New Games |
- Late-night listening: ABSRDST at MAGFest 11
- CES: Nvidia announces Tegra 4 mobile processor
- Independent Games Festival 2013 finalists announced
- CES: Valve investing in Xi3 for living-room PC hardware
- The Question: What was your favorite PlayStation 2 game?
- Artists Wanted: 'Portrait' recap and your next topic!
- CES: Full-size MOGA Pro controller announced for Android
- Review: Seduce Me
- 'Sock Hop,' Destructoid's unofficial MAGFest 11 anthem
- Developer gives a status update on DayZ Standalone
- Contest: Win Under Defeat HD for PSN!
- Jimquisition: Desensitized to Violence
| Late-night listening: ABSRDST at MAGFest 11 Posted: 07 Jan 2013 02:00 PM PST It was probably about three in the morning at MAGFest, shortly after we were kicked out of the main concert room following bLiNd's amazing DJ set. As we walked out into the hallway, we heard something incredibly catchy coming from down the hall. Tucked away in a corner was a table with a lone figure, ABSRDST, playing in front of a small and hazy-eyed crowd. Thanks to the Internets, we were able to track this guy down, and we can certainly say that his music sounds great any time of day. Of particular note is the catchy Sugar Blossom and the Space Cadets album that combines chippy pop melodies with heavy electronic beats. It's a name-your-own-price album, and is certainly worth your attention if you're into retro game music (it's not 8-bit). Let us know what you think! |
| CES: Nvidia announces Tegra 4 mobile processor Posted: 07 Jan 2013 01:00 PM PST Another smaller announcement came out of Nvidia's CES press conference last night alongside news of the Project Shield gaming handheld. The Tegra 4 mobile processor was announced. It follows the Tegra 3, which gave gaming muscle to a ton of products in 2012. Nvidia says that this one sets records for both performance and battery life. 72 custom GeForce GPU cores give it six times the graphical horsepower of the Tegra 3. It's a quad-core ARM Cortex-A15 CPU, giving faster browsing and performance as well as new photography capabilities. For some kind of idea of what this new chip can do, check out some example screenshots of some Tegra 4 optimized games, including Bloodsword, Dead Trigger 2, and Real Boxing.
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| Independent Games Festival 2013 finalists announced Posted: 07 Jan 2013 12:00 PM PST The annual Independent Games Festival will be taking place on March 27 during GDC 2013 and the list of main competition finalists has now been revealed. Pruned from a list of over 580 entries, the nominees here are truly some of the best indie games we've played this year. Up for the Seamus McNally Grand Prize are Hotline Miami, FTL, Cart Life, Little Inferno and Kentucky Route Zero. Also up for a variety of awards in other categories are titles like Space Team, Thirty Flights of Loving, Super Hexagon, and Intrusion 2. What's interesting to note is that all finalists in this year's competition will have the chance to accept a distribution deal with Valve, so we could be seeing plenty of these titles coming to Steam in the next few months. You can check out the full list of nominees below. Excellence In Visual Art Excellence In Narrative Technical Excellence Excellence In Design Excellence In Audio Nuovo Award Seumas McNally Grand Prize |
| CES: Valve investing in Xi3 for living-room PC hardware Posted: 07 Jan 2013 11:40 AM PST Valve's Gabe Newell had previously gone on the record to share the company's interest in the living-room PC market, and CES 2013 seems like as good of time as any to show off. In a press release, Xi3Corporation announced that it has "a development stage system optimized for computer gameplay on large high-definition television monitors" which is being shown at its booth as well as Valve's. The specifications haven't been disclosed yet, but the system will use the Xi3 Modular Computer chassis, shown above. In Xi3's own words, it's about the size of a grapefruit. This is being designed with Steam and the service's Big Picture mode in mind "for residential and LAN party computer gaming" on big screens. Interestingly, Xi3 also announced that it has received an investment from Valve. Given the specific wording about this being a "development stage computer game system," there's probably plenty more where that came from. I'm extremely curious to see how Valve phrases this deal and what the branding looks like.
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| The Question: What was your favorite PlayStation 2 game? Posted: 07 Jan 2013 11:00 AM PST [Every Friday (or whenever), Destructoid will pose topical a question to the community. Answer it if you want!] As you may have heard, the PlayStation 2 is officially dead. Sony has halted all production of the console worldwide, marking the end of an amazing 12 year run. The PS2 dominated the last-generation of gaming, standing victoriously over Nintendo's GameCube and Microsoft's Xbox. There were a ton of amazing games released for the system and it's almost daunting trying to remember all my favorites. Twisted Metal: Black, all the Grand Theft Auto games, Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen, Prince of Persia, God of War, Okami, Burnout 3 -- so much! If I have to pick one though, it's definitely Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. It's my favorite of the GTAs, and one of the handful of games I would play over and over from start to finish. I just love the setting and characters so much. It's also one of the few games I've ever played where I 100% completed everything there was to do. I even went and collected all the stupid hidden packages, a monotonous job I rarely ever do in any game with hidden collectables. So what were your favorite games for the PlayStation 2? Why was it your favorite? Let us know! |
| Artists Wanted: 'Portrait' recap and your next topic! Posted: 07 Jan 2013 10:30 AM PST [Every month or so we post a new art assignment for the Dtoid community. Fun! Here's a recap of the latest. You have until Thursday, January 31st to finish your next project, which is detailed at the end of the post!] Eight brave Dtoiders exposed their sexy faces to the world for our latest Artists Wanted topic, SELF PORTRAIT, and they all looked amazing! From Mega Man to Jet Set Radio to Dynasty Warriors to Alan Wake, everyone's portrait was unique and the stories behind them were all incredibly fun to read! Hit the jump to bask in their glory!
First up is Anaugi, who gave us two fantastic creations! The first was "Round 1 Fight", which you see above. Here's what he had to say about the piece:
Awesome work!
And here's a bit about the second, titled "Megaman Powers":
Awesome x2! Thanks, Anaugi!
Next up is KeithTheGeek with his piece, "I Want to Battle!". Here's a bit about his art:
Looks great to me! Thanks, KeithTheGeek!
Our next artist is anglorum, with his piece titled "Jet Set Radio Pooture". Here's what he had to say about it:
No no, thank YOU, anglorum!
Up next is myherozero with his piece, "Get Weapon". Here's what he had to say about his art:
Fantastic story and art! Thanks, myherozero!
Next we have Roberto Plankton, who gave us three awesome pieces! First up is "Me Moia" (above), followed by "The Hive":
And finally, "It's Gonna Work Because I'm Pushin' it Right":
Check out his blog to find out more about each piece! Beautiful work as always, Roberto Plankton!
Our next artist is our own Kyle MacGregor with his portrait titled "Hyakuretsu Kyaku". Here's a snippet about his work:
If you can manage to do this pretty quickly, I can only imagine what you can do when you take your time! Thanks, Kyle! (Be sure to check out his blog for more info, as well as a few bonus pics.)
Next up is rubenf with the piece you see above, in which he becomes Alan Wake and fights Mr. Scratch! Here's a bit about his work:
Cool stuff! Thanks, rubenf!
Finally, we have the illustrious BeatBeat, who shared the glorious piece you see above and took the opportunity to introduce himself properly to the community. Welcome aboard, and thanks for all the great art! And that's it for this edition! Thanks to everyone who contributed! ---------- For your next assignment, I want you to create something inspired by WINTER. Videogames take advantage of the cold and dark of winter in many different ways; some have you slip-sliding around whimsically in a penguin suit, while others force you to fight the limited visibility and jump scares brought on by blistering blizzard conditions. Do you have a favorite videogame "winter" moment? Draw it! To see your art appear on the front page, simply write a community blog and title it WINTER: [Your Blog's Title]. In the blog, post your art and a bit about the process that went into making it; then we'll gather them all up and put them on the front page! Have fun! Can't wait to see what you all come up with this time around! |
| CES: Full-size MOGA Pro controller announced for Android Posted: 07 Jan 2013 10:00 AM PST PowerA's MOGA Mobile Gaming System for Android devices was a neat idea that must have done reasonably well for itself. The company has announced a new model at CES called the MOGA Pro which more closely resembles the standard design of console controllers. Available this spring, the MOGA Pro offers the same functionality as its predecessor: Bluetooth support for Android phones and tablets, the MOBA Pivot app, and the extendable arm that secures your phone. While less portable than the original controller, I don't know how much of a concern that was, anyway. This seems like the perfect thing to bring on an airplane. |
| Posted: 07 Jan 2013 09:00 AM PST Seduce Me is only on our radar because it was developed by folks who worked on the Triple-A Killzone franchise, and later denied a place on Steam's Greenlight project. We likely wouldn't have noticed it, much less be reviewing it, had Valve not opted to shut it out. But here we are. There are myriad reasons that gamers of all stripes should support a game like Seduce Me. Games should be free to tastefully tackle sex as a subject without being punished commercially or by culture at large. As an effective outlet for base urges, games should be able to do more than violence and still be commercially successful. An "AO" rating from the ESRB shouldn't be a kiss of death. The culture at large should be less shy about one of the most natural human activities. The list goes on. Unfortunately, for gamers and for developer No Reply, Seduce Me is not the game that will do the things above.
Seduce Me (PC) There's no getting around it: Seduce Me is a porn game, straight up. It's not a visual novel with sex scenes, and there isn't much in the way of "romance" as one might expect from the likes of Mass Effect or Dragon Age. The prime (perhaps only) motivation for playing Seduce Me will be to see fictional people boning. With a title like Seduce Me, one would be forgiven for expecting little more than that. And yet somehow, the game manages to both fulfill - and betray - those expectations. Now, it's not as if Seduce Me lacks sex. There's plenty of it to be had, and it's not shy about being explicit. Gamers who worried that it would limit itself to simple innuendo and "sideboob" have nothing to fear; there's porn in that thar videogame, and it earns its AO rating.
Except, the actual process of getting to the porn, the gameplay and mechanics, are rather different from the initial pitch. In truth, the game has more in common with titles labeled "Strip Poker" or those old cocktail table machines where customers would play Arkanoid to gradually uncover a picture of a naked woman, than it does with Mass Effect, the Sims-like Singles: Flirt Up Your Life, or a Japanese "bishoujo" game. For one, despite its touting "RPG elements", Seduce Me has little narrative to speak of. You are a strapping young man invited some reason to a wealthy socialite's Mediterranean villa for a vacation of sex and debauchery with four nubile young porn-movie stereotypes. And though the developers insisted in interviews that the women "are more than just their bodies", there's not much to go on, unless one counts developing certain sexual fetishes out of one formative relationship or another as significant characterization. The girls do have their own endings, so the skeleton of a story exists, creating an end goal beyond "Look at naughty pictures and maybe bust a nut to them." Random events scattered about the map also help flesh out the characters slighty, but the fact that they can be encountered by chance lends itself to repetition.
In truth this is more than one gets from your average porn game (particularly one outside the Japanese sphere) and one can hardly blame it for not having nuanced characters or a complex plot, but Seduce Me's approach to the act of seduction itself is reductive, baffling, and is borderline offensive, depending on one's tolerance for pornographic content and/or crude interpretations of human relationships. This is where the game's "Erotic Strategy" classification comes into play. As they roam the island seeking opportunities to bump uglies with a lady, players can build up "Popularity Points", "Intimacy Points", and "Attraction Points". Popularity points act as a health meter of sorts. Losing minigames (more on that later) decreases them, and when they reach zero, players are kicked off the island and sent back to their pathetic, sex-party-less lives. Intimacy and Attraction points are earned by winning minigames and choosing correct actions during cutscenes. All these points are needed to er, enjoy the island's various pleasures. Some dialog options require a certain amount of Popularity, characters will reveal their fetishes at high Intimacy levels, and actually doing the deed with the ladies requires Attraction. The dirtier the deed, the more points demanded.
Boiling complex social interactions down to high scores is problem enough - though to be fair that kind of quantifying isn't limited to porn games - but the way to get those points is where things get strange. As stated earlier, points are mostly earned by winning minigames. The issue is what the minigames actually are. One might expect these minigames to be ripoffs of classic arcade titles, ala recent Leisure Suit Larry games, or Quick Time Events ala God of War, but no. To Seduce Me, "Erotic Strategy" is to win a card game, and not in the fashion of a Strip Poker scenario. Every single minigame, from "Flirting" to "Small Talk" to "Intimate Chat" to "Confrontation," involves playing - and winning - some form of card game. If not for the sex, Seduce Me would not be out of place alongside Minesweeper or Solitaire in your operating system's pre-installed game selection.
That said, the card games themselves are fairly engaging...for card games. All of them use cards of varying suits and ranks, though the suits aren't limited to the standard Clubs/Spades/Hearts/Diamonds quadrachotomy. Like the pictorial symbols used to represent conversation in The Sims, one might "talk" about a bottle of wine, a puppy, a plane, a house, a pile of money, or two people engaging in foreplay. Each minigame has different rules, but all seem to be point-based variations on Crazy Eights, Rummy, or Sets and Runs (though I'm not familiar enough with card games to tell for sure). "Flirting" has players discarding and drawing cards to try to keep their score as close to their "opponent's" as possible (closer scores yield more Attraction points). "Intimate Conversation" constructs sets and runs in an attempt to shed cards, and simple chatting means trying to beat the dealer's highest-value suit, or putting down a trump to win (for lack of a matching suit). To make a great logical stretch, one could see how these card games thematically align with the back-and-forth of relationship building and trying to get into one's pants. Matching point scores could be like finding common interests. Finding good sets could be interpreted as displaying knowledge, and discarding cards could be similar to winning an argument with a strong hand. But really, come on. These are card games. In a title that's ostensibly about getting people to have sex with you. Calling it a tough sell would be the understatement of the hour. Worse still, that nasty aspect of card-based games, namely the effect of the random draw, rears its head at times. Since all the games are score-based and use the card ranks as multipliers and modifiers, one's ability to win consistently is often determined by the quality of the initial hand. Players can't "hit" by drawing additional cards to improve their hands, and the rules for passing are a tad too strict, so players will occasionally find themselves in "death spirals", with rounds lost the moment they start and no option except to swallow the loss or abuse its autosave system to restart the match (only one save is allowed at a time). It can be frustrating, especially given the fact that seducing people is usually considered a skill rather than a windfall.
But enough with all that. I've yet to answer the most pressing, important, and perhaps only relevant question to be posed about Seduce Me: "How's the porn?" In a word, it's decent. As mentioned, the game is unafraid to be explicit, and its scenarios could be classified as "hardcore" though not quite approaching "deviant". Think of the "Hot Coffee" minigames from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, but a little more graphic than that. Scenes consist of a single image accompanied by descriptive text, arranged in the manner of a comic book (sans word bubbles). The writing sits at about the quality of fiction found in a Penthouse letters column. All the sex is depicted as consensual and between legal adults, so players needn't fear looking like criminals for playing. Sadly, in a blow against diversity, the game doesn't include same-sex relationships, or for that matter, the option to seduce a person of African ethnicity. Unfortunately, there aren't too many sex scenes, or events for that matter. In the three to five hours it takes to raise enough points with a single character and see their ending, I encountered multiple incidences of the same scene event. Each girl has only a handful of encounters to explore, and as mentioned, has little if any dialog to speak of. What content there is is of decent quality, but there's simply not enough of it. A more expansive, diverse cast of romance options, or even the ability to...engage with some of the minor characters that are otherwise just there to bring up Popularity points. Environments are rendered in 3D (via the Unity Engine), and look smoothly rendered, though the colors seem somewhat washed-out, and the villa, ostensibly the site of debauched sex-party socialites, is devoid of people besides whoever players are talking to at any one time. There's also not much reason to explore a location unless telltale sound-effect text emits from its direction, indicating a character or cutscene's presence. Characters are shown as 2D cutouts, drawn in a realistic style that should appeal to folks turned off by the anime-style character design that populates most available erotic games. Everyone looks like a legal adult, and not immediately sleazy (excepting one character's maid outfit).
If its developers had lofty goals for Seduce Me, the final product simply does not reflect them, and is outshined at most turns by its peers, most of which are not porn games. As a game about relationships, it pales beside the likes of Digital: A Love Story. As a game meant to tackle issues of sex and gender relations, games like Catherine, Persona 4 and Don't Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain't Your Story are better for that sort of thing. As a strategy game or RPG, it compares well to Solitaire, but that's not really saying much. However, taken simply as it is, as a game where solving puzzles leads to porn, it's near the forefront of its field, particularly among non-Japanese games. It does make an effort to provide more than naughty pictures, including cursory character development and some semblance of a narrative. It's pretty and technically sound. While slightly anemic in content, it's titillating when it needs to be, and is at times even fun to play - I wouldn't mind playing the card games with real-life friends (minus the sex). And frankly, for a porn game, that's sometimes all one needs. |
| 'Sock Hop,' Destructoid's unofficial MAGFest 11 anthem Posted: 07 Jan 2013 08:30 AM PST
As I mentioned earlier during Mega Ran's exclusive album premier, Niero and Dale North fell in love with "Sock Hop" when Ran performed it during his MAGFest set. They loved it so much that they downloaded the song from Bandcamp right away and played it at the end of the Destructoid panel just because. Thanks to the above video that online radio network 8bitX posted, you too can experience what everyone in the room felt when Ran closed off his set with his cover of the River City Ransom stage 1 theme. This is the song as Ran performed it -- he unfortunately left off the final verse due to time constraints. He did perform the complete song in the Jamspace room on Sunday, and you can also watch the official music video just below. Don't be a square! Do the sock hop! MegaRan - Sock Hop - Magfest 11 - 09 - 010312 [YouTube]
Sock Hop [YouTube] |
| Developer gives a status update on DayZ Standalone Posted: 07 Jan 2013 08:00 AM PST While DayZ creator Dean Hall originally wanted to get the standalone release out before the end of 2012, that clearly hasn't happened. Citing the ambitious nature of "redeveloping the engine and making the game the way we all dreamed it could be," he writes that a closed beta test will be ready soon for 500-1000 people to help test the new architecture. Once finished and the obligatory fixes have been made, there will be a new internal date for public launch. Elsewhere in the blog post, Hall talks up the overhauled inventory system in DayZ Standalone. "You scavenge for items now, as individual parts, picking up pieces rather than piles, looking for cans on shelves or under beds," he continues. "The new system opens the door for durability of items, disease tracking (cholera lingering on clothes a player wears…), batteries, addon components, and much more. If you shoot a player in the head to take his night vision, you will damage the night vision." Additionally, Hall explains that the team wants a user interface that is "simple and effective, rather than flashy and complex." While there aren't images of this yet, they were "greatly inspired by Minecraft." There are, however, some miscellaneous new screenshots of Chernarus. Follow the aforementioned link to check those out. |
| Contest: Win Under Defeat HD for PSN! Posted: 07 Jan 2013 07:30 AM PST Our friends at Rising Star Games have given us 20 PSN codes for Under Defeat HD to hand out to the Destructoid community! We thought the game was pretty good, so why not try it out yourself for absolutely FREE?! To win a copy, just leave a comment below telling us what kind of gun you would strap to your own helicopter if you had one. Limit one entry per person, and the contest closes this Sunday, January 13 at 11:59 PM Pacific. Winners will be notified via Dtoid PM, so please make sure your email address on file is up to date. Good luck! |
| Jimquisition: Desensitized to Violence Posted: 07 Jan 2013 07:00 AM PST
Warning -- Contains graphic content. If you don't want to see disturbing Internet things, skip the footage starting at 1:20 and ending at 1:49. As the mainstream news media continues to revel in the Sandy Hook shootings, its pundits point the finger at videogames for reveling in digital violence. If you believe these hypocrites, your gaming hobby makes you cold and indifferent to scenes of death and destruction. If you believe the Jimquisition - and you should, for its word is law - you'll know that's bollocks. |
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