We’re all fans of Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan, and director Steve McQueen. But we’re not all fans of their latest collaboration, Shame. Since the movie is rated NC-17, so is this podcast, which contains the words penis, hog, and honker. This week’s 3×3 of our favorite transitions in movies kicks in at the 1:06 mark.
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As a city-builder, Anno 2070 is as hardcore a strategy game as you could want. But it’s also got something I haven’t seen in a strategy games since RollerCoaster Tycoon: an almost childlike sense of charm and wonder.
This is what kids see in their heads when they play with blocks. This is what you saw years ago when you stood a block on end and imagined it was a skyscraper…
Read the review here.
All this could be mine. Will be mine. I’ve been busy doing other things, so I haven’t gotten around to actually taking over Steelport just yet.
Unlike the previous games, Saints Row 3 decouples the story from the city conquest. You can approach both at your leisure. And given how good the storyline is, don’t be surprised if you “beat” the game and still have a lot left to do. You can save Steelport without turning it purple.
The basic stats on your profile divide completion into four sections: storyline, collectibles, activities, and neighborhoods controlled. My own completion is at 96% of the storyline (you can replay the final mission to see the game’s other ending, which I kind of don’t want to do for reasons you’ll understand when you get there), 44% of the collectibles, 41% of the activities, and 6% of the neighborhoods. I’ve got my work cut out for me. Yet here I am hanging out in my crib, trying on different outfits, and customizing the color of the anime kitty backback to match my real-life cat. I would make a terrible gang leader.
Anno 2070 lets you know when something goes wrong by posting a message in the alert queue and sticking a floating icon over the troubled area. For instance, when citizens get sick, a red cross hovers over the afflicted building. If a hospital is in range, it will dispatch an ambulance hovercar thingie and all will be well soon enough. If a hospital isn’t in range, well, you should probably build one or suffer the population reduction.
Furthermore, Anno 2070 will almost always reward you for taking a closer look. The above screenshot is what you’ll see if you zoom in and look at a building under one of those hovering red crosses. You can see officials in hazmat suits have posted barricades around the afflicted buildings while they wait on an ambulance hovercar. Good work, guys. So why has the sickness spread to three buildings? Let’s get there sooner next time, okay?
I am dismayed by the lack of hair style options. If The Sims could offer zulu knots, why can’t these people? Eh, a ponytail is functional enough. I have fixed my face, my hair, my chin, and the millions of other weird options and now..
After the jump, on to Skyrim! Continue reading →
Sometimes when your car matches the neighborhood, you just have to pull over for a quick picture.
“A good racing game never ends.”
Since level designers who don’t get how to create tension without life limits receive my derision, it is only fair that a designer who does get it, who creates tension in a simple level without using that threat, receives my praise.
Color Race. The title is unfortunate. It smacks of lack of forethought, like the person who signs up for a blog with only one name for it in mind and has to think up something on the fly because his one choice is unavailable. But who cares? It’s a great little race. Simple. Quick. Easy to reload. Not overly difficult, but still tricky. How do I know that it’s great? Because I felt compelled to keep playing it. Over and over. 99 times to be exact, with “just once more” counting for about thirty of those plays. I never broke into the top ten, but I came close.
Best of all, the only penalty for death is loss of time, not loss of game. I’ve been jonesing for a race since listening to the guys talk about racing games on the Qt3 Games Podcast. This one hits the spot and will tide me over until I get the chance to fire up Midnight Club: Los Angeles again.
Click here for the previous Weekly Little Big Planet
When you start a city in Anno 2070, you choose either the corporate faction or the eco faction. Basically, you decide whether you want progress, or a bunch of layabout tree-hugging hippies whinging about pollution. Not that I’m trying to color your choice in the periodic online elections that determine ingame bonuses.
When you choose the corporate faction, you get your power from coal power plants. Yeah, sure, they’re dirty. But that’s no big deal. Corporate citizens don’t fuss about pollution. They understand that you can’t build a city without cracking a few ozone layers. The bigger problem with coal power plants is that I kind of need that coal for iron, tools, steel, weapons, and so forth. So one of the important early shifts is to nuclear power, which uses uranium and frees up all that coal.
Nuclear power is great. Mostly. I think. I hope. Every now and then I get a little pop-up message like the one in that screenshot, which reads:
Accident at the Nuclear Power Plant! Nuclear power plant in Omicron reports minor incident. Situation under control, no radiation leaked, production unaffected.
So everything’s peachy, right? Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that message is a veiled warning? I mean, I know there’s a small chance of mishaps in nuclear power plants, but it’s so small as to be a non-factor, right? Should I be eyeing the option in my Academy to research increased nuclear safety?
I should have played the eco faction and used windmills.
Up next: down with the sickness
Before I start to play, let me tell you what I want from this game, having read nothing about it and having avoided almost all commercials for it:
I want to be friends with dragons and kill the fuck out of horses.
Before everyone is like “oh no horses are majestic, gentle creatures of wonder” let me remind you that horses can’t a> fly, b> breathe fire or some other thing, c> get out of the fucking way when you’re swinging a sword. Whereas dragons can a> fly, b> breathe fire or some other thing, and c> who cares if they get out of the way, they’re fucking dragons. They have scales and a way higher AC.
My character will be Isabelle, the Horse Assassin of Imperial City who was run out of town because she was so good at her job that it led to a horse shortage. She was run out instead of locked up because all the fast walking people had to do between towns meant that their cholesterol levels went way down and due to wolf, bear, and bandit attacks over-population no longer is a problem.
So she’s off to Skyrim to make friends with some dragons and kill some motherfucking horses.
Tomorrow: the more brooms you have
When not killing horses, Marley enjoys fixing computers, digging up ancient civilizations, acting in terrible webisodes, and cats.
At some point when I had my nose buried in Skyrim or Anno 2070, THQ finally flipped the switch to activate Saints Row 3’s online stats tracking and screenshots. Now, if your friends have registered their Saintsrow.com accounts and if you know their profile names, you can check their stats. For instance, this guy is in the top 95% when it comes to total kills. Pretty good. That’s an A+ on most grading scales.
Now that I can finally post the screenshots I took while playing on the Xbox 360, you’re going to have to humor me, much the same way you might humor someone showing you his vacation pictures. For instance, in the above screenshot, witness the power of a fully upgraded and operational Grave Digger shotgun. Well, maybe not the power, but certainly the aesthetics. Suffice to say I sank enough money into that gun that when I shoot things, they burst into flame.
