Gaming
If you’re playing Bioshock Infinite‘s brand new “1999″ mode, get ready to die and to die a lot. “There are games saves,” said Ken Levine, Irrational Games Creative Director, “and you’re gonna f-cking need them.”
Irrational Games, the studio beyond the latest Bioshock game, announced 1999 as a throw-back, uber-hard mode meant to appeal to hardcore gamers nostalgic for the punishing difficulty of classics such as Contra orGhouls’n Ghosts.
The mode will test players by shortening the health bar, creating tougher enemies, limited resources and ammunition and creating permanent in-game consequences for player decisions. These tweaks are more than simply amping up the difficulty, with experiences and features players won’t endure in a standard play-through regardless of the difficulty level.
The Bioshock games are strategic first-person shooters with sci-fi elements such as other-worldly powers and special abilities which players need to cultivate and develop. In most Bioshock games you can switch your specialties mid-game (don’t like using pistols? switch your development over to shotguns). In 1999 mode, there’s no going back. Players will have to think about how they want to play the game (offensive? sneaky?) and what skills they’ll need or they could be facing death a lot.
That’s not a good thing, according to Irrational Games. There is an actual “Game Over” screen where the player has to start from scratch, there’s no candy-coating death with extra lives and restarts. Sound cruel? The mode was borne from a survey that Irrational Games posted online asking fans what they wanted to see in the game:
“I’m an old school gamer,” Levine said. “We wanted to make sure we were taking into account the play styles of gamers like me. So we went straight to the horse’s mouth by asking them, on our website, a series of questions about how they play our games. 94.6% of respondents indicated that upgrade choices enhanced their BioShock gameplay experience; however, 56.8% indicated that being required to make permanent decisions about their character would have made the game even better.”
Are you excited to try the incredibly difficult 1999 mode in Bioshock Infinite or does it sound like more pain than pleasure? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Social gaming was a big trend in 2011 and we expect the market to continue to grow in 2012. Facebook, the biggest platform for social games, released its list of the most popular games of 2011.
Unlike most year-end lists, this one actually has quite a few surprises. I fully expected CityVille, Zynga’s hit social game, to top the list. Nope. According to Facebook’s measurements, that honor belongs to Gardens of Time.
In the update announcing the list, Facebook does say it is basing its ranking on “games that drew the most active users and received the highest user recommendations.”
That probably accounts for some of the discrepancies we found against other Facebook app data sources, likeAppData.com. According to AppData, CityVille is the most popular game with 48.8 million monthly active users. Conversely, Gardens of Time ranks much further down the list with 8.5 million monthly active users.
Accounting questions aside, here are Facebook’s ten most popular games of 2011:
- Gardens of Time (by Playdom)
- The Sims Social (by EA)
- Cityville (by Zynga)
- DoubleDown Casino (by DoubleDown Entertainment)
- Indiana Jones Adventure World (by Zynga)
- Words With Friends (by Zynga)
- Bingo Blitz (by Buffalo Studios)
- Empires & Allies (by Zynga)
- Slotomania-Slot Machines (by Playtika)
- Diamond Dash (by wooga)
After months of leaks, teasers, previews and a 24-hour delay, Microsoft’s new Xbox 360 interface has finally launched to the public.
The update turns the 360 into a media-centered hub with a sleek, tile-based design similar to Microsoft’s Windows Phone, and new media channels such as television, movies and social. All of these features may seem like a chore to navigate but the team is trying to simplify the entire experience by integrating voice and gesture controls via Kinect, Xbox 360′s gesture-controlled peripheral, and an emphasis on Bing search.
But are all of those fancy new features worth the wait? The launch had a rocky start with a series of delays that pushed the original launch time (approximately 10 a.m. ET on Dec. 6) back by nearly 12 hours. The flood of some 35 million Xbox LIVE users (Microsoft has sold 57 million Xbox consoles) caused some connection errors, but it looks like the service is now up and running without a hitch. Concerned users can check Microsoft’s official service page to check on the status of apps and general connectivity.
