Archive for October, 2012
In his apology for bragging about how he fucked a 14-year-old, competitive Starcraft II player Ilyes Satouri says it was a private joke. Unlike the time he was arrested (pictured) for publicly vomiting all over a Swedish nightclub. Satouri’s private joke was broadcast when he sent it to someone who was participating in a live stream on TwitchTV.
The look on his chat partner’s face is priceless.
Satouri’s team suspended him for the rest of this month. This means he’ll be back on November 1st, at which point sponsors like Monster and Intel will implicitly condone e-athletes who brag about fucking minors.
It’s important that you can choose your characters’ names in a party-based RPG like XCOM. Mainly because it creates a greater sense of investment in the characters, and therefore the game, when you use can use the names Vazquez, Hicks, and Apone in yet another videogame. But also because sometimes the random name generator can be a real dick.
Retro City Rampage is what would happen if Rockstar had a sense of humor. And if it was the year 1988. Which it’s not, so bring a gamepad. I’m having a grand time tearing through the storyline and working my way up the leaderboard (currently #1690). So please don’t play this game much until I’ve made it into the top 1000 or so. If games that used to look like this were this good, my mind would have been blown.
Retro City itself is pretty small, but it sure is lively, especially when I’m wreaking havoc. I mostly do it for missions and points. Sometimes I do it for aesthetic reasons. In the above image, that’s me on the right. The guy on the left is wearing the same hat. How embarrassing. I had to beat him to death with a golf club.
It’s hard not to have Space Shuttle fever here in Los Angeles right now. The Endeavour will trundle through our streets tomorrow on the way to her final resting place at the California Science Center (suck it, Houston!). It’s a one-float parade, but with a single float so awesome that it doesn’t need the rest of the parade. I’ve never seen a Space Shuttle in person before, but I’ve seen various fighter planes, and specifically a B2 stealth bomber doing a flyover at an air show. Through my modern moviegoer eyes, it looked like a special effect. It was too cool to be possible. My brain told me it must have been CG. Shut up, brain. I expect an in-person Space Shuttle will look the same.
While checking out the best places to check out Endeavour in person, I came across this amazing hi-res interactive imagery of the Endeavour’s powered up cockpit, courtesy of some fancy online service called Gigapan. The imagery is amazing to me for a couple of reasons. I’m old enough to remember that when I was a kid and I flew on an airplane, the stewardess would ask if I wanted to see the cockpit. Of course I did! So she’d march me up the aisle through that little door and into a bewildering wonderland of dials, switches, and levers, all manned by fatherly pilots and copilots. I even got little plastic wings I could pin to the place on my chest where Cub Scout merit badges would go if I had ever earned them. I’m not sure when they stopped doing cockpit visits for other kids. Certainly after 9/11. But I never stopped wanting to go up there into the cockpit. Even today, I can’t help but lean into the aisle and peer up the length of the plane hoping they’ll leave the cockpit door open for a while. So it’s pretty amazing to virtually marvel at Endeavour’s wonderland of dials, switches, and levers.
It’s also amazing because it reminds me of what I used to love about complex flight simulators. Systems within systems within systems, all conspiring to blow up an enemy SAM, shoot down a Tu-16 that I’d never even see, or even just find the VOR to DFW for my ILS. It’s been a while, so I might be mangling some of those acronyms. I can’t flight sim hotdog like I used to. But I remember actually caring what any given toggle did. I look at that panel up there, and I want to look closer at the buttons, and I want to know what that button does.
Finally, it’s amazing because it’s an amalgam of avionics over the decades. In the 2000s, Endeavour was refitted with glass cockpit displays for many of her analog gauges. Basically, some of the dials, switches, and levers were either replaced or their functions were duplicated with iPads. The cool blue screens in that image co-exist with all the analog frippery of the 80s and 90s. And if you go to the GigaPan site, you can zoom in and read every label, admire every texture, and all but hear the decisive click of flipping the LOOP 2 BYPASS from MAN INCR to DECR or turning the S-BAND PM ANTENNA from UR FWD to UL AFT.
Guilded, my weekly Guild Wars columns, continue apace over at Gamespy! Check out last week’s entry on the joys of cooking, and this week’s entry on what’s so great about Guild Wars 2’s storyline. Yes, Guild Wars 2 has a great storyline. Several in fact, but not the way you might expect.
The hunter Gareth makes dolyak jerky, but he’s also a single father. His wife is away making her legacy. Gareth insists she’ll be home one day with scars, stories, and trophies. The implication is that something darker has happened and he isn’t ready to acknowledge it, but the point is that he’s got his hands full watching his three kids. The last stranger he enlisted to help lost his right foot. They found it on the roof a week later. Adventures in babysitting.
Guilded appears on Fridays at Gamespy.
Jon Shafer joins Jason McMaster for a trip to the Tokyo Jungle. You can bet Axl Rose never had to deal with an angry Pomeranian in a fencing mask. Jason professes his love for Dishonored and both gentlemen agree that it’s a fine week to kill alien invaders in XCOM.
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If you bought Elemental or pre-ordered Fallen Enchantress, you’ve been able to play the beta of Stardock’s fantasy strategy game for some time now. It’s been exciting stuff, with inventive twists that make it far more than just a fantasy skinned Civ. But since it’s been a beta, it necessarily involved that constant nagging sensation of “wait, is this the way it’s supposed to work?” or “will they change that?” or “well, I’m sure this will be different in the final version…”. Now that Stardock has announced an Official Release Date, that all changes on October 23.
Furthermore, we’ll finally get a look at what Stardock has in mind for Fallen Enchantress’ story-driven campaign mode. The Galactic Civilizations games similarly tried to spin out stories over successive scenarios, which always seemed odd to me in a richly detailed 4X game that will tell its own story anyway.
I can maybe learn to live with the missing hyphen in XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the latter day update of X-Com. Especially since developer Firaxis seems to have simultaneously nailed and updated what made X-Com great. I’ve also been playing a canny iPad clone of/homage to the original X-Com called Aliens vs Humans, which reminds me how slow and intentionally frustrating and meticulous and tense and even sadistically user-hostile X-Com was back in the day. Aliens vs Humans doesn’t shy away from any of this. But Firaxis clearly wants to present the X-Com fundamentals without alienating folks who weren’t dinking around with AUTOEXEC.BAT files and manuals and the punishing trial and error of choosing between progress and permadeath. The differences between X-Com and XCOM strike me as the difference between great movies in the 70s and great movies today. They did things back then that they just don’t do today. It’s the same with games, and that’s not a criticism so much as an observation.
But I do draw the line at the lack of a UFOpedia. What kind of X-Com merely has a “database”? “UFO Database”? Really, Firaxis? Fortunately, I’m playing on XCOM the PC, so surely a mod is on the way.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYkuZ9zf18A
The new XCOM comes out this week, as well as Arkane Studio’s Thiefly RPG, Dishonored. Could this week be the peak of 2012’s holiday wallet threat?
But wait, there’s more! Atlus releases what looks like an ambitious JARPG — Japanese action RPG — for the Nintendo 3DS called Code of Princess. It’s about time I offload some of my recent action RPG habit to the DS. Cyanide transitions from Blood Bowl and Game of Thrones to Of Orcs and Men, an RPG in which you play an orc with a goblin sidekick. Kalypso releases a pirates and merchants strategy game called Port Royale 3. Fable and Harry Potter show up for the Kinect, if you’re into Fable, Harry Potter, or the Kinect as much as the actual people in the above video. All this and yet there are still only 24 hours in the day, some of which have to be spent sleeping, eating, and working?
We never thought we’d see the day all three of us are disappointed by a Paul Thomas Anderson movie. Spoiler, I guess. We make up for it by gushing enthusiastically about Pitch Perfect during the 3×3 for best use of props. It starts at the 42-minute mark.
Next week: Argo
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The argument about whether or not games are art is often just a plea for games not to be ridiculed, and instead to be treated as serious endeavors. I usually avoid it, because I think it’s a misplaced argument, and far too defensive a posture to take about something that shouldn’t cause anyone any embarrassment in the first place. But there must be something to it, because I keep running into it, sometimes in the weirdest places.
After the jump, I run into it in a boardgame about Colombian cocaine trafficking. Continue reading →
Resident Evil 6 has some, uh, unique approaches to multiplayer. What other games stand out for their new and different approaches to multiplayer? Also, don’t miss Tom Chick’s exclusive review of FIFA Soccer 13 and Jason McMaster’s return to the olden days of 2.5D gaming.
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Bait is everything wrong with modern horror movies. It doesn’t know how dumb it is, the cast is terrible, and the CG is soulless.
The premise is, in fact, not supposed to be a joke. A tsunami floods a supermarket. Then a shark swims into the supermarket, trapping some survivors on top of shelves and in a submerged car in the parking garage. In a way, it reminded me of Tremors, which I’ve just rewatched. In both movies, people are trapped while something unlikely swims around beneath them (Bait and Tremors both have the besieged survivors attempting a fishing trap for the monster). Unlike Tremors, which was mostly a comedy, Bait has no idea that it’s dumb. Except for a few scenes of unfunny comic relief, Bait takes itself entirely seriously. If Bait doesn’t let me laugh with it, I will instead laugh at it.
The cast of Bait isn’t so much a cast as an intended demographic. Lead actor Xavier Samuel, who was perfectly cast as a lobotomy victim in another Australian horror movie called The Loved One, is certainly pretty and pretty vacant. He is exactly the wrong actor to establish the backstory and to carry the emotional weight. Yes, Bait thinks it has emotional weight. Don’t ask. At some point in the last twenty years, horror movies were overrun by dumb good-looking teenagers. Tremors, released in 1990, has no teenagers. In fact, its supposed college student was played by a 30-year-old actress.
But everyone in Bait is forgettable and disposable, even when they’re played by good actors like Julian McMahon (one of the leads in Nip/Tuck and the villain in the Fantastic Four movie) and Dan Wyllie (hilarious and memorable as the family lawyer in Animal Kingdom). Tremors is mostly carried by Fred Ward and Kevin Bacon goofing around. But I’d forgotten how adorable it is watching cute little Reba McEntire shoot guns, especially the way she screws up her face like she’s never fired a gun before. Or maybe she’s just trying to look grim. Whatever the case, it’s adorable. And you can’t beat a line like, “You didn’t get penetration even with the elephant gun!” I can listen to Reba McIntyre pretend to talk about guns all day. But I couldn’t wait for the models/actors in Bait to get eaten so they’d stop talking. Not that they do. Too many modern horror movies are too unwilling to kill many of their victims.
The CG in Bait is entirely divorced from the filming. The underwater scenes have no sense for how much room is actually in the flooded supermarket. Instead, it’s just random footage of a CG shark in deep water. Consider that image up there of the shark breaching to eat one of its victims. How is it supposed to leap that far out of water that shallow? Bait doesn’t care. And even though Tremors looks cheap, it comes from a whole different era when you could almost see the love that went into practical effects. Tremors almost literally uses sock puppets for its monster. I find it tremendously endearing to imagine some guy sticking his hand up into a latex tentacle puppet. I don’t find it so endearing to imagine the employees at a contracted visual effects studio at their keyboards.
Bait is available for video on demand, including Amazon Instant View.
Tonight’s Presidential candidate debate will be the first of three. The focus of this one, broadcast from Denver, will be domestic policy. Are the closing of Guantanamo and outsourcing jobs technically domestic issues? Listen to find out! Next week is the VP debate that no one cares about, followed by two more Presidential debates. A catch-all town hall format debate is on the 16th and a foreign policy debate is on the 22nd. You can watch or hear them pretty much wherever you want — television, radio, or the online stream of your choice — but Xbox Live is hoping to entice you by pestering you with questions while you watch.
Throughout the debate, the Xbox LIVE community (Xbox LIVE gold membership required) will be able to weigh in with their opinions by responding to real-time poll questions about the candidate’s performances, their responses to questions and views on issues. Participants will be able to view poll results of the Xbox LIVE audience throughout the evening…. Xbox users can access and participate in this interactive television experience directly through the Xbox LIVE dashboard.
Some of the polling questions were submitted via Twitter by random joes like me. I sent in “Whose Bad Lip Reading Video is funniner, Barack’s or Mitt’s?” Which is a trick question, really, since Obama has only one Bad Lip Reading video, but Romney has two. Why do you think that is?
But wait, if that sort of intelligent commentary isn’t incentive enough, there’s more!
As a bonus, Xbox LIVE users who watch three of the four debates will be awarded with a Halo 4 Warrior Armor avatar.
The debate begins tonight at 6pm Pacific.
“This is just like Raccoon City all over again,” someone says in Resident Evil 6. I’m not sure who it was. Chris? Leon? Doug? Kevin? But when someone invoked Raccoon City, the place where the series was bogged down for so long before breaking out into Spain, Africa, and decent gameplay, I couldn’t have agreed more. Yes, this is just like Raccoon City all over again: stilted, awkward, ridiculous, embarrassing, tedious. Except for the parts where it’s like Call of Duty, which are equally stilted, awkward, ridiculous, embarrassing, and tedious, but with more NPC soldiers milling about. Resident Evil 6 is thoroughly oblivious to so many of the things that make a good game these days.
After the jump, slow boat to China Continue reading →
