At 8:00am on Saturday, October 15th, the Midwest Nerds crew will be participating in Extra-Life, a fundraising event to support local hospitals in the Children’s Miracle Network. Below is our live stream, schedule, and online handles for future stalking opportunities. See you all bright and early! Continue Reading…
There’s something special about a game that includes a place to hang out with your friends between quests or missions. Some of the most fun I’ve had in World of Warcraft has been in Orgrimmar, where the most random and hysterical things can come up. A big part of making that successful is having an interesting setting that players want to spend time in.
And who wouldn’t want to spend time on a World War 2 era aircraft carrier customizing the cannons on their gigantic walking tank?
That’s exactly what Trenched, Double Fine’s new tower defense/shooter hybrid, allows you to do.
In typical style, Double Fine has created a hilarious and interesting world. Blasting enemies (known as Tubes) made out of televisions in a humongous mech is just as ridiculous as it sounds, but it all makes sense in a world where your marine lights his cigar by firing a pistol in celebration of victory.
Achieving that victory comes by defending your base from waves of those Tube creatures as they spew out of Conduits and follow designated paths intent on destruction. Defense can take the form of emplacements, the typical towers that are placed and upgraded in a tower defense game, or the weaponry already equipped on your mobile trench.
Three options are offered for the chassis of your mech. Naturally this choice has a huge impact on your playstyle. The Assault chassis brings the big guns to bear – artillery cannons, grenade launchers, etc. Meanwhile, the Engineering chassis can only equip small weapons like machine guns or shotguns, but it’s able to carry more powerful turrets and can call them in for much cheaper.
Various enemy types force players to mix up their equipment. Snipe Tuners will stay at range and blast your mobile trench, Jacobs make all nearby Tubes immune to damage, and Knobs come in swarms to destroy precious emplacements. Flying enemies can’t be touched by mines and mortar turrets, yet heavy weaponry like that is the only way to crack the armor of the powerful Breaker Tubes.
All these aspects means some serious planning can be required when launching into a mission. Playing through with three other friends, I often found that we’d take a specialty and almost developed our own classes. Frantic moments where an ally is calling for air support on the left, another voice cries out to snipe the Jacob on the right, and an injured player is asking if there’s a repair turret down were the results of a quick pace that you don’t see in tower defense games.
Then there’s loot, following WoW’s traditional green < blue < purple color scheme. Defeated Tubes drop loot boxes containing weapons, legs, marine hats, paint jobs, and emplacements. Sniper rifles that pierce enemies, towers that drop mines to shock and stun victims, and artillery cannons that drop miniature bombs from the shell mean that almost as much time is spent selecting your loadout and drooling over new gear as fighting Tubes.
Perhaps inevitably, the game felt a lot more like a traditional tower defense game when running solo. Being unable to cover all lanes alone meant a heavier reliance on emplacements and running to get scrap myself. With friends, it was a shooting gallery where our turrets merely supplemented our weapons.
All too soon, it was over. We’d reached level 10, shared some laughs, saved the world, sharded purps… and were begging for DLC.
I’ve been gaming my whole life. Seriously, if you went to my first grade journal, all it would contain are entries like “Today was good, I hope I can rent Willow on Friday. I like the Willow game.” Child-Steve really liked Willow. Adult-Steve loves it. In these young days, one of the first franchises I ever grew addicted to was Megaman. Amazing soundtrack, character advancement, and the ability to choose my own level to start on? Way awesome.
Never in all my years could I have imagined the greatness that the franchise was destined for.
God bless my lovely mother for accepting my obsession. You see readers, Megaman X was one of those games that flew under the radarof yours truly. That means that I wasn’t obsessing over its release date and running around my house screaming about its strong points, as was the norm for most titles that held my excitement. As a surprise, my mother rented a few games for me while I was camping one weekend, and Megaman X happened to be among them. After being told this, the drive home consisted mostly of me reminiscing of the greatness that was Megamans 1-6.
From the first level I realized my world was about to be turned upside down.
“Wall jumping? WHAT??! AWESOME!!!”
Once I finally gained an understanding of how the new gameplay worked, I reached the first fight with Vile and became “vile”ated in more ways than a 14 year old Bangkok prostitute. Then, out of nowhere, came the mighty Zero, glowing blade of light in tow. My mind was officially blown.
Choose your own level dynamic? Check. Rock, paper, scissors boss design? You got it. Secret Hadouken technique that was spoken of only in whispers? Winning, duh! The game took everything we loved about Megaman and made it more engaging. Then it added more features on top of the original design to make the game we didn’t realize we wanted. It gave us the Megaman we pined for, plus a Megaman we never imagined.
Megaman X represents re-imagining a series that met the expectation of fans and more. It hit that sweet spot where developer vision overlaps with fan expectation, more so than any game of its time. I feel like that lesson is lost in the modern age, where developers either decide that they want to completely ignore fan expectations or become confined by them and stunt the natural evolution of their franchise.
Developers: You don’t need to change your game genre to reinvent your IP.
You don’t need puzzle elements to diversify every adventure game and you don’t need RPG elements to diversify every action game. If you have a successful IP, fans want a shift in the gaming experience that justifies the sixty dollar purchase. That doesn’t mean we want a God of War that uses Final Fantasy gameplay. We want YOUR game. We like YOUR game. If a developer holds on to its core concepts, but changes how we experience those concepts, they’ll have a success on their hands.
The term “reinvent” has been taken too literally in recent years, and I feel that it will end up dooming more fantastic games than it revitalizes. Take a hint from Megaman. If your game design rocks, your sequel will, too.
We all grew up with some exposure to construction toys such as Legos, Erector Set, Lincoln Logs, Blok, or the cheap store branded kind that really never fit together well (like me). These toys were great. Your imagination, and sometimes the number of 2×1 blocks you owned, was the limit to the creativity and fun that could be had. Everything from simple houses to castles, farm animals to dragons, or cars to spaceships were commonly created in block form out of the minds of future engineers of all stripes. Sometimes these elaborate builds were assembled in back yards, in the sandbox, among friends.
If you spend any amount of time surfing the video game blogosphere it’s hard to have missed the story of Markus Persson, his indie game developing house Mojang AB, and his first (not even finished) game called Minecraft. It is that same construction based sandbox experience we all had as children given the video game treatment. Your avatar exists in a randomly generated world full of diverse regions, benign creatures, and dangerous monsters. That’s it. It is your sandbox. You imagination takes over and you decide what is next. You decide how you will survive once the sun sets. You decide what to explore. You decide what to do/create with all of raw material you will inevitably collect.
One of the only things I loved more than playing with Legos was playing with Legos, with friends. I’ve set up a multiplayer server and would like to invite any of the fans of Midwest Nerds to join me. Anyone is invited but I will need to add your in-game name to the server whitelist before being allowed on. (After all, the internet is full of grieffing jerks that would love to destroy what we’ve built.)
If you haven’t tried Minecraft yet the classic version is free to try. If it’s something you would enjoy the beta is $20 and include multiplayer access. That’s only 125% of the price of the last CoD Map Pack you purchased! What a steal!!
Server IP: 50.22.36.151:25652
Post your in game name in the comments or send an email zvanselow at gmail dot com to be include on the server whitelist. It would be great to have you join us!
Nathan Z
This post was submitted by Nathan Z.
“You’re not tasting it right.”
When I was in high school I distinctly remember watching some awful anime on some awful Tuesday night in which one character explained that if you do not like sake (pronounced sock-eh) it is due to your inability to taste it correctly.
I mocked the notion that there was a correct way to taste such a beverage, but my friend began to explain all the reasons this could be the case: the temperature, what part of the mouth the sake touched, and how long he let the sake linger before swallowing it could have an effect.
Fast forward to 2011, the year of impending zombie doom. On any given weekend, you will likely find me partaking in the art of what is commonly referred to as beeratry. Or Beerism. Or Beerifying. Or Beering up. Regardless of what you call it, I greatly enjoy trying new and varied beers. I love beer and I love sharing this experience with others. When I try a new beer and realize it is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me, I want everyone to know the glory of that sacred nectar.
