The spectacularly good tower defense game Dungeon Defenders just came out today, so I can’t fault people online for not yet knowing the ins and outs of the four classes, each of which makes very specific contributions to the defense. But when some idiot wizard — it’s always a wizard, isn’t it? — takes his crystal and uses it to build frail magic missile towers right in front of a spawn point instead of back at the defensive line the other three players have established, it’s almost enough to make me go back to playing horde mode in Gears of War 3. Hey wizard, why don’t you look up “tactics” in your spellbook? Or maybe check the index for “overlapping fields of fire”, “killzones”, and “combined arms”.
It’s hard to be patient with new or bad players in a tower defense game, where your defenses are only as strong as their weakest link. As I said, it’s always a wizard. Next to boss raids in World of Warcraft, tower defense is one of the worst genres for multiplayer with random online people.
Fortunately, Dungeon Defenders doesn’t just have dynamic join to make it easy to find and create multiplayer games. It also lets you to swap in your different characters between waves, when you’re building your defenses. So even if you’re playing solo, you can avail yourself of unique assets like a wizard’s towers, a hunter’s traps, a monk’s auras, and a knight’s barricades. And then you can actually play the level with whichever character you want to level up. And since all four characters share an inventory, scoop up everything you find and divvy up the loot when you get back to the tavern.
And speaking of jerks in multiplayer, I’ve been putting points into my knight’s running speed so he can more quickly scoop up the cash in multiplayer games. I can’t trust those silly little wizards to make the best use of our resources!
The last thing to come out of Project Greenlight, HBO’s reality show in which an amateur filmmaker makes a movie, was Feast. That bad horror movie turned into a trilogy, with each movie worst than the last. In the second Feast, some biker chicks have to take off their tops and combine them with a motorcycle to make a catapult that will fling midget wrestlers across the street. But Feast 2 wouldn’t even rank among the top ten movies in which biker chicks have to take off their tops and combine them with a motorcycle to make a catapult that will fling midget wrestlers across the street. I can’t think of any other movies in which that happens, but I’m holding the top ten slots in reserve, becuase there’s no way Feast 2 belongs on a top ten list of anything.
At the end of the Feast 3, which is not about giant robots, a giant robot comes out of the desert and steps on the movie’s only survivors. Roll credits. That’s how little John Gulager, the son of a famous actor who probably could have gotten his stupid movies made without taking up an entire season of Project Greenlight that could have been used on someone else, cares about his characters.
The year before Feast, one of the winners of Project Greenlight was a guy named Kyle Rankin. He and his partner co-directed Battle of Shaker Heights. After that, Rankin’s next movie was Infestation, which has an ending that many of you will absolutely hate, much like you might hate the ending of Feast 3. But Infestation ends the way it ends because Rankin cares about his characters. He didn’t like the ending he shot, so he used the footage he had to make a very different ending than what he’d originally written. The result is pitch perfect and I love it partly because so many people will hate it.
Infestation is a goofily irresistable creature feature with heart, a budget, and enough twists to keep it lively. For instance, the hero isn’t who you’d expect. It’s as if the traditionally square-jawed former TV star wasn’t available, so they had to use someone from the supporting cast as the hero. And whereas most creature features stay in one place because a) it’s cheaper to shoot a movie in one place, and b) they’re just aping Alien, Infestation has far too much energy to stay at home.
Infestation is available from Netflix here.
Guess what you’re getting for free for a week? Zen Studios is finally bringing Paranormal from Zen Pinball for the PS3 into Pinball FX 2 on the Xbox 360. And it’s free to play from October 26th until November 2nd.
It’s not a particularly attractive table. It’s got a distinct lack of bright colors and blatantly flashy bits. Instead, it has the Jersey Devil, the Loch Ness Monster, an old plane going down in the Bermuda Triangle, a Hellraiser cube, a cutaway haunted house, those clacky balls that a weird occultist might have in his office, a reverse gravity pocket, and a goofy pop-eyed chupacabra hiding in the bushes. I couldn’t begin to say whether Paranormal is Zen’s best table — there are too many that are too different — but it’s one my favorites along with Secrets of the Deep and Earth Defense Force because of their clear affection for their cheesy theme.
