As some of you around here may know, I like tower defence. I like tower defence because I’m a real-time strategy wuss; a turtler who loves nothing more than holing up, hunkering down and awaiting my eventual demise. Venturing out was never my thing. AND IN-GAME (sorry). Most of my favourite tower defence games however, have offered a lot more besides mere towers and defending. In this regard Gratuitous Tank Battles is no different. Tipped as an RTS/simulation/tower defence hybrid, GTB marks Positech Games’ follow up to the highly praised Gratuitous Space Battles. It’s hardly Gratuitous Hoverboard Battles but it’ll have to do.
If I could remember how many hours I sunk into Master of Orion II, I might be able to guess at how many Endless Space is destined to take. But I just can’t count that high.
There’s a certain category of game that I have thought, for years, would work well on the mobile phone, and that is the First Person Robot Battler. This was a type of game that had some entries in the early nineties, but ultimately never took off as a genre. This is not, in my feeling, due to failure of “first person robot battler” as a concept, but, rather, because Nintendo had a habit of tacking First Person Robot Battlers on to ultimately failed peripherals, such as the unwieldy SuperScope 6, or the awful, mockable, Virtual Boy.
So, for a while, I was enthusiastic (toward anyone who would listen for five seconds; this was an ongoing obsession of mine) about the prospect of moving this concept to the mobile phone. I feel a First Person Robot Battler is an ideal type of shooter for mobile for several reasons …
As it turns out, I’m only about an hour down the road from Cipher Prime Studios. They’re the studios responsible for such inventive music-based puzzle games as Auditorium. I was fortunate enough this week to get a demo of their brand new game, Splice, which was released today on Steam. My impressions after the jump!
I have too many delightful gaming memories to ever choose a favorite, but I can point at one and say it’s definitely among the best gaming experiences I’ve ever had. What I have in mind today is the weekend I spent with two of my closest friends, sprawled on a sofa, playing co-op Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 in splitscreen.
Understand, we had no idea how to play the game. We had no instructions and had never played online or in the campaign. GRAW2 is the most unforgiving kind of tactical shooter, and even simple moves like reloading took a while to figure out. But for some reason we stuck with it, and over the course of about 40 largely-straight hours, we completed the entire co-op campaign. We stopped to catch some sleep around 4:30 a.m. each day, and all my dreams were viewed through a sniper’s scope.
Welcome to Dragon’s Dogma! In this demo, you
Thank you for playing the Dragon’s Dogma demo.
Whenever I go to the pictures (or ‘cinema’ as most people call it) I make every effort to avoid trailers. Over the weekend I went to see The Cabin In The Woods, a film I knew absolutely nothing about other than it was apparently good, and it was written and directed by Drew Goddard (Lost, Cloverfield, Angel) and co-written by Joss Whedon (partly responsible for quite a few things I’ve not liked, particularly that fourth Alien film after the trilogy). We arrived early, got into the screen early and I had to watch the trailers. Looking back, I wish I’d had some ice cream to distract me.
A few more post-PAX reports! Indie was a huge precence at PAX East this year, and it would’ve been just as difficult to see everything there as it would have been all the triple-As. Here are impressions from just a few indie games I played at the convention. I’ll take a look at Girls Like Robots, Primal Carnage, and A Valley Without Wind: three games that are all pretty different from one another and reveal the huge variety of indie games that were available there.
According to our header, you come to Tap-Repeatedly for the media, the opinion, and the attitude. But maybe, occasionally, some news? It’s been a week since PAX and I’m still writing up things that, while an entire week old, could be technically considered “news.” Now if you read the Tap-Repeatedly forums, you’d have gotten this information the day I got it, since I dropped up my rambling thoughts the day of the event. But if you didn’t, you still win, because now you get this information: with all-new screenshots! So, without further introduction, here’s the games I played at the SquareSoft press event at PAX East! Plus the bonus of opinions and attitude.
Dungeons & Dragons has lots of licensed video games. But the pen-and-paper tabletop game that many gamers consider the soul of D&D is a game in flux.
The presence of Dungeons & Dragons was felt throughout the long, broad halls of Boston’s PAX East convention this past weekend. Wizards of the Coast brought with them this year the traditional tabletop offerings, running tables of D&D Essentials and the new Lords of Waterdeep board game in the convention’s table gaming room. But Dungeons & Dragons also means video games these days. In addition to checking out some new content premiering for the existing Dungeons & Dragons Online, I also got a first look at the newest D&D MMO, which is simply called Neverwinter. My thoughts on the latter lead off a series about the things I saw this past weekend at PAX. Join me past the jump.
Technical difficulties, corrupted in-game audio and a bout of illness have all conspired to prevent me from putting up this video. As my first foray into recording in-game footage and editing it afterwards, it was hardly plain sailing. Despite all this, I’m reasonably pleased with the end result and I’ve taken the liberty of using the Guild Wars soundtrack as an accompaniment to the footage. What’s not to love about Jeremy Soule’s music? Hit the jump for the video, I hope you like it.
So, everybody and their dog got themselves a Playstation Vita. Which of course makes no sense. Dogs, unlike cats are absolutely terrible at videogames and my neighbour’s German shepherd while pretty talented in some other fields (like barking and shitting in the street) never won a single Street Fighter match against me. And I let the stupid animal play as Ken, for crying out loud!!!
I wrote nothing on my notepad for the first five hours of playing Guild Wars 2. I always write something when taking part in any Beta event, which makes writing about those first five hours somewhat of a challenge. But then again, this was no ordinary Beta event. All my original intentions went out the window the moment I logged in.
Stupid. A waste of time. Evidence that Nintendo didn’t have a clue what it was doing. “Panic Mode”. Mental. Bonkers. Bloody ridiculous. Massively monstrous. Cheap looking. Ugly. Insane. An admission of failure. Useless. Baffling. What the fuck? Frankenstick!
These are just some of the words and phrases you might have heard mentioned last September in response to Nintendo’s unveiling of the Circle Pad Pro. Many of them by me, as it happens. So today I went out and bought one.