Games Cheats and Reviews

Tron fans can now mark their calendars, as Disney has announced that the upcoming videogame spinoff will be arriving ten days before the film.

Disney also unveiled a sizable collector’s edition, which will retail for $130. The main attraction is a model light cycle, which comes complete with a special display case for the model and a drawer for the game. The collector’s edition will only be available for the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the game.

Tron Evolution will detail the events taking place between the original film and the upcoming Tron Legacy, which is due in theaters December 17. The film will reference events that take place in the game, but will be their own standalone experiences.

Half-Life is one of the most popular franchises in videogames, so why hasn’t the world seen it adapted into a movie yet? According to Valve CEO and co-founder Gabe Newell, it’s because they don’t trust anyone to do it but themselves.

Speaking to PC Gamer, Newell revealed that they’ve actually gotten tons of studio offers in the past. “There was a whole bunch of meetings with people from Hollywood [after Half-Life 1 shipped],” Newell explained. “Directors down there wanted to make a Half-Life movie and stuff, so they’d bring in a writer or some talent agency would bring in writers, and they would pitch us on their story. And their stories were just so bad. I mean, brutally, the worst. Not understanding what made the game a good game, or what made the property an interesting thing for people to be a fan of.”

And that, Newell said, is when they decided only one company could get it right: Valve. “That’s when we started saying: ‘Wow, the best thing we could ever do is to just not do this as a movie, or we’d have to make it ourselves,’” he said. “And I was like, ‘Make it ourselves? Well that’s impossible.’ But the Team Fortress 2 thing, the Meet the Team shorts, is us trying to explore that.”

In one of my favorite poems, “The Hollow Men,” T.S. Eliot writes:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow.

In other words: some of us may be lucky enough to have a fantastic idea, design, thought, whatever, locked up inside our imaginations, but all too often some ineffable force, some unknown obstacle prevents us from making that idea a workable reality.

Portal 2 is expanding on the original game in a lot of ways, including a longer campaign and even cooperative multiplayer. One mode that won’t be making an appearance however, despite early tests, is competitive multiplayer. In our visit to Valve as part of the 1UP Cross Country Game Tour, writer Erik Wolpaw detailed the idea behind the spite-your-neighbor game mode, and why it just didn’t work out.

“Along with co-op, [we had] the idea of sort of a competitive Portal multiplayer,” he said. “We went down that path, actually, for a little while and had something up and running — the best way to describe it is sort of speedball meets Portal. You know, a sports analog. And it quickly became apparent that while it’s fun for about two seconds to drop portals under people and things like that, it quickly just devolves into pure chaos. It lost a lot of the stuff that was really entertaining about Portal, which was puzzle-solving. Cooperative puzzle-solving was just a much more rewarding path.”

Online game developer Digital Chocolate has sued rival Zynga, claiming that the popular social game Mafia Wars infringes on its trademark (via Courthouse News).

Digital Chocolate claims that they coined the name for their own game in 2004 and have superior rights to the trademark. They also say that they sent written notification to Zynga last year, who in turn promised to stop using the name.

However, Zynga has since embarked on a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign with 7-Eleven while filing additional trademark applications for the property.

Namco Bandai took the veils off Super Robot Taisen L in Japan today, marking the latest installment in their long-running series of robo-strategy RPGs. The new game is due out November 25 over there and is slated to cost 6090 yen.

SRTL will feature robots from a total of 17 anime properties, first and foremost no doubt being Evangelion Unit 01 from the new series of Eva flicks. Other new names making their SRT debut here include Macross F, Linebarrels of Iron, Dancouga Nova, and old-school tentacle OVA Fight!! Iczer One.

You can expect few gameplay changes with this latest SRT, though — it’s still a mixture of turn-based simulation and conversation sequences between the story’s main players.

Mafia stories are about the pursuit of the American dream. Typically, they’re tales of a character who tries to claim a share of the world’s wealth and riches. And, as is true with all mafia tales, these rewards come at a great cost. In the case of Mafia II, our hero doesn’t want to be the Don, nor is he power hungry. He is in this life because this is (what he believes) to be the only thing he’s good at. He simply wishes to exist and make as much money as possible. If he happens to meet a dire end as a result of these actions, so be it. Instead of giving players a character who will rise through the ranks to achieve the rank of Best-Mobster-Ever — like EA’s approach to the Game“>Godfather videogames — we’re given one who is content with being the middleman. But in the process of trying to create a serious narrative, Mafia II falls into the trend of other sandbox games: it reminds you time and time again with “you’re playing a videogame” moments that break the hard work put into crafting this narrative in the first place.

It’s a common problem: in these fully realized worlds, you’re often given the ability to create moments that don’t fit into the world you’re playing in. Games like Grand Theft Auto 4 or Saints Row 2 get away with this because their created fiction is full of puns and tongue-in-cheek humor. Mafia II on the other hand, a game that tries to create a serious narrative and a world full of colorful characters, instantly falls apart as soon as you’re allowed to toss random pedestrians off a boat pier. Or when you comically pick up a Playboy magazine and are forced to view the centerfold in the midst of a heated gun battle.

While Fallout: New Vegas is pretty much done (at the moment, the development team at Obsidian is focused purely on bugfixing, since all the content is complete), some recent news has come out about its definitive ending. Much like the original version of Fallout 3 (pre-Broken Steel DLC), New Vegas simply ends — the player won’t be able to go on to play the game some more after the ending. Destructoid has heard one reason from New Vegas senior producer Jason Bergman, and we got an additional explanation from project director Josh Sawyer reproduced below:

“We put a lot of effort into the ending slides — we know those slides are really popular with people so we want to make sure there’s a huge amount of variety and reactivity with that stuff. We weren’t really focused on new features so much as to add a really rich sense of reactivity to the players and the choices they make.”

We want to make it a definitive ending. Initially, we talked about trying to support post-game play, but because the changes that can happen at the end of the game are pretty major, this is what it basically came down to: either have the changes feel really major in the end slides and then have them not be very major after the end of the game, or make them really minor and not that impactful. And we feel it’s better to say, ‘you know what, we’re just going to end the game, and the changes you made can be minor or really really big, but because we can’t script all the changes to the Wasteland to let you keep playing, we’re just going to stop it there.’ But we do let the player know when that’s about to happen– a sort of, ‘the end of the game is coming, so we’re saving your game right now, so if you want to keep your game going, you can, otherwise, it’s about to be over.’”

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