Aliens: Colonial Marine is out this week. I’ve played through the campaign, about half of it co-operatively, and I’ve sampled some multiplayer. The review won’t be posted until tomorrow, so the wallet threat level will have to stand in until then.
Also, Paradox is publishing yet another Dungeon Keeper clone, this time developed by Cyanide, called Impire [sic].
Also out this week is a free 2.0 update for A Valley Without Wind that completely overhauls the graphics and gameplay for this boldly weird endless Metroidvania action RPG, which I really liked. I haven’t tried this overhaul yet, but no one refuses to leave well enough alone like Valley Without Wind developer Arcen Games.
This week’s podcast is a two-to-one split on the critically panned but commercially successful Identity Thief. If you want to avoid spoilers, jump to the 37-minute mark for this week’s 3×3 of bad ideas with great execution.
The Dead Space games were designed around the idea of shooting monsters in the limbs, which often flail wildly so you’ll have to use stasis to freeze them. This makes it much easier to aim for the shoulders and thighs, or whatever equivalent exists on some Thing inspired squirming amalgam of dog, zombie, and octopus you’re fighting at any given time. You can subvert this concept entirely by playing on the easier difficulty levels and just pouring ammo into the monsters. Dead Space is a perfectly viable meat circus if you want to do it that way.
But to really enjoy the combat model, and to traffic in the survival horror economy, and to get the achievements, you’re going to want to play the harder difficulties and especially the new game plus modes like hardcore and pure survival. However, you have to prep first.
After the jump, cue Eye of the Tiger for your training montageContinue reading →
Jon Shafer is at the gates to talk about Jon Shafer’s At the Gates. He also sticks around to chat about fellow former Firaxis dev Brian Reynolds’ latest career move, whether EA’s Dead Space 3 micropayments are evil or just crass, what’s the deal with Noomi Doody Pookie: Wrath of the White Witch, how many hours it takes to get to the gamey center of Persona 4 Golden on the Vita, and why you shouldn’t ride your zombie horse to Thieves Landing in the Undead Nightmares add-on for Red Dead Redemption. Also, Jason McMaster plans a daring assault on Zynga headquarters!
To run in Red Dead Redemption, you can hold down the X button. It’s more like a determined trot. But to really run, you have to mash the X button repeatedly. Which is a distinctly Rockstar idiosyncrasy. I’m pretty sure that’s how it worked in Grand Theft Auto IV and L.A. Noire. Probably even Rockstar Table Tennis.
But other games don’t make you mash the run button. They know that’s a pain in the butt. They let you just hold down the button to go as fast as you’re going to go. Many games these days don’t even make you hold down the run button. Just tap it and you’ll keep running until you stop, freeing up your run finger/thumb to do things like reload, change weapons, slide, and bunny hop. I’m not convinced they’re doing it right.
Tim Roth’s first movie was 1984’s The Hit, in which he played a hitman too hot under the collar for his own good, paired with the world weary and wiser John Hurt. If The Hit had turned out differently, The Liability could be its sequel, with Roth grown world weary and wiser thirty years later, and now paired with his own irresponsible young partner. Hence the title.
I love movies about dumb characters who don’t know they’re dumb. As the eponymous liability, Jack O’Connell has the same star quality Roth showed in The Hit, if not the same shrewd cool. What would be mugging in most performances comes across as energetic sincerity for O’Connell. He’s a really good actor, with excellent comic timing and a grand rapport with Roth. Some of my favorite moments in The Liability are O’Connell saying something stupid and Roth unable to muster the wither for a withering look. They’re a lovely team.
The Liability resembles In Bruges in some ways, including its sharp sense of dark humor. It sports truly clever twists and even flashes of astonishing style. A hypnotic “throw me the idol, I’ll give you the whip” scene plays like something Nicolas Winding-Refn would shoot, complete with the neon synth beat of a sexy pop song and the threat of violence coiled tightly just under the surface.
At one point, when Roth’s character is talking about his background, he mentions what sounds like “Angola”. Did he just say Angola?, you might wonder. Whatever. There are other things going on worth following. But later in the movie, when it’s clear that, yes, he did indeed say Angola and it’s relevant for a reason that was otherwise just a quirky detail, the payoff is one of those rare delights you’ll remember for a long time to come.
The Liability is available on video on demand. Watch it here to support Quarter to Three.
ABCs of Death, a wretched horror anthology in which 26 directors around the world were each given a letter of the alphabet to use as the basis for a short film, captures what it’s like to be a fan of horror movies: lots and lots of dreck, some of it gross, much of it inept, almost all of it forgettable. Yet buried underneath it all, you might find a rare gem. Are the three gems in ABCs of Death worth the 23 other shorts you have to sit through?
It won’t be easy. These shorts range from tedious to dull to flat-out “what the hell were you thinking, Ti West, because now you’ve made me like House of the Devil a little less?” They imply a Japanese preoccupation with farting and jacking off, as well as other countries’ directors expressing their fascination with turds and furries.
But the reasons to persevere are D for Dogfight, Q for Quack, and P for Pressure. Marcel Sarmiento, the director of the uneven but interesting Deadgirl, directs the sleekly hilarious and beautifully textured Dogfight, which is literally about a dogfight. The centerpiece of this live action short is a really awesome dog performance. Adam Wingard, the director of A Horrible Way to Die and the framing device for horror anthology V/H/S, seems fully aware of the futility of doing anything meaningful with five minutes and a random letter of the alphabet, particularly when his letter is Q. Both Dogfight and Quack realize that a good option for a horror short is a touch of black humor.
But then there’s Simon Rumley’s Pressure, which is hands down the best thing in this anthology, partly for how it plays with its title (few of these directors seemed to give a damn about their assigned letter, much less whatever word they came up with), but mostly for how it’s actually a horrific short about a character instead of just a hurried concept. Pressure makes the point that horrible things aren’t always only horrible things. This should come as no surprise if you’ve seen Red White & Blue, Rumley’s masterpiece revenge story, arranged in a heartbreaking lattice of confessionals, cross-motivations, and character reveals (Red White & Blue is available in Netflix’s instant view catalog and I cannot recommend it enough to anyone who can handle Jacobean excess). Pressure is exactly what I would expect the director of Red White & Blue to deliver.
ABCs of Death is available on video on demand services. Watch it here to support Quarter to Three.
One of the clearest indications of L.A. Noire’s ability to express human performances better than almost any other game is the above gag reel, released by Depth Analysis, the folks responsible for its facial motion capture technology. L.A. Noire and Depth Analysis set the bar nearly two years ago, so why am I still looking at a creepy Michael Rooker mask in Black Ops II and vacant plastic faces in Dead Space 3 and an Unreal Dante in Devil May Cry? Those are the equivalent of silent films in a dawning age of talkies. If you want human expression in your game without resorting to some sort of exaggerated cartoon style, it’s no longer enough to hire good voice actors and put Andy Serkis in green tights. L.A. Noire is as good as you need to get.
This week it’s time to exercise your 2nd Amendment rights in space. Not only will you bear arms in Dead Space 3, you’ll build them, customize them, and take them apart to build new ones. Although this might sound like a gimmick, I can attest that it’s one heck of an effective gimmick. As far as horror games go, Dead Space 3 is about as effective as Resident Evil 5. That’s not a compliment. But as far as shooters with weapon progression and meaningful two-player co-op go, it’s also about as effective as Resident Evil 5. That is a compliment. A big one. I can understand that folks are irked at EA’s usual microtransactional meddling in the Dead Space economy. Yeah, it’s pretty crass. But it’s also easy to entirely ignore.
Fire Emblem is one of my least favorite SRPGs for how a story I couldn’t care less about is baked into a tactics system I couldn’t care less about. Does a lance trump a sword or an axe? Or vice versa? Even though I get to make my own character, Fire Emblem: Awakening on the Nintendo 3DS feels like any other Fire Emblem game. Make of that what you will.
A new Sly Cooper game — Thieves in Time, from the folks who made Secret Agent Clank — is out simultaneously for the PS3 and the Vita.
Warm Bodies does for zombies what Twilight did for werewolves and vampires. Unfortunately, we’re not tween girls. To avoid Warm Bodies spoilers, fast forward to the 48-minute mark, at which point our 3×3 shines a light on flashlights in movies.
At first, Citadel seems like a movie like Heartless, in which hooded demons prowl London and are mistaken for thuggish youths. Or Cronenberg’s The Brood. Or the part of Don’t Look Now that you don’t really know about until the final “WTF!” scene. The basic idea is that little people in hoods are scary because you don’t know what’s under the hood. Consider Phantasm. Or jawas.
But it turns out that Citadel isn’t just a monster movie. In fact, it’s a better Silent Hill movie than anything with the words “silent hill” in the title. This is a character driven story about an unprepared father coping with fear, and the Father whose help he needs. Furthermore, here is a movie unafraid to play with children in peril and perilous children. You would never see this in a safely American horror film that only imperils people over 18. Thank you, Irish director/writer Ciaran Foy.
In the main role, the distractingly good-looking and Orlando-Bloom-meets-Harry-Potter Aneurin Barnard spends most of his time shrinking, usually with his eyes shut tight. Is it really a good idea to make your main character such a coward? Given the point Citadel wants to make, there’s no way around it. This movie has no interest in whacking zombies with a crowbar. And in the one scene where that happens, the crowbar is ineffectual. It takes a mirror to seal the deal. Get it? James Cosmos — you probably know him from Game of Thrones — is a welcome variation on the usual priest monster-slayer. With a tiny blind child in tow, Barnard and Cosmos make for a memorable monster hunting party.
Citadel isn’t as heavy handed or action oriented as I might make it sound. It lolls around for a while, as an arthouse horror movie will do. This makes the shocking moments all the more shocking. There are about three effective scenes here that any low-budget horror movie would be lucky to have. Which makes Citadel at least three times better than most low-budget horror films.
Citadel is available on DVD and video on demand. Support Qt3 by watching it on Amazon instant video.
Pixel Defenders Puzzle very nearly does for collapse-3s what Puzzle Quest did for match-3s. You’ve probably never heard of a collapse-3, because I invented the term just now. A “collapse-3” is a variation on a match-3. In a match-3, you match three gems and they disappear. But in a collapse-3, you match three gems and they collapse into a more valuable gem. If you match three of those gems, they then collapse into an even more valuable gem. And on and on. My first exposure to collapse-3s was Triple Town, which was all about scoring the most points by collapsing everything into more valuable forms before you ran out of space. It was a town themed game, so the gems were mostly buildings and landscaping.
Pixel Defenders Puzzle — that name couldn’t be more awkwardly misleading into making you think you’re about to boot up a tower defense game — is the same concept as Triple Town, but it takes everything into the realm of turn-based tactical fantasy combat. Different colored gems collapse into different classes of characters. The yellow gems are fighters, the black gems are necromancers, the green gems are rangers, and so on. But then each of these classes matches with itself to collapse ever upward into more valuable classes. Play your gems right and you’ll get a grid full of vampires, assassins, paladins, snipers, and warrior monks.
After the jump, what good are vampires et al in a collapse-3?Continue reading →
Do you ever have videogame dreams? Like when you’ve been playing a game so much that it burbles up from your subconscious while you sleep? For me, these are often interface dreams. I dream I’m trying to drag select a bunch of units or spend points on a skill tree. I don’t mean to get all tedious by holding forth about my dreams, but I had one last night about Virtue’s Last Reward. And it was unlike any other videogame dream I’ve had.
In cooperation with the developers at Shenendoah Studios, we’re pleased to announce a tournament for Battle of the Bulge on the iOS with $500 of prize money at stake. Some of which will go to people who aren’t even necessarily good at the game! Basically, if you play through one match, your name goes into the drawing for one of three randomly drawn $50 prizes. And these aren’t spacebucks or Qt3dollars or Microsoft points. These are bona fide US dollars.
Read the details in this thread. To enter, post in the thread or email [email protected] if you’d rather not register for the forum. The deadline is February 15th. Good luck, soldier!
Disclaimer: Battle of the Bulge may result in rethinking your perspective on wargames. No bulges were harmed in the making of this game. Do not taunt Patton. I’m pretty sure that painting up there, Battle of the Bulge by Robert Blair, is terrible, but I don’t want to be rude and maybe he was going for a state of mind rather than an actual representation of something. No states are exempt from this tournament, including CA, CO, DE, HI, GO, and WE. Employees of Quarter to Three and their families not eligible. Sorry, Mom.
Joshua DeBonis joins us to talk about Meriwether, his Lewis and Clark expedition RPG, fresh from its successful Kickstarter campaign and on its way to a hard drive near you this fall. We also talk about theme-based gaming, a 50 year old (50!) videogame that DeBonis claims is still fun, the fate of Darksiders developer Vigil, the Netrunner card game, and Path of Exile.
