Monthly Archives: April 2014

There Came an Echo Trailer – How to Keep Unwanted Roommates Away

There Came an Echo is a sci-fi squad-based RTS with voice-control, which means you will play alone because your roommates will think you’re weird shouting things like “Make It So” and “Shields Up!” They will label you, talk behind your back, exclude you from party invitations. I know this because when I was in grad school long long time ago, I had Rainbow Six 3 and woke up many roommates screaming Zulu, Zulu, Zulu in the middle of the night. Like the Tom Clancy game, you can control your men and women with your stick instead of voice, but why shell out $60 for a voice control game if you’re not going to voice control?

In addition to the default words, you can also program custom words, so the possibilities of colorful adjectives and verbs used to command your squad are endless. So instead of Picard-esqe, “Make It So”, you can say, “Make It $^%& So”. That will scare your roommates. They will check your closet for firearms. They will stay away, which might be a good thing. Speaking of Picard, Wil Wheaton lends his voice to the game. There are also other names famous in geekland.

The trailer shows a squad-based RTS that looks like other top-down-angled squad based games. Your squad is like so big and the enemy is like so big and they’re taking cover and shooting at each other and trying to flank each other. There’s one guy who’s limping because he’s presumably been shot and he’s hurting and he’ll die soon if he doesn’t get help. It’s a sad sad world, but it’s voice control, so command him to limp limp limp his way to safety!

The game would benefit from colorful characters like in Jagged Alliance. And disobedience. For instance, if I order Dynamo to charge a machine gun, I fully expect him to say, “You do it, S-O-B!”

The PS4/Xbox One game was funded on Kickstarter and will be out in 2015.

The Evil Within Gameplay Trailer – Box ’em up!

There’s nothing more horrifying than a blood-covered, axe-wielding butcher with a box on his head named Boxman.  He’s the star of the gameplay trailer for The Evil Within, the new survival-horror by Shinji Mikami (Resident Evil) and Bethesda Softworks, and published by Tango Gameworks.

Sebastian Castellanos is a detective.  He goes to a crime scene, crazy things happen, and he ends up in a strange world where more crazy things happen including Boxman.  Some of the other eye candies in the trailer include a dead goat, a straight-jacket ghost, a river of blood, mannequin man, a big arm, zombies, mad “live-dissection” scientist, water beast, asian female spider beast, and hoodie ghost.  There’s also some sweet chainsaw artistry as well as barbed-wire-on-face action.  Boxman, though, is the real beauty of the game and rivals Pinhead as the ultimate show stopper.

The game’s got everything you want in a survival-horror and it’s out on August 26 for Windows, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One.

EA Sports UFC “Gameplay” Trailer – It ain’t Bruce Leroy

It’s Bruce Lee!

He’s an unlockable MMA fighter on the new EA Sports UFC game out on June 17.  The gameplay trailer isn’t a gameplay trailer, but it doesn’t matter because it’s got Bruce Lee and he looks pretty darn good even though he’s not fighting in the trailer.  We want to see Bruce Lee kick some butt.  That’s how you sell these games, man.  And while you’re at it, get Kareem in there.  And Bolo.  No fighting game is a fighting game without Bolo Yeung.

To be honest, I don’t think Bruce would beat Anderson Silva in a match.  I just don’t see Lee wing-chunning some of these dudes to the canvas.  But just about every GenXer would want Bruce to beat the best of the UFC.  That’s why I am definitely looking forward to this game, although it doesn’t look all that awesome.  Again, the trailer doesn’t show actual gameplay – just cinematic replays – but nevertheless, some of the KO punches don’t look true.  A bit like a wrestling punch glancing off to the side but the opponent drops.

But it’s Bruce Lee.  And it’s UFC.  And it’s new gen (both PS4 and Xbox One).  So let’s get it on!

Inspire Me – Point, Click, Change the World!

It’s an inspiring time to be a gamer. Not only is there overall disruption in the industry, but inspirations like Inspire Me have a chance at reality thanks to crowd-funding. Blyts Studios’s new indie is a point-and-clicker coming soon to Kickstarter, and it looks like a good one.

The premise is simple but open to endless possibilities. It’s the future and there’s a time machine. Mix in a mischievous, curious kid and what happens? Give your iPhone to a three-year-old and see what he does with it. You’ll never find your favorite apps again. Likewise, Kelvin messes up history when he goofs around his father’s time machine. Newton and the apple? Doesn’t happen. Beethoven fails to compose Symphony No. 5 and no one’s talking about Mona Lisa’s smile. Kelvin then has to do his best Marty McFly and make things right in the past before he goes back to the future.

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Each adventure requires Kelvin to solve a series of point-and-click puzzles. Click on a bucket of milk to refill a bottle, a door to open it, or a pie on a window sill to steal it…or try to. The trailer shows other fails: Kelvin gives a bucket of water to a man who splashes his lazy horse, but the horse still refuses to move. He also fishes in a fountain but finds nothing but junk. The trial and error is interesting though the game may get old fast if it results in pointing-and-clicking everything on the screen. The game may benefit from some interaction with other characters via point-and-click dialogue, which may already be part of the game though there were no examples of it in the trailer.

The game features some nice artwork with humorous details: a fat man takes several small bites to eat a drumstick. And interesting perspectives: at 1:01 of the trailer, we see a blurred wind vane in the foreground indicating we are observing the scene from just above the rooftops. Overall, the look is amusing and appropriate.

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What other adventures lie ahead for Kelvin besides Newton, Beethoven and Da Vinci? That will depend on the funding. Personally, I would like to see some of the big game-changers in history like Alexander, Gutenberg, or even the guy who invented the wheel whoever that may have been. There are so many great possibilities and many opportunities to be inspired!

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Sev Zero Trailer – Fire TV it UP!

I’m loving Jeff Bezos right now.

First, Amazon launches an industry game-changer in Fire TV, and then lands an immediate combo-jab with a kick-ass game trailer.  Amazon Game Studios’s Sev Zero looks like a good start to their quest to disrupt the console oligopoly.  It’s a third-person shooter/tower-defense Fire TV-exclusive about humanity’s last stand against an alien horde…or something like that.  The exclusive part makes me wince (freedom, not restriction!), and the graphics look like a mobile game, but the gameplay doesn’t seem like a complete dud.  It’s also not a freemium, though it is free (with purchase of the Fire Game Controller).

Sev Zero won’t replace Halo or TitanFall, and it might not even be a great game, but the launch is exciting because it’s a glimpse of the potential of Fire TV.  The Microsoft Titan will Fall.  Owning living rooms is now Sony’s Final Fantasy.

Now, only if I can get a hand on that controller.  I placed my order yesterday but won’t be in stock until end of April.

Amazon’s Fire TV – Disruption Has Begun

Consoles are dead.

Today, Amazon revealed its Fire TV, which opens the door for what gamers haven’t had with consoles past: freedom and affordability.  To be clear, it isn’t an exclusive gaming device.  It’s a home theater device that supports gaming.  PS4 and Xbox are very expensive gaming devices that also offer home theater.

So, which will win?

Consoles will be extinct in a few years.  Fire TV may not be the sole answer, but the field is open now.  Just like JVC isn’t the only VHS/DVD player maker, others will enter the field, which will lower the price and increase new developers to enter the market.  Tech will improve.  Software will improve.  Games on stream will get better because the basic truth is that gamers want to play games and the developers want to get it to them without a big brother middle man.  Fire TV isn’t fully there yet, and it won’t completely remove the middle-man, but disruption has begun.  The Wright Brothers made a crappy little plane but that ultimately led to a man on the moon.

So one would think the consoles would be going in the same direction instead of coming up with more expensive products and features people ultimately don’t want.  PS4 has even announced original programming, a terrible business decision that rivals other bad tech-biz decisions like restricting Betamax manufacturers, also by Sony.

It was a long wait, but finally someone understood that in America, the only things people really care about are freedom and money.  So far, Fire TV seems to offer both (at least compared to consoles).

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