New Games |
- Animal Crossing first 3DS game to pass 2M sales in Japan
- Live show: Batman: Arkham Asylum with Ryuusei
- Humble Indie Bundle 7 adds Cave Story+ and two more
- Untold riches: The brilliance of Half-Life's barnacles
- A new gameplay video surfaces for DmC's Vergil
- Diablo III Team Deathmatch shelved, will be replaced
- Contest: Win a Razer Tiamat 7.1 gaming headset!
- Alpha gameplay video of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn
- Tank! Tank! Tank! makes kid weep manly Christmas tears
- Nintendo Download: 12/27/12: Mega Man Edition
- Podtoid 233: Anal Siege 2 - Analectric Boogalanal
- Soul Sacrifice is going to sound amazing
- Aliens: Colonial Marines gets a story trailer
- Kid loses it after unwrapping Wii U Christmas morning
- Final Fantasy XI: Seekers of Adoulin drops on March 26
- Super Mario Bros. 3 is coming to the eShop! In Japan...
| Animal Crossing first 3DS game to pass 2M sales in Japan Posted: 27 Dec 2012 10:30 AM PST We love us some Animal Crossing, and having the series on a capable handheld system like the 3DS is a great fit, but New Leaf hitting two million copies sold in Japan before any other 3DS title? I had no idea. Check out this great animation created by NeoGAF user Road which charts it all out. The latest installment in the bizarre, charming series has beaten the likes of Mario Kart 7, Super Mario 3D Land, and Monster Hunter 3G to the milestone. What makes this accomplishment extra special is the fact that New Leaf has only been out in Japan since November 8. Granted, the more good software you have for a system, the bigger the install base will inevitably become. Still, this seems like an entirely worthy game. Animal Crossing: New Leaf is selling like hotcakes [Tiny Cartridge] |
| Live show: Batman: Arkham Asylum with Ryuusei Posted: 27 Dec 2012 09:35 AM PST [Mash Tactics airs Monday through Friday at 4p.m. Pacific on Dtoid.TV. Watch King Foom play a variety of games, each day with its own theme. With a heavy focus on community and viewer interaction, you can be as much a part of the show as anything else.] I'm sick as a dog this evening with the flu, so I'll be taking a night off to rest up. But fret not, our good friend and fellow Dtoid.TV broadcaster, Ryuusei, will be holding down the fort. Tune in just a bit later than usual tonight [at 5:30pm Pst] as he jumps into Batman: Arkham Asylum, and hangs out with the live crowd. Thanks again Ryu, and I'll catch you all for Friday Night Fights tomorrow as usual. See you then! Also, be sure to check out the TigerDirect Charity Race Website as we're down to the last qualifying round tomorrow in Jacksonville, Florida. The finals at CES 2013 in Vegas are closing in, and I'll be there covering the event, while rooting for my favorites. Get hype! QotD: How do you deal with being sick? |
| Humble Indie Bundle 7 adds Cave Story+ and two more Posted: 27 Dec 2012 08:30 AM PST The already solid Humble Indie Bundle 7 has added three more titles to its line-up: The Basement Collection, Offspring Fling, and Cave Story+. Should you have already purchased the bundle, these games are now yours at no extra cost; new buyers will have to beat the average contribution amount, currently hovering under a mere seven bucks. If you don't own most of these already, this package is a must buy. And even if you do, consider being the awesome person who gives out unneeded Steam keys to others. I once again find the Cave Story theme song stuck in my head. What a terrific problem to have. |
| Untold riches: The brilliance of Half-Life's barnacles Posted: 27 Dec 2012 08:00 AM PST Hamish Todd is a game designer and journalist. His article on Castlevania's medusa heads just made the longlist for the games journalism prize. You can find out about his game, Music of the Spheres, here. Some of the most fun I've ever had playing videogames has been with the Half-Life series. The games are most famous for their scripted sequences, but there are a lot of other clever pieces of design in them. Today, I'm going to look at a bunch of great Half-Life setpieces all themed around one entity: the barnacle. The barnacle can do horror, action, and even comedy. It can assist you and puzzle you. To do all that, an object needs to have some pretty fundamental stuff in its design.
This video shows you how Half-Life 2 introduces the barnacle. A lot is communicated by this loud, eye-catching animation (captured by Daniel Holden). It's good because it lets you find out that barnacles are dangerous without you having to endanger yourself -- if you were just walking along and got unwittingly picked up and killed by this unfamiliar thing, it'd feel unfair and time-wasting. “Many of our scripted sequences were designed to give the player gameplay clues as well as provide moments of sheer terror” ~Ken Birdwell in Half-Life’s post-mortem So we've been shown by that animation that the barnacles are unmoving ceiling-dwellers that reel up and eat things that touch their thin, dangling tongue. We'll later find out:
Real animals Half-Life's barnacles have some things in common with real animals. This isn't necessarily because Valve was mimicking nature. It's just that "things which make a videogame enemy effective" and "things which will help an animal survive" can sometimes be the same, so ingenious examples of both will converge.
Jonathan Wojcik alerted me to the fact that the Half-Life barnacles' hunting method of dangling a sticky thread and eating the animals that get stuck to it is a method that has been encountered in nature. It's utilized by some spiders, and by the beautiful “fungus gnat” larvae you see in the video above. Real barnacles were probably a direct inspiration for the appearance of Half-Life barnacles. Real barnacles have an extremely long, prehensile appendage coming out of them -- but unlike the barnacles we're talking about in this article, that appendage is NOT a tongue! Half-Life 1 Barnacles have the ability to cordon off danger zones, and that's used well in this area. These barnacles encourage you to take a certain path, and present you with harsh but delicate limitations during a fight. They're also a warning that you're entering a room which is more dangerous than it looks... In the middle of this picture, on top of the box, you can see some shotgun shells which you'll instantly want to jump to when you enter the room (going down via the sloping path is obviously an unappealing option). But when you get onto the box, the wood you're standing on collapses, leaving you no way back out of the room -- and then a pair of aliens teleport onto the slopes and start running up and down them, shooting at you! It's a uniquely constrained battle, and it gets particularly crazy if you happen to run into a barnacle and have to continue shooting while ascending. Here's another setpiece. This screenshot was taken while looking directly up. The four greyish lines coming out of the ceiling are barnacle tongues hanging around you. Barnacles don't move, so they're easy to shoot at -- unless YOU are moving in some complex way. In this scene, the player is standing on a platform that is descending and rotating, a mathematically interesting movement that creates a cage. Aim at a barnacle, and your cross-hairs will curve around and move outward due to the motion. It is possible for you to pull a lever and stop the platform moving. The barnacles here gently encourage you to start making use of that lever. Another room, another way of using barnacles. When a barnacle catches you it pulls you up, which is pretty bad because you're going toward its mouth -- but it's not so bad if it means being pulled away from the mouth of something else! In this water tank, you'll fight the first "ichthyosaur," an underwater enemy [not pictured]. There are half a dozen barnacles dangling their tongues in the water. During the underwater fight, while fleeing the aquatic creature, you might touch a barnacle tongue either accidentally or on purpose. Being hoisted out of the attacking ichthyosaur's reach by a barnacle will provide a strange kind of momentary relief. The ceiling is quite high, giving you lots of time to turn around and smack the barnacle before it tries to eat you. This is our final thing from the original Half-Life. This setpiece again shows how the immobility of the barnacle makes it useful. Note, by the way, that an unmoving enemy in a game is usually called an "obstacle" -- one example would be bottomless pits in platformers. Barnacles basically do the same jobs as bottomless pits: they carve out "areas that you don't want to go." Barnacles are much neater in 3D than pits though, as the above diagram of the "treadmill" setpiece shows us. FYI: jumping onto a treadmill is a jarring and stressful experience, because of the abrupt changes in sideways and forward velocity. In Half-Life, and in real life, you're likely to fall off the treadmill if you're not a little smart about it. You do not want to fall off a treadmill! If you fall off one in real life, the floor will punish you painfully. If you fall off one in Half-Life, these barnacles do the same thing. Think about pits again -- imagine if there were no barnacles here, but instead there were pits on the ground that you'd fall into if you came off the treadmill. It would have the same effect, but the pits would have to take up a lot of floorspace. The barnacle performs the same function in an efficiently smaller space. Before we look to the Half-Life sequels, here's a scene from Blue Shift. One of the cutest aspects of the barnacle is how you can use them as a way of elevating yourself to a higher place, if you remember to kill them when you get to the top. Several setpieces from different Half-Life series entries use this. The above picture is my favorite example of an "elevator-barnacle." The player has to cross this gap, but they can't jump the whole thing. They have to hurl themselves at the tongue of the barnacle, which will then hoist them up so they can dismount on the other end. Why is this the best elevator-barnacle? I like that it involves a jump arc. Also, suppose we made the gap five times wider -- the strategy of jumping toward the tongue would still work, provided the tongue was long enough. We could make the gap five hundred times wider if we wanted! Now notice the pipe on the left. You actually don't have to use the barnacle to get across this room -- you can just walk across that pipe to get to the same place... although doing so is more roundabout and way more boring. Why did the designers add an extra boring solution to this puzzle? Well, it’s there in case the player (reasonably) assumes they just have to kill the barnacle, and does so... rendering themselves incapable of safely jumping the gap. Some pretty cool things there in Half-Life 1 then. Now the sequels! Half-Life 2 Barnacles can be hard to notice. Their body is hidden on the ceiling (nobody ever looks at the ceiling), and they have no movement for you to look out for. And their "danger zone" is so thin. Barnacles can consistently take you by surprise. As you'd expect for a surprising enemy, there are lots of barnacle-infused horror scenes, but I want to show you the scene in the picture above, which is from Half-Life 2's hovercraft sequence. Look at the thin lines below the bridge -- they're actually barnacle tongues! Sorry if you have to squint at that screenshot, but that is actually part of the point of these particular barnacles. The player drives under these bridges with great speed, so faint lines in the distance don't stay in the distance for long. This leads to a particularly jarring but funny situation where you can be leisurely speeding along, and suddenly you're suspended in midair while beneath you your hovercraft pootles to a halt. It's a stern warning to reckless drivers, and a novel piece of technology: things aren't usually able to haul you out of your vehicle in driving games! Here's a great scene from Half-Life 2. The barnacle feature being played with here is "barnacles can be manipulated into moving things around for you." But there's quite a lot more to be said about this corridor. The scene is a puzzle: you want to get to the exit. But to get through the room, you have to kill loads of barnacles. Shooting every barnacle individually is a tedious waste of ammo since you only have a pistol. However, there is an explosive barrel around. The “solution” is to carry the explosive barrel to a barnacle, let them pick it up, wait until it's been pulled right up close to the ceiling, then shoot the barrel to blow it up. This takes out almost every barnacle in the room simultaneously with only two bullets. It's a good puzzle. It gets you to be resourceful and imaginative. It's made more fun by some satisfying animations and cool physics. But the beauty is in the polish. There's a specific game design tool on show in this scene: an "antepiece." Let's say you're making a game containing a very challenging setpiece, and it requires awareness of some specific pieces of information. One thing game designers can do to help things along is to have a very brief encounter just before the challenging setpiece which clarifies some possibilities within the game. That's what I call an antepiece (a portmanteau of "antechamber" and "setpiece"), and you can find some clear examples of them in Portal, Super Mario Bros., and The Mighty Jill Off. Antepieces are cool because they reward players for being attentive, and help them get through games quickly and fluently. This is the exploding-barrel-barnacle puzzle's antepiece. Before you enter the barnacle-filled room, you have to move down this hallway. Your path into the hallway is blocked by three [non-explosive] barrels. To get through you must move a barrel, either by pushing it or carrying it. Wherever you place it, it will roll down the slope in front of you and almost certainly get picked up by one of the two barnacles you can see at the end of the hall. This clarifies three important facts for the player: 1) you can move barrels 2) the floor here is slippery, and 3) barnacles will try to eat barrels. The two barnacles are easy to avoid, so there's zero challenge in this small place. It contributes to the game purely by helping you with the confrontation around the corner. One last clever aspect of the exploding-barrel-barnacle room is the second slope, just before the huge barnacle crowd. It makes things both easier and harder. Easier because you can just put the explosive barrel onto the slope and it'll roll toward the barnacles on its own (just like what happened in the antepiece). Harder, because you're at risk of sliding down the slope yourself! Half-Life 2: Episode 1 This is a terrible picture of a room that explores a clever challenge in a minor way. You can see some dangerous barnacle tongues dangling down here, but not the vulnerable barnacle bodies. This shows you how a barnacle can hide. It's the only game enemy I've ever seen hide behind a ceiling! Here's a crude diagram that will hopefully help you understand the challenge: There are a couple of ways of killing the hidden barnacles. I'm not so interested in them; what I want to talk about is the structure that's built up around these barnacles. This setup presents a problem for the designers: if us players were just walking along and we came up against a barnacle placed in this irritating way, it might feel unfair. We might wonder “How come the holes in the ceiling convenience my enemies so much?” “How come they get to use this separate upper area I have no access to?” So the designers took steps to make sure it felt fair. You actually enter the lower floor by breaking through the ceiling yourself. In other words, you got into this room in the same way the barnacles are getting their tongues into it -- so you have less right to feel annoyed at their advantage. When you've completed this area, you go up a staircase and get to strut, triumphant and risk-free, through the upper room. You can gloat at the barnacles you killed, finish off the ones you missed, and pick up a supply crate or two that you find near them. Most importantly, you are finally given access to this location that was so annoyingly advantageous to your enemies. Half-Life 2: Episode 2
This is a wordless piece of slapstick comedy. The feature on show here is "barnacles can take objects out of your hands." We see a machine that requires a cog. We go and get the cog. When we find the cog, we run excitedly back to the machine ... with the cog blocking our view. While we're away, a barnacle tongue has been scripted to descend over the machine. We're not looking where we're going, so it's able to snatch our treasure out of our hands! When an object is snatched away from you, it doesn't hurt you. It's not a "hostile" act -- it's just a little "mischievous." And when showing off a "mischievous" feature, the best structure to set up around it is the structure of a joke. A joke is more funny if you have some reason to expect the punchline. And an event in a game is more fair if you have some reason to expect it. Valve's people know this: note that there's another barnacle tongue dangling over the place where the cog is picked up. This implants in your head the idea that you should watch out for barnacles, so it doesn't feel cheap when the new one comes along. I should apologize for part of this -- I know that a joke is definitely less funny when someone explains it to you. Let's round this off! My personal assessments I've described about a quarter of the barnacle encounters that appear in the Half-Life games. They're not all winners: designers sometimes get lazy and just bung a few barnacles into a corridor to make you tiptoe around them. Some exist purely to make a room look more scary or challenging than it really is. So barnacles can be mishandled. But they're still really a cleverly-designed enemy. Barnacles are fundamentally a great big bluff -- they're actually very unlikely to damage you. When you get caught on a tongue, you're slowly drawn toward a pair of ravenously clamping, sharp jaws. But if you face toward them, you can take them out with a single whack of your crowbar (which never runs out of ammo). At heart, they're "toothless"... and yet, all players will try to avoid barnacle tongues, because those jaws are just terrifying. Valve is successfully having its cake and eating it too with the barnacle. They've made an entity that you want to avoid, and can therefore be used to make tense, interesting challenges. But it'll seldom waste anyone's time, because it won’t usually kill them. Barnacles are extremely simple: they're just a line going through 3D space. They make no movements, no decisions. They're sensitive to no contexts. There's no timing to their behavior. Some videogame entities need to be put in specially-set-up environments, but you can always use a barnacle (so long as there's a ceiling in the current environment). Complex enemies are hard to introduce to players. Barnacles are effortless to introduce. Once you've been introduced to them, the level designers can combine them with other things, like the ichthyosaur, the explosive barrel, the spiral walkway, or the other enemies. It is in combinations of objects that the intellects of designers can shine, because combinations are allowed to be more complicated than enemy behaviors can be on their own. I see the barnacle as a feat of engineering, rather than a feat of artistry. It's not designed to be in one place, present one challenge, elicit one emotion. It's a tool, to be used to construct any situation you like. Valve is famous for its design processes. Everyone's voice gets heard, and everybody happily works hard for one another's benefit. It's a little utopia. And in all these moments I've spoken about, I feel the harmony of that process comes through in the game: the barnacle was a tool made by one person, as a gift to a bunch of other people. And it provided great help to those people, in all their varied endeavors. |
| A new gameplay video surfaces for DmC's Vergil Posted: 27 Dec 2012 07:30 AM PST In case you didn't know, Vergil will be featured in the upcoming DmC: Devil May Cry by way of downloadable content shortly after the game's release. Now, you can see him in action in the above video, busting out his stylish attacks. Veteran Devil May Cry 3 fans will no doubt see a few familiar abilities from the Special Edition version of the game, which also featured a playable Vergil. If you're curious, you can view another new video below that showcases some random attacks and features. The jury is still out on the full game, but you better believe you'll be hearing about how it went from Jim Sterling and I when it drops next month.
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| Diablo III Team Deathmatch shelved, will be replaced Posted: 27 Dec 2012 06:30 AM PST It's taken a while for Blizzard to come out and say it, but here we go: Diablo III's Team Deatmatch will not be happening as originally intended. According to game director Jay Wilson, "... most of our testers didn't feel like it was something they'd want to do beyond a few hours. Without more varied objectives, or very lucrative rewards, few saw our current iteration as something they'd want spend a lot of time in." As such, the company "will be shelving it for now and exploring other options." Wilson explains that the team is "going back to the drawing board on a new replacement" for the mode, which will be free when released. Continuing, he says: "... we're going to first be looking at new modes that play up to the strengths of the character classes, focus on objectives beyond just defeating other players, and possibly even integrate PvE elements and rewards." While that specific PvP mode is out, Diablo III players can expect to get dueling with the arrival of patch 1.0.7, due out next year. Blizzard will have specifics about the new feature soon. |
| Contest: Win a Razer Tiamat 7.1 gaming headset! Posted: 27 Dec 2012 06:00 AM PST Our friends at Razer have kindly bestowed upon us five of their awesome Tiamat 7.1 elite gaming headsets to give away to the Destructoid community! These bad boys normally retail for $180, but one can be yours right now for absolutely free! To enter, we need you to film yourself doing something amazing. Show us your juggling skills, parkour off your neighbor's dog -- the sky's the limit! Everybody has some kind of talent; now's your chance to make yours pay off! You have until Monday, December 31 at 11:59 PM Pacific to enter, and the contest is open to U.S. residents only. Once you've recorded your feat of amazingness, just drop the link to the video in the comments below. Good luck! |
| Alpha gameplay video of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn Posted: 27 Dec 2012 05:30 AM PST
Well lookie here. Here's a good chance to check out Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn running. It's alpha right now in this "instanced dungeons" romp through Tam-Tara Deepcroft, but it looks really nice already. Very flashy. And it sounds nice, too. What do you think? I can't wait to get my hands on this. A PC beta kicks off in February 2013, and a PS3 beta will follow soon after. |
| Tank! Tank! Tank! makes kid weep manly Christmas tears Posted: 27 Dec 2012 04:45 AM PST
If you were to unwrap a Christmas present and discover Tank! Tank! Tank! inside, anybody's natural instinct would be to burst into tears. However, for one child, his weeping was spurred by joy -- such an obscene gift actually making him happier than any child has ever been. Watch the above video to witness a young boy getting everything he ever wanted by receiving one of the crappiest Wii U games available. Being a child, he lacks basic critical faculties and accurate judgment, but that's okay -- if the kid's happy, it's all that matters. This is why I don't belittle my own when he wants to play Thundercats DS. Good for him, though! We adults may sneer at such lame software, but the little bastards out there love it. Hope he actually enjoyed the thing. |
| Nintendo Download: 12/27/12: Mega Man Edition Posted: 27 Dec 2012 04:15 AM PST Mega Man 1 is finally hitting the 3DS Virtual Console, as is Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels. Outside of those two classics, Fluidity: Spin Cycle is ready to go for the 3DS eShop, as is Johnny Impossible and Mahjong 3D - Warriors of the Emperor. The DSiWare front is getting Goooooal America, Jump Trials Extreme, and Wizard Defenders. The Wiii is getting a lone release today in the form of Shock Troopers 2nd Squad. Once again the Wii U has zero unique releases (or any releases, for that matter). Nintendo also announced the sales for Chasing Aurora, Little Inferno, and Trine 2: Director's Cut a week late. Thanks guys! If you missed last week's installment, here it is. As for what I'm getting, I can't resist quadruple dipping on Lost Levels and Mega Man, but I'll pass on everything else. |
| Podtoid 233: Anal Siege 2 - Analectric Boogalanal Posted: 27 Dec 2012 03:30 AM PST It's the last Podtoid of the year, and that means the gang has cracked open the booze to record a drunken episode. For some reason, Anal Siege was a popular episode last year, so this year we present the chungus-flavored sequel! I'll be honest, at the time of writing, your ol' pal Jim is still drunk as buggered frig, so I can't recall what we talked about. Something about anuses, and post-Christmas talking. God, this podcast was full of things of regret. As ever, you can subscribe to us on iTunes and RSS, buy our Android App or download directly! |
| Soul Sacrifice is going to sound amazing Posted: 27 Dec 2012 03:00 AM PST
The greatest game music composer to ever live, Yasunori Mitsuda, is working on the score for upcoming Vita title Soul Sacrifice. You wouldn't have to hear a single note to know that the man behind the scores of Xenogears, Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross would do a fantastic job for this next project, but the music teased in this new trailer exceeds expectations. Epic on top of epic. They've gone all out, lining up the best orchestra and choir, and they're recording it live at Skywalker Sound. Mitsuda calls it a dream come true. It's going to be pretty nice for us, too. I love it when so much focus is put on the musical score for a videogame. This is going to be great. |
| Aliens: Colonial Marines gets a story trailer Posted: 27 Dec 2012 02:30 AM PST
Here's a hot new trailer for Aliens: Colonial Marines, which is finally arriving on February 12 AND THERE'S NOT A DAMN THING ANYBODY CAN DO TO STOP IT. Except, delay it. I guess they could delay it. Anyway, check out the video above for some dramatic drama and plenty of aliens doing their thing. I'm glad we're in the home stretch of this one -- can't wait to start blasting me some Xenos once more. |
| Kid loses it after unwrapping Wii U Christmas morning Posted: 27 Dec 2012 01:30 AM PST
The kid in this above Christmas morning video from YouTuber Deongello Vanorsby ramps up slowly, from delayed reaction to shock to... tears! Dad gets a flying bear hug that slowly devolves into grateful sobbing. And then, emotionally drained, he goes back to hold his new Wii U. "But this thing was like $349!" he says. What a good kid. I got my niece and nephew a Wii U for Christmas. They were like, oh cool. |
| Final Fantasy XI: Seekers of Adoulin drops on March 26 Posted: 27 Dec 2012 12:30 AM PST
Square Enix announced that Final Fantasy XI: Seekers of Adoulin will be released on Xbox 360 and PC on March 26, 2013, priced at $29.99. This addition will bring new areas, monsters, and game features to Final Fantasy XI. Two new jobs, Geomancers and Rune fencers, will also be introduced. In related news, the same day will bring the launch of Final Fantasy XI: Ultimate Collection Seekers Edition. This $39.99 collector's edition will include all four previously released expansion packs, three add-on scenarios, and three battle area add-ons.
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| Super Mario Bros. 3 is coming to the eShop! In Japan... Posted: 27 Dec 2012 12:00 AM PST Super Mario Bros. 3 is set to hit Japan next week on the 3DS eShop for the standard NES Virtual Console pricing (500 yen). Nintendo World Report notes that the game will have a two player download play feature, but whether this is for the full asynchronous coop mode or for the Mario Bros. "versus" game is yet to be seen. Unfortunately, it looks like it's not the GBA version of the game, which means it's the same version you've played a million times before. Even so, my wife and I have beaten it annually for many years, so having this classic on the go isn't a bad thing. That is, if a western release is in the cards. Super Mario Bros. 3 [Nintendo World Report] |
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