To announce the Mi-24 Hind add-on for Take On Helicopters, executive producer Lukas Milacek cites the following axiom about helicopters:
If it’s ugly, it’s British. If it’s weird, it’s French. And if it’s ugly and weird, it’s Russian.
How dare he! Just look at that regally hulking thing with its bulbous twin canopies and stubby death-laden wings. I suppose Milacek even thinks the A-10 is “ugly”. Harumph.
The new Hind DLC is $13, which seems a bit steep, but you can blame all those $60 scenery add-ons gobbled up by content-starved flight sim enthusiasts over the years.
Soren Johnson (not literally pictured) is the ruthlessly calculating mastermind behind one of the most hideously effective time sinks since actual civilization: Civilization IV. You might think such a fellow is too high-brow and dignified for the likes of us. We’ll be the judge of that on this week’s episode of the Qt3 Games Podcast. Tune in for a recap of the best of this year’s GDC, a little Mass Effect 3 talk, a discussion of the latest Kickstarter projects, and a scientific test that determines whether Soren Johnson is, in fact, a nerd.
In the Normandy’s engineering bay, crew member Cortez talks about the fate of his husband, killed in an attack by invading aliens. Cortez is a dude. With a husband. Shepherd doesn’t bat an eye as yet another “how’s your family?” dialogue unfolds. It’s clumsy, but only because it’s by Bioware. Not because it’s about a gay couple. Part of the beauty of Bioware is that they’re equal opportunity clumsy writers, regardless of sexual orientation.
There’s also a point on Citadel Station where a woman is talking about her asari lover — all asari are chicks — and the tension it causes with her family. I understand Shepard himself/herself can even get into gay relationships. This has been the case all along with the main characters in Dragon Ages, Mass Effects, and maybe even earlier (were there gay characters in the Old Republic games?). I don’t know this firsthand, not because I have any aversion to a particular lifestyle. Instead, my aversion is to ridiculous romance mechanics, gay, straight, or interspecies.
Silent House is the latest remake of a foreign horror film, made for Americans who can’t be arsed to read subtitles. Naturally, we’re all “well, it wasn’t as good as the original Uruguayan film” blah blah blah. At the 33-minute mark, we discuss our favorite animal moments in movies.
The developers at Red Wasp Design have a great sense of atmosphere. Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land is so promising as it boots up, with a picture of Lovecraft in all his gangly ungainly glory. Something scratchy plays at a slightly wrong speed on a gramophone, half way between warbly singing and sinister chanting. This off-kilter spirit of Lovecraft carries into the mission intros, with the characters talking to each other in suitably “period” dialogue. They’re the band of investigators you’d find in any session of Chaosium’s tabletop RPG. Gung ho British soldiers are the cheerful muscle, infused with the can-do spirit of the not quite fallen British Empire. The brains of the party are a plucky psychologist and an occultist in a turban, each with a gun in one hand and a spell book in the other.
It’s World War I. A cult of eldritch god worshippers has insinuated itself among German soldiers. Undead and Leng spiders and eventually worse are shuffling and scuttling about the trenches and mustard gas and ruined cathedrals. It’s up to your ragtag band to get to the heart of the matter.
I’m not very well versed in the Mario Party series, but based on my brief time with Mario Party 9, I can safely say it’s a great game for kids or drunk adults. If your household is host to either of those, consider this a minor wallet threat.
I feel the Silent Hill series has lost its way since the first game, but that doesn’t stop me from being curious about the latest, Silent Hill: Downpour. Still, is it a wise idea to name your game after a heavy rain?
Journey, the next game from the creators of Flower, is out this week. It has some sort of online functionality so that I don’t intend to play it until it’s out and you guys are playing it as well. But if the words “from the creators of Flower” aren’t a wallet threat, I don’t know what is. Finally Yakuza: Dead Souls brings to the clunky Japanese crimelord series exactly what it needs. Zombies.
I have a few things I’d like to say to some of the people playing Mass Effect 3’s cool co-op multiplayer mode. Some very specific things to some very specific people.
Updates the rest of this week will be spottier than usual since I’m away at the Game Developers Conference, which I always find relaxing, informative, and oddly re-energizing. If you’re at GDC this year instead of playing Mass Effect 3, come see the panel I’m moderating at the very end of the conference. The topic is that free-to-play games suck. Actually, that’s not technically the topic, but I’ll see what I can do.
And while I’ve got your attention, thanks for supporting the site by visiting us. We’ve been growing nicely even though I’m awful at promoting things. So if you’ll indulge me for a moment, I could use your help. We have a new Twitter feed ripe for the following at @Qt3, a Facebook page here that I’d be much obliged if you’d “like”, and podcasts that could use your ratings on iTunes (games podcast here and movie podcast here). We’ve also had a donation button up for a while that I’ve been pretty shy about pimping, but I’m grateful to the few folks who have used it.
As an erstwhile wargamer — Wait, don’t go! We’re going to talk about real time strategy games, I promise. As an erstwhile wargamer, I love statistics about armor thickness vs penetration values, visibility profiles, morale ratings, operational range, and so forth. One of my first computer games was a turgid turn-based affair called Mech Brigade, released at the height of the Cold War and detailing all those terrible toys that would come into play in any Red Dawn scenario I might personally experience. When the Soviets came to Little Rock, Arkansas, I would know a Hind from a Havoc, a BRDM from a BMP, a Spandrel from a Sagger. And don’t get me started on Harpoon, which was my first real-time spreadsheet game. Fortunately, Arkansas is landlocked, so all that stuff in Harpoon was strictly hypothetical.
You might not be able to relate. So let me try this angle: when people talk about the sports, they use a lot of statistics, such as how many RBIs Manning Payton scored, a basketballer’s average speed per inning, and Pete Holmes’ stamina rating. In fact, I have it on good authority that entire sports games consist of nothing but statistics, much like how Paradox makes entire history games. And that’s where the unfortunately named Wargame: European Escalation will eventually get its hooks into you: as an almost grotesquely detailed catalog of Cold War hardware.
Two years ago, I wrote up Mass Effect 2 as a list of ten things gone terribly wrong. I dismissed it as “a confused attempt to streamline an RPG, flesh out a shooter, cram a story between space dungeons, and pick up the loose ends from the first game”. But then you people bought it in droves, said adoring things about it, and put it on your various Best Game Ever lists. Nice move. Now we’re all going to get more of the same in Mass Effect 3.
Since one of us has moved out of the country, we’ll be doing shorter podcasts on older movies time to time. For instance, this week, we watched an old French movie from 2002, except that it’s from Belgium. And we happen to think it’s pretty darn awesome. Watch The Son (it’s on Netflix instant view!) and join us. Or join us at the 29-minute mark for a nice high-brow 3×3: our favorite fat kids in movies.
First, let me explain that I’m really weird about trailers for movies. I don’t watch them, because they mess up the experience of letting a movie unfold the way the director intended. I know Tom Hanks is going to get rescued in the end, that Johnny Depp isn’t going to want to jump off that cliff, and that Jason Bateman is going to be grossed out when Leslie Mann uses the ladies’ room. I feel similarly about some game trailers, which is one of the reasons I am a terrible Videogame Journalist ™.
Now that you and I understand each other a little better, I have a favor to ask. Please don’t watch Electronic Arts’ latest trailer for Mass Effect 3. You probably already have. You’re probably watching it right now since I have embedded it in this post to test your resolve. In which case, you’re spoiling at least one truly awesome moment in the game. So if you must watch the trailer, please don’t pay close attention to it.
Syndicate takes you to a sleek sterile future world, drawn with oddly busy graphics and often blown-out lighting. In this dystopia, reams of floating text have wandered away from their HUDs and infested the walls, the furniture, the cups on shelves, the crates, and even the dozing hobos. So this is what the future has in store for us. Labels. Never has a dystopia been so Ikea.
In case you haven’t gotten enough of me burbling enthusiastically about Conquest of Elysium 3, Bruce Geryk and I launched our own Occupy movement on the strategy gaming podcast, Three Moves Ahead. Our tent city was finally dispersed by repressive host Troy “The Man” Goodfellow.
