I’m okay with the robots and hovercrafts and whatnot. But a horseback riding sequence? Oh, please no. I’ve paid my dues in Uncharted, Assassin’s Creed, and Skyrim. With the possible exception of Red Dead Redemption, I have yet to meet a horseback riding sequence that wasn’t awful.
No word on whether Black Ops 2 will have a new zombie mode, but at least its got a zombie narrator. Brains!
UPDATE: In this video, Treyarch’s Mark Lamia says, “If you like zombies, you’re going to be really happy with what we’re doing with Black Ops 2. It’s our biggest most ambitious zombies ever.”
A huge honkin’ earth elemental is blocking my expansion to the north, where I want to grab a patch of holy ground and some ancient ruins. I need the holy ground to build a temple, which unlocks powerful religious units. But I’m not going to have enough gold to afford one of those guys for a long time. More immediately, I need the ancient ruins so I can build an excavation, which boosts my magical research. This is Warlock’s closest equivalent to technology in a Civilization game.
But to grab these two resources on the map — the holy ground and ancient ruins — I need to build a city that will be in striking range of an earth elemental who keeps flinging flaming boulders at my dudes. That’s not very neighborly.
There comes a time in some games when something so irresistible happens that you can’t very well not like it. Skullgirls has a few of those. When Ms. Fortune’s severed head latches onto an opponent and you first pull off a move called OMNOMNOM. Or when sexy nurse Valentine defibrillates back to life one of her fallen teammates. Or when Parasoul’s biker gang of commandos charges across the screen. Or when Peacock does pretty much anything that Peacock does.
After the jump, all the ladies in the house say ‘hey!’Continue reading →
Some of the best horror movies veer off in unexpected directions. There’s nothing quite so nice as having absolutely no idea what’s going to happen next. And there’s nothing quite so dull as watching a supposedly scary movie line up the plot points and knock them down like dominoes.
But, really, there’s no point calling Penumbra’s unfolding mystery a horror movie. This Argentinian gem reminds me more of Martin Scorcese’s miniature urban odyssey, After Hours, with the same black humor and the same off-kilter sense of place. Penumbra’s main claim to being a horror movie is the prior body of work of the brothers who wrote and directed it, Adrian and Romiro Bogliano. Their last movie was Cold Sweat, a goofy potboiler about creepy old men who use social media to lure young people and then kill them with nitroglycerin. The kidnapped heroine is slathered in the volatile stuff, so she has to be rescued by slowly dragging her out of the building on a blanket so she won’t explode. But only after removing her clothes because, you know, they’re soaked in nitroglycerin. There hasn’t been a more perfect marriage of narrative and disrobing since Saffron Burrows stripped out of her wetsuit to electrocute a shark in Deep Blue Sea. The hero in Cold Sweat wears a shirt that says Sorcerer. Get it? If so, you’re exactly the kind of person who doesn’t deserve Cold Sweat.
Penumbra could easily get by with a nod to a couple of classic thrillers of the 70s. But if I told you what T-shirt the hero would wear, it would be a spoiler. The delight of Penumbra is having no idea where it’s going. That’s the point. It’s a smart, sexy, slow burn with a bit of subtle social commentary, a flawed and unlikable main character, a great sense of mystery, and a satisfying payoff.
Penumbra is currently available wherever fine videos on demand are sold. And for another example of why Argentina is a country worth watching for nifty genre movies, I also recommend the thoroughly charming Phase 7.
If you need any convincing that Awesomenauts is a game to watch, I have two words for you: Swords and Soldiers. That’s the name of Dutch developer Ronimo’s last game, which managed a full-featured real time strategy game in a sidescrolling 2D world. Now they’re trying their hand at a Defense of the Ancients style strategy game for the Xbox 360 and PS3. They had me at Ronimo.
Fable: Heroes for the Xbox 360 is a simplified action RPG — do we really need to simplify action RPGs?– with an unintentionally creepy doll aesthetic and a boardgame where the skill tree is supposed to go. Having played a couple of levels, the only connection I can find to Fable is a chicken kicking minigame. I expect the farting, wiving, and dog training will be along later.
Tera Online is an MMO.
(UPDATE: Unfortunately, Awesomenauts’ publisher just went belly up. It looks like the game might be in limbo for the time being and this week’s wallet threat may, in fact, not be Awesome.)
For the love of god, Montresor, don’t make us watch The Raven! At the 34-minute mark, we switch over to this week’s 3×3 and discuss our favorite buttons, levers, and switches in a movie.
The gore is silly enough. Most gore is. The attempts at gritty edgy dialogue are even sillier. Prototype 2’s adult language is anything but. It’s playground bluster. If you got your tights in a twist over the bad guys in Arkham City calling Catwoman a “bitch”, Prototype 2 will send you into paroxysms of righteous indignation. Which is to say this is a prime example of how some videogame writers wouldn’t know good writing if it insulted their wives and called them a cunt. And that’s about all Prototype 2 has to offer in terms of storytelling: insultingly obvious, overintentionally gritty, childish, churlish. Just shut up, already, Prototype 2. You’re not impressing anyone. I have never skipped so many cutscenes so quickly and so willingly.
Jetpack Joyride was already really good. With today’s free update, it’s even gooder. However, I question the entire premise of this being a “free” update. Yeah, sure, it’s free in that you don’t have to pay anything when you get it. Your copy of Jetpack Joyride will automatically update without you paying a cent.
But then you start playing and you’re confronted with two empty slots where you can equip gadgets (pictured). Go ahead and start playing anyway. In the starting room, you’ll see a pair of empty picture frames where your equipped gadgets would go. You want gadgets. You need gadgets. Gadgets are the new money sinks where cosmetic doo-dads used to go. But gadgets actually do stuff. As such, you will definitely want as many gadgets as you can get your stubby little jetpack operating hands on.
That’s not going to happen any time soon. Gadgets are expensive. Each one — there are fifteen — costs around 5000 gold. If you’ll indulge me, let’s do a little math. I tend to make 250 gold on the average run. That means 20 runs to buy each gadget. That means 300 runs to unlock all the gadgets, give or take. At which point I can now try to claw my way up from the bottom of the high score list. Or I can just buy gold as an in-app purchase. This is a cornerstone of Jetpack Joyride’s design.
The update doesn’t just add more grinding to encourage in-app purchases. It also seems to make the slot machine a more prominent part of the game. For starters, I’ve seen more slot machine tokens, which means the slot machine figures more prominently. My first run with the update was a record breaker, but not by virtue of me being better. Instead, I got a free life in the slot machine, which I promptly lost, but not before getting another slot machine token. My pull on the slot machine netted me three more tokens, one of which got me a small blast to push me a little farther down the run. Another of the free spins got me a nuclear blast to push me considerably farther down the run. New high score! Take that, you three people on my friends list who are now under my high score. Three down, about thirty to go! Seriously, how are all you people making 3000m and 4000m runs?
That’s a meteor about to land on the supplies I have to defend. I have to deflect it with my attacks, while also keeping an eye out for monsters. I basically punch it away. The mission ends after I’ve endured 100 meteors. Yep, 100 meteors. As I play this mission, I think of Dane Cook’s bit about bees: “I would punch every bee in the face”. So there’s me, punching every meteor in the face. Well, not every meteor. Just the ones that dare to come near my supplies.
After the jump, things to do when you’re not punching meteorsContinue reading →
This week we talk with Kevin Perry, the executive producer of Age of Empires Online, about the recent dramatic changes made to the game. We also discuss A Valley Without Wind, Streetfighters Cross Tech-In (close enough), Survarium (huh?), Shadowbane (yep, Shadowbane), and one of the best things to come out of the 90s (besides Xena Warrior Princess): Shadow Watch.
Time was a protest was an easy thing. You just showed up at the designated spot and it sort of happened. Then you went home and waited for the US to get out of Vietnam or whatever. But these days, you have to take a more active role, such as posting on message boards or signing online petitions. Let’s say you want a better ending in Mass Effect 3. If you want to join the latest demand that Electronic Arts, uh, fix the ending — whatever that may mean — you need to turn on your copy of Mass Effect 3 on a particular day, and then turn it off, and not turn it back on for at least a day. I think you also have to Tweet a Tweet. You’re also supposed to claim you’re not going to buy the DLC, no siree!, even though you know you will. It’s a pretty involved process. The details are available here. Oops, wrong link. I think this is the right one.
Since I was okay with the ending of Mass Effect 3 — it was about as good as the rest of the series! — I’m instead going to protest the beginning of Mass Effect 3. On May 7th, join me in not playing Mass Effect 3 to send a message to Electronic Arts that we demand they make that toy spaceship look more fakey.
It’s a bit strange to come from meticulously hand-crafted 2D exploration games like Waking Mars and Fez into the procedurally generated infinite expanse of A Valley Without Wind, another 2D exploration game which is available today directly from publisher Arcen Games or from a digital distributor near you. For one thing, A Valley Without Wind is very combat based. You can hardly walk the length of a screen without blasting something. Two or three somethings, more likely. This is a very actiony game. Consider hooking up your 360 controller.
Which doesn’t mean there’s less exploration. There might be a lot of blasting, but that in no way reduces the emphasis on exploration. So much geography!
Game of Thrones fans might know Kate Dickie (pictured) as a mother who doesn’t have a grasp on how long you’re supposed to breastfeed. But she’s so much more than that, as anyone who’s seen the Scottish thriller Red Road can attest. And in Outcast, she is to female magic users what Gandalf is to dude magic users. I shall henceforth name all my female magic users after her character in Outcast.
Outcast is a supernatural thriller from 2010. Oh, who am I kidding? It’s a horror movie. Not your usual horror movie, to be sure. It’s Scottish, drenched in the bleak grey of Scottish weather, lore, and low rent housing. It’s got a great cast, most notably Dickie as the druidic version of Alice from Martin Scorcese’s 1974 movie, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Dickie’s character is on the run from what we assume is an abusive husband. Only this abusive husband can be deterred by blood glyphs on the walls. The cast also includes James Nesbitt as an Irishman out of his element in Scotland, a nuance that will be lost on a lot of us Yanks, along with the piker vs. gypsy subtext. But you can’t deny Nesbitt’s appeal as a slightly confused magician. He certainly looks the part. There’s a thin line between “wizard” and “homeless”. Together, Dickie and Nesbitt are the Sarah Connor and Arnold of celtic Terminator plots.
This is ultimately a movie about a custody battle, but with spells. And I love the way magic is portrayed here. Grimy, unpleasant, painful, requiring clean up afterwards, and with rules beyond human ken. Real magic means that when someone tells you to eat bony roasted pigeon flesh, you don’t ask what for. As Nesbitt says during the obligatory shot from The Shining — you know, with the camera look up from underneath as he leans his head against a door and roars at the person on the other side — “Them’s the fucking terms!”
You’ve also got some young lovers and it’s such a relief that they’re not awful, which would have been the case if this were an American horror movie. However, as with most horror movies that have the courage of their convictions, Outcast will get a bit ridiculous before it’s over. As Christopher Lee would have told you while prancing merrily toward the end of the original Wicker Man, “Them’s the fucking terms”.
In 1787, after things didn’t go so well with America, England decided to invent Australia. So they pushed out to sea some ships full of convicts and rabbits. They headed vaguely southeast, hit an island, and flourished. The convicts eventually produced Olivia Newton-John, Sam Worthington, and the Lord of the Rings movies. The rabbits produced more rabbits. A lot more.
The rabbits, which bred like rabbits, took to Australia’s mild winter-less climate. They enjoyed unchecked population growth as the colonists thinned out the predators that should have eaten the rabbits. The furry little darlings destroyed young trees by eating away the bark. They dined freely on plants that were supposed to anchor the topsoil. For two hundred years, rabbits wrought havoc on Australia’s ecosystem, single-handedly causing the extinction of plant species that occur nowhere else in the world.
I’ve done something similar in Waking Mars.
After the jump, Night of the Lupus, but on Mars and without rabbitsContinue reading →
Risen 2 (pictured) is the other RPG from the folks who made Gothic. This one has pirates. Prototype 2 is the other open-world series from the folks who made The Hulk. This one has — stop me if you’ve heard this one — tank punching. Bloodforge, the only game out this week that I’ve actually played, is a bantamweight God of War clone for Xbox Live Arcade. All in all, it sounds like a pretty good week to play The Witcher 2.
