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SubscribeEinstein taught us that space is both homogeneous and isotropic--that is, on a large scale, the universe is smooth and uniform in all directions. It's empty out there. Like many space games before it, X Rebirth depicts an unrealistically vibrant universe bursting with color and texture, and that's as it should be. A near-vacuum makes a dreary backdrop for a video game, at least for a human observer.
It isn't X Rebirth's inauthentic view of space that should anger you; it's that this sequel is a galactic collision of unparalleled scale, an interstellar parade of bad ideas badly executed. Just as the observable universe has no center, neither does space exploration game X Rebirth find a foundation from which to grow outward, and I am unsure how to begin describing its failures. I can only begin at the quantum level, pulling out each particle and analyzing its deficiencies. And so I start in the cockpit, where most galactic adventures begin.
The Albion Skunk is the aptly named vessel that carries you on this journey. Unless you're peering out of a space port's window or piloting one of the game's different drones, you always see space through the Skunk's front window, and overlooking the aesthetically dull control panel that tells you the ship's condition. In fact, you look at most of X Rebirth's menus in the cockpit, each list pulling up on a digital display viewable by both you the player and protagonist pilot Ren Otani.
This menu integration might have been a sensible way to draw you further into this universe, but no amount of immersion would have been enough to veil the system's grave deficiencies. Pulling up so much as a simple galactic map requires a ridiculous number of keystrokes, with each submenu buffered by just enough input lag and unnecessary animation to cause impatience. Furthermore, the menu doesn't always take up a sensible portion of the screen, making it hard to read intricate mission objectives--and even harder to read them when a particularly garish spacescape shines from behind the Skunk's menu screen.
For a near-vacuum, it sure is busy in space! Garish spacescapes are common in X Rebirth, though there are sights of real beauty. Ships feature a remarkable amount of detail, and space stations and capital ships catch the eye with their intricate industrial designs. Rushing between systems via the game's space highways can be a visual delight, particularly as you watch ships and structures approach and then race by. When the color scheme embraces tranquil blues and developer Egosoft exercises visual restraint, the hazy background nebulae and tumbling asteroids are a treat. All too often, however, the view erupts with harsh orange and turquoise hues, making you wonder if you shouldn't stock the Albion Skunk with sunscreen. A vibrant vision of space is typically pleasing enough, but X Rebirth's depiction occasionally surpasses "meticulous" and surges straight into "gaudy."
Buy low and sell high. It's a solid economic policy, and it forms the backbone of X Rebirth's explore-fight-collect-build gameplay loop. It's an inviting loop, and I found myself pushing onward to collect enough funds, hiring enough ships to join my squad, and building enough structures in the hope of calling the result a true empire.
Sometimes, doing so means shooting spacecraft piloted by members of the slave-trading Plutarch Mining Corporation. Combat is functional, but ship controls are loose, though I never felt as though I wasn't properly directing the action. Regardless, the Skunk is your only ride for the duration, so get used to the way it looks and feels, though you can improve its performance with enhanced weaponry, shields, and so forth. Fortunately, you will build up an entire squad of vessels that perform various vital actions on your behalf, assisting you in combat, erecting structures, and ferrying goods about the sector. Massive battles are visually explosive, momentarily interrupting the slow-paced trading with fiery combat.
This sequel is a galactic collision of unparalleled scale, an interstellar parade of bad ideas badly executed.
Oh God. Just... Oh God. And boy is trading slow-paced. Buying and selling goods isn't an immediate process, or even an efficient one. Instead, you must wait for many minutes on end as your sluggish trading ship edges ever closer to the trade port, giving you an opportunity to poke around the sector, or more likely, to go grab a glass of wine and peruse the latest issue of Science Magazine from cover to cover. You also must maintain fuel reserves, which can come as a shock the first time a hired pilot informs you of his fuel shortage over the comm and has you scrambling to figure out how to rectify the situation, given how ordering your ship to fuel up is not an option you can find in the game's menus.
Building up a fleet takes time and money, and you don't find capable crew members free-floating in space, but rather within space stations, which you explore on foot after docking. First-person exploration could have been a grand addition, taking the X series that much closer to the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink games developer Derek Smart wanted his Battlecruiser series to be, but never was. It soon becomes obvious, however, that traversing cookie-cutter stations sucks the mystery out of space travel, leaving behind horrifying human visages that spout absolute drivel in the most excruciating tone of voice imaginable. You see the same grotesquely scarred faces over and over again, and engaging one of these unblinking ghouls results in absolute nonsense. Any given conversation is utterly devoid of logic. Characters are routinely rude when you approach them, then become delighted, and then lapse into obnoxiousness again. In the meanwhile, female characters frequently whine "Ew! Slimy green lizard things are everywhere!" in the shrillest possible manner, as if they are 1950s housewives from classic cartoons, crying atop the kitchen table and swatting at pesky mice.
Colorful is one thing, but X Rebirth's artists really should have turned things down a notch. That line is shrieked in regard to the reptilian Teladi race, whose existence in the X universe is well established. Perhaps Egosoft wanted to use first-person exploration to further develop the game's tone and deepen its lore. Sadly, a universe full of rude, moronic space travelers barely capable of communicating normal thoughts in a logical order is not a compelling place to be.
Instead, having to dock at a station and walk around looking for the right merchants becomes a chore. My first foray into a station delighted me; I could loot lockers and crates for marketable items, leading me to believe that X Rebirth might spill into role-playing territory. Alas, clicking on lockers becomes monotonous busywork, as does roaming the cut-and-paste hallways looking for vendors and crew members for hire. These places are as lifeless as a white dwarf, even in their underpopulated lounges, each living statue stiffly waiting for you to click on it. Characters speak of their own accord only when prompting you to take part in a ridiculous-beyond-measure minigame in which you engage in surreal small talk to earn a few discounts. It wasn't long before I avoided this minigame altogether, however: no matter how deep the discount, I couldn't stomach the stupid dialogue, which made me question how such imbeciles could have devised any form of space travel.
It isn't just in the space stations where you go hunting for discounts. Out in the black beyond, you glimpse icons that urge you to investigate the objects they identify; examine enough of them, and you unlock discounts and side missions. Little lowercase i's are splattered all over the place, but you have to be close enough to see them, and you must have line of sight. And thus your adventure turns into a vapid Easter egg hunt in which you float around satellite arrays seeking icons, and then soar close enough to them to interact with them. It isn't uncommon to briefly see an icon identifying a side mission only to have it flicker away in a flash, forcing you to maneuver carefully around the starbase hoping to catch another glimpse.
According to the theory of special relativity, X Rebirth stinks. Don't expect those missions to work properly once you graciously accept them from your sneering contacts, however. Each X game has suffered from a certain number of rough edges at launch, and you could be forgiven for assuming that like those games, X Rebirth would be superficially glitchy but eminently playable. Yet no matter how low your expectations might be for the newest X's stability, the game still manages to sink lower. Only a few hours in, and a mission proved impossible to complete, leading me to commiserate with other players suffering from the same game-ending bug in Internet forums. After downloading a saved game file from a helpful comrade, I continued my journey, only to have a side mission task me with destroying a story-critical capital ship, leaving me to wander for hours wondering why I couldn't find my mission objective.
A universe full of rude, moronic space travelers barely capable of communicating normal thoughts in a logical order is not a compelling place to be.
Listing all of the bugs I encountered would take up inordinate amounts of space, and so I offer here a random array. Crashes too numerous to count. Poor frame rates that had me wondering why I'd spent so much money on modern computer hardware. Suddenly unresponsive dialogue that left me stuck mid-conversation. Enemy ships flying around in the middle of space station geometry, keeping me from completing missions. Trading ships that simply wouldn't conduct the assigned transaction. That last one was particularly aggravating, considering how much time you must wait for functional transactions to complete. All too often, X Rebirth had me asking the age-old question: "Is it a bug or a feature?"
The fact that it's too difficult to tell the difference tells you all you must know about X Rebirth. You might assume a bright future for the game, given Egosoft's solid history of supporting its games after release--and given the community's dedication to crafting fixes and modifications that further improve these starry treks. X Rebirth's failings are rooted too deeply to simply be patched away, however. No matter what your level of enthusiasm for the X series is, do your best to escape the pull of Rebirth's gravity. It's only bound to cause a fatal crash.
A high-capacity battery for the Wii U is now available in the United States, promising 8 hours of use with a single charge. The battery is available today through Nintendo's website for $32.
The standard Wii U GamePad battery lasts around 3-5 hours, though all battery life depends on a number of factors including usage of wireless communications and the brightness setting of the screen, among other elements.
You'll need a screwdriver to install the new high-capacity battery. The new high-capacity GamePad battery is already available in Japan and the United Kingdom.
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Huntsman: The Orphanage prompts many questions. Who is the huntsman? How did 12 orphans vanish without a trace from a rural Illinois orphanage in 1897? For that matter, where can I pick up that sweet smartphone that talks to the dead and never loses a charge? Huntsman doesn't answer all of these questions, but some of its chief pleasures lie in rummaging among old suitcases and piles of dusty prosthetics for clues to the answers. When paired with its creepy namesake, it's a premise that manages to deliver some genuine chills, but it's not long before its web of creepypasta stories ensnare you more than any sense of dread. That's both a blessing and a curse.
ShadowShifters, the studio behind the project, created a game that frightens more by ambience than with the jump scares, blood, and violence that define many horror games (and movies) these days. Many of its most effective chills actually spring from the expectation of scares common in horror games that came before it, and indeed, the first tentative steps of the game lead you down a wooded road, past a phone booth, and up to the wrought iron gates of a decaying institution. A casual onlooker could be fooled into thinking you were playing through the start of Outlast.
The huntsman isn't your everyday Slenderman. But there's no blood here, and if there were, it's had over 100 years to fade away. Perfect opportunities for jump scares present themselves and pass, and even 20 minutes into the game you might still believe that this really is just an abandoned complex in modern Illinois, and that the falling crosses and self-closing doors really do owe their existence to nothing besides the wind. By the time I came across the rare wonder of a chalkboard writing a helpful tutorial by itself, I found myself not so much spooked as grateful for the novelty.
Thank goodness you have the best smartphone in the world at your disposal. Its constant presence puts Huntsman: The Orphanage in the same class as "weaponless" horror games in the vein of Outlast and Amnesia, and most of the time you use it as a flashlight but, alas, with none of the dread that springs from losing battery power. The phone's existence comes into its own, however, when the voices and images of the 12 missing children come crackling through it, begging you to find their favorite belongings and return them to their graves so their souls can be free of the dreaded huntsman.
The stories told by the portraits are almost always worth listening to. Sometimes they interrupt you with flashes of video when you get near said items. Sometimes they pop up and tell you stories with clues from their past when you hover the phone over the portraits scattered throughout the orphanage. And in most cases, the excellent voice work for the accompanying stories makes up for some of the limitations of the surrounding visuals. Tales of chopping off hands at the woodpile suggest that these orphans aren't angelic innocents, and some of them speak with just enough hints of menace that you might balk at placating them with gifts. They don't even let up on the creepy act after you've found their junk and tossed it on their hidden graves.
It's fitting that the voice work excels over so much of the rest of the experience. (If there's a drawback to this focus, it's that you have to stare at their photos the whole time to hear the full narration.) The orphans spill their lines, dropping hints based on their histories, and then you set out to dig in and around the inky-dark ruins of the orphanage to find the relevant items. It's tougher than it sounds. The relevant items don't glow or otherwise make their presence known, and since you can't interact with some of them unless you crouch or lie down, you may not even know you're looking at one even though you're staring right at it.
Some of its chief pleasures lie in rummaging among old suitcases and piles of dusty prosthetics.
It's here that Huntsman's overused visual assets unexpectedly come in handy. Dozens of copies of the same Dutch painting and black-and-white group photo litter the rooms of the two-story orphanage, and you grow so used to them and the sight of the same books and blue suitcases that anything else stands out in stark contrast. Good thing, too. Huntsman may be a game about exploring, thinking, and listening at heart, but on many occasions, you find the pieces just by dumb luck. It's sometimes challenging enough with the current design; it might be a nightmare in more detailed environs.
Speaking of nightmares, what of the huntsman? His comparative absence in the review so far may show just how weak of an impression he tends to leave. Oh, he starts out scary enough. You see him first by the light of your phone in the enveloping darkness, with hairy arachnid legs and an upper body that looks like a steampunk dandy sporting a Renaissance plague mask, and his presence is heralded by the sound of what resembles the ticking of a dozen grandfather clocks. Knowing that this fascinating thing awaits somewhere in the dark creates much of the game's early tension.
Regrettably, it's a sensation that doesn't last long. The cacophony of ticking makes him absurdly easy to avoid (particularly when paired with stereo headphones), and once I found him just staring off into space as if ruminating over his poor life choices over the last century. Even when he catches you and sucks you into limbo, the G-rated fade to black might make you wonder if the game's not simply bugging out if you didn't know better.
Get used to seeing this painting. A lot. Once you start to put the children's items back on their graves, however, the experience changes for the better. The catch is that all their graves lie scattered in a sprawling, overgrown hedge maze, and that's when you should look forward to playing in the dark with the door closed and your headphones firmly clamped on. You can always hear the tick-tocking of the huntsman, yes, but the design thrives on the realization that any wrong turn might dump you right in front of its face. With enough repetition--there are, after all, 12 children--it's possible to learn the general layout, but in those early moments, Huntsman: The Orphanage does much to live up to its horror label.
Huntsman: The Orphanage does manage to convey a sense of terror in its quiet moments, but they're more benign chills than you find in bloodier horror adventures that let you fight back or at least present enemies who do more than engulf you in darkness. Its greatest frights lie in the anticipation that anything could lurk in the darkness, but once you realize that it's just you and a clockwork Spider-Man, you might find that you're no longer as afraid of the dark as you once were. And in a horror game? That's just scary.
The new Super Smash Bros. game for Wii U and 3DS will not be released in spring 2014, director Masahiro Sakurai has confirmed on Twitter.
In a pair of tweets (translated by Siliconera), Sakurai said the recent rumor is false and the official release date for the new Super Smash Bros. game is sometime in 2014, as Nintendo has said previously.
Last week, a Nintendo Germany representative said both Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros. would launch for Wii U in spring 2014. Nintendo has since labeled this comment a "misquotation."
Nintendo has yet to reveal any footage from Super Smash Bros. on the Wii U outside of a video demonstration from E3 2013. Nintendo is developing the game in partnership with Namco Bandai's SoulCalibur studio.
As of September 30, the Wii U has officially sold 3.91 million units. The company plans to sell 9 million consoles worldwide by the end of March 2014.
Adventure. The word suggests danger, daring, and excitement, perhaps a journey into the perilous unknown. In Adventure Time: Explore the Dungeon Because I DON'T KNOW, you do indeed venture into dangerous realms, but all you find there is unadulterated drudgery. The game possesses none of the whimsy and imagination of the cartoon that inspired it. This is dungeon-crawling at its dullest and most rudimentary.
Princess Bubblegum has summoned the heroes of the realm, charging them with exploring the Secret Royal Dungeon beneath her castle and dealing with the rambunctious monsters who are not so securely imprisoned there. Unfortunately, she doesn't warn Finn, Jake, and the rest of the gang that it's more likely that the boredom will kill them than the monsters. You trudge through floors of the dungeon, hacking away at enemies and picking up piles of treasure here and there. That's pretty much it.
Of course, there are some great games that rely on this basic premise. Some offer you a diverse range of attacks that feel powerful and are satisfying to use. Some pit you against memorable foes who use attacks that require you to play smartly if you hope to emerge victorious. Some include deep character customization options. Some have terrific gear you can find and equip to make your hero increasingly more powerful. Adventure Time has none of this. The game takes a few cues from the landmark multiplayer arcade dungeon crawler Gauntlet, but despite having the benefit of nearly 30 years' worth of genre advances and innovations to draw upon, Adventure Time fails to even be as exciting a game as that old quarter-muncher.
Yes, there are a number of playable characters with different abilities. Marceline can float right over pits and traps, for instance, while the Ice King can freeze enemies. But no matter which character you choose, the exploration remains slow and tedious; the dungeons remain bereft of interesting places, enemies to fight, or items to discover; and the combat remains excruciatingly shallow and simplistic. No subweapon you might find and pick up in the dungeon, be it a kitten gun or a fire hose (that is, a hose that shoots fire) does anything to liven up the process of pushing buttons mindlessly until monsters fall before you. You can play with up to three friends, but then you're all just sharing a miserable experience.
Oh yeah, the boss fights are terrible, too. After suffering your way through a number of levels, you're given the opportunity to return to the surface with the treasure you've collected, but there's little of interest to spend that treasure on. You can sink it into a few absurdly expensive upgrades to attributes like health and damage, each of which can be upgraded only two or three times. The problem with them being so costly is that you can't stash your gold anywhere. When you reenter the dungeon, you must give up any unspent treasure. This is an idea that works well in games like Rogue Legacy, in which there's a satisfying loop of earning more treasure in the dungeon, which lets you strengthen your character, which lets you earn yet more treasure on your subsequent dungeon runs. But in Adventure Time, spending time slogging through several levels of the dungeon, only to realize that you don't have enough treasure yet to purchase any upgrades and must try to slog through several more levels and collect still more treasure, just feels like punishment on top of punishment.
There's the rare moment of humor, like when the vampire Marceline remarks, right after you upgrade her health, "I can't die anyway!" But cutscenes and dialogue exchanges are few and far between, so even the most devout fans of Adventure Time won't find enough entertaining quips or goofy moments to reward them for struggling through the dungeon. The game's title may not provide justification for exploring the dungeon, but the much bigger I DON'T KNOW here is why anyone would play this game.
This week on New Releases, a whole lotta nothin! But we find a few games that decided to release right before the holiday season. Check out Wii U Fit, The Novelist, Rekoil and the infamous Peggle 2.
Over the weekend, Bethesda confirmed that the Fallout 4 teaser website TheSurvivor2299 was indeed a fake. Now, its creator has come forward to explain why he did it. During a recent Reddit AMA titled "Uhm, Hello? I'm the Prick behind thesurvivor2299," the hoaxer said he stopped the campaign after Bethesda got into touch with him.
"Some men just want to watch the world burn," he said, noting that the intent of the campaign was to force Bethesda's hand to reveal Fallout 4 during Saturday night's Spike VGX awards.
The website featured a countdown clock ending on December 11. The hoaxer said he had planned to release a CGI trailer for Fallout 4 when the clock reached zero. This trailer still exists, but he's not planning to release it anytime soon.
"I'm one of these 'selfish bastards with a lot of money' so I wanted to release a CGI trailer," he said. "But [Bethesda marketing executive Pete Hines] killed my plans. Maybe I'll release it later along with the script, so somebody else can use it!"
The rumored Fallout 4 is believed to be set in Boston, Mass., though is is far from confirmed. The most recent Fallout title was 2010's Fallout: New Vegas, which was developed by Obsidian Entertainment and set in a postapocalyptic Las Vegas.
