With Patch 5.3 releasing today, Blizzard has proven that their talk of an aggressive patch schedule for Mists of Pandaria was serious.   Given that we’ve had patches released roughly every three months, patch 5.4 should hit no later than August.  Since Blizzard has previously stated that the Orgrimmar raid in 5.4 will be the conclusion of Mists of Pandaria, Blizzard seems to be setting themselves up for the usual end-of-expansion dry spell where nothing new is released until the next expansion is ready.

If Blizzard holds to form, they won’t announce the next WoW expansion until Blizzcon, which starts November 8th.  Even if Blizzard announces that the expansion beta is ready to go, Mists was still in open beta for over six months before its release date.  That would mean that even if patch 5.4 is released as late as October it may have to satisfy WoW players for roughly seven months, with Blizzard’s expansion launching no earlier than May of 2014.  A seventh month dry-spell wouldn’t seem so bad compared to ten month window between the Hour of Twilight patch and Mists‘ launch.  However, it is a problem given WoW’s declining player base.

When Activision announced World of Warcraft had dropped to 8.3 million subscribers, CEO Bobby Kotick suggested a solution:  ”It is important to note that the nature of online games has changed, and with the environment becoming far more competitive, especially with free-to-play games.  To address this, we’re working to release new content more frequently to keep our players engaged longer and make it easier for lapsed players to come back into the game.  We believe in the long-term value of this franchise and will continue to commit substantial resources to World of Warcraft.”

Anything short of Blizzard announcing that the next expansion is ready for launch at Blizzcon will be a repudiation of Kotick’s comments, and will result in WoW experiencing a period of player loss with no possible attempt at player retention.  Yet this is exactly what I think will happen.  How will Blizzard stave off this period of decline?  By repeating one of their more successful promotions in recent history — the return of the annual pass.

Mists of Pandaria wasn’t the only WoW-related announcement Blizzard made at Blizzcon 2011.  They also announced the annual pass program, which gave players Diablo III, Mists of Pandaria beta access, and an in-game mount all in exchange for simply agreeing to maintain a WoW subscription for the next twelve months.  Blizzard knew that year would be a lean time, as it would include the end of the Cataclysm expansion.  Rather than watch players temporarily abandon their accounts while waiting for the Horde and Alliance fleets to discover the lost continent, Blizzard made sure that the subscriber numbers would be bolstered.

Essentially, the post-expansion content was Diablo III and the Mists beta.  Players didn’t mind that they were still paying their $15 per month as they had access to one of 2012′s most anticipated games in addition to access to all the new content early.  The annual pass kept players engaged with Blizzard for those twelve months (if not WoW itself) and helped numb the pain of the normally boring time between expansions.   I fully expect Blizzard to reintroduce some form of the annual pass in the lead up to the next expansion to combat the problems they are currently seeing.  The only problem is that without Diablo III-type enticement, what property could Blizzard capitalize on to keep everyone excited?

There is one property everyone is already excited over: Hearthstone.  Hearthstone‘s release (being real-world-soon ready as of PAX) is going to be timed to fall just after Blizzcon; right when players would begin to notice the lack of new-patch content as 5.4 becomes stale.  The playable state the game was in at PAX, and the shoutcast videos being released regularly show the game is just about ready to be launched.  All Blizzard is waiting for is the right time.  Why release it now when Heart of the Swarm and Mists of Pandaria are still relatively strong?  They will wait till the end of the year when they will need it most, and that will be the “new content more frequently” to save Warcraft while we wait for what comes next.

Unless they do something crazy and announce the expansion at E3 or something. But when has Blizzard announced something outside of Blizzcon before???

WoW! Blurbs!

Interview with Ghostcrawler about patch 5.3.  He should challenge Garrosh for Warchief!  http://wow.joystiq.com/2013/05/20/patch-5-3-and-more-with-ghostcrawler/

Someone finally did it!!!   Hooray!  Even if it is a patch old now…  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG8NG1zUqB8

I’m so happy that Among The Sleep surpassed their Kickstarter, but I was far happier that an alpha demo of the game got released. Finally, I got to remember what it was like being a frightened child making my way through a dark house. It was an interesting experience, one that really reminded me of what it was like being terrified in my own room. Luckily, the young child in this game was a little braver than I was as a kid (I was literally afraid to close my eyes when I was really young).

Seeing the world from a child’s perspective was less shocking than I thought it would be, feeling very familiar when I started playing. It felt like I was accessing a part of my mind that had been closed off for some time, and that I was going back to a state where many of my fears had come from. This was the point when many of us were learning what it was like to feel fear, the age when most people learn that there are things in the world to be afraid of. Whether this is through instincts or information we take in, this child’s perspective reminded me of my first times feeling afraid. They’re some of my earliest memories, something that might explain why I’m so interested in horror these days.

That perspective felt natural, but going back to being the size of a child feels anything but. The environment in this game is one that would hardly inconvenience an adult in the same situation, but in this game something as simple as a door can provide a big roadblock. The child isn’t tall enough to reach the knob on any of the doors without some kind of help, so I had to grab a stool or find some drawers to climb on in order to move on. It made the very idea that a monster might be chasing me feel even more frightening because I didn’t have the usual suite of options to get away from it. If something started chasing after me, it’s not like I could start running through doors to get away from it.

Being a child gave me some options that an adult wouldn’t have, though. I spent a whole lot of time crawling under tables and couches as I crossed the house; using them for cover whenever I could. I hadn’t even seen a monster, but I was still crawling under every available object I could find. Every time I heard a sound I would move inside of a cupboard or closet if one was nearby, peering out the open door I’d taken to get inside. Being small provided a lot of good hiding places an adult couldn’t use, although the alpha demo didn’t put them to much use. My own fear did that work for them, although I think it’s something that will come in handy as the game progresses.

A more subtle effect of the perspective was that nothing seemed to look quite right. It wasn’t quite like looking through a fishbowl lens on a camera, but the objects were all so big that the game looked skewed in some way. Seeing all of these things presented in that way really made me feel like I was a child, as dumb as that sounds. As an adult looking at this sort of view, it gives the whole proceeding an Alice in Wonderland vibe; as if the world is off-kilter and that strange, terrible things can happen there. It wasn’t as simple as showing big things because you’re a child, but rather that the world’s perspective was out of whack from an adult point of view and that this would allow for a lot of weird things to happen. It’s the type of place where it feels like logic doesn’t hold much sway.

Lighting tends to resonate one way or another in horror games, but in the demo I was actually feeling conflicted about it. This wasn’t like how light was a good thing in Alan Wake or how dark kept you hidden in Condemned, as I never really felt comfortable in the light or the dark in Among the Sleep. I didn’t know what the monsters would respond best to (possibly because I hadn’t run into any creatures yet), but it left me with a  general feeling of discomfort the whole time. I tend to feel comfortable in either light or dark in most horror games, but this one left me unsure. I just knew I wanted to be out of sight altogether while I played it, so I hid as much as possible.

The sounds were pretty scant, but that really strengthened the atmosphere. I’ve talked about how small sounds often indicate something changing in the game environment (although really, sounds mean changes in your environment just as much in real life), so as a player I often find myself attaching a lot of meaning to the tiniest change in audio. The game excelled at screwing with me using sound, playing footsteps at one point and frightening me into a closet for about five minutes. Over the course of the demo I heard a creaking fan, heavy breathing, and singing in the distance, all of which scared me to a complete halt. The sound design worked because I was never sure if the sound I was hearing meant that I was finally going to run into something. It played on my uncertainty about what I was looking for in the house. I knew I was supposed to find the child’s mother, but from the menace of the sound combined and the visuals made it quite clear she wasn’t there any more.

This place showed all the proof that it was inhabited, looking pretty much like an ordinary home in the evening, but it felt wrong. It carried the same menace a normal house would to a child, communicating it through sound and visuals. By all accounts it is completely normal, but after having watched the opening of the game you know there is something really wrong about it. Even without that opening incident, though, I really think the world would have felt just as threatening. Everything in the house, from the sounds to the visuals should look normal, but there is still a feeling that there is something off. I’m not sure if that’s just my expectation of the game from knowing it’s a horror game or if there is some deeper fear at play from seeing this dark place from a child’s perspective, but almost everything is played up as if it were normal and I was still scared. It’s an amazing effect, and one I want to explore another time.

There were some really strange points and places the demo took me to, and I felt like these were important to pushing the plot of the game forward. They seemed a little too colorful and bright in places, but they also possessed a similar feeling to old fairy tales. I’m not talking the Disney versions, either, but the ones where children are eaten or other terrible things happen. I came across a strange house that was lit right up, but it had been built over a series of cliffs and had broken toys strewn around it. It was so bright that I didn’t really feel any need to be afraid of it as I approached, but once I’d made it to the door and had to open it I really didn’t want to. Again, it was interesting that the game was presenting me with something that my logical mind was telling me was safe, but my instincts were telling me to get away from as fast as possible.

While I continually felt like I was in danger during the demo, it brings up an issue that my playthrough didn’t clear up: how will the child die? I’ve heard that it was confirmed that the child can die during the course of the game, but I’m very interested in knowing how that fail state will be communicated. I fell off a shelf at one point and my screen turned red with the damage, but that didn’t tell me anything about what happens if the child dies. This is a touchy subject, and something that most professionally-made games haven’t touched on.

It’s so touchy that games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout: New Vegas have made it impossible to kill children in them. You can do just about anything you could ever want in these games, but the game draws the line at killing children. This game has no choice but to meet that difficult concept head-on, and how tastefully it is handled may make the difference between creating a solid horror game and one that is just awful to watch. Krillbite Studio was brave to take on this project knowing that, and I have faith they’ll find a way, but it’s still a major tripping point the game could have.

I’m intrigued by how naturally horrifying the game managed to be. It touched on a part of me, creating a place that was different but somehow triggered all of my memories of being afraid in my own house as a child. What I’ve seen so far shows they have a good grasp on using sound to upset me and that they’re more than willing to drag out a moment as long as painfully possible before they give me something to be genuinely afraid of. The bright colors and lights of the final sequence almost felt like they would take my fears away for a few moments, but something about them still felt so very wrong. I’m very curious to see where things go from here, as a lot of my initial fears of the game came from my familiarity with the world. My own fears made sense in a world grounded in reality. While I was still a little scared when the world turned surreal, it didn’t happen as easily. We’ll have to see how well they can make me afraid in this strange space as the full game becomes available.

EA has had some interesting comments to make about the Wii U lately. Well, by interesting I mean ugly. The company has no games in the works for the system right now, and considering this is the company that will try just about anything to make a buck, that seems a little worrisome for a system I dropped an entire paycheck on. EA’s lead engineer, Bob Summerwill, has made some claims that have cut through the PR screen that tends to go around these kind of announcements; at least being refreshingly clear on how he is feeling about the system and the folks at Nintendo. Summerwill’s tweets about the matter have since been removed, like anything even remotely honest tends to be in this industry. It’s not nice to call the Wii U crap, but I’m having a pretty hard time defending it from that claim.

Despite spending a week combing the city for the system when it came out, I haven’t booted up the system since my New Super Mario Bros Wii U review back in December. I picked up ZombiU at around the same time because I wanted to give it a shot, but I literally haven’t turned it on since I finished the Mario game. From the look of the release schedule for it, the only game I can see myself playing on it in the near future is Pikmin 3, which won’t even be available until August. If you don’t feel like doing the math, that’s about nine months between plays. The only thing that’s come even close to getting me to consider turning the system on now is the downloadable release of Super Metroid, and to be honest it’s the game I’m most excited for on the system. When the thing I want most from your system is a game that’s a year shy of twenty years old, we have an issue.

EA seems to be one of many that aren’t developing any games for the Wii U. A couple of studios tried a handful of releases during the first few months when the system came out (mainly providing ports of games that were already going to other systems), but even that seems to have all but dried up. Those ports did have some new features added to them that took advantage of the Wii U’s fancy gamepad, but it doesn’t look like much of anyone is actually buying them. As even the stale ports of old games start to fade away, who is even making anything for this system any more that isn’t already on Nintendo’s payroll?

Nintendo systems have always sold based on the franchises that Nintendo owns, though, so who cares if the other guys don’t want to hop on board. It’s a phenomena I’ve been seeing since before the days of the Gamecube, but it’s Nintendo games that move Nintendo systems. Every once in a while you get a daring project like Eternal Darkness or Resident Evil 4 that comes out of nowhere and just blows my expectations away, but fundamentally it’s the Nintendo releases on the system that make it worth my while. I have very few memories of almost any game on a Nintendo home console, even going back as far as the N64, that wasn’t made by the company itself.

What if Nintendo’s not releasing much of anything, though? When I’m waiting a good nine months between releases, one thing I’m seriously considering doing is selling my Wii U just as I was considering doing during my first year with the Wii. I have nothing to play on it for the better part of a year, so why would I keep it?  This is the third time in a few years that I’ve been burned by Nintendo for buying a console early in its life cycle; and while dumb purchases like mine are the reason they can still get away with this stuff, that hopefulness at their consoles launching is now completely burnt out. Given my issues with the Wii and 3DS I wouldn’t have even considered buying the Wii U at launch if it hadn’t been an important part of my job to be able to play new games.

How many people out there don’t have any feelings of attachment to the system, though? How many of them are going to be having a hard time re-selling their system because there’s nothing out there to play on them? The system has been available for six months, and the section for its games at my local Gamestop, both new and used, doesn’t even take up four feet. To give you an idea, the used PS2 section takes up more space in the store than the entire Wii U section. If someone looks at that and sees the twenty-some feet each for PS3 and Xbox360, and then notices a price tag of at least one hundred dollars less, where do you think that customer is going to go? Nintendo is hoping there is a lot of good faith out there for its system, and that’s good faith it absolutely hasn’t earned this generation.

The Wii was a mess. It started out as a neat experiment; one that didn’t use its gimmick as it promised, and it made a lot of the people who’d believed in it a little upset. When all of the casual and non-gamers flocked to it for how accessible it made games for them, though, Nintendo didn’t much care what the core audience felt any more. Sure, a lot of us had been backing their systems since they’d first gotten into console making, but they had a shiny new audience of soccer moms and the elderly to appeal to. The games that got them to where they are today fell by the wayside while Nintendo courted its newer, more fickle audience; finding out the hard way that trusting the casual market to support the system was like building on sand. When the casual players all got sick of their games, who did they turn to with their hats in their hands?

The Wii U came out of Nintendo’s realization that they needed the games that had kept players buying their systems for years, but they’d fallen far behind the PS3 and XBox 360. Instead of working toward the future, they built a stopgap system with another gimmick: turning flat screen televisions into the world’s largest DS’s. They’d already ripped through most of the good will they’d built with their customer base by ignoring them for almost the entire life cycle of the Wii, so it doesn’t surprise me that things aren’t looking too good for the system now.

I’m not just talking good will with the players, though. The Wii was an absolute disaster for anyone making a game for it that wasn’t Nintendo. Whether through poor implementation of motion controls or Nintendo just not supporting third party development, Nintendo made a lot of developers upset over the Wii’s life. When the money was rolling in for Nintendo products that wasn’t a big issue for them, and it was that attitude that has probably stuck with developers. Not only do you have a company whose systems historically sell only games made by that company, but that company did nothing to support your third party games during the last console cycle. Considering those third party games are what fuels a lot of sales in between in-house game releases, you end up with these huge gaps in releases that are absolutely killing the system.

I love my Gamecube for the Nintendo games that were released for it, but I never once considered buying one until it was in its last years. The reason for that was that I already had systems with consistent release schedules that were filled with excellent third party games. Other companies were jumping in so that I always had something to play on my PS2, and the system wouldn’t go more than a week or two without something interesting coming out for it. Even when I couldn’t afford the new games I was always excited that there were new creations coming out for my system. I didn’t need a system that would only produce something worth playing every couple of months, if that. Given my limited funds I had to go with the system that was the most consistent.

With the Wii U it looked like Nintendo had finally learned its lesson, and that it was going to support third party development in a new way. It looked like the company knew that it had to do something to stop these dry spells from continuing to be synonymous with their home consoles, but in the time since the system’s release we’re still seeing the exact same pattern as before. Third party developers are doing abysmally most of the time, and it’s at the point where many of them have gotten sick of it all. A couple of them are toeing the water, but with companies as big as EA jumping ship I can’t imagine all that many more sticking around for long. Again, those that are sticking around just seem to be putting out tired ports of older games; trying to pull in some easy sales with products that are already dead and gone to most players. All it’s done is make the system look even sadder than it already does.

With player and developer faith at an all-time low, how is this system supposed to survive? Nintendo has really painted themselves into a corner with their behavior over the past couple of years, making mistake after mistake that has alienated third party developers and the core customer base alike. Still, Nintendo just does what it’s always done whenever it was in trouble: make some quality games. At least, it’s trying to. If New Super Mario Bros Wii U and the Game & Wario demo I played at PAX East are any indication, the system may be in trouble from that front as well.

I love Nintendo and its products. I’d be willing to bet their games are the main reason why most of the people on the planet love video games as much as they do. This is what makes it so painful to have watched the way the company has been run over the past decade. If EA wants to back out of making games for their system, then Nintendo needs to realize that they have to do something about that. Nintendo needs to really reach out to third party developers and do their best to keep them on board. They need to see that having huge gaps in their release schedules is not all right, and that their system sales are going to stagnate as long as they do nothing about it.

I may not like games made by EA, but a system needs a variety of games over the course of its life if it’s going to do well. A new system shouldn’t be coming right out the gate lacking features and games that the cheaper, older systems do offer. There’s no way something like that can be sustainable forever. Nintendo has been surviving off the strength of its franchises, but with every generation a few more of the games that support it have faded away, and soon there may not be anything at all besides the Nintendo releases to keep the systems going. If that’s the case, it’s not very hard to see why so many people think Nintendo should get out of consoles and move straight into publishing. Their games are all that people want, so why keep up the hassle of systems?

Because it’s Nintendo, that’s why. I’ve never seen a company try so hard to keep this industry going in new directions while providing a concrete base in solid, well-made games. Nintendo’s name is still a seal of quality to me, and I don’t want to see the company and all of its odd console ideas fall by the wayside because they can’t get their third party developer relationships to work. It’s time for the execs at Nintendo to start tending to their third party developers as they promised they would, and to do their best to get other developers publishing games for their systems. It will take some doing after so many years of poor sales and indifferent relationships, but I think it can be done.

Nintendo, it’s time for you to reach out. You can’t support a system all on your own. I may not like EA, but you need them and as many other developers as you can get right now. Gamers need to know they can get your games and the other ones they want from your system. Nine dry months of stone age ports is not enough anymore. It never has been.

Images courtesy of hypeup.net, forbes.com, ign.com, moarpowah.com

Welcome to the world of Guacamelee! where you will be playing the role of a Mexican man as he travels around a small portion of Mexico to save not only the woman he loves, but the world as well, from an Evil Charro skeleton named Carlos Calaca. This wonderfully lavish and beautiful world was created by Drinkbox studios — an indie developer founded in 2008 in Toronto, Canada.

You take the role of Mexican farmer, Juan, just as he is chosen to aid in setting up a festival that is planned to take place in his home village. As he begins to help preparing for what is supposed to be a wonderful time, he comes across a past friend that he hasn’t seen in years only identified as El Presidente’s Daughter. The real problem arises when a trio who has recently escaped from the world of the dead kidnaps El Presidente’s daughter for some large diabolical scheme just moments after they see each other. However, they haven’t left yet when Juan arrives, and despite Juan’s honorable attempt to save her, he easily killed and sent to world of the dead. This is where the luchadore gods bless Juan with an ancient and powerful mask that will send him back to the world of the living to stop the dark trio from completing their dark mission.

That is all the background information for the game, so now let’s really get into the details about the game. Gucamelee! is an action-platformer with a great combat system that you’ll not only use to fight enemies, but you’ll use to traverse the world. As with most games, all the great moves that really open up the combat system have to be unlocked throughout playing the game. The first time I entered combat there was a simple to follow tutorial that shows you the various attacks and dodges of the core combat system. When you weaken most enemies there is a button prompt that appears above them that allows you the ability to grapple and throw them across the battle area. When you link all these various attacks together you begin to start combos which reward you with bonus money.

Along with combos giving you bonus money you will come across many chests that reward with money. Money is essentially the upgrade currency in the game, and will be spent at stores for upgrades to your health and stamina, or to add additional grappling attacks for combat. When you purchase an upgrade to your health or stamina you get a health or stamina chunk. In order to get the increase to your health and stamina you’ll need to collect three chunks of the respective attribute.

Once you learn the basics you’ll get to start exploring the world using all those base combat skills and your dodge to traverse the world and, of course, to defeat any evil creatures who try to stand in your way. Most of the traveling is fun with the exception of a few areas that didn’t seem so much tricky, but rather like the platforms were placed just a little too far away. This really frustrated me, since I wanted to get everything in every level. Don’t worry, though. What I didn’t realize at first was that Guacamelee! is actually an open world styled game not only allowing you to go back to areas once you gain new skills to help you complete hidden areas that may have been inaccessible your first time through the area, but allowing you to backtrack, or fast travel, to any part of the world you have previously been to at any point you decide.

Through the destruction of various statues in the game you’ll receive new skills from special uppercuts and belly slams, to the ability to wall jump and double jump. Not only will you receive these additional skills, but a humorous scene with a very particular goat-man who is very upset with you destroying his property. Though he does aid you with teaching these new things, he plans to get you back one of these times. When he does, you won’t even see it coming! These skills not only add a layer of ease for traveling the rest of the game, but really lets you start to explore the deep combat system and really have a lot more fun mixing up the skills for crazy high combos.

Exploring the combat system and learning combos will certainly make it much easier to take down some of the tougher enemies in the game. There are several different enemies which are referred to as minions from the world of the dead. You’ll come across the basic ground enemies throughout most of the game, and they won’t take many more than a few hits and a grapple to defeat. You’ll also come across plant-like enemies that will require you to use one of your special attacks to launch them into the air before you can attack them, but if you let them touch the ground for more than a few seconds they will go back underground. The most annoying enemies in the game are actually air based enemies: one of which looks like a blowfish and will explode after ten seconds of appearing and the other looks like a dragon that spit fires at you. Both of which require more a combo based approach if you want to live long enough to defeat them.

Some people may find the game slightly repetitive in the traversal heavy portions of the game due to a lack of variation in the platform design throughout the core of the game. The more fun and challenging portions of the platforming are hidden in the secret parts of the map. Also, the lack of voice acting really bugged me at first, but after about a half hour of seeing the world Drinkbox Studios had created, I jumped over that hurdle realizing that voice acting may have thrown off the balance of the game. The game was sadly short enough that you could play through its entirety in one sitting. I believe I clocked my time at five hours, including completing most of the areas side missions and hidden areas.

On the other hand, the game has an outstanding visual aesthetic combined with a wonderfully Mexican themed soundtrack that really absorbed me into Juan’s world. On top of that I really enjoyed the writing in the game. The parts that you have to read are never very long, and honestly quite humorous. For the game only lasting a few hours, the 2D world is very filled out with all sorts of background gags and to my knowledge the only 2D side scrolling platformer that I’ve played that uses an open-world technique; which really helps make Guacamelee! stand out from the rest. What I enjoyed the most, however, was how the combat evolved with each additional special and grapple attack you get throughout the game. I would highly recommend this game to anyone who owns a Playstation 3 or PS Vita since that’s the only way you’re going to get the chance to enjoy this little indie gem.

While going through our archives I noticed an article about how Miyamoto wanted to see a remake of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past for the 3DS. It came from a couple of years ago back in 2011, and it made me laugh to see it, seeing as how we’ve just seen the announcement that they’re working on a sequel to the game. Three years may not seem like that long a time to have been covering video games, but there is a whole lot of history that Mash Those Buttons has seen in the years since we first started this insane experiment.

I’m pretty sure that everyone remembers the time back when Duke Nukem Forever was in development. Seeing as there are kids who grew old enough to drive during its development cycle, saying you’ve been around since before Duke Nukem Forever was finished doesn’t mean much, does it? Still, we were just as cautiously optimistic as everyone else when Gearbox announced that it was going to turn Duke from the joke of the industry into an actual, real thing. The product that followed was, well… It was definitely a video game. I’m really not sure what everyone thought would happen when you try to update a crass, sexist game character for a video game that is fifteen years too late, but whatever people were hoping for did not occur. Still, I did get to throw poo, so five stars.

It was hardly the only game that went through a long development. I’d completely forgotten about how long it had taken the developers to produce Gran Turismo 5 right up until I saw an article from Robert Hill-Williams from back in October 2011. Since the game was first announced way back in 2005 before the PS3 was even out, that’s yet another absurdly long development time. It was being worked on for so long that Sony released Gran Turismo: Prologue, a game that played like a gigantic demo, in order to appease the fans who’d been waiting for so long. Hopefully, the recently announced Gran Turismo 6 takes a lot fewer years to wrap itself up and this doesn’t become a pattern.

Remember the time back when Ninja Gaiden used to be good? I do, and I still remember how hopeful it had made me for the release of Ninja Gaiden III (Not the one from 1991, which was good and also made the other ones look easy). Looking back on the GDC teaser posted back in March of 2011, I can see that Nick Santangelo was wondering how the series would fare without Itagaki. For those who are curious: Not well. Saying the game lost its way was like saying that being attacked by polar bears is inconvenient.

There were other hopes and dreams getting crushed all those years ago. There was a big push for a fighting game called Arcana Heart 3, if you can recall. The original was a decent fighting game for the PS2, with the second one being so comically bad that it was never released in North America. I have a copy of it in my home, and it’s so unplayable and terrible that I hang it over my front door to ward off evil spirits in the night. Folks still had hope that the third one would come out over on these shores, bringing its own brand of all-girl street-fighting to the world stage. As some Japanese games that are destined to release here tend to do, though, Arcana Heart 3 just disappeared off the face of the Earth, never to be heard from again.

Not getting good Japanese games has left a lot of gamers bitter and jaded, so it wasn’t much of a surprise to see how many people didn’t think Project Rainfall would go anywhere. Looking back at it only weeks after the release of Pandora’s Tower, the third and final game the project had been petitioning to have brought over to North America, I have some hope that we might just see some more weird games coming to our shores again. Still, there was a period not too long ago when Nintendo swore that the games weren’t coming out. Then they were. Then out of nowhere we recently get an announcement that Earthbound is coming to virtual consoles. Nintendo knows how to play with my feelings; that much is for sure.

As for other Japanese games we still haven’t seen, the first word we wrote about The Last Guardian was that it was being delayed way back in April of 2011. Given the popular response the game has received since it was first shown, it’s strange that the game hasn’t shown almost any progress since that article first went up. Given the departure of Fumito Ueda (the man behind the game and such others as Ico and Shadow of the Colossus) from Sony, I have a feeling there won’t be any more developments with this interesting game. Every once in a while someone from Sony swears the project isn’t dead (although the last person we reported saying it was Ueda himself), but I have a hard time believing them. It’s a shame that something that showed so much promise is now just a bizarre footnote in gaming’s history.

While on the subject of bad developments over at Sony, 2011 was also the year of the month of downtime for Sony’s online service. Hacked to death and with personal information stolen, Sony kept pretty quiet on the extent of the damage for a couple of weeks before coming clean about how bad things were. It took them a while to get things running again, only to have to take the network down yet again only a little while after they’d brought it back online. I still have a free copy of Infamous on my PS3 from that mess, although it’s hardly on par with the ridiculous Canadian lawsuit that was leveled against Sony. Nothing ever came of it and I never got my piece of that sweet billion dollars, but at least I got my free Infamous.

That was just the start of a hacking storm that hit just about everyone during this period. A group known an Lulzsec just up and decided that they wanted to ruin everyone’s day all the time, and systemically went after Nintendo, Bethesda, Epic Games, EVE Online, The Escapist, Minecraft, and lots of other places. They seemed to be doing it just for giggles, judging from the statements made at the time. With no real agenda besides driving anyone crazy, I still can’t even type the name of their group without feeling a boiling rage coming on. It is my sincere hope that everyone involved with the group died in some horrible chemical accident since the events of that time, although some arrests did put a smile on my face.

This was also around the time that Brown V. EMA was going to the courts. Leland Yee and Schwarzenegger were teaming up to fight the greatest threat America had ever faced: the dreaded video game, with the youth of tomorrow on the line. Unfortunately for them, the Supreme Court seemed to know what that dang ol’ First Amendment thing was and squashed the bill, although it would hardly be the last time that such absurd bills would be decided by the courts. SOPA and PIPA were not far behind trying to regulate the internet as well. It’s some scary stuff, but we’ve all been lucky so far.

For some good news, we were there as the music game fad started its absurd downward spiral. Looking back on an announcement that the Guitar Hero franchise wasn’t tanked but merely on hiatus, I think most gamers knew that the writing was on the wall. After a good couple of years of music games getting pumped out the doors by Activision, the fad was just losing steam. It was another hit built on the back of the fickle casual gamer, and like the Wii, the user base was starting to lose interest. It’s fun to pick up a plastic guitar now and again these days, but it’s weird to think of the times when game stores were choked, floor to ceiling, with these instruments.

For those of you who bought the 3DS when it first came out, you might recall a seething anger around the time when a price cut was announced for the system. Now, I’ve bought a lot of systems around launch day and have always felt a little depressed when I see a price drop coming before I’ve really put in any time with the system (hello, dusty old Wii). The 3DS was far worse, with the price drop coming so soon that Iwata himself had to issue an apology. Given that this apology lead to reams of free games for the people who bought the system early it wasn’t too bad, but I imagine it was even sweeter for those super-smart jerks who bought the system for cheaper and still got the free games. I sold more than a few of those systems back when I worked at Gamestop, and I was surprised that the look I gave some of these people didn’t kill them on the spot.

On the development scene, it seems like the folks behind Dead Island never learned their lessons after the whole FeministWhorePurna skill fiasco. They apologized for it after some clever gamers found the item in the game’s code, and somehow completely forgot all of the trouble it got them in when they released the images of the woman’s torso edition for Dead Island: Riptide. Apparently, they don’t have very good memories, or they were at least hoping that the gaming community didn’t.

Hideo Kojima also said that he didn’t want to direct Metal Gear Solid V, but he says that all the time about every Metal Gear and no one believed him. He’s like a guy who keeps eying your ice cream but swearing he doesn’t want some when you ask. Even wilder was when Miyamoto was supposed to have stepped down, which was something else that thankfully wasn’t true. While I’d be interested to see what would happen to Metal Gear without Kojima, I don’t know how Nintendo would be without Miyamoto kicking around to keep things flying straight.

Another funny footnote that slipped my mind was the whole Ocean Marketing thing. I think we can be forgiven for forgetting it, but that was when a guy ordered a controller from Ocean Marketing, sparking off what was probably the worst example of customer service I’d ever seen. Christoforo might have thought he could have treated his customer like crap, but he didn’t realize what would happen when his words were put out before the entire internet, drawing the attention of Mike Krahulik and just about anyone on the internet with some spare time. The results are insane, hilarious, and captured perfectly in an article by Robert Hill-Williams. I forgot just how bizarre this whole thing got.

Far less funny was the Cross Assault debacle. One particular member of a web show about fighting games, Bakhtanians, decided that not only could he be a mouthy, sexist jerk, but that he needed to claim it was part of the fighting scene to do so. It’s not his fault he’s an awful human being, as he was only doing his job to support his community. Seeing some of the seedy side of the fighting game scene brought it to light for the rest of us, so we can at least be thankful that Bakhtanians brought his tasteless behavior before the world so we could all start stamping it out.

In other sad news, we got to witness the final moments of Nintendo Power magazine in December  of 2012. It was a particularly depressing time for many of us given how many years we’d spent poring over the pages looking for secrets that would let us have a chance to beat our favorite games. It had become clear over the years just how irrelevant a lot of magazines had become, though. As sad as I was to see it go, I still felt I had a lot of hope for the future. After all, the current gaming news world was what allowed me a chance to take on my current position.

More positively, we started seeing some real drops in Facebook games over the time since we started up. There was a time when pundits were claiming that Facebook games would be the death of all other games, and everyone seemed to be jumping aboard the fad just as they had for the Wii and music games. Seeing it fall into decline was deliciously sweet, and it’s something I expect to see happen in the Android and IOS game space within the next few years as well. These markets aren’t sustainable, kiddies! They’re built on people who don’t really like games! Get in, get the money you can, and then get out. We’ve seen enough fads over the years to know what’s coming.

There was some interesting stuff going on from within the game journalism industry this year, too. With the Game Media Awards came a lot of questions about the people who review games. Were they all being honest? Were things like free review copies, getaways, and other kickbacks from companies making it possible for game journalists to be completely honest? It’s an excellent question, and one I think any good reviewer should keep asking every day. Corruption can come very easily in this industry, and it’s unfortunately up to the readers to find it.

A lot of people have gotten really sick of DLC and all of the shenanigans attached to it this year, too. Items that used to be given away with games to enhance them were being held back to sell as DLC, and with microtransactions on the way it looks like things are only going to get worse. Many gaming sites have weighed in on the crooked ways that game publishers are trying to pry our wallets open, and while not a lot may be being done with it, at least a dialogue has begun. From what I’ve seen in my time here, gamers are becoming more savvy and educated questioning policies and pushing back against things they don’t like or appreciate. With the fall of the Online Pass at EA I’m a little hopeful, though.

We’ve seen a whole lot of bizarre news over our three year span, and this doesn’t even begin to touch on all of the strange events that you see when covering the industry. It’s an exciting place, though, and there’s nowhere that any of us would rather be than keeping you informed. As the indies have grown more prevalent and big studios have scrambled for cash and relevance, we’ve been there and will continue to be there to keep you informed. Thanks for staying with us during this time and for watching this strange industry alongside us. We’ll try to keep you posted on every bizarre, sad, funny, and interesting thing in the future.

Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller Episode III: The Oracle is what happens when you take the point-and-click genre and surgically remove ninety percent of the crap from it. I could hardly believe this chapter was from the same people who made the first chapter, as this literally thrums with excitement. You start the chapter off with extremely high stakes — with the game somehow setting them higher every few minutes. This chapter was electrifying from beginning to end, feeling like you were right on the cusp of figuring it out the entire time only to find the story twisting and turning before you. I should have seen the ending coming, but I was too wrapped up in the game itself to ever figure it out. I really don’t know how they’ll top this one for part four, as it was like playing through a five hour climax.

Just about everything that has ever bugged me about the series, or even point-and-click games in general, has been removed. Once again, the people at Phoenix Online Studios have taken great pains in listening to their fans and critics, cleaving through the bothersome parts and refining everything to near perfection. The game takes place entirely in a single apartment complex, removing the need to schlep all over Boston to talk to anyone. I never even noticed how much this could get on my nerves when I didn’t know where to go, but it had become one more nuisance that I just accepted about the game. In The Oracle you only have a few floors to deal with.

If that sounds like it’s just a different kind of lame, you’d be wrong. The apartment complex is packed with details and important locations, and being able to access or figure out all of them took quite some time. Details that didn’t seem all that important took on new life as you found out aspects of the case, and eventually almost every little thing you could look at or interact with took on some importance for a puzzle. Instead of spreading these items out over huge spaces as most point-and-click games would, The Oracle crams them all into a single, elegant space and asks you to figure out when they’ve gained some importance. It meant that the game wasted very little of my time in getting to an item I knew I needed, and kept me constantly busy just figuring out what I needed.

Also, that space doubles up when you find out that you’ll be seeing it from someone else’s point of view later. In a neat twist, you find out that one of the other characters in the game also possesses similar psychic powers to Erica; only she can see the future instead of the past. The thing is, that character exists in the past, so her seeing the future allows her to adjust things for Erica’s present time. The game uses this mechanic to let Erica look in on her life a couple of times in the game, sending the player to play as that character for a while. This character stays within the apartment complex as well, but as that character lives there they can add some importance and meaning to the objects in it that would be hard to find out otherwise.  It means you get twice as much use out of being in the apartment building, as both characters get different information from the same objects, with one often clearing up the confusion of the other.

Since both characters have opposing powers, they are both aware of what the other is doing and often set things up to help each other. It creates this neat mechanic where I would often get stuck in the investigation as Erica just in time for the game to switch over to the other character for clarification. At one point the other character saw someone open up a wall safe, something that showed me where the wall safe was in Erica’s timeline. At another point there was a camera with a scrambled image on it that the past character couldn’t make sense of, but the game let me place the camera in a hiding spot so that Erica would be able to find it in the future. The connection between the two made for some really creative solutions when I got stuck.

Also, the bad point-and-click solutions have been tossed, or at least feel like they’ve been. There were very few times when the solution to a given puzzle was obtuse. There were some odd solutions for sure, but most of them only required a step or two to get through. I figured out a lot of what I needed to do with rational thought and a walk around the environment, and most everything else just required a quick sweep of the area. With everything taking place in a small area it was easy to get intimately familiar with all of the objects and to notice important things about them. On top of that, Erica often makes little off-handed comments when you look at something; ones that typically indicate why that object may be important later. It makes things a lot simpler to figure out without making them so easy it doesn’t feel like a challenge. I was stumped several times in the game, but it always felt fair. Besides, the game still has its vague but handy hint system in place, so if you get stuck the game almost always has you covered.

Another thing that was streamlined to pieces was the psychic visions. Many of them can be accessed by selecting your psychic power and just clicking on a glowing object, and the more complex powers that required touching more than one correct object have been simplified.  Also, instead of having to find five or six objects to look in on a specific past event, two is typically enough to put together for a cutscene. Getting people to make contact with you so you can see their past is also a lot easier than it’s been in previous parts; something I was thankful for given how annoying it’s been to find a reason to touch people in this series. Even times when you had to touch things in the right order were made almost too easy with direction from Erica or the other character.

I loved going into the past because the characters felt so much more fleshed out there. The games had gotten better at showing me well-defined characters, but most of the suspects and weirdoes in the game were still built on stereotypes; like the yoga hippie from Episode II: The Wise Monkey. The few characters in The Oracle get fleshed out really well, as the game takes time to really talk about them and show me their personalities. I got to see different aspects of who they were and see them make their mistakes. Just when these characters only seemed like they would have one facet to their personalities, I would be treated with an intimate moment with their private thoughts. This game’s characterization is just so far beyond the cookie-cutter characters of the original chapter that it’s hard to believe the same people are working on this game. It’s a tremendous improvement, and really kept me interested in the game.

Despite taking its time with the characters, the plot feels like it’s running at a breakneck pace. The game starts right off with a new murder, with you poking around the environment for a few minutes before you sneak into the building. When you soon find out that you’ve been specifically drawn there by an extremely important character, things start to get really interesting. Looking around this place and knowing that all the answers have been specifically left behind for you to find makes the whole game feel like you’re just about to figure things out. I really thought that The Oracle was going to be short because of it, but the game manages to keep putting these exciting reveals in your path, always cutting them short before you find out too much.

The Oracle excels at telling you almost enough to figure things out, dialing it back each time before you can learn too much. It’s a very careful, deliberate approach that meant knowing exactly how much to tell to keep it interesting without making it obvious that you were constantly pulling the same stunt. Each scene gave a little bit more information, showing a snippet of a fight and pulling away just as it was about to reach a climax. The game tossed more than a few red herrings at me that way; keeping me from guessing the killer’s identity for the entire game. I had a pretty good idea who it was near the end, but I was so wrapped up in the way the game was telling me its story that I barely had any interest in thinking about it.

Also, the last hour is so intense I didn’t have much time to put thought into it. The game does feel like it’s always ready to wrap up, but it’s during the final hour that the game feels like it could end at any second. The entirety of this act feels like it’s about ready to make the big reveal, but just when you’re one hundred percent sure that it’s going to tell you everything, the game continues for one more hour or so. This section was the definition of tension; making me nervous, excited and upset every single moment. The game is literally impossible to put down at this point as you are forced to see things through to their end. I needed to go to the bathroom pretty bad at this point, but I just dragged the laptop in with me and played until my legs went numb. I’m sure you didn’t need that image, but you already have it in your head and there’s nothing I can do about it now. Let’s just move on.

With all of the intense action you get a lot more of the hand-painted cutscenes that I loved so much from the previous games. They appeared more like rare treats in the last two parts, but they show up a whole lot in The Oracle. They’re all just as striking as they were before, but the artist had some really amazing material to work with in this one. I included a lot of the fantastic images in this review, as they’re just so striking and full of emotion. These pictures looked good before, but the scenes they’re capturing just show me how much power this art style was trying to convey before. There are some incredible works in this game, and they just hammered home the emotional force of the game’s events.

The music is still the same as it always was, but I’m also starting to appreciate its strengths a lot more than I used to. There is a lot of nice ambiance pieces in the game, but it’s the high-intensity tracks that made the last hour even harder to bear. The songs that play during many of the game’s more intense scenes are all fantastic; beating with a pulse that matches the events on the screen. It somehow makes the stakes feel even higher than they already are, and I just really liked it.

Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller Episode III: The Oracle is going to be an very difficult act to follow, although the extreme cliffhanger ending will probably help make that a little easier. This game ends on such an intense note that I was genuinely upset that the game was over, and it’s left me hungry for the next one. Given all the fantastic work they did streamlining this game, I know they have the ability to make the next one even better. Their storytelling technique has grown considerably, and with the game playing more logically than almost any point-and-click adventure out there it’s almost a shame to know the next chapter is the last one. It’s amazing to see how far they’ve come since the first game, turning a series I pretty much hated into something I need to play. This chapter alone was worth all of the hassles of the other ones.

Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller Episode III: The Oracle is available to download from the developer’s site.

Andrew Groen over at the PA Report posted about attending a Divekick party and the implications it heralds for gaming culture.  While I love the points he makes in the second half of the article, the first half is slightly concerning.  He establishes that the indie scene in games is becoming akin to the indie scene in music.  While it’s nice that gaming culture is diversified enough that such an indie scene can arise, a scene that revolves around young people enjoying independently developed games at small parties, it can be dangerous in how exclusionary this grouping can become.  Indie music scenes are associated with cities.  Oftentimes, the New York or LA indie scene can hold a magnified importance due to their proximity to media.

Gaming culture has benefited from being closely tied to technology and to the internet (whereas music had to jump to PC via the MP3 format, games have been a PC staple for decades) which has allowed gaming to develop all around the world — independent of any requirement that a large city be nearby.  An indie scene would result in a city-based culture; one that may start to marginalize the small developer working out of their garage in some random suburbia.  Then again, the small developer may be no more than a mythical stereotype, just like the stereotype of the hipster douche, and essentially I’m fearing the bogeyman.  Either way, Groen’s article is noteworthy for the culture he describes and the hope he ascribes for the future.

Blizzard recently announced that in Patch 5.3, they will be lowering the amount of experience needed to level from 85 to 90 by 33%.  While Blizzard has lowered experience levels for older content before, to do this while that expansion is still current is unheard of.  Fundamentally, this highlights a problem Blizzard is lucky to have: the problematic effect of levels on an aging MMORPG.

Leveling is an RPG staple that goes back to the genre’s D&D roots.  It is intended to represent that characters grow and become more powerful as they progress.  Not only do characters gain attribute points with each level, but they often gain new skills or talents.  It is an abstract representation of the fact that as a warrior spends greater and greater amounts of time in battle, he will learn how to be a better fighter through simple repetition.  This is why experience points are used as the analogue measure of when a character has reached a new level.

Vanilla WoW and the early expansions were able to take this staple and use it appropriately.  This allowed Blizzard to design the game with a leveling path in mind.  Zones were each given level designations so that players would travel the world as they grew stronger.  Additionally, this served to gate some areas to newer players.  While there was no literal barricade to stop a new character from drifting into the Plaguelands from Tirisfal Glades, the level 50 creatures patrolling the zone would make sure that no one would get too far.  As Blizzard has refined their approach, they have used these content gates to direct players through content in the new zones.

Pandaria tells a story of characters coming to the continent in the Jade Forest. They wander  the Krasarang Wilds and Valley of the Four Winds meeting the locals before traveling North to Kun Lai Summit and contending with the Yaungol invasion.  Players discover the Yaungol were forced from the Townlong Steppes by the Mantid, who are revealed as victims of the Sha in the Dread Wastes; the very same Sha released in the Jade Forest.  By splitting the story amongst the zones of Pandaria in such a way that the quests (when done in order) tell the story as players level up so they can move onto the next zone and continue the plot, Blizzard has mastered the art of storytelling through questing.  While there are currently enough quests such that players will out-level a zone before completing the narrative, often, the finale is rewarding enough that players will want to finish before moving on (or at least come back and finish the story after level-capping).

Blizzard’s problem in Mists is that this has been an end-game heavy expansion.  Even after a player plays through all the zones, there are factions in each zone that players can return to at level 90 and continue the story.  There’s even a zone solely intended for max level players: the Vale of Eternal Blossoms.  These daily quests have been driving the tale of Pandaria beyond the initial zones and through each subsequent patch.  Blizzard wants players to enjoy the current content — enough that they’ve made a guide for what to do after hitting 90 to prepare for the Isle of Thunder.

Blizzard knows there are always new players coming to the game, or older players looking to level alts and play in the new content, so they continue to develop ways for players to speed through their outdated work.  For example, the experience amount for leveling through older expansions has consistently (until now) been reduced upon the launch of the next expansion.  Additionally, Blizzard’s recruit-a-friend program gives players a way to bring friends into the game and give them experience buffs to make getting to level 90 a breeze.  Heirlooms are also a common approach for speed-leveling alts.

Even the new monk class and the pandaren race have been given buffs that allow them to level much quicker than other characters.  Blizzard knows that players want to experience all that Pandaria has to offer.  That includes all the level 90 content, and they are not going to stand in the way of letting players get to that content as quickly as possible.  In fact, the only way they could let players access that content quicker would be to remove levels altogether, and that might not be a bad idea.

Levels work well for single player games where there is a distinct story and you want players to feel like they are improving as they progress through the story.  In an MMO like WoW, levels can be applied early, but as the world grows, levels begin to create some strange situations.  The primary function of leveling is acquiring skills and talents.  In WoW, these skills and talents are distributed to players throughout the leveling process both as an enticement (only 100 XP until my next level and new skill!) and to help players understand how to play their class.  It is this reason that players are able to change their race and faction, but they are tied to their class.

Blizzard doesn’t want a character to level a warrior and then at 90, switch to a mage.  Class mechanics are all different, and players need to be proficient with them.  This is the true game aspect of Warcraft.  The level grind before players hit max level and are expected to participate in cutting edge group content is intended to prepare players to perform in that group content.  Especially since Cataclysm, Blizzard has continued to push raid situations (such as battles with void zones that need to be avoided — the proverbial fire that you should not stand in) into non-raid content as a way of giving players raid experience without requiring them to learn on the fly.

The problem with skill allotment, though, is that many classes are already beginning to feel button bloat by having too many skills to balance.  Each expansion, Blizzard perfects each class’s rotation only to have to integrate a new (and powerful) skill when the next expansion rolls around.  Players expect new skills as they level, but most classes are already as functional as they can be.  There is little for anyone to gain by Blizzard catering to our base expectations of more skills, and it will be interesting to see how Blizzard deals with this when announcing Mists‘ follow-up.

The way around leveling may actually be to change what levels are measured.  At level 90, Blizzard still gates their content with the ilevel of player’s gear.  This dictates an order for players to progress and increase power without adding skills.  Functionally, Blizzard could get rid of player levels, replace it with gear ilevels, and the game could continue just as it is now; with zones available to a character indicated by the ilevel of gear required.   The only difference would be that players can buy higher level gear on the auction house, whereas leveling can only be acquired through time.  Blizzard would need to restrict some gear availability to ensure that no one could jump into an end level raid before figuring out their role first.

As much as the old content is there for players to enjoy, Blizzard knows that old is old.  The strange thing about Blizzard’s decision is that they are showing that the definition of old has shifted.  No longer does old denote the prior expansion; old is everything that is not in the most recent patch or two.  Blizzard wants to get all of their players (even the alt-oholics) into the Throne of Thunder, and this experience reduction is a sign of that.  Really though, it’s a sign that the leveling model of player progression is starting to buckle under Blizzard’s design philosophies.  Blizzard will probably raise the level cap in the next expansion and continue with the formula they have established, but it would be exciting if they left the level cap at 90, or removed levels altogether as a way of making a more welcoming World of Warcraft.

WoW! Blurbs!

No Patch 5.3 this week!  Come back, one year! http://wow.joystiq.com/2013/05/13/no-patch-5-3-this-week/

Battlefield Barrens preview.  It can’t be any harsher than Barrens chat.  http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/9576262/World_Event_%E2%80%93_Battlefield_Barrens_Preview-5_8_2013

New story explaining what happens to Sunwalker Dezco’s kids.  Holy Cow!!! Pandaria needs a daycare center!  http://us.battle.net/wow/en/game/lore/destination-pandaria/faction-stories/bleeding-sun/1

Dead Island Riptide is a sequel to Dead Island released back in 2011. At first I had my doubts about this title given I couldn’t suffer through the first game long enough to beat it.  Riptide thankfully started off with a nice recap of the events from the first game from beginning to end.  So if you are picking up Dead Island Riptide and never played the first game, can’t quite remember what happened, or like me, simply never finished, this will get you up to speed. The four characters from the original game along with a new character, John, a humanitarian soldier, who’s special is hand to hand combat long with the ability to learn weapon skills faster. Now if you had a save file from the original you can load your character and stats as well as your level from your save file.

The game starts on the boat you were brought to using the helicopter you used to escape the island.  Now what would be creepier than waking up on a boat that is being overrun by zombies taking on water in the middle of a storm?  Warning lights flashing, long dripping corridors and the further you travel the water goes from around your feet to your knees.  In the original Dead Island the hotel at the start was probably the scarest part of the game, at least in my opinion.  While this is was not quite as scary, it was indeed a very new and interesting setting to start off on.

The story for Dead Island Riptide starts off being pretty generic with repetitive objectives. Go here find this, grab that, and now go here is pretty much a good two thirds of your story quests.  It does get better just stick it out and you won’t regret it.  It just so happens that the island that you’re drifted upon is slated to be nuked.  So not only do you have to survive to get off this island like you did in the past but now time is not your friend because an impending doom lies in wait for you.  Desperate times will lead to desperate measures, but it seems to take a long time and a lot of “go, here grab this” to lead to those desperate measures.

This game looks absolutely stunning. I was taken aback the minute I woke up on, yes a new island not the same one as the first.  A good amount of detail was put into this paradise gone undead.  While this game is filled with undead, blood, and bodies everywhere it still manages to display this rather beautiful laid out and sizable island, even though I enjoyed the scenery, after traveling through the world I didn’t find myself as impressed with the land as the first game. It felt like a step back rather than forward.

Through traversing this island you can find several vehicles in which I feel was much better to navigate this time around.  It didn’t feel it was as touchy, had momentum and weight to it; giving it an all-around more controllable driving experience.  There is also a boat you get to travel around in and deal with you guessed it!  Zombies!  Zombies, numerous zombies, are in the water trying to climb into your boat to eat at your flesh.

When it comes to the game play it offers I found this area to be one of the few problems with Dead Island Riptide.  When aiming the gun the movement of your weapons is severely reduced; making getting that headshot not as easy as one would think.  The movement, while giving your character weight in shifting momentum from right to left and forward to back, was rather slow in response time.  It was a little too much. The melee combat was fantastic, making it the highlight.  However, it feels repetitive and the animation of the zombies and even your character seem a bit off at times.

The AI is well done. In times where you’ll be swarmed with zombies, using your wit to outsmart and out maneuver them, they will react and adjust their behavior based on your actions.  In Riptide you’ll being fighting hordes of zombies, finding yourself in some sticky situations fighting off four or more at a time. They seem to spawn endlessly from certain locations, which depending on the type of player you are could be a good or bad thing.

The crafting system is fun and unique, giving a reason to gather and search what you can when you can all the while birthing interesting weapon combinations for some zombie carnage. Among those combinations were flaming shovels and electrified katanas, just to name a few. There is even a wolverine like claw for fist combat, part of the reason I chose John.  Just like in the original your weapons do deteriorate as they’re used, great feature. The work bench is not only for crafting, but also repairing as well as upgrading what you currently have; making it stronger, better, faster.

The talent system in Dead Island Riptide remains close to the original, allowing you to gain new abilities like an upper cut attack or to reduce the stamina consumed while running, jumping and more. The trouble with the talent system is that many of the talents offer only subtle change unless you put all points into it.

The sounds effects add a certain ambiance, making the thrills more thrilling and the environment more rich and alive. The sound mixed with the rich textures and environment make for an immersive world that you would find yourself roaming for hours, whether for the sake of just killing zombies, leveling up, exploring or just progressing the story.   If you have a gaming headset plug it in and enjoy this as it will only enhance the experience.

As with the original, I would recommend this game to be played with a friend or others, while it does seem to be fun played solo as well. With another or others to play with, it just adds so much more to the game.  If you have one or more friends to play this with or were a fan of the first this is a great buy.  If you’re a fan of shooters and want a zombie shooter this is not really for you. The gun combat is very much lacking in overall control.  As with the mobs of zombies in Dead Island Riptide the more the merrier. A go to game for its drop in drop out co-op.