This week just snuck up on me. Here’s the week in video games.
1. (-) Limbo #2 on this list could easily be #1 here, but this game is actually out this week. Limbo came out this past week on Xbox Live Arcade and has received nothing but high praise. Justin at the Rumble Pack says, “If you let it, the game can be an intensely personal experience.” The review at Madison.com says, “Limbo harks back to the old black-and white horror movies, where your imagination was so much more effective in evoking the sense of something gone horribly wrong.” Have you played it?
2. (-) Starcraft 2 Yeah, I’m not going to say anything snarky or witty here. You’ve heard it all. But tomorrow a force of nature rips through the gaming community as Star Craft 2 is released to the wild. I read early this morning on Twitter that had over 800k preorders for this game. We’ll be hearing a lot about this game for the foreseeable future. If it’s been awhile (and it probably has for most of us) since you played the original, Kotaku has a great round-up of the story lines of the first game. Then go over to Joystiq to see the most recent trailer. Then compare and contrast ten plus years of cinematic progress. Blizzard is still the best at it.
3. (-) SF v. Tekken – There were a lot of news and announcements that came out of this year’s Comic Con but I think the Capcom v. Namco/Street Fighter v. Tekken announcement. This is huge.
4. (-) DarkSpore – I never played Spore, I was never really caught up in the hype (and subsequent disappointment) so I really don’t “get” DarkSpore of what it means for gamers, but it did generate quite a bit of buzz this past week. This is clearly in the “not for me” ballpark.
5. (-) Kinect – Did you know that the Walmart Kinect page is the first result when you Google “Kinect”? (Sure, it’s a sponsored link, but I would bet 99% of people searching for it will click on that link.) That’s all to say that Kinect was priced at 150$, to the surprise of no one.
6. (-) Inception – We went and saw Inception this past weekend and I LOVED it. I can’t recommend it enough, especially to my fellow Buttonmashers. At more than one point in the movie I thought, “this movie was made for gamers.” Referring to dream constructs as “levels” and watching the action take place with variable gravity were two specific situations that made me go “Hmmm”. It seems like I wasn’t the only one who thought that, as Totilo refers to many of the same things in his review of the movie.
7. (-) DeathSpank – Maybe this should be higher, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention DeathSpank, the highly regarded XBLA/PSN downloadable game from fabled game designer (and Patron Saint of the Carnival of Gamers) Ron Gilbert. Viking Funk says to “Auto-equip your Epic Chestpiece of Awesomeness and get busy!”
8. (-) Console Gamers Stink at Games – This post generated a certain amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth between PC purists and Console Gamers. I stink at anything involving skill or twitch, so I don’t have a dog in this fight. Maybe you do?
9. (-) Achievements – A fight I do have a dog in is the hunt for Achievements. If you like to get down and nerdy, this post on the Xbox Engineering Blog about the story behind the technology for Achievements is a great read.
10. (-) Plants vs. Zombies PvZ was announced for for Xbox Live Arcade. Even though I played it for hours and hours, I’ll probably pick this up for XBLA, too. Why? See #8 above.
Honorable mention: Mass Effect 2’s newest DLC, the Lair of the Shadow Broker.
I absolutely adored Limbo. It took me about 3 days to beat it (I’d take a break when I got stuck and died a bunch) but it was worth every penny. It’s one of those games that shows that there is a hope for the industry on a creative level, even if most of the BIG games get more and more stagnant.
And I also loved Inception. Was it just me, or did one of the dream sequences really feel like it was based on a feverish round of Modern Warfare multiplayer? 🙂
Yes! The snow level was absolutely straight out of Modern Warfare. That may have been the scene that triggered my way of thinking and got me to reflect the rest of the movie.
I need to see it again.
I found #8 funny because I play TF2 with an X360 gamepad and do just fine (although I do switch to mouse / gamepad when I go sniper).
I’ve been meaning to do this, actually. I’m such a bad TF2 player (and PC FPS player in general) that I want to see if the 360 controller would be an improvement.
Man, I feel like I’m in some kind of bizarro world with people talking about having better control in a PC FPS using a controller… You guys are messed up 🙂