Mashing buttons since 1984
Because we are true to you we go out of our way to remind you of special things. This one is almost eight months old.
We gave Too Human a Rent rating and mentioned you should buy it when it’s a budget title. Amazon is selling it for $20 right now.
This now makes it an amazing exclusive title for your 360. Let me know if you have it and we’ll play some co-op.
And because we’re feeling saucy, you can get Bully: Scholarship Edition for $20 as well. We gave it a Buy rating.
The internet + people = amazing coincidences?
UPDATE: The video is no longer there thanks to the butt-funks at NBC Universal. And they wonder why they are almost dead last in ratings right now.
UPDATE 2: The butt-funks have posted the video on their alien website Hulu.
IP law is the pits. I give you FREE advertising, and you make it hard for me to do so. Idiots.
Heck, yes. It does.
We’re all fans of the recent Metroid games here. This one looks like Ryu is in the suit. Please, no waggle.
If you’re a feed reader and don’t see the vid, please come over to our house to play.
Some quotes from various blogs reporting at E3:
“Microsoft’s new motion controller is a camera, that uses object, movement, and voice recognition to deliver a new kind of immersive gaming experience.”
“We’ve seen Paul’s Höfner bass, John’s Rickenbacker 325 guitar and George’s Gretsch Duo Jet guitar. All that’s missing is Ringo’s drum kit. Until now.” (That’s three guitars, a set of drums, and three mics—Nat)
“Ubisoft announced Your Shape, a new fitness game for the Wii. But more interesting than the game itself is how you “play” it — with a new Wii camera peripheral that reads your body positioning.”
“Red Steel 2 may not have multiplayer, but it does have Wii MotionPlus. No, make that, it requires the Wii MotionPlus add-on.”
“Nintendo announces the Wii Vitality Sensor, a device that attaches to the tip of the player’s finger that measures their vital signs and helps them relax.”
“Richard Marks was here to show off the first PlayStation motion controller, the PS2 EyeToy. The latest camera will enable “a completely new set of experiences” using a new controller.”
This is my response:
I imagine that some are excited by this, but I am sick of buying one-shot peripherals. I have enough plastic as it is and I’m nowhere near close to what some people have. Of course, it’s all here to stay. This is truly the over-priced-plastic-device waggle age.
I, for one, am taking back my living room.
Thanks to Kotaku, Joystiq, and 1up for the quotes.
George, please, watch and take notes as we see Bioware show us what (clearly, this is what they are doing) a duel between Obi-Wan and Vader (what we wanted—not Anakain) could have been.
Star Wars: The Old Republic is an MMO I’m starting to take an interest in.
The city is infected? Sounds like zombies. I have to let out a sigh here. In videogaming terms, I think zombies are the new WWII. Shoot, we’ve got WWII games with zombies now.
Oh, and the video is lightly spoilerly (I made that up). If you’ve not played the first game. It makes for an interesting premise knowing how the first game ends.
I don’t know if we’ll go crazy here with E3 stuff. (That’s Tony’s call). However we all love Crackdown. So there.
King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is a documentary about video game records. It’s an amazing documentary. Period. Maybe one of the best I’ve seen.
In it, the challenger Steve Wiebe squares off against Billy Mitchell for the Donkey Kong world record. Actually, Steve does a lot of playing and Mitchell does a lot of – talking?
What’s the big deal now? Steve is going to try and break the record at E3 on June 2nd. A bigger deal? Twin Galaxies (how far can you throw them?) will be there to verify it as well as G4TV. I think G4 will be there to verify Twin Galaxies.
Anyway, if you’ve not seen the documentary, you should. I felt for Steve. Teared up with him as well.
Here’s hoping Steve and Billy get their dues. My guess is Billy won’t even be there, but he’ll make a statement.
Lost potential?
Ironically, and not entirely by design, we’ve chatted up a couple of items regarding lost potential in the recent months. It appears with all the online problems and piracy that Demigod might be turning out to be one of those titles.
Stardock’s CEO, Brad Wardell, doesn’t seem to think so. In a post on his blog (ImpulseDriven no less) he gives a state of the union address a month in to the game’s release. In talking about Gamestop breaking the street date:
This wouldn’t normally have been that big of a deal except this happened to be over Easter weekend and the release servers for the game weren’t yet up. Moreover, it also caused the “warez” version (i.e. there’s no copy protection on the game so the warez version meant someone bravely zipping it up and putting it up on a torrent) resulting in over 100,000 people using it – at once – before we were even back from Easter break. Suffice to say, it wasn’t a pretty picture.
Online play for your online game? Nope. Pirates are causing the problem. It seems as if Brad is putting a little bit of blame on Gamestop and the pirates. They were not ready to handle the load. 100,000 people had the game illegally and 18,000 legitimate users were left out in the cold because the pirates (surprise!) were trying to play online games.
For the first few days, we struggled to migrate people to a different set of servers that only legitimate users had access to.
Ah, the sad truth. Now, who’s fault is it really? If you have a backdoor DRM check (Irony for Stardock. They are Digitally Managing their Rights) wouldn’t it have been wise to have a honeypot for all the retched hive of scum and villainy.
But our woes weren’t over yet. It became pretty clear that the NAT servers (the servers that negotiate the connection between player A and player B couldn’t handle the # of users on the game resulting in a horrible online experience.
Moving on.
Demigod’s connectivity problems have basically boiled down to 1 bad design decision and 1 architectural limitation. The bad design decision was made in December of 2008 when it was decided to have the network library hand off sockets to Demigod proper. In most games, the connection between players is handled purely by one source. For instance, in Supreme Commander, GPGNet handled the entire connection.
Ah, the sad truth. Stardock and Gas Powered Games decided to use a peer to peer type of technology instead of a technology what as Brad calls “most games” use.
It took us a solid week to realize that this was the problem because we assumed the issue was compatibility with routers or ISPs.
Ah, the sad truth. When in doubt, it’s the customer’s or the ISP’s fault. All of them? Actually, it took them close to three weeks to fix it by contacting the developer of the network library and even pulling in the Impulse team on it. Essentially, they’ve had to re-write the network code and/or the way all the connections happen on the fly. Updates to the game have been numerous.
A couple of other items are mentioned in the post.
Q: What is publisher Stardock planning to do for Demigod players?
A: The plan is to send out an email this week to users who purchased Demigod prior to today with a coupon for 50% off of Demigod that they can give to their friends. In addition, next week we will begin sending coupons for other things on Impulse to active Demigod players to help ensure a vibrant multiplayer community. We plan to keep doing that periodically.
Awesome. I already know who I am giving mine to. Some people have stated that this is a sign that Stardock has not sold as many as they would have liked. The piracy has cut in to the sales.
Ah, the sad truth. They’re wrong. According to NPD, even with the crazy launch Demigod came in third its week of release. It’s still currently in the top ten a month later. The coupon will only increase their sales.
Q: What about a demo?
A: We’d probably already have a demo out if we hadn’t been messing with this. But yes, there will be a demo. In all likelyhood, it will probably be a multiplayer only demo since we want to reassure people when the demo comes out that connectivity is totally nailed and bullet proof. This is different than our original plan which would have been a single player only demo with 2 demigods and 1 map. So we’re still thinking about how to do this in a way that has the most benefit to us and potential customers.
Ah, the sad truth. It makes me really wonder why there wasn’t one to begin with. I think they may have suspected something was up. However, pre-release demo’s are not usually Stardock’s thing.
There are a couple more common questions that Brad answers including more demigod types, his response to sales and reviews (a little under pace to Sins of a Solar Empire, and it’s their fault initial review scores are low), and his outlook (it will surpass any game they’ve done so far).
Even though we’ve focused on some sad truths, the transparency of this company has been nothing but stellar. Almost daily Brad has informed the gaming masses what they are doing and continue to do with this game. Could we imagine some other big name developers (and Stardock is not, really) doing the same thing?
I think not, and that’s a sad truth.
Find a friend with a coupon and get this game. The single-player tournament is still fun, and multi-player games are getting better.
Some time has passed since I did my 2 Minute Review of Demigod, that I’d figured I’d revisit it again. I’ve caught myself passing over such games as a FREE trial of World of Warcraft and even my old standby Dawn of War II in order to play another quick (sometimes involved) round of this game.
While it is true that at almost a month into the game’s release Stardock and Gas Powered Games are still experiencing some multiplayer issues—something we mentioned in the review. It seems as if they are now re-working or even re-writing the net code to do something differently than what was planned originally.
It’s really surprising that this little fiasco has gotten this far. This is not typical of Stardock to have rushed something out the door broken. The piracy issues did not help initially either. However, what has been typical is their transparency and work to get it right.
As a result, most gamers have had to contend with the single-player-story-lacking-and-no-campaign game. It’s tournament after tournament that is almost reminiscent of the Unreal series. Even the “god-like” announcers sound the same. Has it become tedious and old playing the AI over and over?
Nope. It’s a blast. Why? It’s shallow, but complex.
What’s most interesting about the game is the versatility of each of the eight demigods. Even though there are some RPG elements, you start from a clean slate in each round. This helps you vary your play style for each type of map. It also feeds that wonderful addiction of grinding and leveling up. You do it every single round.
For instance, if you need to capture flags and hold them for a period of time and you are playing the rook (See the Hammer Time! image above.), you can tailor his skill set to match. Simply favor the skills for defense and building demolition. Later on, you may be in a map where the first team to ten demigod kills wins. For this, you would want to favor the damage skills and equip the rook with some armor and fast shoes (he’s dreadfully slow early on).
However, the depth of the character just in the “kill ten demigods” map can go deeper. You’re playing on a team. Some of the other demigods have better “vs. demigod” skills and damage. If so, then customize the rook to defend or lure. Actually, there are times I just create havoc on the map in a location where there’s no action. I leave it up to the AI-controlled demigods on my team to work on the objective. This works because there are instances where the enemy team will go after me thinking I’m easy prey and leave it wide open for us to win.
It’s a neat little trick that the developers did with the AI to make it seem like you’re playing with people. (Of course, the comparison is hard right now in light of the multiplayer issues.) As I play this, the possibilities for complex, strategic team play really excite me. Another thing I do first when a round starts is go to the item store and equip up. I was surprised when I caught the AI players on my team doing the same thing. And here I was thinking I was being smart.
With there being eight characters, I had initially thought it would have been hard for the developers to balance the game. I’ve not really found this to be the case. The exponential depth and the fact that you are on random teams each round make it even or at least appear to be. With that, it’s not wise to be locked into a particular style or setup with each demigod.
There are some achievement items that you can earn that carry with your profile for the entire game. However, you can only use one per round. These are uber-powerful items that can tip the scale even more for your demigod or the team. I’ve not really given them a chance yet. I’ve had too much fun playing each demigod and learning various builds of their skills.
Demigod has been a real surprise once I got past the learning curve. I mentioned in our review that the lack of tutorial would be a detriment. Now, I’m not so sure. Learning under pressure and by playing mostly single-player games has helped immensely.
Maybe the online connection issues are not so bad after all.
Love it!
