Roberts Space Industries presents the “most popular spaceship” in Star Citizen, The Aurora. It’s the beginner package ship, also available in a sporty “Legionnaire” model that adds cool racing stripes. A sweet paint job makes anything go faster. That’s a scientific fact. The Aurora is like the Ford Focus of space travel. You can use it like a dependable, if bare-bones compact, or you can bling it up so you can hang out with the cool guys in the 7-11 parking lot.
Crowd-funded Star Citizen is supposed to launch in 2014. The game recently celebrated raising over $20 million in pledges.
I can think of a handful of what I consider perfect movies. These aren’t literally perfect movies, of course. I don’t believe in some Platonic ideal movie made manifest. Instead, these are movies where a uniquely talented writer, director, and actors understand each other completely, and they have something relevant to say, and they somehow advance the medium or tell a story that connects with me. I’ve never really thought of videogames on the same level, which is odd, considering how I consistently try to apply the same standards to videogames that I apply to movies and other forms of entertainment. In five or ten years, with enough distance, will I consider Grand Theft Auto V one of those rare perfect games?
After the jump, I’m torn between “ask again later” and “signs point to yes”Continue reading →
Chris: If you ask people to describe the most iconic scenes from The Exorcist, you’ll hear about pea soup, twisting heads, skin writing, and levitation. Those bits are all fine for what they are, and some of them are terrifying. Nothing in the movie though — not one thing — is as scary to me as one little line, uttered by the demon who’s possessed poor little Regan: “Father, could you help an old altar boy?”
We’re still fairly early in the possession at the point of this line. Doctors and specialists have tried to convince Chris MacNeil that her daughter’s problems are medical in nature. We’ve seen evidence to the contrary, but maybe we’re still sort of giving that some thin amount of credence. Even if we do think that there’s something supernatural afoot, maybe we’re trying to bargain that down. It’s the house. It’s the Ouija board. Something. That line — which Father Karras has already heard on a subway platform from a homeless man and uttered in the old man’s voice — turns any mitigation we might try to make of the demonic presence upside down. It suggests and omnipresence or at least omniscience on the part of the entity; it knows what we do and what we say and what we think. The implication of that line is terrifying.
Before Boba Fett became a New Zealand Order of Merit member, he was a growly badass bounty hunter with a penchant for standing in the shadows with his rifle on the crook of his arm. He may have started out as an animated character in the Star Wars Christmas Special, but he became one of the most popular villains in the franchise thanks mostly to little boys’ imaginations. In his signature Mandalorian armor, Fett chased bounties, fought Jedi, and flew one of the most awesome ships to ever grace the silver screen: The Slave I. As any little boy knows, the cooler your ride, the cooler you are.
After the jump, there was a Star Wars Christmas Special?Continue reading →
I tend not to be jealous of people who are good at things that I’m not. I figure that’s just the way it goes. I mean, I’m good at some things, too. However, I make a special exception for artists. I have a great aptitude for thinking of things with none whatsoever for drawing them, so I can only imagine what it would be like to be able to illustrate my own ideas. If I had this and also had game design skills, then I’d be Tom Wham.
Among the many changes to Marvel Heroes since I last played — Why couldn’t it have been this way when it came out? — is the addition of some new heroes. One of them is Emma Frost. With a name like that, I was assuming she could shoot icicle blasts and invoke a frost aura. Stuff like that. Boy, was I wrong.
After the jump, Emma Frost is way too cool for mere iceContinue reading →
Valve’s hardcore multiplayer shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is now even more hardcore thanks to an integrated “GOTV” feature that allows you to check out continuous streams of professional matches. The Watch and Learn update has added a theater which lets players watch their most embarassing defeats and see how real players would’ve done better. Headshot!
“Watch your previous matches to relive your greatest moments, or to see your progress over time and learn from mistakes. Then, jump into an in-progress match and see how the highest ranked CS:GO players approach the game. Not sure which match to watch? Select GOTV Theater and watch a continuous stream of top live matches one after another.”
Most of my matches would be utterly boring to watch. Ninety percent of them would be staring at the weapon menu, stunned with indecision, or trying to read the incidental posters on the walls of the level.
Goodbye, ugly dude with the weird high and tight haircut. Farewell, woman with too high cheekbones and strange smile. You, and many other user-created criminals of Grand Theft Auto V’s online mode are gone forever. According to Rockstar’s update to the stimulus package blog post, characters that have been lost in the recent server hiccups will not be returning. Pour one out for our homies!
“For those asking about their lost characters or rank, those will not be able to be restored so we sincerely hope that this cash stimulus we’re giving out this month will help you get back on your feet or to make your new life in Los Santos & Blaine extra sweet.”
Players will just have to fumble through the awful “family tree” character creator again and fill those empty menu slots. We mourn you, anonymous online hustlers and petty ne’er-do-wells!
This week we’re sufficiently thrilled by Paul Greengrass’ Somali pirate biothriller, starring Tom Hanks, the US Navy, and four dudes woefully unprepared to take on Tom Hanks and the US Navy. At the 43-minute mark, we pitch our combinations of actor, famous character, and director, only to be upstaged by some of the listener picks. Darn listeners.
Tom: I have such a soft spot for this goofy little made-for-ABC-TV movie for a few reason. Partly because I remember being freaked out by these made-for-ABC-TV movies as a kid. There was one about killer ants, where the survivors have to hole up in the attic while ants work their way up from the ground floor. There was another one about the crew of a Coast Guard helicopter who finds a bunch of dead bodies on sailboat adrift in the Bermuda Triangle. Of course, there was Trilogy of Terror, with Karen Black and the Zuni doll. But this is the one I remember most.
After the jump, don’t be afraid of the things you were afraid of when you were a kid?Continue reading →
While the review of Skylanders Swap Force is underway, let’s look at some of the early battle arenas, based on an evening’s play among adults and some adult beverages. These arenas might be more accurately described by their nickname: Skylanders’ horde mode.
Chris: Sometimes movies get lumped into the horror bin but fall short of meeting requirements of the genre. We’ve reviewed a few of those already. Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now is a film that fits the mold, but also has ambition to push past those confines. It wants to be about sorrow and loss, it wants to be a murder mystery, and it never seems to want us to figure out quite exactly which of those things it is.
Tom: This weird little forgettable anthology feels like it was made for English TV. Which doesn’t have to be a bad thing. I can think of a couple of made-for-English-TV presentations that still hold up today: Ghostwatch and the original Woman In Black. But this thing? It just goes to show that even though we’re out of the age of grampa movies, we’ve got a whole new style of clunky to contend with.
John Carpenter’s Dark Star (1974) not only featured the best spaceship ever, it was also the most influential science fiction movie from the ’70’s with “star” in the title. Its design not only prefigured George Lucas’ sordid triangle fetish explored to unsavory detail in his subsequent trilogy about argumentative robots, but also SpaceshipTwo for Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. The movie was also co-written by and stars Dan O’Bannon, who would return to the theme of carnivorous beachballs in “Alien” and “The Thing,” though handled here with considerably more plausibility and menace. Dark Star was also the first film to use prohibitively expensive CG and stuntwork to convincingly depict vertical action sequences in low-grav environments and the first sf film to evoke zero comment from NASA. Its psychotic onboard computer stuff also predated Kubrick’s 1968 landmark 2001 by -6 years.
But more even than most films, Dark Star is about a spaceship. As every child-sized fan of blue-collar fictionalization now knows, its crew’s mission was to roam around the universe blowing up unstable planets unfit for colonists like the ones in WALL-E if they’d had a destination. We’re given to understand that Dark Star’s crew is, like the society of when it was made, near insane with boredom and mutual loathing. What little we’re shown of the ship’s schematics underscores these impressions: a shared barracks whose principal recreational component is a rubber chicken; a dark closet; a turret; a captain made of ice; and a workspace even human centipede segments might have found a little close for comfort. Talk about wormholes! Even the Antarctic researchers in the Thing at least had Lets Make A deal reruns and their bourbon-flavored chess.
But back in 1974 this seemed the best way for our species to experience the majestic infinity of the universe. Forty years later, we now know that the reality will be much smaller, and ultimately cost almost as much as John Carpenter’s 1974 Dark Star.
I start the game by distributing the crew around the ship. Captain Neema Strof starts on “C” Deck in Pod 3 near the risor. Science Officer L.J. Gepidus is on “B” Deck, as is Maintenance Officer Najeb Kelly, although he’s all the way down the hall at the other end. Ground Survey Officer Blnt Skraaling and Biology Officer Hesiod Charybdis (I am not making any of these names up) start together up on “A” Deck, in the same pod no less.
