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APB Review |  | 
In my three years of writing for 1UP, APB may be the first game to make me seriously question my sanity. After sitting down with what promised to be an experience full of potential, I walked away from my first few hours a broken man. This was what Realtime Worlds had spent years working on? This, from the man instrumental to the Grand Theft Auto series? To confirm that my brain was free of perspective-altering tumors, I cruised the Internet, seeking out user impressions of APB's "Key to the City" preview event.
To call the response negative would be putting it lightly; after reading paragraph after paragraph laced with anger, frustration, and disappointment -- all describing with great accuracy the game I just played -- I realized that I was indeed sane, and something very bad was happening in APB's city of San Paro. Aside from the roving bands of murderous street gangs, of course.
New Dragon Age 2 Details Show Mass Effect Influence | |
For starters, the story confirms that with Dragon Age 2's new hero, Hawke, being fully voiced, the game will eschew the dialogue trees of the first Dragon Age for a "dialogue wheel" system similar to Mass Effect. One new wrinkle, though, is that Dragon Age 2's dialogue wheel will show you exactly what type of response each option will give, noting whether it's "anger" or "flirting," and so on.
Interestingly, though, a whole new character with his (or her) own personality doesn't mean everything you did in the first Dragon Age doesn't matter. Dragon Age 1 save files can still be transferred over to Dragon Age 2, which actually begins during the final moments of the first game. Exactly what will cross-over into Dragon Age 2 wasn't detailed, but presumably the bigger world-affecting choices you made in the first game will have some influence in the second, even if you're playing a different character.
Puzzle Agent Review | |
Well I certainly didn't see this coming. In the nearly four years since the first Sam & Max episode debuted, I feel like I've developed a pretty good sense of what to expect from Telltale Games. The company's point-and-click adventure games have resuscitated a fading genre with their excellent writing and hilariously obtuse puzzles -- but one thing they ain't is surprising.
It turns out Telltale throws a bit of a curveball with Puzzle Agent. The developer's latest downloadable release is less Tales of Monkey Island and more Professor Layton -- mixed with a dash of The X-Files and Fargo. Puzzle Agent puts you in the shoes of Nelson Tethers, a bubblegum-addicted investigator with the FBI's Department of Puzzle Research who's being sent out on his first official case in ages.
Transformers: The War for Cybertron Review | |
Growing up in the '80s was probably one of the best things to ever happen to me. Things like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, decent Star Trek movies, Nintendo, Sega and of course cartoons permeated the consciousness of kids everywhere. And I was smack dab in the middle of it. In retrospect, Optimus Prime was like the greatest babysitter ever. My mom would plop my brother and me in front of the television and we would learn about sacrifice, honesty, truth, and never giving up in a fight. Then we would grab our Transformer toys and go playing in the backyard. Ah, innocence. And while the film franchise is on the cusp of dishing out another terrible flick, it's nice to see that High Moon Studios gets Transformers "right" with War for Cybertron by including everything from heavy-handed dialog to a Stan Bush song in the ending credits.
"Right" can be a subjective term when talking about Transformers lore. From what I understand, the overall story of the videogame differs from the canon of the Transformers origin story. As a fan of both Star Trek and Star Wars franchises, I've run into many canonical issues time and time again (how does one explain Star Tours anyway?), so I can understand the frustration of Transformer purists out there. But if you decide to pass this game up because you can't get over the fact that Megatron turns into a tank instead of a gun, you're doing yourself a disservice -- War for Cybertron really is a lot of fun to play.
Google Games Preparing Launch With Farmville Creator Investment | |
Interestingly, Google itself (not Google Ventures) made the investment. Zynga looks to be the backbone of Google Games, which will probably launch later this year. TechCrunch speculates that Google is looking to create a social graph of players, and to push Google Checkout as the payment method. Google tends to be nothing if not eager to combine its various business types and to continue mapping the preferences of its customer bases.
Google's push into the gaming space isn't surprising. We've heard rumblings of it in the last year, and it was all but confirmed a few months ago when the company posted a job listing for a Games Project Manager. Even so, this investment shows a large cash commitment to the project, as well as the direction Google may be leaning for its games department. They seem to be aiming directly for the casual market, which could make rivalry with Facebook a great spectacle to watch.
read full article Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands PC Review | |
Prince of Persia's had somewhat of an identity problem this past decade. If you count Prince of Persia 3D, The Sands of Time, and 2008's Prince of Persia, The Forgotten Sands marks the fourth time Jordan Mechner's classic puzzle-platformer has been reinvented over the last ten years. It's strange, because with the last installment in the series simply bearing the name "Prince of Persia," you'd think that this sort of straightforward title would indicate a definitive reboot for a series that suffered a bit throughout the latter two installments of the Sands of Time Trilogy.
But, with the curiously late Disney feature film adaptation of 2003's Sands of Time hitting theaters this month, for the sake of profit, a new videogame is essential for the typical Hollywood mass-marketing blitz. The result? A production that feels like little more than a riff on the fantastic Sands of Time, but a polished riff nonetheless.
Arkham Asylum 2 Details Hinted With Domain URLs | |
Aside from a teaser trailer presented at last year's Spike VGAs (above), Warner Bros. and developer Rocksteady have been as stealthy as Batman regarding details for the upcoming Batman: Arkham Asylum 2. They've been so quiet, in fact, that we don't even know if Arkham Asylum 2 is the game's actual title. But a new set of domain registrations from Warner Bros and caught by superannuation may shed light on the title and even some plot details.
Among the interesting title choices, we see several references to "Arkham City," which makes sense given how the trailer showed asylum inmates spilling over into Gotham. Some others hint at this as well, including "Ashes of Gotham," "Broken Ground," "New Arkham," "Rise of Arkham," "Seige of Gotham," and "War in Gotham City." Then we have domains that look like titles, but don't fit the same theme, like "Grand Delusion."
Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online Review | |
Mark Twain is famously credited with declaring, "Golf is a good walk spoiled." And now, with EA's golf franchise shifting from console to desk- and laptops with Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online , a good couch-sitting spoiled is now available in the comfort of your workday chair -- or anywhere you can find an open computer to sneak in a few strokes.
That's the magic of TWO (Tiger Woods Online): you can play anywhere. You can pause post-hole and save your progress, even pick it up later on your friend's desktop if you're tired of having your laptop scorch your crotch. As a sports gamer and world traveler who can't haul his 360 everywhere, my grand hope is that EA does this with all their franchises.
Call of Duty: Black Ops Pre-Orders Outpacing Modern Warfare 2's | |
It's not all good news for Activision, however. Where every previous Call of Duty has outperformed the previous game at retail, Wilson does think that Black Ops will be unable to continue the trend this year. He estimates that MW2 sold 16 million copies in the 2009 holiday quarter, so even with his updated prediction, the game would fall roughly 4 million copies shy of that mark. In his words, that's "due to competition, weaker marketing, and the Infinity Ward situation."
The Infinity Ward situation of course refers to Activision firing the IW co-founders Jason West and Vince Zampella, who subsequently sued Activision. The situation also led to the exodus of a huge number of staff members, a separate lawsuit against Activision (which we just recently learned even more about), and the formation of Respawn Entertainment by West and Zampella.
Hamlet Review | |
Okay, before you get all freaked out about memorizing soliloquies and parsing Elizabethan English: Hamlet is just a simple, point-and-click puzzle game with no English Lit. degrees required for installation. In fact, it barely calls for the use of English at all -- most of the game is played by discerning visual cues, thinking laterally, and engaging in furious pixel hunting when you don't know what to do next. Indeed the connection to Shakespeare's Hamlet is pretty bizarre and attenuated: the main character goes back in time and is dropped into the fictional world of Shakespeare's play, altering the outcomes and character arcs when his time machine crushes the title character to death. Truth is, you don't need to worry your pretty little head about the story, anyway, as it has little relevance to what is going on in the game, and as a result feels largely tacked on and unnecessary.
As for gameplay, it consists solely of a series of "room" challenges: you're confronted with a single, 2D screen within which one or more puzzles must be solved. Figure out the secret and you'll move to the next room, where you'll solve something different. Puzzle types range from pixel hunting to logic games to "meta-game" stuff like bringing an item from the help screen over for use in the main game world. While Hamlet does come with a built-in hint system, you'll rarely use it. This is because the challenges are generally either so easy that the hints are unnecessary, or so hard that the hints aren't helpful. One puzzle was so opaque that I simply clicked everywhere on the screen until something finally happened. Unfortunately, obscure puzzle construction is as common throughout the game as confusing Hamlet references -- it's one thing to try to out-clever the player, it's another to just make things hard just for the sake of being hard.
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