I’ve personally never checked out the Europa Universalis series because I’ve always been afraid to, thinking it would be too tough and hard-to-learn. Maybe with the fifth game in the series that has changed? A lot of people at Quarter to Three are pretty excited over that one. Since traditional point-and-click adventure games died a long time ago, I suspect that Syberia — Remastered will be threatening few wallets this week. I personally loved the original. Tom has already quit, but he’s confessed that he’s not much of an adventure gamer.
A few years ago, I started wondering about this burgeoning “factory” genre. On the forum, I asked which game would be ideal to start getting into these games. Factorio? Satisfactory? Dyson Sphere? Shapez 2? The answer from most seemed to be to wait for 1.0 release of Satisfactory. And then when it was released, I started waiting for the console release. And this week I’ll have no more excuse to wait any longer, since the console release of Satisfactory is finally here.
So what is it that what I’m most excited about among this week’s releases? Maybe it has to do with how much I’ve been enjoying Farthest Frontier, a recent village building game, but the games that seem the most exciting to me are of the calmer zen variety, focusing on charm over challenge. There’s a charming adventure game called A Pizza Delivery out this week. A coop sequel in Biped 2 about two robot having an adventure where each player controls both of the charming biped robots’ limbs individually. A charming puzzle game called Puzzle Depot about pushing boxes. A charming platformer where you play as an egg in Egging On. And a lovely looking charming simulation about creating tiny, Japanese inspired garden dioramas in Dream Garden. What is threatening your wallets this week?
Continue reading →
I fuss a lot about interface and documentation and how videogames teach themselves to us. When I play a game, it’s important for me to eventually know what’s going on, to understand the systems, to wrap my head around the design. I want to know enough to make informed decisions, to fully appreciate what I’m seeing, to share a perspective with the designer and better appreciate what he’s done.
But sometimes, I just have to let go of that. Xenotilt, like Demon’s Tilt before it but absurdly moreso, is one of those times.
Continue reading →
Doesn’t it feel as if the big releases have been relentless lately? The trend continues this week with big releases like Arc Raiders, the big extraction shooter de jour. The Outer Worlds 2 is a sequel to what I lovingly referred to as my gaming comfort food, and this one is reportedly the same but slightly better in every way. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is Digital Eclipse doing their thing of being gaming historians, and preserving old games by putting together presentations of how they were made while having you play the games themselves. On the JRPG front, we have a couple of remakes and remasters: Tales of Xillia was originally a PS3 exclusive, so most people probably missed it, and Dragon Quest 1 & 2 get the HD-2D remake treatment from Square Enix. My own personal time, attention and money is under the greatest potential threat this week from a game created by ex-Criterion employees that looks like a combination of Trackmania and Burnout, and is a game called Wreckreation.
Continue reading →
In Love and Death on Long Island, John Hurt plays a reclusive author named Giles De’Ath. Convinced by his agent to finally come out of his self-imposed cultural shell and experience modern entertainment, he ventures to a local cinema to see an E.M. Forster adaptation. But not being hip to the modern multiplex, he instead stumbles into a teenage sex comedy called Hotpants College II. He watches patiently for a time, aggrieved at the inanity of it all, before finally realizing his mistake and drolly noting, “This isn’t E.M. Forster.”
That’s how I felt coming into this game: “This isn’t Painkiller.”
Continue reading →
[Editor’s note: Please welcome longtime forum member Rock8man back to the front page! Every week, he’ll be detailing the threats posed to our metaphorical wallets by the upcoming week’s new releases. Note that wallet threats don’t just pose a financial danger! Perhaps more importantly, they pose a danger to those far more precious currencies such as time, attention span, spouse tolerance, fear of missing out, and all the various elements that determine what we play and when we play it.]
How many revivals, remakes and sequels are out this week? Well, we have a new Ninja Gaiden, a new Painkiller, a new Jurassic World Evolution, a new Double Dragon, a port of Persona 3 Reload to the Switch 2, a remake of the original Plants vs Zombies, a sequel to Powerwash Simulator, a new Katamari, and a remake of House of the Dead 2. There’s also a sequel to Vampire Bloodlines coming that’s reportedly less of an RPG than the original. Crate is finally releasing their follow up to Grim Dawn, Farthest Frontier, which is not another ARPG but a city builder that’s been in early access for a few years. The now standard indie game practice of cross-pollinating genres of games continues this week with Bounty Star, which combines Mech fighting with farming and base building.
Personally speaking, I’ve got my fingers crossed that the new Painkiller recaptures the magic of the original game this week and I’ll gladly let it drain my wallet.
Continue reading →
Oceans not being what they once were, neither are lighthouses. The lighthouse has become, to modern audiences, a place of loneliness, isolation, and even madness and monsters. Imagine being cooped up on some rocky promontory far from civilization, cut off for months, even years at a time.
Yet imagine you’re protecting the brave men who ply the vast uncaring oceans, stitching the world together across their impossible expanse. This is the lighthouse of the aptly named Keeper. This is the sagging stone edifice that somehow revives itself and walks precariously on crab legs made from roots. This is the faithful companion for our dragon gull thing that opens the story. This is the entry point for Double Fine’s latest creation, a mere “adventure” game, but also a staggeringly weird and imaginative journey through a place you’ve never been.
Continue reading →
As you may have noticed, the forums are currently borked. If you were on your way to post something, hold that thought! And thanks for your patience while we figure out what broke and how to fix it.
I’ll update this space as more information is available.
UPDATE: And we’re back up! Turns out the server ran out of disk space, most likely as a result of all my posts about the Switch 2.
Now that Tom is back to liking Robert Eggers movies, listen as he tries in vain to remember the man’s first name. Meanwhile, Kellywand wants listeners to weigh in on their opinion of Nosferatu’s longer term plans with Ellen. What kind of marriage did he have in mind? And where will they be registered? It’s the latest Qt3 Movie Podcast and another classic -opsis for our new favorite classic horror movie!
Podcast (movies): Play in new window | Download
Subscribe:
We welcome neurosurgeon, wargamer, and cinematic dilettante Bruce Geryk to join us for a discussion of Alex Garland’s provocative [sic] political [sic] thriller [sic], Civil War! For an added bonus, this episode’s -opsis was written and performed by someone Kirsten Dunst personally accused of having a “dirty mind”.
Podcast (movies): Play in new window | Download
Subscribe:
We’re still working on getting a regular schedule going, and even though this was meant to be a shorter episode specifically for the Dune II synopsis, we end up chatting about Denis Villeneuve’s next entry in the apparently ongoing saga of Timothee Chalamet’s conquest of the universe and our hearts.
Podcast (movies): Play in new window | Download
Subscribe:
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which is an absolute delight and one of my favorite games in a long time, has four main things going for it. The first and most immediately obvious is Metropolis, the glittering comic book city where Superman makes his home, an emblem of Silver Age comics if ever there was one.
Rocksteady, the developer who took us inside Arkham Asylum and then built an entire Gotham for their Batman games, has done it again. This time they’ve built a vast, dense, brightly candy-colored Metropolis…and then trashed it. An alien invasion has almost entirely depopulated the city. Its highways are empty and its flying cars are grounded. Walkways and rooftops are littered with the dead in the form of gray ash statues frozen in mid-panic. Drones hoover up hidden survivors to bring them to the mothership. Alien tanks trundle down the highways and patrols roam the streets or squat sullenly on rooftops. Occupation. An eerily abandoned, tattered and beaten utopia, brimming with shredded detail. And given that this is a morality inversion — in Suicide Squad, bad guys are good guys, and vice versa — it all carries the whiff of some dormant fascism. Bioshock: Infinite never had it so good. Now get in there and open-world to your heart’s content!
Continue reading →
We’re doing something a bit different this time, discussing a very strange and strangely compelling British comedy/thriller that Kellywand calls a “What’s going on?” show. It’s technically a six-episode miniseries but if you watch it all at once — which we recommend — it’s just like a three-hour movie! What kind of movie? Well, that’s quite the question.
Up next: We’ll be revisiting two of our top ten picks from 2023. They Cloned Tyrone next week, and Poor Things the week after. And after that, we’re hitting the theaters to see Dune. We hope you’ll join us!
Podcast (movies): Play in new window | Download
Subscribe:
When it comes to bees, the latest Jason Statham vehicle gives us a lot to think about. While Statham does the hard work of administering punches, we ponder the implications of beekeeping as a metaphor for world stability. What have we learned and how can we make this world a better place for bees and people? Listen and find out!
Up next: Am I Being Unreasonable?
Podcast (movies): Play in new window | Download
Subscribe:
We don’t actually know the top ten movies of 2023. But we can talk about our ten favorites! We’ll also tell you our most surprising, our most disappointing, our favorite little thingies, and our guesses at what movie Dingus would have picked. Get comfy, because it’s going to take us three and a half hours.
Podcast (movies): Play in new window | Download
Subscribe:
When a giant lizard wades ashore and lays waste to Tokyo, we can’t very well NOT podcast about it.
Podcast (movies): Play in new window | Download
Subscribe:
