Latest Gaming and MMORPG Updates |
- Metal Gear Solid HD Collection Gets the Limited Edition Treatment
- Conquering Death: How Games are Reinventing Loss
- Age of Wulin (CN)
| Metal Gear Solid HD Collection Gets the Limited Edition Treatment Posted: 03 Oct 2011 05:44 AM PDT Just because it doesn’t contain any new games doesn’t mean the Metal Gear Solid HD Collection can’t get its own special edition bundle. The Metal Gear Solid HD Collection Limited Edition was announced by Konami today and is fairly modest in terms of its contents. In addition to the games themselves, you’ll get specialized packaging created by Yoji Shinkawa, the series’ lead artist, and an exclusive, 248-page art book titled The Art of Metal Gear Solid. Unfortunately today’s announcement didn’t include any pictures of the book’s contents, though based on its title and length it sounds like it could be a must-have item for fans of the franchise. The Limited Edition will be available on both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 alongside the standard version of the game on November 8. No matter which you choose, included in the collection are the Substance and Subsistence versions of Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid 3, respectively. That means in addition to high-definition versions of those two games and Peace Walker, you’ll also be able to play the original Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. Konami didn’t mention a price for the Limited Edition, and it has yet to respond to 1UP’s request for comment on the matter. With the standard version priced at $49.99, how much would you be willing to pay for the LE package? Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
| Conquering Death: How Games are Reinventing Loss Posted: 02 Oct 2011 05:36 PM PDT I’m sick of dying in video games. Please don’t take that to mean that I die unusually often in games, or that doing so frustrates me, or that the concept of challenge in video games needs to go away. Honestly, in many ways, it already has; few modern games exact much of a penalty for dying, anyway. It’s just that, after 30 years of playing games, I’ve seen enough of them that explore the concept of loss in interesting ways that I the use of death increasingly seems a simplistic way to denote failure state (Game Over, press Start to continue) to speak of a depressing lack of imagination on the developers’ behalf. Most games equate failure with the death of your player avatar, and that obviously works; otherwise it wouldn’t be the medium’s standard. But there are so many more interesting things that can be done with failure in a video game. The forced restarts and checkpoint setbacks you see in most games are a holdover from the olden days of arcades, where the goal of a game was to extract as much money as possible from an audience. Those games toed the line between fun and unfairness to keep you hooked enough to drop in quarter after quarter without making it easy for any but the most dedicated to play more than a few minutes without failing. Few games operate on the coin-op payment model these days, though; why should they continue to be constrained by coin-op thinking? Granted, one could just as easily ask why death should be a concern at all in video games. Ultimately, it boils down to a natural limitation of the medium. Conflict is at the heart of any narrative, be it film, literature, music, or something as simple as “eat dots, avoid ghosts.” The gaming medium is unusual in that it makes the audience an active participant, and as such the rules change; unlike a book or a movie, a game can’t simply get along with the player as a passive witness. On top of that, the fact of the matter is that violent conflict is by far one of the easiest forms of interaction to simulate; it’s a fairly binary matter of kill-or-be-killed, and the nuances of ragdoll physics or targeted damage are child’s play next to the more subtle shading required for convincing human interaction. Developers have to work many times as hard to create an eventuality for the many possible directions and outcomes of a conversation as they do for an armed encounter. Games are violent simply because violence is far easier to render than a convincing facsimile of the less exciting things we do on a day-to-day basis. A game has to bring the player into the narrative somehow, and even those that suffer from lengthy, non-interactive cut-scenes (you know — the ones harshly decried as “interactive movies”) eventually involve the player on some level. Metal Gear Solid makes you sit and watch as characters talk about nanomachines and super babies for half an hour at a time, but eventually even Metal Gear overlord Hideo Kojima has to put aside his control-freak tendencies and relinquish control to the player. When that happens, the game shifts to conflict and the avoidance thereof. Players can slip around enemy lines and evade notice to reach their destination, but they can fight or sneak their way out of a fight (should it come to that) with an almost pornographically detailed array of weapons. Fail, however, and Snake dies; game over. Well, usually. Every once in a while, Metal Gear games do something more interesting with death than have Snake’s radio operator shout his name as the screen fades to black. In Metal Gear Solid 3, for example, players face off against an elderly sniper named The End. It’s one of the lengthiest and most stressful battles in video game history (I spent about two hours on it), but Snake can’t actually die during the fight. The End might get the jump on you, and he might outshoot you, but he won’t kill you. Lose to The End and you end up in jail — a setback, but not a complete loss. In the context of the game, this helps to establish The End as a unique and unusual foe. In the context of the series, on the other hand, it’s a surprisingly rare inversion of video game norms. Kojima is a demonstrable fan of subverting player expectations and playing with the “proper” mechanics of the medium, so it’s strange to think he’s so rarely disrupted the relationship between failure and death in the Metal Gear games. He’s even stated his desire to create a game that destroys itself when the player loses, giving them only a single chance to succeed — not exactly the most consumer-friendly concept, but definitely an interesting one. Kojima’s single-use game has been echoed in the urban legend of Killswitch, a purported Russian game that deletes itself from the player’s hard drive forever once the player loses. Then again, the idea of permanent failure for dying in a game isn’t precisely a disruption of the relationship between video game loss and avatar death — it’s more akin to the idea taken to its absolute extreme. A more interesting subversion can be seen in BioShock, a game that (perhaps unintentionally) bears a close philosophical resemblance to Metal Gear. Beneath their action trappings, both series question both cultural morality and the artifices of the video game medium in particular. Yet they each handle death in radically different ways. Death in Metal Gear is simply a fast ticket to a partial reset; in BioShock, on the other hand, death is barely even an inconvenience. The city of Rapture is densely populated with devices called Vita-Chambers, which restore the player’s character to life without resetting the surrounding world. There is almost exactly zero penalty for death in BioShock until the final battle, and players can advance through Rapture as carelessly and incompetently as they like. Eventually, they’ll chip away at enemy hordes and triumph through persistence, no matter how many trips to the Vita-Chamber it takes. Many players cried foul about the way the Vita-Chamber defuses the tension of exploring Rapture, which is a fair enough criticism. But eventually, the Vita-Chamber’s true role — a narrative device — is revealed when the player at last meets Rapture founder Andrew Ryan and is forced to kill him by his own command. Ryan robs the player of the choice to commit murder while at the same time electing to die a true, permanent death: Once Ryan breathes his last and you again regain control over your actions, the first thing you discover in the back of your victim’s office is his own personal Vita-Chamber — a chamber which has deliberately been deactivated, driving home the point that Ryan was a man of his convictions. He died preaching about the importance of making conscious choices knowing full well he had chosen a true death. The Vita-Chamber thus becomes important subtext to a not-so-subtle set-piece; its role in the play mechanics seem almost secondary to this key point of plot- and world-building. Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
| Posted: 02 Oct 2011 05:36 PM PDT
In Closed Beta 1, there will be 11 areas opened for the top 11 guilds to build their base. After a player registers a guild and there are no 4 players in it after 3days, the guild will be disbanded. Those with the amount will become an official guild. When the number of players in a guild reaches 100 and there is 20 silver in the guild bank, it is possible to upgrade to level 2. Only upon reaching level 2 can a guild declare war on others and vice versa. For Closed Beta 1, guilds with a base will not be able to declare war on another with none. Pretty much similar to Ragnarok Online’s War of Emporium, there will be a short time for both attacking and defending guilds to prepare for the war once it has been declared. For the defending guild, the guild master have the option to relocate where the guild throne, the ultimate goal of the attacking guild, is placed within the walls. If not done so, the game will automatically choose a spot itself.
Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
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