Spark looks a lot like an extension of Kodu Game Lab, a proof of concept that Microsoft R&D put up on XBLIG and the GFWL Store, i.e. two places nobody would ever find it.
I'm disappointed at the removal of the humor in Shadow Warrior. People don't seem to be able to differentiate between actual racism and a parody of racism. At some point the stereotypes go so over-the-top into the level of the absurd that you can't take it seriously as racism. It's akin to the fake trailer in Grindhouse by Rob Zombie, Werewulf Women of the SS. Nicolas Cage as Fu Manchu is a joke, not actual racism. Women with large breasts and ample cleavage in Nazi uniforms is a joke, not actual sexism.
I kinda felt that Spec Ops made your actions feel much more ambiguous and questionable than Infinite did. In Infinite it always felt like you were doing the right thing and when things went wrong that was because of technobabble. In Spec Ops you often felt in the wrong right after doing something and it didn't take what amounts to magic to turn your choices into the wrong choice. Konrad and Riggs seem to act much more understandably than Comstock or Fink.
Comstock's followers are pretty much American Sky Nazis so I feel no remorse killing them, even with the Skyhook executions. Hell, even the civilians deserved dying.
That the Vox turned out to be crap wasn't really a surprise. Most revolutions go that way. Hint's right there in the name, really: After a full revolution you end up back where you started just with a different tyrant sitting on the throne. This was more like North African style than French Resistance, they win and immediately establish Sharia law and try to kill the other minorities that don't share their faith (or specific branch of their faith, more exactly).
I have to say I wasn't really able to track what made Booker turn into Comstock in terms of personality, at the baptism he rejects his guilt while rejecting the baptism means accepting his guilt but that one change is enough to turn him into basically Adolf Hitler vs a down-on-his-luck private eye? Also I guess the Luteces dragged Booker through time when sending him on the mission since he seems significantly younger than Comstock?
I played around 40 hours of Tri, not really in the market for playing an extended version of the game that I already played (didn't see everything in the game anyway so I don't need more content).
One nice part of the Wii version was that you could use the IR cursor to see tooltips on stats and such.
The NeoGAF thread on XBLIG had a bit on Rocketgirl, apparently some Japanese devs questioned how that game even got past the "no porn" rules and said that hentai games would be tamer than that.
I think a big part of the DayZ atmosphere, the whole bit about "long periods of intense boredom punctuated by short bursts of intense fear" is just something Arma already brought to the table except with some of the enemy soldiers controlled by the AI (the game supports absolutely massive player counts on servers and even has a mode with base and unit construction where every player can field units and command them around while also acting as a foot soldier). Anyone who's been adding realism mods to games like Battlefield 2 should really play Arma because that's probably what he's looking for. Supposedly the online community is composed of people heavily into milsims who will act like proper soldiers instead of rushing headlong into the fight.
The smartphone game markets are so full of outright illegal stuff that I'm always wary when I see something that looks too professional in some areas and too wonky in others (some games I got suspicious of turned out to simply use the same repository of royalty free art, I know of Tyrian but didn't know about RT3D which is a common thread between MANY space based indie games). There's enough scummery on there that I wonder if any of that alleged approval process actually exists, if the videogame industry was as aggressive as the RIAA there would probably be tons of content filters on these marketplaces already.
Log in to comment