By Wes Schwengels
Reviewer

So here I am, running from masked police who are shooting at me just because I was doing my job. Sixty floors above the city’s streets, fleeing for my life, looking for any possible escape route, and yet I can’t help but notice how gorgeous the skyline looks today. Especially that crane over yonder…

This is Mirror’s Edge, an absolute masterpiece of a game that has received a lot of hype since it made its debut earlier in the year. In this case, the buzz is well deserved.

Mirror’s Edge follows the story of Faith, a young Runner — or more accurately put, a messenger-acrobat-martial arts fighter — whose job is to relay information between people who are rebelling against the authoritarian government and police force. As the game opens, Faith learns her twin sister, a cop, has been framed for murder. It’s up to our heroine to free her sis from a certain prison sentence — and likely worse.

But the plot, while solid and even touching at times, is about the 20th-best reason to play Mirror’s Edge. The main reason for all the hype is the gameplay, which can best be described as a first-person, parkour-style take on platformers with a nearly constant sense of urgency.

The game teaches you all you need to know early, including wall-running, slide kicks, speed vaulting and even slowing down time to disarm enemies. But it’s up to you to be aware of your surroundings and find the quickest way from Point A to Point E, even if Point B is a moving subway car, Point E is a flying helicopter and Point C is guarded by dozens of angry, ninjalike cops.

There are more than a handful of jaw-dropping moments, led by the one involving the aforementioned crane, but getting to those points is equally as fun. The developers at DICE did an excellent job of pacing the game and knowing when to give the player a break. Make it past a round of trigger-happy police, and you’re rewarded with a challenging but authority-free climb through the innards of an office building.

Then again, it’s so fun to take a cop’s gun while kicking him in the head, sometimes it’s worth it to try and shoot it out John Wayne-style. Heck, sometimes it’s necessary.
More on Mirror’s Edge on the jump

Crayon Physics Deluxe from Petri Purho on Vimeo.

Crayon Physics Deluxe, winner of the Independent Games Festival at GDC back in February, is taking preorders.

Why should you care? Because it’s a fun, unique game, it’s a small independent developer who deserves support, and because if you preorder it’s only $15. Just watch the video, you’ll understand.

If you liked PAAOtRSPoD:E1 you’ll probably love PAAOtRSPoD:E2, out today on Live Arcade and for the PC, Mac and Linux via Greenhouse. But I’m not going to make any guarantees until I review it, which should happen as soon as I 1) get my review copy and 2) stop playing Fallout 3.

And yes, I love that acronym.

My review of Episode 1 is here, though supposedly there have been some tweaks and changes for Episode 2 so don’t expect it to apply completely.

It pales in comparison to the announcement of a new Star Wars MMO, but Episode 2 of Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness will be available for PC, Mac and Linux through Greenhouse and Xbox 360 through Live Arcade next Wednesday, Oct. 29.

This, mind you, is six days after the release of Episode 1 on PSN.

That’s right, a new Star Wars MMO. And it’s called Star Wars: The Old Republic. That’s right, it’s set during the same era as the Knights of the Old Republic series.

The amount of information released is staggering, so here are the highlights:

• The story is absolutely massive. According to the developers, there are no simple “Collect X items by killing monsters.” quests, everything has a purpose that advances the story. And on top of that each class has its own complete story…you could play through twice and never see the same quests twice.
• While you do choose Jedi or Sith, you aren’t choosing good or evil right away; Jedi aren’t necessarily good and Sith aren’t necessarily bad. There is a stigma to being Sith, but in the KOTOR tradition it’s the decisions you make that change your alignment, not an arbitrary selection at the start of the game.
• The game explains the origins of the Sith for those of us who never read the EU novels. The short version is that it was founded by exiled Dark Jedi who subjugated a race called the Sith, intermarried and founded the Jedi’s counterpart. During the game they have an uneasy truce with the Jedi with their own areas, which is an MMO standard.
• There will be very little instancing. It won’t be like WoW where everyone has a chance to line up and kill some epic evil, once an epic evil is dead it’s dead. It goes back to the importance of story.

There’s more of course but those are the “Why isn’t this just Galaxies again?” highlights. It really does sound different than previous MMOs in several fundamental ways, it addresses many problems I have with the genre and, given the combined pedigree of LucasArts, BioWare and the Star Wars name, it’s the first real contender to be the next big MMO, following in the steps of Ultima Online, Everquest and World of Warcraft.

For more information hit up the official web site, and for a rundown of last night’s press conference check out Kotaku’s liveblog.

Game: Civilization IV: Colonization (PC)

Pros: It’s Civ on a smaller scale, lending itself perfectly to micromanagers and making the game less daunting.

Cons: The learning curve is pretty steep, especially for Civ veterans who aren’t used to things like population management and commodity trading, and combat is a lot harder to balance against profitability than in previous games in the series.

Verdict: Civilization fans will love it for all the same reasons they love Civilization, and newcomers to the series will be thankful for the smaller scale.

Grade: A

Read the rest of this entry »

Can’t wait for The Sims 3 to make all 196 of your expansions obsolete on Feb. 20? Well good news! You can preorder now, over four months in advance! And you can spend an extra $10 on the requisite Collector’s Edition, featuring the following amazing items:

– The Sims 3 Game for PC

– The Sims Plumbob USB Drive with matching Green Carabiner

– Exclusive In-Game European-Styled Sports Car

– Tips and hints guide

– The Sims 3 Plumbob Stickers

The plumbob, by the way, is that green thing over their heads.

Is it just me or is four months a little excessive for a preorder lead time? That’s a full third of a year. I mean, I’m still playing Spore and waiting for Fallout and they’re already pushing Sims 3 on me? Can I preorder Sims 4 too?

Remember Starcraft? How you bought one game and got to play as all three races in the single player campaign? Wasn’t that nice, paying once to get the complete game?

Ah, the good old days.

Well the good old days are over. According to Joystiq Blizzard has announced that the Starcraft II single-player campaign will be treated as three separate games: Wings of Liberty for the Terrans, Heart of the Swarm for the Zerg and Legacy of the Void for the Protoss.

According to Rob Pardo we should “…look at the next two as expansion packs, but [they] will have the feel of stand alone products.”

I look at expansion packs as costing more money. They haven’t announced whether all three will be released at once and how much the other two thirds of the game will cost, but based on other expansion packs expect to pay $100-$180 for the full campaign.

Remember spending over a thousand bucks upgrading your computer for Far Cry, then refusing to spend $1,500 upgrading your computer again for Crysis because even if you did it would still barely run? If not let me remind you that it was apparently designed for some theoretical future computer released long after the game itself, my brand new bleeding-edge gaming rig struggled every time I went outside.

Well now Far Cry 2 is coming out and they’ve released the required and recommended system specs. First the good news:

Minimum requirements
CPU: Pentium 4 3.2 Ghz, Pentium D 2.66 Ghz, AMD Athlon 64 3500+ or better
RAM: 1 GB
Video card: NVidia 6800 or ATI X1650 or better, Shader Model 3 required, 256 Mb of graphic memory
Media reader: DVD-ROM
Hard drive space: ~12 Gig or HD space. (tbd)

Surprisingly reasonable! In fact I think Vista’s minimum specs are higher than that. Of course those aren’t the recommended specs…

Recommended
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo Family, AMD 64 X2 5200+, AMD Phenom or better
RAM: 2 GB
Video card: NVidia 8600 GTS or better, ATI X1900 or better, 512 Mb of graphic memory
Sound: 5.1 sound card recommended
Supported Video cards:
NVidia 6800, NVidia 7000 series, 8000 series, 9000 series, 200 series. 8800M and 8700M supported for laptops. ATI X1650 – 1950 series , HD2000 series , HD3000 series , HD4000 series.

Ouch.

Anyone out there who works at Fry’s or has some time want to calculate the cost of building the recommended rig?

(From Ubisoft via Kotaku)