I don’t know much about anime, but I think Cowboy Bebop is one of the fundamentals. The only animes I can name are this, Sailor Moon, and Hello Kitty, so I figure they’re all equally famous. A friend of mine who’s not even into anime is unashamed to wear a Cowboy Bebop T-shirt. He told me it’s good. I believe that he believes that, but I don’t have much interest in finding out for myself. Like sports, James Joyce, and reality TV, it’s a gap in my cultural literacy I can live with.
But I’m about to change that. Continue reading →
Here I am playing pretty much the exact same game a fifth time over. I first played Diablo III when it came out for the PC. Again when the Necromancer was added. Again for the Xbox 360. Again for the Playstation 4. And now for the Switch. Nothing has changed since the last time. And of course, none of my progress has been carried over because battle.net, Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are like divorced parents who refuse to talk to each other, much less come together to support a single game. Everyone’s gotta be his own gatekeeper these days.
So, naturally, the ennui sets in quickly and I commence the dull slog through content I’ve already seen a hundred times, right?
As if. Continue reading →
No Retreat, No Surrender! Christine! Cam! After we talk about seeing those movies, we discuss our favorite repeated lines in movies.
Next: Widows
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The dirty little secret about hate-watching is that you’re not just doing it because you hate a show. That’s certainly part of it, but it’s not the main part. If you simply hated the show, you would stop watching. But what none of us will admit, and what drives all of us who hate-watch, is the secret hope that the show will get good again. That it will show some sign, even a glimmer, of what made us watch it in the first place. We call it hate-watching so we don’t feel dumb for watching a show that’s no longer good. But really, there’s no such thing as hate-watching. There is only hope-watching.
And sometimes it pays off. Continue reading →
It’s got something for fans of horror, something for fans of history, and something for fans of Kurt Russell’s son.
Next: 3×3: our favorite repeated lines
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I haven’t minded that State of Decay has never had crossbows. Because every single other game has a bow, or crossbow, or hand crossbow. When Arthur got his bow in Red Dead Redemption 2, I groaned out loud. Oh god, another archery weapon. Really, Rockstar? To be honest, I always felt a little silly using the bow as Arthur. Like I was playing a videogame. So I don’t really need to get my archery fix in State of Decay 2. I know, I know, Daryl Dixon in Walking Dead. I get it. But one of the many many silly things about Walking Dead is that Daryl Dixon would be far more badass if he just grabbed an assault rifle like everybody else. At this point, toting a crossbow smacks of hipsterism. Like listening to vinyl.
But I guess I wouldn’t mind a crossbow in State of Decay 2. Which is something that will happen with tomorrow’s update. It’s adding a crossbow. Actually, eight crossbows. Eight seems excessive. Three I could understand. Maybe as many as five. But eight? The update also adds a bunch of other stuff you can read about here. It’s mostly just bits and bobs, but it’s a free update, and there’s nothing like more bits and bobs to pull me into another playthrough.
The more interesting announcement is that there are two sets of DLC in the works. One will be an updated version of Trumbull Valley, the setting from the original State of Decay. If you played the original State of Decay as much as I did, a Trumbull Valley map will be like coming home. But the DLC that really grabbed my attention — but apparently not the attention of Undead Labs’ copyeditor — is this:
…we’ve got a new difficulty setting coming in 2019. This will bring you a more challenging player experience, and allow you struggle through increase difficulty in new or existing communities.
Since I’m fluent in poorly edited text, I think I know what they’re getting at. It sounds like the Breakdown DLC for the first game, in which you played on increasingly harder difficulty settings until you failed, which is how any zombie story is supposed to end. Currently, the difficulty in State of Decay 2 is a built-in dynamic system. As you clear more of the map, it starts spawning more special zombies, and the remaining areas get more difficult to clear. It’s a good system, but it doesn’t push back very hard. On the contrary, it sort of hangs fire and lets you muck around at your own pace. Which is fine for some people. But what I really want in my zombie apocalypse games is a prohibitively difficult survival challenge with the looming inevitability of despair, starvation, failure, death, and the annihilation of humanity. Is that too much to ask?
The crossbow update is out tomorrow. The Trumbull Valley map and difficulty settings will be out next year.
Ever wonder what would happen if Gerard Butler was in charge of a submarine?
Next week: Overlord
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Can two famous people playing famous people make it work?
Next: Hunter Killer
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First we talk about Halloween III: Season of the Witch, The Old Man & the Gun, and American Ultra. Then we bet you’re too chicken to listen to the rest of the podcast. Bwaak, bwak, bwak!
Next week: A Star Is Born
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Red Dead Redemption 2 will talk you through most of what you need to know. For the most part, it’s not a challenging game and it’s not trying to be. It just wants you to spend time with it while it tells you a story. But sometimes, you’ll find yourself wrestling with the controls or not quite understanding how something is supposed to work. You might accidentally shoot someone because you mixed up your L2 and your R2. You might then find a town full of folks shooting at you. You might then hitch your horse when you meant to get up on it. You might then die and now you’ve lost your favorite Appaloosa. All this is theoretical, of course. I’m not saying it happened to me. But I’m not saying it didn’t.
So here are a few helpful things that I had to figure them out on my own. And since none of them are spoilers, I pass them on for you to use as you start playing.
Continue reading →
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of homespun wisdom, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
–with apologies to T.S. Eliot
The camp is celebrating because one of the gang members has returned, rescued from certain death. A night of carousing has begun. Mary-Beth asks Arthur to dance. He’s not much of a fella for dancing, he tells her. Oh, it’s okay, Arthur, she says, just ’cause you dance don’t mean you’re not still angry and sad.
Is that what you think of me? he asks good naturedly.
Sad in a good way, like a romantic poet.
Well, that’s about all I can muster, he drawls. They dance in the firelight to a merry accordion.
Continue reading →
We’ve come a long way since 1978. Or have we?
Next: 3×3: taunts
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Due to Bad Times at the Qt3 Movie Podcast Recording Software, we had to use a back-up in which Christien Mulanski’s voice is way quieter than anyone else’s. You’ll have to keep your hand on the volume knob and surf our various volume levels, which will make it our most interactive episode ever.
Next: Halloween
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I’m not sure there’s anything particularly new or even special about Strange Brigade. You could call out its commitment to serial pulp adventures set in the 40s. Or, as it’s known these days, Indiana Jones. These characters and their weapons are the trappings of an era when a pilot was called an aviator and pith helmets weren’t ironic. Steamer trucks full of weapons and nary an assault rifle in sight. Zeppelins, tents and short wave radios at excavation sites of ancient Egyptian ruins, an incredibly annoying announcer trying his darndest to sound like announcers of yore. You gotta give developer Rebellion credit for their commitment to the aesthetic.
But really, Strange Brigade is the simple act of shooting powerful guns at monsters. And lobbing the occasional grenade. And even more occasionally popping off some magic power because, well, that might as well be in there if we’re going to have zombies and skeletons. For the most part it works splendidly. Simple, gratifying, quick, accessible, with a unique sense of character, to boot. So why have I stopped playing?
Continue reading →
The first four of hopefully lots more Williams tables for Pinball FX3 just came out this week. Williams Pinball: Volume 1 is $10 DLC that adds Fish Tales, The Getaway, Junk Yard, and Medieval Madness, which all feel dated…in a good way. They’re among the physical tables from the days of yore, from actual stand-up pinball machines that exist in the real world, now ported into Pinball FX3 thanks to Zen Studios’ licensing deal with Williams. They introduce an odd dilemma for those of us who’ve been playing Zen’s tables all these years.
Pinball FX’s physics have been criticized as “floaty” or “soft”, and it’s not an unfair observation. Their tables are made to play by their own rules, with their own feel for where the ball should go and how. They never claimed to model actual steel balls rolling down actual inclines, bouncing off actual bumpers, and flipped by actual flippers. You could say their physics are stylized, which has freed Zen Studios to do some truly strange things with their tables. That’s just part of the identity of Pinball FX. There are other videogame pinball options for people who put a priority on real world physics. But with these four new tables, when you play a standalone round independent of the unlockable bonuses and wizard powers, you have the option to choose a “difficulty” setting. The choices are Arcade Mode or Tournament Mode. Arcade Mode is Zen Pinball as it’s always been. “Floaty” and “soft”, if you will. But Tournament Mode is their brand new physics model, presumably built to bring a sense of fidelity to these classic tables. And boy, does it feel different.
It feels so different that it doesn’t feel like Pinball FX anymore. It feels faster, and less forgiving, which is probably why Zen calls it a “difficulty” setting. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it’s like playing a whole new game. Who could object to getting a whole new game? And if you don’t like it, you don’t have to play it. But if you do like it — which I really do — now you have four tables that play this cool new way, and 78 tables that don’t. Now you might find yourself wishing the 78 other tables would get their own Tournament Mode. Now you might find yourself understanding why people bitched all these years about “floaty” and “soft” physics. Really, it just means I have to make hard choices as I mess around with these new tables. Get used to the new physics? Or pretend they aren’t in there? There are separate leaderboards for each mode, and although part of me winces at leaderboards splitting off in so many different directions, it does give me more options to beat my pesky friends who play Pinball FX3.
But what’s most puzzling to me is that now I like these tables that I didn’t think I would like, and not necessarily because I actually, you know, like the tables themselves. I like how they play. I like Tournament Mode physics. I’m coming around to the actual tables. I’m sold on Getaway, which is fast and flashy and open and growls like a muscle car. It wants to move. The pinball whipping madly around the crazy racetrack at the top of the table will never get old. It also means I’ll never have to play V12 again. Have you tried that table lately? Ugh. Junk Yard and Fish Tales are kind of junky and weird, but it feels nice to play these old fashioned designs for a change. Medieval Madness, however, just feels superfluous, given that Zen already has a jokey generic fantasy table called Epic Quest. But you can’t play Epic Quest in Tournament Mode, so Medieval Madness has that going for it. This will all be a non-issue as soon as Zen releases more Williams tables, especially the real classics like Pin-bot or Bride of Pin-bot, which give that much more weight to the new physics. But please hurry, Zen! It’s a very confusing time for some of us fans.
