlers paddling pool. The same criticism could perhaps be levelled at last years Modern Warfare 2, where a wilfully controversial level did much to mask the lack of any real substance. One of the main problems is that the core game, the shooting section has remained exactly the same for several years now. So much effort has gone into the set-pieces and even the story, that the actual first-person shooter section of the game is beginning to feel dated and neglected. Instead of being the glue that holds the package together, the shooting is beginning to feel like the dull bit between the set pieces that has to be endured.
The early game has enough variety that you may not immediately notice these problems, you’ll find yourself throughout the course of the game doing things like escaping a prison on a motorbike, piloting a heavily armed riverboat through the treacherous waters of Laos or flying a chopper around blowing up oil pipes. These sections don’t last long, which is probably a good thing as they are more about spectacle and the thrill of doing something new than actually being fun and interesting in their own right. But the very last part of the game is back to basics – run, take cover, shoot the bad guys, proceed ten meters, rinse, repeat. It’s here you’ll notice just how dumb the AI is, never surprising, never being much more than slightly an annoying roadblock that must be cleared before you proceed. You’ll get plenty of different tools to dispose of them, but each is as good as the next and the combat lacks any urgency or tension. Even the obligatory stealth scene in the game feels like little more than an interactive cut-scene. The story is marginally better than recent entries in the series, using a more personal tale as an excuse to visit various cold-war locations and blow them up. There are recurring numbers, crazed Russians, jail-breaks, torture scenes and a big twist at the end that is nicely foreshadowed, if a little obvious. All in all the story gives you enough incentive to keep playing through the campaign, but it would be nice if the game-play was reward enough.
The multi-player is probably the strongest part of the game offering a number of tweaks from Modern Warfare 2 that make it a worthwhile proposition. If you ignore the zombie mode (you should, it’s rubbish), what you’ll find is a mode filled with options for how you want to play, how you want to look and what kinds of games you’ll want to take part in. Choice, customization and one of the best multi-player arcade shooters out there make for a satisfying and long-lasting experience. With 15 levels of prestige to be attained, there’s always something willing you to keep on playing and there’s always something to unlock. Although the mode initially released on the PC with a horrible CPU issue that caused masses of lag, the problem seems to have been patched out now, although some people with lesser PC’s may still want to give it a miss. Guns have proper recoil now, kill-streak rewards are slightly harder to earn and you can slap a picture of a unicorn on your gun if you so choose, a feature sorely lacking from most online shooters. Perhaps the best new feature of the multi-player is the inclusion of wager matches. Forget the pretence of playing to earn cash, you’ll earn enough through normal play that it will never be a great concern. Wager matches are essentially mods to the core game that ignore your level, weapons and perks and place everyone on a level playing field, each with some fun conditions. My personal favourite is Sticks and Stones, which gives everyone a crossbow with explosive bolts, a tomahawk and the ballistic knife. You earn points through getting kills with these weapons, the person with the most points at the end of the game wins. The twist is that tomahawk kills, hard to pull off but immensely satisfying cause your opponent to lose all their points. The game becomes a tense show-down where skill and timing is everything, you can’t camp or sit still for a moment in case someone comes along and sticks a tomahawk in your vertebrae. The Multi-player segment of Black Ops can be a genuinely good time, but it will still feel overly familiar to players of the last three Call of Duty installments, if you’re not interested in more of the same with new maps and weapons and gamemodes, this isn’t for you.
The Call of Duty series seems to be at a point now where it has transcended criticism. Activision are not a particularly popular company. Their CEO is something of an internet hate figure . Yet this seems to have little impact on their record-smashing sales figures even with a series that runs the risk of becoming mired in mediocrity. The worry is the message Activision and other publishers must be getting from those figures. A yearly release, churned out with a good trailer and a celeb-studded launch party are fast becoming more important than a game being any good. Black Ops is not a bad game, but it’s not the greatest of all-time. But why strive for greatness when middle of the road reaps better rewards? If you don’t care for multi-player you’d be better served avoiding Black Ops, it will leave you reminiscing of the days when the Call of Duty name was a seal of quality.
Cry of Disappointment
World of Goo was awesome, one of my favourite games of all time. I dream of seeing a new World of Goo title. My dreams may, just may, come true.
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Call of Duty never used to be about Modern Warfare and CODBLOPS, it is a series that used to have a sense of seriousness surrounding it, a of gritty down-to-earth realism.
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This is a great idea, Show Me The Games is a portal to a whole bunch of indie games like AI War, Gratuitous Space Battles, World of Goo and 17 others. The concept is explained in detail by Positech’s Cliff Harris but it pretty much boils down to an attempt to create an indie game portal, and a simple example of what indie games are.
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Lego Universe has a lot in common with a second hand Lego set. It seems like an awesome premise from the outset, is great fun for a while but is marred by the frustration of finding out that not all the pieces are there. Set in the titular Universe of the title, a dark force known as the Malestrom has taken over the world, and can only be defeated by the minifigs (characters) of the Lego Universe by restoring imagination to the world through battle and building.
The main facet that really holds most Lego games together – and moreso with this one – is the charm. There’s definitely something to be said about cute Lego versions of our favourite characters running around in the games based on movies and it’s comforting to know that the charm still exuberates from the Lego Universe even when it’s not tied down to another franchise. It’s clearly apparent that Net Devil know what they’re doing in this department, and charming little touches such as the Minifig that covers his eyes when you put in your password in the login screen really make the game feel like it has a sense of fun in the purest sense of the world, after all this is what Lego is all about.
Quite wisely, NetDevil have tried to stay away from the most obvious of MMO trappings, and combat is based around similar mechanics from the other Lego games, meaning the game does play more like an action platformer than the regular genre staples of pressing keys and watching pre-canned sequences. On the flipside however, this can mean fights feel a little samey and tactics become largely about proper health and ‘Imagination’ management – Lego Universe’s term for what is basically Mana. Imagination is used for many mechanics in the game, including building the preset stacks of blocks in order to reach previously inaccessible parts of the world.
So with all these touches, the game is a charming little action adventure – so the problem comes in the whole MMO aspect of it. There’s just not a lot of content at the moment. With three proper worlds in place total at the moment, it’s hard to feel as if you’re getting a true ‘Universe’ as such and more a small collection of areas to play in. Of course the developers might improve this over time as with all MMOs with their dynamic content, but by not having a mass of content to explore in the first place is leading to an already sparse population – which in turn doesn’t encourage future buyers and in turn doesn’t look good for further content. In a very tough post APB MMO market this makes it hard to currently justify the subscription fee – especially with Guild Wars and other, free to play MMOs that just feel like they have more to offer.
Of course, there is the building side to the game – every time you conquer so many missions you’re allowed access to a plot of land on which you can build using blocks gained from battles. Potentially it’s one of the best parts about the game, but it’s hampered by how fiddly it is to actually build anything in practice. And while understandable to protect the target audience of the game, it’s a terrible shame there’s no real ‘communal’ building areas and you are by and large restricted to viewing your friends’ creations which seem rather limited in scope when you compare them to things like Minecraft. It seems slightly off that the master of the physical creative building blocks should be bested in the virtual space by an essentially one man team.
Overall Lego Universe is a hard game to reccomend. It’s charming sure, and I can definitely see the potential within. But even for those planning to buy it for their kids – with a subscription of real money no less – parents may feel they’re getting slightly short changed by this deal, especially with other MMOs for children on the market that are free to play. If NetDevil can improve the game by adding more content and the like it may be worth a purchase in the future, but the tale of APB shows that Netdevil could be playing with a somewhat more fragile collection of bricks.
A few bricks short.
I wasn’t really all that interested in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, then I saw the brand spanking new trailer which you can see after the jump.
