Goodbye Chase D’arnaud. Be good Lastings Milledge. Take care Dirk Berkowitz (see you at Thanksgiving).
I’ve been traded. To the New York Mets. Well, the Triple-A Buffalo Bisons for now. On the Vita our home stadium sits amidst non-descript rural greenery, while on the Playstation 3 we’re in a stadium under a bridge with a view of the Empire State Building that’s either in Hoboken or Queens or maybe even geographically impossible.
After the jump, blindsided Continue reading →
Xenoblade Chronicles is on the Wii. Which is, at times, a shame. It is too big for the Wii. It is perhaps even too lovely for the Wii. The amount and scope of its imagination cannot possibly fit on Nintendo’s last-gen system! I keep waiting for everything to abruptly stop because the disc has run out of space.
Part of what this means is that you’re not getting elaborate animation, or even very good animation. When you come to a mining node indicated by a mining pick icon, your characters don’t actually swing a mining pick. It’s as if the developers just decided pick swinging animation wasn’t worth the bother. So the character stands there impassively and sucks colored dust into his body. Mining.
After the jump, where animation counts Continue reading →
Netflix somehow convinced me to watch a French thriller called Black Heaven. Until I knew what was going on, it was a nifty thriller with an appealing cast and an even more appealing location. So that’s why people talk about the south of France! But then it turns out it’s about a videogame.
The game in the movie is called Black Hole, and it seems to consist only of people walking around, voice chatting with each other (ha!), and having cybersex (not shown, although the movie isn’t nearly so shy about its IRL sex). The obvious inspiration is Second Life. In fact, the French title of the movie is L’autre Monde, which means The Other World.
There is apparently keyboard mashing combat in Black Hole with a hefty death penalty and the option to loot characters you’ve killed. In other words, the sorts of thing no modern online game with any reasonably large player base would do. The interface is minimalist to the point of being non-existent. Obviously, the filmmakers want their videogame to look more like an animated movie than a videogame. Also obviously, they are as clueless about actual videogaming as the folks who made Gamer with Gerard Butler and that NBC cop show Life in which the police hack a computer by getting to level ten of Prince of Persia.
One of these days, someone will make a movie that actually shows how people play videogames online. Until then, for a much better hybrid of thriller and videogames, please see the Spanish movie King of the Hill (El rey de la montana) without reading anything about it.
Okay, let’s see what’s out this week. Star Wars Kinect (pictured). A niche 2D fighting game called Skull Girls on Xbox Arcade (UPDATE: which isn’t out until next week). More cars for Forza 4. An add-on for the PC version of Tropico 4. Not much of a wallet threat this week.
Except, of course, for Xenoblade Chronicles. If you’re into RPGs, or even into just good games, you won’t want to miss this one.
One of the advantages of doing a sequel to a terrible movie like Clash of the Titans is that it’s relatively easy to make a better movie! So Wrath of the Titans has that going for it. Speaking of wound management, that’s the topic of this week’s 3×3, which starts at the 39-minute mark.
Next week: Goon
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