Yesterday we learned that Dead Rising 2: Case Zero had 300,000 users on its leaderboard, suspicious language that could be parsed a couple of ways. Today they’ve come back around to play the story out with this little quote.
Author Archive
Jonathan Blow was at PAX over the weekend with a new game, but he didn’t tell anyone. Or, he told some people but not other people? It’s hard to say how people picked up on an unmarked booth, but I guess I’ll just go ahead and offer the benefit of the doubt that journalists were just trying out every unmarked booth they could find.
Konami has made Silent 8, which is still the working title, official for PS3 and Xbox 360, platforms they previously confirmed at E3, to release in 2011, which is a whole year and not a release date.
Game Informer has new screens of Bioshock Infinite today, and there’s a lot of information to cull from these guarded visages.
For instance, The Handyman, which replaces the Big Daddy as most-feared combatant, has really big hands. So, there’s that. Also, the top story of the day is that “anarchists lose.” Plus, ice made from distilled water is an item that people sell. Hoo boy, my mind is reeling with the possibilities of playing a game that may or may not be a lot like the original Bioshock but with bigger hands involved.
Read more on Bioshock Infinte screens: Still too much bloom lighting….
Lance Henriksen and Keith David are solid vocal talents that bring a little cred to game narratives, as they did in Modern Warfare 2.
But there’s just a little more push to the names Gary Oldman and Ed Harris, who will lend their voices to Call of Duty: Black Ops. Oh, boy. They’ll be yelling all sorts of things I won’t remember the next day while my ears squint through all the explosions straining to make out any coherent or relevant dialog. Really, anything of substance at all, Call of Duty.
Listen, the new Duke Nukem Forever thing is great. I can’t wait. But it sort of overshadowed another big Gearbox moment from PAX over the weekend.
Namely, Gearbox’s head honcho Randy Pitchford taking the reins on a game of his own. We’re talking about a pretty extended timeline here, but if we’re taking bets on the most influential company of the next generation, I would stake some claim on whatever this is going to turn out to be.
New games this week are pretty underwhelming unless you belong to the niche market of hockey by way of NHL 11 or Spiderman cash-ins.
Actually, I don’t have any idea how well Spiderman: Shattered Dimensions came together, but this is shaping up to follow the pattern that Web of Shadows set back in 2008: This is a game they need to have on shelves in time for Gramma to pick it up for junior. Reviews should start trickling in later today, so prove me wrong, Beenox.
I recorded 24 minutes worth in my roughly first 190 minutes worth of play. That’s a little over a tenth of the entire experience. Is that too much?
In the Stacks peridocially features gems you might have missed in Netflix’s extremely uneven Watch Instantly library.
On some levels, Fear Itself it has a plenty in common with Masters of Horror, a series it shares a lot of creative talent with. But the discipline and constrictions that NBC put on this concept — handing isolated, short-form projects to renowned directors — did it a lot of good. Gone are the trips so gruesome as to be unrecognizable, but gone, too, are the languid, tone-def episodes that practically dematerialize in front of you.
“If this is all life has to offer me, then I can do without.” — Casting trailer for Heavy Rain.
The best writing David cage has done came long before we got a hold of Heavy Rain. It’s that casting trailer they used to show off the game’s tech at trade shows. It seemed like a maudlin misstep at the time, too breathless, too unfocused. It is those things still today, but how it colors the project is more relevant now that we know what the game is.
It’s about living out the cliches of victimhood, it’s about cutting youself while you’re trying to cut him, it’s about remembering what it used to be like before all it ever was was raining just before sunset. It’s high school poetry in the mouth of a serial killer. It’s dreck: limp self-absorption, but it’s a mesmerizing trip into the belly of the beast and sometimes even a profound one.
I fell into the brief expansion episode expecting a similiar retelling of the grand narrative in broad strokes. That’s not what this is. What is on offer here seems more focused in game play, but a shallower representation of the bigger picture.