Dragon Age II isn’t a step back for the franchise by any means, and at its core it remains a gripping RPG experience, but it also isn’t the evolutionary leap forward many fans were hoping for.Packing a ton of content, gorgeous visuals, and fast-paced gameplay, last year’s The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai was a reminder that in a time of AAA blockbusters with million dollar budgets, the determined independent developer still has a place in the industry.
The console version of Dragon Age II, however, is a bit of an oddity in that while it marks some much needed improvements to the series’ gameplay, it also includes some questionable structural changes that may risk alienating hardcore fans. Now, the sequel has arrived, hoping to score yet another critical hit among both gamers and fantasy aficionados alike. 2009’s Dragon Age: Origins, however, was in many ways a return to BioWare’s Dungeons & Dragons roots, with a sweeping Tolkienesque fantasy narrative, robust character creation, and a combat system so steeped in pen and paper RPG mechanics you could practically hear the rattle of dice underneath the game’s code. Hither came BioWare, a game developer forged in the frozen depths of Edmonton, steeped in the lore of Gary Gygax himself and destined to change the face of geekiness forever… Okay, so the origin of Canadian game developer BioWare may not exactly be the stuff of legend, but there’s no denying the company has created some pretty epic role-playing games over the years, from ground breaking titles like Baldur’s Gate and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, to more recent hits like the sci-fi action blockbuster Mass Effect 2. The game also managed to stand out with its subdued yet stylish visuals, with the kind of crudely drawn, yet dementedly original, characters you’d find scrawled in the back of a high school text book by a mopey, teenaged geek.Ĭonsole Review: Dragon Age II has more ups than downs, but narrative disappointsĪmpersand Arcade Review by Adam Volk Know, oh prince, that before the rise of next-gen consoles there was an age undreamed of, when gamers gathered to slay dragons, not with controllers, but with pen, paper and dice. Flash-forward to 2009 and Dead Samurai went mainstream on Xbox LIVE Arcade as a blood spattered, button-mashing fanboy pastiche filled with countless elements culled from anime, comic books, 16-bit video games, horror movies and grindhouse cinema. The award earned Silva a hefty $10,000 prize, a Microsoft development deal, and acclaim among the homebrew game community - an impressive accomplishment given that Silva spent a mere four months single-handedly designing, coding and animating the game. Dishpan hands flashbacks aside, Vampire Smile is the demented brainchild of James Silva, a former dishwasher himself and a largely self-taught game designer who shot to prominence in 2007 when his indie game The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai, won Microsoft’s inaugural Dream-Build-Play amateur game development contest. You clean enough ramekins of coleslaw during an eight-hour shift and almost anyone is going to start hallucinating about slashing through an army of mutant-cyborgs with a meat cleaver. It was no big deal.Īmpersand Arcade Review - The Dishwasher: Vampire SmileĪmpersand Arcade Review by Adam Volk As someone who spent countless hours of my adolescence scrubbing pans in a restaurant dish pit, I can relate with the surly, sword-wielding protagonist of The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile.
And as we’ve shown and talked about, there’s this 20 to 30 minute period before you rediscover GLaDOS and turn her back on, and for that first thirty minutes, players could clearly see that they weren’t Chell. We started with a game where you weren’t Chell, you were some other test subject. And we actually started Portal 2 with the idea that Chell was gone. What sort of challenge was there in constructing a bridge from the first game to the sequel that fans would accept? Erik Wolpaw : We knew that Chell had left the facility. But so far it seems that the first and second game are going to be linked together quite nicely in terms of story and progression. Matt Braga talked to the writers of Portal 2, Erik Wolpaw and Jay Pinkerton, about the followup, how they intend to maintain the levity and if there will be any Internet-wide memes like “The cake is a lie”: National Post Portal was a game that stood on its own. Q&A with Portal 2 writers Erik Wolpaw and Jay PinkertonĪ key part of what made Portal a breakout hit in 2007 was the laugh-out-loud writing and character building.
0 kommentar(er)
