“EA Partners Is A Murderers’ Row - Who’s NOT On This List?” at MTV Multiplayer
This is a good bit of investigative reporting from Stephen Totilo. With last Thursday’s announcements by Electronic Arts of deals with Grasshopper Manufacture and Epic Games, they now have at least half a dozen major partners, and that’s not counting the smaller companies they have outright purchased over the last couple years.
Latest Feature: Impulse Buyer
Can Stardock break into the marketplace, and will it help reduce piracy?
COLUMNS
Smart, satisfying, and a lot of fun.
Space Invaders Extreme is, in many ways, to Space Invaders as Pac-Man Championship Edition is to Pac-Man. They’re similar visually, and both find ways to work modern game design into an old formula, but they do so in different ways. Pac-Man Championship Edition did it through pattern memorization and clever level design, and Space Invaders Extreme does it by adding in new mechanics and progression. Ultimately, Space Invaders Extreme isn’t as clever as what I ended up considering the dark horse of the running for last year’s Game of the Year, but it’s still a great-playing game.
The only semblance of context you’re given is a blurb on the back of the box that tells you that Earth is in trouble and you need to defend it; it’s all about the gameplay. It’s got more smart design packed into such a small package than it has any right to. You’re rewarded for killing enemies with the same coloring, shape, or placement in the environment, with power-ups and bonus stages, reminiscent of Galaga’s Challenging Stages, that can get you even bigger power ups. It’s also constantly playing with your expectations, as bosses cross two screens, and enemies go kamikaze, and flip sideways (making them razor thin and very difficult to hit). There ends up being a lot to it; more than most will be able to pick up quickly without reading the manual, but it all works together beautifully.
The presentation is also fantastic, for the most part. Its art style is the hippest of the hip, with neon on top of black everywhere and E’s aren’t even 3’s, but are just backwards. Everything also happens in time with the music, meaning that every sound effect is also in time, leading to Rez-style music you inadvertently make as you play. Unfortunately the background music and sounds you make aren’t as good as the ones in other similar games (specifically Rez and Meteos come to mind), but I’ll support any game that does this; it’s really been underutilized since Rez’s release seven years ago. It makes chomping through enemies feel similar to, and nearly as good as, doing the same to music notes in Guitar Hero and Rock Band.
Space Invaders Extreme is a game you want to buy if your DS has been dying for some attention, you love 80’s arcade shooters, or you want to be the coolest hipster fuck wearing headphones on the subway. It’s not everything it could have been, like Pac-Man Championship Edition was, but it’s smart, satisfying, and a lot of fun. Plus it’s budget priced. Hey publishers, this is how we fight piracy.
I have become amazed at what XBLA has done in the past few weeks. It started with Geometry Wars 2, a game Jim Canapa described perfectly in the previous column (he should know, since his high scores are far better than mine). Bionic Commando, another great game I will go into detail about later, was the most recent addition. But in the middle was Braid, the first game to ever cause an internal conflict for me.
Morrowind really helped pull itself head and shoulders above the crowd by developing a realistically complicated world in such an unfamiliar setting that its players can’t help but explore every nook and cranny, finding new reasons to love it every time they play.
“Gaming’s 20 Greatest Challenges” at Edge
Colin Campbell doing what he does best. I can’t imagine coming up with this list, not to mention writing as smartly and concisely about them all. The one problem here is that he doesn’t always offer a solution to these problems, but it’s still important either way.
“THE ACTION BUTTON DOT NET MANIFESTO: A LIST OF THE TWENTY-FIVE BEST GAMES OF ALL-TIME” at Action Button
They’ve been teasing it for months, but finally here it is. Twenty-five full reviews. It’s a lot, so they’re releasing them three at a time twice a week. The three up now are all good examples of why Tim Rogers is important to the topic of this column.