Video games don’t always have to be fast paced. You don’t always have to have bullets constantly flying or several hundred explosions going off in the space of about ten seconds, and even multiplayer shooters featuring squads of soldiers armed to the teeth with enough ordinance to erase a medium sized country from the face of modern civilisation don’t always need to be twitch-controlled fragfests. And though I do love sprinting across the Fields of Battle or being Called to Duty with groups of my friends online, I am here today to tell you about a game that takes the exact opposite approach to player-versus-player modern combat.
In the future, professional sports will no longer be comprised of a team of athletes chasing a sphere or ovoid around a grass field, but rather take the form of teams of cloned combatants killing each other in colourful metal deathmatch arenas for our entertainment.
As some of you may know, though many of you will not, Monday Night Combat has seen something of a re-launch this week as it makes it’s debut on Steam. This time however, I am already seeing a much brighter future for the game than it ever had on Xbox Live Arcade.
Sometimes it feels like modern games coddle players. There was a time when beating a game meant sitting down and battling through it in one sitting. If you were lucky the developer employed a password system that would bring you back to the start of whatever level you were on. Now we have checkpoints after every minor battle and constant autosave systems. We have unlimited lives and omnipresent hint systems. Gamers today often find their only challenge in competitive multiplayer; someone on the other end creates a challenge where the developers couldn’t.
I mention this because Super Meat Boy is hard as hell. I had every intention to finish the game before reviewing it, but I couldn’t. This isn’t to say I can’t beat this game or that I won’t; god help me I will finish this game. However my conquest has eluded me due to a perfect storm of tortuously difficult levels and sheer content overload.
Super Meat Boy is, on the surface, a simple platformer where you lead a skinless flesh bag through a carnival of dangers with the elemental power of wall jumping. Dig deeper and you will begin to notice how tight the controls are. With practice you’ll find yourself recreating the exact same jump time and time again. You’ll start to feel how button press duration affects your trajectory and how a running start affects your momentum.
And then you will die, a lot, and eventually you’ll grow to accept that too.
Ok so we’re a few days behind posting this, and surely you already know by now, but it’s worth mentioning so we’re mentioning it. One of the arcade’s all time greatest beat-em-ups is coming to XBLA and PSN… with 6-player online drop-in/out coop play.
The X-Men arcade game ruled arcades back in the early nineties, and here’s hoping we see other arcade classics like The Simpsons and Sunset Riders hop on the downloadable games bandwagon… but what does it say about modern gaming that we’re able to get excited about re-releases of 18 year old games?
Our pals over at FrozenByte have been hard at work on the next iteration of Trine if this teaser trailer is anything to go by. And they usually are, which is pretty much the reason we bother watching them and the developers bother releasing them. That’s more or less the whole intent of teaser trailers actually, so I don’t know why I brought it up in the first place.
Anyway Trine 2 is due out sometime next year and is sure to set my console aflame with 3 player online coop.
Today the positively hilarious guys over at Zombie Cow Studios released their latest game, which features a crack squad of contraceptive-capped marines delving deep into people’s most disturbing orifices, blowing up all kinds of nasty naughty diseases.
It also happens to be free, so you can go grab it right now and not have to pay a penny!
We’re just over a week away from the launch of Monday Night Combat, the third person arena shooter that’s not trying to hide its inspiration drawn from Team Fortress 2. In this 14 minute walkthrough from Uber Entertainment, we see a match of MNC’s “Crossfire” mode. Crossfire is described as follows:
Crossfire
Crossfire is Monday Night Combat’s six versus six competitive mode over Xbox LIVE. Both teams try to protect their Moneyball while trying to destroy the opposing team’s Moneyball. Both teams have streams of robots that march mindlessly towards the enemy Moneyball and will jump on it and bring it down for players to destroy once they are escorted there. There are four Crossfire arenas.
There are two categories of robots and eight total robots. Breach Bots follow a set path from their spawner to the enemy Moneyball. When they get there, they jump on the Moneyball and breaching the shields, making it vulnerable. Eliminator Bots pick an enemy Pro and go after that Pro until they die and then move on. If there are no Pros, they attack enemy turrets and then the Moneyball. Robots can be spawned by players at their own spawners for a cost. The type of robots spawned depends on what class spawns them.
Of particular note in the video is how money is earned and upgrades purchased during active gameplay. Immediately after respawn, the developer takes a moment to upgrade various weapons and talents of his character. Unlike TF2, where class changes are common as a change of pace, it appears changing class late in a game of MNC might put you at a disadvantage.
Monday Night Combat launches August 11th on XBLA for 1200 MS Points.
If the sheer number of posts about the game are anything to go by, Alien Swarm is taking Fall Damage by storm these days. Now fresh from PC Gamer we get this video, with a few nifty console codes that transform the top-down isometric view into first person.
For those who can’t squint their way to 20/20 vision, here are the codes from the video:
You have to go to Options > Keyboard > Enable developer console. Then hit ` (to the left of 1) and type:
