2014. Sze. 29.

  Once upon a time, after the release of the game I tried the paying version out in a free weekend, and I wrote my first impressions about Champions Online, but that is not actual anymore. Cryptic Studios (they gave us the Star Trek MMO too) restarted the whole heroismo in a partly free version with microtransactions. What you basically must know about the game can be summarized in short: The game system and the setting is based on Champions PnP (Pen and Paper) superhero role-playing game, and the microtransaction model doesn’t decrease the enjoyment level. Of course, if you pay for the game, you get more possibilities, but that doesn’t mean that you can be stronger with the bought options. For example, you can entirely customize the powers and appearance of your hero, while free players can improve their characters only in given directions. However, because only the style and the side effects (stunning, freeze, poison, etc.) make differences between the powers, paying players get no better or stronger things, but they have significantly more options. Mentioning style… How can a superhero video game grab players who doesn’t know the original PnP role-playing game? With style, of course. There are no Marvel or DC comics characters known by millions to make the setting unique. The gameplay is the same as offered by other MMOs and superhero games: You beat the bad guys and take the reward. Graphics is prime, but this is a requirement nowadays. What do remain, if not the style? And the game is stylish, that’s a fact, or I can write that it’s rioting in cool elements. So that somewhere I can’t even interpret the abundance offered by the developers. It’s because I have a character, it’s appearance was made unique during character creation, and I don’t wanna change it. Well, a few days ago I gave her a cape, but I don’t get used to the sight and I’m not sure I will keep it. In words, I have a unique toon and I wouldn’t buy 99 percent of the costumes in C-Store even if I could. Maybe the devices and some other things, but I don’t feel the...

2014. Sze. 29.

I can’t stop ranting about MMOs, and there was a time with another beta test session. It ended long ago, but since then I didn’t have any mood to start the game and play again. At the end of this article I will tell you why, but first I want to glorify the game. Maybe it sounds like I have a split mind, but this is my opinion: The game is all right, but I don’t like it. It’s not MY game and that’s all. It all started with a newsletter from Funcom (i.e.: Anarchy Online [AO]) – I was playing AO for a time, so I have a registration there – calling me to try this new flick out. I did. It was worth the time. In the newsletter mentioned above I found such sounding phrases like “Easy to learn, challenging to master” and “Bloodline Champions is set to become one of the most important games within its genre.” Not to mention the two gaming rigs I could win. I never win but what if I do after all…? I beg to inform you that Funcom delivered the goods. Indeed they created the next milestone in the category of arena-based multiplayer games. Well, it’s square that the big score is not in the requirements of the genre, because there are a number of arena games and it’s unnecessary to throw just another subgenre to the players. Possibly Funcom thought the same, because it is like this: Register, search a match, choose a character and you can grind the enemy as you can. Implicitly, the game has its own world (there are some short texts for the mood, and they plan to publish a world map, but it’s still in the lap of the gods). But what is the big novum? The keyword is: Balance. With a capital B and emphasized several times. Because there is no character development in the game, and the main ability scores are similar – regarding Hit Points there are only 10-20 points of difference among most of the characters (they have 160-180 HPs). Only the tanks have more (around 220), but they are weak in other areas. Besides,...

My head hurts. For a while I’m staring at an image in a puddle, and I slowly realize the thing I see is myself. If there is still any “me” behind the helmet. In the background soft jazz is playing from a crackling radio, makes eerie contrast with the ravaged scene. Rapture. I remember. The pieces of my broken life slowly come back. There are web-like crazes in the glass dome, litter covers the ground, the walls are wet and mouldy. The music dies away. A whale passes by. The sound of its bitter song filters through the glass wall and rides away on the streets of this New-Dead-Atlantis. Silence sets and raises an unmappable feeling in me. The ocean around me is just like my mind – I see only a small part of it, and the remainder is scrammed by doubt and darkness. Eleanor! Beastly anger gushes forth in my soul when I see her face in my mind’s eye. It is followed by the beautiful eyes of Doctor Lamb, a handgun, then the cold barrel on my temple… This is the feeling of Bioshock 2‘s (BS2) first moments. The sequel of one of the most unique games in the last 5 years is advanced and conservative in the same time – or a bit stuck-in-the-mud, to tell it rougher. Rapture is the same as we got to know it, only the story and the characters changed. The first and most important thing to know is that our main hero is a Big Daddy. Aired news, previews and trailers uncovered this early, so there was no surprise when I got behind the thick helmet of a deep-sea diving suit. After the intro and the first minutes you probably will find your chin on the floor, but even at this point I must mention a little flaw that is nothing else than being a Big Daddy. Although our basic weapon is that certain scary driller that made the hair on our neck stand in Bioshock (BS), regarding gameplay it brings no significant changes. Honestly: Being a Big Daddy gives you no different experience than taking the role of Rapture’s lost savior in the...

Soon, you can purchase Arkham City, the newest episode of the Batman series. In some measure, this makes a review of Arkham Asylum relevant, and on the other hand, this writing was already published on the pages of GameDroid, but it was removed because of technical issues. The article was written about the Game of the Year (GOTY) edition. In regard of mood Batman: Arkham Asylum is not a Bioshock, and there is nothing new in it, but it’s also a bloody serious action-adventure game based on comics. I even saw a little pinch of Metal Gear Solid (or Splinter Cell, for the matter) in it. “Well, there can’t be any great trouble!” I thought. Let’s see if it’s true or not! Who Is Batman? Batman is the most known superhero ever. He started adventuring in the company of numerous other DC Comics superheroes in the early times of the comics-boom, which means around 1940. Since Bob Kane dreamed him on paper in 1939, Bruce Wayne/Batman is one of the darkest and most contradictory comic-book hero. Originally, he fought with two handguns like Max Payne (without Bullet Time), and had no moral issues, when he had to make some holes on bad guys. He appeared in detective anthologies, and soon became a fav of the readers by his lack of general heroic attributes – by his dark and grim background, by rising fear in the heart of the opponent, like the embodiment of nightmares of the guilty. (In the beginning, his costume had some scent of cheap rentals, but with time drawers dreamed more and more realist dresses on him.) It’s not everything, of course, because the most important attribute of Batman is not his hardness or scariness but his aspect of being one of the best detectives of all times. So, the original Batman stories were not about fighting all night long: Sociopath supervillains tried to rise chaos in a corrupt, dark city. Batman solved cases not by fists or in the company of his stretch-costumed pals but alone like a lone wol… bat. And he mostly used his abilities as a detective. The Darker and Darker Knight In the time of this...

2014. Júl. 26.

A strange fashion had evolved in the game industry: Big publishers and developers are making only “products”, while independents are considering the medium of video games as a form of artistic self-expression. Personally, I support this idea, because sometimes we get much cheaper and more enjoyable stuff from the latter than the expensive games of the former. It can be the hand-drew Machinarium, the awfully genial Braid, or the Bastion from the action-adventure genre, the independent developers prove such creativity that big fishes — who are mostly just mining their franchises — can be envy of. The story is simple like a peg: An apocalyptic event named the Calamity smashed the world apart, and only some floating parts remained from it. Our main hero, the Kid awakes on a floating land like that, but soon he finds the only stable point; the Bastion. He is helped by old Rucks — who is, in the same time, the narrator of the game — to collect a splintered energy crystal, the Core, which can physically rebuild the once country, Caelondia. The elders might count on the Calamity, because they made a machine under the Bastion that can produce buildings and landmass by the help of the crystal splinters. Of course, there is more. Two more survivors (Zulf and Zia) turn up, but they came from another country — and there is a diary that tells a lot about what caused the Calamity. To continue the mandatory circle, lets take a look at the background! Seven people + two years = Bastion. The Supergiant Games was founded by two guys who climbed up from the pits of Electronic Arts, because they wanted to try some ideas and anyway, they wanted to do a much steadier work. One of the founders was writing, the other was developing the gameplay, but they needed a musician, an artist, a narrator, another writer and a helping hand in general. They made it frankly, even if there was some people in the team who never met before the release of the game. This is where art begins to grow. The world is fantasy based with a little steampunk tone in the equipment,...

2014. Júl. 26.

American James McGee is an original game designer of our era. Doom and Quake fans can know his name for a time now, but I more like those projects of him which came from his own head. I loved Scrapland, I enjoyed the first part of the Alice series, and although Bad Day L.A. was failed, Grimm seems peculiar enough to worth a try. But here is the second part of the Alice game, and as the title says: Madness Returns. However, 11 years had passed after the release of the first part, and it shows on the game. While American McGee’s Alice mostly just turned Wonderland out and degraded it into an imagined world of a psychotic-schizophrenic little girl, the sequel hits much harder. In the first part Alice defeats her own out-of-control-evil-superego, the Queen of Hearts. After their house was burnt down, Alice literally went mad about loosing her family, and while she withers in an asylum, Wonderland drags her in more and more. But this world is the creation of her own mind, so loosing sanity leads to a horrific version of Wonderland. The sequel begins in the real world. A psychiatrist, Dr. Angus Bumby takes her under his wings and treatment. The girl is professedly blaming herself for the fire, so she cares nothing about the world around – principally because the good doctor tries to erase her memories by hypnosis. Attentive players can observe that too much crazy kids are living at the foundling hospital of Dr. Bumby, and the answer for ‘why is he so interested in the little folk?’ turns out during the game. I wouldn’t like to reveal the twists in the story but I can tell that in Wonderland Alice gradually finds her memories about the night of the fire, and with time she gets to the source of what endangers her personal world of imagination. During the journey she meets typical Wonderlandish characters who are, of course, just as twisted as everything around them. The girl herself is more like a warrior virgin with a gothic appetite than that little uncertain explorer, who walked in the worlds of imagination in the books of Lewis...