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.
That’s a witch in Path of Exile. As you can see, she’s pretty drably outfitted. I suppose the face mask looks suitably evil. But she’s way higher level than you’d expect based on the fact that she’s wearing colorless tatters and weilding a stick in her right hand and a dried vine wreath in her left hand. But that’s about to change.
For a guy with three boring names, each more boring than the last, writer/director Paul Andrew Williams is utterly fascinating. If you’ve seen London to Brighton and The Cottage, you know what I mean. If you haven’t seen them, you should. Both of them. In any order. You pick. But see both of them. Because you can’t really get a sense for this British director’s talent without seeing both movies. And then, for good measure, see a weird arthouse horror movie he co-wrote called The Children.
All caught up? Good. Because now it’s time to see Cherry Tree Lane, Paul Andrew Williams’ grim horror thriller that you previously had to import from the UK to watch on a region-free DVD player. It was worth it. But lucky for you, it’s available today in the US where fine DVDs are sold and rented.
As you’re watching Cherry Tree Lane, you might think it’s a mean-spirited thriller preying uncomfortably on issues of race and class and how small the houses are in modern day London. You’d be partly right. But the point of Cherry Tree Lane — and I’m going to take pains not to spoil it beyond acknowledging it — is the last scene. Or, rather, the moment the last scene ends. The way the last scene ends. The musical cue on which the last scene ends, wanting only a thick red curtain dropped by a stagehand in the wings. All the building tension and pressure, from the very opening scene of water boiling on a stove to that last moment in the same kitchen, is entirely about how you as a viewer feel at that instant. I bet you didn’t know you had it in you? But Paul Andrew Williams did.
It was immediately clear when I sat down to play Sins of a Dark Age, the upcoming real time strategy game from Sins of a Solar Empire developer Ironclad, that I was playing a game like League of Legends and Defense of the Ancients. Or, as they’re known by the unfortunate acronym for multiplayer online battle arena, a MOBA.
I chose a hero, I was killing AI controlled minions and other players’ heroes to earn xp and gold, I was choosing among my hero’s four skills when I leveled up, I was buying equipment towards a specific character build, and I was pushing down lanes or jungling or some combination thereof. It was all pretty familiar.
But then a banner popped up along the top of the screen announcing something that never happens in MOBAs.
With the release of Hansel and Gretel, another month of January releases is behind us. If you want to avoid Hansel and Gretel spoilers and listen to our 3×3 of least scary monsters, jump to the 38-minute mark.
DMC Devil May Cry is a best-case scenario for what happens when you take an established series and hand it over to a new developer to let them have a turn. The Devils May Cry up to now have been so very Capcom. But now developer Ninja Theory leaves behind the series’ trademark “you’ll play this battle over and over again until you learn the combos and you’ll like it” approach. They unpack this brawler neatly, carefully, gradually, patiently, giving you ample time to get comfortable, introducing new gameplay over the duration of the story, and fitting it all into a consistent framework. Every weapon is introduced with an easy “here’s how this works” battle. You can try a move before you decide to unlock it. The vocabulary of Devil May Cry — that’s a fancy way of saying the buttons you have to press — is intuitive and easy to remember.
Capcom has at last let someone make a Devil May Cry for the rest of us.
The Cave is the first game from Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert since he hooked up with the folks at Double Fine. It’s out this week.
Shootmania, the shooter from the folks who made Trackmania, is intended to be a flexible construction kit for players to make a variety of different game types. But if I know online shooters, it will be a bunch of dudes free-for-all deathmatching, first to fifty frags wins.
The PS3 exclusive JRPG Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is a collaborative effort from Studio Ghibli and Level-5. I would have played it by now if the Playstation 3 that I got to replace my dead Playstation 3 hadn’t died within days of getting it. If this happens eight more times, it’ll rival my failure rate with Xbox 360s.
Mama is exactly the kind of movie you expect to see in January. If you want to avoid spoilers, fast forward to the 52-minute mark for this week’s 3×3 of stupidest cops.
