Archive for September, 2011
I agree so much with the Gamespy review of Dead Island that I could have written it!
Well, most of it. I scratch my head at that bit in the intro about “enough to induce an instant state of catatonic pure terror”, which uses about four words too many to no good effect (the original text read “is scarier still”). But the bigger issue is that I wouldn’t have made a reference to Dead Island being “buggier than a decomposing zombie’s stomach cavity” and I wouldn’t have written that penultimate paragraph suggesting the game flat-out doesn’t work with a mouse and keyboard. I’ve personally logged upwards of fifty hours using a mouse and keyboard on four separate computers. My experience has been almost entirely free of bugs with any meaningful impact.
Furthermore, if I were reviewing Dead Island, I would totally give it five stars. But otherwise, great review, “Gamespy staff”!
In this Dutch horror movie, a bunch of twenty-something teenagers with a Ouiji board party in a haunted Belgian mine. You know where this is going, so there’s really no need to watch it play out by actually seeing the movie. In the US, this movie is known as Slaughter Night because we rightly read Sl8n8 as “Slate Nate”, which isn’t the least bit scary and actually makes me think of Avril Lavigne’s song, Sk8ter Boi.
The most disappointing thing about this forgettable demonic possession/slasher movie is that it doesn’t have the slightest shred of identity that isn’t slavishly borrowed from crappy American horror movies. This is usually what happens when you pick through foreign horror films. You end up watching something that just apes American movies or, if you’re lucky, Japanese movies. But sometimes you’ll find something with a sense of national identity. In recent years, I’ve had the pleasure to discover Sauna from Finland, Let the Right One In from Sweden, The Backwoods from Spain, Isolation from Ireland, and Trollhunter from Norway, all with a distinct sense of national character in the story, the actors, the locations, and the situation. No such thing happens in Slate Nate.
However, I did learn a little Dutch. The Dutch word for “fucking loser” is “fucking loser” and the Dutch word for “fucking hell” is “fucking hell”. Also, when surprised by the obligatory corpse falling out of a closet, one of the twenty-something teenagers yells out, “Jesus!” According to the subtitles, this is Dutch for “Christ!”
Okay, so I took a look at your computer. I don’t know why it’s doing that, but now it doesn’t have a battery anymore. Sorry, but I need the battery, even though I already have seven of them, including this one expensive laptop battery that I’m afraid to sell, because maybe I’ll need it later. That’s how I feel about most of this stuff. I mean, seriously, you should see all this stuff I’m carrying around. Oleander. Can you believe it? I’m carrying around oleander.
Also, I’m going to need to take a look at any phones, copiers, and cash registers you may have around here. Especially cash registers. And do you happen to have any duct tape I can borrow? What about wire or nails?
On this week’s Joystiq podcast, I’m part of a panel of dudes who played Deus Ex and have a few things to say about it. I’m also on this week’s Gameshark podcast, where there’s a fair bit of Deus Ex talk. It seems odd to me that I’m talking Deus Ex: Human Revolution on two podcasts this week. I should probably step aside and let people who feel more passionately talk about it. Having some guy go “eh, it’s fine, I suppose” isn’t really interesting.
But since I didn’t care for the original Deus Ex, I’ve been asked by some folks what I think of this latest sequel. And that’s actually an interesting angle to me, because I think a lot of Deus Ex fans really appreciate what Eidos Montreal has created. I do as well. Partly because Eidos Montreal gets what made Deus Ex work, but also because they get what didn’t make Deus Ex work. Human Revolution address many of my complaints about the original game, including the AI problems, the problems at that time with the Unreal engine, and what I felt was a sloppy and mostly irrelevant mishmash of conspiracy theories in lieu of a story. Probably my favorite thing about Human Revolution is its timely and relevant theme of society’s ambivalence about technology. I couldn’t care less about those Illuminati goofballs.
Hard Reset, which is so very Painkiller meets Deus Ex and doesn’t bother with stealth or hacking, is out this week for the PC. I love what I’ve seen of it. I’ve been told it’s short, but it’s also half the price of a regular release, so do your own math. It’s also entirely missing any sort of multiplayer, so be sure the carry the two.
Red Orchestra 2, a World War II shooter in which you can’t even play as the Americans, is out this week. However, it’s not available for the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3. In fact, but you can’t even play it with a 360 controller. You’ll have to get your mouse and keyboard out of the closet.
King Arthur: Fallen Champions is the standalone sequel to King Arthur, a very scenario-based strategy game that plays a bit like one of Creative Assembly’s games, but with more magic than usual on account of Merlin and company. It’s only on PCs because it’s an RTS. Duh.
One of my favorite RTS developers, Petroglyph, is trying trying again, this time with a free-to-play MOBA called Rise of the Immortals. It goes live this week. Only on the PC, of course.
Finally, Sengoku from Paradox is out this week, and it has way too much math for any console gamers to figure out. It’s also got enough Japanese names to really confuse a gaijin like me. But I love how it takes the more personal, character-driven approach of Crusader Kings to convey the ebb and flow of feudal Japan. For all the glorious armies and rich artwork of Shogun 2, sometimes a guy just wants to concentrate on the strategy game parts of his strategy game.
Is Stephen Soderbergh’s Contagion the Traffic or the Ocean’s 13 of global pandemic movies? And how much does it suck that the trailer spoils important plot points? Much like this podcast. At the 59-minute mark, we start this week’s 3×3 of our favorite uses of the camera from a first-person point of view. Spoiler: Doom didn’t make any of our lists.
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(The following short story appeared on Quarter to Three on September 18, 2001.)
On September 11, 2001
I woke up to the sound of the TV in the front room. It was Trevor, watching something. He doesn’t live with me or anything. But there he was, watching the World Trade Center bleed smoke.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Something that matters,” he said, without turning around.
We watched. It didn’t occur to me to wonder why he was here.
“I better go see how my Mom’s doing,” he said and then he was gone. I kept watching. When I finally stepped outside to check the mail, nearly ten hours later and still in my robe, I noticed the front door was still locked from the inside.
It could have been a dream or something. Trevor being here, watching the coverage. Maybe it was just some sort of narrative device. I didn’t really understand at first. But it makes sense now. The people we know, how we know them, how we look at them. Those rules are a little different now.
Continued after the jump Continue reading →
In the 19th century, as Christianity spread through Asia, the term “rice Christian” emerged to describe people who converted just so they could get rice and other handouts from the missionaries. Rice Christians give lip service to religion for the material and social benefits. In Dead Island, you might say I’m a fruit Christian. I constantly visit the church in Moresby to take advantage of its plentiful stocks of respawning fruit. It’s a great place to nosh up your health, and the fruit is much better for you than the energy drinks littering the beach resort. Those things are probably full of high fructose corn syrup.
Sometimes, I’m also a mace Christian (pcitured). Sister Helen hands out some pretty nifty weaponry. I’m disappointed that developer Techland didn’t take the opportunity to make the mace a named unique item. Rod of God has a nice ring to it, wouldn’t you say? Later in the game, I will be a machete Christian.
And while we’re passing out new categories of Christians, I’d like to point out that distinctive type of Christian known as the videogame Christian. For instance, Sister Helen in Dead Island, Sister Miriam Godwinson in Alpha Centauri, and Father Grigori in Half-Life 2. You know what sets them apart from actual Christians? They never talk about Christ. They never once mention the name Jesus. They are characters written by game developers who play it safe, I presume to avoid offending anyone. It’s actually a common facet of popular entertainment. I recently watched the fun but awful Priest, in which a Blade Runner world surrounded by vampire-infested Western-esque wastelands is ruled by Christians who never once mention Christ.
It strikes me as silly to make a character Christian, and then limit him or her to safely bland talk about a generic universalist God. Every Christian I’ve ever met is happy to talk about Christ. Since when do fictional Christians have to dance around the founder of their religion? I mean, for Pete’s sake, if Danish cartoonists can draw pictures of Mohammed, can’t Father Grigori let loose with the occasional “the power of Christ compels you”?
Witness the power of this fully repaired and operational purple sickle!
By the way, that guy can still attack. I can tell you from first-hand experience that zombie headbutts hurt.
You might guess from this screenshot of an iPhone game that you’re looking at some actioney shooter thing in which a little dude shoots monsters. Not quite. That’s no monster. That’s a Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath. And while there’s certainly shooting involved, check out those stats on the right side of the screen. SAN? As in “sanity”? But of course. What sort of Cthulhu game doesn’t have sanity?
What’s more, look a little closer and you’ll see the AP and hit% figures at the bottom of the screen. Action points and die rolls? Like you’d find in a turn-based game? Yep.
Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land is a turn-based RPG, and it’s set in the early 20th century, like any Cthulhu game should be. Your dudes — you’ll control up to six of them — might lose sanity when encountering monsters, but you’ll also spend sanity to cast spells.
The Wasted Land is based on the Chaosium pen-and-paper RPG, so in addition to the usual combat skills (it’s still basically a combat game), you’ll also have a Cthulhu mythos skill that determines how well you can use spells, and a psychoanalysis skill that lets you restore lost sanity. There’s no announced release date yet, but find out more here.
Victoria 2 is one of Paradox’s greatest games partly because it’s great, but partly because it has such a unique sense of identity. No game models the interplay of population and politics quite so cannily as Victoria 2.
However, the last time I played, it had a couple of frustrating issues that killed my interest. The first is that I was able to max my spending on bureaucrats just long enough to optimize their effect, at which point I could lower the spending to zero with no apparent detrimental effect. My society would run smoothly with an unpaid bureaucracy. Wisconsin would be so proud.
The other problem I found was a global shortage of liquor, which made a lot of production difficult. You need liquor for artillery, for instance. It may not seem like a good idea to mix liquor and heavy firepower, but them’s the rules. If you want artillery, you gotta get your men liquored up.
So during a recent trawl through the Paradox forums to see what’s up with patches, I was pleased to discover the following in the notes for the latest beta patch.
– Beuruecrats will demote quicker to farmer and labourers if no current spending.
– Increased liquour output a little bit further.
I’ll refrain from putting [sic] in there, since I’m American and therefore have trouble distinguishing between the Queen’s English and a typo.
Cable has Shark Week. Qt3 has Dead Island Week. Until science discovers a way to combine them, we devote a fair amount of this week’s podcast to the latter.
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Iced Wind is a cute adventure level where you scoot around in ice caves collecting bubbles. It certainly doesn’t have the personality of last week’s Toy Story level, but it’s a good little platformer I played last week. I actually meant to go back to a level I found too difficult to finish and try to figure out why it had given me such problems, but my PS3 pulled this updating scam on me where it insisted I had to download a 568MB update for LBP2 before I could play it. I freaking hate that forced-update scheme, but what’re they gonna do? They know that left to my own devices I’d put that off forever. Oh well. I’ve only got to wait 267 more minutes until it’s updated.
I wish there were a way I could be warned about those things. A little bell that would cause me to salivate and automatically know I had a wait ahead of me. Or a warning sent to my iPhone so I could schedule the update for when I’m cooking dinner and getting my kid to bed. Something. Instead I it takes me by surprise in that tiny window of time I have for gaming and annoys the hell out of me. I suppose there’s no way to train someone to expect this.
Because I don’t mind training. If it’s good. In point of fact, I love it.
After the jump: good for you, good for me, mmm good Continue reading →
There’s a particular genre of book, military history book specifically, called the “unit history”. It may have a desultory title like “The History of the 1st Infantry Division in World War II” or a slightly jazzier name like “The Big Red One: Crusade in Europe”. It’s usually a catalog of where a unit was on each day of a campaign, what it did, and a lot of name-checking and shout-outs to people who served in that unit, along with photos and other memorabilia. It’s both a historical and personal record, meant to preserve the unit’s memory and standing, and take due (or undue) credit along the way.
There isn’t anything inherently wrong with this, except that as an outsider I don’t have any attachment to any particular military organization or unit, so there’s nothing to grab my attention. I’m not a “fan” of any tank division in the same way that I am a fan of — for example — the Detroit Red Wings. I generally find this kind of stuff boring, despite my interest in military history. Someone once gave me, as a gift, a copy of Comrades to the End: The 4th SS Panzergrenadier Regiment “Der Fuhrer” 1938-1945. I’m not sure what kind of comment that is on him or me, and I probably shouldn’t think about it too much. It’s on my bookshelf somewhere, but I don’t particularly care what a bunch of Nazis did on, say, 14 October 1943, or any day before or after that, unless they died, in which case I’m good with the outcome.
So it’s weird that I just spent thirty bucks plus shipping on a copy of Messerschmitt Bf-110 Bombsights Over England: Erprobungsgruppe 210 in the Battle of Britain.
After the jump, eat your heart out, Detroit Red Wings Continue reading →
Also, Svetlana, can you please move a little to your left before I accept the quest?
