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The Summoner's Guidebook: Wards win League of Legends
A lot of you have noticed that I've been talking a lot about wards over the past several months. This is for a good reason: Wards win League of Legends! I think that every one of my past wins on Summoner's Rift has been either due to wards or a complete blowout laning phase. Of those two things, there's one you have almost zero control over, even as a jungler. You can outlane the person you're against, but there's no telling when your opponent is just better than you. If you're a jungler, sometimes the enemy lanes don't give you any openings or your lanes just throw kills away to the enemy jungler. No matter how good you are, someone can always be better than you -- or your allies can be horrible. However, in Season 4, if you place down a ward, in probably 90% of circumstances you're getting vision for the full duration of the ward. No matter how good the enemy team is, if it moves through that area, you get intel. If it doesn't, you also get intel.
The Summoner's Guidebook: Evelynn, League of Legends' new top jungler
It shouldn't be a surprise that Evelynn is one of my favorite characters in League of Legends. Before the 3.14 patch, she was one of my go-to picks in the jungle. Now, I have not yet played a normal or ranked game in 3.14 that was on a character other than Evelynn save for one game where I was stuck playing mid (and lost horribly). I probably could have played Eve there too. Every game thus far I've gone 5/1 or better in the laning phase. She's just that good now. While there are a few other junglers that are considered to be very strong, I feel that Evelynn is the best of the best right now. She clears fast, deals tons of damage, and scales well with items. But more importantly, she can do what few other junglers do well: gank.
The Summoner's Guidebook: Learning how to not lose from the League of Legends pros
The League of Legends World Championship semifinals are over, and unfortunately the two teams I was hoping would advance ended up losing. The matches were good, especially the SKT1 versus NJBS matches. Definitely watch them! However, this week I'm going to get back to basics, and by that I mean guides on improving your game. I've been talking about Worlds for weeks and I'll be at the finals in LA around the time you're reading this, which would make for four weeks of straight coverage about the LoL World Championships. That feels lazy to me. I have been watching a lot of pro matches lately, both the tournament matches and just random streams and casual matches. One thing that came to mind for me was improving our losing games. We all have them, and of all the games that we should improve upon, those are the games that are the most important. Pro players take bad lanes or feeding teammates and make wins instead. How do they do it?
Dementium: The Ward gets psycho on your DS this Halloween
Survival horror FPS, Dementium: The Ward, received an official release date today of ... (cue up haunting music) Halloween. That's Oct. 31 in case you just can't be bothered to remember. The Gamecock published Dementium is a little independent title by Renegade Kid which impressed us at E3 because of its intuitive design and solid feel. Granted, it's on the Nintendo DS, so we don't have many survival horror FPS' to compare it to, but it was fun and almost made us miss our next appointment.Dementium: The Ward is a mature rated game and uses the leeway that rating gives it. We're definitely looking forward to more DS titles from Renegade Kid. They seem to know what they're doing, getting Dementium together in about a year from scratch. With any luck, gamers will find Dementium and we can see more solid off-the-beaten-path DS titles from the company.[Via Press Release]%Gallery-3636%
Joystiq hands-on: Dementium: The Ward
Pleasant surprises end up being more than pleasant because pleasant surprises are so few and far between -- Dementium: The Ward is a pleasant surprise. The first-person survival horror game for the Nintendo DS does the best it can with the hardware's technology and could, at a minimum, be a serious break-out sleeper hit. When you find out Renegade Kid will have finished this game with a development cycle of 11 months, with only three internal guys and five external guys working on it, you'll be surprised. The reason they could pull this off is because these developers are all veterans of the N64 and were "firing on all cylinders out of discipline" knowing how to work with the development software, for them the trick was how to incorporate the stylus, but it all came out just fine.The most shocking thing you'll notice about Dementium is how smooth it runs. It uses the Metroid Prime Hunters control scheme, but because the pacing is slower than MPH, the concept feels better. Left hand stays on the control pad with one finger on the left bumper for action, right hand uses stylus on the bottom screen. The top screen is uncluttered standard FPS fare. The bottom screen has a heart monitor which gives a standard thud-thud when you are at normal health and gets more rapid as you take damage. Currently the heart beat can't be turned down or silenced, the developers said that will put that option into the final game -- listening to a heart beat for that long would drive you Edgar Allen Poe telltale crazy. There is a simple action button when you need to open doors (loading times are nil) and an easily accessible notepad when you need to remember codes or keep notes to figure out puzzles. Items are easily selected by tapping them on an inventory tray which runs along the bottom of the screen. The only thing is that the flashlight is so important to seeing more than a few feet in front of you that a quick hotkey on the bottom menu would be nice -- especially because you can't use the flashlight as a melee weapon (hello Doom 3 irritation all over again). The map is great showing you where you've been and which doors are locked and unlocked. The game takes approximately 7 hours to complete, so figure a few extra hours if you take your time. Puzzles include stuff like finding a code written in blood that you'll need to input into a door and searching around a room for notes to play on a toy piano. Dementium looks like it'll be a great unflinching M rated addition to the DS library. The story is still under wraps, but if the story is as tight as the controls, this'll be a winner for the independent games movement.%Gallery-3636%
GDC07: Classic Suda 51 weirdness hitting the DS
Suda 51's first games as part of Grasshopper Manufacture are being remade for the DS. The games, called The Silver Case and The Silver Case Ward 25, were originally released for the Playstation and mobile phones, respectively. Suda revealed this fact during his GDC keynote "Punk's Not Dead".Both are graphical text adventures; Ward 25 uses static art and the original Silver Case uses full-motion video. Unfortunately, because of the amount of text that would have to be translated, Suda isn't sure the remakes will be released outside Japan. Someone tell him that American DS players love graphical text adventures! And tell him that we <3 Grasshopper Manufacture too.
IWARD nursebot looks to clean hospitals, fend off intruders
We all know security gets a little heavy eyed when the wee hours of the morning roll around, and we highly doubt the janitorial staff is humming along at maximum efficiency when the residents are snoozing away, so implementing a robot to tackle both tasks seems quite practical. The IWARD project hopes to develop a "nursebot" that wears several hats, and can handle cleaning up spills, utilizing face and voice recognition technology to "communicate with patients and spot unauthorized visitors," and even working in "swarms" to distribute tasks between the robotic crew. Researchers are aiming to have a three bot prototype ready to rock by 2010, and want to integrate sensors and camera to avoid collisions whilst "traveling along high-speed lanes in the hospital corridors." Better steer grandma's wheelchair clear of the robotic raceway, eh?[Via TechieDiva]
Criterion's Alex Ward chats up Wii and DS
Alex Ward, director of design for Criterion Games (Burnout), recently talked about the DS and Wii during an interview with N'Gai Croal. Alex talks, rather favorably, in regards to the Wii and DS, but mainly focuses on Burnout stuff outside the realm of Nintendo. While we could definitely care less about that Sony and Microsoft stuff, Alex makes a few interesting comments regarding their approach to their first attempt at making a game for the Wii or DS, should the developers pursue such a project: What about Wii? You've got Nintendo fans--what can you offer them? At the moment, we're only working on Playstation 3 and 360. We're into the Wii. It's not like we're not. We used to get all the hate mail from people saying, "Why aren't you doing this?" I'd love to do something on that system. We'd like to think about exactly about what it would be. And we'd have to build something bespoke. I've met with the Nintendo guys. They've shown me their stuff. It's cool. I think we'd have to look at very bespoke experiences. So you don't want to just do a port. No way. We just don't do ports at Criterion. We never have. When we did Burnout 1 on Xbox, it was like, "What else can we do?" We were the first game on Xbox to do Live scoreboards. Burnout Revenge on 360, it was a three-month job, but we were big on Save and Share. We were big on Live Revenge. We knew that Live was going to be where it was at, so we put all our time into Live features. When we get a look at the hardware, we just think, "What's the best game we can do on that?" If we were to do a DS game--and we haven't done a DS game yet; the last Burnout for DS wasn't done by us--we've got some ideas we think that would be very bespoke. Using the stylus. Using the microphone. Using everything you can to make that system fun. And hypothetically, Burnout on Wii--maybe you wouldn't do any driving in it at all. Let's do something totally different with it. The Burnout team, we want to do it, but at the moment. we're just focused on doing the PS3 and Xbox 360 Burnout 5. Who knows what we'll do after that. We'll probably be dead.
