The Storm Legion add-on is now live for Rift. The most relevant part of the update for Rift dilettantes like me who haven’t hit the level cap is the new set of skills for each character class. But the most intriguing part of the update is Rift’s new player housing. Developer Trion takes the mostly traditional approach of giving players instances that everyone can ignore. Voila, player housing! Because, short of selling virtual real estate (imagine what a nightmare this boondoggle is going to be), what else are you doing to do?
But the instances in Storm Legion aren’t just places where you drop your trophies. They’re the sites of building sets where you can arrange components you’ve unlocked or crafted. Use them to modify the location or create your own structures, a la Minecraft. For instance, Trion proudly showed us someone who had made an entire Viking ship, and another player who had built a mountain with a jumping puzzle, and another player’s magical resort. Players can visit these instance to admire each other’s handiwork (pictured). Naturally, you can “like” your favorite creations, visit the highest ranked creations, or just sample them at random.
Is there anything relevant to gameplay in the housing? Of course not. This is no more meaningful than coloring your armor. And as someone who’s diligently collecting dyes and parceling them out among his characters in Guild Wars 2, I can completely understand the appeal.
Jennifer Lynch probably hates being called out as David Lynch’s daughter. And really, it’s not very fair to her, since she’s pretty much doing straight up horror thrillers. Her best movie is Surveillance, a violent and energetic mind trip with a cast that’s clearly having fun. I particularly like how Bill Pullman seems to be in the stage of his career when he couldn’t care less whether people take him seriously. But then Jennifer Lynch made a horrible snake woman movie in India called Hisss (sic, by the way). Hisss’ only claim to fame is that it keeps the Spider-Man reboot from being the most embarrassing movie Irrfan Khan has ever made.
Lynch’s latest movie is an occasionally interesting but mostly just gross movie in which Vincent D’Onofrio plays a serial killer who keeps the child of one of his victims to raise as his own. To be a serial killer himself, natch. Maybe you haven’t seen Dexter. But to Chained’s credit, it’s not sexying up the serial killing. D’Onofrio is slow, loathsome, cruel, and — gasp! — out of shape. As Chained develops the relationship between D’Onofrio and a strikingly odd-looking actor named Eamon Farren, it has a few weirdly effective moments. But these eventually fall away, someone gets stabbed, and any goodwill Chained might have earned is squandered in a disgusting and unnecessary finale.
There’s a German movie from last year called Michael about similar subject matter. But it’s even grosser in that it doesn’t have any opinion on what the psychopath its doing. It’s neither sympathetic nor judgmental, which is an odd way to tell a story about a pedophile who holds a child captive. I could appreciate the craft of actor Michael Fuith’s disconcerting performance (check him out in the excellent German zombie movie Rammbock for a Michael Fuith palate cleanser), but I couldn’t get past how dispassionately the movie Michael portrayed a reprehensible person’s reprehensible deeds. At least Chained knows it’s gross.
Chained is available on DVD.
Playing team deathmatch in Black Ops II on the night of its release, I rack up one kill and 27 deaths in one of my games. So that’s how it’s going to be, huh? Apparently, the kind of person playing online after a midnight release is considerably more, uh, committed to the gameplay. Or maybe my assault rifle of choice, the Type 25, just sucks.
Then I try the ironically named hardcore mode, which relies less on watching the minimap, since it doesn’t have a minimap. It furthermore relies less on the damage ratings of weapons, since all you have to do is basically brush someone with a slow velocity bullet to kill him. In my first game in hardcore mode, I get ten kills to eight deaths.
But by far the most reliable way to earn points has been farming UAVs. As soon as I hear the UAV announcement, I switch to the SMAW I carry on my back. One guided missile for an easy 75 points! And the best thing about UAVs is that they don’t shoot back.
The latest fall from grace for military personnel who collaborate with videogames is David Petraeus, who just resigned as director of the CIA and appears in Black Ops 2. The two incidents aren’t related. That we know of. In Black Ops 2’s 2025 storyline, he doesn’t look a day older than 60! Furthermore, his political career has recovered nicely from that whole mess about having an affair with his biographer, because he appears as the Secretary of Defense under a President named Bosworth. A female President. Kate? As anyone from California or Minnesota could tell you, anything is possible.
UPDATE: So President Bosworth is supposed to be Hillary Clinton, as is obvious from the voice actress and character model. But unlike Petraeus, she isn’t called out by name in Black Ops 2. Whatever Activision hoped to avoid by picking and choosing among real-world political figures — did anyone care that Kissinger and McFarlane were playable characters in the original Black Ops’ zombie mode? — is now all the more notable for the fortuitous timing of Petraeus’ resignation.
Just when you thought it was safe to dismiss James Bond movies… We’re so thrilled with Skyfall that we go on for an hour and seven minutes before getting to this week’s 3×3, at which point we add a shot or scene to the ends of movies.
Next week: Lincoln
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