About Nick Santangelo

The Wolf Among Us Episode 1: Faith was developed and published by Telltale Games. It was released on October 11, 2013 for $4.99. A copy was provided for review purposes.

As it turns out, “ever after” in all those storybooks you read as a child wasn’t so ever after, after all. At least, not the part where it was supposed to be “happily” ever after, that is. The tellers of tales over the ages actually did get the ever after part mostly right: the citizens of The Wolf Among Us’ Fabletown have lived so long that it might as well be rounded up to forever. And if the humans — or “mundys,” as the fables call them — they’re now sharing New York City with remember their tales from the old days well enough, the fables will keep on living forever, even if they’re struck by ostensibly fatal blows. Despite the best efforts of the local constable, however, there is precious little happiness to go around in Fabletown.

Unlike in The Walking Dead: Season One, The Wolf Among Us: Faith doesn’t quite give Telltale the narrative freedom to carve out its own characters from formless blocks of wood like Geppeto at his workshop. The Big Bad Wolf (here going by Sheriff “Bigby” Wolf), Snow White, the Woodsman, Tweedles Dee and Dum and the rest are already established characters. With the first episode of its latest serial, Telltale spends more time playing Puppeteer Geppetto than it does Creator Geppetto. It pulls on those strings with aplomb, keeping every character as devoid of bliss as he or she is meant to be in grim Fabletown – it’s just too bad that Telltale doesn’t let the player do enough of the same.

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After repeated delays for various reasons, German developer Deck 13 Interactive’s Blood Knights might finally have its real release window in sight, according to a press release from the game’s new publisher, Kobalt Games. Blood Knights, which will be the first release under the newly formed Kobalt Games label, is now scheduled for a Q4 2013 release, meaning it could potentially arrive on XBLA as soon as next week.

For Deck 13’s hack-n-slash title, it’s been a long and winding road to release. Originally announced in July of 2012, the co-op vampire-hunting game was first planned for an October 31, 2012 release. Unfortunately for those looking forward to Blood Knights, Halloween 2012 came and went without a word from Deck 13 or its thenpublisher, DTP Entertainment.

The game’s developer took to its official Facebook page a couple weeks later to reveal that Blood Knights was still coming and would arrive in December 2012. “We are sorry to announce that the release date for Blood Knights has been delayed until December,” wrote a Deck 13 representative. “Keep your seats, sceptics… [sic] as this is due to legal negotiations which has [sic] taken us longer than we planned.”

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Mighty No. 9, a spiritual successor to Capcom’s Mega Man series, will blast its way onto Xbox 360 sometime during the spring of 2015. The side-scrolling action-platformer being developed by Mega Man co-designer Keiji Inafune along with a collection of other series veterans, has hit its console version goal of $2.2 million on crowdfunding website Kickstarter.

Players will take control of Beck through a minimum of six stages — more will be added if stretch goals are hit — that can be played in any order. Beck is described by developer Comcept as “the 9th in a line of powerful robots, and the only one not infected by a mysterious computer virus that has caused mechanized creatures the world over to go berserk.” Beck’s boyish appearance, arm cannon and ability to steal enemy attacks and use them for himself are all design elements lifted directly from Mega Man.

The Blue Bomber-starring series that inspired Mighty No. 9 is Capcom’s most popular of all time, having sold 29 million units as of June of this year. Things have been mostly quiet on the Mega Man front since Mega Man Legends 3 was canceled in July of 2011. Fans hungry for new Mega Man content and excited by the involvement of Inafune funded Mighty No. 9‘s initial $900,000 goal within just a few days of the game’s Kickstarter campaign’s beginning on August 31.

Inafune is serving as the project’s lead at Comcept, but he isn’t the only former Mega Man developer attached to the project. Comcept says that “veteran Japanese game creators with extensive experience in the genre, and with Mega Man in particular” have been charged with creating Mighty No. 9 in its entirety.

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There’s a scene in Ska Studios’ Charlie Murder in which the members of the titular punk rock group do what rock stars do best. No, they don’t rock out, though the game does dedicates several scenes to just that. During the scene in question, the band does the rock star thing and tears apart a hotel room. The rambunctious five behave the way we’ve all come to expect rock stars to behave: irresponsibly. Furniture is destroyed, a mattress gets kicked, hell is raised.

So what, right? That’s all standard rock star fare, and it fits right into a game that celebrates nearly every aspect of the (undead) punk rocker lifestyle. That little mattress-kicking bit, though, well, that seems to have upset at least a few game critics. It’s not so much that the mattress is being kicked that caused the issue, but it’s the individual doing the kicking and the role she plays in the game on the whole that caused some reviewers to be put-off by the character.

The character is Kelly “Skelekitten” Skitten, and she spends most of the hotel scene meagerly kicking at a mattress while the rest of the band — which itself raises from hell in the game’s opening scene — raises hell. Eventually, a male member of the band walks over and does the job of destroying the mattress that Skitten apparently could not accomplish on her own. I noticed it while playing through Charlie Murder for review, but I thought it merely a harmless joke about a woman who looks to weigh all of 90 pounds not being capable of destroying a mattress by kicking it. Another critic felt differently.

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Charlie Murder was developed by Ska Studios and published by Microsoft Game Studios. It was released August 14, 2013 for 800 MSP. A copy was provided for review purposes.

Charlie murders. Charlie — in concert with the other members of the band of his namesake — brutally, bloodily murders undead and demonic foes by the score. Oh, he also skateboards, puts on concerts, drops acid, flies on a broomstick and does a whole bunch of other crazy crap. Mostly, though, Charlie murders. He makes a point of stomping on downed adversaries’ defenseless faces, sending their eyeballs and somehow-still-intact brains flying out of the noggins that contained them only a second earlier. He shoots, he slashes, he bludgeons, he punches — he murders. Such wanton destruction might prompt another round of those discussions as to whether or not those damn video games the kids play really have gotten too violent, whether or not they really are rotting gamers’ brains (at least they have the good courtesy to leave them in their respective noggins). It might do that, but it shouldn’t. It shouldn’t do that because the death and dismemberment is all so outrageous, so ridiculous, so…hilarious, that no one should take any of it seriously.

Absurdity is never in short supply in Charlie Murder. The two-person team of James Silva and Michelle Juett-Silva have distributed it with liberally enough here that Charlie Murder crashes right through genre convention, and, for the most part, keeps on rockin’. Silva once commented to XBLAFans that he had no need for a design document. It wasn’t entirely clear at the time how serious he was about that statement, but it’s obvious now that there was at least some truth to his words. It’s impossible to believe that anyone at Microsoft told the Silvas what they could and could not do when designing their game. In fact, it’s hard to believe that they themselves were even capable of as much. Yes, the tried-and-true brawler staples are all here, but so are myriad off-the-wall ideas that somehow come together in a way that (usually) works. Charlie Murder isn’t the first brawler to load up on crazy — but it is one of the best.

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“So the basic idea being, what would happen if you could become your shadow, and I’ll start walking on shadow lines in the world. That really, at its core is where the game concept first evolved. In the same way as Portal, I wanted to create a mechanic that really fit well and [you could] learn well. So something that had enough depth that as long as there is a light source in the game you can become a shadow and use this mechanic in several ways.”

This is how Compulsion Games Studio Head Guillaume Provost presents his game to XBLAFans and a smattering of other members of the games media. He does it behind closed doors at Contrast‘s Electronic Entertainment Expo booth. It’s a little backwards. Having played the demo half an hour ago, I’ve already walked on the shadow lines to which Provost refers. I’ve already manipulated the power of light to illuminate a cabaret stage and subsequently born witness to a less-than-harmonious meeting of lovers after the close of the show for which I played at stagehand. I’ve already become a shadow to platform across the dark contours of merry-go-round horses at an eerily deserted circus in an old town.

Now, after they’ve already been experienced, these things are explained for the first time, and that leads into some questions. Chief among our curiosities are finding out who these characters are and what it means when they become shadows. Provost and Complusion’s public relations and community man, Sam Abbott, are mostly forthcoming with the answers. Mostly.

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He knows what he wants, Christian Allen does. He’s known since the start. Even before the start, actually. Before Takedown: Red Sabre’s 2012 Kickstarter campaign successfully raised over $200,000, Allen, creative director at indie development studio Serellan, knew he wanted to go back.

He wanted to take gamers back in time. Not too far, only a few years. Back to a time when “tactical” shooters felt more, well, tactical. They had realistic combat — or as close as video games of that could come to approximating it, at least. The Tom Clancy video games from early last decade didn’t play anything at all like the myriad Halo, Gears of War and Call of Duty releases that dominate today’s shooter market. Certainly there is nothing inherently wrong with the approaches those games’ developers have taken to creating an FPS. There is something wrong, though: most everyone else is trying to make the same games as them.

Not Allen and his team at Serellan. Allen knows what he wants, and it isn’t Halo or Call of Duty. Lucky for him, he seems to have a team that knows how to deliver it.

Being a team player

He estimates that the least amount of experience anyone at Serellan has is eight years. Each member of the team has shipped multiple shooters for multiple platforms. As for Allen, between 2002 and 2007 he worked for Tom Clancy factory Red Storm Entertainment on various titles in the Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six franchises — tactical shooters. I ask if that deep and varied shooter development background meant Takedown would feature a lot of different concepts.

“I wouldn’t say it’s about concepts, because we’ve had a really clear vision from day one about what we wanted gamers to experience,” Allen responds. “The great thing about the different devs is that we’ve all shipped at least a billion dollars in revenue of games and almost exclusively shooter titles. So I know, for example, our weapons artist, our character artist, our environment artist — they know how to build shooter levels and content that works, so I can really fire and forget.”

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You’re angry, and I can understand that. You didn’t much care for Microsoft’s announcement last month that its next-generation console, the Xbox One, will feature oppressive DRM measures. The once-every-24-hours online check-in when playing on your own console and the once-an-hour check-in when playing on someone else’s is only slightly less draconian than what the public was fearing would be announced. On top of that, publishers will also have the option to limit gamers’ ability to buy, sell and trade used games.

The anger is based on the gaming public’s deduction that Microsoft’s goal is to minimize the used game market on the Xbox One. And while it does not appear poised to put forth any mandates to make that happen, it will be giving publishers, itself included, a host of new tools that will make it possible to achieve that goal. It would seem, then, that the public is right to be angry. It’s right to remain angry, too.

On Monday of last week I took my seat at University of Southern California’s Galen Center and watched as Microsoft talked about precisely what it said it would at E3: the games. That’s great, because the games are ultimately — or should be, at least — the main reason anyone decides to invest in a new gaming platform. It’s also bad, though, because it meant the platform holder did nothing to assuage gamer fears of an ironfisted Microsoft crippling the used game market.

That evening, rival Sony held its own press conference in which Sony Computer Entertainment America President and CEO Jack Tretton all but sat Microsoft Interactive Entertainment Business President Don Mattrick over a dunk tank and handed the audience softballs. Forget about bad. Things were now looking terrible for Microsoft.

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Electronic Arts today announced a new title in its Plants vs. Zombies franchise to be released on the Xbox One. Revealed during the publisher’s E3 media briefing, Plants vs. …
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Minecraft will make the jump to the next generation as an Xbox One release, Microsoft announced today at its E3 media briefing. Microsoft Studios Corporate Vice President Phil Spencer …
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