Dead Rising 2 - Review

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I liked the original Dead Rising.  Sure, it had its hang ups.  You couldn't see any text on anything if you didn't own a HDTV, the boss battles were extremely difficult, the survivors were idiots, and Otis... Otis...  would interrupt you in the most inopportune times. At its heart though, existed an awesome zombie survival game that was limited only by your own imagination.  So I was super excited to hear that Capcom would be releasing a sequel to their game that took care of some of its fans biggest complaints.  So if you played the first one, is it worth going through the second?  In short, yes,  yes it is.

Dead Rising 2 picks the story up in Fortune City, host of the latest Terror Is Reality show where contestants fight zombies for big money.  Chuck Greene competes in these games to be able to afford Zombrex, a zombie virus suppressant drug for his daughter.  Things go to hell, and they get pinned on Chuck, who has 72 hours to clear his name.  Not the most original of stories, but the story isn't important here, it's zombie killing that we came for.

Chuck has quite the knack for combining items together to make new interesting ways to kill zombies.  A cement cutter and stack of plates will give you a plate thrower that slices through packs of zombies with ease.  Got a wooden sword?  Add some motor oil to it and you've got yourself an Infernal Weapon (one of my favorites).  There's a total of 50 different items you can create out of other weapons and items that you're free to try to discover on your own, or save survivors, stop psychos, or even get ideas for from movie posters.

Paddle + Saw = Untouchable

The Survivors this time around are much smarter, and you can hand simple weapons over to them that they can defend themselves with, or even save you from becoming zombie chow.  The Psychos on the other hand, are very similar to the boss fights you would run into from Dead Rising 2.  These fights can still be hair pullingly frustrating, as they have lots of life, and weapons they can do a lot of damage with.  Fortunately,  you can take some of their weapons to help fight others.  It would be extremely rare to find me without katanas and the six shooter to handle anything that might surprise me.  If things get TOO out of hand, the game has cooperative play online to bring a friend along to work together on those problems.

Your radio now acts as a quest log, only when  message is deemed "urgent" will it keep ringing until you pick it up, and if you happen to have to start attacking, the conversation keeps going.  No more being called rude by the janitor.  Save points are much easier to find, and they even give you three save slots to work with instead of the one that Dead Rising players were stuck with.  It seems like it would be a small change, but it allows you to play a little bit bolder if you know you've got a few points to fall back on.

So they made a lot of good changes to the game, is there anything I didn't like about it?  Well, yeah.  The game is not without its parts that make me want to throw the controller.  The psycho fights go poorly until you find some good weapons to fight them with (see Infernal Weapons above), and I still think that the AI cheats at poker.  Money doesn't come easily in the game, if you want the cars and the like, you're going to have to go online to play their Terror Is Reality multiplayer games.  Finally, and this is a minor gripe, I really would have liked to be able to put items together on the fly instead of having to find a maintenance room.  I understand why they chose to go this direction, but still.

So you like killing zombies, right?  I mean, who doesn't.  If you haven't picked this one up yet, I highly recommend it.  Even if you're not going to follow the story and just want to run out into the stores, toss on a tuxedo, grab a sledgehammer, and introduce it to the nearest zombie skull, you're going to have a lot of fun.   I sure did.

Castle Ravenloft - Unboxing

Some time ago I had heard about Wizards of the Coast's upcoming board game, Castle Ravenloft.  The idea of an adventure cooperative board game is always interesting to me, and adding to it that nobody has to sit back and run the adventure because it randomizes itself is what made me want to buy it.  So I head to GenCon fully expecting them to be pre-selling their game there, and to my disappointment, couldn't even find them demoing it at their booth (they were running demos around the con which I was able to watch part of, though).

So not being able to get my hands on it, and seeing the price tag at a steep $65, I put in an order with Cool Stuff Inc where it could be found for only $42.  Toss in a few more items and I had a nice $100 that gave me free shipping.  Unfortunately one of those items was Dominion: Prosperity, and the order wouldn't ship until they had everything.  Last week, however, I got everything in!

Yay!  New game!

First off, this box is big.  While the length and width of it is pretty normal for a board game, check out the depth:

WOTC Product, meet WOTC Product

That's a Magic The Gathering card that I'm holding up next to it, about the size of a playing card for anybody who is still wondering.  There is going to be a lot of stuff in this box.  So let's get this thing open already!

Nothing surprising here, the rule books, and a bundled pack of punch out pieces for the board and life counters and such.

More Plastic

Underneath is a black plastic card holder, with two decks of cards, a bag full of minis, and a large undead dragon.

Anything Else?

Ah!  Quite a few more punch out pieces underneath the black plastic!

  

Ok, now that everything is out of the box, let's dig into some of these things. 

Minis first!

Tearing open the bag of minis actually yielded several other bags inside, with each piece divided by color, as well as a 20 sided die.

There are many colors in the Undead Rainbow, come on and let your color shine

Opening up the pieces, it became obvious that these are pretty much just unpainted DnD mini figures cast in certain colors.  Anybody who is looking for some minis might find what you're looking for here, but there's probably cheaper alternatives.

Like D&D Minis, each piece has its name on the bottom of it, so there's no mistaking what you've got on the table.  Here's the pictures of the rest of them:

The Dragon!

These are pretty nifty, actually.

He-ro!

The bad guys

I found it interesting that the skeletons had an additional layer of plastic around them, this seems to be pretty common in plastic collectible games that contain skeletons. 

He's very delicate, like a undead flower.  That wants to kill you.

Next up are the tiles.  The first thing I noticed about them is that they are very thick cardboard and have a nice finish to them.  The tiles interlock with each other, and having played games with tiles like that before, I was worried that they might easily get stuck together or not fit right or something.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that they fit right together, and leave enough space where you don't push them together to connect them, but keep it tight enough so there's no worry about accidentally becoming disconnected.  Well done on this one, WOTC.

Front

Back

Along with the tiles came tokens, and there are a LOT of them. And many of them aren't small.

This is a little over two pages worth, and there's a lot of pages.

The last few cards were the character sheets, healing surges, entry hall, and a card for the big boss vampire himself.  

So everything is punched out, and put into its container.

Hrm, this isn't going to fit..

There's a problem with the black plastic container they give you to keep everything in.  Wizards tried to make a container that would hold everything, and for the most part they did a pretty good job.  They unfortunately still run into the problem that many other token heavy games run into, in that despite having a large number of tokens of differing kinds, there's only a few places where they can go.  There's a couple spots under the card which I utilized, but the pits below where the tiles go just aren't enough, and there's no place that I found to put the large double sized tiles.  Maybe I need to see a picture to see how I'm supposed to be doing this, but this isn't it.

I left the cards packaged up for now.  We'll go over them more later.  For now, what's important is that I'll be doing a review game session with some of my group this weekend, and will have a full review of our experience, including input from the players, up early next week, just in time for Halloween.  We'll see you then!

Be a Better Gamer - Contribute

It's game night!  The table/console/other medium is set, the game has been chosen, and your friends come filtering in, ready for a night of fun.  The night progresses and everybody is having a good time so far.  Then somebody gets thirsty.  Heading into the kitchen/cooler they find nothing to drink.  Another person gets hungry, and there are no munchies to be had.  Nobody brought anything to game night.

We had this problem in our gaming group a couple months back.  The wife and I typically play host to our sessions, since we have a house, a good sized table, and several smaller tables that we can expand into.  At first, our friends would rotate every week bringing a case of pop for everyone.  Then they started forgetting and dipping into our stuff.  Then they stopped bringing anything and just grabbed from the fridge and pantry.  Not everyone, not every time, but this had become a problem. 

So, after talking things over and speaking with one of our friends, we decided that we needed to make everyone aware that we felt we were maybe being taken advantage of, and that people weren't really giving us any respect or contributing to the group.  After a particularly bad night, we sent out an email to everyone stating that we wouldn't be hosting gaming at our home for a few weeks to give people some perspective.

At first, it didn't seem to be a big deal.  We would play somewhere else.  There were some problems with that, though.  Two of our friends still lived with their parents, so we couldn't go there.  One of our friends doesn't have anywhere to play in their condo, so that was out.  Another had a room mate that had church early the next morning, so anything late couldn't be done, and finally the last didn't have anywhere to sit, let alone play, for more than two or three people.  It was looking pretty bleak.

A couple of people started to realize what was going on.  We had been taken for granted that we would just always be there for everyone and nobody else needed to do anything.  The next night we got together, there were only four of us.  Our friend with the seating problem ended up buying a dining room table to play on, another brought a D&D adventure to DM for us, and the wife and I brought pretzels and drinks for the group.  We  all contributed to try to make it a great time, and it was honestly the best night of gaming we had in a long time.

The next time we got together, though, it was the full group again.  We brought some snacks and the games to play, the host had a kitchen table, but there were no drinks to be had, and he didn't want us touching his stuff.  We ended up ordering food and having to order some drinks to go with them, something that could have been avoided if the others had thought to contribute.  The group as a whole hadn't learned yet.

We've had a couple more game nights since then, and people have brought brownies, and pop, and some assorted other things.  Only time will tell if they all really get it or not, but I have some high hopes for them (and maybe this article might act as a little reminder ;)).

Maybe I'm being harsh or unrealistic, but I think that each person in a group like this has a responsibility to try to make the night as fun as they can.  I don't necessarily mean bringing chips and dip every week, but bringing a good attitude, being ready to play, and thinking about everyone else can help game night be the best night, and for you to Be a Better Gamer.

Cutthroat Caverns - Review

At GenCon 2010,  Cutthroat Caverns was the first game that I demoed, and it was over at the Smirk and Dagger booth.  The wife and I sat down and enjoyed a 20 minute demo of how the game worked, and I posted about it on my Day 1 on the GenCon floor post.  We said we would probably pick it up, but were a little worried about the number of expansions to it.  Well, GenCon has come and gone, so what happened? Well, we ended up picking up the core set, one of the expansions, and a choose your own adventure style book for the game, and then not playing it for almost two months.

You see, my group was a bit afraid of a game called "Cutthroat Caverns" having nearly started a fist fight over TPKing (Total Party Kill) in Tomb by AEG Games.  I reassured them we would have some fun, and sat down to play.  What we discovered was a very entertaining game with a unique mix of working together and edging each other out gameplay that we hadn't experienced before.

The story hook goes that you're a group of adventurers who have stumbled over a great and wondrous item and make a deal that whomever has the most prestige after exiting the dungeon alive will get to keep it.  Prestige is gained through different means, but the most common is to get the killing blow on monsters that you encounter from room to room by playing attack cards worth various amounts. There's other cards that allow you to bolster your attacks, heal yourself, or swap cards with other players to add to the strategy.   There's another key word there, in that you have to survive until the end.  The monsters attack back and you only have 100 health to make it through ~9 encounters.  Fifteen prestige is worth nothing to a dead man.

So what you find yourself doing is working as a team to bring down a monster, and then manipulating the last round or two of hands to try to get the killing blow, or even stopping the person with the highest score from getting it.  If you mess with your companions too much, you won't be able to take down the monster, but if you don't do anything, you won't win the game.  The mechanic works really well, and we even found ourselves in tight spots thinking that it might be better to bow out and let somebody have the killing blow rather than risk taking more damage.

We had a really great time playing this game with six players, and when we had to scale it back to 4, it played just as great.  I've always thought it to be a great sign that a game plays just as well no matter how many players are involved.  Sometimes, game companies try to get as many as they can into a game ignoring when the game stops being fun, but Smirk and Dagger knew where to draw the line, as sad as it makes me that we couldn't get just one or two more involved.

At GenCon we were a bit concerned with the number of expansions, as the more that get involved, the more complicated a game gets (see Zombies!!! or Killer Bunnies for examples).  We only played with the core set for a few games, and then added the 2nd expansion pack (recommended by Smirk and Dagger to us) which included events than ran alongside with the encounters.  They added an extra level to it that was still manageable, but provided incentives for doing strange things, like being the last character to take a hit from the monster.  Since then, I've ordered the additional expansion packs looking for more like what I got from this one.

So, in the end, do I recommend this game?  Well, if you can't tell by all my writing here, then yes, yes, a hundred times yes.  Its unique mix of cooperative gameplay and bit of backstabbing without too dire of consequences makes for a fun evening.  Pick it up and enjoy a night of dungeon crawling with your friends. 

The Dead Pile - October Edition

Gamers have a problem.  Too much cool stuff comes out for us to take all of it in, no matter how hard we try.  For whatever reason, things get bought, started on, or worse, never even opened, and then set down and forgotten.  Allow me to start with one of my most made fun of purchases:

An unopened copy of GTA: Vice City.  It was bought on the day of release, which if you can read that sticker there, is 10/3/02.  I'm almost positive that the day I open the game, the universe will end.  Why did I never open it?  I had just started a new job, and didn't have the time for it, and I felt really guilty that I snagged the last one whereas a co-worker didn't get his and threw a major tantrum about it.  But that was 8 years ago.  Here's what's sitting on my dead pile now.

Game:  Chrono Trigger

Reason Bought:  Chrono Trigger is one of those games from the SNES era that the people who picked it up fell in love with and wanted to see more.  Unfortunately, this one never hit my radar and when it was released as a DS game, I couldn't resist. 

Reason Stopped Playing:  It didn't captivate me like the Final Fantasy games did.  There's plenty of gamers who say that Chrono Trigger surpasses Final Fantasy VI in every way, and I'm a little sad to think that had I picked up this instead of FF VI, I might feel the same way about what I call one of the best games ever made. 

Will I ever return to it: It's hard to say if I'll ever pick up my DS again, let alone return to Chrono Trigger.  The iPhone does everything I would want out of a portable system, which its real detraction.  So, probably not.

Game:Bayonetta


Reason Bought: Claimed to be an awesome action game, but with poor voice acting and cheesy over the top scenarios and game elements. Also, it was on sale.


Reason Stopped Playing:  I couldn't get past a boss.  I felt that the game didn't really teach you enough as you went on to overcome some of the challenges it threw at you, and the difficulty ramped up too fast.  Also, combine not being able to beat a boss with VERY long load times every time you die, and it was too much to take.


Will I ever Return to it:  Probably not.  The time I spent with it was fun, but there's way better games that I'm playing and actually get a sense of accomplishment out of them.

Game: Borderlands


Reason Bought:  My friends wanted to get into this game as a group, and we were able to do a buy two copies and get one free deal through Toys R Us.  It never really struck me as something I wanted to play.


Reason Stopped Playing:  I only ever played with my friends, and we stopped playing together, so I stopped playing the game.  I never liked the idea of leveling up on my own and being this uber powerful guy who knew about everything there was and had all the best stuff while they didn't.


Will I ever Return to it: I'd actually like to.  Borderlands is a fun game, and I want to see if I can get some more out of it. 

Game:Demon's Souls


Reason Bought:  Had just bought a PS3 and wanted a good game to go with it.  The wife liked the concept of it, so we picked it up to try to play.  Glowing reviews didn't hurt either.


Reason Stopped Playing:  This game is effing hard.  Super intelligent me started playing the game on Halloween last year, which is when all the zones were black and hard to fight in.  I don't think I have the patience for it, the online strategy guides are terrible about explaining all the nuances to it in simple terms, and you can't buy a strategy guide to go with it because it was only available in the collector's editions.  When I searched for it on eBay, the guide by itself was worth twice what the game was. 


Will I ever Return to it:  This is another one I'd like to try again, but I want to understand what I'm doing in it, and I can't do that without a lot of research.  I just don't think I have that kind of time, and with the servers supposedly going down next year, I don't think I'll ever get around to it in time.

Game: Last Night on Earth


Reason Bought:  B Movie Zombie Survival board game with scenarios?  Yes, please.


Reason Stopped Playing:  The humans cannot win.  I've read the reviews on Board Game Geek and on forums saying it starts that way, but soon the human players learn how to play and then it gets more fun.  Nope, never happened for us, no matter how many times we've sat down and try to figure it out, the zombie cards create too large of an advantage for the zombie players and it just cannot be overcome. 


Will I ever Return to it:  Nope, never.  Give me the normal Zombies!!! 2nd Edition any day of the week. 

Game:Mad World


Reason Bought:  Found it on clearance for $15, and X Play gave it good reviews for it originality and interesting game play, decided to give it a chance.


Reason Stopped Playing:  The game play is neither original or interesting.  Once you beat the first level, it's essentially a grind on to each boss battle, which actually are at least a little interesting.  Too much repetitiveness on this one, Sega.


Will I ever Return to it:  Not likely.  The announcers were interesting to listen to for a bit, and some of the killing methods were fun in a disturbing sort of way, but there's not enough here to warrant the purchase, even at $15.

Game:  Mod Nation Racers


Reason Bought:  When you see a Kart racing game, you have to think Mario Kart, and the thing that the wife and I did was play the cups in that over and over against each other.  We saw this, and came home to enjoy a night of racing against each other.


Reason Stopped Playing:  Except that's not how it went down, I was immediately thrust into the single player game and only after racing a game was I able to get the wife in to play along, and then it was only one race at a time.  The long load times when trying to select a new track and no way to keep track of who was on top made us pull the disc and go back to Mario Kart.


Will I ever Return to it: A solid maybe.  This is an excellent game, but it isn't Mario Kart.  The computer AI can be painful to race against, and it's really hard to pull off some of the goals in the game, but if I ever feel like racing by myself, this isn't a bad option.

Game:  New Super Mario Bros Wii


Reason Bought:  The wife actually wanted this one.  She liked the idea of us playing a game together and she was a fan of the New Super Mario Bros that was on the DS.


Reason Stopped Playing:  You can't play this game with other players, despite that "Up to 4 Players!" statement on my cover.  For reasons for this, see my article Single Player or Divorce Mode?


Will I ever Return to it:  This is an okay game, but it just doesn't hold my interest like Super Mario World did when I was a kid.  Maybe it's just me, maybe they actually don't make them like they used to.

Game:  Tomb: Cryptmaster

Reason Bought:  We loved the original Tomb board game and wanted to supplement it with a new board, new characters and new monsters.

Reason Stopped Playing:  Never in the history of our gaming group have we had a game that made us hate each other as much as Tomb: Cryptmaster ever did.  The inclusion of the Cryptmaster cards which made already difficult encounters even more difficult, along with the poorly written (and later errata'd) mercenary rules, and feeling of hopelessness you get from running into losing your entire party 30 minutes into the game, has earned this game banned status in the house.

Will I ever Return To It: Banned.  Seriously, we had to ban a board game because it was ruining friendships.  There's playing a competitive game, and there's being complete #!@#% to each other, and this one brought out the worst in us.


So there's my gaming Dead Pile.  There's actually a lot more to it, there's another couple GTA games that are sitting in it, but we'll save those for another day.  If you have some games in your Dead Pile or something you've had to ban in your house, share it below in the comments, or send me a tweet @videogamingat30.  Happy gaming, and may your dead pile always be small.