Mud!
Every game about the invasion of Russia includes the rasputitsa, the name for the spring and autumn muddy season when rain or the spring thaw renders the roads impassable. Something I didn’t know until I looked it up for this article is that there is a corresponding Finnish word, rospuutto, which translates to “roadlessness”. Is that true, Finnish readers? Who said wargames don’t teach you anything?
After the jump, why you should never wrestle in the mud with a Stalinist nation Continue reading →
Mount and Blade is the latest open-world, medieval action RPG by Turkish developer Taleworlds Interactive. What started out as a small independent project eventually swelled into a retail release; and then a pseudo-sequel subtitled Warband; and now With Fire and Sword. a reimagining of the Mount and Blade formula in a largely historical version of Eastern Europe in the mid-1600s. Upon hearing about With Fire and Sword, I prepared to dive into this new world by reinstalling Warband and logging a dozen hours over the last few weeks.
With Fire and Sword adds gunpowder weaponry as a departure from the franchise’s stereotypical medieval warfare. So I created a combat-oriented character, Johann Bodewig, and decked him out in some rather fashionable musketeer attire as seen above. I then launched myself into a changed world.
The question, however, is if this change is good.
After the jump, fire can’t solve every problem Continue reading →
I’m new to the Motorstorm franchise. In fact, I’m still new to playing games on the PlayStation 3. I won’t waste time with any commentary on the console wars, but my first hour of Motorstorm Apocalypse was actually an hour of turning my house inside-out, trying to remember what the cable to charge a PlayStation controller looks like, and what junk drawer I stuck it in. So as I’m jumping into a new franchise on a still-feels-new-to-me console, I’m trying not to let my expectations color my experience too much. That isn’t working.
After the break, what I expect is exactly the kind of racing game this isn’t Continue reading →
Am I the only one that finds it surreal that one of the best fighting games you can play — a full-featured, hardcore enough, content-packed smorgasbord of licensed but shrewdly designed asymmetry that doesn’t even have dated graphics — is on the Nintendo Wii? I experience a niggling cognitive disconnect every time I click my TV’s switcher box over to the Wii, knowing that I’m about to fire up a fighting game every bit as good as Mortal Kombat, BlazBlue, Dissidia 2, and Soulcalibur IV.
But the comparisons are misleading. The defining characteristic of Super Smash Bros. Brawl (and Melee before it, which has been effectively obsoleted by Brawl) is that anyone can play. Anyone. Let me repeat that: anyone. I am convinced there is not a man, woman, or child on this planet I couldn’t sway with the charms of this eminently accessible gateway fighting game.
After the jump, the first hit is free Continue reading →
Carny is about a travelling carnival that manages to get hold of a (the?) Jersey Devil for one of its exhibits. The beast looks about as dangerous as a fat old bulldog with stumpy wings. Think Pete’s Dragon. Of course, it gets loose. Local sheriff Lou Diamond Phillips has to deal with the creature, which is what local sheriffs do all the time in horror movies. Furthermore, Lou Diamond Phillips has experience as a local sheriff dealing with creatures. You saw the Bats, right? That was about bats, as you can probably tell from the title. When I was a kid, killer bat movies had much better titles. For instance, Arthur Hiller’s Nightwing. Would you rather see a movie about killer bats called Bats or Nightwing? I rest my case.
So Lou Diamond Phillips does some forensics work with a tape measure. He says the line, “If it bleeds, we can kill it”. Finally, he uses his pick-up truck and a ferris wheel to kill the Jersey Devil. I think he falls in love with a fortune teller, who rushes to his side as he’s dying. She says to him that he didn’t have to do this, and with his dying breath he basically says that, yes, he did. “I did what I had to do,” he says while letting fake blood drool out of his mouth. What a jerk. She was trying to be nice and he shoots her down like that.
The real sin of these Syfy creature features is how little craft or even attention is put into them. They reek of made-for-TV. And that’s a very different quality than low-budget. Low budget almost necessarily means there’s going to be a degree of care, if not craft, in a movie. Low budget is often passionate, or at least charmingly oblivious. But made-for-TV is just product, slapped together, quick and dirty.
At one point, Lou Diamond Phillips punches the villainous carnival owner. The punched actor snaps his head to the side and sprays out a mess of fake blood across the side of a trailer. The stuff spatters and drips down. Did they mean to use that much blood? It’s like Lou Diamond Phillips just punched a gallon jug of red syrup. They’re really going to use that take? Yes, they are, because this isn’t just low budget. It’s made-for-TV. Oh, and the point of this movie, is that the real monsters are…us! It’s kind of depressing that someone wrote a script and intended a message, yet it gets made with all the care of an actor spitting far too much red syrup on the side of a caravan.
(Carny is available on DVD. But so are plenty of other movies you’d be better off watching. Such as Chupacabra Terror.)
The rain seems eternal, though I know it has only been going on for about 2 weeks, ripping the leaves from the trees and making the ground an ungodly mess. My feet are completely saturated and I don’t even wanna talk about the chafing. Humping it up to the top of the closest ridge, a building comes into view.
The place looks safe enough. An abandoned supermarket, though ravaged by war and time, is a better place to sleep than the woods in a rain storm. Only thing between us and it is a muddy bank and the parking lot. We slide down the embankment and double time it to the front of the building. Running on asphalt is a strange, otherworldy feeling to me now. Almost like deja vu but sadder… sweeter. The dried husks from this spring’s weeds disintegrate beneath my boot, repelling the invasion of nature into the world of man once again.
Hot Lokust action after the jump Continue reading →
The closest I’ll ever come to being a hardcore fighting gamer is knowing that Soulcalibur is one word. So now that I’ve established my credibility as a fighting game authority, let me tell you why I really like Soulcalibur IV.
After the jump, it’s all about the do Continue reading →
Since the very beginning one of my favorite aspects of the Final Fantasy games has been their distinctive, lavish visual design. Even in the 8 and 16-bit era the character art, enemy designs and lush environments have been a strength of the series.
Much of the art was created by the Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano. Amano began working for Squaresoft in 1987 and was responsible for the character designs in every Final Fantasy game through Final Fantasy VI. Because of the technological limitations of the NES and SNES, the games weren’t always the best showcase of his distinctive style. Luckily there was one place you could see his illustrations in all their glory.
After the jump, they’re art books, I swear! Continue reading →
Today, I’m going to save you literally tens of dollars. Maybe.
After the jump: If you’re not using AppShopper, you’re wasting money Continue reading →
I have a mental disorder known as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Before I was diagnosed, I thought of OCD as the disease that makes you wash your hands constantly, but there’s so much more! Other than the “wake up in the middle of the night and check your door locks” kind of crazy, I also have a few others, though it’s not necessary to recite them here.
You may wonder what this has to do with Gears of War 3. I’m getting to it. Back off, man!
After the jump, I ch-ch-ch-choose you, Thrashball Cole! Continue reading →
Before they fell off the face of the earth (i.e. started making NASCAR games), developer Papyrus made a racing game called Grand Prix Legends back in 1998. It was brilliant for both the physics and the old timey subject matter of those cars that are like kazoos with wheels sticking out of the sides. They were thrilling for how they looked and felt like they were going to fall apart. There’s no rollercoaster quite so exciting as a rickety rollercoaster.
As I dig on the Need for Speed: Shift games, I think back to what Papyrus did in Grand Prix Legends. They captured that ineffable sense of speed and power where you’re pushing the edge of control. I’m sure physics has something to do with it, but you’d need a scientist, programmer, or race car driver to explain it. I’m just a videogame reviewer who knows words like “ineffable”.
I expect most of the downloadable content for Shift 2 will be cutting-edge supercars that I couldn’t care less about. This may be racist, but all those Italian sports cars look the same to me. And who can remember how to spell their names? Lam-BRO-ghini or lam-BER-ghini? And where does the H go? And how many pairs of Rs are in Ferrarri? And how is it that “Zonda” isn’t a typo?
So I’m elated that the first DLC for Shift 2 eschews all that nonsense and instead looks back. The Legends pack, as it’s called, doesn’t look as far or narrowly back as the legends of Grand Prix Legends, but at least it’s a step backward to more manageable cars on tracks with less product placement. And I don’t have to look up how to spell of Mini Cooper.
After the jump, fully functional and entirely useless rear view mirrors Continue reading →
An $86 million opening weekend can’t be wrong. Or can it? If you don’t want us to spoil Fast Five, fast forward to this week’s 3×3 at the 58-minute mark for a discussion of objects as characters. We’re not entirely certain what that’s supposed to mean either, but we won’t be deterred.
Podcast (movies): Play in new window | Download
Subscribe:
Many games are built around short self-contained conflicts. But then what? You win, you lose, so what? Why does it matter? Are you just playing to pass time? The answer, of course, is yes, but videogames are all about denial of that fact.
So videogames add context, ranging from high score screens to exhaustive grinds. For instance, real time strategy games put their battles into a campaign. Some of them fold in RPG-style leveling up. Starcraft II’s battle.net uses a hearty ranking system and unlockable badges. The Total War games drop battles into a larger turn-based strategy game. In League of Legends, you earn points you can spend on microtransactions.
Fighting games are mostly terrible at situating their battles into a larger context. Mortal Kombat tries, but it mostly comes down to buying koncept art in the Krypt. BlazBlue has a legion mode where you manage an army on a grid, but you have to be able to play the game in the first place. That’s not likely to happen this lifetime for us mere mortals. Soulcalibur IV has RPG character building and Super Smash Bros. Brawl lets you collect stickers to power up in the story mode. But one fighting game schools them all.
After the jump, Dissidia 2 gives you reasons to fight Continue reading →
As a child I was extremely fastidious about large purchases, or even when deliberating over what large gifts to ask for before Christmas and my birthday. I never liked surprises on such occasions and for my sanity, and their own, my parents made sure I understood the gifting parameters and I made sure I knew what I wanted. When it came time to upgrade from my NES to a 16-bit system, this dynamic led to an extraordinary level of research on my part.
In the year leading up to my eleventh birthday I did my due diligence reading every game magazine I could get my hands on. I went so far as to repeatedly check out an issues of the Consumer Reports published magazine Zillions, targeted at children, from my school library. The issue in question featured an in depth analysis which compared the relative benefits of the Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, and NEC’s TurboGrafx-16. I also, in turn, rented each 16-bit console and a few different games for a weekend test drive. When I rented a Super Nintendo for the first time I also brought home Final Fantasy II, properly known as Final Fantasy IV.
After the jump, Square sells hardware. Continue reading →
My first command, this expedition, has gone downhill rapidly. The enemy leader is fighting against my grasp, so I tighten my stranglehold and she quiets down for the time being. I can’t tell if it’s the loaded snub so close to her head or the idea of what will happen to her if we get an evac, but her muscles are coiled and trembling. I’m backing up against the wall, watching the corner. Anya and Marcus are watching the one entrance while Baird and Dom grab some grenades from the bunker. I can hear them, grunting in that language of theirs, preparing to come in here, kill my men. All I pray is for my men to die quick, honorably. It won’t be so easy for me.
After the jump, here they come. Continue reading →
