Clippings: Black Phantom Edition

Console versions of Dark Souls II are now out! Here is a good comparison betwee the three games in the series. All the reviews I’ve seen are glowing — but silent on my biggest concern. In DS2, you can be invaded by other players at any time, a change from the nice risk/reward trade-off in the previous games (if you wanted to summon in other players for co-op, you opened yourself to the risk of invasion). I love these games, but given my awful track record in PvP, that’s a potential deal-breaker. Can anyone comment on how well it works?

In other news:

1. I hear good things about Qvadriga, a newly released turn-based chariot racing sim — how often do you see that? No reviews out yet, but here’s the preview that caught my eye, back in November, and here is a demo.
2. Remember Territoire, the upcoming game from the studio behind Recettear? It’s still upcoming, but here are impressions of its (Japanese-only) demo.
3. I think this may be an actual scoop: while you can’t access the Wargame: Red Dragon unit database from the game’s homepage, you can punch its URL straight into your browser. It looks like a work in progress (and the URL even calls it “rd_test”), but it still provides fun material for theorycrafting. Mm, M1A2 with 25AP…
4. Anyone remember SimEarth? Universim sounds like an attempt at a successor.