Enemy Within’s big question is just how much you’re willing to monkey with your soldiers before they’re no longer human. Certainly, your troops seem more human now – each responding to orders in their native language and wearing armour appropriate to their roles – but XCOM’s expansion is about taking your pawns and tearing them apart until they’re as abominable as the alien threats they face. It’s all for the good of humanity; ours, not theirs.
Enemy Within is a director’s cut of sorts – the same story with new beats, the same systems with new mechanics, the same missions with new maps. “The Civilization expansion packs [are] one-third, one-third, one-third,” says senior game designer Ananda Gupta. “It’s one-third new stuff we dream up for this new title, one-third modifications of existing systems, and then one-third fan-service fixing. We’re taking a similar approach [with Enemy Within].”
New stuff includes XCOM’s Cybernetics and Genetics labs, where XCOM’s soldiers are filled with alien goo and riddled with robotic components in the name of winning this new, more difficult war. Powerful cyborg MECs can be deployed with flamethrowers, grenade launchers and cover-shredding special attacks, and while they can’t take cover, they can be cover when locked down. Fighting alongside them are genetically augmented comrades who can be modified with alien tech to add passive cloaking systems, psi-cancelling implants and other abilities.
The two new flavours of augmentation dramatically change the squad makeup, and their presence is vital with the aliens fielding ‘Mechtoids’ – machine-encased Sectoid soldiers. There are 47 new maps, new weapons for mech troopers, new projects from the Foundry and a new resource – MELD – powering development of those new units once found. MELD canisters are scattered around maps, depleting with every turn and adding another tactical knot to each battle: do you rush in and grab the MELD or inch your way forward, scavenging what little you can as you leapfrog from cover to cover?
“There were a number of things we wanted to fix about the original game,” says Gupta about the existing systems Firaxis rebuilt and fixed, most notably the infamous bug that broke how XCOM calculated flanking advantages. “We needed to address that flanking bug but we could never patch it, so the engineers investigated it and found out there were three different flanking bugs and that’s why no one fix was working. We were able to fix it but we had to do a fairly substantial dive into some of this code, so while they were digging around they made some improvements to how certain things work. I think there are a number of cases where, with sharp eyes, players will notice that things are a little smoother, a little better… in some of the micro-movements of units, the kick from weapons and so forth.”
The remaining third was all fan service. Inventory management is made easier by a button that returns everyone’s equipment to a shared pool, and multiplayer gets new maps and offline squad editing. It’s a shopping list of things that only matter if you play XCOM regularly, but when you do they’re a big deal. Players on console platforms may respond less well to such small upgrades, where Firaxis’s “substantial dive” into the game’s code prohibits Enemy Within being distributed as downloadable content, but XCOM veterans will notice a little extra punch to the weapons, a slightly faster response to orders, and other near-invisible upgrades that make Enemy Within less like an expansion and more like the game Enemy Unknown should have been.
That’s not to say that XCOM: Enemy Unknown failed – “Nobody at the studio expected we would win 15 Game Of The Year awards, but everyone thought we were going to put together a game that would surprise people,” Gupta says – but like Civilization’s expansions, once you play Enemy Within, the original game seems much smaller and more limited. It’s not enough to deploy a shotgun-wielding sprinter to lead the assault any more; you have to consider his armour, how his genetic modifications meet the specific threats of the battle, and whether to send that fast soldier after MELD or after Sectoid heads. Cover-reducing attacks from mecha troopers mean soldiers have to stay mobile, fire and gas offer new ways to control space, and powerful MEC melee strikes knock soldiers off their feet and make precipices deadly.
Those additions to your tactical deck make it hard to go back to Enemy Unknown, but the $40 outlay on the Xbox and PS3 versions may make it hard to go forward for players already finished with Firaxis’s first XCOM project.
XCOM: Enemy Within will be released on 360, PS3 and PC on November 15.
The post XCOM: Enemy Within – a bigger, wider, tougher take on enemies unknown appeared first on Edge Online.
This is a PS4 PSA. Like the Xbox One, the PS4's compatibility with existing headsets leaves a lot to be desired. Both consoles come with a fully functional headset, mind, but that's little consolation for those with expensive gaming headsets. Potential PS4 compatibility, as reported by Game Informer, is complicated.
If you own the PlayStation Pulse headset (I do, it's pretty good), a system update will give the cans PS4 comparability. So, don't expect to use it at launch. Lame.
Meanwhile, according to Game Informer, "Any other headset that relies on bluetooth for chat will not work at all." Headsets that use USB for chat will eventually work with a system update. You can still get sound out of digital optical sets out of the box.
I'm disappointed the PlayStation Pulse won't even work out of the box. I don't intend to play online, anyway, but the Pulse is how I play into the wee hours of the night. Hopefully the compatibility update isn't far away.
Planning On Using An Existing Headset With A PS4? Read This [Game Informer]
The gaming community was shocked when the controversially outspoken yet undeniably talented indie designer Trent Trout publicly rage-quit the industry. Trout’s long and self-destructive struggle to complete the puzzler/platformer Fedora was already the stuff of legend. But he joined the notorious ranks of creative hothouse flowers when he got so upset over an insult from some blogger that he went ballistic on Twitter (vacillating, as usual, between preening belligerence and the rawest vulnerability) and cancelled the hotly anticipated Fedora 2, which had been predicted to take Trout much less time to complete than the first one, thanks to advances in Microsoft Paint. But a guy’s got to work, right?
This month, YPIW reports on the trail of carnage Trout has left in industry after industry since he swore off games with a final unwarranted insult to his long-suffering Twitter followers, thereafter only taunting them by posting the occasional mysterious Vine or random electro track.
First, Trout tried his hand at fashion, attempting to parlay his Fedora brand into an actual line of hats. Forming the company Polygon Headwear with partner Jared DeFragg, Trout prepared to debut his line at the Pan-American Chapeau Showcase, or PACS. But the business partners had a row before the convention, and DeFragg threatened a lawsuit if the hats were shown, which caused all the capillaries in Trout’s eyes to burst. “I’m going to lose my shit,” he snarled through his bloodied gaze. “I’m going to fucking kill that guy and it’s going to get everybody in trouble” – although it’s unclear why he thought it would get anyone in trouble but him.
Still, the show went on, and Trout’s kiosk was pure bedlam, as the half-finished hats frequently unravelled or got stuck on people’s heads. Sometimes they even crashed and had to be rebooted – which was odd, because they were just hats. No lawsuit was ever filed because, we suspect, Trout did go on to murder DeFragg, most likely eating the carcass raw. Polygon Headwear was summarily dissolved.
Why Trout took his next gig is difficult to fathom – perhaps he’d sunk the Fedora war chest into Polygon Headwear and had to take the first thing he could find. Whatever the explanation, we know that Trout then manned the customer complaint department at a shopping centre for exactly three-and-a-half minutes. He spent the first three minutes alternately berating a puzzled security guard, trumpeting his own accomplishments over the intercom, and demanding arbitrary public apologies from strangers. He spent the last 30 seconds calling an elderly customer – who mildly complained about the air conditioning – a “shrivelled-up old colostomy bag” that “sneezes smegma” and suggesting that it was nice and warm in Hell, where she should go by killing herself. He was escorted off the premises by security, while he harangued shoppers about his unjust persecution.
Fully in a state of career freefall, Trout bought a hotdog from a Japanese vendor and took a bite, which he then spat out onto the pavement with disgust. “Your hotdogs suck,” he sneered, and lectured the silently weeping vendor about the deficiencies of the Japanese hotdog industry for half an hour. Humiliated, the vendor slunk away to disembowel himself, dropping his apron, which Trout then put on.
When word spread that an infamous videogame designer was working at a hotdog stand, a queue quickly formed. It stretched around the block as Trout slaved over his first order, placing each particle of offal in the hotdog casing by trembling hand. When the customer – who had by then grown a mosaic beard and Guinness World Record-worthy fingernails – finally dared to protest that he had been waiting five years for a hotdog, Trout condemned him as a “trivial pundit” who “sat in judgement, masturbating”. Cancelling his next order and all to follow, exeunt Trout from the hotdog business.
Finally, feeling the need to get away from it all, Trout donned a skipper’s cap that dashingly set off his mutton chops and booked on as the captain of a freighter carrying videogames to Singapore. But the trouble started almost right away. “People are telling me they’re going to pirate my games because they don’t like me, over,” he radioed back to shore. “Gamers are the worst fucking people ever, over.” This was unfair – people were going to pirate Trout’s games not because they disliked him, but because they were actual pirates.
Trout’s vessel was overtaken by speedboats in the Strait of Malacca and hit with an RPG, hurling the unsold hats that were ballasting the ship as far away as Sri Lanka. The pirates took Trout captive but, finding his incessant jabbering intolerable, released him after just a few minutes. Perhaps it was then that Trout began to realise that most gamers weren’t so bad after all, priming his inevitable comeback after a span of sufficient pleading and coddling from his fans. In fact, let’s make a bet – if he isn’t back in gaming in six months, I’ll go back and pay for all those copies of Fedora I pirated out of sheer malice and spite.
The post You’re Playing It Wrong: misunderstood genius Trent Trout quits the industry appeared first on Edge Online.
From now until October 14 you can get any Capcom game on Steam for 50 to 75% off. Holy crap. That's a great way to celebrate a 30th anniversary!
Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition at $7.49, Lost Planet 3 (which just came out) is at $29.99, DmC is at $24.99, and man there's so many deals! Look at the Capcom Action Hits Bundle. It has these eight games for $59.99: Bionic Commando: Rearmed, Dead Rising 2: Off the Record, Dead Rising 2, Devil May Cry 4, Lost Plant 2, Resident Evil 6, Resident Evil 5, and Super Street Fighter IV: AE.
Go check out the full catalog, but be warned, you're not going to leave the page without spending money on something.
The undisputed star of Sony’s Gamescom press conference this year was not a mega-budget shooter or epic sci-fi fantasy, it was a game about a little girl holding a balloon and cowering away from the shadows. Afterwards in interviews, it was the game that SCE chief Andrew House kept referring to, the one everyone talked about. A game about a little girl holding a balloon, in search of her mother – and, of course, the inspired touchscreen interface behind it all. In Murasaki Baby, the player must hold the girl’s hand and guide her through the darkness.
Parallels have been drawn with Ico, but the game’s creator Massimo Guarini says the origins of the idea are more personal. “I was on a train and I saw a little girl with a balloon, holding her mother’s hand. The image was so beautiful, so striking to me that my brain immediately translated it into a character on a touchscreen, with the player’s hand grabbing hers.” Guarini is a videogame industry veteran, despite the fact that his native country effectively had no game industry when he began his career in the mid-’90s. “I started out designing websites,” he explains, “but I got the opportunity to move into games through Ubisoft; [it was] building an Italian production studio and I applied. I think I became the first game designer in Italy!”
At first he worked on Game Boy Color titles, converting Rayman to the platform, as well as many other franchises; later he moved to the Montreal office and contributed to the Tom Clancy titles as a senior designer. But he was always aiming for something else – or, more accurately, somewhere else. “My dream was to go to Japan,” he says. “I was an otaku about anime and manga, about the culture as a whole. I sort of worked it out by learning a little bit of Japanese and applying for jobs there.”
His ambition was realised, and then some. Guarini’s CV reached Grasshopper Manufacture, the cult studio behind Killer7, No More Heroes and Lollipop Chainsaw, and he was offered a job. “They said no Japanese skills would be required – but they actually were, I later found out,” says Guarini. “When I moved there, I had to learn Japanese just to survive, which was a good thing. It was a dream come true: I grew up with Japanese games and cartoons, and for years I’d been attracted by their approach to game design.”
Professionally, part of the allure was the escape from realism. “The big thing is that the Japanese don’t try to emulate reality all the time – they construct richer, more imaginative worlds, they have a surreal way of storytelling. Japanese pop culture is heavily influenced by manga, and making comics actually comes from ancient roots; it’s a tradition. Their culture is so visual… Here, we’re very attached to photographic realism, we see this as a medium dependent on technology. I spent ten years at Ubisoft making realistic games. The Tom Clancy series was all about simulation, and after a while I got really bored with that.”
And in Grasshopper’s idiosyncratic director, Goichi Suda, he had the perfect manager and creative inspiration. “It was an awesome experience,” Guarini enthuses. “I was totally into his vision, which is all about approaching videogames more from a pop-culture point of view. All of his games have this lo-fi digital punk attitude – and we really played up to that. He approaches design and storytelling from a surreal point of view; everything is exaggerated.”
The pair had such a good working relationship that Suda effectively handed over control of Shadows Of The Damned to Guarini, who revelled in the responsibility.
“Grasshopper triggered something in me,” he says. “It’s not like I suddenly became this surreal and grotesque guy – I’ve always been like that! But when I was working on Tom Clancy games I didn’t have the confidence to be disruptive. The Grasshopper experience gave me what was missing: this level of confidence, an I-don’t-give-a-shit attitude that makes you expose and express yourself.”
At Grasshopper, Guarini also met two other Japanese game design legends. He got on brilliantly with famed composer Akira Yamaoka, responsible for the audio design of the Silent Hill series. The two formed a band, Grasshopper Demanufacture, with Guarini on drums. They’re still in touch now. But there was a much more challenging presence in the studio. “I had more problems with Shinji Mikami… who I respect very much,” says Guarini. “He’s really a tough guy, and his reputation in Japan makes him something of an untouchable rockstar. It took six months for me to gain his trust. Before that, it was really painful; every single revision, every meeting was a challenge for me. He is an extremely intelligent person, and really he was challenging me – to wake me up to their way of doing things. Once he knew I was in line with him, he completely changed.”
In 2011, Guarini moved back to Italy with his pregnant wife. He set up Ovosonico with Gianni Ricciardi, another ex-Ubisoft employee, to bring Grasshopper’s surreal, fearless style to the west. He worked up a couple of prototypes and, via contacts accrued during his Ubisoft years, scored a meeting with Sony’s VP of worldwide studios, Michael Denny. The game he pitched at that point wasn’t right for Sony, but Guarini casually mentioned Murasaki Baby. Sony called the next day and offered to fund its development.
With a visual style influenced by early Tim Burton drawings, and a setting that draws from the classic Silly Symphonies cartoon Lullaby Land, Murasaki Baby is a dark fantasy platformer. Players must guide the lead character through a child’s imaginary world, avoiding enemies and removing areas of darkness. While the front touchscreen interacts with the character, the rear pad can be used to manipulate the backgrounds, utilising interactive objects. As with many indie projects nowadays, the game is built in Unity, an engine Guarini loves for the way it liberates designers. “The tools are now there for people who don’t even work in the industry – that’s really important,” he says. “Now people who have something to say can just grab Unity and do their stuff.”
Due out in 2014, Murasaki Baby is a fascinating project, but it’s just a taster of what Ovosonico wants to do. Guarini says his studio is platform agnostic, led by ideas not technology, but he has his eye on PlayStation 4. The ambition is to create truly emotional connections between the player and character. “We’re experiencing a transformation as creators,” he says. “We’re old enough as an industry to know that games aren’t just about the challenge; they can say something. Games like Journey and Dear Esther have proved that. We can trigger emotion, just like movies, but we can do it using our own vocabulary.”
The post From big in Japan to independent in Italy, the story of Murasaki Baby creator Massimo Guarini appeared first on Edge Online.
Those of you in the UK that have yet to get a Wii U might have some good incentives to finally get one with the holidays looming. Nintendo has announced three new Wii U bundles, the best of them being this New Super Mario Bros. U + New Super Luigi Bros. U bundle. It'll include a black premium Wii U with 32GB of storage, and will be released on November 8.
Then on November 15 the Wii Party U Basic Pack will be released that includes Nintendo Land. Lastly, on November 22 there will be the Just Dance 2014 Basic Pack bundle. Both of these consoles are the white editions, and include 8GB of storage, a Wii Remote Plus controller, and a sensor bar. All three of these bundles have been priced at £249.99 on Nintendo's online store, which is the same price point for the Wii U Premium that just includes Nintendo Land .
Wait, the UK has a Nintendo online store now? Finally! The store just opened, and in even better news, Nintendo is offering free standard delivery on everything that's available in the store. You can even get your orders delivered the very next day if you spend over £200 and complete your order by 8PM.
