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FTL: Faster Than Light
FTL: Faster Than Light is a new indie release that you can pick up over at the developer’s website, Steam or GoG for around $10, and it is worth every penny. I backed it’s Kickstarter, and thanks to Arqade’s own James I had a chance to play the beta extensively before release.
FTL’s a highly polished indie gem of a game. It manages to mix many different elements from many different RPG and strategy genres into a cohesive game that pushes you with its difficulty while still remaining fun.
What Is Happening In Diablo 3?
Hey guys, this is my first post on this blog, hope you enjoy it. In this article I will be talking about the upcoming changes planned for Diablo 3 and what I think about them.
Diablo 3
The Broken Economics of Diablo 3’s Auction House
One of the most heavily discussed features of Blizzard’s eagerly awaited Diablo 3 was its introduction of an auction house to facilitate trading between characters. The random nature of Diablo’s item generation system quite often left players with an item that would be useful to someone else, but not to them directly. The auction house promised to replace the confusion and inefficiency of players trying to arrange direct player to player trades through chat channels dominated by ads and spam.
Kingdom of Amalur: The Excessive Use of Black (Demo Review)
75 million dollars. Apparently, that’s what you can get from the Rhode Island government as a game development studio, despite having no prior published games at all. No wonder this state is broke. Well, as a gamer, RI resident, and taxpayer, I feel that it is my duty to at least try out the demo that was recently released (and provide faint praise) in order to do my little part. But wait! This first game, called Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, isn’t even developed here in RI. The studio is actually created by the Maryland-based subsidiary of 38 Studios. Well, that does it. Time to bust out the gloves of bashing +5
Have you seen… Nitronic Rush?
Nitronic Rush is an “experimental survival driving game developed by students at DigiPen Institute of Technology” and was released – for free – on the 11th of November.
That very brief description really doesn’t do the game justice; it feels a bit like Trackmania in many ways, but with a extra side helping of crazy (the good type of crazy). Oh, and ignore the “student” bit, the game really is very well put together, I’d say they clearly know what they are doing.
Scoregasm, or how to make an awesome game and ruin it
If you are a stereotypical horny 13 year old male, you’ll find absolutely nothing wrong with Scoregasm.
It’s a fun dual stick shooter where you aim with your mouse in the general direction of enemies, and when you’re surrounded you can click to activate your close range attack and annihilate anything in the circle around your ship. This means that even if you’re surrounded by all sides in tight patterns of bullets, à la curtain shooter, you can always click yourself out of trouble; actually, you want to do that as much as possible.
Killing adds to a combo meter, but click-killing does so twice as fast, and while you can’t just spam your attack you can certainly use it generously. The combo meter drains with time and resets on death. If your high water marker for combo is high enough you’ll unlock exits to harder levels. End a wave with the combo above the required level and you’ll enter frenzy mode, where you’ll get even more ships onto you for a chance to get a crazy high score.
Basically, a bullet hell game that tries to be a little more accessible than the monsters out there, and thus has something to offer to everybody. What’s not to like?
This:
To be fair, the above is a cut out from four minutes of gameplay. You can watch the whole thing here, but the moaning is pretty much a constant throughout the game.
An unnecessary, unjustified, annoying, obnoxious, tasteless constant. And there’s no obvious way to turn it off. Even as a white male in his youth, the “porn sounds” became old real fast.
FallenAngelEyes has contacted the developer and we’ve learned that, luckily, we’ll be able to turn off this constant on and off with the next game update.
This game was part of the second Indie Royale bundle, and probably is the most fun game of the bunch.
Dead Island – a Bloody Mess
I am a huge fan of games involving zombies (I’m also a sucker for games involving jet packs). I am COMPELLED to play any zombie game, be it Resident Evil, Left 4 Dead or Atom Zombie Smasher (great indie game, by the way). Naturally when the first Dead Island teaser video came out showing the infection of a little girl using a nonlinear sequence presentation, I was hooked. I have been waiting eagerly ever since to play this game. Unfortunately, despite the release of the game on Steam, I am still eagerly waiting to play this game. So with no game to review due to its extreme bugginess, I have to occupy my time in another manner, so I present to you:
The 10 Buggiest (released) Games of All Time
Gamescom 2011 Diary – Day 3
The diary continues! While Gamescom 2011 is over now, we’ve still got 2 days of diary posts to get through. We had a late start on Saturday because I slept in to try to catch up on some sleep. We left the hotel around 12:30 to head to the Koelnmesse. The traffic jams were horrendous, and the parking areas that were open on Thursday and Friday had completely filled on Saturday. Signs directed us to drive to the Lanxess Arena’s parking garage, where we spent 10 minutes trying to drive around and actually find a parking spot.
While checking Twitter, I saw Gamescom had tweeted that they were closing the Koelnmesse because it had reached capacity, which I have later learned is around 62,000 people. They were only letting people in when others left. Ugh. We shortly debated going back to the hotel, but I’m stubborn, so I insisted that we give it a shot anyway. After finally finding parking, we walked to the Messe.
Waiting to get into the Koelnmesse on Saturday
13:30 The line was huge. We must have seen hundreds of people standing in line for the East gate. My mind was boggling. It was also incredibly hot, around 34C/93F, and probably hotter than that in the full sun. We wanted to get an idea of how insane the line was, so we kept walking until we arrived at the East gate entrance. It was there that we noticed a second line had formed going in the other direction from the East gate. It was probably a 10th of the length of the other one, so we scootched in there.
14:37 We barely missed getting in. They kept letting people in in small groups then holding off again. You could hear people cheer every time they decided to let more people inside. It was hot, crowded, and a bit nerve-wracking, as whenever another push to the doors started, people became antsy and aggressive. I was literally standing in the doorway now. A woman was separated from her husband or boyfriend or whomever she was there with. She was able to get through, but security closed off entrance while the man she was waiting for was still in the crowd. She looked to be on the verge of tears. Sometimes people would walk by inside and take a photo of the waiting crowd, then walk smugly on their way.
14:47 Finally! I’m glad we were at the very front of the crowd, so we could get out of the way quickly. After the long walk back to the the main halls, we headed to the NCSoft booth because I wanted to try to get my hands on the WildStar demo.
Gamescom – Hands on with the Playstation Vita
Sony's newest toy, the PlayStation Vita
Late Saturday evening at Gamescom, I decided to see if I could brave the line to demo the Playstation Vita. It was nearing 19:00, so I figured the line may be more manageable at that point. Luckily, I was right, and we only ended up waiting around 15 minutes.
While we were standing in-line, someone came out to explain how the process went. The names of the games that they had offered were on cards, and we had to pull a card randomly while they were face down. They had several games I was interested in, including ModNation Racers, LittleBigPlanet, Uncharted: Golden Abyss, and the one I’m most interested in and maaaybe possibly considering getting a Vita for, Sound Shapes (I have a music game obsession, so sue me). I eagerly drew my card, turn it over and it was…
A Diablo fan’s perspective on Dungeon Siege 3
No hidden biases here. I’m laying it right out there. I’m a big fan of Diablo, and its more recent spiritual brother, Torchlight. While normally a fan of slower turn-based strategic games, there’s something about the frantic slaying of monsters and gathering of loot that keeps me coming back for more. I had never played the Dungeon Siege series, but reading the description it sounded like it would provide more of what I love, and I set out eager to enjoy it.
Now, about 8 hours into the game, I find myself torn between progressing further, or taking another romp through Torchlight. For a reason that I found difficult to put a finger on, Dungeon Siege just didn’t grab me in the way Diablo and its kin have. So, what is it that differentiates Dungeon Siege 3? Am I just the wrong audience for an otherwise fine game?