“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
There used to be a lull in summer releases. I almost welcomed it; there was finally time to catch up on the games I missed during the previous November crunch, or at the very least pad my gamerscore with marginal releases. XBLA and the advent of console digital distribution has brought an expensive end to that. Far be it from me to complain about there being too many good games to play, but my wallet needs time to breathe. Poor as I may be, there are always games that I will make space for, and a sequel to Geometry Wars is reason enough to sell plasma.
The original Geometry Wars was the best thing on the 360 for several months after release. After I turned off Perfect Dark Zero for being terrible and finished Condemned in five hours, I turned to Project Gotham 3. It was a good enough racing game, but I am willing to bet that the XBLA game it demoed ate up more hours of playtime than the game itself, and I am far from alone in that line of thought. Geometry Wars was the first big arcade hit; it resurrected the two stick shooter, and is still among the best of its kind several years later. There have been sequels in the intervening years (on systems I don’t own, jerks) but the series has finally come back home with Geometry Wars 2. Not much has changed, gameplay wise, and this is most certainly not a complaint. You move, you shoot things before they kill you, repeat until your eyes fall out of your head. It still works, only it looks much more polished now and has better music.
What has been changed is excellent news for both new players and old fans alike: the removal of a penalty for dying. In the original, dying reset the score multiplier, which usually led to me resetting the game and yelling at the TV. Now, the multiplier is based not on how many enemies are killed but on how many of their shattered husks you collect. This rewards aggressiveness, forgives the occasional bone headed mistake, and makes the game much more playable for extended periods of time. Add to that six game modes that require vastly different play strategies, and the doubling of the price feels like a pretty sweet deal. It’s $10, so go buy it and add me to your friends list so I can crush your pathetic high score.
No other arcade games released this week, but one demo is of definite note: Madden 2009. Is the game any better than last year? I have no idea; the yearly demos of Madden have provided me with all the football gaming that I need. A few games of some random team, and I am set for twelve months. It looks better than last year, but I don’t know nearly enough about football to tell you if it is any better than it has been in the past. Play the demo, and then go back to selling blood for cash. Geometry Wars 2 was just the first in what will be four excellent arcade offerings in a row.
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.