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Archive of "PC" Category
N4G Snark Busters Code Giveaway
Today N4G has some Snark Busters codes to give away!
Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light Review
Lara Croft has been a disappointed woman. We’ve certainly heard it before: a re-imagining of the series, a fresh chance for Lara, a reboot of the franchise, and still others in a string of broken promises. This time around the buxom heroine must be pinching herself: Guardian of Light is a great game. Yet it’s quite possible that those left dreaming of the Lara of yesteryear will be dissatisfied. This is not Lara as she first broke ground on the PlayStation, this is a crossover series with Lara stealing scenes in an excellent dungeon crawler. Guardian of Light plays so nicely with others that once again the spotlight is on Lara as a true heroine, unburdened by franchise disappointments.
Free Stuff Alert! Zentia goodies giveaway on N4G
Want some free stuff? Want some free Zentia-themed stuff? N4G has two sets of goodies from the folks at ChangYou and their new MMO, Zentia. Each bundle contains a swag bag, t-shirt, Beta code, fox plushie key chain, fox or sheep plushie and Dragon Oath and Blade Wars mouse pads.
For all the info on how to enter, blah blah blah.
N4G Vindictus Swag Giveaway
Today N4G is kicking off a giveaway for those of you that want to get your hands on some E3 swag from Nexon! These Spirit Hoods (pictured below) were in high demand and very short supply at E3, but Nexon helped N4G get their paws on the Vindictus themed goodies for you.
Party like it’s 1922
Gatsby couldn’t leave well enough alone. Coming hot on the heels of pushing-classic-lit’s-buttons Dante’s Inferno, The Great Gatsby is a video game.
Fingers crossed for Tropic of Cancer?
Quick and Dirty at E3: Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light
Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light is going where no Lara Croft has gone before – downloadable. Due out mid-year on PC, XBLA and PSN, this adventure goes gameplay centric, for the win. Be advised: this isn’t your Tomb Raider. Abandoning the Lara blueprint, Guardian of Light takes the savvy archaeologist and gives her a game worthy of a fearless heroine.
Lara’s camera is stuck on isometric as you explore the platformer and its puzzles. One stick fires while the other moves, twin stick shooter style. The simple control scheme made jumping into the co-op demo on the show floor a breeze. Arsenal-wise, you’ve got Croft’s pistols as well as other heavy firepower – even spears. Getting into the game the weapon menu’s counter-intuitive screen prompts did give me pause, but after that it was smooth sailing.
Tomb Raider fans really need to be reminded: this doesn’t look like a Tomb Raider game, this doesn’t play like a Tomb Raider game. Sure you will find some of the familiar, like Lara making use of her grappling hook, but overall this is a wholly refreshing and fundamentally gameplay centric re-imagining. If you’re thinking of complaining about the relative lack of pixels devoted to Lara’s bosom, bite your tongue and give the lady another shot at being part of a good game.
Gameplay focuses on crowd control, clever platforming, puzzling and, in the case of co-op, teamwork. Lara joins forces with Totec, a really old Mayan warrior dude – that means 2000 years of old. Totec can use his shield to boost Lara up, and it’s also a handy defense against enemy fire that can protect Lara while she interacts with the environment. In the demo Lara and I were deposited near a temple and the enemies started pouring in. Rapid mow-em-down gameplay is punctuated with teamwork platforming and some theatrics, like a collapsing bridge that Lara and Totec must cross in tandem.
If, however, Co-op isn’t your thing then there is a single player campaign. Absent from the single player is the option for co-op with AI which is, frankly, a great omission. The environment-based puzzling and gameplay in Guardian of Light just isn’t suited to AI teamwork. It would either frustrate or cheapen the experience, so kudos for not shoehorning that in.
For online types, headsets would be needed to properly enjoy this co-op. Lara and Totec can revive one another, if one of you dies then you respawn next to the other player and puzzles require coordinated teamwork. With no limit on lives, the only penalty is a return to checkpoint if both players die.
Despite its dungeon-crawler appeal, there’s no loot proper – but you do receive points for kills adding a competitive element to the co-op. There are health, ammo and gems to find, but Lara’s pistols never run dry. Mini-achievements add to the fun, and in the demo rewarded feats like crossing the river without touching the water, or collecting ten red skulls. The bounty for your efforts ranges from ammo and health to artifacts, and the significance of the last hasn’t been revealed yet.
The environments are alluring, and while the temple seemed to have some extraneous paths and areas the progression was pretty linear with all detours optional. Those are the nooks that hide the rewards like artifacts, and it seems that players disinterested in those bonuses can just plow through the primary puzzles, a deft handling of the downloadable format.
Guardian of Light puts a safe distance between Lara and less admirable forays. Stamp this one as a day one purchase, Guardian of Light is a fresh start for Lara – and her fans.
Quick and Dirty at E3: Rage
Go take your favorite post-apocalyptic open world game, pick up the crafted universe of Bioshock, make some smoochy sounds and out comes a beautiful screaming baby – with guns. We’ll name it Rage! At E3 we were taken through two different sections of the game, and both supported all the bold claims of the id Software staff on hand to show off the game. The environments are beautiful, the gameplay is badass, and I most fervently want to get my Rage on.
A meteor destroys the planet, and something called The Authority has buried people in arks so that the human race can rise again. When your personal ark goes faulty you escape to the surface to rejoin the mutated insanity that remains. The first section focused on an encounter with an old, slightly off-his-rocker guy in a shack and a combat-heavy ride in a makeshift vehicle, heavily outfitted with weaponry. Your vehicle has to be upgraded and outfitted, and the employees made it clear that our breezy trip from shanty to Wellspring was only the result of some hard work and modification.
The drive, fraught with gunfire, concludes in Wellspring, a major city in the game. Wellspring’s signature underwater fresh water spring makes it an oasis in the desert-y wilderness. It’s here that we dive into the well to stop the Ghost clan from poisoning the supply and get a real taste for the arsenal.
You’ll find familiar weapons like a sidearm and an AR, but I was most pleased when the id employee playing the demo pulled out a crossbow loaded with electric bolts and electrified some enemies in puddles. I was downright giggling when he used the spider turret (a bot that takes down enemies in range, Agents of Doom, anyone?) and then a remote control car loaded with explosives. For that back-to-nature feel use your wingstick, a boomerang barbed with knives. As you progress through the game you learn how to build different items, like the turrets or a gadget that picks locks. Once learned, all you need are the requisite parts for construction and you can build it on the spot.
The wasteland is littered with mutants for you to dispense with. The Ghost clan, just one of the game’s factions, are nimble. They like to adhere to the ceiling and pull of bullet-dodging acrobatics, so it was especially gratifying to see the effects the hits you do land have on them. Nailing the guy in the chest caused him to stagger just enough to slow down his speedy assault.
For the grand finale, we were treated to the ruins of Dead City. Since Dead City is largely abandoned and apparently more deep in the apocalyptic wasteland, the mutant types were very different from those previously encountered. They looked, well, further gone. After a few mutated nasties migrated up from the sewers for an attack, a giant, enormous, gargantuan hulking baddie lumbered out into – no, over – the space. As the id guide began to unload all the firepower he had on him, the Rage logo appeared. If that conclusion isn’t testament enough to the cruel genius of id Software, just wait until you see the game.
Interview with Perfect World Product Manager Jon Belliss
Before E3 I made Perfect World Entertainments Product Manager Jon Belliss answer a bunch of our questions. The results of the interrogation are over on ZTGD.
Forsaken World
Eyes on Civilization V
Hello, my name is Cat, and I need just one more turn.
If you’re a longtime Civ fan like me, Civ V will do much to impress and delight you. Notably, it seems to learn from recent forays into the casual. Don’t worry, you still get your same level of control and detail (and then some), and this bold new Civ does much to lure more gamers into our fold. Nowhere are these efforts more apparent than the interface, which in the case of the primary view pushes your myriad options to the border making all those micromanaging possibilities as unobtrusive as possible.
“Believability” was their art lead’s key word, and you can really appreciate this in moments of negotiation, which feature the Civilization leaders. Basically, it’s less unintentionally funny. The leader artwork is beautiful, they fill the screen and reside in their own unique settings. Elizabeth is on her throne and Napoleon is horseback on a smoky field of battle, each speaking their respective languages. The AI of the leaders gives them unqiue playstyles, as well, so Napoleon will be aggressive with his military – but if you pose a strong threat in return he won’t blindly press forward.
A more subtle step toward believability is how you manage tasks during your turn. You no longer have to keep up with occurrences, but can go to them later, after the turn. Similarly, it is not necessary to make production choices right away. This will make managing those large civilizations easier, and removes the frustration of trying to remember what city need which changes while 12 of them require immediate production input.
Tiny change you might have heard about: Civ V tiles are now hexes sp unit movement radiates naturally. City influence also spreads more believably, absorbing the tile that it needs, like a production tile. If you need that production but your influence isn’t great enough yet, you can use gold to purchase adjacent tiles. Or, you could always tweak your city and its citizens, something the new city view makes simple. If you are in a production race, for example, you can focus on production, even selecting civilians and moving them around to different tiles (though the AI often knows what’s best).
New to the game are City-States, single city entities that don’t grow and don’t complete. In the demo shown at E3, Geneva is the featured City-State. City-States begin neutral, and have their own personalities, in this case “Irrational”. Doing favors for them wins them over to you, and they will give you culture and assistance. In the demo we were shown Elizabeth and Geneva were near neighbors, and Elizabeth’s AI predisposes her to coastal cities like Geneva. If you are aiming for a Diplomatic victory, then taking a City-State by force is risky. If Elizabeth were to take it by force, however, then liberating Geneva would win us favor with the Genevans while putting us at war with Elizabeth and her formidable navy. In the demo, we politely sent a delgation to Newcastle to suggest that we purchases Geneva from them, but since Lizzie was unrepsonsive, we went to war.
In the past I have derived pleasure from my stacks of doom, particularly when it was a tile theoretically crumbling under the weight of tanks and mech armor against longbowmen, but it just wasn’t very satisfying. Now, with one unit per tile, Civ introduces more tactical gameplay that reinforces the need to place your units strategically on the terrain to give them bonuses and back-up. Ranged combat is reintroduced, and artillery will need support from nearby units as they are defensively weak.
Once you acquire a city you can decide what to do with them. You can, of course, choose to raze then to the ground, or you could annex them. Annexing the city will still leave the citizens unhappy and pull resources, but the puppet state reduces unhappiness. As a puppet state you collect their science, gold, and culture but they do their own thing without your lordly input.
Cities themselves no longer get a unit stack, either, so the critical change is how to go about defending them. Simply, cities themselves become a unit. They have HP and can garrison a melee unit (as well as an air unit since those exist on different planes). Cities can employ the usual defenses, like build castles and walls, and if they are coastal can keep a navy in the nearby waters – you just won’t be able to have 20 pikemen holed up within the walls of your capital.
Victories (science, culture, domination and diplomacy) work differently, too. For a Domination victory you need to capture capitals, not decimate the entire civilization. Culture victory’s are particularly interesting: you must have to have 3 cities at the top, but now there are Social Policies in play. With Social Policies, you unlock things like tradition, liberty or piety, and each carries its own bonus and corresponding policy trees. The culture you accumulate is the currency you use to purchase these policies, and acquiring all policies unlocks the Utopia Project which, if built, means a cultural victory!
There is full steamworks integration with a friends list, invites and achievements. Additionally, Civ V now features Mod system integration – free – which you can access through the main menu (community ratings will weed out the fodder).
Civilization V brings some much needed updates, and even more that I never even thought of. The average game is estimated to last 8 hours, significantly less time than the E3 demo, so while I didn’t get to see what all these changes mean in “Civ time”, I’m very excited to play through to year 2050 this fall. This September 21, we all get one more turn.
Torchlight – I’m a Mac!
We’ve already reviewed it, so what’s different? Fortunately, just what you play it on.
Since Torchlight became available for Mac a few weeks ago, scarcely a day has gone by that I haven’t snuck in at least 30 minutes in the mysterious town. This is the first time I’ve gotten my hands on the game since PAX last fall. It was my first appointment at the event, and if I’m being honest my thoughts at the time went something like, “I want to play this game, I hope it doesn’t suck”. Sure, I’d heard of the game’s developers, but their game? Not much.
When I was chatting with Max Schaefer I was struck with how well the game seemed matched to what I’ll call the adult audience. Don’t be dirty, I mean the adults that have jobs, families and need their games in more easily tackled and concentrated doses. Torchlight is streamlined, beautifully, and wonderfully keen on removing the things that make the typical dungeon crawler tedious. For example, you get a pet (wolf or lynx) that not only aids in battle but takes all your unwanted goodies and sells them in town, no matter where you are in the dungeons, and they’re back in less than a minute’s time. This is a fantastic way to eliminate a typically tedious part of loot collection – not just having to sell your loot, but the horror of becoming overburdened and having to choose. As it happens, I’m very pro-hoarding when loot gathering. If that wasn’t handy enough, there are chests for storing your extra loot as well as one to place loot you want to share across games with your other characters.
Make no mistake, having your pet along isn’t a perpetual escort mission. They hold their own, and then some. Should you tire of their appearance just go fishing. Wherever there is sparkling water, cast your rod to haul out some very special fishies. When fed to your pet they transform into a monster (the type is specified in the fishy’s description). The average fish casts the effect for 120 seconds, a bigger catch for an hour and the biggest fish is permanent (until another fish comes along to change it up). The last option never appealed to me, though, I like my wolfie too much.
You are given the choice of three classes with fixed character models: The Destroyer, a skilled fighter; the spell casting Alchemist, or the ranged Vanquisher. I chose the latter most, not just because the character model happened to be a foxy lady, but because I wanted to try the blend of ranged specialty, melee and trap setting. To quote our PC guy, “she deals a ton of damage from afar and looks bad ass with a gun”. Yes, please. All three can use at least a bit of magic, and the skills and spells are pleasantly gratifying – so much so that my next character will be an Alchemist.
Story goes that having discovered Ember beneath the town of Torchlight, things start going terribly wrong. As the miners and ember-seekers head into the mines they discover civilizations in ruin, corpses, nasties and people corrupted by the tainted Ember. Enemies are pleasantly diverse, with each level of the mine introducing new threats. In addition to the descent through the mines, there are Portals you can travel through to tackle tougher monsters for bigger and better loot.
Loot, experience points and fame are abundant from gold, to weapons and armor, to powerful accessories. Items have different colors to indicate things like their rarity, if they are part of a set, or if they are magical, and items with sockets can have gems added into them for bonuses (with Gorn and Furl in town to remove gems if you want to rearrange). Additionally you can find folks in town to combine items into new ones, enchant items, or a purveyor of as yet unidentified magical items. Many items are classified as “unidentified”, so place a premium on those Identify scrolls you pick up early on.
Leveling up allows you to increase things like your strength, dexterity, magic and defense as well as spend points on upgrades across multiple trees. The latter was the hardest decision for me, having to choose between assigning a very limited number of points to my preferred magical attack skill, or my ability to land a critical hit. Fame is less fickle in the town of Torchlight, and as yours increases a title is added to your character name bringing with it those precious skill points.
Control-wise, clicking an enemy prompts attack, right click for special skill, and tab allows you to swap between two preloaded skills. You can also load up a quick select with things like mana and health potions. I was cool with the mouse-mostly direction, but there were times (particularly the crowded battles) where I did long for the power of WASD.
Dungeon crawling through and through, Torchlight has the trinity: accessible, beautiful and highly addictive. At next week’s E3 we’ll talk to Perfect World Entertainment a little bit about how the little indie that could caught their eye, and what their involvement in the MMO version means for the game.
N4G’s Forsaken World Beta Key Giveaway with PWE’s IBUYPOWER Chimera 2 Desktop Giveaway
Today we’re kicking off our closed beta key giveaway for Forsaken World with Perfect World Entertainment’s IBUYPOWER Chimera 2 desktop giveaway, which will run starting from today to Wednesday, June 30.
Dragon Age: Origins to Close
(This post is spoiler-free)
Dragon Age: Origins: 4 complete playthroughs, including DLC. Result: Cheerful gripes over the cruelty of “traveler” Trophy/Achievement.Dragon Age: Origins: Awakening: 1.25 playthroughs. Result: ebay.
No, I wasn’t overly fond of the DLC pattern that had me plunking down cash here and there to add a few quests to my story. Not overly fond, but a tiny bit willing. Fine, it was consensual. (more…)
N4G Heroes of Three Kingdoms Beta Key Giveaway
Thanks to Jason Varden and the rest of Perfect World Entertainment, we have 5000 beta keys to give out over on N4G for the closed beta of their upcoming MMORPG, Heroes of Three Kingdoms!
Weekly Gaming Review Wrap-Up Episode 14
I play catch up with the slow season in full effect, and break down our latest reviews including Mass Effect 2, Emberwind and Tatsunoko vs. Capcom.
N4G Battle of the Immortals Beta Key Giveaway
Thanks to Jason Varden and the rest of Perfect World Entertainment, we have 5000 beta keys to give out over on N4G for the closed beta of their upcoming MMO, Battle of the Immortals!
A 2.5D MMO, Battle of the Immortals is a highly competitive PvP MMO with players pitted against one another for the right to slay epic bosses in dungeons.
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About
I’m Community Manager and Admin for the NewsBoiler Network, home to N4G, TechSpy, AnimeShinbun, FilmWatch and 11×2. I also write for network editorial site, ZTGD.
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