The Mammoth is glorious. This enormous wheeled vehicle is like a cross between a sandcrawler and that RV from Damnation Alley. It’s got a big-ass gun on top. Surely new Halo developer 343 Industries knows their Chekhov. When you introduce a big-ass gun at the start of a mission, you must fire it by the end of the mission. Maybe I’ll get to fire it. I hopped on board and couldn’t wait for the mission to start. This was going to be good. Probably better than that giant mechanical spider mission in an earlier Halo. Obviously better than the mondo truck mission in Gears of War. Maybe it will rival the crazy over-the-top sandcrawler sequence in Lost Planet 2!
“Chief, better get a jetpack,” one of the ancillary characters tells me.
A jetpack? What for? Why do I want a jetpack? Oh, in case I fall off. Good thinking!
The Mammoth starts rolling. It wends slowly through a narrow area barely wide enough to accommodate it. It’s like trying to park a Hummer in a space for a compact car. I get to shoot at about ten Covenant aliens off to the left. Then the Mammoth stops. I’m told I have to get off and go play Halo in an area to the right. I play a little Halo. The Mammoth waits for me patiently. Now it’s time to get back on the Mammoth. Then it wends its way a little farther down the very narrow path. Then it stops again for me to play a little more Halo.
This is how it plays out. The Mammoth will never fire its bad-ass gun. It will never drive anywhere other than along this closed in canyon. It’s an oversized bus taking me to bits of the same old Halo I’ve been playing for ten years. It is a massive fake-out, like everything else new in Halo 4: the Spartan ops feature, the storyline, the ancient evil awakening, the new multiplayer. Ponderous, familiar, and disappointing.
After the jump, what’s a Halo 4? Continue reading →
The Political Machine 2012 edition of Tom vs Bruce is now live for early access supporters.
Bruce: Unless your political party is named Viet Minh or Khmer Rouge, someone has to pay the bills. In The Political Machine, you make money by a combination of building up an extensive network of headquarters and upgrading them constantly, and fundraising in various states. The bigger the state, the more money you make. As the biggest state, California commands all our attention. These solicitations are based on diminishing returns, though, so by the end of the game both candidates will likely be scrounging for quarters in laundromats in Compton.
If you’re an early access supporter, you should have your password by now. If you’re not one of those, we’d invite you to become one by donating $18 or more to our Paypal account at tomvsbruce.com, which will get you early access to The Political Machine as well as the next eight articles. Otherwise, we hope you’ll check out the article when it goes public on Wednesday. In other words, when it’s no longer relevant!
“Are you making this up?,” someone asks when looking at a picture of the source of an outbreak in Maryland detailed in The Bay. “This looks Photoshopped.”
Mockumentaries are a sub-genre of found footage in which the narrator — in this case a thoroughly blank actress playing a local TV reporter — explains what’s going on while the story is cobbled together from Skype calls, iPhone videos, Google image searches, text chat, police dashcams, security cameras, and web sites. The wind-up is tense enough, but like many horror movies, it falls apart as it shows and exhaustively explains the monster.
The stuff about the Coast Guard, FEMA, the CDC, and Homeland Security failing to protect or help anyone is far more relevant and horrifying than anything that creeps out of Chesapeake Bay because of waste from a chicken farm. But this is a movie where the government response and cover-up is just an afterthought. Instead, at the top of the agenda is ick factor, similar to Eli Roth’s flesh eating bacteria movie, Cabin Fever. Plus a couple of obligatory jump scares with blaring musical cues despite the fact that we’re watching found footage. Nothing undercuts found footage quite like a carefully calculated musical cue.
The Bay was directed by Barry Levinson. It was produced by Oren Peli, the director of the original Paranormal Activity who’s been slathering his name on bad horror ever since. It was also produced by the Strause brothers, whose digital effects studio Hydraulx has been instrumental in movies as diverse as Battle Los Angeles and Take Shelter. But The Bay plays like a product of the collected talent behind movies like Wag the Dog, Sphere, and Skyline, and the TV show The River.
At least it’s better than a similar movie in which Val Kilmer plays a scientist who joins his daughter to fight prehistoric bugs thawing out in the Arctic. If you guessed such a movie is called The Thaw, you win. One of the most memorable parts of Gina Kolata’s book on the flu epidemic of the early 20th century — if you guessed the book is called Flu, you win again — details contemporary scientists digging up flu victims who were buried in permafrost in Alaska. They needed samples of the 1918 flu virus and hoped to find them intact in the frozen corpses. But they had to consider whether this might unleash a new epidemic. Spoiler: it didn’t. But because disease and parasites are often unseen and misunderstood, they occupy for many of us a place where ghosts and goblins would have been centuries ago. The Bay works at this level for a while, but in the end, a microbudget movie about throbbing pustules is just a microbudget movie about throbbing pustules.
The Bay is available now on video on demand (Amazon.com link here).
I’m an MMO dilettante. I’ve played a lot of them. But I can count on one hand the number of MMOs I’ve played in which I’ve leveled a character to a number higher than my age. Make of that what you will. And I would still have my thumb, pinky, and ring finger left over. The point is that I wasn’t sure what to expect in Guild Wars 2 after the ultimate ding.
There isn’t any more ceremony when you hit level 80 than when you hit level 2. In fact, there’s more ceremony when you hit level 2 because at that point the game is still keen to explain stuff. But by level 80, it knows you’ve pretty much figured everything out. So you’re liable to not even notice when you hit level 80. Nothing changes. You don’t look any different. No angels sing hosannas. You don’t ascend to demigodhood. Just another splashy light effect, no different from the effect you’ve seen 79 other times.
When it happened to me, I was busy clearing out the icy waters of Frostgorge Sound, diving underneath one of those majestic kodan settlements that’s half iceberg, half massive sailing ship. Me and another player, a level 79 guardian named Quite Eyes, had hooked up in that way Guild Wars 2 players hook up. We were just tagging along with one another, helping each other out, neither of us leading, neither of us following, one of us eventually inviting the other into a party even though it’s not at all necessary. Remarkably enough, we both hit level 80 from killing a veteran undersea assassin called a largo. We swam to shore and stood there at the edge of the sea.
We looked out over the water. I imagined we were catching our breath. I imagined our breath steaming in the cold. For all I know he was dinking around in his inventory with whatever bone fragments or scales he’d collected. But in those places in an MMO where my imagination fills the gaps in the actual game, we were like two guys who’d just finished a marathon or reached a peak at the same time.
He dove back in the water after a moment, but I excused myself.
Thanks for the party, I said. It was one to remember.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=Yf_gTmbxU60
The above IGN video review of Black Ops 2 was originally posted here, where there is now only the crater of a legal threat from Activision. Fortunately, it was reposted for your viewing pleasure. However, if you look closely at the score at the 3:18 mark, you’ll see the video review is obviously a fake. There’s no way Black Ops 2 is anything less than a 9.4 at IGN.
Thanks Squee!
Well, everyone knows the Aztecs were defeated by Spanish conquistadors. What this Crusaders Kings II add-on presupposes is…maybe they weren’t.
Nick Diamon, aka Telefrog, joins us this week to discuss the scariest games we’ve ever played. Because, you know, it’s Halloween. Then we talk some Assassin’s Creed III, Halo 4, and Euro Truck Simulator 2. Yes, you read that right. There’s a fourth Halo game!
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In the twee hipster-than-thou comedy Saftey Not Guaranteed, twee hipster Aubrey Plaza comments on someone’s laptop.
“Why do you have flames on your laptop?”
“It’s a gaming laptop. It’s really fast.”
Then hipster Jake Johnson picks them up for some putative time travel shenanigans. It’s like Looper, but more hip. Guess where such a hip movie is set. If you guessed Oregon, you’re close enough. A dude makes Aubrey Plaza fall in love with him by playing a zither. That’s right, a zither. Not since The Third Man has a zither been used so effectively.
Safety Not Guaranteed is mostly just an appeal to people who think Aubrey Plaza is hot. Which, sure, she is. But for any sort of convincing emotion, you’re left with Jake Johnson trying not to cry while driving a go-cart, smoking a cigarette, and swigging whiskey from a bottle. Dig it. There. I just saved you ninety minutes. It’s enough to make a guy want to catch up on The New Girl.
At least Mark Duplass as a mentally unbalanced time traveller — or is he? — lends the movie some sincerity. To see Duplass in a better movie, I cannot recommend strongly enough the hilarious Hump Day, which exists completely outside the usual studio conventions and the typical twee indie vibe. And for the non-grating version of Safety Not Guaranteed, see Happy Accidents with Marisa Tomei and Vincent D’Onofrio.
Safety Not Guaranteed is out now on DVD and VOD (here’s an Amazon.com link to support Qt3).
Okay, whose idea was it to simultaneously release Natural Selection 2, Primal Carnage, and Guns of Icarus Online? And to furthermore do it at the height of the holiday release season? All three games are gunning for the same audience. Namely, people who dig the camaraderie of team-based online shooters, but who are looking for the sort of twist that only an indie developer can provide. So the question you have to ask yourself is, “What flavor do you want? Aliens, dinosaurs, or zeppelins?”
Although this Forza is unlike any Forza you’ve played before, it will feel familiar to anyone who’s played Smuggler’s Run, Fuel, Test Drive Unlimited 2, Midnight Club: Los Angeles, Burnout Paradise, or Driver. Basically, there’s a lot of driving between the driving. How do you do this without making it feel like a commute? Forza Horizon mostly handles this adroitly. It’s a laidback road trip with lots of road running through lots of scenery. Kick back and drive.
But if you’re looking for a well-made open world, you’ve taken a wrong turn into the sort of festive racing fest you’d find in an EA game or one of Codemaster’s latest games. You play yet another mute character racing against a bunch of trash talking douchebags, but this time you wear the world’s ugliest watch. What, you don’t drive from the cockpit view? Given that timepiece, I can’t say I blame you.
After the jump, where would you like to go today? I hope you said Colorado. Continue reading →
Painkiller: Hell & Damnation is an uncanny Unreal 3 remix of the original Painkiller, which is my favorite Doom game of all time. It’s every bit as good as it was in 2004. Actually, better. I forgot how awesome it is to play a shooter that doesn’t need a reload key. And this time it’s got co-op support. If there’s one thing better than replaying Painkiller, it’s replaying Painkiller cooperatively.
Cargo Commander is an indie space dungeon exploration game. Think of it as a sci-fi Rogue-like with unique space-based qualities and the catchiest space honky-tonk aesthetic this side of Starcraft 1. Here’s how it plays.
The last few Assassin’s Creeds are kind of a blur for me. Kind of like they were a blur for the folks who made them. Zing! So I had very little enthusiasm going into Assassin’s Creed III. After playing for a while, I still had very little enthusiasm. Assassin’s Creed III starts slow, despite an interesting idea for how to do a prologue. It’s ponderous and familiar. It features way too much Desmond (at this point, any Desmond is way too much Desmond). For those of us burned out after a few years of cavorting around cities that weren’t as good as Venice, Assassin’s Creed III feels like just another Assassin’s Creed, but with dishwater dull Colonial architecture. Here we go again. But then you get past the first five or six hours and, holy cats, the Assassin’s Creed series is good again! At this point, I couldn’t be happier with how this is turning out. Consider your wallet imperiled.
After an extensive beta period, Natural Selection 2 finally goes live this week. This team-based aliens vs marines multiplayer shooter/strategy hybrid has a following from the first game for a reason. And lest you worry what you’re getting into, this is no free-to-play grindfest. It’s a straight-up, two-asymmetrical-but-equal-teams-against-each-other, reset-to-zero-when-you’re-done complete package.
And speaking of team-based multiplayer shooters with a twist, Guns of Icarus launches this week. This release doesn’t yet include an intended adventure mode where your airships fly around trade routes to make money and buy upgrades. Instead, it’s an airship vs airship skirmish game in which players crew the airships. Considering the dearth of airship deathmatches since Flying Heroes, I’ll take what I can get.
Electronic Arts releases Need for Speed: Most Wanted. No telling how long the servers will be up, so hurry up and race before it’s sunsetted!
Marvel Avengers: Battle for Earth is some sort of Kinect fighting game that poses the question “who would win in a fight between Spiderman and Wolverine?”. The correct answer is “Spiderman and Woverine aren’t Avengers”. I also would have accepted, “I’ve already played Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and I didn’t need a Kinect to do it”.
Cloud Atlas leaves us variously nonplussed, in love, and appropriately whelmed. To skip spoilers, jump through time to the 55-minute mark for this week’s 3×3. We bring you our horror triple features just in time for Halloween.
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Because I love Guild Wars 2, this is a column I don’t want to write. But because I love Guild Wars 2, this is also a column I have to write. And it’s long overdue.
Read this week’s Guilded here.
XCOM is elegant and simple except when it’s not. For instance, ever wonder why you are or aren’t flanking a particular alien? Like so many things in XCOM, it’s all about the cover. MarinusWA’s excellent diagrams of various tactical situations shed light on the inner workings of XCOM. Plus, I can’t get enough of those weird alien smiley faces and frowny faces. Check it out here.
It’s not enough to have Rob Harvey join us this week to talk about Skylanders Giants. So we press into service a serious expert. But first, we talk Zynga, Sword of the Stars II, Dwarf Fortress, Fallen Enchantress, and “games journalism”.
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