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SubscribeThe most lasting monument that will be built to honor me is likely to be a simple gravestone with my name and dates of birth and death etched into it. A tombstone is an enduring memorial, but it's also an impersonal one. It's difficult to express the wonder and the turmoil of a single human life with a single slab of granite and a bouquet of flowers resting at its base.
9.03m seeks--but ultimately fails--to honor memories in a way a simple monument cannot. It is an interactive memorial for the precious souls lost in 2011 when a powerful tsunami devastated Japan's eastern coast. It does not depict the lives of known victims, nor does it present a solemn list of names on which to pontificate. Instead, it leads you across a tranquil beach in first-person perspective, where glowing markers lead you to dark silhouettes that represent lives cut short. As you approach, the shadowy figures dissipate, replaced with precious items that embody the joy, the youth, and the love that were washed away in the destructive deluge. The first figure: a young boy who vanishes, and is then substituted with a soccer ball, which in turn erupts in a flash of luminous particles, leaving a butterfly that flutters ahead, guiding you to the next shadow.
This 10-minute journey uses emotionally manipulative audiovisuals to make its impact. The sky, the sand, the ocean, and even the sun are infused with an indigo hue, initially lulling you into a serene melancholy underscored by the hushed roar of waves lapping at the shore. A maudlin piano soundtrack creates momentary dissonance with suspended chords, then gives way to relaxed thirds--a simple, proven method of inviting quiet contemplation. Each cherished object you examine (a music box, an engagement ring, and so forth) brings to mind an individual who will never dream again, yet each butterfly seems to emblematize the victim's soul, the game implying in its cliched conclusion that the spirits of the lost live on.
You might call 9.03m a form of interactive poetry, though its final message is more "Hallmark card" than "heartfelt eulogy." It is undoubtedly committed to its manipulation; the gentle camera movements, glittering waves, and hazy visuals want to comfort you, to embrace you. And in some sense, 9.03 works, in the way a Thomas Kinkaide painting works, or a Stephenie Meyer novel works. It has a shallow allure that allows you to use words like "pretty" and "pleasant" to describe it. But the game's laudable sentiment is an empty facsimile of grief and hope, rather than an honest expression of those emotions. Just as a tombstone is too dry and solemn to properly commemorate the tumult of a human life, 9.03m is too hollow to be a respectful tribute, and never uses player interaction in any meaningful way.
9.03m thus has no more to offer than would a pretty landscape drawing dedicated to the tragedy's victims. It's hard to fault the developer's intentions, and I appreciate the game's tranquil color palette and its pensive atmosphere. In a different context, 9.03m might have been a lovely trifle--but the lives snuffed out in 2011, and the survivors that mourn them, deserve more than just a trifle.
Ska Studios, the developer behind Charlie Murder and The Dishwasher, has quietly released one more game before 2013 came to a close, officially listed on the Xbox Marketplace as TIME VIKING!!!!!ANDSPACERAPTOR. You can download a trial game for free on Xbox 360 and get the full version for $1.
Ska Studios considers it a spiritual successor to its earlier and lesser known I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1, another Xbox Live Indie Game that Ska released for $1. The game didn't get as much attention as Ska's later releases, but it was well liked by those who found it, including many Gamespot readers.
The game's description is just as ridiculous as its title, and hence useless in describing what it actually is, but as you can see from its trailer (which is worth watching for the song alone), it seems like a 2D shooter for one or two players, in the signature Ska Studios hand drawn art style.
In ways both fantastical and familiar, Violett weaves a yarn that snakes around you and pulls you in. This point-and-click adventure shoves its surreality and challenge to the forefront, announcing its intention to lure you into its twisted world and twist your brain into knots from the get-go. As the story grows, the game's mechanics wane, touching on possibilities Violett never fully exploits. Yet where the lead character's magical abilities never wholly blossom, the journey casts its own kind of spells on you. Push past the frustrating initial moments and prepare for a lovely and unusual tale.
The basic setup is one we've all heard before. A young, rebellious teen moves away from her school and her life in the city to an old haunted house in the middle of nowhere. It's a bit hackneyed, but it works as a solid foundation for the game's real draw: a mind-bending nightmare world filled with tough puzzles and inventive visuals.
Channeling some unholy fusion between all of the great surrealist artists as well as a healthy dose of Lewis Carroll, Violett opens with the eponymous teen looking around her room for something--anything--to do. She spots a glint through a hole in the baseboard and reaches in to find herself quickly transported to a visually stunning alternate world. The story is pretty bare-bones and is almost exclusively without words, instead relying on pictures, symbols, and facial expressions to communicate. Unfortunately, while that approach helps the already stellar visual presentation, Violett's first few moments are marred by a dedication to that minimalism.
After her transportation to this alternate dimension, Violett finds herself trapped inside a cage, and you, as the player, have some small degree of control over her surroundings. At first, she can't do much besides rock her cage back and forth, by means of you clicking and dragging the mouse to and fro. Unfortunately that requires some strange timing, and it took me about 10 minutes to get the hang of it. On the flip side, that awkward motion shows up only once more at the very end of the game. Coarse first impressions aside, this first scene is fantastic as a vertical slice of everything you need to learn to progress.
This pond is more representative of the late-game stages and lacks the strangeness of earlier stages, instead looking very grounded, albeit quite somber. Once you've rattled your cage sufficiently, you briefly grab the hands of a fairy, also imprisoned, which grants you some basic telekinetic powers. From there, you can manipulate objects throughout the room, either by simply clicking on them or by clicking and dragging them in a specific direction to achieve a specific effect. If you're trying to manipulate an object in the wrong way or at the wrong time, Violett shakes her head and mumbles disapprovingly.
Scattered around the room are a few colored orbs that you can collect by clicking on them. They are hidden, though, and very carefully disguised by the environment. These are orbs of elemental power, and they act as a constant sort of Easter-egg hunt. Often there are four or five on any given screen, but figuring out exactly where they sit is a running puzzle that helps guide you to look around the room for clues as to your next objective. With this knowledge in hand, you have all you need to move on.
Not everything in Violett's world looks like it comes from the land of nightmares...sometimes there are colorful party balloons! From there, things start to get really strange. The first room you come to after the introductory area features a demonic-looking teapot that never takes its one eye off of you. It's distinctly unnerving, but works well to set the creepy, absurdist tone. This room also tests the lessons you learned in the first room to make sure that you've got the hang of them. From there, you find an M.C. Escher-inspired hub of sorts that leads off to several other places, and the game proper begins. This is also the toughest part of the game, since you have several rooms that you must tackle with relatively little to guide you. The strangeness of the world and the obtuse rules it follows highlight Violett's nature as an outsider to this world. You don't understand it, because she doesn't, at least not yet. Regardless, this first hub and its connected rooms amount to the first few hours of gameplay, and they are stunningly hard. While some of that difficulty continues, after you start to get a decent grasp on the world, it isn't quite as alien or as hostile.
There's an overarching theme of escapism that steadily transitions to homesickness, much in the way that Alice's trip through the rabbit hole first seems like a fun romp before becoming more and more hostile. Here, though, the first few environments are remarkably unfriendly, whereas the later ones are wistful and lonely. Because there are no words or real cutscenes to help communicate the game's message, and there's a strong implication that this is Violett's escapist fantasy, it's hard to shake the feeling that this trip through the rabbit hole is reflective of Violett's own emotional state. Helping that interpretation along is the absolutely fantastic musical score. The music changes from room to room, helping to contextualize each major location in the game. Some rooms rely on pizzicato strings to imply that Violett is in danger; others shift into G minor chords to imply sadness and loneliness.
A few orb locations are obvious, but some aren't so easy. There are quite a few in this shot alone. Can you find them all? While the meat and potatoes of such simple games are the environments and the puzzles, Violett does have a few odd problems. First, while the colored orbs I mentioned earlier are useful in that they help encourage you to look around and closely examine the rooms, they don't have much utility beyond that. Later, Violett gains some other powers in addition to her telekinesis. It's sort of implied that the strength of those powers is related to how many orbs you've collected, but they don't change at all over time. Even if they did, those other powers are rarely used. Violett's ability to float, make plants grow, and finally encapsulate herself in a shield all seem like they'd be fantastically useful for navigating such a strange land, but they never come up in a story-critical context until the last few seconds of the game. Instead, they're used only to help collect pages of a diary left by an unknown stranger. These pages aren't critical, nor do they provide any hints to help the game along. They are entirely optional, though you often have to go to rather extreme lengths to collect them. I was left feeling that the game is unfinished, because these skills aren't used for anything interesting or vital.
Despite the oddly incomplete utilization of otherworldly psychic powers, and an insane difficulty curve, the emotional context goes a long way to helping Violett along. The steep curve is representative of Violett's own confusion, and the powers are her growing determination to escape this alternate world and return home. Violett is quiet and unassuming, but it steadily weaves a tale about childhood fears and desires with which we are all too familiar. Despite its surreal setting, it has a very personal touch that grounds it.
A freshly unearthed Sony patent has shown that the company is working on what appears to be a way to add new content to classic PlayStation games being emulated through the cloud.
The patent, filed in 2012 but released publicly yesterday through the United States Patent and Trademark Office, says that it will function as a framework that allows developers to introduce additional and modified content in a classic game--such as an iconic boss fight where players have less health--by creating snapshots of titles in an emulator.
Modified content could be introduced through this snapshot system, the patent explains.
"Finding new ways to play preexisting video games can increase the longevity of older games," reads the patent filing, describing its pitch for modified elements as mini-games. "In order to create mini-games without reverse engineering and recoding a game designer may rely on the use of triggers and snapshots to provide information needed for the mini-games without having to dig into the code of the legacy game.
In order to illustrate its point in the new patent, Sony also produced a series of images, including this awesome one where a stickman is fighting a ghost. "The mini-games may be made by providing an emulator with game inputs that bring the emulated game to a certain point where the mini-game will begin. A snapshot may be generated according to aspects of the present disclosure and that point may be used as the used as the starting point in the future mini-game. Thereafter, triggers may be generated in order to provide new experiences for the game."
Sony's patent--the catchily-titled "Suspending State of Cloud-Based Legacy Applications"--would likely integrate with cloud-streaming service Gaikai. Sony is yet to reveal its full plans on how, or precisely when, it will incorporate Gaikai into the PlayStation 4, but has mentioned that it wants PS4 owners to be able to stream PS3 games onto their new console.
More information on the patent can be found in this thorough analysis by Rösti on NeoGAF.
In ways both fantastical and familiar, Violett weaves a yarn that snakes around you and pulls you in. This point-and-click adventure shoves its surreality and challenge to the forefront, announcing its intention to lure you into its twisted world and twist your brain into knots from the get-go. As the story grows, the game's mechanics wane, touching on possibilities Violett never fully exploits. Yet where the lead character's magical abilities never wholly blossom, the journey casts its own kind of spells on you. Push past the frustrating initial moments and prepare for a lovely and unusual tale.
The basic setup is one we've all heard before. A young, rebellious teen moves away from her school and her life in the city to an old haunted house in the middle of nowhere. It's a bit hackneyed, but it works as a solid foundation for the game's real draw: a mind-bending nightmare world filled with tough puzzles and inventive visuals.
Channeling some unholy fusion between all of the great surrealist artists as well as a healthy dose of Lewis Carroll, Violett opens with the eponymous teen looking around her room for something--anything--to do. She spots a glint through a hole in the baseboard and reaches in to find herself quickly transported to a visually stunning alternate world. The story is pretty bare-bones and is almost exclusively without words, instead relying on pictures, symbols, and facial expressions to communicate. Unfortunately, while that approach helps the already stellar visual presentation, Violett's first few moments are marred by a dedication to that minimalism.
After her transportation to this alternate dimension, Violett finds herself trapped inside a cage, and you, as the player, have some small degree of control over her surroundings. At first, she can't do much besides rock her cage back and forth, by means of you clicking and dragging the mouse to and fro. Unfortunately that requires some strange timing, and it took me about 10 minutes to get the hang of it. On the flip side, that awkward motion shows up only once more at the very end of the game. Coarse first impressions aside, this first scene is fantastic as a vertical slice of everything you need to learn to progress.
This pond is more representative of the late-game stages and lacks the strangeness of earlier stages, instead looking very grounded, albeit quite somber. Once you've rattled your cage sufficiently, you briefly grab the hands of a fairy, also imprisoned, which grants you some basic telekinetic powers. From there, you can manipulate objects throughout the room, either by simply clicking on them or by clicking and dragging them in a specific direction to achieve a specific effect. If you're trying to manipulate an object in the wrong way or at the wrong time, Violett shakes her head and mumbles disapprovingly.
Scattered around the room are a few colored orbs that you can collect by clicking on them. They are hidden, though, and very carefully disguised by the environment. These are orbs of elemental power, and they act as a constant sort of Easter-egg hunt. Often there are four or five on any given screen, but figuring out exactly where they sit is a running puzzle that helps guide you to look around the room for clues as to your next objective. With this knowledge in hand, you have all you need to move on.
Not everything in Violett's world looks like it comes from the land of nightmares...sometimes there are colorful party balloons! From there, things start to get really strange. The first room you come to after the introductory area features a demonic-looking teapot that never takes its one eye off of you. It's distinctly unnerving, but works well to set the creepy, absurdist tone. This room also tests the lessons you learned in the first room to make sure that you've got the hang of them. From there, you find an M.C. Escher-inspired hub of sorts that leads off to several other places, and the game proper begins. This is also the toughest part of the game, since you have several rooms that you must tackle with relatively little to guide you. The strangeness of the world and the obtuse rules it follows highlight Violett's nature as an outsider to this world. You don't understand it, because she doesn't, at least not yet. Regardless, this first hub and its connected rooms amount to the first few hours of gameplay, and they are stunningly hard. While some of that difficulty continues, after you start to get a decent grasp on the world, it isn't quite as alien or as hostile.
There's an overarching theme of escapism that steadily transitions to homesickness, much in the way that Alice's trip through the rabbit hole first seems like a fun romp before becoming more and more hostile. Here, though, the first few environments are remarkably unfriendly, whereas the later ones are wistful and lonely. Because there are no words or real cutscenes to help communicate the game's message, and there's a strong implication that this is Violett's escapist fantasy, it's hard to shake the feeling that this trip through the rabbit hole is reflective of Violett's own emotional state. Helping that interpretation along is the absolutely fantastic musical score. The music changes from room to room, helping to contextualize each major location in the game. Some rooms rely on pizzicato strings to imply that Violett is in danger; others shift into G minor chords to imply sadness and loneliness.
A few orb locations are obvious, but some aren't so easy. There are quite a few in this shot alone. Can you find them all? While the meat and potatoes of such simple games are the environments and the puzzles, Violett does have a few odd problems. First, while the colored orbs I mentioned earlier are useful in that they help encourage you to look around and closely examine the rooms, they don't have much utility beyond that. Later, Violett gains some other powers in addition to her telekinesis. It's sort of implied that the strength of those powers is related to how many orbs you've collected, but they don't change at all over time. Even if they did, those other powers are rarely used. Violett's ability to float, make plants grow, and finally encapsulate herself in a shield all seem like they'd be fantastically useful for navigating such a strange land, but they never come up in a story-critical context until the last few seconds of the game. Instead, they're used only to help collect pages of a diary left by an unknown stranger. These pages aren't critical, nor do they provide any hints to help the game along. They are entirely optional, though you often have to go to rather extreme lengths to collect them. I was left feeling that the game is unfinished, because these skills aren't used for anything interesting or vital.
Despite the oddly incomplete utilization of otherworldly psychic powers, and an insane difficulty curve, the emotional context goes a long way to helping Violett along. The steep curve is representative of Violett's own confusion, and the powers are her growing determination to escape this alternate world and return home. Violett is quiet and unassuming, but it steadily weaves a tale about childhood fears and desires with which we are all too familiar. Despite its surreal setting, it has a very personal touch that grounds it.
@sunyatanada76 It must be such a hard game to balance. I like how now it is going to be less linear, so you won't have bottlenecks like O & S. But the series has die hard fans who want it to be much harder, and you have to pair that with making it possible for new timers to finish.
They've been talking about balance in a few interviews, and some of the stuffs sounds very promising, and sometimes a bit strange.
Q: Has anyone seen a PC release date yet? I'm buying on PS3 first, but was going to get PC version once I had played through a few times to make it easier to use character creators for PvP and mod for challenges, etc.
An expired licensing agreement means that all of Activision's titles based in the Marvel universe have been delisted and removed from sale, including the recently released Deadpool.
High Moon Studios' critically lukewarm Deadpool shipped in June 2013, and is now unavailable on Steam, Xbox Live, and PlayStation Network. Physical copies of the game are still available.
The Activision titles affected are Deadpool, X-Men: The Official Game, X-Men: Destiny, X-Men: Origins - Wolverine, and the Spider-Man titles Edge of Time, Shattered Dimensions, Friend or Foe, and Web of Shadows.
Beenox's movie tie-in Amazing Spider-Man is still available, however, and Activision community manager Dan Amrich confirmed that Amazing Spider-Man 2 is still on track to be released alongside the movie sequel this year.
Activision's Marvel games disappearing digitally has occurred shortly after Capcom removed its Marvel vs. Capcom games from online storefronts.
"Just as Capcom was asked to remove their Marvel games from download, so did we. Activision's ASM2 game comes out this spring," said Amrich on Twitter.
[UPDATE] It appears police showed up at Phantom Lord's house last night.
"Just had an automatic pointed at me, put in hand cuffs and sat in the back of a cop car as I watched as 6 policemen go through my whole house.. will keep you all updated," he wrote on Facebook before later providing a lengthy explanation of the day's events in a YouTube video.
The original story is below.
A hacker group going by the name DERP has taken responsibility for DDoS attacks earlier today against League of Legends, EA.com, Battle.net, and other gaming sites. The downtime for each site seemed to last no more than 10-15 minutes, but the real target of the attacks, according to a post on Reddit, was a Twitch streamer going by the alias Phantom Lord.
Reddit summarizes the situation as: "A group called DERP is apparently DDoSing League of Legends NA/EU/OCE servers. They also took down Dota 2, Club Penguin, Battle.net, EA.com. They are taking down whatever game Phantoml0rd is playing (or perhaps, trying to play rolf). Most recent event is Phantoml0rd playing on OCE with stream fans and they took it down. On behalf of the League of Legends situation, it seems like they are directly attacking Internap network, Riot's service provider."
According to his Twitch channel, PhantomLord is a "professional streamer" with over 350,000 followers. PhantomLord's stream is currently down, but according to his Facebook and Twitch chat, police were called to his home in response to a "hostage situation." PhantomLord wrote, "Just had an automatic pointed at me, put in hand cuffs, and sat in the back of a cop car as I watched as 6 policemen go through my whole house." He later posted that the situation had stabilized: "I'm good guys. More updates soon, promise."
The previously affected sites are all currently online and functioning normally, but we'll update this story with new details as they develop.
@torbjorno seems slightly generous based on the review;
short single player,
very limited co-op,
micro transactions to boost scoring make a mockery of leader boards in competitive modes
I feel for reviewers these days,no way these transactions can sit well with anyone in the gaming community.
We can only stop it as a community, together, through sticking with the f2p models that offer cosmetic only purchases like Team Fortress 2 and Path of Exile. And turning a cold shoulder to the pay to win models that want to have a user/addict base rather than a fan base.
