Adam Rosenberg

Gaming By Adam Rosenberg

Bringing horror out of stasis in Dead Space 3's 'Awakened' DLC

If there's any worry at Visceral Games over criticisms that Dead Space 3 strays too far from its horror roots, no one is talking about it. On the contrary, producer Shereif Fattouh seemed completely optimistic about the game's reception and its place within the Dead Space universe during a recent preview of the upcoming 'Awakened' add-on content."Whenever you release a title, you're gonna get the positives and negatives. We as a dev team are really proud of the game we made. We feel it was very true to the franchise and we're excited to put it out," Fattouh told Joystiq. "There are people that have criticisms, and that's everybody's right. For us, we put a lot of our heart and soul into the game and we feel it's enjoyable."Fattouh's description of Awakened paints the picture of a campaign add-on that hews closer to the spirit of previous entries in the series. The 'creep factor' was indeed high in our hands-on demo, which sends Isaac back to the CMS Terra Nova's Conning Tower, after it's been overrun by a Necromorph-worshipping cult of scarification practitioners. Strange symbols and unsettling altars that mash together human corpses with Necro parts line the walls."We had a vision for what we wanted to make with our DLC," Fattouh explained. "The nice thing about it is it kind of married into what some of the more hardcore community guys were asking for. They didn't feel that there was as much horror as they would have liked [in Dead Space 3]."%Gallery-180986%

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Entertainment By Adam Rosenberg

From city-builder roles to caring for citizens in SimCity

Regions are the beating heart of Maxis Games' upcoming SimCity revival. The always-online game places a lot of emphasis on community, but it's less about the global fellowship and more about the ties that bind neighboring cities together.Players face a choice when they're first starting out: break ground in a small region with only two or three city-sized plots of land to develop ,or jump into a more expansive location, one that supports as many as 16 cities. The cost/benefit for each choice is simple enough to break down; it's the difference between carving out your own, private space in the world versus leaving the door open for other players to join.All of SimCity's regions are created in-house at Maxis – there's no plan to let players mold their own regions – and each plot of claimable land comes with its own advantages and disadvantages. A helpful status bar pop-up points out which resources are and aren't available when an unclaimed plot is highlighted, so you know what you're getting before you settle on a civilization site.Maxis has been working to test against a whole galaxy of possibilities in the run-up to SimCity's March 5, 2013, release. It's to the point that sizable portions of the working day at the studio are now devoted purely to play, with staffers being assigned to a range of discrete city-builder roles. "It's hard to go into every nook and cranny of the game because there's just so much. The breadth of the game is really large," lead designer Stone Librande told Joystiq. "We have different designers who are assigned to different tasks. Like, 'You're making university town, you're making casino town, you're making ore and coal mining town.'"%Gallery-179241%

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Entertainment By Adam Rosenberg

Oddball world of Fuse: Splicing the Insomniac DNA with Smash TV

Fuse is a difficult game to preview; it's a busy experience with plenty of interconnected systems and a HUD that brims over with symbols, numbers and meters of various sorts. Insomniac's coming shooter thumbs its nose at the current era of clean user interfaces, which attempt to disguise vital information in natural ways, in favor of the bright-as-can-be notices found in old-school arcade games. It's a retro style that, in the face of modern titles, feels decidedly fresh. Further complicating the experience is the ever-present nature of your squad, working together as a foursome set out to destroy enemy lines.The trick with Fuse is that the four-person squad is always present: whether you're playing with friends, computer-controlled bots, or a mixture of the two. Fuse features a "Leap" system, allowing players to jump quickly between each character to command their unique skills. Insomniac says its goal is to give players the opportunity to fill every role."We've built this game from the ground up with that in mind," Insomniac president and CEO Ted Price tells Joystiq. "We wanted to make sure that there are always four characters in the game but you can have just as much fun by yourself, or with one friend, two friends, or three friends. So that's been our design mantra from the very beginning."%Gallery-179118%

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Entertainment By Adam Rosenberg

Molding and shaping Terraria's world with twin sticks

Terraria, the PC creation conceived by the small staff at developer Re-Logic, will finally make its way to the digital storefronts of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Developed by Engine Software and published 505 Games, the console version of Terraria features fresh content, including a new big bad dubbed Ocram as well as additional enemies, weapons, pets and inventory items, and is scheduled to arrive at "the end of February or early March," according to 505 Games community manager Logan Rosenstein.The console version's biggest addition, however, is the ability to play Terraria with a controller. It's initially hard to picture playing Terraria without the combination of a mouse and keyboard. The basic movement controls are simple enough, but inventory management, mining, and construction are all governed by a pointer-based interface that is best left for a mouse to handle. The gamepad controls developed for the port aim to offer the best of both worlds."The biggest challenge [the dev team faced] was the controls," Rosenstein said of the porting process. "The PC version is so heavily reliant on the keyboard and mouse, so the dev team spent a lot of time and a lot of effort working on the controls. They did several different layouts and several different practice runs."%Gallery-178191%

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Gaming By Adam Rosenberg

Feeding on undead armies in Skulls of the Shogun

Here's your high-concept, catch-all elevator pitch for Skulls of the Shogun: samurai zombies meets turn-based strategy, and a dash of Words With Friends thrown in for flavor. 17-BIT's charming top-down strategy title captures the action-flavored flow of the Advance Wars series, though it ditches the grid-based world in favor of more natural radial movement. The whole package comes together around an ambitious multi-platform release that features asynchronous multiplayer match-ups and a meaty, multi-hour campaign.Don't let the "multi-platform" thing fool you. Skulls is 100 percent a Microsoft exclusive. You'll simply be able to play it on anything that runs Windows or some approximation of it. Xbox Live Arcade, yes, but also Surface tablets, Windows Phone devices, and Windows 8 PCs via the new operating system's app store.As you might have read in our earlier previews or our recent Joystiq Indie Pitch, the 10-15 hour campaign casts players in the role of a recently deceased samurai lord from feudal Japan. Horrified at being forced to wait in line for half a millennium before being admitted into the afterlife, our General Akamoto takes matters into his own hands. He enlists an army of zombie Ronin to fight by his side and sets out to carve his way into the great beyond.%Gallery-171897%

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Gaming By Adam Rosenberg

Surviving the Xenomorph offensive in Aliens: Colonial Marines

The stranded squad of space marines makes hasty preparations amid the flickering lights of a ruined former colony's command center. A scrounged sentry turret sits idle in a corner of the room, slowly scanning for signs of non-human life. Raging storms outside mask the sounds of creatures scuttling through air ducts, but the ever-present rhythmic beeping of motion trackers fill the air with ferocious frequency as the alien menace approaches.Murky shapes take form as they leap into the light, slick, inky-black creatures with pronounced ridges lining their bodies. A shotgun burst drops the first attacker in an instant, its inert body slumping to the floor as a burst of acid blood sprays over a nearby squaddie.Gearbox Software is a studio of many talents, but the developer's biggest success on Aliens: Colonial Marines may well end up being how accurately it's managed to nail the feel of the famous sci-fi series. This is vital, as anyone who has seen the movies can understand. There's nothing in the science fiction genre quite like the franchise's Xenomorphs, a race of highly aggressive and agile beings with acid for blood and the ability to reproduce through something akin to a cross-species infection. Xenomorphs in Aliens: Colonial Marines slide through the environment with the same sort of ease that they do in the movies, as we learned during a recent hands-on demo of the game's campaign. An unseen network of air ducts connects every room and corridor, so any alien that slips out of sight will eventually emerge elsewhere. Probably behind you.%Gallery-173092%

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PC Gaming

PC Gaming By Adam Rosenberg

Assaulting an alien battleship as a Triad defector in XCOM: Enemy Unknown's 'Slingshot' DLC

You probably remember the day that your best friend died on the field of battle in XCOM: Enemy Unknown. One of the coolest features of the Firaxis-developed remake is the ability to customize the names of individual soldiers that make up your army of alien-stompers, fostering a strong connection that adds weight to a soldier's permanent demise. It's unexpected, then, that for its first downloadable content in the rebooted XCOM universe – dubbed 'Slingshot' – Firaxis has decided to create a completely fictional character as its star.Zhang is a member of the Chinese Triad who defects over to XCOM when he comes to recognize the magnitude of the threat that the world faces. He's introduced in Slingshot's first mission via cutscene, a heavily scarred, besuited tough guy who stands as motionless as the Foo Dog statues that surround him.The Triad defector is a civilian in the first mission, a neutered unit that must be escorted by XCOM forces to a nearby evac location situated close to your Chinese cemetery rendezvous point. Alien forces attack from all sides, same as it ever was, and only tactical thinking sees you through. You'll probably think more than once "Why can't I just hand this Triad fellow a gun and tell him to point it at the invaders?"That opportunity comes later, as Zhang's defector status puts him on the outs with his former bosses. Complete the first Slingshot mission and your Triad buddy joins XCOM as a Heavy. He's just like any other soldier save for the fact that his name and appearance are locked. You don't even need to bring him along on the two Slingshot missions that follow, though his high stats might compel you to do so anyway.%Gallery-172363%

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Entertainment By Adam Rosenberg

Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor's Edge review: Sharpened

Keep track of all of Joystiq's Wii U launch coverage on our Wii U hub page! Team Ninja has always done better on the rebound, and Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor's Edge is a testament to this fact. The technical excellence of the 2004's Ninja Gaiden was one-upped in Ninja Gaiden Sigma. Ninja Gaiden 2 was improved dramatically in Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2. Razor's Edge carries that trend forward into the series' latest entry, with surprising results. It's one thing to turn a great game into an even better one, but to turn a once-terrible game into a launch lineup highlight? Impossible!Apparently not. Team Ninja cuts liberally from Ninja Gaiden 3 in Razor's Edge, stripping away everything from the obnoxious "steel on bone" QTE-style button mashery to the multitude of joy-killing sequences in which players guide a stumbling, curse-afflicted Ryu through neutered enemy encounters. Even the questionable presentation is erased, exemplified by an early moment that forces Ryu, and thus the player, to murder a man in cold blood as he pleads for his life. This insufferable moment has been excised from Razor's Edge, and for that we can all be thankful.%Gallery-165268%

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