Next time someone accuses me of being a contrarian because I was critical of popular games like Gears of War 3 or Rage, I’m going to fling in his face this quote from my review of the latest Batman game:
There is almost nothing in Arkham City that doesn’t feel perfect.
Ha! Take that! What kind of contrarian hops so gleefully onto the Batman: Arkham City bandwagon? In fact, scoot over and let me drive this thing.
Read the rest of the review here.
Like so many horror movies, Reeker starts with a bunch of kids in a car going someplace to party. But the first striking thing about this movie is that none of these kids is annoying. How is this possible? The premise of many bad horror movies is that you secretly want these snotty grating kids to get killed. But I actually liked every single one of the characters in Reeker, without exception. Even the funny guy, who would usually be the most annoying of all, was likable. Much of the credit goes to the actors, but you can’t underestimate writer/director Dave Payne’s convincing dialogue and humor that’s actually humorous. Any of these characters in, say, Shark Night or Wrong Turn wouldn’t fare nearly so well.
What’s more, the monster isn’t obvious for a while, so you can’t very well root for it. This is one of those “what the hell is going on?” movies in which characters are literally lost in the desert and the audience is metaphorically lost in the desert. Is it a slasher film? A creature feature? A metaphysical mind-bender? When it all comes together, it’s not the least bit surprising to anyone who’s seen more than a handful of horror movies. But it’s a good example of how a horror movie doesn’t have to be unique or even airtight. It just has to work.
The movie frequently shows us things the characters can’t see, which is usually a cheap shot. But Reeker has a good reason for doing this. In a couple of clever ways, it plays on the senses. The title refers to a bad smell, which is rendered with a silly visual effect you’d normally use to show the gas stove is turned on and it’s going to blow up the house when someone lights a match. I personally would have preferred something along the lines of how Charles Schulz drew Pigpen.
You can get Reeker on Netflix here.
MOBA is a term that’s becoming more popular in gaming, but how many know what it means and where it comes from? Quite a few I’m sure, but for those that might not know this article is for you. However, I guess we should take a minute to talk about what the hell a MOBA is and what does it have to do with gaming.
After the jump, the Arcane History of MOBA
The real wallet threat this week is Kirby’s Return to Dreamland. I wasn’t aware he’d left, but I’m glad he’s back. This is Nintendo platforming at its finest. Mario who?
I’m mostly curious this week about The Haunted: Hell’s Reach (pictured), a mod-gone-pro supposedly published by THQ. I say supposedly, because when I searched for the game’s name on THQ’s site, the only result was a zombie unlife sim for tween girls called Monster High Ghoul Spirit for the Nintendo Wii. “This semester, there’s a new ghoul hitting the haunted halls of Monster High — you!” So, like, Bully, but you’re a zombie? I would totally play that. Err, uh, I mean, that sounds stupid. Pfft. Anyway, that’s out this week as well. But The Haunted: Hell’s Reach, not for tween girls, is a horror-themed PC shooter with co-op multiplayer. I watch the trailer and think about how great Painkiller would have been with co-op multiplayer or how good Bulletstorm should have been.
I’m also curious about a downloadable War of the Worlds side-scrolling adventure for Xbox Live Arcade and PSN called, fittingly enough, War of the Worlds. It’s published by Paramount, but it’s based on the 1953 movie instead of the Spielberg movie. I would like to think this was a creative choice made by the developer, but I’ll bet you dollars to donuts it was an easy way to sidestep the rights to Tom Cruise’s likeness.
Stronghold 3 is out this week for any castle building needs not being met in Minecraft. Folks with Kinects might care about Dance Central 2. Cursed Crusade looks like Atlus’ attempt at a slice of the Assassins Creed and Dark Souls pies. Pokemon Rumble Blast is probably the worst game name this year. Also, Electronic Arts’ Modern Warfare 3 is out this week.
One of the trademarks of indie horror is that it can’t get too ambitious. One haunted house, serial killer, or monster at a time, please. Mulberry Street didn’t get that memo. It’s a movie of limited resources, but considerable ambition for telling a story about a plague in Manhattan. And even though it tries to go big, it does something that I love about some movies set in New York: it lives comfortably in a specific neighborhood. This New York City consists of the people in a crowded apartment building, a neighborhood bar, and the route one character takes for his morning run. The Statue of Liberty and Times Square are nowhere to be seen.
These crowded city apartment buildings span generations and ethnicities. They aren’t unique to New York, or even America. [Rec], Phase 7, and Rammbock present the same thing in entirely different countries. Here are people who are different but close, their relationships tested by some horrible calamity. They are the new family unit.
Mulberry Street features a twist on the familiar soldier-returning-home motif that I really liked. And I love how much attention it pays to older folks. Normally, if you’re over 60, a movie isn’t going to bother with you for very long. Mulberry Street also features some neatly staged action sequences, including a fight scene that belongs alongside Disney’s Tangled as proof of the tactical advantage of weidling a skillet. Also, any movie where Larry Fessenden shows up gets extra points in my book (his vampire movie Habit was another great example a New York City neighborhood). Enjoy his mini character arc as Man Behind the Gate.
Director Jim Mickle and actor Nick Damici, who co-wrote Mulberry Street, recently made a more ambitious but ultimately less effective movie called Stake Land, which ranges across a vampire post-apocalypse. Sometimes it’s better to just keep your apocalypse local.
Mulberry Street is available on Netflix here.
Movies simply can’t do HP Lovecraft*. You have to accept that as a starting point. You’re mostly going to get Stuart Gordon doing deviant things to Barbara Crampton or Jeffrey Coombs chewing scenery. So you should appreciate any movie that manages, however slightly, to evoke Lovecraft more faithfully. That’s the main thing The Resurrected has going for it. It’s loosely based on Lovecraft’s Case of Charles Dexter Ward, but not as loosely as other Lovecraft movies are based on their source material. By the time director Dan O’Bannon made this in 1992, he had earned his genre stripes with Dark Star, Alien, Return of the Living Dead, and the underappreciated Dead and Buried. He had obviously seen a lot of Dario Argento movies as well.
The Resurrected starts out as a slightly clumsy but winsome attempt at an old timey detective noire. This is obvious from the opening credits, soundtrack, and voiceover. John “Hawk the Slayer” Terry and his hopelessly 80s haircut stand in for what I presume was supposed to a hard-boiled protagonist. He’s more poached, or even over-easy. When the hot woman comes into his agency to enlist help finding her missing husband, Terry insists twice that he needs the husband’s social security number.
Jane Sibbett is delightfully awful as the distraught wife. Ten years later, she will be the voice of one of the snow dogs that vexes Cuba Gooding Jr. Chris Sarandon is cast probably because of his vampire role in Fright Night and I couldn’t help but notice he appears in a rather effeminate robe, much like he did in Dog Day Afternoon. The most watchable guy in this movie is Robert Romanus, who you’ll remember as Damone from Fast Times at Ridgement High. So this is where that guy went!
By unfolding as a mystery, The Resurrected captures the investigation aspect of Lovecraft’s stories most often ignored in movies in favor of monsters and magical rites. The Resurrected has its share of monsters and magical rites, but it earns them first. O’Bannon’s previous experience serves him well with the special effects and a nifty dungeon crawl sequence. By the time it’s over, you can almost forgive The Resurrected its “wizard did it” resolution, featuring something unfortunately called “the reflux”. Go ahead, try not to think of the Duran Duran song.
The Resurrected, which somehow came to be listed as Shatterbrain on IMDB, is avaiable on Netflix instant watch.
At a Sundance screening of The Woman, some guy sat patiently through the movie and then loudly berated the director during the ensuing Q&A. Then he stormed out of the theater. In the lobby, he held forth in front of a videocamera about how the movie should never have been made.
After the jump, I agree with him Continue reading →
* In Saints Row 3, every day can be Talk Like a Zombie Day when you pick the zombie voice for your character. You won’t be able to understand a word you say, because you’ll sound like a cross between Scooby Doo and Chewbacca. But that’s okay, since everyone else can understand you.
* Remember the name Oleg. You’ll be seeing a lot of him. In more ways than one.
* You have never seen a hacking minigame quite like this.
Those are a few tidbits from my time with Saints Row 3, which I got to spend a day playing. And I was surprised at what THQ had done to my over-the-top open-world action game. Read about it here.
Yeah, sure Batman: Arkham City is out this week and we’ve all dutifully got our copies. But at least two of us have other picks for our games of the week. Also, how much do you really know about country music? Join Tom Chick, Jason Lee McMaster, and the inimitable Chris “triggercut” Hornbostel with a special Bangles update and some timely advice for how to watch scary movies.
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I was never much of a flight simmer, but I’m pretty sure I’m doing it wrong in my little fighter plane up there. Going down in flames is probably the wrong move. Unfortunately it’s the move I’m best at executing, so every time I played this week’s level, Angels of the Sky, it ended the same way.
This means a couple of things, most notably never seeing the final boss of the level, which is supposed to be a formidable Zeppelin that has threatened to devastate the city. I’m bummed about that. Not about the city. I don’t even know what city I was supposedly protecting. I wanted to see that Zeppelin. Any time there’s a Zeppelin involved I want to see it. Of course my failure also means the destruction of several trusty RX-01 fighters. What I should have done is land my plane. I don’t own that plane, the taxpayers do!
I failed this level every time. Yet still I picked it as this week’s featured level. Curious.
After the jump, my ego writes more checks Continue reading →
One of the great things about Isolation, a beautifully bleak movie that takes place at the intersection of science, agriculture, industry, machinery, biology, and provincial paranoia, is that it’s so very non-American. Over there in Europe, people freak out about genetic research on crops and livestock (considering a silly movie called Black Sheep, they freak out about it in New Zealand, too). But here in America, we don’t care too much, so long as it doesn’t involve stem cells. In fact, we don’t think much at all about what happens at farms. I suppose people grow wheat, raise cows, and build baseball diamonds. In the last farm-themed movie I saw, Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant did various shenanigans that rekindled their strained marriage. I think they were on a farm. There were horses there.
But Isolation is about the icky stuff that goes on at a farm. Farm animals are stinky and big and kind of weird. They’re huge bags of meat, really. You can’t even ride most of them. Isolation is about that. It’s about what kinds of gross things might happen where giant bags of meat just hang around all day, pooing and peeing and stepping in mud until they get slaughtered and sent to supermarkets so we can eat them.
This Irish movie is also uniquely Irish in a few ways. For instance, everyone speaks Irish, except for the one guy who doesn’t. The movie makes certain assumptions about people living in caravans that we wouldn’t make in America, where we don’t even call them caravans. The police have the word “garda” written on their uniforms, presumably because “police” would be too obvious (I learned about this from the Brendan Gleeson vehicle, The Guard, which is a gleefully Irish middle finger to America and England). I wouldn’t call Isolation as Irish as, say, Far and Away. But it has a lovely provincial sense of place that isn’t just West Virginia or some other state where they have cows.
Watch Isolation on Netflix instant view here, but don’t get too comfortable. Tomorrow, you’re going to have to go out to the theater.
The spectacularly good tower defense game Dungeon Defenders just came out today, so I can’t fault people online for not yet knowing the ins and outs of the four classes, each of which makes very specific contributions to the defense. But when some idiot wizard — it’s always a wizard, isn’t it? — takes his crystal and uses it to build frail magic missile towers right in front of a spawn point instead of back at the defensive line the other three players have established, it’s almost enough to make me go back to playing horde mode in Gears of War 3. Hey wizard, why don’t you look up “tactics” in your spellbook? Or maybe check the index for “overlapping fields of fire”, “killzones”, and “combined arms”.
It’s hard to be patient with new or bad players in a tower defense game, where your defenses are only as strong as their weakest link. As I said, it’s always a wizard. Next to boss raids in World of Warcraft, tower defense is one of the worst genres for multiplayer with random online people.
Fortunately, Dungeon Defenders doesn’t just have dynamic join to make it easy to find and create multiplayer games. It also lets you to swap in your different characters between waves, when you’re building your defenses. So even if you’re playing solo, you can avail yourself of unique assets like a wizard’s towers, a hunter’s traps, a monk’s auras, and a knight’s barricades. And then you can actually play the level with whichever character you want to level up. And since all four characters share an inventory, scoop up everything you find and divvy up the loot when you get back to the tavern.
And speaking of jerks in multiplayer, I’ve been putting points into my knight’s running speed so he can more quickly scoop up the cash in multiplayer games. I can’t trust those silly little wizards to make the best use of our resources!
The last thing to come out of Project Greenlight, HBO’s reality show in which an amateur filmmaker makes a movie, was Feast. That bad horror movie turned into a trilogy, with each movie worst than the last. In the second Feast, some biker chicks have to take off their tops and combine them with a motorcycle to make a catapult that will fling midget wrestlers across the street. But Feast 2 wouldn’t even rank among the top ten movies in which biker chicks have to take off their tops and combine them with a motorcycle to make a catapult that will fling midget wrestlers across the street. I can’t think of any other movies in which that happens, but I’m holding the top ten slots in reserve, becuase there’s no way Feast 2 belongs on a top ten list of anything.
At the end of the Feast 3, which is not about giant robots, a giant robot comes out of the desert and steps on the movie’s only survivors. Roll credits. That’s how little John Gulager, the son of a famous actor who probably could have gotten his stupid movies made without taking up an entire season of Project Greenlight that could have been used on someone else, cares about his characters.
The year before Feast, one of the winners of Project Greenlight was a guy named Kyle Rankin. He and his partner co-directed Battle of Shaker Heights. After that, Rankin’s next movie was Infestation, which has an ending that many of you will absolutely hate, much like you might hate the ending of Feast 3. But Infestation ends the way it ends because Rankin cares about his characters. He didn’t like the ending he shot, so he used the footage he had to make a very different ending than what he’d originally written. The result is pitch perfect and I love it partly because so many people will hate it.
Infestation is a goofily irresistable creature feature with heart, a budget, and enough twists to keep it lively. For instance, the hero isn’t who you’d expect. It’s as if the traditionally square-jawed former TV star wasn’t available, so they had to use someone from the supporting cast as the hero. And whereas most creature features stay in one place because a) it’s cheaper to shoot a movie in one place, and b) they’re just aping Alien, Infestation has far too much energy to stay at home.
Infestation is available from Netflix here.
Guess what you’re getting for free for a week? Zen Studios is finally bringing Paranormal from Zen Pinball for the PS3 into Pinball FX 2 on the Xbox 360. And it’s free to play from October 26th until November 2nd.
It’s not a particularly attractive table. It’s got a distinct lack of bright colors and blatantly flashy bits. Instead, it has the Jersey Devil, the Loch Ness Monster, an old plane going down in the Bermuda Triangle, a Hellraiser cube, a cutaway haunted house, those clacky balls that a weird occultist might have in his office, a reverse gravity pocket, and a goofy pop-eyed chupacabra hiding in the bushes. I couldn’t begin to say whether Paranormal is Zen’s best table — there are too many that are too different — but it’s one my favorites along with Secrets of the Deep and Earth Defense Force because of their clear affection for their cheesy theme.
Introversion’s Chris Delay confesses that Subversion, their high-tech heist game, is on hiatus.
…the first thing I plan to do is gut the thing from top to bottom of all the tech fluff that we forced in over the years. Without a core game it’s all a worthless distraction, and I will NEVER again spend so long making tech for a game without having a solid core game in place first. Subversion needs a total rethink from top to bottom, and some long standing sacred cows need slaughtering.
…somewhere along the 6 years of part-time development, we had lost our way. We couldn’t even remember what sort of game it was supposed to be anymore. We’d ended up with a game that looked and sounded brilliant, classic Introversion with its blue wireframe and sinister faceless characters. But there was a massive gaping hole where you would normally see a “core game”. We’d tried and tried to fill that hole with ambitious tech and experimental systems, but you couldn’t escape it.
In the end, after all that development and years of work, you still completed the bank heist by walking up to the first door, cracking it with a pin cracker tool, then walking into the vault and stealing the money. There was no other way to complete that level. And this would be the essential method by which you would complete every level after that. Technology 1, Gameplay 0 – we’ve made the fatal mistake of having more fun making the game than gamers would ever have playing it.
I deeply admire any developer who can say and do what Delay has just said and done. Most companies would throw a few more years of development into the game and then release it to recoup their expenses. Developers should learn to slaughter sacred cows more often.
(Thanks Blues News!)
