Category: Articles

Alice’s Adventures in The Shivering Isles: Part 4

New Sheoth, The Town So Nice They Named It Once

In part three of this game diary Alice met Sheogorath, god of madness and ruler of the Shivering Isles. Then she got annoyed at his accent and poked him with a fork, so he magicked her up into the sky and she fell to her death. That last part was actually a dream she conveniently woke from, like many of the stranger things that happen to Alice, because happily her life comes with the ability to save and load.

Alice snaps out of a daydream about doing violence to Sheogorath to find herself falling not out of the sky but into the dishy brown eyes of Sheogorath’s steward, Haskill. Haskill is explaining that the next stop on our tour of the Isles is Xedilian, which is some kind of trap designed to deal with the riff-raff of wannabe heroes who travel to the Isles looking for “mad loot”. Xedilian has been in disarray since the birth of the Gatekeeper, who used to keep adventurers out until we sort of murdered him on our way in.

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Alice’s Adventures In The Shivering Isles: Part 3

The Horror Of Horripilation

In part two of this game diary, Alice began crossing the Shivering Isles on her way to New Sheoth and an appointment with Sheogorath, god of madness. Although that’s a very important date she did get a little sidetracked in the town of Split after discovering that everybody there had a double. All of the Splitizens had magical twins they hated, and all of them wanted Alice to murder those twins for them. It was all a bit creepy and we decided to split. Get it? It’s funny because the town is also named – never mind.

The town of Split fades into the draw distance, safely somewhere far behind us among the rolling hills and giant mushrooms of Mania. What is with all these crazy people with multiple identities, we think as Alice runs away and I look at the map.

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Alice’s Adventures In The Shivering Isles: Part 2

Splitsville

In part one of this game diary, Alice got tired of spending her holidays in Wonderland and Looking-Glass Land and wherever she went in those American McGee games and decided to visit the Shivering Isles. An add-on for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, this is the domain of Sheogorath, god of madness. It’s a odd place, even here on its outskirts where visitors who aren’t quite crazy enough to be allowed in straight away wait their turn – or alternatively plot to murder the Gatekeeper and sneak in.

Inside the Garden of Flesh and Bone, skeletons attack. With a name like the Garden of Flesh and Bone it was always going to be skeletons, unless it was zombies. Between Jayred the hunter’s bow and the “I can’t believe it’s not Vorpal” sword Alice looted from the adventurers killed by the Gatekeeper back in part one, the skeletons crumble back into bones within seconds. Oh, of course, bones! That’s what we’re here for. Lying in the grass are the bones of one of the Gatekeeper’s brothers. We pinch those bones as it begins to rain, which is very symbolic of something or other.

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Alice’s Adventures In The Shivering Isles: Part 1

We’re All Mad Here

The Shivering Isles is an official expansion for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It’s a significant add-on, throwing a whole new landmass into the game. The Shivering Isles is also famously mental. Those Isles are a bizarre place ruled by the god of madness, Sheogorath, whose rules are about as sensible as you’d expect from a god of madness. Sheogorath is in need of a mortal champion – you, of course – but you aren’t the first person who has been drawn to his surreal home, so the entire place is full of people who have been dragged in previously and driven mad by the place. There is not a single person in The Shivering Isles who isn’t batshit insane, apart from you.

The only sane person in a capriciously surreal fantasy land full of frightening whimsy? The perfect character to play through this was obvious: Alice. She must feel like having a holiday after being stuck in all those American McGee games, right?

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It’s Radiothon and that means we need your help! All subscriptions and donations go directly towards running the station, keeping us alive and independent!

If you choose Zed Games as your favourite show when you subscribe, you’ll go into an extra draw to win gaming swag!

All prizes will be given away. Everyone who lists Zed Games as their favourite show will be contacted via email after 17 September. We’ll do our best to make sure you get the items you want!

Big thanks to Game Traders, Ubisoft, Konami, Halfbrick, Supergiant Games, Dylan Fitterer and Randall.

Subscribe here www.4zzzfm.org.au/radiothon2013

Full prize details behind the cut.

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Plenty of psychological studies have searched for a potential link between violent video games and antisocial behaviour, but if we’re interested in the effect games have on us, why not test non-violent games as well? In 2010 a study by Silvia Osswald and Tobias Greitemeyer published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology did just that, examining whether playing a game about what psychologists call prosocial behaviour – co-operation and helpfulness – could encourage prosocial behaviour outside the game.

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Razor tries the Oculus Rift for the first time. Courtesy Loki Davison. Game: Wander http://www.wanderthegame.com

Plus: Final round of the Omegathon. Edge888 vs Disparis.

Games shown:
Wander
Colossatron: Massive World Threat http://www.halfbrick.com
Hand of Fate http://www.defiantdev.com

Music: Kris Keyser – Batsly Labs

mikeandjerrymediaqanda.mp3

Yours for free to download and keep! Right click and select “Save As” to download, or left click to listen in browser.

  Lee and Razor with Jerry Holkins on the floor of the Expo Hall at PAX Australia.

The first PAX Australia is officially done and dusted, and the overwhelming consensus is that it was a terrific success!

Many of the panels were hard to get in to due to overwhelming demand. One of the most exclusive panels was the media-only Q&A session with Mike and Jerry, the creators of Penny Arcade and founders of PAX. If you weren’t at PAX AUS, a member of the media, or able to rouse yourself for the 9AM Sunday morning start (thought to be deliberately chosen so that only the dedicated turn up), chances are you didn’t catch this one.

Thankfully, Zed Games was there, and we present to you the complete session for your listening pleasure.

There were some sound problems with the PA and stage mic placement that unavoidably transferred over to this recording, but it’s clearly audible and a great listen.

The session begins with the pair thanking the journalists for offerings, in the form of a mountain of recording devices placed on the table.

Questions were asked about booth babes, panel controversy, gamer culture as well as PAX itself and Penny Arcade.

Over the past week, I’ve been lucky enough to wreak some poorly engineered wrath on numerous cities in the SimCity Closed Beta. The new SimCity is set to release in March and if the Beta is anything to go by, the official game is going to glue a lot of us to our computer screens.

The beta starts off with an overly lengthy and honestly fairly dreary – but necessary – tutorial. It teaches you how to attract people to your city, how to raise or lower your taxes, how to zone industrial, commercial and residential areas, and alerts you of things your town is missing. You’ll need a power plant, a sewerage plant, police, hospitals, schools, a town hall, public transport centres and even parks and recreational areas to attract wealthy Sims. Each building or zone you place will build itself from the ground up right before your eyes and handy stat trackers will tell you exactly how prosperous your city is becoming.

Everything you need for a fully functional city is fairly straightforward, easy to find and even easier to become familiar with. The thing that really makes the game addictive is the constant demand for more, more, more. You’ll repeatedly be told, as mayor, that you desperately need more industrial zones to employ your local Sims. Then, there’ll be a higher demand for residential areas, a demand for more fire stations, more police stations and more schools. Nothing is ever perfect, nothing settles for even a moment, so you’ll be building and building and building until you get to a point that makes you sit back and go, ‘huh, I wish I lived here.’

And, when the full game comes out, I’m pretty certain I will be living in front of my computer screen.