The Week in Games
Back to the post-apocalyptic future, more games with sexy librarians, and lots of pretty, after the break.
Hype of the Week
Borderlands (PC, Xbox, PS3) is a newly-released first-person shooter with RPG elements. It’s set in a sci-fi setting that’s similar to Fallout’s. The play is similar to Diablo — lots of killing, 4 separate playable characters, each with their own unique abilities and skill tree. The reviews have been uniformly good (85 at Metacritic). The stand-out feature might be the opt-in cooperative multiplayer — 1up called it “MarioParty for FPS fans” in their B+ review:
No, that doesn’t mean that Borderlands is suddenly a board game full of mascots, fluctuating rules, and silly minigames. It’s that Borderlands is a game where the single-player ranges from good to downright boring or frustrating; but when you add multiple players to a session, it becomes a delightful fusion of cooperative mechanics, a simple (yet effective) reward scheme, and solid gunplay. It’s secretly the party game for people who disdain minigames, but love to shoot things in the face.
Here’s the trailer:
Hype of the Week: Runner-Up
This week Famitsu, perhaps the most popular video game magazine in Japan, gave a perfect 40 rating to Bayonetta (Xbox, PS3), an action title starring – as near as I can tell – a sexy librarian. It is the the first Xbox 360 title to receive this score. The game releases in the US on January 31st.
I mention Bayonetta for two reasons. First, 40! That’s four times as good as a game we’d have here in the states. Secondly, it gave me an excuse to point to this ad, which features a real live sexy librarian:
Business News
Videogame sales in September were up for the first time in six months, but still weak. Analysts were expecting double digits, and got 1%. (Depending on whom you listen to, The Beatles: Rock Band either hurt or helped sales.) Perhaps as a result of the market, GameStop stock tumbled. (Just days after their head executive sold $60 million of his stock.)
Meanwhile, over in independent land, 2D Boy’s ‘pay-what-you-want’ sale for World of Goo (reported here last week) was declared a huge success, and extended until October 25th. Follow the link for details, including a chart of what people paid.
Production Notes
I’m a sucker for ‘designer’s notes’ — sketches of characters; notes about decisions the production team made about characters, motivation, and plot; animation tests; paintings that influence mood and palette. This week brought a lot of great urls in that category:
- Boing Boing – ‘The Art and Motion of The Beatles: Rock Band’
- GameInformer – ‘Inside the Game: Epic Mickey’
- Boing Boing: ‘Like Ghibli Barfing Rainbows: the Art and Motion of Capybara’s Critter Crunch’
- Kotaku: ‘Virtual Fashion: What They’re Wearing In Uncharted 2′
Miscellaneous Hardware Notes
IGN, iPhoneFreak, and Zikkir all wondered if the iPhone is good for gaming. (Meanwhile, the SuicideGirls released a choose-your-own path iPhone game where the object is to seduce a girl.) … A bunch of geeks at Carnegie Mellon did the obvious thing with a Microsoft Surface and played Dungeons and Dragons on it. … A videogame analyst predicted that Project Natal will cost $50, and the PS3 sphere no more than $100. … Stone Age gamer is taking pre-orders for a handheld device that plays Sega Genesis carts. It costs $54.99, comes pre-packed with 20 official Sega titles, and ships in late October.
Game-Trading Made Easy?
SwitchGames is a recently-launched site that allows its users to trade games: 1-for-1. One user proposes a trade, the other accepts, games are mailed. Joining is free. Here’s an article on G4 about the service.
