During their Game Developers Conference press conference yesterday, Sony finally announced the name of their PlayStation 3 motion controller. Contrary to many reports, it will not be called the Arc or the Wand- it is called the PlayStation Move. READ MORE
March 2010
Denmark-based developer Press Play is trying really, really hard to make their game the next indie hit. How? By borrowing elements from lots of other small-team hits. And it ends up working fairly well.
Max & the Magic Marker‘s concept is simple: Max traverses areas, collecting items and avoiding enemies with the help of a Magic Marker drawing shapes that Max can jump on or kill baddies with. It sounds like a cross of Drawn to Life and Crayon Physics and, well, it is. And unabashedly so. Here’s the story: Max is a kid who loves to draw. One day, he gets an orange marker in the mail, so he draws a monster with it. The monster comes to life and starts wreaking havoc, so Max decides he has to stop it.
Games have had problems controlling a person and the environment at the same time. (We’re looking at you, Scribblenauts.) Max actually does this flawlessly. The Nunchuk controls Max (Z jumps, C grabs and pulls). The remote controls the marker.
The whole thing takes place in Max’s imagination as he doodles, so you can move and draw at the same time or, if you choose, pause the action and draw in the real world. This seems like “easy mode” to some, but it really adds another layer of strategy, since you can pause and draw things under Max mid-jump, or create suspended platforms to save him from a fall. Of course, even if you don’t want to use it for gameplay, the real world view shows everything in childish drawings, and it’s just a cool effect. The world of imagination is lush, and the worlds of Max’s mind are a lot like what you’d expect a kid to think about.
The menus are reminiscent of World of Goo. As in, it seems they took the menus and swapped out some graphics here and there but left everything where it was. It even borrows Goo‘s idea of making exceptional performance in levels unlock more supplies for a “playground” area. Of course, World of Goo is one of the most successful WiiWare releases, and the most like Max, so who can blame them?
Of course, all games have their shortcomings, and this one has one main one: length. There are only fifteen levels in the game. There’s a little value in replaying levels to collect everything, but pretty much it’s a one-and-done title. The 1000-point price tag is reasonable, though. If it had something that made it worth leaving on the system, it’d be one of the best games of the year. Being a lot of fun for a little while is still good, though.
Tropico 3 is almost exactly what I’ve always wanted out of a city building game. It takes the city building of SimCity and mixes it with the strategic balancing of Civilization. The result is an addictive real-time strategy game that plays better than I ever expected.
The over-arching objective of Tropico 3 is to become a successful dictator of the Caribbean island of Tropico. You have a huge variety of choices and ways of going about this task though, ranging from being a paranoid, militaristic dictator to a libertarian, enlightened despot.
The meat of Tropico 3 is definitely the campaign. In the campaign you rule over a series of islands, each with its own set of goals and restrictions. Before each mission you are given the option of picking from a select group of real-life dictators, such as Augost Pinochet or Fidel Castro, or creating your own ‘El Presidente.’ If you go this route, you get to customize your look, background, and personality traits. Everything you choose will have benefits and drawbacks, so it pays to recustomize your dictator before each mission based on the overall objective. No matter whether you are charged with exporting a certain amount of goods, courting tourists, or simply staying in power, everything will require you to build a good economy and keep your people happy.
Keeping your people happy is dependent upon making sure they have enough jobs and food, along with courting the various factions that your populace belongs to. These will vary from intellectuals, who want to prioritize liberty and education, to the religious, who only care about how many churches and cathedrals you build for them, to the nationalists, who prefer you block immigration and tourism. This balancing act is what adds a large amount of the strategy to Tropico 3.
Graphically, Tropico 3 looks stunning on the Xbox 360. Everything is very vibrant and detailed, even when you zoom in as far as you can. Additionally, each island has its own look and feel, further adding to the humorous mood it projects from every facet of the game.
Unfortunately, the audio doesn’t stack up to the rest of the game. DJ Juanito seems to only have three or four tracks to play, so you’ll quickly mute the soundtrack and listen to your own music instead. His public service announcements, though, add a lot to the general feel of the game. His amusing spin and delivery are a great addition to the game.
Tropico 3 has the standard sandbox mode for this type of game, made somewhat unique thanks to the game’s tongue-in-cheek humor; however, from the start you’ll know that your main focus of the game will be the campaign.
The only downside I found with the 360 version of Tropico 3 is the present of a weird bug that causes a status screen to freeze on the screen. Once it does this, the game is entirely unplayable until you turn off the game and restart it. It happens very rarely, but because of its severity, it is still a black mark against an otherwise superb game.
Tropico 3 has a long campaign and a great sandbox mode, and with the complete lack of any game on the 360 to compare with, Tropico 3 is a must buy for any fan of the genre.
Plays Like: Tropico, SimCity
Pros: Long campaign, great visuals, humor fits the game like a glove
Cons: Music gets grating quickly, weird bug that makes the game unplayable
As many gamers know, using hexagonal tiles is a statement. Hex tiles are the geekiest of the geeky, and putting them in your game set the tone for how you want to be taken. Hex tiles bring to mind thoughts of modern board games like Settlers of Catan, Twilight Imperium and others, and it also evokes classic PC strategy titles. When a company puts hex tiles in the game, the statement is this: “Our game has incredible strategic depth.”
Greed Corp, the first release in the “Mistbound” universe from developers W!Games, has hex tiles. And, indeed, it feels a lot like a board game. There are preset boards, and players take turns capturing and harvesting from these tiles in an attempt to shut out the opponent. It’s not that simple, though. Harvesting tiles, while necessary to gain money to buy units and make progress, slowly destroys the tiles, and takes away land under your control. Of course, a smaller area is easier to control, and those resources make it easier for you to do it. It’s a balancing act.
Your tools are few: you can build a harvester, earning money from (and destroying) that tile and all surrounding ones each turn. You can build armories to create more walkers, which allow you to destroy other walkers and claim new tiles. You can build cannons and buy ammunition to destroy tiles from afar, and, perhaps most importantly, you can build carriers to take walkers anywhere on the board. The reason it’s most important is this: the game’s end almost always is a series of tiny, isolated islands building fleets and dropping armies of walkers on opposing bases to capture (or destroy) them.
All of this is based in this new world dreamed up by W!Games. The Mistbound setting, where the developer apparently plans to set many upcoming titles, is a sort of dystopian steampunk future with incredibly limited resources and four factions fighting to control them. There’s the inherently evil Empire, the corporate Cartel, the greedy Pirates and the seemingly hypocritical Freemen, a group that wants preservation but has to fight like the rest to stay alive.
Of course, this has absolutely no effect on the gameplay. Every faction plays the same. It’s just a little flavor for those who like that kind of thing.
Each faction has its own campaign, comprised of mostly evenly-balanced games against tougher and tougher A.I. This is a good way to learn strategy, but for anything that feels like a board game, its primary attraction is multiplayer. It obviously supports online play, but it thankfully also features up to 4-player local matches as well. There’s enough variety in the maps to keep anyone happy.
Does it live up to the hex tile promise? Mostly. It seems like it’s one extra gameplay twist away from being incredible. As it is, it’s still great fun, and has that abstract Euro-style simplicity that many love. But, let’s be honest, some people are freaked out by hex tiles.
SB Asks: GDC ’10
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So the 2010 Game Developers Conference is this week. In past years, there have been a few interesting announcements made at the show, and though it’s never been anywhere near the level of E3, we can’t help but get excited about what may be shown. But what about you? Are you excited about it? Do you want to go? What do you think will be announced? Let us know!
