Quarrel comes out on Xbox Live Arcade today for the measly sum of five whole dollars and it’s pretty safe to say that if you don’t buy it you don’t like words.
It is a great iOS game that inexplicably lacks multiplayer, which is something that they thankfully decided to remedy for the Live Arcade incarnation.
Tom Bissell for Grantland with a fascinating behind-the-scenes on how Madden is made every year:
Every year for the past three years, key members of Madden NFL’s development team have traveled to the Bay Area suburb of Pleasanton, Calif., to meet with John Madden himself at his production company’s office building. There, Coach Madden and the dev team discuss identifiable trends that have emerged in professional football over the past year and spitball ideas about how these trends might be implemented in gameplay. Coach Madden is also briefed on the creative direction and “feature set” of next year’s game. Once that’s done, Coach (as he’s called) and the dev team watch a fully catered afternoon’s worth of professional football games in a large studio space that Coach built after retiring from broadcasting a few years ago.
I—like, I am sure, many others—did not have any idea that Madden was as intricately involved in the development of each game as portrayed in this article.
It’s a great read on how EA Tiburon works to create a fresh take year after year, and some thoughts on the future of the king of sports video games.
Tom Chick’s quick review of the Genki Bowl VII DLC for Saints Row: The Third has prompted me to write some thoughts I was saving for tomorrow.
He says:
The Genki Bowl DLC is weird for weird’s sake, and frankly, it’s not even that weird. A giant ball of rampaging pink yarn is just an immutable Katamari. The new pink catwomen homies are no stranger than the costumes you’ve probably been wearing all along. A pink convertible with mounted flamethrowers sure would be cool in a game without VTOL cycles, TRON tanks, and a moon buggy.
I want so much to disagree with this, but I have to say that I’m unfortunately disappointed with this first DLC pack in much the same way.
The Third was a great ride and definitely worth my money, and to support Volition for making it I dropped the money on the season pass for the DLC sight-unseen. But Genki Bowl VII is missing almost everything that I liked about the base game itself.
It’s a series of derivative diversions that aren’t as fun as the material that they are supposed to push to the next level of crazy.
Apocalypse Genki is a harder and more confusingly-laid-out version of Super Ethical Reality Climax. Super Ethical PR Opportunity is an Escort mission, just not as difficult or novel. Sexy Kitten Yarngasm is the Tank Mayhem diversion but without a cannon and with hangups on the world geometry. And Sad Panda Skyblazing—though a unique diversion that’s like nothing else in the game—is an exercise in frustration that’s over as soon as you figure it out.
The bonuses for completing these things aren’t even very interesting, especially if you are playing with a character that’s already reached the endgame. There’s little enjoyment to be had in running them co-op (though it does decrease the difficulty a bit). And there’s a moment in the closing cut scene where it’s blatantly obvious that they didn’t record lines with The Third‘s uniformly excellent voice talent.
I had high hopes for the DLC based on my experience with the base game—but it was such an over-the-top piece of performance art that perhaps anything they do at this point is going to fall short.
I bought the Season Pass for it as soon as it was in my hands, but the first DLC for Saints Row is released next week:
It is known by many names: “The greatest specatacle in sports,” “The most dangerous game,” and “Holy [redacted] I can’t [redacted] believe I [redacted] [redacted].” It is the one, the only, Genkibowl VII!!
As a special surprise, the Professor has allowed his very own Genki Girls to theme the new games after themselves. Sail through the skies with Sad Panda Skyblazing. Fight through dark, shark-infested jungles in Angry Tiger’s Apocalypse Genki. And crush your way to victory in Sexy Kitten Yarngasm. But don’t forget to help Professor Genki maintain his excitement before any public appearances in Super Ethical PR Opportunity.
I am hoping this is exactly the kind of insanity that I think it is going to be.
I have had a great deal of fun with co-op games in the past few years, with highlights being the Covert Ops stuff in Call of Duty, the Gears of War series in campaign, and most recently with Saints Row: The Third.
When it comes down to it, I find that I would rather play a game that way than just about any other, so my lazyweb request for today:
Recommend to me an Xbox 360 game that has an amazing co-op experience.
Guidelines:
Comment!
Ryan Markel 