First Impressions: Medal of Honor Warfighter multiplayer

Out of the gate at PAX we quickly scanned the showroom floor for things to play. Time is limited in the first few moments of PAX, you need to get your ass in gear before the lines fill too quickly. We found Medal of Honor Warfighter with barely anyone discovering the line entrance and decided to hop into the next match. I’m glad we did too, because before long the line was pretty large and didn’t die down until later in the weekend.

What I’m playing: Tribes Ascend

Its a weird time in gaming when you play something that feels so new, but its actually over a decade old.  Today I’m playing Tribes: Ascend, the new free-to-play game by Hi-Rez studios, based on the now crazy-old Tribes franchise.

What happened to Tribes?  Back in 2001 Sierra released Tribes 2 and many fans believed this game was the definitive Tribes experience with jetpacks, spinfusors and skiing.  It was perfectly balanced and unique gameplay with an addictive quality.  But it was also one of the last games of what I’d like to call the “sliding shooter” genre, games like Quake and the original Unreal Tournament, where players moved quickly across big maps and had big amounts of health and armor.  These days the sliding shooter has been largely taken over by the “crouch-and-sprint” shooters we’re all so familiar with, like Counter-Strike, Halo and Call of Duty, to the point where many have completely forgotten about the old shooters, or may have only grown up with the new style (yea, I’m willing to concede I’m getting older).

So now Tribes: Ascend has been released and even though the formula is over a decade old, it feels brand-new.  Suffice it to say that nobody is really doing a game like this right now.  Let’s take a look:

Takedown on Kickstarter punches through at the last minute

It was last Friday, I was in the throes of my daily work routine and decided to take a quick break by checking out the latest updates to some of my supported Kickstarter Projects.  Somehow while browsing I happened upon Takedown, with only 3 days of funding to go.  Admittedly the cool logo helped a lot to get me to click on it.  I also noticed the game was sitting at a hefty $130,000, but was still shy of its $200,000 goal (one of my other supported projects, The Banner Saga, has a $100k goal for comparison).

So I clicked in and discovered a project that I almost immediately knew I wanted to back, a tactical shooter that harkens back to the glory days of Rainbow Six.

First Impressions: Syndicate

I like to take chances on games a lot, especially when they have some sort of promise of originality.  I took a chance on Brink last year and it turned out terribly.  I took a chance on Sonic Generations and was incredibly impressed.  This week I took a chance on Syndicate and came away, as Charlie Sheen would say: winning.

Battleship being turned into a FPS…what?

I’m sure you’ve heard of the upcoming movie based off of the classic board game Battleship.  As if turning the gripping story of putting a red peg in B9 into film wasn’t enough, now they want to turn the franchise into a first-person shooter/”naval strategy”…thing.

Uh, guys, we already have a game based off of Battleship.  Its called “Battleship“.

Syndicate creators worry their game is too hard

“Games today are too easy” we keep telling ourselves.  “Remember when games were hard?”  Apparently Starbreeze does, creators of the up-coming Syndicate reboot.  What is it about when somebody tells me a game is too hard that actually gets me really excited?  I think its because games today just are too easy and we seriously crave challenge.

The 1000 player FPS nearly hits its mark

I think part of getting a world record these days is the ability to think of something nobody else has tried before.  That seems to be what Pikkotekk, creators of the server behind this feat set out to do yesterday.

The unfortunate letdown?  They capped at 999 players, not quite reaching the quadruple digit milestone they so badly wanted to achieve.  Still though, 999 isn’t a number to sneeze at.  I used to play a lot of PlanetSide back in the day and even on a good large battle we never hit those numbers.  Hit the jump for a video of the results.

XCom returning to the strategy genre alongside its bastard FPS step-child

I didn’t play X-Com until way after the fact, when I heard it was one of the best tactical/strategy games ever made.  I played it, loved it, was done with it in about a month.  But the ride I had was pretty great: building a secret government base complete with alien autopsy rooms, monitoring the atmosphere for incoming extra terrestrials and leading a team of super-SWAT-people to capture downed alien crafts.  Its the sort of game that, frankly, was rarely ever copied because I think it was hard to grasp the formula.

It was a bit of a shock, then, when 2K announced a fresh new adaptation of the series titled XCOM, which would take place in the 1950s and be a first-person shooter.  Fans generally sounded outraged by this blasphemy, you don’t turn a strategy game into a FPS.  Admitededly I liked what 2K was doing despite all that, it looked like a neat idea, but I digress.  What seems to have come out of the ashes of publish backlash is a proper follow-up to the classic game with XCom: Enemy Unknown.