Ronimo games is proud to announce the next Awesomenaut in collaboration with Total Biscuit, who did some awesome voice acting for: Vinnie & Spike.
The kindest thing I can say about the new character is that it’s no more annoying than Jessica Chobot in Mass Effect 3.
Developer 2×2 Games deserves an award for the most literal name for an expansion pack ever conceived. Unity of Command: Red Turn is a 17-scenario campaign for the Soviet Union in World War II. It’s the sequel to Unity of Command: Stalingrad Campaign, which I called an excellent introduction for new wargamers (because I am one).
Something bothers me right away about Red Turn. At the end of Stalingrad Campaign, the Soviets go on a long campaign to drive the Germans back from Stalingrad. Now the Soviets get to take another huge turn again. The Axis only get two measly scenarios this time around. That hardly seems fair. I suppose Germany must get two turns in a row later in the war. I’m not sure.
No matter. The most important thing about a new wargame is what the new unit icons look like. Red Turn adds a few attractive new models to show the progress of the war. Let’s take a look.
After the jump, feast your eyes on these novelty-sized upper torsos. Continue reading →
Overrated is a loaded term. It looks good in a headline. It’s often used for no purpose other than to goad a reaction. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful. When I call a game overrated, I don’t mean it’s bad, that the reviews were wrong, that the people who liked it were dopes, or even that I didn’t like it. It just means I’m surprised more people weren’t more critical, that the conversation wasn’t more often about ways the game could have been better.
After the jump, the most overrated games of 2012 Continue reading →
It took Zen long enough to get my beloved Paranormal table from the Playstation 3 into my Xbox Live collection where it belonged. I was grateful. I was content. I was then willing to let go of the four core tables for Zen Pinball on the Playstation, which must have been the casualties of some sort of platform-specific deal. Tesla, Shaman, Eldorado, and V12 were the exclusive properties of Sony (and eventually the Nintendo 3DS). I could visit them, but I would never be able to embrace them.
But like hostage victims released many years later, those four tables will be available tomorrow on Xbox Live. You’ll find them listed as “Zen Classics”, available for ten bucks. I can finally take the yellow ribbons off my 360 controller cords.
Last year, Rift stuck Christmas decorations all over the place, including presents and Christmas trees out in the open world. It was cute if you’re into the whole “let’s drizzle holiday themes over everything” approach. I don’t recall if there was some sort of Rift fiction about these Christmas trees and presents. I don’t recall much about Rift’s fiction at any rate. And I haven’t played World of Warcraft enough to know whether the winter snowball fights and presents and whatnot have some sort of unique place in Azeroth other than “just because”. I imagine DC Universe will have Christmas in Gotham and Metropolis because Christmas actually exists in the real Gotham and Metropolis.
But I like how ArenaNet’s fictional holidays — which I believe have been carried over from the original Guild Wars — feel like they’ve bubbled up from inside the world of Guild Wars rather than being imposed from the outside simply because of the real world. First there was the Mad King for Halloween, and now there’s the asura Tixx in a massive golem-shaped zeppelin, which will visit various cities before coming to rest at Lion’s Arch. Wintersday — not Christmas, mind you! — starts this weekend. Check out the schedule here, with dates and places for the zeppelin’s tour.
Calling a game disappointing arguably has more to do with me than the game itself. Disappointment isn’t an inherent quality. It can’t exist without some sort of expectation in the first place. In many cases, these games are sequels, or the creations of developers with proven track records, or entries in established genres. But for various reasons, the central fact about these games is that I had hoped to like them better.
After the jump, I’m not mad… Continue reading →
Before we can get to the fight for Stalingrad or whatnot, there is the small question of Sevastopol. This naval base on the Crimean peninsula, famous as the site of the focus of the Crimean War in 1855, was the home of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet in 1941 and stood as a fortress through a 250-day siege until it finally fell to the Germans in 1942. In War in the East’s Operation Blue scenario, the Soviets get 50 points for every turn they control the city. That’s a lot of points, so I need to make an all-out assault on the first turn to limit the damage to my final victory.
After the jump, Germany made an all-out assault of their own. Continue reading →
This week is our hopefully annual “We love Lynn Shelton” episode. We discuss the non-studio comedies Humpday and Your Sister’s Sister, directed by Miss Shelton. At the 53-minute mark, we mount up for this week’s 3×3 to consider whether bicycles are awesome or ridiculous.
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Although I’m a bona fide Assassin’s Creed 3 fanboy, it’s a bit of a bummer to see how Assassin’s Creed: Liberation loses something when it’s crammed into the Playstation Vita. This is not a series that takes kindly to be shoved down into a tiny screen. But unlike Vita games that are just direct ports writ small, Liberation is its own creation. And in some ways, that creation is better than Assassin’s Creed 3.
After the jump, seven ways that Liberation beats its bigger sibling Continue reading →
Graham, who posts as Giaddon, joins us to talk Far Cry 3 (not pictured) and to set us straight on all things Twilight. We also discuss Assassin’s Creed 3, Guardians of Middle Earth, Super Hexagon, and Unit 13. And look out, Pocket Tactics. We’re coming for you!
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Here’s some good ol’ boy white trash grindhouse with the slightest whiff of Southern gothic. Its starts off pretty simple. Clayne Crawford (pictured, the unlikely heart of the movie), Travis Fimmel, and Daniel Cudmore are three unbathed violent redneck brothers for hire. Damsel in distress Eva Longoria hires them to get a McGuffin from Billy Bob Thornton. But when the McGuffin happens, Baytown Outlaws takes a strange turn.
Let me digress for a moment. Did you see Hit and Run? Because you should. It’s a collaboration among Dax Shepherd, Kristen Bell, a strong supporting cast, and some truly sexy cars. In Hit and Run, the word “fag” comes up. And even though Hit and Run is a movie seriously in love with the olden days of Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw trying to get away from stuff, it’s also a movie about seriously decent people with modern sensibilities. So the movie’s reaction to the word “fag” is really sweet on a couple of levels.
Baytown Outlaws — in which the brothers freely call each other faggots, as you’d expect — does for “retard” what Hit and Run did for “fag”. What a lovely touch of dignity in a white trash grindhouse action movie. It even allows its characters to progress from shooting people in the faces to pondering the nature of God before shooting a bunch of bad guys who have climbed into trees for no other reason than to get shot out of them.
Not to give Baytown Outlaws too much credit. It’s got its share of stumbles. It’s a minor crime to squander Zoe Bell. She’s best known as Uma Thurman’s stunt double from Kill Bill who got to be onscreen and on the hood of a car in Death Proof. Here she’s little more than a body for a costume and a trigger finger for an absurd shotgun. How hard is it to do a good action scene in which a bunch of sexy whore assassins — the movie even calls them that — fight it out with the heroes in a roadhouse? Apparently too hard for Baytown Outlaws, which has been watching a lot of Terminator and Near Dark. But you’ll have to see Rza’s Man with the Iron Fists to see whore assassins done right. There’s still more ridiculousness in store as several more rounds of McGuffin chasers pile into this particular picaresque clown car of a movie.
While Baytown Outlaws might not have the budget to shoot its Road Warrior sequence with the spectacle it deserves, at least it can afford exactly the right music. And it has a few good actors beyond the three brothers. Andre Braugher and Billy Bob Thornton are slumming it, but the stars of Armageddon and Poseidon are no strangers to slumming it. Although Braugher is obviously enjoying himself, Thornton just seems annoyed he was cast. I guess it’s a character choice.
Baytown Outlaws is available on video on demand. Support Quarter to Three by watching it from this Amazon link.
Bruce Geryk and I appeared on the most recent Three Moves Ahead podcast to discuss solitaire boardgaming, which is something I mostly know from my iPad. But I was glad to get to talk about a really cool boardgame called Nemo’s War, published by Victory Point Games. It’s a real eyesore, but it’s one of my favorite examples of solitaire boardgaming, above and beyond anything on the iPad. Actually, why isn’t Nemo’s War on the iPad, where it could get a little production value?
By the way, that image up there was posted by Blake Phillips on Board Game Geek. It’s how he spent his time during a power outage that lasted several days. If that’s not a case for making sure you have a solitaire boardgame in the house along with candles, extra batteries, and bottled water, I don’t know what is.
Before I answer whether Zombie U (I refuse to call it ZombiU) is the best multiplayer game of the year, I am contractually obligated to talk about the single-player. Which is kind of a shame, because I couldn’t care less about the single-player, despite that it’s old-school bullet-by-bullet survival horror in the tradition of the original Alone in the Dark. It’s also is a bit like Dark Souls in that you’re gradually pushing forward into scary terra incognita, unlocking shortcuts to new areas, frequently punished by a permadeath system that means you can’t get too attached to your skill upgrades. You get to explore this world six bullets at a time, because that’s how many bullets you get each time you respawn with a new character. Six. You’ll be using the cricket bat a lot. How very English in a smarmy Shaun of the Dead way.
After the jump, isn’t this one of those new-fangled Wii U games? Continue reading →
Phantoms is forty five minutes of made-for-TV-level haunted house horror, and then forty-five minutes of scientificky sci-fi hoo-ha with soldiers and the dog from The Thing, but an adorable golden lab instead of an inscrutable husky. During the scientificky hoo-ha part, Peter O’Toole — not the sad old man from the movie Venus, but an elder version of the fiery young Peter O’Toole — is yelling at Ben Affleck — not the stridently soulful Hollywood celebrity who made Argo, but the dumbass kid who stumbled into too many leading roles in the 90s.
“This thing is what wiped out the dinosaurs and they were pretty tough fucking customers!” says O’Toole, describing the monster, which is basically sentient primordial tar. Later a bunch of zombies show up to make a zombie tornado that Ben Affleck shoots. Liev Schreiber is one of the minibosses. To beat him, you have to use the shotgun to shoot the syringe into his head.
Rose McGowan sits behind O’Toole, trying various expressions. That’s one of them up there. She doesn’t have any lines during most of the exchanges, which is a shame. I’ve seen Planet Terror about a zillion times. She obviously channeled her Phantoms experience to know how to make bad horror oh-so-good. She spends a lot of Phantoms hanging out in shots where she doesn’t have any dialogue. It’s as if the director — a guy named Joe Chapelle who would go on to work on TV shows including The Wire, which I’ve been told is good — has the presence of mind to know a watchable actor when he casts one. Not that you’d know this from the amount of screen time given to Ben Affleck and someone named Jennifer Going. Miss Going, who I thought was either Joanna Whaley-Kilmer or Ally Sheedy for most of the movie’s running time, has an apt name given her credits since Phantoms.
At the opening of the movie, the title card for Phantoms comes onscreen as follows:
Phantoms
Dean Koontz’s
In that order. Like it just wants to quickly remind you that these aren’t any normal Phantoms. They’re Dean Koontz’s. Based on his book. Dean Koontz’s. Made from his screenplay. Dean Koontz’s. And now you’re about to watch a hilariously incompetent movie. Dean Koontz’s.
Far Cry 2 was one of those rare games with unique vision. It dropped you into a shattered African country controlled by warlords. Everyone with any sense had fled. Even the beasts had fled. The new beasts were the other men with guns. It was frequently quiet and vast in the same way that ruined buildings are quiet and vast. You were racked with malaria. Your guns were often broken. You were miles from where you needed to be. Your rides were rattling dusty jeeps that ran on regular gasoline and needed a tune-up. Your friends weren’t even your friends in the end. It was a broken world of fire, misfires, disease, distance, loneliness, and betrayal. Even the ending sucked.
Understandably, some people wanted a straight-up player-friendly game designed to deliver maximum thrills per minute. They fled Far Cry 2 in droves to enjoy their Saints Rows and Calls of Duty.
After the jump, Ubisoft makes Far Cry 3 for them Continue reading →
