Diablo III is finally here and per the usual Blizzard standards it comes with a superb Collector’s Edition. While you wait for the servers to clear up and let you play, take a look at what goodies come packed inside their giant sized CE.
Please excuse the photo quality, they were taken on an old iPhone.
Fresh from Amazon, the box itself.
Diablo makes his presence felt once the lid comes off.
Small box inside the box. I wonder what could be inside...
Diablo statue with USB Soulstone containing Diablo II and its expansion.
Diablo assembled. My wife is not happy with its placement in our house... my dresser
Soundtrack CD, Behind the Scenes DVD & Blu-Ray, and a bunch of guest passes.
What we came for, the game itself.
Diablo III artbook.
A look inside the artbook.
Now if you will excuse me, it is time to kill some demons. Look for a Quick Attack on the game followed by a review in the very near future.
Quick Attacks are Vagary.TV’s way of giving you, the reader, a glimpse at a game we are playing. This could be a game we are reviewing in full or just something we picked up for a few days to kill some time but either way it will highlight thoughts and impressions from the first hour or two of gameplay. Opinions could change before our final though.
In this Quick Attack, we look at the first few hours of Minecraft Xbox 360 Edition for the Xbox 360.
Minecraft is fun but there isn’t much game there and even less direction. It will appeal to players that enjoy being given a sandbox and the tools to play in it, those preferring a more directed experience will want to stay clear. Look for our full review from Tony Odett in the near future.
Eastern Europe has long been known as a hotbed for high creativity mixed with awkward execution. While games like The Witcher 2 have proven that highly polished product can come out of the old communist bloc, most games are still amongst the wonkiest released to retail. So, going into Risen 2: Dark Waters, I knew exactly what to expect and it mostly hits those expectations, but it also has a surprising amount of natural charm that gives clemency to a lot of the nagging issues at play.
Risen 2: Dark Waters is a follow up to developer Piranha Bytes tepidly received roleplaying game, Risen. Having not played Risen, I cannot tell if the story of Dark Waters directly follows the events of the original or not. Regardless it seems that those events are mostly inconsequential as Dark Waters takes the series out of the stock fantasy realm the original was based in, instead taking pirates as the theme. As such, with so many games where players fight generic fantasy monsters, Risen 2 is a breath of fresh air.
Players will take on the role of the nameless hero as he sets out to infiltrate the world of the pirates on a mission to track down the whereabouts of a legendary weapon. Unlike many Western styled roleplaying games, the main quest in Risen 2 is actually well thought out and thoroughly engaging and there is surprisingly some very solid writing with excellent characters in the game.
It is the story, characters and the ability to live out the life of a pirate that define Risen 2 and make it worth playing. Unfortunately, the game takes its sweet time showing these things to players, instead choosing to put its worst foot forward with a sluggishly paced opening and a tutorial area that highlights the worst aspects of the gameplay and progression system.
It seems to be a calling card of games developed in Eastern Europe to make their players suffer before getting any enjoyment out of their products. Risen 2 follows suit and during an extra-long training session, masquerading as a prologue, Risen 2 forces players to do tiresome fetch quests, complete multi-tiered quest lines with no direction, navigate an atrociously designed map, and fight monsters that cannot be defended against. While some of these things are part and parcel with roleplaying games, they generally do not show themselves in the opening act when the game is trying to hook players with a reason to keep playing. And the biggest of these issues is something you will do throughout the game, combat.
Combat in Risen 2 is designed around three different disciplines, sword fighting, gunplay, and voodoo. The default system available is sword fighting and it has major design issues that hinder it from being an all-around effective choice for battle. The biggest issue is that unless combat is against human characters, the intricate defense/parry system is useless. This makes all fights against wildlife and monsters troublesome even on lower difficulty levels. It can be highly frustrating dying repeatedly at the hands of a fire-breathing chicken because it has un-blockable attacks. And it is even more frustrating when you realize that you were mistakenly on the wrong side of an island when it happens.
Navigation in Risen 2 is troublesome to say the least. In all my time with the game I was never able to get the quest marker system to work properly with the map and without a waypoint to aim for there is a lot of aimless wandering. I will fully admit that maybe I missed the instructions for how to utilize the map but even so, it is not intuitive.
Worst of all the awkward design decisions though might be the progression system. Leveling revolves around two things, glory points (experience points) and gold. Glory points, awarded for doing just about everything in the game world, can be used to buy levels in the game’s core proficiencies like sword fighting or gunplay but each proficiency has skills that can also be leveled up. However, all this sub leveling is done through meeting trainers in the game world and paying them large amounts of gold to train these skills. Being as gold is hard to come by for over half of the game, leveling can be somewhat of a chore.
As someone that generally gets turned off by a noticeable lack of polish, sticking with Risen, despite its issues, rewarded me with a very unique gaming experience and a charming story that captivated me and made me want to continue playing. The fact that it is noticeably different in setting from every other roleplaying game out there also helps it quite a bit. In the end though, these issues may not be enough for some players to overcome but that is alright, Risen 2 is after all a janky game and will not be for everyone. If you are however, in the mood for sailing the high seas with a bottle of rum, this game will scratch your itch quite well.
Pros
Cons
3 / 5
It is another lite week in the world of new film releases.
Hitting theaters in wide release is the latest Tim Burton/Johnny Depp colaboration, Dark Shadows. Based on the 70s gothic soap opera of the same name, Burton once again brings his quirkiness to audiences. Unlike his last few releases with Depp (Alice in Wonderland, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), Dark Shadows does not seem to have the same wide appeal and I personally smell bomb.
Also releasing in theaters, albeit in limited release, is God Bless America. The dark comedy directed by Bobcat Goldthwait is well worth watching if you can find a theater showing it. If not, there is always The Avengers which is sure to hold strong in its second weekend of release, provided you are one of the few that has yet to see the blockbuster.
Horror comes in a variety of flavors and while Resident Evil ruled the game scene with its campy B-movie approach, there was always room for something more serious. That is where Silent Hill came along. Until the original Silent Hill, on the original Playstation, I had never been scared by a game before. Silent Hill rectified that through effective use of their unique sound and visual design paired with mature subject matter, generally not found in games. Needless to say, Silent Hill was a smash success for publisher Konami and the series continued in sequels on the Playstation 2.
Konami, seeing the success other games have had with HD re-releases, has brought fans of the series, and potential newcomers, Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3 in one package called Silent Hill HD Collection. Notably missing from this HD collection is Silent Hill 4: The Room. While The Room was less well received by both critics and fans, its exclusion from this collection diminishes the value of the package somewhat. That said, there are plenty of other things that diminish this package, that the exclusion of a mediocre title is the least of its worries. Developed by Hijinx Studios in conjunction with Team Silent, the Silent Hill HD Collection is a mixed bag of excellence marred by technical flaws and poor design choices.
While many games do a great job of putting their best foot forward, hiding their inherent flaws until one is too invested in the goings on to turn back, this HD Collection slaps users in the face on the main menu screen. Actually that is being a bit harsh; it waits to slap users until after they choose whether they want to play Silent Hill 2 or Silent Hill 3. Accidentally choosing the wrong game will require players to exit the game fully and reboot from the dashboard as there is no menu option to return to the game’s root menu. Some might be willing to overlook this issue but when grouped with the rest of the game’s technical issues and wonky design decisions, the menu issue is just the first check mark on a shoddy production job.
My personal experience got even worse. Using a wired third party controller that I have used to play other games before and after playing the Silent Hill HD Collection, the game was near unplayable. Character movement was jerky and unresponsive in both Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3, to the point that I actually felt the collection was completely broken. On a whim, I decided to try a Dualshock 3 and magically a lot of the unresponsiveness disappeared, albeit not all. Characters still controlled somewhat wonky until I switched the in game control toggle from 3D to 2D, or standard tank controls.
While things became playable after the switch from 3D to 2D control, the games themselves suffer from incredible amounts of slowdown. The frame rate fluctuates constantly, often with no rhyme or reason to it. This slowdown creates atrocious drops in playability, especially if it happens during an action sequence. There is absolutely no excuse for these drops in performance.
There is also no excuse for how little improvement has been made to the visuals. This is supposed to be a high definition collection but the textures only look fractionally better than their last generation counterparts and much of the visuals in the two games look muddy. The muddy visuals could actually be overlooked, and might have been overlooked, if Hijinx had not upped the brightness level of the game. With the added light, the visuals, in some cases, actually look worse than when the games were originally released.
I do not want to sound completely negative after all Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3 are two of the best horror games to come out and this HD Collection does pose the opportunity for players to experience them both, that is providing one can look past the bugs and outright poor design choices. Both games are fantastic in terms of writing, puzzles and scares. Silent Hill 2 in particular deals with some extremely mature subject matter that most games today would not even dream of touching.
Silent Hill 2 anchors itself on the theme of loss as protagonist James Sunderland sets about exploring the mysterious town in search of his dead wife. Instead of overloading the player with jump scares, cheap scare tactics and tons of enemies, Silent Hill 2 works a more psychological angle utilizing smartly designed levels and effective use of sound. Sure there are still enemies to defeat but figuring out the mysteries of the town and James relationship with his wife are the most interesting and terrifying aspects of the game.
Where Silent Hill 2 deals with loss, Silent Hill 3 deals with revelations. Heather, the protagonist of Silent Hill 3, is the adopted daughter of the original game’s hero, Harry Mason, and the game sets out to reveal the secrets behind the mysterious town. As a fan of the original game, Silent Hill 3 is a great piece of fan service that continues the fine tradition set forth by its predecessors. It may not be as deep in its messaging as Silent Hill 2 but it holds a unique charm. However, the appeal of the game may be less to people that have not played the original game, still it lays a smart, cohesive horror story out that few games have matched since.
Neither game would be nearly as effective as they are without the stellar sound design. Hijinx mostly gets this transfer correct. For whatever reason, new voice acting was recorded and it leaves a bit to be desired but nearly everything else is spot on, from the soundtrack to the ambient noises that accentuate the terrifying atmosphere. I say nearly everything else because gunshots in the games sound muffled and less crisp than I remember them being. That said, regardless of if my memory is correct or not, gunshots sound flat and lack power which is extremely noticeable compared to the rest of the sound design. Still the sound design in these two games is excellent and shines amongst everything else in the package.
HD Collections should be celebrations of classics, providing fans the experience they remember while presenting newcomers with the evidence to support the acclaim these games received. The Silent Hill HD Collection fails to do this and as such it fails to be something that can be recommended.
Pros
Cons
2 / 5
Note: This review was done using the Playstation 3 version of the game. It is also available on Xbox 360.
There had to be a contingent of people at Marvel that felt spending years of time and nearly a billion dollars in money to facilitate bringing The Avengers to the screen was too big a gamble. After all, the idea of creating a film universe intertwined like the comic books they are based on, spanning over five different films from four different franchises, of varying success, and culminating in one super-sized blockbuster has to fall into the realm of craziest ever in film history. After having seen The Avengers, I have to fathom that those people, along with any other doubters are long gone from the employ of Marvel.
What Marvel have accomplished with bringing The Avengers to audiences is something special and should be commended. Oh and the film is pretty decent as well.
Building off of the events of Thor, The Avengers sees Loki (Tom Hiddleston) up to no good as he steals a dangerous artifact from the covert ops organization, S.H.I.E.L.D. This artifact holds the power to open a portal in space, which Loki plans on using to bring an army of aliens to conquer the mortals of earth. Of course an event of this magnitude requires more than just one super hero to get the job done and S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) has just the right “team” in mind. He sets about assembling Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) into a team, albeit under false pretenses.
The assembly of the team establishes the characters and their differing personalities, motives and relationships towards one another but it is also somewhat of a slog. After about the first half hour I started to get a bit restless, and so did the crowd I watched it with. Sadly, it takes about another half hour before things really get going. Fortunately once they do get going, the film took me on a phenomenal thrill ride that few films have in recent memory.
Similar to last year’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon, The Avengers lay waste to an entire city during their climactic final battle. But unlike the bombast filled Bay film, The Avengers never feels tiring. Writer/Director Joss Whedon (Buffy, Firefly) has interspersed moments of levity into the incredible carnage. Every time I felt I was reaching the point of sensory overload, something absurd, yet fully fitting, would cut the tension and reset my attention span. Superhero movies should be fun and these moments of levity show how much Whedon got the material with which he was entrusted to work.
In addition to Whedon fully grasping the material, the entire cast is completely in touch with the material. Everybody from Downey Jr., whom steals scenes every chance he can, to Jeremy Renner (as Hawkeye) has bought into these characters. The shining star of the film though might very well have been Mark Ruffalo as Dr. Banner and his alter ego, The Hulk. Ruffalo, best known for romantic comedies, is charming as Banner and terrifying as the Hulk. It is a fantastic performance all around and one that is sure to get him a shot at his own Hulk film.
After last summer, where so many of the biggest blockbusters failed to fully satisfy (even those setting up this film), The Avengers kicks off the 2012 summer movie season in style. It is a roller coaster ride worth experiencing in theaters. Go see it, you won’t be disappointed.
4 / 5
The modern horror genre has much for which they can thank Edgar Allan Poe. His stories and poems of the mysterious and macabre have inspired more than a few creators of the horror we enjoy today. While his literary works have lived on, his life could be viewed as a tragedy. He was an alcoholic that died broke and delirious in Baltimore, Maryland and the mysterious nature of his death could very well have been written as one of his dark tales.
Starring John Cusack as the troubled author, The Raven latches onto the idea of Poe’s last days mirroring his writings. Unfortunately, it shoehorns the concept into a traditional murder mystery with gore soaked trappings. A serial killer in Baltimore has adopted the writings of Poe as his calling card and Edgar gets drawn into a macabre game of cat and mouse as he has to race against time to save a woman he loves. Effectively the film plays out like a 19th century version of Seven mixed with Saw, except it’s horribly tedious.
To its credit the film does start out rather strong. Poe belligerent and drunk gets tossed from a bar only to pass out in an alley, at the very same time a murder is being played out that draws its inspiration from Poe’s works. Because of the circumstances surrounding the murder, Poe is obviously a suspect and because he passed out he cannot prove his innocence. The film toys with this idea for a bit longer but ultimately, like the rest of the film, it is just wasted potential.
Speaking of wasted potential, director James McTeigue may very well be the definition of it as this point. The fact that McTeigue was the helmsman for this shipwreck of a film makes it all the worse. The filmmaker had such a positive upside from his stellar debut, V for Vendetta, and his work with the Wachowski’s on The Matrix trilogy. But the Raven has none of the intellectual or stylistic flourishes that viewers saw in his past work. It is a massive shame to see what his talent has become.
Much like Poe’s life was a tragedy, The Raven is a tragedy of filmmaking. It wastes a fun performance by Cusack, the film’s lone bright spot, and somehow makes murder and mystery out to be components in the cure to insomnia. Poe deserves better but even more so, the viewer deserves better. Filmgoers’ time and money would be better spent reading some of Poe’s work instead of seeing this sorry excuse for a “historical” thriller.
1 / 5
I met Robert Kirkman at a comic signing shortly after The Walking Dead launched. It was a nice little shop attached to a dingy little shopping center in Levittown, PA. As much as I loved the comic at that moment in time, I never would have thought that his little black and white comic book, published by a second tier comics company, focusing on the zombie apocalypse would spawn into the cross media sensation it has today. But that is exactly where we are. AMC has brought the adaptation of the comic series to television with astounding success and now Telltale Games brings fans its own vision of the series in the gaming space.
At the first mention of Telltale developing an episodic game based on the series, I was apprehensively optimistic. Telltale after all has a history of developing great adventure games and making The Walking Dead into an adventure game made perfect sense because of how much exploration and character interactions play a part in the series. However, the content of The Walking Dead was so unlike anything they had ever done before that I could not help but worry.
While zombies are the catalyst for the events taking place in the world, The Walking Dead is really about the character interactions and choices that are made by those that are still living. Telltale completely understood what makes the series tick and nails it from the opening moments of the game. Instead of focusing on the zombie outbreak, the beginning of the game is just a simple conversation during a car ride out of Atlanta. The whole thing lulls the player into a false sense of security and because of the underlying premise, players know something bad is going to happen, it is just a matter of when and the tension mounts as the climactic delivery is waited on.
Building and maintaining tension consistently is something The Walking Dead had to do especially well, fortunately with a solid combination of good writing and smartly designed gameplay, it is able to deliver it throughout the episode. The gameplay system The Walking Dead utilizes is a hodgepodge of design elements from other games. The dialog system in particular is very reminiscent of Alpha Protocol’s timed dialog wheel, while the navigation and environmental interaction pieces seem strongly influenced by Heavy Rain, albeit heavily modified.
These design choices give the biggest boon to the game via how Telltale has implemented the action sequences in the game. Forgoing generic third person scenarios that would have lost the feel of the series, action sequences are built around disorienting the player and making them feel uncomfortable. These scenarios generally have an easy solution but ,whether it is through visual manipulation, making it hard to see what needs to be done, or by presenting to the player a choice that needs to be decided immediately, The Walking Dead makes it hard on the player. And doing something or failing to do something can have major repercussions down the line.
Cause and effect are two major players in The Walking Dead and seeing how my choices played out in the game was emotionally draining. Unlike something like Mass Effect where my decisions are recorded and played out over the course of three complete games, to varying degrees of satisfaction, The Walking Dead delivers on player choice. If I neglect to do something it could be the difference between a character living or dying. If I seemingly insult someone that person could very well hold it against me causing me potentially irreparable harm down the line. While it is true that some of the decisions are purely cosmetic because the story has to be directed down a certain path but most of them have weight, making the game quite satisfying to play.
Due to the nature of the content, The Walking Dead will not be for everyone. However for fans of the comic and television series, for fans of the horror genre, and even for those just looking for a mature take on mature content, The Walking Dead is a treat. It is too bad we have to wait a month before episode two.
Pros
Cons
5 / 5
Note: The Walking Dead is an episodic series, this review was done using the PC version of the first episode of the game. It is also available on Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.
Racing is a delicate balance of speed and control. Knowing how and when to shift that balance from one to the other is the key to victory or failure. This is true whether you are driving karts, supercars or even futuristic racecars that travel faster than anything we can fathom today. Of course the entire dynamic gets tossed out the window when you add in weaponry, which is probably why I never felt at ease with Sony’s premier Vita racer, Wipeout 2048.
Wipeout, Sony’s long running futuristic racing franchise, takes place in a world where racing consists of more than just rubbing out your opponent. Featuring pickups to enable combat weaponry and effective countermeasures, racing in Wipeout is just as much about balancing offensive and defensive tactics as it is about balancing speed and control. Wipeout 2048 brings this all to the Vita, in a package that may be the best showcase for the system out of the launch lineup games.
Like any good racing game, Wipeout 2048 delivers a great sense of speed. This is all the more impressive considering the futuristic nature of the vehicles. Balancing the speed is simple to learn, yet hard to master. Screeching out of the gate is liable to get your vehicle a one way ticket to the junk yard though, so mastering braking and sliding on the track are musts. Then comes the combat power-ups, running over an active pickup spot will activate the power-up on the craft, which can then be easily deployed via a simple button press. I had more than enough trouble adjusting to the ultra high speeds of the races that combat was something I never got a good handle on, despite seeming so simple. While being a well rounded racer is certainly beneficial to success, to the Wipeout 2048’s credit the game allows for players to play to their strengths. All of this together helps to make Wipeout 2048 one of the more easily accessible Vita games to launch with the system.
Wipeout 2048 utilizes a honeycombing node structure for both its single player and multiplayer career modes. Each node has a specific set of challenges that need to be achieved before it can be cleared. Focusing on both the racing and combat aspects of the game, these challenges offer quite the variety in gameplay and did a great job in keeping me interested as I progressed through the career. Being able to select nodes that work to my strengths, particularly speed trials, also did wonders to keep me engaged.
While the progression of the single player and multiplayer career nodes are two separate entities, overall experience is shared between the two. For someone like me, that mostly plays single player, being able to jump in and still be competitive in the multiplayer career was a huge bonus and it made me actively want to play more. Unfortunately, due to some sloppy design choices the game itself made it quite difficult to remain engaged in any of the multiplayer features for any length of time.
For a game that revolves around speed, Wipeout 2048 surprisingly takes inexcusable amounts of time to get players into a multiplayer game. Wait times can be upwards of five minutes and considering the battery life of the Vita, these extended waiting periods can add up to a small amount of time actually playing the game. On top of that, the lobby system implemented by the game is atrocious. In my time with the game, I found no way to communicate with other racers while waiting instead being forced to stare at the same few screens available to me.
Compounding the issue even further is the excruciatingly long track loading times. To load into a track, both single player and multiplayer, load times of over a minute are common place. Some may see this as a very nitpicky complaint but I do not care how great the game actually looks and plays, these load times are completely unacceptable for a game on a portable device. When I take out my Vita, I want to be able to jump into a game as quickly as possible and Wipeout 2048 makes that process exceptionally difficult.
Despite these functionality issues, the gameplay is top notch and visually it looks stellar; all of this combines to make Wipeout 2048 one of the premier releases on the Vita system. It is a definite showcase piece for Sony’s portable system. But more importantly it is a fantastic racing game, not just on the Vita but on any system.
Pros
Cons
4 / 5
For the most part the horror genre survives by utilizing well worn clichés. Unfortunately, this approach has made much of the genre into a color-by-numbers book; delivering cookie cutter experiences that seemingly get more and more unsatisfactory each time out. However, there are some films that take these clichés, do something new with them, and deliver thoroughly entertaining experiences. The Cabin in the Woods is one of these films.
The Cabin in the Woods features five college kids setting out on a weekend getaway to, wait for it… a cabin in the woods. The five fit the stereotypical horror roles, there is the dumb jock (Chris Hemsworth), the slut (Anna Hutchinson), the nice guy (Jesse Williams), the stoner (Fran Kranz) and the virgin (Kristen Connolly) and being a horror film that is working with standard genre clichés, bad things are bound to happen to these kids. But there is something else at play as well. Talking about this something else would spoil the fun but let us just say that this is not your normal trip to the woods.
The film, written by Joss Whedon and Drew Godard (also the director), is smart and witty throughout. It has fun with the genre, playing with genre conventions in such a way that made the 90 minute run time some of the most fun I have had in a theater in a long time. Knowing beforehand that Whedon was involved in the writing of the film, I expected witty dialog and a frantic pace mixed in amongst standard genre tropes and that is exactly what I got. But, it should be noted that while it plays with the tropes of the slasher genre, the film is not particularly scary. This is not to say that The Cabin in the Woods is any less of a horror film than say the latest Friday the 13th film, but rather that ingrained expectations can be deceiving.
Most people walk into a horror film knowing what to expect and The Cabin in the Woods manipulates these expectations to deliver something unique. If the film is about anything other than delivering a good time, it is about shattering expectations. On one hand it openly mocks the conventions of the genre and what they have become, while at the same time it treats the genre with the reverence it deserves. Each turn of the film plays with the viewer and at times I felt like the film was actively mocking me, leading me down familiar paths with unexpected outcomes.
It is a shame that the lack of genuine scares in the film might be seen as a turn off to some viewers and that others that will not be able to get past their pre-conceived expectations for the film. But for those that can accept it for what it is and what it does with and to the horror genre, The Cabin in the Woods offers a fun, thrill ride that should not be missed.
4 / 5
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