Fragile — Japanese RPG Musical Trailer
I’m mostly posting this just to fill up Helvetica with the boiling fluids of pure and liquid desire. Fragile, or more proper, Fragile: Sayonara Tsuki no Haikyo, is a role-playing game for Nintendo’s Wii set in a post-apocalyptic world. Sound familiar to anyone here? The difference is that the world is covered by a strange darkness and dense fog. Most of the world’s population has vanished, and the cities rest empty in their rotting decay.
Fragile should appear on store shelves in Japan come around the end of January, but as yet there’s no telling when it might be released to the rest of the world.
Budcat Creations Swallowed by Activision
You’ve never heard of them, but Budcat Creations was responsible for rather a few games in the last couple years, notably Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock, and Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. This recent success caught the attention of Activision, who devoured the small studio in a recent deal. You can check out the press release here.
This move helps to strengthen Activision’s grip on the music game genre as they seek to forge an unbreakable steel collar around those clicky plastic guitars.
Jeremy Andersen of Budcat Creations refused to comment on the financial terms of the deal. Activision, when asked for a quote, merely twirled its mustache before issuing a cackling laugh.
Necessary Complexity in Virtual Gaming and Games Within Games
The good folks over at Massively.com are running a great article about necessary complexity in games, using the failure of Google’s Lively MMO as an example. Short order, games that are too complex might offer players a wealth of options and free cookies, but no one’s going to run that kind of rat maze when they could be playing World of Warcraft. A game that’s too simple, like Lively, risks boring players out of their skulls with a lack of options and sending them back to playing World of Warcraft. Or, to use the jargon of the day, boring games suck. You can read the article here.
Now, I’ve been a part of the pen-and-paper gaming world for aeons long past remembering, and our shrouded guild of fiends and ghouls has been wrestling with the same problem. Why is the most popular role-playing game in …
Left 4 Dead — How to Zombie
As a malign parasite entity driving around a stolen corpse body like a little car, I have a natural affinity for the undead. Left 4 Dead is a great game that helps feed my hunger for zombie action, but it has become painfully obvious that no matter how many of the ravening dead we throw at the survivors, well, sometimes those bastard breathers get out alive. This must end.
To assist my fellow brain-eaters in their tireless efforts to devour the internal organs of the living, I have collected a set of fine instructional videos on how best to use your unhallowed and repulsive talents. With a little study, and alot of practice, soon you too will feel the flesh of humanity slithering down your clenching throat.
The Smoker: It’s all about the tongue, baby
…
Dead Rising. Wii. Zombie Rock Video
Well, this is unique. Capcom has plans for Dead Rising on the Wii, which only makes sense, but what doesn’t is this video. Zombie punk rockers sing about Dead Rising in Japanese. There is violence, and there are explosions. Check it out right here.
Pirates of the Burning Sea Updates Avatar Combat
And it’s finally time, too. Pirates of the Burning Sea is, well, a pirate MMORPG that released to relatively little fanfare some time ago. Partly, the gaming community received it with a resounding wall of “meh” thanks to a dull and uninteresting combat system. Battles outside your ship boiled down to a simple matter of pressing a button, maybe two, and either winning or losing. There just wasn’t much to do in combat that could change the results of a fight.
The folks at Pirates noticed this little lack, and took it to heart. They’ve scrapped the old combat system entirely and replaced it with a new, more involved system backed by streamlined and effective character skills. The result is build 1.11, the Clash of Steel upgrade. You can read the release notes for 1.11 over here, which is something you’ll …
City of Heroes Begins Macintosh Client Open Beta
The superhero MMORPG City of Heroes has recently opened up trials for its spanking new Macintosh client. Previously limited to the obviously superior Windows operating system, this new client will allow the desperate market sliver that makes up Mac users to experience the joys of eye beams and massive raids against an immobile sac of protoplasm.
The full release of a Mac version for City of Heroes is expected around January of 2009. Or maybe February. Could be March.
Lead designer Position posted the announcement in this forum thread. You can also sign up for the Macintosh beta test over here.
Virtual Worlds as Teaching Tools
As gamers, we know games are incredible learning tools. Just look at everything you’ve memorized to pwn noobs in AV, right? Hell, you knew what I meant when I said “AV.” That’s learning. On and off, the educational community has been considering the potential of games to teach real lessons in science, math, and reading, but the efforts have always been local and half-hearted. With the rise of social gaming (like, say, the World of Warcraft that Alterac Valley comes from), the scale of gaming has changed. This change allows more gamers to experience the lessons a game might teach.
The educational video games Food Force, a U.N.-produced game on the mechanics of food aid distribution, and Whyville, another game that takes place in a virtual world, each has about 4 million players, a number that far exceeds the number of students graduating each year …
World of Warcraft, Lich King, Claim 11.5 Million Subscribers
To put that into perspective, the US presidential election was decided by about three-million votes, and some European countries couldn’t even aspire to that sort of population. In a recent press release, Blizzard confirmed Lich King sales of over four-million copies in the first month, which makes me wonder when those other many millions of players plan on getting with the program. That number also tags Lich King as the fastest, and best-selling, release of all time, a record formerly held by Burning Crusade. Gee.
You can read the whole press release to discover just how tightly Blizzard has taken the game industry’s balls in their iron claw. If you’re one of those millions who have yet to upgrade, do it! Lich King is great, Death Knights are more metal than the black shores of Hades, and the quest lines are a vast …
Crystal Chronicles on the Wii. God Help Us All
The official name is Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time, but down here on the streets, we’re calling it goddamn gamer crack. I’ve lost friends to the original game, always coming around, asking if I wanted to try some Crystal, telling me everyone’s doing it. Join the party, they said. Now, on the Wii, sometime in 2009? Hell, I tell you.
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