New Games |
- Latest Battlefield 3 PC update gets detailed
- What I learned playing Self Defense Training Camp
- Ezio gets all stop-motiony in this fan animation
- Review: Anno 2070
- The 'Splosion Men blast their way into Retro City Rampage
- Comments of the Week: SOPA SOUP
- 14k Starman pendant to be auctioned off for Child's Play
- Happy Skyward Sword Day!
- Hmm... I think we've got time for one more Zelda rap
- Fan-made Halo miniseries coming in January 2012
- Contest: Win these Saints Row themed ASTRO A40 headsets!
| Latest Battlefield 3 PC update gets detailed Posted: 20 Nov 2011 10:00 AM PST Battlefield 3 didn't have the smoothest launch ever, with problems such as online passes not working straight out of the box, PC users finding ways to play Battlefield 3 on PC without the use of EA's Origin service and the fact that the flashlight was too bloody bright. According to DICE, they've been hard at work getting as many issues fixed as possible and will be shooting off a "significant" patch for Battlefield 3 on PC -- console versions of it will follow soon after, because Microsoft and Sony need to check things out first. It's going to be improving everything from weapons balancing, general stability, squad control and that "negative mouse acceleration" thing some PC users have been experiencing. As for the whole cheating/boosting situation, DICE simply says to keep reporting them as you see 'em and made no mention of any implementations to stomp on currently known boosting techniques. They could just be playing dumb, though, and would rather surprise the hell out of everyone when said techniques no longer work come next week. Incoming: Battlefield 3 update! (Battlefield Blog)
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| What I learned playing Self Defense Training Camp Posted: 20 Nov 2011 08:00 AM PST I've been playing a ton of Kinect games for review lately, and one of these is Ubisoft's Self Defense Training Camp. The game aims to teach you a variety of techniques that you can employ to get yourself out of a dangerous situation. I found the whole experience to be thoroughly enlightening and wanted to put together a video which showcased how there's a way to escape absolutely any problem. |
| Ezio gets all stop-motiony in this fan animation Posted: 20 Nov 2011 07:00 AM PST Stop-motion animation will never die, and the world is a better place because of that! In this wonderfully choreographed video, Ezio from Assassin's Creed goes toe-to-toe with... ummm... uhhhh... the guy from Tenchu? I dunno... maybe? Whatevs, some ninja dude who gets his sh*t ruined. It's all good fun, so no biggie. Assassin's Creed Revelations Fan Tribute: Assassin VS Ninja! [YouTube] |
| Posted: 20 Nov 2011 06:00 AM PST The popular Anno series has survived for over a decade now, each title being numbered in such a way that makes you wonder if they form some kind of sequence test. There is only so much you can do with wooden ships and colonial-era economies, and instead of going for an Anno 1805 or Anno 1299 the franchise has finally made the jump to the future. Mankind has messed up the planet's ecosystem leading to a dramatic rise in sea levels, forcing civilization to spread across somehow uninhabited islands that act as the colonies of old. Two new and completely different factions -- the ecology-minded Eden Initiative and the industrialist Global Trust -- now vie for control of the remants of civilization, and it is up to you to keep trying to create the perfect archipelago empire until the birds start chirping and you notice the sun has started to rise. Yep, it's still an Anno game alright. Anno 2070 (PC) The traditional Anno formula is still intact in the year 2070 and once again you are tasked with balancing an ever expanding economy across multiple islands with the financial burden of keeping everything running. The industry side of your economy will be familiar to most: harvest raw materials for industry buildings that create the goods you need in order to grow your population and support higher levels of industry. Construction of buildings costs goods you can produce yourself, but it also often costs money -- something you primarily gain by taxing your population and by trading with other powers on the map. Expanding your population in Anno 2070 is of paramount importance to stay in the black, but building large residential areas shares more similarities with the Caesar games than, say, Sim City. Instead of building wildly across a huge map, you tend to slowly fill up islands with separate industrial and residential areas. Residences require two things to advance in 'level': goods your economy can produce and services that are projected in a radius by special buildings. As you satisfy your population's needs, residences will advance to house more workers and the workers that live there will advance in skill level and pay more taxes. Each skill level your workforce attains gives you new needs to satisfy before they can advance again, and each level you gain access to new buildings for your economy. This leads to a slowly paced but very enjoyable cycle of growing your economy and advancing your workforce to grow your economy some more. Compared to similar games like The Settlers or Caesar where resource transportation can eat up a lot of time, Anno 2070's economy features storage buildings that magically and instantly share all resources with every other storage building across an island, removing the need to transport resources from one place to the other. Industry buildings don't need workers to function, so it becomes a game of optimizing the available space on an island to produce the most efficient residential areas while you build your industry wherever it fits best. Not every island has access to all types of resources or has the soil to support all types of farmland, though. As your population grows and advances, you'll inevitably need to expand to other islands that provide the resources you need to keep advancing your little island civilization. If you are missing a 'fertility' that allows you to grow a certain crop, you can buy or research an item and seed your island to support that crop, but this is usually more of a mid-to-late game option. Eventually the island-spanning economy becomes gigantic in size and it can take some getting used to if you haven't played an Anno game in a while, or if you are new to the series. Thankfully the campaign does a good job at very slowly easing you into all the aspects of the basic economy, advancing your population levels, and moving from your initial island to a nation that dominates the seas in both trade and maritime power. Central to the post-global warming era are the two main factions: the Eden Initiative (the Ecos) and the Global Trust (the Tycoons). Each faction has a wildly different economy and both require a slightly different play style. The Eden Initiative gets more eco-friendly buildings, but they are highly reliant on farms that suffer under ecological stress. The Global Trust on the other hand is all about highly polluting industry, but they are not as reliant on farming as the Ecos. The global warming theme being central to Anno 2070 offers a new gameplay element, the ecology of your islands, that affects production and mood. Ecology is negatively affected by farms and industry, but you need both of these for the sake of progress. This can be unfortunate for the Eco faction since their population becomes less happy as pollution increases, although the Tycoon population doesn't care if it lives under a layer of smog. Because both factions do benefit from paying attention to your 'ecobalance' rating at the farming level, they have their own solutions for removing pollution. The Ecos have pollution-free power generation instead of the Tycoon's coal power plant alternative, and they can spread weather control stations all over an island to reduce pollution. The Tycoons have waste recycling centers that reduce more pollution if they are surrounded by more houses, but this takes up precious room around your city centers where otherwise people could've lived to provide you with more tax income. Other high level ecology-boosting buildings unlock down the line, but at a very high cost. As a result, the Ecos tend to end up with a more balanced ecology due to the types of buildings they require, while the Tycoons tend to make ecology something that is more of a bother than a goal -- you can often put those affected farms on another, cleaner island, after all. This difference is reflected in the visual style of an island. Not only do the Ecos have 'green' buildings that blends right into a forest, but their ecologically flourishing islands are basked in sunlight and have nice warm bloom-y glow. The Tycoons on the other hand end up with the type of cities you know from dystopian movies like Blade Runner and their polluted islands are grim and dark environments. Unfortunately the ecology of your islands doesn't really affect the gameplay that much other than acting as a production and mood modifier; don't expect to lose coastal ground to a further rise in sea levels if you mess up the world some more. There is a global eco rating for all combined players, but it doesn't seem to affect anything for the moment. A third faction, the S.A.A.T., is a Tech faction that allows you to research upgrades for your island's economy and ecosystem, your Ark (a floating base that acts as a flagship), and your naval units. During the campaign you'll get some playtime with them, but they are primarily a separate research faction that you can unlock during the game's single missions and its continuous play sandbox mode. Using the S.A.A.T. isn't as simple as just constructing their buildings so you can research upgrades, though. Research requires you to essentially create an entirely separate city and matching economy for the Tech workforce to unlock the high level fruits. Of course, this Tech workforce requires completely different goods than the Ecos and Tycoons, effectively forcing you to manage two different factions at the same time. This can get a little ridiculous and you'd do well to get your primary faction's economy up and running first. While the Ecos and Tycoons both require food and drink that is relatively manageable to supply, the S.A.A.T. researchers drink energy drinks at a completely unhealthy rate. The energy drink economy takes up a lot of valuable space which can require some careful planning if you want to place both factions' residences and basic economies on the same island. Among the Tech faction's and other faction needs are resources that can only be harvested on the ocean floor. Anno 2070 expands upon the old formula by adding underwater plateaus for base building, but don't expect to create massive underwater cities; underwater bases are little more than cool resource colonies that are a fun visual distraction with no meaningful impact on the gameplay. The game's campaign mode acts like a long tutorial for the first two of three chapters, and initially you might be worried that there isn't all that much to it because it is pretty easy to blast through. By the time you get to the third chapter, however, you have to learn the hard way how to manage your finances and how to keep oversight of dozens of production chains simultaneously. There is a story that ties the three factions together in a way that lets you get the hang of all of them, sometimes requiring you to manage all three at the same time, but the campaign only lets you scratch the surface of Anno 2070's endgame. The meat of the game that will have you playing Anno 2070 for days on end is found in the sandbox mode and a handful of single missions. The latter are scenarios with preset goals where you have free reign to choose which faction to start with and a huge map to claim as your own. It is here that you finally go from one ship to an armada, from one dockside warehouse to numerous cities, and a mindboggling deep economy. Other factions occupy the same map and you can trade with them, declare war on them, use some basic diplomacy, and do quests. These quests shape the campaign missions as well, usually simply requiring you to bring thing A to place B or scanning an object with a unit, but in the more free-form single mission and sandbox modes they also offer Influence Points and other rewards. Influence Points can be traded for special upgrades items, sometimes providing you with a shortcut to something would've had to research. Play one of these scenarios the right way, and you can even end up with access to all three factions' production trees if your mind can handle managing them all at the same time. If all of this sounds like a lot of work and too many aspects to keep track of, it is a lot of work and it can be hard to keep track of it all. Yet somehow Anno 2070 pulls it off to offer the freedom of multiple paths to success for diverse economies and play styles in a way that never feels restrictive. The UI with its building tabs for every level of your population can take a bit of getting used to, especially when a building that constructs the same type of goods is found in different tabs for different factions, and here and there the odd German description for a building or good will pop up. The game also doesn't explain some small aspects as well as it could, but when there are so many of them to cover this is bound to happen. After a day or so of playtime, everything will become second nature and what minor issues there are become of little importance. You will need a Uplay account to login and play Anno 2070, and it requires online activation and all that jazz, but disconnecting your internet in-game doesn't hamper the gameplay, thankfully. The only major downside you'll find in Anno 2070 is the amount of time it will consume. You can pretty much forget about doing anything productive until you grudgingly drag yourself to bed once you start a sandbox game or single mission scenario -- which can easily last for days -- and an accessible multiplayer system with chat functionality and friends lists is there for whoever wants to build cooperatively, or raid the seas competitively. Story-hungry players might feel unfulfilled by the campaign, but Anno 2070's mechanics provide enough food that their bellies will be bloated by the time they move on to another game. While it may bewilder players new to the genre with the sheer complexity of it all, Anno 2070 succeeds at giving the decade-old series a fantastic makeover. Fans of the franchise will feel right at home as the formula hasn't changed all that much, but the myriad additions and improvements have been expertly crafted to fit right into the core gameplay. Moreover, it manages to do what A Nightmare on Elm Street may have done to you as a child: you won't want to go to sleep and when you do, you'll dream of even more efficient island layouts to try out the next day. |
| The 'Splosion Men blast their way into Retro City Rampage Posted: 20 Nov 2011 05:00 AM PST
Oh, Brian Provinciano! How do you keep managing to squeeze cameo after reference and reference after cameo into Retro City Rampage? Keep it up and the game will never be released in our lifetime! This latest trailer announces that Twisted Pixel's 'Splosion Man and Ms. 'Splosion Man will be making craters in this grand menagerie of 80s-style carnage. It's not specifically mentioned in the press release, but these special guests may be exclusive to the Xbox 360 version. If all goes according the plan, Retro City Rampage will drop early next year on XBLA and WiiWare. |
| Comments of the Week: SOPA SOUP Posted: 20 Nov 2011 04:00 AM PST If SOPA gets passed, at least I know it won't affect my Public Domain ingredients only soup website: That thing's just about soup.
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| 14k Starman pendant to be auctioned off for Child's Play Posted: 20 Nov 2011 03:00 AM PST Fan craftsman Juno makes a lot of classy custom videogame jewelry, from Triforce earrings to a Metroid pendant. None of them are for sale, however, so you can only admire them from afar. His latest concoction is a 14k gold Starman from the Mario series. For an extra touch of class, he added sapphire stone eyes. You might be able to grab hold of this glimmering shiny, but only if you win it when it's auctioned off next month for the Child's Play charity. Sure, a winning bid may set you back a small stack of cheddar, but you'll be helping out some rather sick children as well as gaining the power of invincibility with which to smite your foes. It's a win-win! Super Star Pendant [ThirdProjectJuno's Shineys] |
| Posted: 20 Nov 2011 02:00 AM PST Good morning, everyone! It's a beautiful day outside! The birds are chirping. The brisk autumn air is dancing around the colorful, fallen leaves. The villagers are gathering in the center of their beautiful, floating city. The hero clad in green holds his mystical sword above his ... wait a second, what?! Oh, that's right: IT'S SKYWARD SWORD DAY! As of today, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword has officially been released for the Wii. I have been playing it all morning and am absolutely in love. But what do you think about it? This is the place to discuss everything about the game. What's your favorite dungeon? Who is your favorite character? WHY ARE YOU STILL READING THIS AND NOT PLAYING?! Let us know in the comments! With today's Skyward Sword release, Destructoid's Zelda week is officially over. Just in case you missed any of the coverage, you can check out all of the week's features right here: Review: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword Happy Skyward Sword Day! Now get back to playing! You have a magical new world to explore! |
| Hmm... I think we've got time for one more Zelda rap Posted: 20 Nov 2011 01:00 AM PST Sure, why not? A little more hype fuel for the Skyward Sword fire! This Zelda rap comes courtesy of the Smosh boys, the minds behind Pokémon in Real Life. I give 'em props for having the courage to pull off a Tingle costume! THE LEGEND OF ZELDA RAP [YouTube] |
| Fan-made Halo miniseries coming in January 2012 Posted: 19 Nov 2011 11:00 PM PST Next year, a new web series based on Halo will begin airing. The show is called Helljumper, and it's an adaptation of author Tobias Buckell's short story "Dirt" from Halo: Evolutions. It follows the life of an ODST and the tragedies he endures leading up the Fall of Reach. The trailer above is looking fairly polished. Once again, leave it to the fans to do what Hollywood is too chickensh*t to attempt on its own. Friggin' Hollywood. |
| Contest: Win these Saints Row themed ASTRO A40 headsets! Posted: 19 Nov 2011 05:00 PM PST Saints Row: The Third is arriving November 15 for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC. For those of you just dying for the game, Voliation and THQ released the Initiation Station to everyone and it lets you create your character right now to give you a head start or just share it with the world. To enter our Saints Row/ASTRO A40 giveaway, you'll just need to go download the Initiation Station on your Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, upload your creation to SaintsRow.com by linking your Gamertag/PSN ID to the website and then share a link AND embed the actual photo to your creation in the comments below. Your SaintsRow.com name needs to be the same as your username as it appears on Dtoid or must start with Dtoid*YourUserNameHere* (Like DtoidCTZ, for example) for your submission to count! The two best submissions will each win a special limited edition Saints Row: The Third themed ASTRO A40 headset (either the Saints Purple or Decker Blue), 4-pack Saints Flow Energy Drinks, full 8 set of Bobble Budds and a I <3 Rim Jobs t-shirt. Four runner-ups will each win a I <3 Rim Jobs t-shirt (either male or female sizes). Contest is open to anyone with a US based address that the prizes can be sent to. You have until November 20 at 11:59PM CDT to enter. Good luck! |
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