Plenty of movies have songs. Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head, in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, for example. Or whatever AC/DC song that is — they all sound alike — in The Avengers. But not many movies take the time to show us characters listening to songs. There are three points in Roadie when Ron Eldard’s character listens to a song and reveals something about himself. Regret, fury, and longing, in that order, and each for a different song.
The character, Jimmy Testagross, a recently out-of-work roadie for Blue Oyster Cult, is otherwise pretty bottled up. He’s a combination of childlike vulnerability and the guarded quality of a picked-on teenager. He wears on his face the perpetual ingratiating smile of someone always waiting to discover he’s the punchline of a joke that he’ll have to laugh at to get people to like him. I’ve previously written off Eldard as a TV lightweight who works best with a CG monster or Ben Kingsley doing the heavy lifting. But there is nothing TV lightweight about what he does in Roadie, from his paunch to his pathos to the way he takes a slap or steals a glance. During one scene, he lets down his guard and explains why Blue Oyster Cult is unique, and what the music means to him. It’s like Paul Giamatti talking to Virginia Madsen about wine in Sideways: so this is what this man is all about.
Then there’s Roadie’s supporting cast. Lois Smith smolders with a combination of confusion and anger as Jimmy’s abandoned mother; Bobby Canavale shows that being a smooth clown doesn’t have to mean being funny; and the remarkable Jill Hennessy is a revelation to someone like me who thought Crossing Jordan was the name of that post nuclear apocalypse thing with Skeet Ulrich. She’s far more than the usual object of affection. And as the person singing one of the songs Jimmy listens to, she’s got a sultry set of pipes. Queens is also a character in the movie, which is no surprise given that director Michael Cuestra and writer Gerald Cuestra have been here before. Their first movie, L.I.E., was a darker look at the same area from either end of Roadie’s age range.
But don’t be fooled by Roadie’s happy-go-lucky romcom DVD cover. This is no romcom. It’s a grown-up movie about the inability to be a grown-up, like Young Adult minus the double twee of Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody.
After all those years of Playstation exclusives, it’s hard to remember that Ratchet & Clank developer Insomniac is still independent. But they’re finally stretching their wings, collaborating with Electronic Arts for a game called Overstrike, which will be playable on systems other than the one you use as a Blu-ray player.
But Overstrike won’t be their first release with EA. They just announced something imminent called Outernauts!
Combining Insomniac’s immersive storytelling with a unique art style and sense of wit, Outernauts is an adventure role-playing game that casts players as members of United Earth’s elite Outernaut force. The Outernauts are charged with capturing and training exotic alien beasts as they uncover the riddle behind mysterious “ancients” while battling pirates and evil corporations seeking to control the galaxy. Players will explore planets, harvest loot, and fight asynchronously alongside or against friends to master a wild, untamed universe.
Sweet! So when can I play it?
Outernauts is currently in a closed beta testing phase and will launch on Facebook this summer.
Oh. Nevermind.
If you consider games journalism the process of writing about games that haven’t come out yet, I’m a terrible games journalist for caring instead about the games that are already out. And I’m an especially terrible games journalist in the case of a few specific games that I don’t want to know anything about. For instance, Bioshock Infinite. I know everything I need to know to want to play it, and any additional information I get I’d just as soon get from actually playing. As you can see, I can’t even bring myself to post a screenshot of it.
So E3 was going to be a real pain in the butt, because everyone and his dog was going to be talking about Bioshock Infinite. But no more! 2K just announced that not only has Bioshock Infinite been delayed until February 2013, but it furthermore won’t be showing at E3 next month. Phew.
Home invasions are low hanging fruit for horror movies. It’s one of those timeless fears: What if a bunch of dudes break into your house, your sanctuary, the place where you’re safe and relaxed, and have their way with you? It’s the ultimate “what if they get in here?” scenarios. One of the earliest home invasion movies I know is the original Desperate Hours with Humphrey Bogart, which holds up well even if it has a charming civility as far as home invasions go. Among the worst recent ones I’ve seen are Trespass, which isn’t a home invasion movie so much as a Nicolas Cage movie, and Secuestrados (Kidnapped, in English), which is the sort of tasteless pointless stylish trash that gives good horror movies a bad name. If I had to pick a favorite, I’d go with Paul Andrew Williams brilliant brutal Cherry Tree Lane, which isn’t available in the US yet. Someone get on that. It is the Straw Dogs of the 21st century.
Until that time, there’s Mother’s Day, not to be confused with the original Troma film it’s supposedly based on. Speaking of trash. The original Mother’s Day was one of those gross 70s rape movies that recreates the feeling of stumbling across Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s porn stash. But this remake — which is absolutely not a remake — is a mean lean smart script about colliding systems. On one hand, a veritable beer commercial of good-looking fun-loving privileged friends. On the other hand, the eponymous mother and her brood of mismatched white trash kids. A literal and figurative tornado is brewing.
Briana Evigan, recently locked in a house with a tiger in Burning Bright (get it?), is locked in a house with a whole other kind of tiger this time. The icy menacing Rebecca De Mornay isn’t mad; she’s just disappointed. She’s like the crocodile in Black Water, just waiting, watching, keeping her prey in place until she’s ready to either pounce or saunter off. It could go either way. She’s as sexy as she was in Risky Business, as dangerous as she was in Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and as sexy as she was in Risky Business. Did I mention that she’s sexy? With an unlikely brood at her beck and call — wait, she had all those kids? — she is the biggest baddest wolf since Cate Blanchett in Hannah.
Mother’s Day is out on DVD this week.
Warlock isn’t really a game about diplomacy any more than it’s a game about city building. There’s diplomacy in here, but like the city building, it sits in the back seat while you fling spells and command armies. City building is there as a support system for your armies. And diplomacy is there to determine against whom to direct your armies. Or to ignore and just direct your armies against everyone. Which is what I’m doing now. I’m at war with everyone.
However, none of them are being aggressive. Is that because the AI is too meek? Let’s see how it responds to an invasion. I’ve decided to pick on my closest neighbor. He’s a wizard named Rjakh, who I mainly think of as the pink wizard because he’s pink. How hard can it be to beat a pink wizard?
In a Civilization game, I would march units into his territory and lay siege to his city. If I brought enough units of the right mix, I’d prevail. That’s not how Warlock works. Because when you correctly do a one unit per hex game, the strategic level map is also the tactical playing field. That’s a whole other kind of war than marching stacks up to city walls and letting your unit mix take over.
After the jump, Warlock’s AI at war Continue reading →
This week offers three new games to help you kill time until May 15.
1) Starhawk is out for the PS3 this week. I predict another feather in Sony’s multiplayer cap. This mix of real time strategy, air and ground vehicle-based action, on-foot shootering, single-player campaign, and online multiplayer could be in the same league as Playstation exclusives like Mag and Killzone 3. I’ll have more to say about it once it’s gone live.
2) Turn-based strategy fans get Warlock: Master of the Arcane, hopefully with the day zero patch. I really like what I’ve seen in the pre-release version. It’s not quite Conquest of Elysium 3 in terms of gameplay, but not for lack of trying. And it’s certainly got the production value for those of you who couldn’t stomach Conquest’s spritely artwork.
3) Hey, look, you can play Minecraft on your Xbox 360! Which is pretty much the same Minecraft you already know and love. This console version is a lot friendlier to new players than the PC version. There is no guesswork with the crafting, thanks to extensive tooltips for inventory items and a helpful menu system in place of alt-tabbing to a wiki. While I certainly admire the game, I still can’t shake off a pervasive sense of pointlessness as I play. Where do I check my high score?
We mostly aren’t into the whole comic book thing, but we really liked The Avengers. Well, most of us did. Listen to reveal the secret identity of this week’s wet blanket! Or avoid spoilers by fast forwarding to the 42-minute mark for this week’s 3×3 of unanswered questions in movies.
Next week: Dark Shadows
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In The Avengers, as Robert Downey Jr chews high-tech scenery on the control deck of the SHIELD helicarrier, he observes that someone is playing Galaga. It’s just a throwaway joke in a string of throwaway jokes. But the difference is that it’s not thrown away. It’s a setup for a visual gag that scores a place in the credits for Galaga creator Namco.
But is Galaga the right choice? If you want to include a gag about a young technician playing videogames in a high-tech control room, wouldn’t it be more appropriate to go with Team Fortress, Skyrim, Counter-Strike, or Modern Warfare? Just work your way down the Steam usage statistics until you get to the highest paying product placement. Or maybe you should just go with Farmville to ensure the greatest number of people in the audience gets the gag?
But like so many other things in The Avengers, this is a nod to boys of a certain age. The Tony Stark of the Iron Man movies and now The Avengers is the right age and exactly the right demographic to identify a Galaga screen. And the audience is exactly the right audience for this fond brief wink.
As for why some young technician on the deck of a helicarrier would set up an emulator to play a 30 year old arcade game…well, who are we to question what SHIELD employees do to entertain themselves? At least it’s work safe.
Awesomenauts is a mostly unimaginative re-tread of the all-too-familiar Defense of the Ancients gameplay. Pick a lane. Push with your creeps towards turrets. Maybe jungle a little. Kill the other team’s dudes for a leg up. Endure, endure, upgrade, endure, endure, upgrade. Once you get a few levels on the other team, push a little harder. Endure some more. Endure. Push. Upgrade? Nope, not just yet. Endure. Kill. Endure. Now upgrade. Win. Or lose. Like Ronimo’s actually awesome Swords and Soldiers, Awesomenauts is a compressed experience, so a game will typically take 20 minutes instead of 40 minutes. But beyond the fact that it’s a gleefully cartoony 2D sidescrolling game, Awesomenauts does little to distinguish itself from, say, Demigod or League of Legends.
After the jump, six men enter, three men leave Continue reading →
MMOs are fundamentally broken. Like the free-to-play model, they all too often put commercial demands in front of game design. Which is great if you’re a publisher. It’s not so great for those of us who play games. The good guys in the MMO sphere are few and far between: Guild Wars, Eve Online, and, uh, am I forgetting anyone?
So, anyway, Bethesda is finally making Elder Scrolls the MMO it hasn’t been for so long. Imagine Skyrim with a dozen players running in the opposite direction, another dozen players racing towards that dragon you’re trying to kill, instanced housing, everyone sporting his own Lydia, and a faction grinding bar where your title Thane of Whiterun would have been. And probably a subscription fee. Bethesda strikes me as arrogant enough to figure they could charge $15 a month.
After spending 120 gratifying hours in Xenoblade Chronicles, which offers almost everything you might want from an MMO without being an MMO, this is about as exciting a prospect as using Kinect to play Skyrim.
It’s a good time to be a fan of action-oriented tower defense games! While PC gamers finally get to enjoy the original Toy Soldiers on Steam, those of us playing the deliriously wonderful console-only sequel, Toy Soldiers: Cold War, get $10 of new DLC. For some odd reason, it’s broken into two separate $5 packages. Napalm and Evil Empire each include a three-mission campaign, a new mode for the survival missions on the old maps, a new versus map, and a new barrage attack that might come up when you kill one of the bonus targets and get a randomly determined special attack.
The new minigames are as disappointing as most of the old minigames. I can’t see playing either of them more than once to set a basic score. I mean, seriously, whack-a-mole, but with capitalist pigs? Similarly, the new survival modes are puzzling. Trauma mode just means that every time you place a turret, your base loses some health. It’s a pretty minor tweak. It’s more the sort of thing you’d see on an options screen than in a DLC package. Then there’s the commando mode, which means you’re just running around the map using a permanent supersoldier. These are the same guys you get as occasional power-ups. America gets the goofy Rambo and the Soviets get the goofy Dolph Lundgren. There’s no harm in having all of the action and none of the strategy, but it’s a bit like taking a great joke and drawing it out for too long. I can get that for free on Saturday Night Live.
The DLC campaigns each have three new missions, and there’s enough variety in the map layouts and included vehicles to set them apart from the main game’s missions. Since many of the Soviet defenses have their own unique tweaks that you could previously only enjoy in versus games, it’s nice to get more time with them in the Evil Empire campaign. However, Napalm’s Vietnam oriented maps are much livelier than the dreary Eastern block maps in Evil Empire. The new barrage attacks are probably the best thing in the DLC. The Soviet orbital beam is especially gratifying.
The biggest drawback for this $10 of DLC is that Toy Soldiers: Cold War was already such a full-featured package. Without folding any new units or defenses into the mix — this aspect of Toy Soldiers has been pretty much frozen since the original World War I setting — it just feels like new ways to play the same old game. But at least this same old game is one of the best action oriented tower defense games you can play.
According to this unsourced rumor, a Bayonetta sequel that was never announced was cancelled. Which can mean anything from someone throwing away a piece of concept art to an entire project scrapped and internal schedule reworked.
My initial reaction is the expected, “Aww, now I won’t get to play Bayonetta 2!” But it occurs to me that I’m pretty sure I don’t want Bayonetta 2. Some games are fine as self-contained entities, with no further elaboration needed, and no real need for improvements. Remember when God of War, Devil May Cry, and Mortal Kombat were fresh? That’s the same thrill I got discovering Bayonetta that I eventually lost with those other games as they trundled down their path of sequels and remakes and reboots. If any game deserves to transcend the usual franchise treatment, it’s Bayonetta. What’s wrong with a really good one-off from time to time?
Of course, time was I would have said the same thing about Bioshock. Then along came Bioshock 2 and now I’m giddy with anticipation for Bioshock Infinite.
As the old saying goes, one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic, and a billion is a serviceable opening move in Pandemic 2.5.
In this iPhone port of a webgame, you create a disease to infect people, which earns evolution points. You spend these points to add new features to your disease. Your goal is the infection and eventual annihilation of humanity, starting with patient zero. One down, about seven billion to go. This is a horror game as brutally dispassionate and coolly catastrophic as Defcon.
After the jump, the Chick Tickle Continue reading →
A Valley Without Wind developer Chris Park joins us to talk about Prototype 2, To the Moon, Age of Empires Online, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, and the rumored Xbox 360/Kinect subscription bundle. And, of course, A Valley Without Wind, a curious game of infinite exploration.
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The premise of Area 407, yet another found footage movie, is that a bunch of actors who are really bad at improvisation do a lot of improvisation (i.e. screaming their dialogue) when their flight to LA crashes onto a secret government breeding ground for camera shy velociraptors. This movie is notable for having somehow secured the back half of a ruined airplane (pictured). That apparently ate into the budget that would have been spent on CG velociraptors.
I like how sky marshals are now a trope. According to Hollywood, every flight has a sky marshal, and therefore an easy way to introduce a gun. Just pick the most unlikely character on the airplane. That’s the sky marshal. In Bridesmaids, it was the nerdy guy sitting next to Melissa McCarthy. In Area 407, it’s the hot chick with the on-again/off-again Australian accent.
Area 407 is available on video on demand, but don’t bother. For a far better movie about plane crash survivors stalked by predators, check out The Grey or the first episode of Lost.
