This week we talk about the aftermath of Hurricane Halo and the detritus left behind. We also talk about the fate of THQ and their stock, what’s inside Peter Molyneux’s Curiosity, whether Need for Speed: Most Wanted is better than Forza: Horizon, the part of Assassin’s Creed 3 that you’re missing, and just what the heck Sound Shapes is. Because, pictured.
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Apparently, there was some sort of midnight launch event for Halo 4 back in June that afforded Halo fans (pictured) the opportunity to take pictures five months before the game even came out. Some of them revealed an inclination to pretend to shoot their moms.
Seriously, though, these are pretty darn adorable, or at least awkwardly endearing in that “brother, I can dig it” way. As the saying goes, the golden age of sci-fi — and Halo! — is twelve.
The latest Guilded is basically my to-do list now that I’ve hit the level cap. Read it at Gamespy.
As part of their Halo 4 launch week coverage, 1up asked me to write an article on the history of the Halo series. Has it really been ten years? It feels like longer.
Click here for five things Bungie did right, and five things Bungie did wrong.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=PHh7JtKFr_0#t=100s
After two seasons of about 25% classic zombie apocalypse and 75% episodic soap operatics, I went into the third season of The Walking Dead with a half-hearted “might as well” attitude. I might have even sighed tiredly. But after last night’s episode, the fourth in the new season, I couldn’t be happier with how the series is turning out.
I thought there would be no room for the uniquely dire demands of a zombie apocalypse on television. Time and again, AMC has proved me wrong with their willingness to resort to over-the-top gore, to kill off significant cast members, and to give the end of the world its due in a way that Falling Skies and Revolution never will. It’s the difference between networks with a “B” and a “C” in their names, and everyone else.
Futhermore, a TV show has the luxury to trace character arcs more precisely, more languidly, with more detail than a 90-minute movie. But too often these character arcs take a back seat to the episodic tendency to reset to zero, or the sanctity of the cast, or the focus grouping of the demographic, or TV’s tendency towards telegenics over talent, or whatever unholy forces so often make a series forgettable and safe.
Consider how rarely TV shows know what to do with growing children. For a variety of reasons, it’s a tricky proposition to cast a child in an ongoing series, particularly a successful one. Poor RJ Mitte in Breaking Bad has faded sullenly into back bedrooms. I cringe at the out-of-his-depth child actor who plays Manny on Modern Family. And who knows whatever happened to Walt on Lost. Kids grow up. Maybe they aren’t good actors. Maybe the storyline doesn’t have room to involve them. Maybe the show is busy catering to the adults.
But last night, one of Walking Dead’s most dramatic twists wasn’t what happened during the plot. That was staggering, to be sure, and another sign that AMC has the ruthlessness needed for a zombie apocalypse. But to me, the most dramatic twist was how Walking Dead doubled down on its confidence in apple-cheeked Chandler Riggs, the child actor who plays Carl Grimes. Zombie apocalypses have the dire tradition of never playing it safe with children, living or undead, starting in the basement of the house in Night of the Living Dead and now going all the way to the boiler room of the prison in Walking Dead.
This time, there are no people in Need for Speed: Most Wanted. I don’t just mean the absence of pedestrians on the generic city’s sidewalks and in its parks. There is no mute doofus protagonist. There are no trash talking rivals. There is no pandering appeal to car culture with sexy chicks’ midriffs and gruff mechanics and a fast talking sidekick. DJ Atomica doesn’t explain the modes to you. This is a game about cars and only cars, racing wildly and recklessly around a huge generic city brimming with reckless nonsense to do. It has focus, purpose, intent. It has the clarity that any good arcade racer needs, even (especially?) if it’s going to play out in an open world.
Feel the need for Need for Speed, after the jump Continue reading →
This week, the men with the tin throats discuss The Man with the Iron Fists. Then, at the 42-minute mark, we discuss our favorite letter writing in movies.
Next week: Skyfall
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The Mammoth is glorious. This enormous wheeled vehicle is like a cross between a sandcrawler and that RV from Damnation Alley. It’s got a big-ass gun on top. Surely new Halo developer 343 Industries knows their Chekhov. When you introduce a big-ass gun at the start of a mission, you must fire it by the end of the mission. Maybe I’ll get to fire it. I hopped on board and couldn’t wait for the mission to start. This was going to be good. Probably better than that giant mechanical spider mission in an earlier Halo. Obviously better than the mondo truck mission in Gears of War. Maybe it will rival the crazy over-the-top sandcrawler sequence in Lost Planet 2!
“Chief, better get a jetpack,” one of the ancillary characters tells me.
A jetpack? What for? Why do I want a jetpack? Oh, in case I fall off. Good thinking!
The Mammoth starts rolling. It wends slowly through a narrow area barely wide enough to accommodate it. It’s like trying to park a Hummer in a space for a compact car. I get to shoot at about ten Covenant aliens off to the left. Then the Mammoth stops. I’m told I have to get off and go play Halo in an area to the right. I play a little Halo. The Mammoth waits for me patiently. Now it’s time to get back on the Mammoth. Then it wends its way a little farther down the very narrow path. Then it stops again for me to play a little more Halo.
This is how it plays out. The Mammoth will never fire its bad-ass gun. It will never drive anywhere other than along this closed in canyon. It’s an oversized bus taking me to bits of the same old Halo I’ve been playing for ten years. It is a massive fake-out, like everything else new in Halo 4: the Spartan ops feature, the storyline, the ancient evil awakening, the new multiplayer. Ponderous, familiar, and disappointing.
After the jump, what’s a Halo 4? Continue reading →
The Political Machine 2012 edition of Tom vs Bruce is now live for early access supporters.
Bruce: Unless your political party is named Viet Minh or Khmer Rouge, someone has to pay the bills. In The Political Machine, you make money by a combination of building up an extensive network of headquarters and upgrading them constantly, and fundraising in various states. The bigger the state, the more money you make. As the biggest state, California commands all our attention. These solicitations are based on diminishing returns, though, so by the end of the game both candidates will likely be scrounging for quarters in laundromats in Compton.
If you’re an early access supporter, you should have your password by now. If you’re not one of those, we’d invite you to become one by donating $18 or more to our Paypal account at tomvsbruce.com, which will get you early access to The Political Machine as well as the next eight articles. Otherwise, we hope you’ll check out the article when it goes public on Wednesday. In other words, when it’s no longer relevant!
“Are you making this up?,” someone asks when looking at a picture of the source of an outbreak in Maryland detailed in The Bay. “This looks Photoshopped.”
Mockumentaries are a sub-genre of found footage in which the narrator — in this case a thoroughly blank actress playing a local TV reporter — explains what’s going on while the story is cobbled together from Skype calls, iPhone videos, Google image searches, text chat, police dashcams, security cameras, and web sites. The wind-up is tense enough, but like many horror movies, it falls apart as it shows and exhaustively explains the monster.
The stuff about the Coast Guard, FEMA, the CDC, and Homeland Security failing to protect or help anyone is far more relevant and horrifying than anything that creeps out of Chesapeake Bay because of waste from a chicken farm. But this is a movie where the government response and cover-up is just an afterthought. Instead, at the top of the agenda is ick factor, similar to Eli Roth’s flesh eating bacteria movie, Cabin Fever. Plus a couple of obligatory jump scares with blaring musical cues despite the fact that we’re watching found footage. Nothing undercuts found footage quite like a carefully calculated musical cue.
The Bay was directed by Barry Levinson. It was produced by Oren Peli, the director of the original Paranormal Activity who’s been slathering his name on bad horror ever since. It was also produced by the Strause brothers, whose digital effects studio Hydraulx has been instrumental in movies as diverse as Battle Los Angeles and Take Shelter. But The Bay plays like a product of the collected talent behind movies like Wag the Dog, Sphere, and Skyline, and the TV show The River.
At least it’s better than a similar movie in which Val Kilmer plays a scientist who joins his daughter to fight prehistoric bugs thawing out in the Arctic. If you guessed such a movie is called The Thaw, you win. One of the most memorable parts of Gina Kolata’s book on the flu epidemic of the early 20th century — if you guessed the book is called Flu, you win again — details contemporary scientists digging up flu victims who were buried in permafrost in Alaska. They needed samples of the 1918 flu virus and hoped to find them intact in the frozen corpses. But they had to consider whether this might unleash a new epidemic. Spoiler: it didn’t. But because disease and parasites are often unseen and misunderstood, they occupy for many of us a place where ghosts and goblins would have been centuries ago. The Bay works at this level for a while, but in the end, a microbudget movie about throbbing pustules is just a microbudget movie about throbbing pustules.
The Bay is available now on video on demand (Amazon.com link here).
I’m an MMO dilettante. I’ve played a lot of them. But I can count on one hand the number of MMOs I’ve played in which I’ve leveled a character to a number higher than my age. Make of that what you will. And I would still have my thumb, pinky, and ring finger left over. The point is that I wasn’t sure what to expect in Guild Wars 2 after the ultimate ding.
There isn’t any more ceremony when you hit level 80 than when you hit level 2. In fact, there’s more ceremony when you hit level 2 because at that point the game is still keen to explain stuff. But by level 80, it knows you’ve pretty much figured everything out. So you’re liable to not even notice when you hit level 80. Nothing changes. You don’t look any different. No angels sing hosannas. You don’t ascend to demigodhood. Just another splashy light effect, no different from the effect you’ve seen 79 other times.
When it happened to me, I was busy clearing out the icy waters of Frostgorge Sound, diving underneath one of those majestic kodan settlements that’s half iceberg, half massive sailing ship. Me and another player, a level 79 guardian named Quite Eyes, had hooked up in that way Guild Wars 2 players hook up. We were just tagging along with one another, helping each other out, neither of us leading, neither of us following, one of us eventually inviting the other into a party even though it’s not at all necessary. Remarkably enough, we both hit level 80 from killing a veteran undersea assassin called a largo. We swam to shore and stood there at the edge of the sea.
We looked out over the water. I imagined we were catching our breath. I imagined our breath steaming in the cold. For all I know he was dinking around in his inventory with whatever bone fragments or scales he’d collected. But in those places in an MMO where my imagination fills the gaps in the actual game, we were like two guys who’d just finished a marathon or reached a peak at the same time.
He dove back in the water after a moment, but I excused myself.
Thanks for the party, I said. It was one to remember.
That large chunk of Detroit steel above you is a M103. It was designed in the 1950s to destroy Soviet armor in a general European war that thankfully never happened. Prior to playing World of Tanks, I had never heard of the M103. Then, when I first heard of it in the upcoming patch notes, I didn’t like it. Now I love it.
After the jump: How I learned to love the M103. Continue reading →
http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=Yf_gTmbxU60
The above IGN video review of Black Ops 2 was originally posted here, where there is now only the crater of a legal threat from Activision. Fortunately, it was reposted for your viewing pleasure. However, if you look closely at the score at the 3:18 mark, you’ll see the video review is obviously a fake. There’s no way Black Ops 2 is anything less than a 9.4 at IGN.
Thanks Squee!
