I read a cool article on gearboxity that featured the new Gunzer from Borderlands 2. They interview Paul Hellquist, Creative Director for Borderlands 2 as well as Scott Kester the Concepter Designer and Jonathan Hemingway the Game Designer. The article is note worthy because it traces the evolution of the Gunzer design over the project. I don't see that in interviews so it seemed radtacular.

*snip*

"The Gunzerker started as an action skill in a long list of potential action skills. The draw of dual wielding in our gun-centered game was immediately very strong. It was an idea that was kicked around during the development of the first game but with all of the other major challenges turned out to be one that we couldn't tackle at the time. Once we starting thinking about Borderlands 2 and decided that we wanted include dual wielding as an action skill we then needed to identify the action skills for the other classes before we could do anything else."

The article also mentions they wanted to add dual wielding in the original Borderlands but due to technical limitations they left it out. Dual wielding was one of those things I did want in the original Borderlands but I understand that technical tradeoffs must be made to ship awesomeness.

Here is the article in question:
http://www.gearboxity.com/content/view/892/33/

Valve is a cool company. I am looking forward to what people create with this tool. Machinima anyone?

-
http://sourcefilmmaker.com/

I have many awesome childhood memories of spending tons of quarters playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game. I remember when the game was new and it was always full up with kids playing it at Chuck E Cheese and other local arcades. I loved getting my cousins and friends on the four player arcade cabinet and having enough quarters to get to the Technodrome and defeat Shredder. I think there were a few versions of this arcade game over the years because I remember the final boss being Shredder in some and Krang in others.

I preferred playing as Donatello as he had the longest reach or if he was taken, Michelangelo because he seemed to attack quickly. Not sure if there was an actual play difference to the Turtles, but it was fun to be able to choose which one you wanted to play as.

I always liked the levels with the Mousers as they were pretty small and easy to kill but occasionally if you didn't kill them fast enough they would bite on your arms and you had to wave them off. I always told myself if I ever had money I would buy the four player cabinet and put it in my house so I could play this game whenever I wanted.

Oh and it was pretty annoying that the only thing that refilled your life in the game, Pizza, was shockingly absent throughout the game. Then again, if you had a sporting chance of actually surviving the game on a quarter they wouldn't make much money on the game. Still...

Fast forward a few years and its been remade for consoles called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time Re-shelled. I downloaded the demo on my PS3 and checked it out. Overall its a fair shake of the material but I prefer the older style graphics myself. The reboot has a 3D look to it that isn't great to my eyes. I hit up a local Portland arcade called Ground Kontrol and I prefer the old arcade cabinet they have to the reboot on the PS3. Maybe I need to keep spending quarters to play this game? I don't know. Maybe I just don't want to play this game with a modern look to it.

In any case the original cabinet game can't be beat. And we all know a reboot can't capture 15 years of pizza and pop stains on an old arcade cabinet which always translates to magic.

Happy Retro Tuesday.

-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teenage_Mutant_Ninja_Turtles:_Turtles_in_Time_Re-Shelled

SimCity Social BETA was released recently and I just checked it out. Its a Facebook game and I figured it would get out of the typical Facebook game mold because, its SimCity. It doesn't. SimCity Social seems to do the same thing as Farmville, CityVille, etc by allowing you a certain amount of free actions per day and then requiring you to include you friends to get more actions or pay to play. I don't mind the pay to play model for games, but in the case of SimCity Social it mines the FarmVille model that just seems stale to me.

I would love to play a modern SimCity in my browser. It would be awesome to build my city and share it with my friends so they can see my progress. It would be cool to have them do stuff in my city if they want that isn't annoying. It would be great to be able to play the whole game and not be stopped to enter my credit card every 15 minutes. It would be great if I could drop in and play for 15 minutes or 5 hours if I wanted.

I guess in the end SimCity Social is just too similar to other games I have left to be compelling to me. That said, its free on Facebook and you should check it out for yourself if you are interested.

You can do that by here:
https://apps.facebook.com/simcitysocial/welcome?pf_ref=x1035_fanpage_openbetaannounce_global&redirect_addr

New video for the new Descent Second Edition! Cool.

Really looking forward to this.

Recently I was on vacation visiting the Grand Canyon and other sights in Arizona and took a few pictures of things I thought were interesting. I snapped a pic above of a green porcelain pig at a Native American Store. Couldn't help but want to throw a bird at it.

At the same store I came across some computer mice that had Spiders, Scorpions and Beetles encased in them. I don't know, its kind of cool but this would creep me out.

http://i.imgur.com/d70zM.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/bwhMl.jpg

At the Grand Canyon I saw a rock formation called "Isis Rock." This might just have been my nerdy side thinking but.... Well yeah it reminded me of the Wind Fish Egg from Link's Awakening.

http://i.imgur.com/wndTe.png

Finally, I found some Native American art that reminded me of something from a Mario game. Funny what comes to your mind when you see things.

http://i.imgur.com/FZOl9.png

Can't touch this!

Oh and as a bonus here is a video of a Monk killing Diablo in Inferno in 3 minutes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDFFYAwThFI

Build and more:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/monk#abkXgi!dXU!acabYc
http://imgur.com/a/RNqAp#0

Cool Pac Man 3D street art.

The new Diablo 3 1.0.3 Patch dropped a few days ago. More details here:

http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/blog/5238315/Patch_103_Now_Live-20_06_2012

A few items I felt interesting:

"Attack Speed bonus values on weapons and armor have been reduced by 50%"

Heard for quite sometime people should stack attack speed, I guess Blizz thought it was too overpowered.

"Magic Find will no longer be considered when looting objects in the environment such as chests, barrels, vases, pots, and corpses"

Doh!

"The item quality of all components needed to craft the Staff of Herding, as well as the Staff of Herding itself, have been changed from Common to Legendary (i.e. their item names will appear orange in color)"

I have a Staff of Herding now and this doesn't seem to effect it but I don't quite understand this. Can someone with more knowledge chime in on this change? Does this mean all the items drop as non-white or orange? I hope its not harder to get, it was tough as it was.

"Combinations for these ranks now only require 2 gems, down from 3"

This is the best change in the patch.

Many other changes are in the link above, so check it out if you play. Do you think these are mostly good or is this just the long arm of a Blizzard nerf cannon?

For Retro Tuesday I am going to nerd out on a game from a galaxy far far away.... Queue John Williams please....

In a world where movie tie in games go horribly wrong Star Wars is one franchise that does pretty well for itself. More recently with the Knights of the Old Republic MMO Star Wars has had good luck with its tie-in games. One such game I played was Super Star Wars on the Super Nintendo.

Super Star Wars is a fast paced action side scroller where you played Luke Skywalker starting the game with a simple blaster. As you progressed you could upgrade your blaster and after meeting Obi-Wan you got the lightsaber. At one point you can play as Han Solo but I never opted to use him as Luke could use the blaster and lightsaber and all told the lightsaber was too good to miss.

One thing I really liked about Super Star Wars was that for two missions they tossed out the sidescrolling elements and you took a first person view for a Landspeeder run in Tatooine and ended the game in the Death Star trench in Lukes XWing. The Landspeeder run in Tatooine was fun as you spend your time collecting items and shooting Jawas and bullseying Wamprats.

A few months into owning the game I discovered an issue of Nintendo Power that dropped a hint on a secret area of the game where you could collect unlimited lives. Getting all these lives allowed me to replay certain hard levels to master them. After I mastered some harder levels beating the game with the standard life set wasn't too hard. The game didn't allow a continue at the level you left off at so losing all your lives was pretty annoying.

I really dug this game and as far as side scrolling action shooters go its one of the best I played on the Super Nintendo. I didn't pick up Super Empire Strikes back or Super Return of the Jedi though. Always looked cool to ride a Ton Ton though.

-

Want to know all the game secrets? Doesn't everybody?
http://www.gamefaqs.com/snes/563218-super-star-wars/faqs/40138