Kinect has been around for a couple of years and the Xbox 360 has been around for about six years. Since it was announced that no next-generation console was going to be presented at this yearâs E3, the American manufacturer has to rely on games to impress gamers: Fable: The Journey, Halo 4, and Forza Horizon. We will bring you all the information about Microsoftâs press conference live starting at 12:30pm Eastern / 9:30am Pacific.
In development for over five years, Fez has finally launched. Since its first announcement back in 2007, the game has increasingly been getting more attention from gamer with its unique twist on puzzle-platformers and since it is featured in the highly anticipated Indie Game: The Movie documentary. Is Polytron’s first attempt in the video game arena a success? After having spent some time with the game, I sure believe it is.
Fez tells the story of Gomez, a little white creature living in a 2D world. One day, he gets out of his house and is given a special red fez hat. However, this gift completely breaks the universe which he must put back together by collecting special golden and blue cubes. To make his quest easier, the fez make him realize that he is actually living in a 3D environment, letting him rotate around the levels.
That is the core mechanic Fez uses throughout the game and is actually one that is easy to understand when you see it but somewhat hard to describe in words. So here we go: each of the game’s levels has four sides to each of them and you can only see one of them at a time, having the game “flatten” the 3D environment into a 2D one. Due to perspectives magic, this allows you to cross huge gaps even though the platforms are not really close to each other in the 3D space for example. This transforms the actual game exploration a puzzle in itself while never really being a pain to figure out.
Going through the levels, you must collect pieces of the universe which are represented by golden cubes. Collecting most of them simply require you to explore the game; the only obstacles getting in your way being simple perspective trickeries. However, there are also blue cubes, which are much harder to obtain since they usually require you to navigate through very complicated paths or by solving really complicated puzzles. While these can be quite a pain to collect, they were the reason why I actually enjoyed the game to a higher level. Everything you need to solve these puzzles is located within the game, only requiring you to pay attention to the details around you. This requires you to take a lot of notes as you go through the game and understand a few simple yet very important concepts in the game. Since I do not want to spoil anything, I will just say that some of the puzzles take advantage of some rarely used capabilities of modern gaming consoles (at least, not in this meaningful way).
Fez also shines through its beautiful 8-bit looking graphics. Just by taking a small look around the environment, you can tell that a lot of attention was given to the game’s look with complex tetramino patterns all over the place, interactive animals living in the levels as well as multiple interesting level themes. While pretty much all levels are marvelous, I would say the old Game Boy look (black and green) and Virtual Boy (black and red) looking sewer levels are amongst my favorites. Finally, without spoiling any surprise, I have to admit that the game gets even more beautiful when you start playing the “New Game +” option.
The game’s audio also follows the 8-bit ambiance with sounds that will quickly remind you of your childhood. While the sounds are somewhat nice and do fit in perfectly, its the game’s soundtrack (written by Disasterpeace) that totally steals the show on the audio department. Calming, vibing… the music just makes you feel like you are in some kind of yoga session. It’s pretty much like the music wanted to tell you that you are not in any hurry and that you should take your time to explore the game’s world.
Still, Fez does suffer from some slightly annoying problems. The most notable of these is that the game is very unstable. This can be seen in the numerous frame rate drops you will most likely run into either during normal gameplay or during the game’s loading transitions. Even worse, the game actually crashed over 10 times in my case so far in around 7-8 hours of play (thing that NEVER happened to me on any other Xbox 360 game). Also, the map system is rather complicated at first, which is going to get you more lost than anything else (although you do get used to it). I love the aesthetic of it but it should have been designed to be easier to use.
Fez is indeed the diamond people are praising right now. The game takes you back to an era long gone in the video game industry. An era where it was all about taking your time and figuring out complex puzzles by yourself, taking notes on a piece of paper. Fez is brilliant, complex yet accessible, and should serve as an example to some developers who could really bring us great experiences like this one on a more regular basis. Just get on Xbox LIVE and buy it already.
- Great use of technology and great variety in puzzles
- Peaceful and relaxing music
- Simple yet great art style
- Reminiscent of old-school exploration games
- Quite a few bugs and crashes encountered
- Confusing and complicated-to-use map system
Game experience at time of redaction: All Gold cubes collected, almost all Blue cubes collected (25).
Fez is available on the Xbox LIVE Arcade for 800 Microsoft Points (around $10.00 USD).
Some games never get old through time. Whether you think about Tetris, Frogger, Peggle, and many others, a core gameplay formula will always have you coming back for more. This is what Red Lynx is trying to do with Trials Evolution, a new entry in the popular racing/puzzling action franchise that started many years ago as a free flash game. Thankfully for the fans, this new title holds up to the high standards set by the previous title.
For those of you who don’t know what Trials is about, consider this game as a 2D racing title using left and right balance as its core mechanic mixed with puzzle elements through its environments. Basically, you control of one crazy motorcycle freaks and must gauge its balance as well as its acceleration in order to get through some crazy obstacle courses. While it might sound like an easy job, the game gets complicated rather quickly with original objects obstructing your way such as steep hills, fires, mines, TNT crates, saw blades, and much more. Luckily for newcomers, each difficulty setting comes with a mandatory tutorial, making it easier to understand how to overcome specific situations. The game does feel like its predecessor (Trials HD), but the physics in the game are somehow slightly more “realistic”. It is not much (most players won’t even notice) but the bike feels heavier, changing how you approach each jump compared to what you were used to.
As far as the single player is concerned, nothing has changed much in terms of single player progression. You get through progressively harder levels, earning new bikes along the way. The only notable changes are the possibility of customizing your character and your bike as well as the aforementioned tutorials, which are all simple but great additions. New skill games are also available and are a great change of pace. From skiing down a hill making flips to flying in a UFO, or controlling a huge silver ball (Marble Madness style), each of these little mini-games are fun to play and can even make you forget you are playing what is supposed to be a motorcycle game. Still, Trial Evolution’s impressive improvements can be seen in the great online multiplayer and on the overhaul the track editor received.
The online multiplayer option is a great new addition to what is already an awesome game. You can play ANY of the countless tracks the game has to offer as well as new Supercross levels in which four players simultaneously appear on the level (on different “tracks”, just like Excitebike). This brings a totally new dimension to the game in which winning is much more about being consistent in races than having a lot of patience to get THE golden run.
As for the track editor, Red Lynx has gone totally crazy and given players an insanely great creation tool. Not only will people be able to create good traditional trials track, but they will also have the power to create mini-games that do not necessarily have anything to do with the core gameplay mechanic. That means players can create top-down racing games, first person shooters, side-scrolling shoot ‘em ups, and more. In short, Trials Evolution’s map creation tool is essentially like LittleBigPlanet level creator included with what is already a great game. Even better still: levels can be shared with the rest of the world easily, providing players with an infinite amount of levels to play. An all you can play Trials game? Sign me up.
Graphically, Trials Evolution is as beautiful as its predecessor. However, the game does have more variety in its environments that are more animated too. Instead of being stuck in rocky levels, mountains, or abandoned factories, you will get to see many more environments such as backyards, rooftops, back alleys, and even a baseball field! As for the audio, nothing had really changed. The same type of motocross type music (intense punk/hardcore music) was kept in the game and the sounds are more or less the same too (crazy bikers yelling and the motorcycle’s “vrrrrrrr! Vrrrr!”).
However, the game is still not perfect. The new online multiplayer supercross events do come with some frustrations due to the weird camera angles that can sometimes obstruct your own character. This causes you to have to guess in what posture your character is and most of the time making you fail because of not knowing this crucial information. Also, load times are much more noticeable than in Trials HD, killing the fast rhythm of the game that was so enjoyable. However, it is not such of a big deal since the game’s addictiveness makes up for these small flaws.
If you own an Xbox 360, you must get your hands on Trials Evolution. While some would say it is only more of the same experience that Trials HD was, the game is highly addictive and fun to play. You will have trouble putting the controller down and will keep coming back for more to beat your friends’ scores over and over. This is one of the best downloadable games to have been released on Xbox LIVE for a long time.
- More of the same old Trials awesomeness
- Faced-paced online multiplayer sessions are great additions
- Skill games are a good and fun change of pace from the real game
- The Track Editor is just perfect
- Weird camera angles in Supercross multiplayer sessions
- Rather long load times kill the rhythm of the game
Game experience at time of reaction: All Single Player tracks - Gold, played some Skill Games, played some online games.
Trials Evolution is available on the Xbox LIVE Arcade for 1200 Microsoft Points (around $15 USD).
Tower Defense games are pretty much a hit or miss genre. You either really like the amount of strategy it takes to excel at them, or find it incredibly boring to just sit there and watch enemies walk down a fixed route as your turrets shoot them down. There is a lot that can be attributed to the negative opinions of tower defense games, one of them being that they are just all so a-like. Out of all the thousands of tower defense games that exist they all really work the same way. You set up your towers, turrets, monsters, or whatever you have, and you wait as the enemy has all the fun attempting to attack. Don’t get me wrong, defending yourself is an essential part of surviving any type of situation, but haven’t we all heard that the best defense is a good offense? What happens when the people you control realize they might just win faster if they attacked too? If these questions have ever plagued you, then have no fear, for Paradox Interactive’s Defenders of Ardania might just be the answer to your woes.
Originally an iOS game with critical acclaim, DoA has recently made its way to Xbox Live Arcade, offering new ways to play tower defense. One of those is of course, being able to not only defend yourself against waves of attacking enemies, but also going on the offensive and attacking them back. This is a key aspect that makes DoA more immersive than other tower defense games, because it completes the game play. No longer are the levels just lines on a board, they’re now a battleground with each side’s soldiers hoping to survive the no man’s land of deadly towers in order to defeat the enemy. There are 3 different races to choose from: Humans, Nature, and Underworld. The Nature race units have lower health but move faster, The Underworld race are slow but can take quite a few hits, and as with most games, Humans are in the middle, being the most balanced. The game offers three game modes: Campaign, Survival, and Multiplayer. Campaign takes you through the world of Ardania, which you may recall from Paradox Interactive’s Majesty games. You are traveling from place to place, as you and your men try to figure out what has caused the dead to rise from the grave again after hundreds of years. Survival mode essentially brings back that classic tower defense gameplay we are all accustomed to by having you defend wave after wave of enemies. Multiplayer is, well, just you against other players online. To give the game more of a medieval fantasy feel they’ve even added spells which can be used during the game alongside your units.
Starting off with the good, The game looks good. This is in part because 90 percent of tower defense games are 2D flash games, but none the less it’s not a bad looking game. The graphics are really shown off, in the later levels of the campaign, where it looks like all hell is breaking loose on the battlefield. It’s a chaos that I always enjoy, but others may not feel the same way, and might think it’s too hectic to keep up with. If that person is you I suggest you stick to two player matches on multiplayer, anything beyond that will surely give you a headache.
Unfortunately, while DoA’s concept is a good one, it’s execution is pretty sub-par. The gameplay suffers from an unbalanced resource system. This is because you are limited to the amount of troops and towers you can have on the field at once, always leaving you with more resources that you actually need, and severely harms the core strategic elements that tower defense games should offer. This also affects the length of the matches, because the limitations prevent players from eventually overpowering one another and claiming victory. Two decent players can easily have a match last any from 45 minutes to an hour with not much happening on either side. It causes a long unappealing stalemate that ruins whatever fun you may have been having with this game. The spells available make this problem even worse, because by mid game you will have an unnecessary abundance of resources, you can just spam the heal spell every time your health gets too low. Luckily enough the AI in Campaign mode doesn’t have the ability to do this, but when you’re playing online expect it to be abused beyond belief. You’ll get to the point where the game is just annoying, and every time your opponent recovers from being at the brink of defeat, you’ll ask yourself what’s the point of even being alive anymore. While the graphics may be appealing, that too gets ruined when the game suffers from horrendous frame rates. the sound effects, and the soundtrack itself become extremely repetitive, add that on top of the fact that you probably have to sit through these problems for a long period of time, and you’ll probably decide that Ardania doesn’t deserve to be protected, and abandon this game altogether.
[jwplayer mediaid=”16038”]
Ultimately, while Defenders of Ardania spawned from a great idea, with all its flaws it makes the case that Tower Defense games should be left in the world of handheld devices and Newgrounds.com, and have no business on a home console. This game will seem cool for the first 5 minutes of the first match you play, but when you realize that you’ve just spent 5 minutes making absolutely no progress, the frustration will start to set in, and that’s not what you look forward to in an arcade game. You’re looking for something that is easy to pick up, easy to get into, and fun. FUN being the most important. I think I’ll stick to Grave Defense HD on my Touchpad.
This week Albert is riding solo on the podcast as Matt has been feeling a little under the weather. Get better soon Matt! Albert discusses the latest in video game news this week including the continued downfall of THQ. Tune in to this week’s episode to see what else is going down in the industry!
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[podcast]http://www.thatgamerhub.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/TWB_02_05_12.mp3[/podcast]
On This Week’s Episode:
Contact:
Hosts:
Albert “A To The P” (@albertperkins)
Matt “Wiggidy” (@mjwiles88)
Music:
Intro Song & Outro Song:
Weapons Of Mass Distortion by The Crystal Method
Music Played During The Podcast:
▪ Game: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Nintendo, 1998, N64)
▪ ReMixer(s): djpretzel
▪ Composer(s): Koji Kondo
▪ Song(s): ‘Title Theme’, ‘Zelda’s Theme’
▪ Game: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (Nintendo, 2003, GCN)
▪ ReMixer(s): HyperDuck SoundWorks
▪ Composer(s): Hajime Wakai, Kenta Nagata, Koji Kondo, Toru Minegishi
▪ Song(s): ‘Kakariko Village’, ‘Ocean’, ‘Title’, ‘Zelda’s Theme’
In a world where people tell you that actions speak louder than words, that talk is cheap, Quarrel comes, throws a dictionary at you, and says nay. It tells you to take every word you’ve ever learned into consideration, look at the 8 letter arsenal in front of you and make a word powerful enough to crush your opponent; in a cute, adorable, tropical sort of way. Developed by Denki and published by UTV Ignition Entertainment, Quarrel is essentially the spunky adorable love child of Scrabble and Risk; and while this at first sounds very odd and maybe even a bit ridiculous, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. I do however suggest that you look over your notes from 12th grade English class, in the hopes that you still remember the English language. All those years of Facebook and Chat-roulette really ruin a man’s ability to write well.
Starting up Quarrel you may be tempted to jump right into quick play, skipping the tutorial. I mean who wouldn’t? You load up the game and see those energetic and quirky little soldiers that will be at your disposal and you can’t help but to go right in and have them deliver verbal warfare to your enemies. Have no fear, jumping right in is perfectly fine. The game is fairly easy to pick up and learn right away. Of course, the tutorial would teach you more moves and strategies but there’s nothing that you couldn’t learn over time on your own. Quarrel essentially works like this: everyone playing a match gets territory on the game board. The objective is of course to take over all the territories on the board. You do this by engaging in quarrels with your opponent’s troops. When a quarrel begins you are given 8 random letters which together make a word, or anagram. The length of your words depends on the amount of soldiers you have in a territory, so the only way to make an anagram is to have a full squad of 8 soldiers. Whichever of the two players makes the highest valued word wins the quarrel and either keeps the territory they just defended, or takes over the territory they just attacked. It may sound complicated to some, but anyone who’s ever played Scrabble will get it in five minutes or less.
Quarrel offers 2-4 player multiplayer, and 4 game modes in single player. The game is easy to understand, but don’t let the vibrant, tropical environments fool you into thinking it will be a cake walk. The game modes in single player offer an array of different situations that know how to pack on the pressure. These range from placing time limits on quarrels, starting you off with only one territory, or giving you a limited number of troops. Multiplayer, of course, offers the challenge of playing against real people over Xbox Live, who may or may not have been an English major in college with a 3.9 GPA.
The first of the single player modes is Domination, which is a sort of tournament mode I guess you could say. You play twelve matches on twelve different islands against up to 3 opponents. Win all twelve matches for a chance to become king of the world! Well, king of islands that for some reason have rising territories and miniature soldiers on them. But a king none the less.
The next mode is Showdown. This is also a tournament-esque survival mode, with only nine matches, all of which are 1 on 1. The two combatants are given an equal amount of territories, which all have low troop numbers (nothing over four). You basically have to work with what you are given and crush your opponent with letter tiles of doom (which are actually used as weapons in the animations, who knew the hidden explosiveness of the English alphabet).
The most entertaining and challenging game mode in single player is of course, Challenge Mode. In Challenge Mode there are 4 different challenges all with 3 different levels that increase in difficulty. The first of them is Trailblaze To Victory, where you must win a certain amount of quarrels in a row within the match. The second is Back From the Brink, in which you must capture a certain number of territories in a match, starting you off with only one. The third is Battle of the Giants, which is as awesome as it sounds. Here you must win a certain number of colossal conflicts, which are full on 8 vs 8 quarrels. This mode is less about strategy and more about straight, non-stop attacking, and provides the best potential for making anagrams if you’re good enough. Eight on eight quarrels are always risky because you never know when your opponent will find out what the anagram is and win with massive points (It has happened to me on a few occasions). The final challenge is Procure Prisoners, where you do what the title says and capture prisoners. You start off with fewer soldiers in your territories than everyone else and must win quarrels having fewer soldiers than your opponent in order to capture prisoners. The challenges add a good twist to the gameplay and keep you interested in playing solo for a while before jumping into multiplayer. They also help to improve your overall skills. The one thing that would have made Challenge mode really amazing was if Denki had included a daily challenge mode, as seen in the iOS version of the game. That would have added a great deal of replay value to the game in general.
The last game mode is Make Match. There’s not much else to it but making your own custom match. You pick whether you want time quarrels or casual ones, the number of players, which characters to face, what map to play on and then you’re ready to go. This seems like least important of the four game modes simply because at this point you should be well into the game enough to be ready to face other people online. Let’s face it, you can only face Dwayne and Biff for so long.
Multiplayer is truly a great experience in Quarrel. It runs quite smoothly and I experienced no problems at all. It even tells you if your opponent is using the Xbox Messenger Kit, which doesn’t offer up much of an advantage if you still can’t make good words quickly. There are three options in Multiplayer: Ranked match, Player Match, and Xbox Live Party Match. Ranked matches in Quarrel are like in any other game. You play others at or around your Word IQ level in order to go up in the leader boards. Player matches are casual online games that don’t affect your rank at all. You can play a quick match, Join a match someone else made, or make one yourself. XBL party matches are just that, matches between the people in your party (who also have the game, of course.)
There are 12 achievements in Quarrel, the hardest of which being “Make 100 Anagrams”. Trust me, it’s hard making eight letter words in this game since you need both eight soldiers AND have to know what random word hidden within the letters. Playing online I did not encounter one person who even came close to an anagram. Do people even know what words more than five letters long look like? Don’t we shorten every word or phrase that is longer than that, and writing “lol” with six O’s does not count. Honestly, Quarrel managed to exceed my expectation. I had given up on the lost art of words. I saw no hope for the future of the alphabet. Then I came across this game, and it made me believe again. It made me want to learn new words just so I could have a bigger arsenal at my disposal. Believe it or not Quarrel made me want to crack open my dusty dictionary and learn at least one new word a day. They say the pen is mightier than the sword, but I guess you could say in this game the pen IS the sword. Quarrel becomes addicting, you want to show off your knowledge, your vocabulary brutality, and most of all you want to see those adorable, quirky soldiers of yours dance in victory every time you beat your opponent. When you go to the exit screen one of them even tells you “Stay here… stay forever”. Creepy? Perhaps, but maybe I just might just stay along for the ride little guys; and for 400 Microsoft points and about 111 MB of hard drive space, you guys can too. Quarrel and it’s play on words get a 4 out of 5.
I have very fond memories of my very first computer. Despite being born in the mid 80′s, our household didn’t have a PC to call our own until Christmas in 1994. My very first game on it was one that came bundled with it, called The Even More Incredible Machine, a game where you had to complete a half-finished Rune Goldberg machine. To this day it remains a game that I had a lot of fun with, and a series of games that I wish were still around.
Today, Crazy Machines fills the void that The Incredible Machine left behind with its series of PC and iOS games that serve a very similar purpose. A couple of weeks ago, FAKT Software released its first console version from this series; a port of Crazy Machines Elements went live for both the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. The Rune Goldberg machine fix still lives today but does it fill the gap that earlier entries left void?
Source: thatgamerhub.com
Fast-action platformers have been coming back into the gaming scene quite a bit recently with titles like Super Meat Boy. While these games are not built for everyone (as they can be very unforgiving), the Xbox LIVE Indie Games platform has also been hit by this wave with titles like The Deep Cave and Aban Hawkins & the 1000 SPIKES. Originally released in June 2011 as a browser game, DoubleDutch Games’ SpeedRunner HD has landed on Microsoft’s Indie Game channel. Was the transition between the two platforms successful? Let’s find out.
Source: thatgamerhub.com
Welcome to another live recorded rendition filled with laughs opinions and dropped calls that thanks to the magic of editing, you’ll never hear! We discuss Apple, Sega, Nintendo Rumours, Sonic CD, a “Home” relaunch and Poutines!
On This Week’s Episode:
Subscribe:
Contact:
Hosts:
Hbomb (@usfhbomb) and E*Master (@EMaster1980)
Music:
Intro Song: Jungle Drums by E*Master
Outro Song: Pinch me – Barenaked Ladies
Source: thatgamerhub.com
I remember the day I purchased my Kinect in vivid detail. I wandered into the store in a dreamy haze with a head full of hopes. Kinect was finally here and it was going to take gaming to the next level of interactivity! Voice recognition, infrared sensors and motion sensing camera all in one package. And the best part? No controller required! I, like most gamers, had seen the Milo demo for the Kinect, way back when it was still called Project Natal, and had to collect my lower jaw from the floor. The Minority Report type of interactivity we’ve all been waiting for in our gaming consoles had finally come and the possibilities were endless! Yet here we are, almost a year out from the launch, and Kinect games have failed to capitalize on much of that potential.
Source: thatgamerhub.com
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