Baoz Yakin’s last movie, Max, was about Kate Mara saving a disabled dog. When the name of the movie is also the name of the dog, you know what you’re getting. Fun for the whole family, assuming the whole family enjoys saccharine animal movies. But now he’s made this bloody burlesque? Don’t be fooled by the prosaic title. Boarding School is a delighfully macabre coming-of-age freak show, in which each development is weirder than the next.
The key to this horror show is Luke Prael, an aburdly pretty child actor whose prettiness was one of the running jokes in the movie Eighth Grade. But he’s no joke here. Although he’s a bit stiff, he’s admirably fearless. He needs to be since Boarding School plays subversively with gender identity and sexuality. This isn’t the Spielburg/King homage you might expect when the title card says, “The 90s”. It’s dressed to kill at sleepaway camp. It wants to let the right one in. This stuff can be dicey when it involves kids. It can be even dicier when the kids have serious disabilities. And even dicier still in a movie about murder, ghosts, monsters, vampires, Nazis, and Will Patton’s malevolent smirk.
Patton’s having a great time in Boarding School, and he’s squarely in the “giving no fucks” stage of his career as a character actor. He affects a pinched voice and an old coot demeanor. Such weird choices given the Dickensian cruelty of his character! But because the payoff comes down to conversations and decisions, weird works. Any ol’ horror movie about the demented principal of a scary boarding school can culminate in gratuitous bloodletting. Boarding School certainly isn’t shy about gore (a throat-slitting scene is uncomfortably memorable). But Yakin has been writing long enough to know that blood and fire are no substitute for conversations and decisions. And he writes well enough to ask, “Why not both?”
If you’re hoping for a bunch more Star Wars tables for Zen, well, yeah, you’re getting some of those. But you’re also getting a whole lot more, and it’s like nothing else Zen Pinball has done.
Of all the action RPGs out there — sheesh, there are a bunch of them! — you’ll find plenty that know how to situate the mindlessness of hack-and-slash in a larger and less mindless context. Soldak’s Zombicide drops you into evolving worlds to navigate a web of creatures and factions chasing their own agendas. The hand-made geography of Grim Dawn, a game built to encourage you to explore its nooks and crannies, trumps any procedural arrangement of dungeon tiles under forest paths next to castle walls. The intricacy of a Path of Exile character build, wending its way through that ridiculously complex chart, like some advanced celestial navigation. The breadth, personality, and dynamism Guild Wars 2 brings to traditional MMO world-building.
All of these action RPGs offer compelling reasons to wade through potentially repetitive slaughter to level up a character. They all understand how to answer the question “Why?”. But none of them compares to Diablo when it comes to the moment-to-moment hack-and-slash. The animation, the rhythm, the variety, the information-rich chaos. Where the blade meets the bone, where the arrow meets the artery, where the fireball meets the flesh, that’s where Blizzard truly excels. The why of Diablo falls away before the glory of its what.
Hey, that’s not a submarine in that concept art from the Subnautica: Below Zero teaser site. That’s not even underwater! Hmm. What could the folks at the aptly named Unknown Worlds have planned for the next step in Subnautica? Dry land? Or at least wet land that’s frozen? We’ll know soon enough when it enters beta, and for a longtime thereafter we’ll have to make the hard choice between playing Below Zero in whatever state it’s currently in or waiting until it’s finished. It seemed like it was forever before I could play a version of Subnautica willing to call itself v1.0. And based on this comment…
In the coming months, we will release Below Zero in Steam Early Access. Then, we will begin releasing consistent content updates, carefully crafting the game based on player feedback – Just like the original Subnautica.
…it sounds like it’ll be another forever before a version of Below Zero is willing to call itself v1.0.
There are a lot more people on the roads of Afghanistan since I was there about a year ago. And by Afghanistan, I mean Afghanistan ’11, the brilliant hearts-and-minds strategy game that explores the overlapping roles of combat and nation-building. I was just poking around in the new Royal Marines DLC, which adds British units from a time when Brexit sounded like the name of a wheat cracker. It also adds cars. Lot of cars. It’s bumper to bumper out there. Whose cars are these? What are they doing out and about while I’m ferrying soldiers, dropping airstrikes, refueling helicopters, and trying to patch up another leaking water tank for some village that won’t even tell me where the opium is at.
This page announcing the DLC says that some cars are carrying car bombs, and I can intercept them by setting up roadblocks. Eventually I can recruit local police to man the roadblocks. The Afghanis trying to get someplace in their cars can be hassled by locals instead of foreign soldiers. I wasn’t sure how all this worked, so after Alpha Company spent a few turns loitering around in front of concrete barricades, I told them to pack it in. They went back to base. Meanwhile, my political capital had plummeted because I’d forgotten how to play. The game over screen came along shortly thereafter. To the manual! Unfortunately, none of this is in the manual yet. In fact, the manual hasn’t been updated to include any of Afghanistan ’11’s new features. There are plenty of them, starting with convoys, then MOABs, then new rules for politics, combat, garrisons, villages, special forces, and now new UK units, car bombs, and so forth. Afghanistan ’11 has gotten plenty of updates, including a bunch of new content. Yet the manual still says “this feature is coming soon” in the place I went to remind myself how convoys work. Convoys were added over a year ago. As far as I can tell, you won’t find any documentation for anything released after the game first came out. Post-release support should include reminding guys like me how to play when we come back after a long absence. A couple of tersely worded pinned posts in the Steam forum don’t cut it.
The Royal Marines DLC comes out September 6th for the PC. It will be available for the iOS version at an unspecified later date. Between now and then, I’ll be trying my best to figure it all out.
With this week’s release of the zombie DLC for Far Cry 5, Ubisoft has fulfilled its commitment to folks who bought the season’s pass. So how did it all turn out? What did you get for your $30? This is not a good week to ask that question. The latest add-on, Dead Living Zombies, is unmitigated junk, and that’s especially clear if you’re playing Rebellion’s surprisingly smart Strange Brigade.
It’s clear early on what game the Gladius developers have been playing. And not just from the interface. Not even from the fact that you start with a settler and two warriors. But from the way it gallops apace. The turns tick-tock along with the nearly clockwork drumbeat of your thumb on the spacebar. This needs your attention, then that, then this, then you’re done with the turn. Spacebar, spacebar, spacebar. Units then cities then end turn. Thumb thumb thumb from units to cities to end turn. Units to cities to end turn. Units to cities to end turn. Units to cities to tech tree to end turn. Units to cities to end turn. It’s a steady sequence, designed so that the act of playing is rhythm and the act of not playing is dissonance. Why would you want to mess up that rhythm? It would be more natural to keep playing than to stop playing. Units to cities to end turn.
Maps of fantasy kingdoms look cooler than maps of real kingdoms, because real kingdoms don’t have lava rivers, mountains festooned with Minas Tirith looking cities, or massive blue sky vortices. But that’s not stopping Creative Assembly from trying to wow Total War: Warhammer players with the map of China in their upcoming Total War: Three Kingdoms. The above video has a touch of the usual army spectacle, but it’s mostly a flyover of campaign map graphics that would make any ork green with envy.
Total War: Three Kingdoms is scheduled for a spring 2019 release.
Hyperion is not what you would expect if the only Dan Simmons you’ve read is The Terror, a slab of historical fiction with an uneven supernatural glaze. It’s overlong, tedious, confused, and ultimately flat. You’d never guess it was written by the same person who wrote Hyperion, a sparkling collection of multi-faceted science fiction, with carefully built characters, a lovingly detailed world, and a glaring problem that threatens to undermine it all.
But we’ll get to that later. The first thing that’s clear in Hyperion, which I don’t remember being a takeaway from The Terror, is that Simmons is an adroit writer. Maybe it helps if you’ve been reading someone who isn’t.
