The Gran Turismo movie will be based on a true story. Sony’s plans to turn their flagship PlayStation racing franchise into a film was revealed at E3, but few details of the plot were available. At Gamescom, Polyphony Digital’s Kazunori Yamauchi revealed that the movie will focus on the real-life story of Lucas Ordonez and how he went from playing Gran Turismo 5 to becoming a professional race car driver.
Yamauchi says he envisions a film that starts out with a mother that is worried about a son that always plays videogames. He says it should end with this same boy turning into a full-fledged racing champ.
It’s fitting that the movie based on Gran Turismo will be based on actual events. The games are known for their attention to detail and verisimilitude. Based on my experience with GT5, the movie will have long scenes of Ordonez trying to beat all the time trials. Unlike the upcoming Need for Speed movie, the Gran Tursimso movie will likely have less car-flipping and shooutouts.
Karla Zimonja, one of the Gone Home developers, explains those SNES carts you found in the game. I bet you didn’t know they were created by famous people.
Torn Banner Studios has announced Chivalry: Deadliest Warrior for Chivalry: Medieval Warfare. It’s based on the Spike TV show that features odd match-ups like cowboys versus Zulu and asks viewers to guess which would win in a fight. This is decided by way-too-serious guys measuring the effects of the hypothetical combatants’ weapons on dead pigs or blood-filled dummies. Chivalry: Deadliest Warrior adds samurai and Spartans (with more fighters coming later) to the base game so people without access to dead animals can have their shot at judging the warriors the way they were meant to be analyzed – in a multiplayer video game.
At the beginning of Shelter, a game about being a badger mom caring for her badger babies, one of the badger babies is unmoving and greyed out. The other four badger babies snuffle around and follow you as you try to figure out what you’re supposed to do. You can left click to bark pitiably. You can pick up a turnip. Invisible walls stop you from leaving. Indie games can be brutal! But who knew the Shelter developers — previously known for a ruthlessly puzzly platformer called Pid — were this brutal? What a harsh statement about the life of badger moms. Here you are, trapped by invisible walls to mourn a dead baby for all eternity. Maybe it’s a bug. I emailed the developers with one of those annoying “Hey, there’s a bug in your game” emails that must frustrate developers to no end, because sometimes a bug is just a player too dumb to know the greyed out badger isn’t dead, but just faint from hunger and waiting to be fed the turnip lying conveniently beside him. I appreciated the developer’s patient reply.
From that point, Shelter seems like a laidback exploration game to teach you stuff about nature, like how badgers headbutt apple trees to knock the apples loose. I should watch more nature documentaries. Then comes the badger stealth sequence, where you move from cover to cover to avoid an eagle. At least I think it’s an eagle. Whatever it is, it’s terrifyingly big. But I know stealth. I’ve been playing a lot of Splinter Cell. So I wait for the eagle to pass and then I dash to the next– Oh god, no, the baby badger is being carried away by the eagle, WHERE’S TEH ATTACK BUTTON THIS IS THE WORST THING TO EVER HAPPEN IN A VIDYAGAME!
So there are four badgers left. If it’s any consolation — it isn’t — I’m back where I started when I thought one of the baby badgers was dead in the beginning. Now we’re in a dark cave at night and I feel like the surviving badger babies are judging me when they look at me. Dudes, it’s not my fault! I blame The Last Of Us for conditioning me to think stealth rules only apply to the player character.
The artwork is fantastic, stylized and slightly twisted, but washed out for some reason. Is it because badgers live mostly underground and don’t see color well? Or is that moles? I should watch more nature documentaries. But I don’t mind the washed out color because I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more lovely videogame interpretation of a night sky. Check it out, little dudes. I’m sorry your brother/sister isn’t here to see it. I blame Ellie.
Shelter: God Hates Badgers is out next week. You can pre-order it on Steam or directly from the developer for $10.
Don’t Starve has been updated with Steam Workshop integration. Klei Entertainment updated their survival crafting beard-growing game with mod support through the Steam Workshop, so you can easily find horrible new ways to run out of food and die while beset by spiders.
We’ve been nothing but amazed by the player creations that have popped up since we introduced modding to Don’t Starve. Now it’s easier than ever to create and install mods for Don’t Starve to change your game and share with the community.
What does that mean? Well, a lot of things. Add in custom characters, play with the world generation, create new creatures and items, or take your adventure in a whole new direction! Using our handy-dandy Mod Upload Machine you can put your mods directly onto Steam Workshop for everyone to download and enjoy.
The developers have also added new monsters to attack you, a new area to get lost in, and new craftable items to give you a false sense of hope. Most importantly, they’ve added a Morgue Screen that will keep track of all the wonderful ways you’ve died.
For my second playthrough of Saints Row IV, I have to get the character just right. But after faffing about in the character builder, I could’t get anywhere near what I wanted. I don’t know what to do with sliders for temple depth and jowl height and rear neck width and so forth. But then it occurred to me that I don’t have to, because the player community does. And they’ve probably created exactly what I need.
Sure enough, I typed “palin” into the search box and there it was! Thanks, bsnead79, whoever you are. Although I don’t appreciate that you made her so old. And why did you figure she wouldn’t wear underwear? This was a potential Vice President of the United States! Do you think Keith David goes commando? Actually, don’t answer that.
Anyway, it’s nothing a visit to the plastic surgeon and my wardrobe can’t fix. Then apply a stylish blunderbuss model for her shotgun. Now to find someplace that sells a red power suit with the skirt and blazer. After that, here I come, Zinyak. Again!
Tom wrote about the achievement system in Europa Universalis IV because the developers decided that you get nothing unless you play with Iron Man Mode enabled. No cheesing saves. Make your moves and deal with it. Play a marathon 20-hour game as Luxembourg against the world, but didn’t have Iron Man Mode on? Congratulations, but you’ll get no achievements to show off on your Steam profile. Hardcore!
To the Moon, an indie RPG by Freebird Games, is even more discriminating about handing out achievements. It’s about two doctors that can manipulate dying people’s memories to fulfill their lifelong dreams. It’s tearjerker subject matter and the game does everything it can to get you to turn on the waterworks. Imagine lots of observations about regret and love. Playing it is either an exhausting emotional journey or an annoying exercise depending on how you deal with a game asking you to get in touch with your feelings. No matter which is true, players will have to truly earn the only achievement they can get which the developer recently added to the game.
Note: Phantom Leader designer Dan Verssen asked if I would take a look at a prototype version of a game he’s publishing, which is in the middle of a successful Kickstarter campaign. Since the game is basically finished in terms of the design, and since this sort of thing is definitely in my wheelhouse (i.e. horror, tabletop, solitaire!), and since it’s H.P. Lovecraft’s birthday, I happily took him up on the offer. Fortunately, it didn’t suck, so I’m happy to also write about the game here.
The Cards of Cthulhu is a solitaire game with a healthy amount of die rolling as you try to keep the boards from filling up with nasty Lovecraftian creatures. The overall vibe is holding back evil tides pouring through dimensional gates. Anyone who’s played Fantasy Flight’s Arkham Horror knows the feeling. Plug one hole and two more pop open. Before you know it, you’ve got byakhees in your basement, old ones in your attic, and Cthulhu dragging himself out of the Pacific. It’s not easy holding back elder gods. It’s even less easy holding back four of them. This is what happens in The Cards of Cthulhu and I’m pretty sure it’s not realistic. There is no HP Lovecraft where four gods come knocking at once. But I suppose I can make an allowance for a fantasy tabletop game.
After the jump, full house, deep ones over fungi from YuggothContinue reading →
This week we welcome Steve Gaynor, one of the developers of Gone Home. Unfortunately, you are not allowed to listen unless you’ve played Gone Home. Which you have done, right? No? Why not? Read this review if you need any convincing. Now go away and don’t come back until you’ve played it.
Even though it mostly plays like an endless runner, Race the Sun isn’t really an endless runner. Despite the structural similarities, this is no mere jetpack joyride or temple run. Sure, you’re trying to get as far as you can along an infinite track before you screw up and die. But an important difference is that Race the Sun, as befits an unfettered PC game, isn’t just infinite out to the horizon. It’s also infinite left and right, ranging as wide as your reflexes will take you. It’s like skiing down one of SSX’s open mountains. I can go wherever I want, as long as forward is one of the directions.
After the jump, if 2001 and early Dynamix games had a baby…Continue reading →
No One Lives is so obvious and predictable. A couple is passing through. They stop for dinner and get waylaid by a band of murderous thugs. You can see where this is going. The couple is going to have to fight to survive. There will be screaming and stabbings and whatnot.
But it makes an early misstep that doesn’t bode well. There’s a serious problem with the casting. The most psycho of the thugs sits down at the table to intimidate the couple. The thug is played by a pretty TV actor who’s shaved his head to look hard. And the man in the couple is played by Luke Evans. The chiseled god-like Luke Evans who has played Zeus, Apollo, and the best Musketeer. As the lightweight TV actor attempts to cow him, it becomes clear Evans’ is going to have to defend himself. His fingers inch tentatively towards a steak knife on the table.
“Don’t,” his girlfriend says softly. They don’t want any trouble.
“Yeah, don’t,” says the pretty TV actor. “You’re not the type. Trust me. I know the type.”
But Evans, as an actor, is totally the type. He played Zeus, Apollo, and the best Musketeer. He has faced down boys as pretty as Paul Walker in Fast and Furious 6. He would eat this latest guy for breakfast. He wouldn’t take any guff from him and he certainly wouldn’t need to fumble for a steak knife to do it. Who does this movie think it’s fooling?
Me, for one. Because No One Lives isn’t obvious at all. It’s an entertaining danse macabre of reversals and unexpected turns, and it’s cast very well. Among the other actors is the always reliable Lee Tergesen as the aggrieved leader of the thugs. Lindsey Shaw, who voiced the wholesome Trip opposite Andy Serkis in Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, talks about someone getting a “deep dicking” and then engages in a very unladylike fight scene with Bitch Slap’s America Olivo. Michelle Williams doppleganger Adelaide Clemens is a formidable partner in the series of escalating pas de deux mind games.
Director Ryuhei Kitamura got his start in 2000 with Versus, a movie about a bunch of dudes out in the woods fighting each other. Way back then, he showed an eye for choreographed action and gore. No One Lives affords him plenty of opportunity for both. There’s not a character here whose face isn’t sprayed with blood at some point. And that’s about the only thing that’s predictable.
No One Lives is available for video on demand. Watch it here to support Quarter to Three.
Killzone: Shadow Fall is one of the many games Sony showed off in their Gamescom opening presentation. The multiplayer gameplay looks pretty in that next-gen shooter way. Lots of slick effects, guns go boom, and space marines die in gritty ways. They made a big deal out of the way you can set up matches by choosing between all sort of options. Want a sniper duel with slow-moving armored guys? Have at it! Do you prefer a lot of power-ups and snazzy abilities? Make it so! It all looks great which I suppose it had better since Killzone is Sony’s big first-party console shooter property.
Unfortunately, the marketers neglected the most important bits of news, tucking it away on the Killzone website.
“The game has three classes with unique abilities and 22 different weapons – all unlocked from the get-go, so you can determine for yourself how and in which order you want to specialize.
We’ve also redesigned our progression system to work with challenges rather than XP. There are over 1500 increasingly difficult challenges to complete in Killzone: Shadow Fall multiplayer, so you’ll have plenty of opportunity to prove your skills and collect rewards. To increase longevity even further, we plan to continue support for the title well after launch – and yes, DLC multiplayer maps will be released free of charge to ensure everyone can play.”
Hold on! Free maps for everyone? All abilities and weapons unlocked from day one? Has Guerrilla Games not been paying attention to the trends of console shooters? You have to make players grind for their unlocks. You have to charge $15 for every map pack and segregate the players. Who do these guys think they are anyway? Only Valve gets to do this – and not even with their console releases.
Firaxis and 2K announced that the new expansion XCOM: Enemy Within, will come with more singleplayer maps for the XCOM: Enemy Unknown game. How many maps? “Nearly 50% more” is the coy way they’ve worded it.
The expansion will also add new soldier abilities, a new resource to reserach and gather, more multiplayer maps, and mechs (or “MECs”) to stomp around in. XCOM: Enemy Within will launch on November 12th. $29.99 for PC players, but consoles will have to get it as XCOM: Enemy Within – Commander Edition for $39.99 which will include the full base game as well as the previous DLC.
Blizzard has announced Diablo III: Reaper of Souls, an expansion for their controversial action-RPG. There’s nothing at the official site yet, but the few bits we know from Gamescom sound promising. The expansion will add one more act, a revised and expanded loot system, a new character class – The Crusader, a melee weapon and shield specialist – and more customization options with a “transmogrification” process that will allow players to copy the appearance of one item and place it on another without changing the stats.
The most interesting news would be that Reaper of Souls will add more activity to the endgame.
Diablo III’s Paragon progression system is also being majorly upgraded for the expansion, adding even more end-game character advancement and replayability. Two new game modes – Loot Runs and Nephalem Trials – are being added as well, providing fun and rewarding challenges for players to tackle when they’re not busy saving the world.
Loot Runs will be small, entirely randomized dungeons, that can be played for quick fixes of killing and looting. Torchlight II’s endgame offers a similar feature with its Mapworks feature and it’s something that could get me back into Diablo III. Hopefully, Blizzard copies the way Torchlight II offers modifiers to the Mapworks runs such as making all enemies have lightning auras or all players get 50% of their health. That’s the kind of variety I crave.
