The point of zombie movies is partly that the people we know and love will track us down and kill us. Everything else — whether they walk or run, whether they’re dead or infected, what they eat, how they got that way — is incidental. If you use that primal fear as a starting point, if you’re not the type who denies 28 Days Later is a zombie movie, then movies like The Crazies (both of them) and the underrated Impulse (the 1984 one) are a subset of the zombie genre.
That’s where The Signal comes in.
After the jump, enter the mind of a “zombie” Continue reading →
Call of Cthulhu is the $3 in-app purchase that adds a new campaign to Elder Sign: Omens, along with some new gameplay mechanics. This gameplay is most prominent during the second half of the campaign, when you sail out into the Pacific Ocean on the cargo ship Ultima Thule. There you’ll encounter an entirely new set of adventures and tasks, often with new gimmicks. Thrilling heartbreaking new gimmicks.
After the jump, what Bob found — and lost — in the Pacific Continue reading →
Housing poses one of the most interesting challenges in the base game of Tropico 4. Initially, when money’s tight, most of the downtrodden citizens live in crime-ridden shacks that provide nothing but an incentive to rebel. Upgrading their living conditions is a critical goal, but one with options that provide an interesting series of trade-offs and choices. Do I stuff hordes of my ungrateful workers into cheap low-quality tenements that are just barely good enough to prevent them from shooting me? Do I build dozens of expensive lower occupancy but higher quality apartments? How about condos or mansions for the wealthy and upper-middle class residents, or some combination of these and several other choices?
The net result is often an island whose housing winds up looking pretty realistic, one where grindingly poor neighborhoods stare enviously at the good life that’s just a few unattainable streets away. Towards the end of scenarios where I’m flush with cash and feeling magnanimous, I’ll often demolish the cheaper stop-gap housing that I built to stave off revolution and replace it with higher quality dwellings while basking in the imaginary acclaim of my virtual subjects.
Sadly, the Modern Times expansion eliminates all of the base game’s housing challenges by introducing a single, massively overpowered structure.
After the jump: the only housing building you’ll ever need Continue reading →
The Assassins Creed games open with a hand-wringing disclaimer about how all world religions are equally valid and Ubisoft intends no offense based on anything it depicts. Which turns out to be pretty much nothing of consequence and, hey, look, you can climb this building! Action games keep you too preoccupied to think about being offended until they stop and intentionally offend you to make sure blogs talk about them. I think the last time I considered someone might actually be offended by an action game was when I found out several months after playing Prey that the lead character was supposed to have been Native American. Maybe some folks would object to the “native” class in multiplayer Call of Juarez bringing a bow to a gunfight. But no one plays that game, which raises the question, “If someone programs an ethnic stereotype on an empty server, will anyone hear it?”
After the jump, the games that can only offend people too smart to get offended Continue reading →
