In yet another step towards the video game singularity, Dallas-based game developers The Fun Pimps have begun a Kickstarter campaign to fund their new game, “7 Days To Die”. Described as “An open world, voxel-based, sandbox game blending the best elements of FPS, Survival Horror, Tower Defense and Role Playing Games”, 7DTD is not only looking to bring together elements of some of the most popular games from recent years, but also intends to break new ground. You will still be able to gather resources and build structures in the style of Minecraft, but now you have to worry about the structural stability of the materials you are using. Not only will you face “special infected” a la Left 4 Dead, but you can exploit their senses of sight, hearing, and even smell to avoid confrontation.

The way I see it, there can only be two possible endings to this:

1. A bunch of different mechanics from a bunch of different games get stitched together in some horrible Frankenstein-like monstrosity that will ultimately rise up and kill its masters, or…

2. The key mechanics of some of the best games of all time come together into one giant, ass-kicking, Voltron-esque powerhouse that becomes one of the best and most immersive games of our time.

Or, you know, something in the middle.

The game has already reached $14,663 of it’s estimated $200,000 cost after two days. The campaign will run until August 15th, so get your wallets over to http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/7daystodie/7-days-to-die-zombie-survival-game and help this Megazord of a game get funded.

Ocean Quigley, the creative director for SimCity, and the owner of one of the greatest names I have ever heard, announced via twitter today that he has left Maxis and founded his own game development studio, known as Jellygrade. And he won’t be doing it alone. Leaving along side Quigley are lead architect Andrew Willmott, and lead gameplay engineer Dan Moskowitz. No word from Maxis on what losing three of its best means for the future of SimCity, but Quigley and Co. have already announced that they have begun work on an iPad game that will simulate the origins of life on Earth, using water, lava, rock, and primordial creatures. Having worked on SimCity, the Sims, and Spore, I’d say that this team is very well equipped to tackle such a project.

To see the original tweet from Quigley go to: https://twitter.com/oceanquigley/status/357197508985896960

To stay updated on the new project, and the future of Jellygrade games you can visit them at: http://www.jellygrade.com/

While Gru, the ex-supervillain is adjusting to family life and an attempted honest living in the jam business, a secret Arctic laboratory is stolen. The Anti-Villain League decides it needs an insider’s help and recruits Gru in the investigation. Together with the eccentric AVL agent, Lucy Wilde, Gru concludes that his prime suspect is the presumed dead supervillain, El Macho, whose his teenage son is also making the moves on his eldest daughter, Margo. Seemingly blinded by his over-protectiveness of his children and his growing mutual attraction to Lucy, Gru seems on the wrong track even as his minions are being quietly kidnapped en masse for some malevolent purpose.

Straight off the bat, this film made me laugh so hard throughout that I was actually crying…   So before I even talk about it, it’s a win!

Gru (Steve Carell), Dr. Nefario (Russell Brand), the minions and the girls are back and now Gru is a totally legit business owner making jams and assorted jellies (none of which are even remotely edible according to the Minions)

This is when we meet Lucy (Kristen Wiig), a super secret agent for an agency that ONLY deals with the super villain crazy plans (like Gru stealing the moon in the first film).  Who then kidnaps Gru and a couple of the minions and takes them back to the super secret submarine base to meet Silas Ramsbottom (Steve Coogan) (heehee, Bottom!), to try and get Gru to help them catch the supervillain that stole a secret formulae that turns even the meakest and mildest creatures, into crazy, indestructible Frankenstein like monsters.

At the same point, Gru’s girls, Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), Agnes (Elsie Fisher) and Edith (Dana Gaier) are trying to find Gru a girlfriend and a mother for themselves…  As are his neighbours, with varying, crazy results (some of which are so similar to dates I’ve had in real life, I think I might be the films muse)

Ok, as I already stated at the begining, this film was HILARIOUSLY funny, so this review is gonna be short and sweet

The 3D was excellent.  The laughs were many and varied and made for both kids AND adults.

The music was brilliant and catchy.

Watch it!

9/10

~Lone

Preface: This piece got away from me a bit. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, just skip to the TLDR at the end.

When Red 5 studios announced that they were working on a new MMOFPS with jetpacks at PAX in 2010, it was hard for people to not immediately think “Oh, they’re making a Tribes clone”. After all Tribes: Ascend was being developed at the same time, and people were already freaking out about the return of good, old fashioned jetpack based gameplay to the FPS scene (because jetpacks). After spending about ten hours in the game over the past couple of days, I am happy to report that Firefall is definitely it’s own monster.

It’s important to remember that this is an OPEN BETA. And not one of those frilly “We’re really just letting people play our MMO for free for promotional reasons before we release” open betas. There are technical, practical, and artistic problems with the game as it exists right now. Anything I write below may be completely different by the time the game is actually released, so keep that in mind.

Firefall is set about 200 years in the future in a region of Earth called New Eden after a disaster has left most of the world uninhabitable, covered by a massive energy storm called “The Melding”. There is a pretty extensive back story involving a meteor, a new element called crystite, and a race called The Chosen, but most of it I had to find in promotional videos and on Wikipedia. The game explains very little of it to you. All you get is an opening cutscene where a spaceship largely resembling a WWI warship tries to leave Earth, but instead ends up crashing into it which apparently starts a large purple thunderstorm. And then you’re in the tutorial. I’d like to see a little more explanation in game of the story line as the game develops, because it’s pretty baffling to try and figure out the narrative just based off of what they give you in game.

And the story isn’t the only baffling thing in the beta. The tutorial gives you the basics of moving around and using the abilities of the different battleframes (Firefall’s classes), and then chucks you into Copacabana. Copacabana is the name of the starting area in New Eden. Copacabana is also a popular song by Barry Manilow that has been stuck in my head since I started playing this game last week. In Copacabana you are given a couple of introductory missions that are supposed to teach you how to gather resources, level your battleframes and craft new items. Unfortunately, whether it’s because of bugs or just an overly complex mechanic, the crafting system was almost unusable. After about twenty minutes of trying to remember what I was told to do (there is no way that I can find to look back over instructions) I accidentally ended up spending all of my resources on three copies of the same jetpack after being told I didn’t have the parts to make even one of them. Hopefully this system will get refined in the future, because it looks incredibly deep.

The battleframe system is a nice change of pace from traditional MMO RPG gameplay. Each battleframe encompasses and different role: Assault (Soldier), Dreadnaught (Tank), Engineer (Summonable Turrets/DPS Support), Biotech (Healer), and Recon (Stealth/Sniper Support). Each battleframe levels independently of the others and your character. Essentially what this does is give you five distinct characters to switch between who can all share items if they need to, and you don’t even have to leave the game world to pick another one.

Now, let’s talk jetpacks. The jetpacks may be my favorite element in this game, and not just because you get a jetpack. Red 5 has managed to address one of the chief complaints I hear about why people don’t enjoy MMO’s: Walking. In a traditional open world MMO, players tend to have to do a lot of walking and retracing steps and going up and down mountains and ramps and stairs and it’s all very exhausting. Instead of having to walk around obstacles like buildings and mountains, you can just fly over them. And the map is laid out is such a way that you can generally get from any point on the map to any other by traveling in a straight line.

This leads me to my next favorite element of the game: the open world. There have been a lot of games that have promised huge, expansive, completely open worlds. This is the first time I have ever felt like the world was truly open to me. One of the first things I always do in an open world is test the boundaries of it. If I can see the highest mountain in the game, you can bet I’ll do everything in my power to get to the top. If it looks like there’s an invisible wall, I’m going to do spend the next hour trying to find a gap in it. Beyond maps restrictions that are based on the story, if you can see a location, you can probably find a way to get there.

And openness isn’t the only great mechanic of the world map. New Eden feels like a genuine place that is under siege by alien invaders. There are very few random enemies placed around the map that just periodically respawn. Instead, the Chosen will periodically attack watchtowers or actual towns all over the map. Players can actually lose control of towns to the Chosen, which then have to be reclaimed. Haven’t had a Chosen attack in a while? That’s OK, because a giant purple and orange laser tornado has just appeared on the map, and is spawning monsters all over a huge area and it’s up to you and whoever is around you to kill it.

Which leads nicely to another part of the game I’ve been enjoying: interaction with other players. Since the world is largely open, and most of the missions happen in real time on the map, you can generally skip over the whole LFG for dungeon part of the game. If you find a mission area, there’s a pretty good chance that there is someone else there who’s about to start running it. You can run a whole mission with another person without having to group up, or even talk to one another. It all happens in real time with no break in the action.

Adding to the realism of the world, there are also no quest givers standing around with exclamation points above their heads. Missions are given out by an NPC communicating through your HUD as they become available. You can are usually within a sixty second walk of at least two missions, and you can just into them just by going to the location. No accept quest button, no loading screens, just running into a cave filled with enemies.

And there are a lot of enemies in these caves. This game gets HARD. If a mission says that a group is “recommended” what it really means is “wait for someone else to help you out because this next room is packed with large enemies who want nothing more than to shoot you with rockets”. It becomes especially difficult as there are still a lot of bugs with triggering mission objectives, so your mission tracker will be telling you to go to the mission start, when you’re already knee deep in Chosen corpses.

I haven’t had a chance to try out the PvP arenas yet, but after watching the SPGL Mustang League Jetball finals this past weekend, I am very excited to get my feet wet. I’ll make another post as soon as I have some thoughts to share.

Of course all of this gushing over the world is not to say there aren’t things I didn’t like about the game. For instance, I am someone who likes to spend a long time making my character unique, both ability wise and in appearance. Both of these seem a little bit limited right now, but again, that may just be that the game is in beta, and there are more features to be implemented later on. The resource gathering mechanic is a little shaky as well. To gather resources for crafting, players call down machines called “thumpers” that mine minerals out of the ground over a period of about three minutes. During this process the thumper is attacked by wave after wave of enemies, all trying to destroy it. While this is a nice change from simply wandering the map and gathering any resources you see, it is also very easy, and feels a little grindy after the first couple of times you do it.

TLDR; this game is tremendous fun so far. There are still a lot of bugs and narrative problems, but when it comes to gameplay, Firefall fixes a lot of the issues that I’ve had with MMO’s in the past. Plus, we’re only a week into the open beta, so I think we can expect a lot of these issues to be addressed in the coming weeks and months.

Are you already in New Eden and have some thoughts? Have specific questions about Firefall? Head over to the forums and let us know.

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