RandomNPC – Video Game RPG Reviews, Editorials, and Features

Dead Island is Borderlands meets Left 4 Dead set in Far Cry with the melee of Condemned. I wanted something less abrupt to start with, but this game is a Normandy beach landing away from hitting the FPS singularity (not to be confused with the FPS titled Singularity). No doubt the story of how a design team brainstormed their way to this is one for the history books. The combination might sound impractical and unwise, like wiring up a crowbar with a car battery, but you can’t argue with results. It’s messy, cumbersome, strange, and fun as hell. Continue reading ‘Dead Island – Staff Review’ »

Evening, all! Whether you spent this Sunday in mournful remembrance of 9/11 or calling for the head of your team’s offensive coordinator, we’re glad to have you join us for the news. Here’s what’s going down this week:

• Dragon Quest X makes the jump to MMO superstardom.  Longtime fans outside of Japan go “Yaaay! …wait, what?“
• The Dragon Quest news is such a shock it caused Asian stocks to take a dive, notably Square Enix and Sony.  So argues Nikkei, at least.  Random people on the internet disagree.
• That said, Deus Ex: Human Revolution shipped a tidy number of copies, locking in the eventual development of Human Revolution 2, Human Revolution 2-2, and Nucl3arsnake’s Island Hacking Adventure.
• Dead Island has a major stumble on release, substituting a developer build for the full version in Steam copies.  I take this time to vent about false advertising with the trailer, and the horror game genre in general.
• Gamasutra has a handy breakdown of the year’s biggest publisher flubs.  I say let’s shoot for the moon and take bets on what crazy things can happen before 2012.
• Nintendo turns a corner with the 3DS (at least for the moment), “someone” registers the domain of www.finalfantasyxiii-3.com, and more!

Continue reading ‘What Happened This Week – The Fast Track to Infamy’ »