All this time I was thinking it was the Indy, the Darth Vader, the Batman, the Aragorn and the Legolas. You’d think I would have wised up when I found myself enjoying a Lego Harry Potter. I don’t know a Hogwarts from a quidditch and yet there I was Harry Pottering it up, collecting spells, hoovering up studs, and exploring some sort of kid wizard academy.
And now here I am supergrooving on Lego Undercover City, a game divorced entirely from unLego licensing. I’m tapped into the gameplay 100%, without any preloaded disposition towards the setting or characters. Not that the setting and characters don’t matter. They do. The setting matters because it’s so inventive and varied. The characters matter because they’re well written and enthusiastically acted. Furthermore, this is a funny game, with clever riffs on pop culture and charmingly awful wordplay. “That’s one small step, foreman,” a NASA technician says to another worker when he stumbles. I laughed.
But there’s no licensing hook for me here and the big revelation is that I don’t need it.
Among her many roles in Cloud Atlas, Halle Barry did not play a 911 operator who saves the girl from Little Miss Sunshine. To find out how that would look, you have to see The Call. Which we have done this week. At the 54-minute mark, we wade into this week’s 3×3 of our favorite crowd scenes.
So here’s what the folks who made Bastion, my favorite game of 2011, are doing next. I now know all I need to know until it’s out in 2014. See you then, Transistor!
Among the many failings of The Walking Dead is stranding a good actor like Dallas Roberts, whose job as Woodbury scientist Milton Merle is to look concerned while less capable actors talk at him. To realize that Roberts is a good actor, you’d have to see what a perfect foil he is to Liam Neeson in Joe Carnahan’s existential survival drama The Grey, or you’d have to notice his small memorable role in the overlooked evil kid thriller Joshua. Because you certainly wouldn’t know he’s a good actor from Shadow People, in which Roberts is miscast as a burned-out, world weary, supposedly mellifluous radio talk show host who sometimes looks more like Val Kilmer than Dallas Roberts.
Shadow people are a silly concept pretty much invented by radio talk show callers who didn’t have the imagination to actually come up with something scary. The idea is that you see them out of the corner of your eye, or as you fall asleep, or some other time when you can’t really get a good look at them, which is convenient for the sorts of inarticulate folks who call Art Bell. One of the few decent things this movie does is flesh out the shadow people backstory by suggesting they were imported into the modern Western world from Southeast Asia, with the implication being payback for the Vietnam War. It’s less clever how the movie then supposes a viral social media propogation, as if you haven’t seen many horror movies since The Ring.
But it’s downright crass how Shadow People pretends to blend “documentary footage” with dramatization, a conceit ripped off from The Fourth Kind, right down to the refusal to credit the actors playing the characters in the documentary footage. As if this weren’t enough, the movie ends with a bibliography consisting of about eight things the writer/director claims to have read. Next time, I recommend he watch a movie like Mothman Prophecies, which demonstrates that it’s entirely possible to make a creepy movie out of the goofy lore that comes from late night talk radio.
Shadow People is available now on DVD and video on demand.
I’m mostly uninterested in the ongoing SimCity furor, partly because I’ve been playing a really good EA citybuilder instead, but also because the furor is focused on the wrong things. The issue I care about isn’t the launch problems (those tend to go away) or that EA lied (for politicians and videogame publishers, that’s called “talking”) or the inherent evil of always-on DRM (we’ve long since lost that battle, because while everyone was beating up on Ubisoft, Diablo III sneaked into our rear) or that the simulation isn’t simulating an actual city (abstraction isn’t just for boardgames anymore). The issue I care about is the one getting the least internet furor mindshare: the fundamental design of tiny interconnected box cities lending each other a hand doesn’t work as it’s supposed to work. And furthermore, assuming it will work in a later update, it’s not implemented very well. But because everyone else is gnashing their teeth about one of these ancillary issues — Server instability! EA lied! Down with DRM! Sims should only sleep in their own houses! — there’s little incentive for Electronic Arts, a publicly owned company that changed the ending of Mass Effect 3, to actually make their potentially good game that already sold 1 million copies work the way it was designed.
But the good news is that EA, the publicly owned company that changed the ending of Mass Effect 3, is going to give you another game! In a press released titled “SimCity make nice”, which sounds like poorly translated forced cheer from across the Pacific, Electronic Arts announced that players will soon receive a free game of their choice from the following list:
Battlefield 3 (Standard Edition)
Bejeweled 3
Dead Space 3 (Standard Edition)
Mass Effect 3 (Standard Edition)
Medal of Honor Warfighter (Standard Edition)
Need For Speed Most Wanted (Standard Edition)
Plants vs. Zombies
SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition
That’s definitely a make nice list, since it has only a single stinker. Care to guess which one?
I might go so far as to say Lego Undercover City — WiiU only, I’m afraid — is the best Lego game I’ve played. Don’t hold me to that just yet. I’ll have more to say in the review later this week, but suffice to say Undercover City strikes me as the purest expression of Traveller’s Tale’s gleeful Lego gameplay so far.
For all intents and purposes, Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate is also WiiU only, but it has limited connectivity with the moderately gimped 3DS version. I skipped the last-gen Wii version of Monster Hunter (this is basically the same game, but with extra content, HD graphics, and full multiplayer support), so it’s all new to me. But having played Monster Hunters, I’m experiencing an overwhelming sense of “here we go again”, equal parts dread and excitement. Getting deep into a Monster Hunter game is as easy and nearly as dire as falling down a sinkhole.
Also WiiU only is the WiiU version of Need for Speed: Most Wanted, which features unique multiplayer shenanigans involving the gamepad. I’m hoping this will compliment ZombiU as a go-to game for people on the same couch who are a little too dignified to resort to party games.
If you’re interested in action heroes the size of refrigerators and with about as much personality, Microsoft has a new off-season Gears of War release, this time created by the folks who made Bulletstorm. And if you want a platformer that demands skill, Alien Spidy is incredibly gratifying when you get it right and incredibly aggravating the rest of the time.
Heart of the Swarm consists of seven units. Well, six and a half, since one of the units is the nascent form of an already existing unit. Actually, maybe six and a quarter since one of the units is an alternate form for another already existing unit. However you do the math, a few new units is pretty much what you’re getting with this add-on. Unless you count the campaign, but why on earth would you do that?
The above image is what you get when you start SimCity Societies. Basically, a gaping hole through which you can see an abandoned Facebook page that won’t even fit into the hole. The first thing you see every time you play this game is a reminder that Electronic Arts will gracelessly orphan the games they sell you. How hard would it have been to patch that gaping hole out of the launcher? How hard would it have been to retire a game this good without leaving it basically vandalized? How hard would it have been to do something other than unceremoniously abandon one of the boldest citybuilders since the original SimCity?
Furthermore, let’s take a look at SimCity Societies’ online mod database, prominently featured on its main screen. Or not. The button goes to a dead web page that doesn’t even load a 404 error page. Has Electronic Arts never worked up a 404 error page? I can think of no publisher more in need of a 404 error page.
Fortunately, unlike another more recent SimCity, SimCity Societies wasn’t designed around the idea that it can’t be pirated. It is a traditional videogame that you install from a disk and then play whenever you like, however you like, with modded XML files if you like, when you’re travelling, when your modem is flaking out, no matter how many other people are playing it, no matter how few other people are playing it. I don’t mind that a new online SimCity game has launch problems so much as I mind having to trust Electronic Arts to do the right thing in the long run, particularly for a game where the online stuff isn’t optional, like it is with SimCity Societies. I just wish I didn’t have to be reminded of it every time I boot up my game.
We kick off this week’s podcast with a visit from Vickie to discuss her Tomb Raider let’s play series. Then Rob Harvey joins us to plumb the shallow depths of our Starcraft II expertise. Is this really a game for RTS dilettante’s like us? Should we steer clear of the multiplayer and stick to the campaign? And how is the campaign this time around? If you’ve got the endurance, stick around for a discussion of Lego Undercover City, X-Wing tabletop dogfighting, and some obscure boardgame McMaster dug up.
Behold the humble office building! Not too expensive, not too high an upkeep cost, not too substantial an income, not too big a footprint considering it employs 20 sims. You might think it’s a boring building. In any other game, you’d be right. But this is SimCity Societies.
After the jump, the slippery slope from clerical work to mind controlContinue reading →
Last week I got an email from a woman named Vickie who asked me to take a look at her let’s play series, which she posts on YouTube under the name owlsighs. I don’t normally enjoy let’s plays, mainly since I’d just as soon play a game myself, but also since they’re often cynical or ironic. But after sampling a few of Vickie’s videos — this “let me show you my house” for Skyrim is particularly charming — I was struck by her absolute lack of cynicism and irony. So I asked her if Quarter to Three could sponsor a Tomb Raider series. She graciously agreed and it begins in the above video. Furthermore, she’ll be dropping in on the podcast in the coming weeks to keep us updated.
You’d think children would be useless in SimCity Societies given its population model. When you build houses, you add people to your city. Those people visit venues — movie theaters, retail shops, bars, churches — to keep their happiness up so they don’t riot. And that’s all you need in a city if you have infinite money.
But since you don’t have infinite money, you need to build workplaces. People go to workplaces to fill the available jobs, which provides you with money. That’s the basic economy in SimCity Societies. Houses provide people; workplaces translate people’s time into money; and venues make people happy. And the happier they are, the more money they (i.e. you) make.
So in a game without aging, what good are children if you can’t put them to work? Because you can’t put children to work. There are a few options for dystopias in SimCity Societies, but none so Dickensian.
After the jump, children aren’t the future. They’re the now.Continue reading →
As you may know, Electronic Arts publishes one of the worst citybuilders you can play, and one of the best. I’ve been heartily enjoying the latter now that I’m no longer playing the former. SimCity: Societies, a 2007 game created by the folks at Tilted Mill who know citybuilders like no one else, takes a unique approach to the genre. Love it or hate it, you haven’t built a city like this.
Many citybuilders are based on a “gardening” model. You stake out rows for particular crops, make sure the conditions are right, and stand back while they grow. It’s an organic and arguably realistic approach to how cities develop. But SimCity Societies is nothing like planting a garden. It’s more like fitting together unique pieces to create elaborate clockwork systems with unique personality. And one of the game’s strengths is how much personality you’ll find in the different pieces.
After the jump, let me tell you about one of the pieces. Bring your knitting needle.Continue reading →
Landing is that part of the flight, where an aircraft returns to the ground. Easier said than done: sometimes it’s not that trivial to pilot an aircraft through strong winds, a deep fog or a roaring thunderstorm. Mayday! Emergency Landing…challenges players to overcome the fiercest difficulties and have their planes touch the ground safely all by keeping the passengers as happy as possible.
I have no idea whether this iOS game, which includes “heartbreaking airplane failures”, is any good. But I love that the stewardess — I think I should be allowed to call her that if she’s going to dress so old school — is giving directions. Take that, George Kennedy!
