I was at PAX East over the weekend and good times were had by all. MC Wilson has some delightful pajamas, and I may or may not have made out with some of the L4D2 crew. Conjecture abounds.
All of that aside, there were a number of games and tabletop insanity going on at the Boston Convention Center. Here’s some stuff I played and what I thought about it:
Shank: If I was going to pick a game of show, I think this might be it. You’ve got knives, guns, a chainsaw, and some grenades. Your goal is to make a whole bunch of dudes real real dead. That’s pretty much all you need to know going into the game. The combo system is surprisingly deep, and I really hope the game gives you an opportunity to master it. Also, chainsawing dudes is really, really fun.
Breach: Ok, let’s just pretend that the ten minute speech about how this game is “real warfare” didn’t happen. Breach is a team-based multiplayer shooter with persistent experience rewards, fully splodable environments, and some pretty environments. It’s also coming to XBLA for $15. For that price I’ll definitely go for a moderny 1943.
Monday Night Combat: Hey, remember DOTA (Defense of the Ancients)? What if it had a love child with Unreal Tournament? You’d get this thing. Playtime was limited for me, but it looks like something that I’d enjoy. It has a fantastic cartoony feel and plays crazy arcadey. I’ll be interested to see more stuff about this.
Yesterday, I learned the hard way: don’t buy the new Castle Crashers DLC. Don’t even turn the game on Live multiplayer anymore. It’s over. The game broke.
What happened?
This happened:
It appears that fast leveling glitch with the boomerang to hit level 99 is nothing compared to this. A new exploit involving a wave of players quitting games and repeating the first boss ad-nauseam in the name of instantly boosting your characters up to level 256 is all you’ll see when jumping into a game. There’s several different theories how to do it, but one of the big ones apparently requires another player to be at level 256. Like an internet worm or a griefer’s STD, this new wave of god mode is running the purpose of the game into the ground. Level 256 allows players to kill anything, including bosses in one hit while remaining virtually invincible, which is odd as the stats screen has finite amounts, but I’ve seen it. One thwack of the sword, a barbarian boss dead.
Why write about this? A comment in one of the DGR threads would be sufficient, yes? This post is about cheaters and the integrity of Xbox Live. All’y'all party people have your own reasons for justifying the $60 annual price tag of the gold service. Some of you cite the 95% success rate of the network, others say the party chat and easy invite system, some of you would argue Netflix, last.fm, and facebook add-ons have added up to the price tag. I personally accept the $60 thorn in the neck because of Microsoft’s crackdowns to continuously enforce a fair competitive environment when they’re not spending all their resources on banning accounts with words that could be interpreted as a reference to something inappropriate to an age under eight. Sure developers are charged with fixing the exploit, but what about the fallout damage to the statistics, leaderboards, and rankings? Is fixing that also a developer duty or the console maker’s duty? Sony or Nintendo do not dabble with propping a game back up after a widespread case of steroid abuse as far as I know. Sony’s 3.0 frimware is supposed to introduce a feedback system which may or may not come with the relevancy to keep gigadouche moderated. Microsoft’s feedback system, even with its current issues, has been adequate enough to keep leaderboards and gamerscores from falling to the “9999999999999999999″ top rank curse. With that credibility, I’ve never questioned the integrity of high scores on leaderboards. With that credibility, I bought Left 4 Dead knowing the experience depended entirely on the ethics of a community with the collective intelligence of a pinecone. I expected somebody to find a way to break the game (and they did), but it would be fixed. This fix happened for the most part, as it does with many FPS, and the gaming service remained golden through today’s sessions. We can debate the integrity of the L4D Survival mode leaderboard as all the stages had exploits in the beginning, but that will remain grey area like a Barry Bonds asterisk as we just don’t know who’s legit and who hides under the map.
You may have heard of a little game called Castle Crashers that got released yesterday on XBLA. It’s the final game in the “Summer of Arcade” series they’ve been putting on and it’s created by the good folks over at Behemoth. I’m sure all of you, like me, feel a little twinge of pain on mention of that studio. Try and purge the beating you took from Alien Hominid and look with happiness on the Behemoth’s latest offering.
I remember days spent in the arcades, plunking down quarters into a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or The Simpsons arcade machines. Destined each and every time I played the game to spend all of my summer money on those machines, they provided hours of great fun. And it’s due to those games that the genre of the 4-player brawler is so ingrained in my mind.
While there have been many games that have tried and failed to live up to the standard those classic games set, Castle Crashers is not one of them. It is a perfect example of why the 4-player brawler still works in this day and age of online gaming. In fact, I think it’s a perfect fit for XBLA and I hate to add to the “best game on XBLA” talk but…I’m just sayin.
