Stephen Colbert adds some much-needed levity to the conversation about violent video games, which has gone national in a big way following U.S. vice president Joe Biden's meeting with the games industry last week.
And really, who among us doesn't look back and sigh when we think back to the good old days, when we all played SimCity and then immediately joined a gang of roving urban planners? The 90s were pretty weird.
Hopefully, you've already made some progress in the "Stand for Tacos" quests in ChefVille, which introduced a new Taco Stand and Flour Tortilla Maker to the game, as there's another set of new quests to complete in this new taco theme. A brand new Specialty Meat Stand has launched in the store, and you can now build one of your own via the "Tacos Especiales" quests in your restaurant. We're here with a guide to getting started on these three new quests.
Specialty Meats
• Place and Build the Specialty Meat Stand
• Collect 5 Carne Asada
• Tend 12 Onions
The Specialty Meat Stand can be placed for free when starting this quest. It requires three clicks to unwrap, and from there, you'll need to collect 13 building materials with the help of friends. You'll need six Shade Awnings which are earned via a general news post on your wall, along with seven Hooks that can be earned by sending out individual requests to your neighbors.
When the Stand is complete, you can harvest it once every 30 minutes to earn a specialty meat, including possibly a Carne Asada. Unfortunately, there's no guarantee that you'll receive a Carne Asada from this item, as you could collect a Chorizo instead (as an example). You also can't build a second of these, so you'll need to simply keep collecting from the same stall once every 30 minutes and hope to get lucky.
These quests will only be available for the next six days. We'll make sure to update this space when we have more info on how to complete the rest of this Tacos Especiales feature.
• Stand for Tacos Quests Guide
• Tuna Ingredient Guide
• ChefVille's First Six Months
What do you think of this new Specialty Meat Stand in ChefVille? Would you take the time to build multiple stands if you knew you would be guaranteed a specific ingredient, or do you like these stands that have a "random chance" mechanic? Sound off in the Games.com comments!
Republished with permission from:
Brandy Shaul is an editor at Games.com
Here are the minimum and recommended specs for running BioShock Infinite PC. We can't say for sure whether you should run the game on PC, as opposed to Xbox 360 or PS3. But, judging by how good the first 4 1/2 hours of the game are, we recommend your run it on something.
These specs are from Infinite studio Irrational Games' official site:
MINIMUM
OS: Windows Vista Service Pack 2 32-bit
Processor: Intel Core 2 DUO 2.4 GHz / AMD Athlon X2 2.7 GHz
Memory: 2 GB
Hard Drive: 20 GB free
Video Card: DirectX10 Compatible ATI Radeon HD 3870 / NVIDIA 8800 GT / Intel HD 3000 Integrated Graphics
Video Card Memory: 512 MB
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
RECOMMENDED
OS: Windows 7 Service Pack 1 64-bit
Processor: Quad Core Processor
Memory: 4 GB
Hard Drive: 30 GB free
Video Card: DirectX11 Compatible, AMD Radeon HD 6950 / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560
Video Card Memory: 1024 MB
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
If you want to know about control options and other PC options, read the full post.
PC Specifications for BioShock Infinite Announced! [Irrational Games]
Lewd adventure game Leisure Suit Larry and the funny parody DLC Quest are among the latest batch of Steam Greenlight games, announced by Valve today.
These are games (and non-games!) voted by the community to receive coveted spots on Valve's digital distribution service. Here's Valve in a press release:
Valve today revealed the fourth set of games and Software titles to advance through Steam Greenlight and be offered worldwide distribution via the popular platform for games and software.
Over 60 titles have advanced through Steam Greenlight and been offered Steam distribution agreements since Greenlight launched in August of last year.
The latest Software titles are:
articy:draft | Game Design Tool
GroBoto - Modeling App
The latest games are:
Akaneiro: Demon Hunters
Asylum
DLC Quest
Eador. Masters of the Broken World
La-Mulana
Leisure Suit Larry
MaK
The Age of Decadence
Unepic
War For The Overworld
These titles will be released independently in the months ahead (as they are varying stages of completion).
It takes something special to get me invested in one of the wave of mobile collectible card games seeking to ride on the overwhelming success of Rage of Bahamut — it took Transformers to get me to appreciate the appeal of the genre. With its eye-catching pixelated style, DeNA's D.O.T. Defenders of Texel threatened to be the next collectible battler to capture my attention, but then it fell flat.
Like the countless collectible card games flooding Google Play and iTunes these days, Defenders of Texel is all about collecting a series of units that increase in power as they increase in rarity. The key to success and progression is fusing together the sprite-based units built using resources either gathered during the story mode or purchased with real money into more powerful units. Sacrificing one unit to another is how you level your power players, while combining two of the same type of unit produces a similar unit with enhanced capabilities.
Players create a party out of these units and explore the game's story. Exploration consists of visiting a location and hitting a button to advance a meter, here represented by a pixel hero travelling along a path. This monotonous task is interrupted regularly by random battles.
Aside from the nostalgia-infused graphical style, these battles are what differentiate Defenders of Texel from other games in the genre. Rather than passively watching the game add-up statistics and compare them to the enemy's, here units are arranged in a three-by-three grid, the player tasked with selecting three-unit groups by drawing lines on the grid. The fights then unfold as they would in a turn-based Japanese role-playing game, units automatically casting spells or utilizing special attacks until the enemy forces lie in ruin. Each unit's health carries over across each battle in a chapter, and should one of them fall they'll be unavailable until the run is finished or they are healed using special items.
It's not exactly an active battle system, but it's a far cry better than simply watching numbers fly. Sadly the novelty doesn't last long, especially once the full effect of the game's brutal energy recharge system kicks in. A full energy bar allows the player to move 20 times before it's spent completely. It takes five hours for that energy bar to refill. That's a lot of downtime. I understand the idea is to tempt players into buying recharge items in the in-game store, but the idea is not to make it so painfully obvious.
This sort of hard-sell wouldn't be so annoying if the game weren't constantly crashing on my Galaxy Note II. And check out those button labels on the middle screen of the top image. Notice anything missing? Sloppy.
Lacking the multiplayer competition and trading of similar titles, there just isn't enough good in D.O.T. Defenders of Texel to keep me playing once the perfect pixel paint job dries.
Mr. Gergo Vas is at it again, taking a slick new gaming trailer and boiling it down to several stellar GIFs. His subject today is the newest trailer for next month's Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.
Show us some GIFs, Gergo!
Here's the full trailer.
The game will be out on February 19 for the PS3 and Xbox 360.
A drop-based matching game recently launched on Facebook from Broken Bulb Game Studios, Bake Shop Drop is an addictive little game that has me quite conflicted—do I play another round, or run to the store for cupcakes?
The pieces are frosted cake slices, sprinkled doughnuts, chocolate chip cookies and red velvet cupcakes. The power-ups are line-clearing bear claws and cinnamon rolls. This is a game that's incredibly not fair to someone monitoring their caloric intake. So what if the pieces have eyes? I'll eat their damn eyes too.
When not struggling with the compulsion to devour sentient baked goods, Bake Shop Drop is lovely bit of matching goodness. The goal is to keep the treats from reaching the top of the screen by dropping solo pieces from on high, completing groups of three or more across, up and down or diagonally. New lines of boxed goods appear every four drops, requiring matches made on or around for them to be unboxed and readied to form groups of their own. Matching large groups produces explosive and type-clearing snacks, with big moves scoring Golden Tickets used to fuel each of the game's three powers, each usable once per round.
While not the freshest experience on Facebook, Bake Shop Drop is a well-decorated slice of workday distraction. Factor in friend-based leaderboards and it could easily be the sort of game your gaggle of Facebook groupies fight over for weekly tournament dominance, especially if the winner gets cupcakes.
Bake Shop Drop [Facebook]
A controller gets put down. A disc gets shelved next to dozens of others just like it. But, sometimes, the game lingers. It creeps into your sleep and live on in the backs of your eyelids, demanding ever more from you.
Here's an example: the one night that the crazy nocturnal zombies from Alan Wake showed up in my head. I was me in my dream, and not the overwrought author that's starred in two games.
I hadn't played an Alan Wake game in more than eight months. But a nightmare I had about a month ago threw me into a world straight out of Remedy's psychological horror thriller. I wasn't wielding a flashlight and automatic weapons like the writer hero of the two games. I was in trouble, prey for powerful enemies without any special video game abilities.
I don't know why some games stick around my subconscious more than others. Long after I've left them behind, they pop up when I least expect. I'm not talking about the warm fuzzies I get when remembering favorites like Phantasy Star on the Sega Master System, Shadow of the Colossus or Gravity Rush. Rather, these are straight-up ambushes from the chemicals in my brain, sneak attacks that I can't predict.
Back to that Alan Wake dream. I was on the run, inside my own clumsy body after looking back at the shadow-engulfed people that were chasing me—I can remember in horrifying detail the way that a slimy darkness snaked up their legs and over their bodies. I remember feeling utterly fucking helpless. And somewhere in the churn of my thoughts, I also remember some more conscious part of my brain thinking: "Didn't I beat this game already? And the other one after it? Why am I in here?!"
Worst was how it ended. The Dark Presence—an evil force that possesses people in the Alan Wake titles—crawling up my feet, locking first my ankles, then my knees into place. I couldn't "see" what happened next but I could "feel" it. I lost the battle against the Dark Presence. That never happens in video games, which is probably why I woke up so agitated.
This dream made me wonder about how and why certain games worm their way into my head. It makes sense that Alan Wake would stay lodged in the recesses of my brain, since so much of Remedy's game concerns what happens below conscious thought. But Bastion was more of a surprise. The first few times I fell off the world in Supergiant's acclaimed action RPG, it reminded me of the acute physical sensation of when I'd fall in my dreams: a sense of increasing momentum paradoxically paired with full-body paralysis. But the Bastion-based dream was worse than just falling. This nightmare was filled with Lunkheads, the frog-like creatures that were my most hated enemy from the game. I suspect the real reason Bastion showed up is because the game's final choice is the kind of moment where you have to think about who you want to be in both real and fictional worlds. But dreams are never that clear cut, are they? I didn't have to figure out what I'd do after a cataclysmic tragedy in my Bastion dream; I was only left haunted by giant, disgustingly real versions of some of its antagonists. Lucky me, I guess?
What's more surprising are the games that haven't lingered on the edges of my unconscious brain. I loved Papo & Yo and fully expected to have daydreams or sleeping visitations from the PS3 game. But Monster and Quico haven't shown up after I fall asleep at all. Journey's another game, impressionistic as it is, that I figured would be in my dreams. But I haven't had any kind of adventures in the Wanderers' robe since I finished thatgamecompany's masterpiece. Likewise for Silent Hill 3, a game I swore would stay with me forever after scaring the crap out of me years ago, but it never ever showed up in my most meandering thoughts or dreams.
It's tough to figure out any sort of rhyme or reason as to why some games make appearances in my subconscious and others don't. The amount of time spent playing a game doesn't seem to factor into it. Titles that I've spent hours and hours with, like the Mass Effect series, never come to bed with me. The muscle memory that's a physical part of playing games probably isn't any sort of conduit to the part of my brain that brews up dreams. But the feeling of being in a gameworld—recreated in your mind with all its terror, beauty and familiar cues, yet without a button to press or the power to control an outcome—can be a terrifying one. As much as I love games, I'm glad it doesn't happen more often.
If you are a severed torso fetishist or serial killer, you will undoubtedly be ecstatic to know that one special edition of Dead Island: Riptide comes with the above statue.
Fans of bloody female torsos clad in UK flag bikinis can go out and pre-order the "Zombie Bait" edition of Deep Silver's upcoming open-world action role-playing game right now, assuming they live in Australia or select European countries. Sorry, U.S. torso aficionados. You guys can get the "Rigor Mortis" edition, which comes with a zombie hula girl bobble figurine, a zombie arm bottle opener, and a wooden keychain. No torso.
I'm not sure exactly what one does with a bikini-clad, severed female torso, but at least it makes a good conversation piece. Put this on your mantle and everyone'll be talking.
Really though, this is disgusting. It's the sort of marketing misstep that can make it feel really embarrassing to like video games.
I've reached out to Deep Silver's UK office to ask what the deal is. Deep Silver's American PR rep says the company's U.S. branch was not involved here. Dead Island: Riptide is out on April 23 for Xbox 360, PS3, and PC.
Two game developers from Czech Republic-based Bohemia Interactive (Arma III), who were jailed in Greece for the past 218 days, will finally be able to go home, according to Czech media reports translated on a site dedicated to the men's release.
Ivan Buchta and Martin Pezlar had been facing up to 20 years in prison on charges of espionage after they were caught photographing a Greek military base. The developers had maintained that they were sightseeing and possibly scouting locations for an upcoming game.
The two had been denied bail in November, but strong lobbying for their release appears to have paid off.
The developer's release on bail for 5000 Euros each (about $6700) allows them to return home to the Czech Republic where they will presumably be safe from Greek prosecution. The arrangement was formalized through a conversation between the prime ministers of Greece and the Czech Republic, according to this Czech media report translated by the "HelpIvanMartin" blog:
As a result of repeated dealings, today the Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras informed Czech PM Petr Nečas over the telephone that the two Czech arrested by Greek police because of supposed photography of military objects on the island of Lemnos have been released. Both can now return back to the Czech Republic. PM Petr Nečas expressed appreciation for the efforts of PM Antonis Samaras and thanked him," said Petr Nečas' spokesperson Michal Schuster on Tuesday.
No word from Bohemia Interactive on this yet (we're checking in with them), but the company's Dean Hall, who is responsible for the popular DayZ mod, is jubilant:
Ivan & Martin Free on bail [Help Ivan & Martin, via Rock Paper Shotgun]