The above trailer for Kirby Mass Attack starts out innocently enough. At about the thirty second mark, I started to feel uneasy. A minute in, I was pretty sure I was watching something without quite understanding that it was dirty, like when you see a video of two people in animal costumes prancing around and then it gets a little weird, and before you know it, you’re dragged into an unwelcome new awareness of a fetish you didn’t even know existed. That’s how I’d describe the psychological journey I took watching so many little Kirby’s doing things I didn’t understand. Part of it is that Kirby himself is so weird. Ten Kirbys are ten times as weird. Ten Kirbys doing indeterminate things to various objects and creatures is exponentially weirder.
Double Fine’s lively, charming, and polished tower defense/action game, Trenched, should be every bit as good as Signal Studio’s lively, charming, and polished tower defense/action game, Toy Soldiers: Cold War. But it’s not. And the simple reason is that there are too few ways to play Trenched. There is no survival mode. There is no head-to-head option. There are no minigames. There are no set-ups for different types of games. There are no challenges. All the great things that give Toy Soldiers: Cold War such incredibly long legs should be in Trenched, but they aren’t. It’s no longer enough to just make a good game. You have to give us different cool ways to experience that game.
Fortunately, Trenched is getting a survival mode at some point in the future. It’s only one map, but at least it’s one step closer to making Trenched as good as it should have been.
Oh, also, it’s not going to be called Trenched any more because of a legal brouhaha with some Europeans who have something called Trench. So later this month, Trenched will forever after be known as Iron Brigade, which sounds like something turn-based and with hexes.
Well, most of it. I scratch my head at that bit in the intro about “enough to induce an instant state of catatonic pure terror”, which uses about four words too many to no good effect (the original text read “is scarier still”). But the bigger issue is that I wouldn’t have made a reference to Dead Island being “buggier than a decomposing zombie’s stomach cavity” and I wouldn’t have written that penultimate paragraph suggesting the game flat-out doesn’t work with a mouse and keyboard. I’ve personally logged upwards of fifty hours using a mouse and keyboard on four separate computers. My experience has been almost entirely free of bugs with any meaningful impact.
Furthermore, if I were reviewing Dead Island, I would totally give it five stars. But otherwise, great review, “Gamespy staff”!
In this Dutch horror movie, a bunch of twenty-something teenagers with a Ouiji board party in a haunted Belgian mine. You know where this is going, so there’s really no need to watch it play out by actually seeing the movie. In the US, this movie is known as Slaughter Night because we rightly read Sl8n8 as “Slate Nate”, which isn’t the least bit scary and actually makes me think of Avril Lavigne’s song, Sk8ter Boi.
The most disappointing thing about this forgettable demonic possession/slasher movie is that it doesn’t have the slightest shred of identity that isn’t slavishly borrowed from crappy American horror movies. This is usually what happens when you pick through foreign horror films. You end up watching something that just apes American movies or, if you’re lucky, Japanese movies. But sometimes you’ll find something with a sense of national identity. In recent years, I’ve had the pleasure to discover Sauna from Finland, Let the Right One In from Sweden, The Backwoods from Spain, Isolation from Ireland, and Trollhunter from Norway, all with a distinct sense of national character in the story, the actors, the locations, and the situation. No such thing happens in Slate Nate.
However, I did learn a little Dutch. The Dutch word for “fucking loser” is “fucking loser” and the Dutch word for “fucking hell” is “fucking hell”. Also, when surprised by the obligatory corpse falling out of a closet, one of the twenty-something teenagers yells out, “Jesus!” According to the subtitles, this is Dutch for “Christ!”
