Archive for October, 2011
Part of the expectation with found footage movies is that the you’re going to see a modest production that relies on creepy horror instead of effects or spectacle or anything too over-the-top. Found footage is often a shortcut for production values.
So that’s why the mostly not very good, but ultimately satisfying Grave Encounters is a refreshing change of pace. You have all the ingredients for a low-key found footage horror movie: bad actors left to improvise, a chintzy reality TV premise, a dumpy set, obvious humor, and reliance on gimmicks like a window moving ever-so-slightly. So it goes. They can’t all be Paranormal Activity.
But once you think you’ve got a bead on Grave Encounters, it pulls a fast one. Let me stress that you’re not getting a good movie. Instead, you’re getting a fun haunted house thrill ride. And in horror movies, that’ll do just fine.
Grave Encounters is currently available as video on demand. I recommend enjoying it with a group.
Among certain scientists*, it’s a known fact Quarter to Three readers are smarter, better looking, healthier, and win more stuff than the average person. Just ask Jens Genberg and Habbaku, the recipients of free copies of Space Pirates and Zombies, and Land Murphy and Abruzzi Ridge, who get their choice of free T-shirts from 604 Republic. Congratulations!
* my cat
One thing I have in common with Eric Bana is that we both share a fondness for a line of Fords manufactured in Australia under the name Falcon. Do not confuse the Australian Ford Falcon with the boxy American Ford Falcon your grandma drove to church on Sundays. Australian Falcons are for mischief, including the sort of hard driving you have to do after an apocalypse. I know this because I’ve seen Mad Max and The Road Warrior, where Ford Falcons were cast as “the last of the V8 Interceptors”.
However, unlike Bana, I have never driven a Ford Falcon. Until today. I almost didn’t even notice it. Forza 4 drops cars into your garage like a pinata drops candy. No, seriously Forza, I don’t need any more cars. I haven’t even gotten around to driving the last ten you gave me. I don’t need any– Hey, what’s this? A 1970 Ford Falcon? Well, well, well, don’t mind if I do.
I immediately went to paint it, hoping I could dress it the matte black it wore in The Road Warrior. No such luck. In fact, I couldn’t even figure out how to override the two-tone color scheme and the GT351 logo on the side. So I went online to check Forza’s catalog of player-made designs, which is one of the unique strengths of this driving series. Guys who wouldn’t dream of fussing over what their sims wear will spend hours perfecting and uploading paint schemes for their Forza cars. I found plenty of black Mad Max schemes, complete with the gold badge on the side of the car. But even better, I found some of the colorful pre-apocalypse police schemes from the original Mad Max movie. Pictured, by the way. Gorgeous, huh? It just needs the police lights on top. The guy who made it didn’t even charge me any of my ingame Forzabuck credits.
Then I drove it and, uh…
After the jump, you get what you pay for Continue reading →
British director Neil Marshall had a memorable enough introduction with the amateurish but enthusiastic Dog Soldiers, which was Aliens, but with British soldiers in the woods instead of Colonial Marines in space, and werewolves instead of xenomorphs. After that, Marshall’s women-in-a-cave-with-monsters movie The Descent was a memorable entry in the genre of horror movies that don’t need dudes, but also don’t need to stoop to sorority house massacres. But then Marshall did the goofy goulash Doomsday, which was Aliens meets 28 Days Later and then unexpectedly stumbles onto Road Warrior and then gets tangled up with Ladyhawk on the way to the closing credits.
So what to expect from Marshall’s latest movie, a swords & sandals non-epic about Roman soldiers ambushed in hostile territory and then hunted by a Ukrainian model wearing someone’s Blizzcon costume? Pictured, of course. In Marshall’s version of ancient history, hot Pict chicks abound and the villain’s name is Gorlacon. Go ahead, say that out loud a few times. “Gorlacon”. Roll it around on your tongue. “Gorlacon”. It’s pronounced exactly like it’s spelled, as if it was an annual gathering of Gorla fans. “Gorlacon”.
At one point, the conveniently diverse band of surviving soldiers is hiding in a cave, exchanging backstory with each other over dinner. Michael Fassbender’s voiceover shuts up long enough to let everyone else talk. Liam Cunningham, the token older guy, says, “This was supposed to be my last tour. I had my eye on a farm in Tuscany.” That’s Latin for being two days from retirement. I wish I could write dialogue that bad. Centurion is easily the worst movie Marshall has made, and I suspect it’s a long downhill slide from here. Was The Descent just an anomaly?
If you must watch a swords & sandals movie, I heartily recommend Kevin Macdonald’s The Eagle for getting right pretty much everything Centurion got wrong. Strong actors, a powerful sense of history and setting, and actual character development. About the only edge Centurion enjoys is its splatter sensibility. Marshall doesn’t shoot action scenes so much as he edits together gore effects. But The Eagle, which stars no hot Ukrainian models, knows enough to spin a great story around two talented lead actors who work really well together. One of the leads is Jamie Bell, so no surprise there, and the other is Channing Tatum.
And if you’re up for something more contemporary by about a thousand years, the enjoyably grim Ironclad, from director Jonathan English, is a real treat for the performances, the writing, the battles scenes, and the nifty historical angle in which Paul Giamatti, as a petulant English king, decides he didn’t want to sign the Magna Carta after all, so he’s going to round up a bunch of Vikings to take back England. It’s up to a hearty band of actually English actors and Kate Mara to stop him.
Since you so rarely get to hear me on a podcast, you might be interested in the latest episode of Roleplayers’ Realm, Gamepro’s RPG podcast hosted by Kat Bailey. We talk about Big Huge Games’ upcoming Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning in a bit more detail than I was able to go into with my preview. As soon as I leave, everyone breaks out into a Dark Souls conversation. Typical.
Check it out. That’s my Honda Fit tearing it up at Tsukuba in Forza 4. Pretty awesome, huh? I don’t know why you don’t see more Honda Fits in the racing world. Like, say, the Annual Honda Fit Invitational at Nurburgring.
Paramount’s 2003 remake of The Italian Job was a love letter to (i.e. product placement for) BMW’s new Mini Cooper. I think it’s time for a similar movie featuring the Honda Fit. Paul Walker will star as the hero who assembles a plucky band of heisters, each with a different colored Honda Fit. Daniel Day-Lewis will play the villain, who drives a Humvee. In the big finale, our heroes will save the day because Day-Lewis has to pull over at a gas station to fill up, while the Fits merrily drive away, getting nearly 40 miles to the gallon.
Disclaimer: I drive a Honda Fit. This post may or may not be a desperate bid to convince myself my car is, in fact, cool.
Among my emails this morning was the following:
Hi First Access Member,
The Hail to the Icons Parody Pack add-on for Duke Nukem Forever is now available! It offers three new multiplayer game modes, four new maps, as well as new weapons. As an early member of the First Access Club, you get it for free!
To get the code for your platform of choice, head over to http://www.dukenukemforever.com/access/
– Your friends at 2K Games & Gearbox Software
I vaguely remember talk of an expansion pack for Duke Nukem Forever. So, what’s this thing all about? Oh man, it’s called the Parody Pack. When I first saw that, my reaction was similar to the reaction of the reels guy having to load the Hulk running in Modern Romance. This isn’t looking good.
In this pack, you get access to a few new modes, including the Hot Potato one where you kidnap a woman. The other big draw is the release of four new maps, all of which are parodies of other games. There’s Call of Duke (Call of Duty), Sandpit (Halo?), Inferno (Doom), and 2forts1bridge (Team Fortress 2) all available for download in the new pack. Each map includes a special weapon, most notable the DFG on Inferno. In Doom, BFG stood for Big Fucking Gun. What does DFG stand for? Duke Fucking Gun? Probably.
Good luck to the 12 of you trying to play online tonight.
I didn’t realize it at the time because I was just a kid, but the 80s began on December 14, 1979 with the release of London Calling. The Clash’s masterpiece of focused punk rage was varied, catchy, and smarter than any mere punk rock. The rest of the 80s had a tough act to follow.
London Calling was added to the Rock Band catalog earlier this year when Harmonix released the entire album. But as far as I’m concerned, The Clash’s contribution to the 80s isn’t fully represented without a single from their album Combat Rock, released two years later. Rock the Casbah. I was never a big Clash fan while growing up. Silly Brit musicians, thinking they’re playing punk rock when they sound nothing like Black Flag or The Dead Kennedys or even The Sex Pistols. But I remember everyone playing Rock the Casbah when the Gulf War began in 1991. If you listened to the lyrics, which were mostly easy to parse except for some line about being “fundamentally caught naked”, the song was about repressive Islamic governments cracking down on Western culture. It was probably a response to the Islamic revolution in Iran, something kind of weird for a punk band to get bent out of shape about, particularly a punk band with an album called Sandinista. If you overthrow puppets like the Shah and Samoza, you’re going to get what you get. But it was the Cold War, so the rules were more about ideology than consistency. “Fundamentally caught naked” indeed.
So thematically, nearly ten years later, Rock the Casbah had nothing to do with an American-led coalition responding to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, which I would argue was the end of the 80s, as we found a new post-Cold War place in the world. But there was some stuff in the song about jets dropping bombs between minarets, so it would have to do. And because it was a very English song, it folded nicely into Operation Desert Storm’s international flavor. Just as The Clash played us into the 80s, here they were playing us out of the 80s as we made our way into the 90s.
Rock the Casbah is available today, along with some Blink 182 stuff that I’m sure the other kids in your dorm would enjoy.
I had forgotten how beautiful Wipeout HD is. Not just the course graphics, but — THOOM — pretty much everything about it. The looks of the different vehicles. The design of the fictional product placement around the tracks. The color and activity. In the background of the — THOOM — above screenshot is a milling crowd I’d never noticed. Even the interface before you’re into the game proper is beautiful. The animated folders for the — THOOM — Fury add-on. The icons for each individual track on the game settings screen. Wipeout has always been an aesthetic feast.
I had also forgotten that every race seems to take place over an underground mining colony hard at work with their, I dunno, rock pounders or whatever they’ve got that makes such a racket. I’ve never seen them, but by golly I can hear them. THOOM. Erratic but constant, deep and resonant. It drove me crazy. I never understood it. A perfectly sublime game — THOOM — ruined by its inexplicable proximity to invisible industrial machinery. Surely that can’t be how the game is supposed to sound. Was it some problem with my sound set up, maybe a — THOOM — crossed wire sending the wrong signals to my subwoofer? I even asked other players if they noticed it. No one knew what I was talking about. Like the pipes that heated my college dorm*, I learned to live with it.
Until now.
After the jump, the mystery of — THOOM — Wipeout HD’s pounding diversion solved Continue reading →
Stalker 2, a sequel to a game that people thought would never come out in the first place, has released its first bit of detail. Instead of telling you about the setting or a new enemy, GSC revealed that the sequel will require a live internet connection and will stream bits of the game off of internal servers. Recently, after being asked about their copy protection plans, studio director Sergey Grigorovich had the following to say:
Protection from piracy? Part of the content will be located on the server and downloaded as the game progresses. Permanent internet access is required. Text information, code and quests will be loaded through that connection.
This was brought to the attention of the GSC forum users who weren’t overly fond of this move. As far as I know, this is a first. I’ve never seen a company announce their DRM before telling anyone anything at all about their game. Luckily, GSC has since backed off of the claim, stating on twitter:
DRM was only mentioned as a possibility, not a choice. We’re still looking for a method that is acceptable for both GSC and the community!
Here’s hoping they come down on the side of the gamers.
The problem with most party games is that they think simplicity and depth are mutually exclusive. So you get a bunch of people sitting around frantically shaking Wiimotes for no good reason. Moto Heroz — lordy, I hate that name — knows better.
After the jump, you liked Trials HD, didn’t you? Continue reading →
Sometimes I like to think I’m fairly sophisticated when it comes to movies. The cinema, really. The culture of filmmaking and its sociological implications and Louie Malle and whatnot. For instance, I read this article about the influence of Islamic cinema on the Arab Spring. I fully intended I would then watch some of those movies to be, you know, more informed and culturally aware and stuff. But the entirety of my takeaway from that article was “Wait, there’s an Islamic horror flick?”
After the jump, there is in fact a Pakistani slasher movie with zombies Continue reading →
If you have small children and a Kinect, two things that aren’t conducive to videogaming as we know it, this is your lucky week. Doublefine’s Sesame Street game, Once Upon a Monster, is out this week.
Aliens: Infestation for the Nintendo DS is a 2D game in the tradition of the Castlevania/Metroid games, set aboard the Sulaco immediately following the events of the movie Aliens. As you explore, your squad of Colonial Marines will have to contend with a permadeath mechanic that also ties into the aliens’ lifecycle. Will we see the most meaningful chestburster gameplay since the multiplayer in Monolith’s Aliens vs. Predator 2? Based on what I’ve heard about Aliens: Infestation, Sega seems to be sitting on something special.
Dead Rising 2: Off the Record marks the re-return of Frank West and his camera, after the disappointing Case West add-on. Do I really want to play revisit the same area I’ve already played through a couple of times in Dead Rising 2? And hasn’t the meaty combat in Dead Island upstaged Dead Rising’s inconsequential zombie mowing? Will Off the Record’s sandbox mode be enough to sustain another trip through Fortune City?
Heroes of Might and Magic V is out this week. Oops, I meant VI. Heroes of Might and Magic VI. I’m sure they’re totally different games. Another totally different game is Ace Combat: Assault Horizon, which is the technical title of Ace Combat 15. I’m not exaggerating. There have been 14 Ace Combat games. Number 15 is out this week.
If you turn your nose up at console games and therefore missed Renegade Ops, now you can get Avalanche Studios’ superlative vehicular mayhem RPG for the PC. It will be available on Steam, with a Gordon Freeman buggy thrown in for good measure.
Finally, Forza 4 is out for those who want to use the Kinect to look at their cars in the new Kinect-driven “autovista” mode. Well, some of their cars. Kinectlook is only supported on certain cars. But I’ve been told you can also race in Forza 4, so keep an eye out for that if you’ve exhausted your copy of Shift 2.
The new technology introduced in this week’s podcast is more dramatic than anything in Ides of March, a rather sleepy political yarn from George Clooney. We have perfected our bleep technology to shield you from a spoiler someone (i.e. Kellywand) lets slip about an unrelated movie. Exciting stuff. And if you don’t want Ides of March spoiled, fast-forward to the 53:30 mark for a 3×3 of our favorite post-coital lines of dialogue.
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When you launch your ball on the Wolverine table in Pinball FX 2, Wolverine, who gained his mutant powers when he was bitten by a radioactive wolverine/badger, makes the following observation:
I’m the best there is at what I do, but what I do best isn’t very nice.
Well, that’s very interesting, Mr. Wolverine, and it sounds awfully tough the way you kind of growl it. But let’s take a closer look at your assertion. The implication is that you’re talking about the same thing in both clauses. I’m going to assume you mean something rather dire like “killing” or “eviscerating bad guys with unobtanium claws” or whatever. But grammatically, you’re on shaky ground. If we parse your comment, you’ve phrased it in such a way that you could be talking about two completely separate activities: “what you do” and “what you do best”.
Let’s say you’re a plumber. That’s “what you do”. But let’s say you have devoted your entire life to dancing the Macarena and you’ve gotten very good at it, moreso than any other activity or even your profession. That’s “what you do best”. They aren’t the same thing.
So I’m not understanding your quip, Mr. Wolverine. It doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Without more context, it’s a non sequitur. Maybe Professor Xavier has someone teaching grammar classes in that X-Man school thing he runs. Look into it. Get Gambit to sign up, too. No one understands a word that guy says.
I only bring this up because the Wolverine table is the focus of the latest Pinball FX 2 tournament. Play the table at any time through October 14 and your score will be registered. You probably won’t win, but that’s not important. What matters is getting a higher score than your friends, and also adding your tournament score to your superscore, and thereby staying ahead of your friends. If you’re on my Xbox Live friends list, please ignore this post.
