Chris: Here’s a movie that I had figured out from the start. The Haunting Of Julia is clearly going to be a very British drizzly afternoon stately haunted house movie. Put on a spot of tea, have a scone, and settle in for 90 minutes of perfectly telegraphed nonsense about seeing the ghost of a dead loved one and having a bittersweet epiphany about letting go and moving on. All I really knew about this movie going in was that it was based on one of Peter Straub’s earliest novels. I couldn’t believe he’d write something so mawkish and obvious and gentle.
After the jump, he didn’t… Continue reading →
There are a few things missing from Grand Theft Auto V. A playable ingame MMO, for instance. Why can’t Franklin sit in front of a computer to grind away at some fictional fantasy world? I’m not at all joking. I am 100% serious. After all, he spent enough time and money with an online self-help program he found in GTA V’s fake internet. You guys did that bit, right? I can’t be the only one who fell for it. Spoiler: I got a T-shirt for my trouble.
But the main thing missing from Grand Theft Auto V is the ability to run a drug empire, similar to what you could do in Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars. Trevor has the equipment, material resources, and personnel to cook meth and I’m sure some of those layabouts in Shady Shores would be eager customers. Furthermore, the TV show Breaking Bad means cooking meth is something we all want to do. But for whatever reason, Rockstar has denied us. Maybe with DLC.
Until then, there’s Clicking Bad, a full-blown meth empire simulation that doesn’t quite offer the same level of graphics as Grand Theft Auto V.
(Thanks, Kelly Wand!)
I wouldn’t classify myself as the type of person who feels graphics make or break games, but one of the best things about Pokemon X/Y is how the upgraded visuals and changes to visual style make the game feel so much more alive. Don’t get me wrong, past Pokemon games always had their own cute touches, but for all of those touches, lately they were still DS games shoved on to the 3DS’s screen. There’s only so much you can work with there, even with the expanded real estate of the 3DS XL.
After the jump, switching systems and switching styles. Continue reading →
We got to the end of Starship Week but still had a day left, which I’ll chalk up to the weird time disconnect that happens during faster-than-light travel. Kind of like when you travel through space for six millenia and when you get back you find out they’re still not out of Final Fantasy sequels. In any case, it leaves me a free day to explain that the moral of Starship Week can be found entirely in one story I could have told you at the beginning and saved you a whole bunch of time and screenshots.
After the jump, I hope you don’t feel mad or cheated. Continue reading →
Nvidia debuted two new PC gaming technologies today that could make gamers swoon. GeForce ShadowPlay is a free game capture application that records up to 4GBs of footage on Windows 7 and an “unlimited” amount on Windows 8 in manual mode, or the last ten minutes of gameplay in Shadow Mode when you press a hotkey.
ShadowPlay leverages the H.264 hardware encoder found on GeForce GTX 600 and 700 Series graphics cards to record 1920×1080, 60 frames per second. All DirectX 9 and newer games are supported. In comparison to software solutions that hammer the CPU, ShadowPlay’s hardware solution has an approximate 5-10% performance impact when using the max-quality 50 mbps recording mode, and by saving to automatically-encoded and compressed H.264 .mp4 files, ShadowPlay avoids the disk-thrashing, humongous, multi-gigabyte files associated with other gameplay recording applications.
The other new technology announced today was Nvidia G-SYNC, which is a separate hardware module that can be used in monitors to reportedly make stuttering and screen-tearing disappear. Epic’s Tim Sweeney seemed to like it.
“It’s the biggest leap forward in gaming monitors since we went from standard definition to high-def.”
The separate module will be available for gamers to purchase and install in their existing monitors later this year, but Nvidia hopes to have OEM pre-installed units in monitors by next year.
I don’t know if Sony will win the Console Warz with this detail, but it’s cool to see the branding used on the tiniest component of the PlayStation 4. German tech site, Computer Bild, found these screws during their analysis of a PS4 devkit. Adorable! I guess you could argue that any Phillips-head screw in the Xbox One matches their brand as well.
Tropico 4 has a new Apocalypse DLC for PC and Xbox 360 today. Along with a Nuclear Shelter building that provides faction bonuses, and a snazzy Hazmat suit for your leader, the Apocalypse DLC adds a “How I Learned to Love the Bomb” mission.
The Cold War has turned hot and nuclear conflict is inevitable. Prepare the island nation of Tropico for the coming apocalypse and carefully choose which resources and factions to save from certain eradication.
El Presidente demands all nubile women join him in the shelter to wait for the mushroom clouds to clear! They will be humbly grateful for the opportunity to repopulate the Earth!
Microsoft is extending the Games with Gold program indefinitely. The program allows Xbox Live Gold members to download and keep two games a month for free. According to Microsoft’s Xbox Wire post, the free games offer has proven popular enough to keep around for the foreseeable future.
“At E3 2013, we launched Games with Gold as a limited-time program to thank our Xbox Live Gold members. Within that short period of time, we’ve seen an overwhelming response, with more than 120 million hours played with Games with Gold titles. Today, as a part of the “Week of Xbox Live,” we’re excited to announce that we are making Games with Gold an ongoing benefit for Xbox Live Gold members on Xbox 360.”
Previous games given away in Games with Gold have included Rainbow Six: Vegas, Crackdown, Assassin’s Creed II, and Fable 3. The current game offered to Gold subscribers is Halo 3. Unlike Sony’s similar Instant Game Program for PlayStation Plus members, Games with Gold allows gamers to keep any game they’ve downloaded if their subscription lapses. Microsoft has not said if Games with Gold will continue with the Xbox One.
Chris: From the very beginning of the film, you can visualize the pitch meeting that created The Omen. It feels like the kind of movie created by clueless studio execs who thought the credits rolled on Rosemary’s Baby just when it was getting good, or who felt like what The Exorcist really needed was more quasi-religious mumbo jumbo. Everything about it feels like a derivative idea we’ve seen executed more skillfully before. I was ready to snark this movie up and down the street.
After the jump, the sincerest form of flattery Continue reading →
Of all the starships in history, the Enterprise is the only one I can think of which has had such a long, consistent, and well-documented life. It started out in the 1960s as a toy suspended on wires and progressed through the 1980s and 90s as a more elaborate toy, to reach its present existence as a computer’s realization of its artists’ imaginations. Along the way, it died, and was reborn, and the emotions provoked by those events and its subsequent spawn form an almost family history that is shared by a fan base that has established its own lineages. Its captaincy is almost a royal succession, and the different courtiers all have their allegiances, but throughout it all, the throne itself is never in doubt. Because the entire timeline has taken place aboard one form or another of that talismanic ship.
After the jump, that darned ship. Continue reading →
It’s pretty easy to be dismissive of Zen Studio’s latest pinball tables. Check it out:
Zen Pinball continues their tradition of milking franchises with three more Star Wars tables. These include a Darth Vader table with traditional ramp-based gameplay. It opens with the infamous “noooooo” scene and continues with the Sith Lord commending your performance with basso profundo observations such as “fantastic”, “awesome”, and “absolutely marvelous”. Okay, maybe not that last one, but that’s probably because I haven’t gotten enough points yet. It’s a very open table, a very red table, and a very “Uh, really? Why?” table. You also get a Return of the Jedi table that iterates on the excellent Empire Strikes Back table in the last Star Wars pack. But just as Return of the Jedi is a pale shadow of Empire Strikes Back, the Return of the Jedi table is a pale shadow of the Empire Strike Back table, featuring Ewok collection, a terrible Princess Leia impersonator, and a mission in which R2-D2 and C-3PO have to walk to the door of Jabba’s palace. George Lucas and maybe even Richard Marquand would be proud. 2 stars.
See? How easy that was?
But, after the jump, there is another. Continue reading →
Every generation of Pokemon games adds new creatures to the mix to the point where the total number of Pokemon is over seven hundred. Take a moment and think about that. Seven hundred different character designs, many of which have been updated with new animations and new visual touches as the years have gone on. Can you think of any other game franchise that sports over 700 character models? I can’t. Heck, I’m happy if I get maybe two dozen different enemy types in a game. Sure, not all of them are going to be winners, but even if only half of them were good, that would still be over three hundred winners. That’s a heck of a lot of pocket monsters.
After the jump, what good are new creatures if you can’t train them? Continue reading →
I was talking with a colleague about spaceship games, and told him I was particularly interested in games where you had to do things aboard a starship. He came up with a nice list for me that I’ve added at the end of this post. All of these involve being aboard a starship in some way.
But there’s one game that no one remembers anymore, and that you haven’t heard of either, and that’s reason enough to wrap up the week talking about it.
Because, after the jump, it tells a story that gets to the very heart of Starship Week. Continue reading →
Warner Bros. Games has patched Batman: Akham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City to remove Games for Windows Live and Securom from the PC versions of the games. Keys purchased through retail sources can be activated through Steam. Just like when BioShock 2 was updated to remove GFWL, everyone with a valid key will get the GOTY editions of these games with all the DLC!
Dear Batman Arkham Fans – Microsoft has begun the process of closing down Windows Live services over the next year. To make sure there is no interrupted service, we will be moving the game to Steam for verification and update services for both the Base and GOTY versions of Batman Arkham Asylum and Batman Arkham City.
Both games are currently on sale through Steam to celebrate.
In Beyond: Two Souls, Ellen Page plays a creepy version of the character model of Ellie from The Last of Us. She has access to something called an iDen, which has a number of apps. It has a wall hack app. It has an app to divert the flow of flashbacks into her face so that she can see them. It has a medical app that you’ll almost never use. It has an app to tump over items that are scripted to tump over. It has a mindhack app that can mindhack about 1% of the characters you meet. That’s the problem with the iDen: it only works where the game developers say it can work.
For instance, mysterious things happen at a house and the Ellen Page character model is told not to look outside. Under no circumstance. Don’t look outside. Just don’t. Don’t even think about it. Naturally, this means she’s supposed to look outside. So you fire up the iDen’s wall hack app only to discover that suddenly the walls to the outside of the house are impervious to wall hacking. Oh, sure, you can still wall hack the walls to adjoining rooms, no problem. But certain walls have now become magically immune to the iDen. So now you have to figure out the puzzle some other way. Except that it’s not a puzzle at all, since the solution is to go to the front door and open it. Are games getting dumber, or am I getting smarter? Wait, I think I mean the other way around.
After the jump, the iDen explained Continue reading →
