A year for the history books

Around this time, everybody starts reflecting on the past year and what it meant. What memories will we keep from?? it, and specifically for us, what games were our favorites? Top ten lists go up across Twitter, and we call the game in the number one spot our personal "Game of the Year."

But 2020 was different. It was devastating.?? It will be the subject of documentaries. It could encompass an entire chapter in a h?istory textbook. In all my life, there has never been another year like it.

Sure, humanity has weathered disasters in the past. And sure, most of the time, goings-on in the real world have been at least possible to ignore when considering the game of the year. Last year, however, the entire world's population -- all 7.6 billion of us -- went through some version of the same thing. We all experienced some amount of isolation, sadness, and loss over the COVID-19 pandemic, and there was one game from 2020 that arrived at exactly the right time to provide togetherness, joy, and respite from the horrors of the world. If there is one game from last year that will forever define the year in my memory, it is Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

This is a huge break from my usual thought process on what deserves the (largely meaningless) title of Game of the Year. Often, the game that earns that spot is just the game I played the most in a year. Or it's the game I liked the most. Or it's the game that did something so new and different that it stands out from everything that came before. None of those criteria describe Animal Crossing. The game I played the most was probably Apex Legends. The game I liked the most was probably Hades. And while I can heap praise on the minor advancements New Horizons ??brought to the series, it would be a stretch to bring the word "innovation" around what is at its core the same simple life simulator we've been playing for n?early 20 years.

There's an interesting aspect of timing when considering Animal Crossing: New Horizons as 2020's Game of the Year. If it had come out in 2019, it wouldn't have been the cultural touchstone it ended up being. If it had come out in 2021, it would have been too late. We would have already suffered through 2020 without it. Animal Crossing was made for 2020, and 2020 was made for Animal Crossing. For m?ost, it would not be in the running for Game of?? the Year in any other year.

But for 2020, it was there just when we? needed it, and it remained a steady presence whenever real life brought so much doubt and despair. In the early days of the pandemic response in the United States, it filled the hours when employers scrambled to figure out how to transition employees to work from home (or worse, when employees lost jobs entirely). It showed up almost precisely when everything else shut down? and provided a welcome alternate reality: a tropical island where the very worst thing that could happen to a person is they get bitten by a tarantula and teleported back to their house. No pain, no sickness, just an "aw shucks, oh well."

As the pandemic continued and we started to really miss out on events and milestones, it became a virtual venue for substitutes. Players made in-game prom dresses because they couldn't attend a traditional prom. When it became clear in-person graduation wouldn't be a thing, students set up commencement ceremonies on their islands. During Ramadan, while Muslim holy sites could be seen abandoned, Animal Crossing provided a time and a place for sunrise and sunset gatherings. Those who participated will likely always remember those? celebrations, and they will be inextricably tied to 2020.

The holidays provided more opportunities to make up for what we were missing out on in real life. Many Americans wouldn't hold large gatherings for Independence Day, but the weekly fireworks displays in August helped ease the sting a bit. The same goes for Thanksgiving/Turkey Day and Christmas/Toy Day; those who were responsibly staying home could still find some small bit of joy in a facsimile of what we couldn't do. Just this past month, I celebrated my birthday? quietly at home. I did not see any family or friends, but I did visit my island. And I'm not ash??amed to admit that when Jacques (one of my favorite villagers) invited me to his house for a surprise birthday party, I was moved to tears over it.

This year has been so difficult, but these cute animals have been there ??throughout it to lift our spirits? and keep us going.

It is with that consideration that I can easily name Animal Crossing: New Horizons as the Game of the Year for 2020. It may not have been the best game to release this past year, and it may not have ??even been my favorite one either. But for the rest of my life, when I think?? back and remember this nightmare year, I will always think about my tropical island escape and how it touched so many people and helped so many of us get through 2020.

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I think he's better at throwing grenades

Season 8 of Apex Legends is just about a week away, and as usual, we've been peppered with some teasers about what to expect with the changing times over the past few days. Moyse showed the launch trailer along with the ??Nintendo Switch launch rumor this morning, but just a few hours later, Respawn released the gameplay tra??iler above.

It explicitly shows some of the new stuff coming, like the new 30-30 Repeater rifle and go?ld magazines. (The 30-30 looks like it hits hard and fires more slowly than a G7 Scout; gold magazine automatically reload weapons while the??y are stowed.) Season 8 will also introduce the new legend, Fuse, and this trailer teases his abilities. Clearly, his ultimate is the cluster of napalm he launches at around 2:12 in the video, and most players expect his tactical to be the small cluster grenade he shoots out of his mechanical arm at around 1:52. But it doesn't take an eagle eye to see what he does at 2:08, launching an arc star out of his arm cannon at an airborne enemy. My guess is his passive allows him to fire existing explosive ordnance (frags, thermites, and arc stars) faster than a normal throw, allowing them to go further and arc less, making them easier to hit faraway targets.

What might take a bit more of an attention to detail to spot happens at 1:23 and 1:59. While aiming down sights on the 30-30 Repeater, there is a small meter that fills up over time, resetting on a shot. My guess here is that the Repeater has bonus damage with slow, paced shots, and less damage pe??r shot when the trigger is spammed.

As usual, the above is all speculation until confirmed, but if history is a reliable indicator, we can expect a character trailer for Fuse within the next week to go through all of his ab??ilities before the new season officially ?launches on February 2.

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Welcome to Olympus

Just a couple days ago, we got a new "Stories from the Outlands" video introducing the new playable character in Apex Legends for Season 7. Pas??t that, the official site mentioned the new map that has been teased since Season 5. Today, we got our first look at a stylized representation of it.

The trailer?? also ties into Season 6's graphic novel-told story, picking up right after Rampart learns Mirage packed all of her stuff up on a shuttle as it's launching. The two follow that shuttle to Olympus and we get to see the lush city in the sky where we'll be fighting. It's futuristic and verdant, and it still appears to have a good balance of open space and clusters of features.

We also get to see the new legend Horizon in action, and can make some more educated guesses on her abilities. She carries a drone on her back that looks a little like Lifeline's D.O.C., but instead of dispensing healing, it acts as her ultimate ability,?? creating a black hole that sucks nearby enemies in. Her tactical ability is indeed tied to the gravity lifts that have been showing up around Kings Canyon and World's Edge, though as demonstrated here, they can be used to flush an enemy team out of cover in addition to just providing some vertical mobility for her own team.

The last big thing in today's trailer is the footage of the Trident in action. This is the first time Apex Legends will have vehicles, and it appe?ars there will be one fairly protected driver and spots for up to two teammates, one on either side, to hang out and fire weapons at the risk of being largely exposed to incoming fire. The trailer also shows the Trident suffering some brief malfunction when hit by a powered-up shot f?rom a Sentinel, so that may provide another reason to pick up the sniper rifle that doesn't get a lot of love.

Check out the trailer above; it's a?? good one. We can still expect one or two more videos to release before Season 7 launches on November 4,? and those will likely include actual gameplay footage to mull over and finer details on Horizon's abilities to pick apart.

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New character is named Horizon, as in 'event'

Apex Legends is gearing up for its seventh season on November 4, and at this point we know what to expect in general. Each season introduces a new playable character, and in the week before launch, we learn all of the juicy details. Today's entry in the "Stories from the Outlands" series sets the stage for the next legend, Horizon, thou??gh it doesn't make clear h??ow she'll handle in the battle royale.

She was also teased in-game a couple weeks ago, with a small quest called "A Wee Experiment," which had the Scottish scientist leading players to newly installed gravity lifts across both the Kings Canyon and World's Edge maps. Given other in-game teases (Octane's jump pads, Rampart's paintball mod), it's pretty likely that the gravity lift will be a part of her kit. Other than that, we don't know, but we should learn more over the ne??xt week.

What today's video does let us know is her origin story. She was a mom who went looking for a new energy source?? for society, but was betrayed at the last moment and left to drift near a black hole. Relativity doing what it does, she escapes a fate of starvation, but while she only spends a short time in limbo, 87 years have passed for the rest of the universe. She returns to look for h??er son, to fulfill the promise that she would come back for him, though much later than originally expected. Presumably, she could also be harboring a grudge for the corporation that left her out in space to die, which may lead to her entry into the Apex Games.

We have some additional information about Season 7 via the official Apex Legends website. Ther?e will be a third map set on Olympus, and some sort of vehicle called the Trident. If past seasons are any indication, we can expect a couple more videos leading up to the start of the season. We should be in for a gameplay trailer showing off the new map and the Trident, a battle pass trailer exhibiting the new cosmetics, and finally a character introduction video focused on Horizon's abilities.

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Give the woman some heavy weaponry

Apex Legends Season 6 launches in two days, and compared to the map modifications and new weapon, the biggest potential shakeup to the me?ta between seasons is always the new character. In a character trailer released today, Respawn has finally provided more granular details on Rampart's abilities.

As expected, Rampart's tactical ability allows her to place cover walls that can be fired through in one direction, but there's a twist: outgoing f??ired is powered up, dealing more damage than usual. It appears she can place three walls in quick succession, one for each legend on a standard team. Also expected was her ultimate being the mounted machine gun Sheila, though the trailer does add that it has a long reload time, implying it has limited ammunition.

The one piece of the puzzle we have been in the dark about is her passive ability, and it turns out it has been quietly staring at us in game for a week now. The limited-time mode Always Be Closing Evolved introduced the graffiti mod for the Spitfire, which increases its magazine size and reload speed. It turns out that was basically Rampart's passive ability in a mod, as she'll have a natural proficiency with light machine guns, bumping those s??tats for the Spitfire, Devotion, and L-Star. This proficiency also extends to Sheila, so while anybody can use the mounted gun, Rampart will be the best with it.

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Probably not going off world just yet

One of the cool aspects of Respawn's battle royale Apex Legends is its evolving story providing t?he backdrop for changes and additions over the course of its life. Players can choose to ignore it completely and just go for the W, but others can dive into the story and use it to predict upcoming gameplay ch?anges.

One of the popular predictions for Season 6 was the introduction of a third map into rotation. Season 5's "Broken Ghost" quest all but confirmed a new map would be coming in its conclusion, and the rocket shown in a previous Season 6 trailer hinted it could be soon. Today's gameplay trailer pumps the brakes on that a little: the World's Edge map will be getting that rocket as an updated point of interest (near the largely ignored corner of the map where The Dome sits), but Apex Legends probably will not be debuting a third map until later. Maybe that means later in the season, or maybe it means we'll be waiting until Season 7 for it. Other updates to World's Edge look like they are near Drill Site and Mirage Voyag?e.

Another new addition for Season 6 is the crafting system, which today's trailer shows in a bit more detail. It doesn't appear to be too complex: collect a new type of in-game currency, find a crafting station, and buy specific items that are on various daily, weekly, or permanent rotation. The shot in the trailer does show the old hop??-up Turbocharger coming back, so it's possible the Devotion is coming back out of care packages, or it could just be that it will attach to the new energy SMG, the Volt.

We can still expect one more trailer to release before Season 6 drops on August 18, going into ??detail on the new legend, Rampart, and her abilities.

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Sheila makes an appearance

We are just one week away from the launch of Apex Legends Season 6, and just the other day we got our first look at the new playable character, Rampart. While that was a look at the near future with her fighting in the Apex Games, a new video released today displays her recent past, showing the events leading up to her entry into the battle? royale.

It looks like she has been friendly with Bangalore and Gibraltar for a while, but only after a visit from some cyberpunk assailants does she get the invitation from Blisk. (I'm told he's important in this universe. I don't know. I never played Titanfall. Forgive me.) During the fight, Rampart shows off some?? of the same abilities as in the last trailer, including a deployable barrier that can be fired through in one direction, and a mounted machine gun. We can probably expect those to be her unique abilities in game.

This is not the first "Stories from the Outlands" trailer for Apex Legends. These vignettes provide a little more context to the carnage, as when Revenant was surprise-introduced before Season 4. If we can go by past season launches, we can expect two more videos to show up before Season 6 begins: The next will likely be a gameplay trailer showing off the ne??w weapon and Battle Pass, and then the last will be a character trailer to really detail Rampart's abilities. I think I've nailed down what her tactical and ultimate will be (the barrier and the machine gun, respectively), but I'm still pretty clueless about her passive. We'll probably find out just before Season 6 launches on August 18.

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She's got a big gun

Apex Legends Season 5 is winding down, with this week being the last to provide challenges for those who still need to fill out their battle passes. Next week, there will be a limited-time mode wherein the ring never stops s??hrinking and players start matches with an evo shield and a Mozamb??ique. But that's just a little bit of tiding over for the new season launch, which is set to happen on August 18.

Respawn released a launch trailer for Season 6 today, and it has some interesting details in it. The long-rumored Rampart character shows up ready to kick ass and chew bubble gum (and she appears to have plenty of bubble gum). She is seen in the trailer o??perating a mounted machine gun, raining fire on the other legends in a stylish, reversed-time showing.

Another new piece of tech on display is a semi-transparent wall, which the trailer shows Bangalore using ??as cover while firing her weapon through it. My guess? That wall is R??ampart's tactical ability, deployable relatively frequently, while the mounted machine gun is her ultimate. It probably puts her in the category of "Defense" legends, along with the likes of Gibraltar, Caustic, and Wattson. I'm looking forward to taking over an entire building with fences and gas canisters, with a huge mounted gun on the roof for extra "stay away from me" energy.

That leaves her passive ability as an unknown, but typically Respawn releases character information closer to the season launch, so we can expect to know exactly what Rampart is capable of in the coming days. At this moment, there are only scant details on the Season 6 website, including Rampart as the new legend, a new battle pass (of course), a new energy submachine gun, and a new crafting system for finding loot. From the sound of the latter, if you can't seem to find that hop-up you ne??ed, you will instead be able to pick up crafting materials around the map and make one ??yourself.

Absent? from the trailer is official confirmation of a new map, which was hinted at in the Season 5 storyline. (However, the Hammond-branded rocket seems like a strong indication of a new battleground royale.) We should know more about the possibility of a new map some time before Season 6 launches later this month.

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Not just Lifeline's new revive ability

At last week's EA Play event, Apex Legends kicked off the festivities, probably in part because its ??news was so pressing: the upcoming Lost Treasures event launches tomorrow. With it come several features that were shown in the? video and/or explicitly pointed out by Respawn.

Today, Respawn released patch notes and a developer? commentary video, and there is more changing than just the addition of mobile respawn beacons, Crypto's town takeover, and Lifeline's ability to have her Drone of Compassion revive teammates without her help. A good portion of the thirteen-character roster is getting tweaked, and some of those tweaks may have a significant impact on how the battle royale's competitive scene plays out.

The top four picks in the recent Apex Legends Global Series were Wraith, Wattson, Pathfinder, and Gibraltar, and each of those have some change coming. Wraith's "Into the Void" ability will take longer to activate and her portal's maximum distance will be shorter. Wattson'??s Interception Pylons will now only last 90 seconds each, where they previously could last indefinitely, but she can hold more Ultimate Accelerants to offset it. Pathfinder is getting indirect nerfs: Revenant's Silence grenade can cancel a grapple in the middle of it and zipline gymnastics will be tougher with a new cooldown. Gibraltar's nerf is a simple one, with the faster heal inside the dome slowed down a bit.

On the other end, lower tier characters like Octane, Crypto, and Revenant are getting buffs. Octane will be even faster now when he's using his Stim ability, and his Jump Pads will allow for a mid-air double jump to change directions. Crypto can summon his drone faster and his EMP will now disable Wattson's pylons, which cou??ld have a huge impact on the often defense-heavy competitive matches. ??Revenant's Death Totem now has infinite range, but it'll still be limited by time.

Perhaps the most in?teresting change is to Lifeline, who isn't getting a straight buff or nerf, but instead a bit of a sides?tep. Now her drone can revive teammates while she continues to fight, which is huge, but that passive ability replaces her old one, which was a 25% heal speed increase. In addition, she'll be able to summon her drone more frequently and her care package has a chance to contain additional items.

Those are the major changes, but if you'd like to read the full patch notes, you can find those here.

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It's gotten better since the first week

A few weeks ago we checked in on the new story mode in Apex Legends Season 5, the "Broken Ghost." And the verdict there could be distilled to "neat, but shallow." Still, the model appears to be working well for Respawn, as it has reported its best player retention rate yet for the battle royale. Requiring players to log in and play on at least five separate days (or pay extra) in ??order to keep up with the weekly episodic narrative has had its intended effect. I can personally attest: it has changed my habit to a nightly jaunt into King's Canyon where it was previously just a weekend binge.

And for what it's worth, the story missions have gotten better over time. After completing the first one, it felt like a proper introductory mission, laying out t??he structure and keeping it fairly easy without throwing in too many twists. And I could imagine each episode being roughly the same, just with the difficulty tweaked upward once players had a handle on it. Thankfully, it has exceeded those expectations, if only by a bit.

Thus far, we're nearly halfway through the series at four of nine episodes released. (As an aside, Respawn isn't calli??ng these "episodes," but I am, as the weekly b?ite-sized releases are the closest thing to episodic gaming I've played since the term was invented.) The first episode introduced the basic structure that all would follow: start in one location, move to another location, defend that location for a short period of time, then move to a third for extraction.

The second episode shook that formula up a bit with a sniping section from the top of the Cage, blocking forward progress until enough critters had been taken out. In addition, it also introduced some drama into the narrative, reinforcing the idea we saw with Forge in Season 4 that if a Legend dies in a cutscene, then that Legend dies for good. Nobody died in the second episode, but somebody almost did, and she has still been out of commission, unable to be chosen as a playable character in these story missions since. (She can still be pla??yed just fine in t?he battle royale mode.)

The third episode might be my favorite so far, with an openi?ng inspired by last year's Halloween event. Revenant gets in on the action and forces players into the shadow m?ode from that limited-time event. Instead of moving from point A to point B, firing weapons at Prowlers, players are sprinting around a more open area, avoiding the creatures while trying to destroy totems in order to restore their normal forms. After that section, it reverts to the standard format, but the open spaces in Water Treatment still make for a different approach than the linear nature of Artillery Tunnel and Hydro Tunnel.

This week's episode starts in Slum Lakes, a collection of shacks that makes for the opposite of a linear path, then it twists it by littering the area with Octane's Jump Pads and putting all the good loot on the rooftops. The "defend the drill" section here was more hectic than others have been, where backpedaling away from a beast while firing ?would often lead to bouncing out of the ring and panicking to get back inside. The extraction was perhaps the least tense of the bunch, however, with a Jump Tower right next to the drill and the extraction ship well within range of the redeploy.

Another neat little twist that may turn some players off is how the events in the story missions and in the text portions a??ffect which Legends can be played from week to week. For instance, this week we learned that Octane went AWOL and went nuts with the Jump Pads before we got there, so he wasn't selectable to play through the mission. For people who have a favorite character to play as, it could be a bit of a bummer to be locked out, but there are enough characters now? that I haven't felt restricted by it.

All in all, I'm looking forward to the rest of this series, and I'll be checking in on it every Tuesday until it's over. It's not the greatest storytelling or gameplay in a genre of what I'd call "Left 4 Dead Lite," but it ha?s surprised me?? in how it has grown since the first episode.

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From an unexpected, free add-on to a battle royale

The new season of Apex Legends launched last week, and with it came the surprise addition of the "Broken Ghost" quest, a new solo or cooperative multiplayer experience meant to flesh out the back story for its league of mass-??murdering gladiators. And while the season began last week, it wasn't until this week that we got to dip into the game mode and see what it's all about.

And... it's fine? Look, I went into it with no expectations and came out of it pleased enough but ready to get on with the?? battle royale. I do expect it will get better over time, but it's not looking like it will ever be substantial enough to be replayed.

Players can queue in solo or in groups of up to three, and for this first story mission, the dropship puts the group down just north of Watchtower North, outside of Artillery Tunnel, armed with just a P2020 and a Mozambique. Respawn uses its systems cleverly here; by providing a static ring to block out a portion of the map, it presents a linear path from the starting poi??nt into the heart of Artillery for its objective.

In con??trast to the normal gameplay of random loot drops in an open field, this has the feel of intentional design. The level designers get to pepper in upgrades precisely when they want, affording players hammerpoint rounds not too far into the tunnel and upgraded body shields once in Artillery. Though the mission is timed, there are some rewards for those who take the scenic route, like a nice gold Spitf?ire on the southern end of Artillery.

While ??all this is going on, Prowlers (those beasts that can be found in Bloodhound's Trials on the World's Edge map) are attacking at defined checkpoints. So it's a bit of a crawl, moving forward, triggering enemy spawns, killing those enemies, then repeating. Eventually, once inside the northernmost building in Artillery, the gameplay switches slig??htly into a defend-the-objective mode, but it's still largely the same, mowing down Prowlers until the mission is ready to move on.

One minor disappointment is in the lack of voice work. From a production standpoint, it's understandable, but from a pure gameplay standpoint, it doesn't work well when a snippet of text pops up on the edge of the screen while the player's focus is on the action in the center. It especially feels out of place because Apex Legends is typically very good with its voice work, with characters calling out important battlefield information all the time. And then when the mission is ??complete, one of the rewards is a few pages of text that is decently funny, but I can't help but wonder how much better it would land if thos??e lines were delivered instead of read.

The main complaint I have with this episode is one I expect will be addressed with f??uture episodes: it was just so dang easy. A P2020 with a purple extended magazine and hammerpoint rounds is brutal against the unshielded Prowlers, and since we got that gear early on it never felt like we were in any danger throughout the mission. That's not to mention the absolute rain of ammunition, with enemies dropping ammo and plenty of it already scattered around the arena. It stands to reason that this is meant to be an introduction to a new idea, and as the season progresses these missions will become more challenging and (I hope) more interesting as a result.

What it is now is like an extremely pared down version of Left 4 Dead. Go from point A to point B, fighting off relatively easy-to-kill enemies along the way, before making a last stand and then evacuating. I can imagine it being more intense just as a function of the paths provided, the enemy spawn rates, and the loot placement along the way. But as far as this first mission goes, it's just a five-minute walk in a slightly spooky park, with some decent di??alogue as a reward.

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Adding some PvE to the battle royale

Apex Legends is finishing up its Season 4 this week, with Season 5 launching on May 12, and we have some details now on what sounds like it could be the biggest seasonal addition the game has seen since it launched last year. There's the usual stuff, including a new legend to play as (see Loba's introductory trailer below), and some map changes (bye bye, Skull Town), but by far the most unexpected change is the new "Broken Ghost" season quest.

The gist of it is that it will be a way for the battle royale to deliver more story elements in-game rather than only through trailers and blog posts. It's also sounding like it wants people to play regularly or pay if they want to keep up, as a new cha??pter unlocks every week for the first nine weeks of the season, but gaining access to those chapters requires players to play on five different days to pick up a special item in the competitive mode.

Doing so unlocks a "Hunt," which lets solo players or squads zone into King's Canyon at night for a PvE event similar to last Halloween's Shadowfall event, where players need to brave an arena filled with Prowlers to ??secure a piece of the macguffin and extract on a dropship without dying. Successfully finishing a Hunt will provide in-game rewards like weapon skins, but also the next piece of the evolving story.

It's an exciting time for Apex Legends players. Check out the story trailer an?d gameplay trailers below to see what happened to Skull Town and what's showing up in its place. Good riddance.

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Beats it by an order of magnitude in less than a day

You know Gloomhaven, right? It's the number one board game in the world according to BoardGameGeek, it's got a Steam Early Access game, and it's absolutely huge. It's so large, even though it released about three years ago, some groups have not finished it. Despite the fact that it contains hundreds of hours of game that can last years, it's getting a sequel called Frosthaven and that sequel went up on Kickstarter yesterday.

It had a funding goal of a modest half million dollars, which it crushed about ten mi??nutes after the campaign launched. It reached one million in pledges in under an hour. At the time of this writing, not even 24 h??ours from launch, it has cracked five million. This thing is a phenomenon.

Apart from being a financial success, it sounds like an improvement on the original game in a lot of ways. Some of my complaints about Gloomhaven had to do with the stuff between games, where character retirements and town progr??ession were unsatisfying, and both of those are getting revamped, while the core gameplay of picking two cards to perform actions will remain untouched.

One neat thing the Kickstarter campaign is doing is a daily puzzle. The one we've seen so fa?r is a three-round one-on-one against a particularly tough enemy. It's a cool way to introduce the new character classes and keep people engaged throughout. I've already got my pledge in for this beast, but I'll be checking back daily on it to solve the puzzle anyway.

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A decade later

[Author's note: This is a community blog I wrote almost eight years ago. With only days away from the release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and only a week away from our ninth wedding anniversary, it seemed fitting to revisit this story, with years and dates updated.]

Almost ten years ago, I asked a special woman to spend the rest of her life with me. This is the story of it all. I've told it to friends, I've told it on Podtoid, an??d I've written up an old community ?blog that is all broken and busted due to the constant onward march of the internet.

It started almost 15 years ago, in the summer of 2005. I worked in a laboratory in college, and so did she. Our desks were near each other, and in between experiments, we would help each other out with online crossword puzzles, mahjong solitaire, and ShyGypsy's Funny Farm puzzle. She was cute, and I felt comfortable talking to her, which is something I struggled with when it came to most other people.

One day I invited her over to my apartment to hang out and play video games. My roommates and I were broke college kids, and we lived in an old house in upstate New York, so we kept the thermostat at a chilly 50 degrees Fahrenheit. It wasn't the most welcoming environment, but I was able to use it as an excuse to snuggle up on the couch and play Clubhouse Games with my soon-to-be girlfrie?nd. She seemed to enjoy it and particularly liked my Nintendo DS.

I don't remember what exactly spurred her to get one of her own, but soon enough, she had a DS Lite, along with her own copy of Clubhouse Games and New York Times Crosswords. ??Meanwhile, I had taken her t?o see opera excerpts at the local symphony hall, taken her out to a teppan dinner for her birthday, and finally worked up the nerve to give her a kiss.

Things went well for the next few months, but then we had to face an unfortunate truth: I was graduating and moving to California for grad school; she was finished with her work and moving back to Mississippi. Our first summer apart was difficult, though we talked daily. I sent her a gift of a game I thought she may enjoy: Animal Crossing: Wild World. With each of us on our DSes, we were able to run around town to?gether, catching fish, gifting items, and making hearts appear above our heads. It wasn't quite the same as snuggling togethe??r on a couch, but it was better than just talking on the phone.

We spent a year apart, though we saw each other about once a month. Sometimes she'd visit me in California, sometimes I'd visit her in Mississippi. Other times we met in entirely different locations. Every time we met we talked about when we'd be together again. After that first year, she quit her job in Mississippi and move??d out to California to join me.

Two years passed, and over that time, I played Animal Crossing less and less. I always wanted to play the latest releases, and I tried getting her into other games, but nothing ever really stuck with her. She was content to play Animal Crossing, visiting her town and diggi??ng up fossils on a daily basis.

It was then that I started planning how I would ask her to marry me. I wanted it to be something personal to both of us, something we would both remember forever. The decision was obvious: I would ask her through Animal Crossing. But I couldn't just do so??mething small; it needed to be g??reat.

My first idea was to bury letters, sending her on a scavenger hunt, finding eac?h letter one by one, until the last one had the question. To my chagrin, I realized t??hat it's impossible to bury letters, so that idea was mostly scrapped. I still wanted to do a scavenger hunt, but I had to be creative with it.

For weeks I bought red roses whenever I saw them on sale in Nookington's. They would be instrumental to the plan. I created an alternate character on my copy of Animal Crossing named Mysterio, who strangely looked a lot more like I do than my main character did. With Mysterio, I bought a bottle mail, filled it ??out, chucked it into the ocean, and then went to her town so it would show up on her shores. While I was there, I wrote her a letter and left it with Pelly to deliver later. I had Mysterio return to my town, then go back to hers. I searched the beaches to find my bottle mail, then I got to work gardening, and posted a message on her bulletin board. Everything was set.

Oh yeah, I also bought a ring. Then everything was set.

At the time, I was working a job that let me stay up late and sleep in until noon, so we only occasiona?lly fell asleep together. That night, after she went off to bed, I tur?ned off the TV and followed her in. She still played every night, to the point that she had actually conditioned herself such that the 9:00 pm music causes her to fall asleep. She was facing away from me when she started playing, and I watched over her shoulder.

Immediately after she exited her house, she heard the whirr of a UFO and saw Gulliver flying overhead. She ran to try and catch him, but her aim was off and she missed her chance at knocking him out of the sky with her slingshot. Flustered, she saved her game and closed her DS Lite. My engagement plans were about to be ruined by an anthropomorphic seagull. "Hang on," I said, "I think you had mail to check," hoping I wasn't b??eing completely obvious.

She seemed a little confused that I was ??interested in her reading her mail, but she opened her DS back up and restarted the game. She looked in her mailbox and saw a letter from Mysteri??o, telling her that something important had washed up on the shore of Dogtown. Intrigued, she set off south to the beach, and combed it, until she found an arrow of red roses pointing to the bottle mail. I had to cut down one of her coconut trees to plant that arrow. Inside the bottle mail, the message instructed her to go read the town's bulletin board.

She trekked back north, toward City Ha?ll, where she found the following message on the b??ulletin board. Meanwhile, I had stealthily grabbed the ring from inside my nightstand and waited.

She rolled over with excitement in her? eyes. Almost ten years ago, I asked a specia?l woman to spend the rest of her life with me. She said yes.

The post A very Animal Crossing engagement story appeared first on Destructoid.

Boom, bust, and zombies

Over the decades, games and idea?s come and go. At the end of last decade, plastic instrument music games were riding high, but these days they're all but gone. Today, hero shooters and battles royale are the hot ticket, but who knows how long those will be around?

Telltale Games experienced that arc of boom and bust. And while the studio released its first game in 2005, this story begins in 2012 with The Walking Dead.

Adventure games were not a new thing at the beginning of the decade; indeed, the genre is one of the oldest in all of video games. But Telltale was at work evolving the genre, moving from more puzzle-focused titles like Sam & Max and Nelson Tethers to narrative-focused games with an emphasis on branching storylines?? and impactfu??l player choices.

There were a lot of factors that contributed to the success of The Walking Dead. Remember, this released around season?? two of the AMC series, when fans were frothing at the mouth for the property (like the walkers therein) and not yet beaten down and burned out on it (like the humans).

But Telltale's take on the comic book series did more than just please existing fans; it cu?ltivated new ones. One factor that helped it achieve that was its episodic format. It was easy enough to ignore high praise for a single game, but when that praise is sustained over months, peaking every time a new episode is released, it became nearly impossible not to try it out, to see what all the buzz was about.

Plenty of video games can make the player feel something, but more often than not, the feeling is one of power, success, or achievement. Dread is perhaps less common, but it's easy enough to find games that elicit that response. For many players, The Walking Dead was one of the first games to bring out not only sadness and regret, but al??so mirth in the?? face of its dark story.

The story of Lee and Clementine is one most players will never forget, and unique to the medium, each player's story is just a little bit different than anybody else's. Another part of the continuing buzz came after an episode's release, when friends could compare and c??ontrast how their individual stories are going.

The Walking Dead was so successful that it sent Telltale into overdrive. The studio created some of its best work in the wake of this game, like The Wolf Among Us and Tales from the Borderlands, and it secured huge IPs to work on like Game of Thrones and Batman. It inspired games from other studios to follow its formula like Life is Strange and Oxenfree.

Sadly, the success of The Walking Dead also led to Telltale's eventua?l shuttering. It was such a huge hit, and its formula so well defined, that the business plan outpaced the creative energy at the studio. Secure rights to a popular IP, stick it in this aging engine, and the writers? and coders can keep up with a grueling monthly or bimonthly release schedule, right?

It turns out, no. Not right.

Telltale's story mirrors that of the game industry at large in the twenty-teens: it finds an idea that works, and it burns through that idea while it's hot. It flames bright while it can, but the fire is unsustainable, and the people who end up getting burned worst are the ones working on feeding the fire. Telltale is now a smoldering pile of rubble where a game studio once was, and its downfall began with the highest highs of The Walking Dead.

_{[You can read all of our Games of the Decade choices here as they arrive.]}

The post The Games? that Defined the Decade: The Walking De??ad appeared first on Destructoid.

Not for the newbies yet

The digital adaptation of the current top-rated board game on BoardGameGeek Gloomhaven was announced about a year ago, and it is now available on Steam Early Access. For strategy gamers, it may seem like a no-brainer. If that many people like the tabletop version that much, and we can get a digital version for less than a quarter of the price, then it?? should be worth it, right?

Well... maybe. If you're like me, a person who has put hundreds of hours into the board game already, then Gloomhaven on PC has some distinct advantag??es: no need to carry that monster of a box around, no setup or takedown, and the addition of visual effects and sound. But if you've been interested in the board game and want to try this out to see if you like it, you might be better off waiting for more features.

Namely, new players will almost certainly want to wait for the planned tutorial to release. See, Gloomhaven uses a unique card-based action system in which the cards represent your abilities, your initiative, and your stamina. A character takes a turn by choosing to p??lay the top half of one card and the bottom half of another and executing the associated actions. Some actions are more powerful and can only be used once per game.

It sounds fairly simple because the system itself is simple, however, the cards themselves make for exciting decisions from turn to turn, often requiring players to plan one or two t??urns ahead of time. It has an elegance to it, where masterful play will leave options open, setting up one combination of actions for a certain board state, but keeping the opposite set of actions on hand in case something unexpected happens.

It's a little difficult to explain why the decision making in Gloomhaven is so satisfying without going deep into specific card?s and rules interactions. The digital version in its current state does not make that any easier, because a lot of the gameplay elements that had to be handled manually are now automated, so it is not as obvious to see everything that is happening if you don't already know it should be.

One major example of this is the attack modifier system. In the board game, you have a deck of twenty cards that can modify your attacks anywhere between doubling the damage and completely nullifying it. On PC, the attacks happen so quickly that it is not immediately obvious why a sword swing dealt no damage. The characters and enemies have icons as shorthand for different condi??tions and effects, ??but with no context, new players might not know what they mean. Heck, as an experienced player, it took me a few dungeons before I worked out what was what.

Another downside to the way attack modifiers are handled is while you save time as compared to the deck, you lose the drama. I can recall specific instances p??laying at the tab??le where we had a make-or-break attack on the line, and everybody at the table is staring breathlessly at the attack modifier deck, hoping for a fortuitous +1 to land the killing blow. In the digital version, there is no buildup and release; it makes each modifier draw mundane.

That said, the abilities are not mundane. For many, I had images in my mind what is happening, based entirely off of the cards' names and their effects. But it is satisfying to see some of them fully animated, as with the Cragheart's Rumbling Advance, a short movement capped off with a stomp, flinging rock and debris in all directions, hurting both friend and foe. When the first images for this version came out, I was ambivalent about them, but in motion, it looks and feels like Gloomhaven should.

In its current state, Gloomhaven is mi?ssing its classic campaign mode, its multiplaye??r capability, and 13 of the 17 character classes. All of those features are planned by its full launch some time next year, but for now, we have a new mode, taking our mercenaries on a randomly generated quest made up of several scenarios. It's a nice change of pace from the game in the box, not necessarily better or worse, just smaller in scale and having a different energy to it. Where the tabletop version feels like a grand adventure, the digital version feels like a string of unconnected tactical battles.

There are some other comments I could make that get far into the details (I'm not sure how I feel about the tweaks to character progression and hand choice in the roguelike mode), but without going down that rabbit hole, the bottom line is that Gloomhaven on Steam Early Access shows that Flaming Fowl Studios (made up of former Lionhead developers) knows what it is doing with this property, and it should end up being a solid full release in due time. But unless you're already a Gloomhaven fanatic, you're probably best off waiting at least a f??ew more months for this to grow a lit?tle more meat on its (living) bones.

_{[These impressions are based on an early access build of the game, provided by the publisher.]}

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Risk and reward

Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair popped up unexpectedly a couple weeks ago, and we were able to get some hands-on time with it at E3 last week. It takes the lizard-and-bat duo from 2017's crowdfunded 3D platformer and flattens the action down to two dimensions. From the basic premise, I'm predicting it'll be big at AGDQ after it releases this year.

See, the Impossible Lair mentioned ??in the title is a challenge issued by Capital B, daring Yooka and Laylee to try to complete it. As such, it is available right from the start, and in theory, somebody could go straight to it and beat the game without touching any of the other levels. It would require a standard of perfe??ction you only see out of the highest-level players who practice a game for months or years, striving to be the world's best.

Though Playtonic showed very little of the lair itself, the developers showing the game off noted that if they made attempts at the Impossible Lair unassisted, they'd be l??ucky to make it 5% of the way through before biting the bullet. It's theoretically possible for gaming gods to do it. For the rest of us, th??ere is still hope in completing the Impossible Lair.

See, completing each regular level frees a member of Queen Phoebee's royal guard, the Beetalion. (There are still a lot of bee?? puns in this entry in the series.) What those little bee friends provide Yooka and Laylee are a??dditional hits they can take in the Impossible Lair. Finish a level, rescue a bee, increase your endurance in the final level.

What I love about this idea is that it lets the player set the difficulty organically. The hardest of the hardcore can attempt to navigate the Impossible Lair without any bee assistance. The completionists will go for all 48 bees before entering the lair, allowing ??them to take 48 hits before things look dire. At any point in between, players can decide to take on the final challenge and venture in.

Even without any Beetalion members, Yooka and Laylee can take one hit and still recover. It's a bit like Sonic and his rings or Yoshi and his Baby Mario: the first hit makes Laylee freak out and start flying away, but if Yooka can catch her and calm her down, h??e has his safety net back. If she stays out too long, she'll fly away and Yooka is left to fend for himself. This is doubly dangerous, because not only does Laylee provide ?the protection from one hit, she's also instrumental in some of the movement abilities like the mid-air twirl and the butt stomp.

Losing Laylee totally chang??es the cadence of a level. With all the abilities avail?able and a free hit, players can be cruising through an area, rolling for speed and jumping and twirling to maintain it. Then some mean bug hits the duo, and Yooka has to continue at a much more careful pace, until he can get to a particular checkpoint to bring Laylee back. I can picture a speed run brought to a tense moment after an errant mistake, the runner weighing options on how best to proceed.

There are 20 levels to navigate through and an ove??rworld map to get between the levels. The cool thing about the overworld map is that there's more to do than just walk between the interesting parts. There are exploration and puzz?le-solving aspects in the overworld, and certain activities in the overworld will unlock the second version for each level.

Playtonic made a point to say that the second version of a level would play significantly differently than the original, and that no idea for changing a level is recycled. One example they gave was flooding the level on the over??world, then entering it to find the same level geometry, only now it's all underwater, forcing Yooka and Laylee to swim through instead. Another example was a level on a drawbridge, where the first time through it's horizontal, but the second time through it's been rotated 90 degrees into a more vertical space.

With 20 levels and alternate versio?ns of each, that accounts for 40 of the 48 royal guard members. The remaining eight bees are acquired "elsewhere," which probably means somehow through the overworld. But it won't be necessary to catch 'em all. I can picture the speedrun leaderboards right now, with the fastest clears happening after havin??g only completed 10 or 20 levels, whittling down and down until somebody beats the Impossible Lair unassisted, in one perfect run.

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Treating it like it's Final Fantasy XVI

CJ got the early take on Final Fantasy VII Remake at E3 this year, and after having played through the same section he did, I can agree with most of his observations. But this is one of those big deals so we needed?? to dig deeper than just the floor demo. I went to my appointment with Square Enix's Yoshinori Kitase armed with my shovel.

Where the floor demo dropped players into the final area of the bombing run mission, up against a few small enemies to prepare players for t??he Scorpion Sentinel boss fight, the behind-closed-doors demo started from the beginning. That's right, train pulling into the station, Cloud unnecessarily flipping onto the platform, and tears coming to the edges of my eyes. It's so beautiful.

Kitase spent some time talking about what has been going on behind the scenes. The team he put together to work on Final Fantasy VII Remake is made of many of the original game's core team members overseeing a fresh young cadre of developers. Kitase noted since Final Fantasy VII was a "defining title in the history of video games," the pressure is on his team to "make something incredible." What that means in terms of the high-level design philosophy is that the team is treating Final Fantasy VII Remake as a main numbered game in the series. In other words, it's as if they are developing Final Fantasy XVI, but it has the same story skeleton as Final Fantasy VII.

Kitase and his team intend to put a lot more meat on that skeleton. Given ??control of this world, they are "trying to go deeper into story and characters." They want to "reimagine the world without having to cut back." That not cutting back has made something massive; this first chapter detailing the saga in Midgar, from the bombing mission to the motorcycle escape, spans two Blu-ray discs and according to Kitase is "equivalent to an entire game in its own right."

A lot of that space is taken up by elements that weren't in the original. Obviously, the big improvement is in the graphics, but Kitase also noted that Final Fantasy VII didn't have motion capture or voice acting; Remake does. Speaking of the voice acting, he noted the voice cast is a fresh set of actors, separate from those who play these characters in games like Dissidia or Kingdom Hearts.

After Kitase finishes, we get the basic gameplay as told through the bombing mission. Players begin with control of only Cloud, slashing away with his Buster Sword by hitting the square button and stopping time to use ATB charges for magic, items, and special abilities. What isn't as obvious is the comm?and mapped to the triangle button; for Cloud, it lets him switch between the speed-based Operator Mode and the power-based Punisher Mode. Think of it like a way to change stances. Some enemies will be more susceptible to his slower, more powerful Punisher attacks, while others may be quick and more easily dealt with by fast Operator attacks.

What's more interesting is that the triangle button ability is unique to each playable character. Barret's triangle ability is Overcharge, which lets him gain ATB charges more quickly than normal with the caveat that any time he spends on Overcharge is time he's not shooting things. We did not get to play with Tifa or Aerith, but we can see in the trailer that Tifa's triangle command changes between Bash (where it spends most of its time) and Omnipunch, and Aerith's is?? an ability called Tempest.

The other thing the behind-closed-doors demo provided was a ton of screen time to Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie. Since they were such minor characters early in the original game, I barely remembered them, but in Remake, they get more fleshed-out personalities and dialogue. Biggs is the distrusting hacker, Wedge has a heart of gold and he believes Cloud does too, and Jessie, well, I accidentally fell in love with Jessie. It's clear from this demo Kitase really means it when he says Final Fantasy VII Remake is going deeper into the characters.

One last thing Kitase said about the philosophical approach to remaking one ?of the most iconic role-playing games in history is that the team wants to "push boundaries and surprise players." Veterans of the old command-based battle system already feel this; the switch to a more action-focused combat is surprising, for sure. De??lving deeper into the stories will no doubt yield some more surprises. I joked that they should kill Cloud at the end of the first act. That would be surprising.

But perhaps the most surprising thing of all is that despite the trepidation about the direction Final Fantasy VII Remake is taking the battle system, I'm now more excited for it than ever. Like CJ, I'm still not sold that the combat will be better or more s??atisfying than the original, but I'm getting more and? more behind the idea that making the major change is the right decision regardless.

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I never liked downtown anyway

At one point in the hands-off gameplay demo of Dying Light 2 at E3, the Techland employee making decisions for the p?acked room to see on-screen turned on some pumps at a dam, draining one section of the city and flooding another. That one choice ha??d an impact on the environment in the open world. His people needed water, and he did what he had to do. But just because it was what he felt he had to do doesn't make it the right thing.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. That moment happened towar????d the end of the demo. It's a cool idea to give players significant control over the environment, but maybe it will make more sense to know how it gets to that point.

The Dying Light 2 demo began with a murder mystery. Or at least, I could sniff out a murder mystery even if protagonist Aiden Caldwell couldn't. Two rival factions in his part of the city are forming a shaky allia??nce against the man who controls all the ??remaining drinking water. That man is sending an envoy to meet, but a scuffle breaks out, and Aiden's buddy is shot. One of the faction leaders claims it was the envoy, but I'm pretty sure I know better.

This is right where my path would have diverged with the demo if I had been in control. Play??ers get a choice to pursue the fleeing van or ?to stay with the wounded friend. I don't trust the guy telling me it was the men who came to talk. I would have stayed.

But instead, we're whisked on a parkour rampage through the city, jumping between rooftops, climbing on ledges, and falling into zombie pits (oops!) as Aiden attempts to catch up with the van. The team showed off some of the tricks players have access to, like a grappling hook and a paraglider to really get around town. The free running looks a little bit stilted to me, as Aiden runs to a ledge, stops for a split second, and then jum??ps off. It lacks the smoothness seen in the parkour in other games.

Aiden catches up with the van, casually murders a couple of people, then takes a seat for a nice conversation with the neurotic driver. Again, some binary choices pop up: do you want t??o play good cop or bad cop with him? Techland notes that for some choices, there is a "hidden" third choice of indecision. If you can't pick between the given options in the allotted time, your choice is silence.

According to Techland, the choices will have a huge impact on how players play the game. Since some choices can reveal or destroy entire sections of the city, and some choices will determine who lives and who dies to give you missions, players will finish Dying Light 2 having seen at most only half the content. To see the rest, players would have to play through again and make the opposite choices, which can be done with either a totally fresh save file or through a New Game+ o???ption, keeping all of the upgrades from the previous run.

Dying Light 2 will als?o feature up to four-player cooperative multiplayer, so it will be possible to see the consequences of alternate choices in your friends' games too. It's worth mentioning that whicheve??r player is the host "owns" that instance of the city, and players who join are just tourists looking at an alternate timeline.

Otherwise, Dying Light 2 is looking very much like you'd? expect. There's brutal melee combat, breakable weapons, and a fair bit of zombie-killing. These zombies are sensitive to ultraviolet light, so roaming the open air during the day isn't so bad, but venturing into the underbelly of the city or going out at night can be dange?rous.

When the demo made it to its climax, Aiden confronted the big bad guy, who makes a credible claim that he was not responsible for ordering the killing of Aiden's friend in the beginning. I'm inclined to believe the man. But since I was not in control, in order to see what happens if Aiden had made the choice to trust him, I'll just have to wait until Dying Light 2 releases next year.

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The highs and lows of living in a time loop

Three writers sat in a room in the Microsoft Theater, looking at one man in a room with his wife. She wants to have dessert, so he sets the table while she goes into the ot?her room. T??he man starts eating without her.

Presumably, the guy to my right, controlling the man on scr??een, is not married.

But it's okay, because soon I'll get my chance to right some of the wrongs done on this first playthrough of 12 Minutes. I'll actually wait for my wife to sit before I start eating. Oh yeah, ?and I'll do my ?best not to get murdered a couple minutes later, too.

See, 12 Minutes is on a time l?oop. Once the player (and the character) have the necessary knowledge, a "complete" play through will last exactly 12 minutes, with the game's events playing out in real time. In order to get to that point, developer Luis Antonio estimates it will take most people about six to eig??ht hours of playing through the thriller. For each of our plays, we only lasted about three minutes.

Not long into the man?? and his wife's dessert date somebody starts pounding on the door, claiming to be with the police in possession of a warrant. We nev??er got to the bottom of it, but something tells me the guy who zip-ties our hands together and then executes us on the spot is not with your typical law enforcement.

But the man comes to, and it starts all over again. Not only do we, the players, know what is about to happen, but the man we control does too. He's heard what his?? wife has to say, and he can prepare for the incoming attack. None of us around the table are successful in our attempts thwart the bad man on our next attempts but, as a group, we were discussing possible solutions.

Once that initial threat has been dealt with, there are more problems to tackle. The story and puzzle design is complete at this point, ??so most of the remaining development time is being spent on polish, as full voice work and animations need to be implemented. If we had enough time, we theore??tically could have played the game in its current build from start to finish, working off of subtitles and ignoring stilted animations. Antonio is shooting for a release early next year.

As far as what the finish actually is in a game about being trapped in a time loop, Antonio kept referring to "reaching a satisfying conclusion" without giving much more away about what that means. When pressed, Antonio noted that, with each playthrough, your perspective of the situation changes. That change of perspective is what he consid?ers satisfying. It's a bit cryptic, but that's fitting for the narrative-driven adventure. If the point is to come to some realization through iterative play, then spelling out what that realization is in the beginning would defeat the purpose.

The post A lot can happen in just 12 Minutes appeared first on Destructoid.

Slay, sister

Sitting down next to ??my temporary sister in Bethesda's booth at E3, we shake ??hands. He takes control of Jess while I get to handle Soph. We're the twin daughters of legendary Nazi fighter B.J. Blazkowicz, and he's raised us right. Which is to say, he's raised us to be Nazi killers too.

Out in the deserts of Tex?as, Jess goes hunting with her father while Soph practices close-quarters combat with her mother. The parents seem a little paranoid, but it becomes apparent why not long after. The twins get thrust into th?eir first real combat situation. It's do or die, but they have each other to rely on.

Infiltrating a Nazi zeppelin, Jess and Soph move in for their first kill. Jess tries to kill an unaware Nazi with a hatchet, but fails to land a finishing blow. He?? readies his weapon to retaliate just as Soph strikes from another angle, turning his head into a splattery red mush. Imme??diately after, the sisters celebrate their initiation, alternating between cheering and vomiting. Jess complains that his brains got in her mouth. It's a scene that manages to be graphic and bloody, but also somehow light and slapsticky.

Finally, my co-op buddy and I gain control, and it's time for us to skulk around this zeppel?in and kill ??some Nazis ourselves. We both took the cloaking option for our first skill, so we use that to good effect, using countdowns to get simultaneous stealth kills on two different guards in a room.

We can't keep up the stealth strategy forever. Eventually,?? we flub a knife swing or two and things get loud. Nazis pour in from all sides and their guns are bigger than ours. Thankfully, we just need to kill some of them and take their weapons, then the fight becomes more even.

Movement is crucial in these high-stress situations, and I felt more than capable with all the tools available. The sprint seems especially fast, sliding into a room and blasting a dude never gets old, and the combination of a double jump and an ed??ge clamber make maneuvering around the battlefield natural.

We eventually make it to the target we were sent to assassinate on the zeppelin, and he's got a power suit with a ton of armor. I went at him hard and eventually ran out of ammo with everything but my pistol. My sister was low on health and ?playing a game of cat-and-mouse with him. We finally got him onto a wing and then shot him into a jet engine, by simultaneously hitting both of his hands as he was hanging. My buddy goes in for a fist bump, and you know I wouldn't leave him hanging.

The example of shooting his hands at the same time is sort of the extent of cooperative mechanics shown in the two-mission demo. There are also the obligatory "doors that are too heavy for one person to open alone" and the "buttons on opposite ends of a room that need to be pressed simultaneously." One cool idea is that the sisters have a shared pool of lives, encouraging you to pick up a downed teammate, and also creating situations where we were both incapacitated so I chose to bleed out faster so I could come back and pick up my partner, thus spending only one shared life instead of two. It's nothing revolutionar?y, but perhaps it doesn't need to be.

What it needs to be is a functional shooter that works as well with a living cooperative partner as it does with an AI sister for people who prefer to play solo. At that, it??'s looking like it'll be a successful romp through Nazi territory in the hopes of locating the twins' father.

I'm personally interested to see more of the sister moments. The scene surrounding their first kill was endearing considering the subject matter, and I want to get to know them better. I loved seeing their personalities bouncing off each other, and the fact that I'??d get those scenes peppered in between a lot of Nazi killing ??is pretty much fine by me.

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Bottomless Mags

All right, I may have messed up. When we called dibs last month, I was dazzled by the south Asian muscle woman Amara. And while I'm still going to put her poster up in my locker and draw hearts around it in pink permanent marker, I may have to go back and choose somebody else as the first Vault Hunter I take to dive into Pandora, Eden-6, Promethea, and wherever else Borderlands 3 takes me.

See, my favorite character to play as in Borderlands 2 was Salvador the Gunzerker, and after a short session playing as Moze the Gunner, I got a tinge of what it felt like to play Sal. Moze can't stay in her Iron Bear mech indefinitely the way Salvador could keep Gunzerking forever, bu??t when she's in it, she feels like an unstoppable beast in the same way.

Her Action Skill is the Iron Bear, which first called to mind comparisons with Axton's Sabre Turret or G?aige's Deathtrap, but it isn't one of those "set it and forget it" abilities; it's something Moze actively takes part in. She hops into the mech, lumbers around in it for a period of time?, and fires off some big guns while she's in it.

Not only is using the Iron Bear an active experience, but customizing the mech affects how it is played. Each arm acts as a hard point to attach weapons, and there are a fair number of options. At the start of her skill trees, she has only three options: a minigun, a grenade launcher, and a railgun. Like Zane, she g??ets to pick two of t?hese to use at a time; unlike Zane, she doesn't have to sacrifice her grenade to do it.

Players can mix and match hard point attachments, so you could have two miniguns, or a minigun and a railgun, and so on. With just the starting three attachments, that already makes for six different possible setups (not counting equivalent left/right swaps). As she levels up her ??three skill trees, she can gain access to three new attachments, a flamethrower, a rocket launcher, and a giant clawed fist. That makes for 21 unique hard point setups, not co??unting the effects of other skills and augments.

When Moze starts to feel like Salvador is when she goes down the "Bottomless Mags" skill tree, with two miniguns attached to her Iron Bear. She has skills that make some shots not consume ammo, some skills that regenerate ammo, and an augment to her miniguns that increase the uptime before overheating. It feels nice to hop into the armored suit, hold down both triggers to unleash a spray of bullets, and only stop once all the bandits nearby are ??dead. For even more bullet carnage, she can install a rear-mounted turret for cooperative partners to hop on and spray.

Her middle skill tree, "Demolition Woman" might put her play style closer to Brick's from the original Borderlands. It's all about explosive damage: adding explosions to weapons that don't naturally have them, making explosions bigger, and granting her more grenades to play with. It also has some s??kills that increase the Iron Bear's uptime and decrease its cooldown time, which would be a nice complement to either of the other two skill trees. This is also the skill tree that lets the Iron Bear roam around killing things on its own even after Moze?? exits it.

Her third skill tree, "Shield of Retribution" is all about increasing her survivability, specifically through shields rather than health. It has skills that increase the strength of her shield, skills that automatically recharge her shield, and ?one that gives the Iron Bear an additional shield. More interesting are the skills that promote a risky play style, like one tha?t decreases her health, but increases her shield by the same amount. Another gives her bonus damage for being low on health. The idea would be to stay at near-death health levels and rely entirely on shield and Second Wind to keep from dying, while outputting a ton of damage.

Gearbox showed off a few other new bits of Borderlands 3 at E3, like the lush, green, swampy planet Eden-6, and the new built-in social features. Now players can buy weapons their friends have sold without ever connecting to their games. It will also be possible to mail weapons and items to friends. Even people who play Borderlands solo (as I typically do for my first run through the story) will be able to interact with? people on their friend lists through these features.

But clearly the big thing at this event was the full gameplay reveal of Moze. With Amara an??d Zane shown off last month, that leaves only FL4K still unplayed before release. (My guess is the Beastmaster will be playable at PAX West; we can circle back ?to see if this prediction is correct.) And who knows, maybe after playing as FL4K I'll change my starting character again, but until then, I think Moze is gonna be my girl.

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Investing in Crypto

When the original Destroy All Humans! released, it was met with a favorable (bu??t not spectacular) reception. So it may seem like doing a quick, cheap remaster could be viable, but you have to remember: that game came out in 2005. What was fine to play then just wouldn't hold up today. THQ Nordic knows this, so it tasked developer Black Forest? Games to give it the full remake treatment.

What that means in practice is while the story and voice work has stayed the same, just about everything else has been rebuilt from the? ground up. Most notably, co?ntrollers have evolved in the past fifteen years, and they allow Crypto to do things today he wasn't able to do back in the day.

By today's standards, the original game looks clunky. In the upcoming remake, aiming is made easier with the ability to lock on, letting players get to the part they want: picking up cows with psych??okinesis and throwing them at farme??rs in order to crush them to death. There's less time spent fixing the reticle where it needs to be, keeping the action flowing.

Another smoothing measure this new version takes is allowing Crypto to perform some actions simultaneously. So instead of killing one human, stopping to extract its brains, then moving onto the next one, the process is now more fluid. Crypto can be extracting from one dead body while mur??dering the person who will become o??ne next.

UFO controls have been updated as we??ll. Where the original could only move on a flat plane, it now has the ability to use that z-axis to increase or decrease altitude. It may sound like a little thing, but it made lasering grain silos and circus tents into rubble feel natural.

Speaking of that wanton destruction, it looks pretty. In the E3 demo, we were shown a handful of in-game locations, but one of the most fun places was a little debug area demonstrating how each buil??ding in the game catches fire and explodes aft??er a little coaxing from Crypto's UFO weaponry. Everybody in the room had to take a turn blowing stuff up.

Every asset in the game has been recreated, and Black Forest Games producer Dennis Schiefer went into detail about how they had to stylize certain models in order to maintain the feeling people remember about the original, even when the original did not go so far. Part??icular care wa??s put into Crypto's look, where they did new motion capture and facial capture for cutscenes.

All of this is going on in Unreal Engine 4, so where there were originally flat green hills with the occasional tuft of grass spikes, there's now lush vegetation that sways i??n the wind covering the landscape. It's sort of a given for a modern game, but it's striking to look at the two games side-by-side. Some areas in the game keep the same general geometry of the original, but at least one space had to be completely reworked to make it viable today.

Completely preserved from the original is the voice work. As a result, the story follows the original's beat for beat. Black Forest and THQ Nordic wanted to do this to preserve the game's humor and style, but that's one area I'm not sure holds up. Is it still funny for an alien to come to Earth and assume cows are the dominant species, ?before one poops toward toward that alien? I don't know. Maybe.

THQ Nordic is aiming Destroy All Humans! at fans of the o??riginal looking to sate their nostalgia, but also to newer players who might not have caught it the first time around. The devs at Black Forest Games seem to like working on it; while no plans for DLC have been announced, Schiefer mentioned that the studio would love to add their own original levels to the?? game, but that decision would lie in THQ Nordic's hands.

The post Destroy All Humans! w?ants to ?make genocide smoother than ever appeared first on Destructoid.

Run and gun and jump and jump and dash and gun more

I'll admit it: Doom Eternal is not the kind of game I typically play. Don't get me wrong; I play first-person shooters a ton. But I'm more used to the flavor of shooters that have you ducking behind cover to catch a breath and recover some health or the ones that make numbers appear when you shoot things and if you're unsuccessful then you just need ??to find a gun that makes bigger numbers.

Doom Eternal is... not that. It's fast and it's frantic, but it's not random. There is a definite combat flow to follow, but it all goes so quickly you almost need to take your brain out of the equation. When my hands just did what they needed to do because of what my eyes saw, bypassing conscious thought, that's when I was succes?sful. When I stopped to think and plan, that's when things would go awry.

I died a lot in the E3 demo for Doom Eternal. Like, more than my neighbor was dying. More than I'm probably comfortable to admit. But each time I died, the loading screen had the same help?ful instructions to read. Need health? Do a Glory Kill. Need armor? Use your flamethrower. Need ammo? Use your chainsaw. It's a simple system, and yet, I could not seem to make ?it work for me at first.

After every death, I'd study that loading screen and play back in my head what went wrong. Maybe I wasn't doing enough Glory Kills. Maybe I was doing too many Glory Kills?, and that's why I ran out of ammo. And why can I never remember to light things on fire? Remember to light more things on fire. Next time I'm going to light the first thing I see on fire. (I proceed to do that and then forget to use it again afterward.)

It really comes down to muscle memory. Years of training have taught me that when I'm done shooting something, I hit the left face button to reload my weapon. That's great, except this is Doom, and there ain't no reloading in Doom. So I'd kill the last demon in the i??mmediate vicinity and try to swing my chainsaw at nothing.

But despite all of my flailing, I was able to make forward progress. I killed a lot of demons and I made it to the boss. Then, when fighting this particularly resilient baddie, things started to click into place. When the low health warning popped up, I'd nail?? a Glory Kill. When the low ammo warning did the same, I'd instinctively reach for the chainsaw. I cut down on the time betw?een stimulus and reaction. Instead of making decisions, I was just making stuff happen.

When everything is going well, it's almost like a trance. On that boss fight, I finally started incorporating all of the tools at my disposal. Run from the big nasty thing. Jump. Double jump. Dash in mid-air. I?? got pretty good at avoiding damage from him. Now kill the little things and keep your health up. Jump some more. And whatever you do, never stop running.

I still never remembered to use my flamethrower. And I never did actually beat that boss. Chalk that up to needing more training. That's an aspect of Doom Eternal I can appreciate: it has a high s?kill ceiling. Even if I never end up being any good at demon slaying myself, I can definitely imagine watching high-level play on Twitch or speedruns at GDQ. It has plenty of visual flair for that kind of consumption.

Even though I skulked away from the Bethesda booth in defeat, and now its several hours later as I write this, I'm still trying to analyze what I could have done better to claim victory. The movement in Doom Eternal is so fluid and the?? bone-crunching combat is so satisfying that it has not let go of my brain. 

But that might be my problem. I need to let go of my brain if I want to succeed in Doom Eternal. I don't need to analyze. I just need to get good. And even ?though I'm not there yet, I think I want to b??e.

The post Doom Eternal doesn’t let you stop to think and that’s okay appeared first on Destructoid.

2 Crash 2 Fuelrious

Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled is a substantial remake. Not only did the team at Beenox update all of the tracks from 1999's Crash Team Racing, it also added in the tracks from 2003's Crash Nitro Kart. It took those tracks, spiffed up the visuals - in some cases resizing and reshaping them to work well in the same engine - and threw in some Easter eggs for fans to find. Nitro-Fueled is going to launch later this month with 31 racing tracks a??nd 12 battle arenas.

But it's 2019, and you can't just release a game and stop there. After all, what's cooler than 31 tracks? 32 tracks. What's cooler than 32 tracks? We can go on like this indefinitely. Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled intends to do that, at least for a little while,?? and the good news? is that each new addition to the game will be available free.

After Crash Team Racing releases on June 21, the first "Grand Prix" will begin on July 3. Players will gain free access to the all-new track Twilight Tour, ?and they will be ab?le to complete races during this limited-time event to earn progress toward customization options: new characters, skins, karts, and stickers. Basically, it's a take on a battle pass, but it doesn't cost anything.

There are currently three Grand Prix events planned, each coming with i??ts own new track and racer. The length of time each event will run is still under wraps. Depending on how well the game performs and how the community responds to the release scheme, there could be additional events beyond the initial three.

It also looks like Spyro the Dragon is headed to Crash Team Racing, but ??it'll be through the third of these events. He'll be added to a roster which includes other fan favorites like Penta Penguin and Tawna.

As far as what's in the game at launch, it's a lot. There are a half-dozen or so racing modes that can be played on each track and another half-dozen or so battle modes that can be played on each arena. There's also an adventure mode that puts players through a series of unique challenges and pr?ogresses the story. Through all of it, there is a lot of kart racing.

As a Mario Kart veteran, that muscle memory sabotaged me a bit in Crash Team Racing, since its power sliding works just a bit differently. Jumps are higher, so it takes a split-second longer to start the slide. Then the speed boosts aren't t??ied to the fine tuning of the slide, but instead a timing mechanism using the other jump button. It's complicated at first, but I think I started to get the hang of it after a while. I could definitely see it being a racer with a high skill ceiling.

Difficulty is one aspect the old games were notorious for. Nitro-Fueled is keeping the option for its classic difficul?ty, but it's also adding a more forgiving and fairer difficulty setting as well.

So far, this title looks like it's set to be a fan-pleaser. As far as remakes go, there's not much more that could have gone into Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled. Beenox could have update??d the visuals, added in online multiplayer and leaderboards and called it a day, but it looks like it went the extra mile to make it feel like a worthy return to a??n old friend.

Some of the details on the Grand Prix system remain to be seen, so ?hopefully those pan out well too. Even if they don't, what comes on the disc should satisfy ?kart racing enthusiasts.

Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled launches June 21 on PS4, Xbox One and Nin?tendo Switch.

The post Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled has a ton of tracks, and it’ll keep adding more appeared first on Destructoid.

Possible cross-play

The free-to-play cooperative action-RPG that released on other PlayStation 4 and X??box One Dauntless is heading Nintendo's little co?nsole a smidge late. It's coming to the Switch later this year.

There's a decent chance it gets cross-save, so players can probably get started on one of the other platforms now and then take it on the go in a few months on the Switch??. Big monsters on a little console.

The post Dauntless is heading to Switch later this year appeared first on Destructoid.

Different kind of goombas

In a stylish trailer during today's Nintendo Direc??t, we rewound through a tommy gun massacre, unbreaking a perfectly good bottle of whiskey and unmessing up some poker chips.

Little else was shown, but it looked like players control a party of characters, and the camer?a angle implied a sort of tactical view. According to Paradox Interactive, it'll be a "character-driven strategy game."

The post Old timey gangster game Empire of Sin ann??ounce??d for Switch appeared first on Destructoid.

The Switcher

It's The Witcher 3 on Nintendo Switch. The Switcher 3. (It's too easy to pass up.)

This was announced this morning during the E3 Nintendo Direct. It only got a few seconds of screen time, but that's all it really needed to deliver the message. The Witcher 3 is headed to Nintendo's hybrid handheld/console later this year. It's the "complete edition," so ??we can safely expect all the additional stuff the other platforms got later.

The post The Wi?tcher 3: Wild Hunt is coming to Switch this year appeared first on Destructoid.

Yay

Crystal Dynamics' Scot Amos and Meagan Marie were up on stage talking up the virtues of the new Marvel's Avengers game. In what feels like a return to the good old days, it will have continuously releasing downloadable content, including new characters to play as and new locations to visit. And the icing on that cake is that all of that?? DLC (aga??in, characters and regions) will be free.

The duo also took the time to stress it would not include l?oot b??oxes, the current bane of the industry. Nor will there be pay-to-win mechanics, a previous bane of the industry.

After announcing ?this, a mini trailer may have also hinted at Ant-Ma?n as an upcoming downloadable character.

The post Square Enix’s Avengers game will have free DLC, no lootboxes or pay-to-win mechanics appeared first on Destructoid.

How soon? Who knows

Romancing SaGa 3 and SaGa Scarlet Grace Ambitions have been available in Japan, but as Sq?uare Enix is wont to do, it is bringing those puppies over here. Eventually. "Soon," if the presentation at E3 today is to be believed. We don't know how soon.

Romancing SaGa 3 will be hitting a ton of platforms, including PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Steam, iOS, and Android. SaGa Scarlet Grace Ambitions is h??eading to comparatively fewer platforms, landing on ?only Switch, PS4, Steam, iOS, and Android.

The post Romancing SaGa 3 and SaGa Scarlet Grace Ambitions are coming west ‘soon’ appeared first on Destructoid.