Bill Abner joins us this week, bringing a report from the front on the war against MMO fatigue, where Jason McMaster is still valiantly fighting and Tom Chick is engaged in a mostly successful flanking maneuver. Casualties are heavy all around.
Our posts of the week are as follows: Bill picked this canny evisceration of the MMO model, Tom picked this personal tale of an Advanced Squad Leader module, and Jason picked this furor over a customer service nightmare.
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The first rule of writing for a videogame should be “do no harm”. If your writing, characters, dialog, and plot actively make me not want to play, you have done the worst you could possibly do. For instance, the follow-up to Zombie Apocalypse, called Zombie Apocalypse: Never Die Alone, features writing so sophomoric, so unfunny, so stale, so trite, and so unskippable that it all but kills the game underneath. It squats obscenely in front of and often on top of every level. I have seen a lot of awful horror movies, and I have rarely encountered characters so grating that I wanted them to die as quickly as I want the Canadians in Never Die Alone to die. Sorry, Canada, but this Canadian themed game isn’t doing you any favors.
After the jump, does this game really want to hurt me? Continue reading →
I honestly can’t tell you how I ended up watching Pitch Black on Netflix. It’s one of those things that just happened, not unlike waking up in Bangkok with a tattoo on your face or a shaved head. I might have mistakenly remembered that it’s a cult classic and that my sense of disappointment from seeing it in theaters over ten years ago was misplaced. That way lies madness. That way lies rewatching things like Soldier, Dune, or Stargate.
Pitch Black is awful. The writing is terrible, the production design is cheap, and the dramatic tension is entirely artificial. The cast mostly flounders, particularly poor Vin Deisel under the misguided notion that he’s the most bad-ass intergalactic criminal since that guy who didn’t like Mark Hamill either. When Deisel goes nose-to-nose with a space bat, lunging left and right to stay in its blind spot as it turns its head, Pitch Black loses its last faint shred of credibility. The worst sin any movie can commit is to betray its own conceit. Here is a movie about terrible terrible space bats that will eat you if you venture into the dark, except for all the times various characters venture into the dark and don’t get eaten.
It’s kind of cool seeing Claudia Black considering how much I hear her in videogames like Uncharted, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. And I’ve always liked Radha Mitchell, who somehow seems to rise about the various genre stinkers she’s been in. Which reminds me, hey, she was in that Silent Hill movie! That wasn’t so bad, was it? Maybe I should watch that again, since I actually ended up with the Silent Hill DVD somehow, which is a bit like waking up in Vegas with a missing tooth and a tiger in the bathroom.
The director of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull paid an extended visit to Weta’s motion capture studios. The result, Tintin, is exactly what you’d expect from Polar Express meets a Belgian comic book. This week’s podcast also includes a fair amount of talk about Hugo, Young Adult, and more than you’ll ever want to know about the alien invasion yarn The Darkest Hour, from the writer of Ridley Scott’s upcoming Prometheus! The 3×3 of our favorite fake movie products starts at the 58-minute mark.
Next week: our picks for best movies of 2011
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Happy holidays from all of us at Quarter to Three to all of you on the other side of this monitor! Here’s me hanging out in front of one of the holiday decorations sprung up around the world of Rift. You’ll even find Christmas trees smack dab in the middle of swirling rifts spitting out monsters. I don’t want to be all bah humbug, but how long are those going to be there? At least in Space Pirates and Zombies, I can turn off the Santa Claus who flies around and drops candy-filled presents.
We’ll be back next week with a couple of new contributors doing game diaries for games that I guarantee you aren’t expecting. Seriously, go ahead and guess. You’ll be wrong.
There are two kinds of cards in Ascension: non-monsters that you buy to put into your deck, and monsters. When you beat a monster, it’s banished from the game and you earn some victory points. In the basic Ascension cards, the most powerful monster was a fellow called Avatar of the Fallen. I have no idea who the Fallen is or why he’s sent an avatar in his stead, but I know card was as bad-ass as enemies got. I had a friend maintain that if you could beat the Avatar of the Fallen, you were going to win the game.
After the jump, Sam he is! Continue reading →
Here I am, nearly a year after first hearing about it, finally giving Minecraft a shot. My first attempt didn’t go so well. When night fell and the zombies came out, I retreated to the back of a cave to hide until dawn. Of course, it’s dark in caves, and even darker in caves at night, and zombies are persistent. So when I heard zombies coming and I was unable to see anything, I did the only thing I knew how to do: I attacked the darkness. My inventory consisted of 8 flowers, 3 mushrooms, and 9 blocks of dirt. Of those three things, I figured the blocks of dirt would make for the most powerful projectiles. So I equipped them and right-clicked to throw them in the general direction of the moaning. I threw them until I didn’t have any more to throw.
I don’t think I killed any zombies. But I did succeed in walling myself in so I couldn’t move. Or see anything. I tried jumping, right-clicking, punching, crouching, to no avail. There’s apparently no crouching in Minecraft. Having Cask of Amontillado’ed myself, I think my only recourse is waiting until I starve to death and respawn. So, yeah, game one of Minecraft. So far, so good.
My second (and final?) game, after the jump Continue reading →
With The Sitter, Director David Gordon Green obviously intended a latter-day Adventures in Babysitting. Take a charismatic lead, add a handful of adorable kids, and send them out for a night on the town where they run afoul of criminals. The twist? A hard R-rating, which Green undercuts with one safely sappy facile redemption after another.
If there’s any reason to see The Sitter, it’s to re-affirm that Max Records is a kid to watch. In Where the Wild Things Are, he was easily as fascinating as those enormous weird puppets, and whatever payoff that movie offered came from how good he was in his final scene with Catherine Keener. Records is one of those rare expressive child actors with a very adult grasp on what he’s saying, and how to express it even when he isn’t saying anything.
In The Sitter, when it comes time for Jonah Hill and Records to have their convenient redemption scene, you get good writing, two lovely performances, and surprisingly delicate subject matter for such an obtuse movie. It turns out Records’ character, a 13-year-old kid with psychiatric issues, is merely gay. Hill explains this to him, and Records lashes out and says he doesn’t want to be a “faggot”. “Don’t say shit like that,” Hill admonishes. He then explains to Records that, look, high school is really going to suck, but once he gets to college, no one will care that he’s gay. And then he’ll get an awesome job in the entertainment industry. Facile? Sure. But it’s the sort of scene that deserves a far better movie.
Also, The Sitter is a little fascinating for Sam Rockwell hopelessly miscast as a vicious drug dealer. No one handles being miscast with as much enthusiasm as Sam Rockwell.
One of the reasons I really like Ascension is that its flavor takes some time to appreciate. This is a game that simmers instead of pops. You won’t recognize these cards as your standard fantasy tropes. For instance, the game’s four factions might look vaguely familiar, but how familiar are they? They’re called Enlightment, Void, Mechana, and Lifebound. A look at the artwork and a basic understanding of each faction’s dynamics might lead to certain conclusions. So, uh, priests, evil, machines, and fairies? White, purple, brown, and green? Paladins, necromancers, engineers, and rangers? Humans, demons, dwarves, and elves? Religion, obfuscation, science, and nature? Knowledge, power, technology, and peace? Who knows.
After the jump, WWTBD Continue reading →
As much as I admire the lush graphics and puzzle design (i.e. how the character abilities interact with the world) in Trine, and as clearly as they’re carried over into Trine 2, complete with a new RPG system that lets you unlock new skills for each of the characters, I suspect this isn’t a game for me. Anytime I come upon a situation in which I have to try a jump more than five times, I’m pretty much done with a game. Life is too short to finesse the timing in a jumping sequence.
(Note that you can invoke the “life is too short” opt-out for nearly any skill based videogaming pursuit. That I choose to say this about jumping sequences is as arbitrary as someone else saying it about a build order in an RTS, a lap time in a driving game, or a high score on a pinball table. One man’s tedium is another man’s treasure.)
But one thing I love about Trine 2 is how the developers at Frozenbyte approach achievements. Every achievement is based on playing with their cool gameplay systems. For instance, there’s an achievement for firing three arrows into the air as the thief, and then swapping to the knight and catching all three arrows on your shield. Another achievement rewards you for using the wizard’s levitation power to make a stack of eight objects and then stand on top of the stack. There isn’t a single “beat a level”, “finish the game”, or “gather collectibles” achievement. You play the game for the game’s sake. You play the achievements for the achievement’s sake.
When you meet the big purple man at the end of the story mode in Marvel vs. Capcom 3, he summons silver versions of the game’s characters to help him. They look like T-1000s. I guess they’re “heralds”, because if you select the herald faction in the Heroes and Heralds DLC for Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom, all your dudes will be silver. Since the two factions are otherwise identical, this automatically makes me want to play the other faction. Who wants to play as Spiderman and whatnot wearing a costume leached of all color?
After the jump, enough about the costumes already. What’s the deal with the game? Continue reading →
If you’ve ever wanted to hear Desmond talk about himself at length, this is the game for you.
I don’t know if the shorter development cycle for Revelations was a problem, or if Ubisoft has truly lost sight of what makes the Assassin’s Creed games good, but this was easily one of the biggest disappointments of the year for me. Thumbs way down. Read the review here.
As much as I like some of the Marvel comics tables in Pinball FX 2, I hope the developers at Zen Studios are done with men in tights. We don’t need another superhero.
So after the jump are five ideas Zen should steal Continue reading →
In the good old days before the add-on, Oziah the Peerless was the fiercest warrior you could get into your Ascension deck. This guy automatically and single-handedly beat any monster in the deck, except for the Avatar of the Fallen himself. I mean, you can’t very well have one card trump the main villain, can you? But otherwise, Oziah the Peerless was worthy of his superlative. It seemed a shame to waste him on a Mephit or even a Corrosive Widow. He could take down an Earth Tyrant. He could even best Xeron, Duke of Lies. This guy meant business. But then the add-on came along.
One of the problems with using superlatives as a title is that you never know when an add-on is going to come out. Return of the Fallen includes a hero named Adayu. Adayu, the Chosen. That’s Mr. Chosen to you. Adayu, the Chosen is a card that lets you simply take or defeat any card you want. Any card. Even an Avatar of the Fallen. Even the actual Fallen, who I presume is the brand new uber-baddie in the expansion, Samael the Fallen. There is no card in Ascension that Adayu does not trump. Of course, there’s also no card as expensive as Adayu, but you get what you pay for.
And this means Oziah is no longer peerless. Oziah, meet Adayu. Adayu, Oziah. You guys will be sharing a room. (Psst, Oziah, come here. Don’t tell Adayu I’m telling you this, but I still like your card art and flavor text better!)
Up next, Tom Bombadil meets his match
Atlus…announced plans to celebrate the holiday season with a Pure White World Tendency event for the award-winning hardcore multiplayer action RPG Demon’s Souls for PlayStation 3 computer entertainment system…Until January 2, 2012, the world of Boletaria will shift to Pure White World Tendency, easing the game’s difficulty and unlocking otherwise inaccessible areas and items. Following the recent news that Atlus would extend the Demon’s Souls’ online servers–responsible for the award-winning cooperative and competitive multiplayer roleplaying that has cemented the title’s place among gaming’s most celebrated classics–this holiday tendency event further demonstrates the publishers ongoing commitment to the game and its loyal community.
If you’re like me, you read that as Dark Souls. But this is, of course, the previous game, with the publisher intent on your knowing their iteration is still going for folks who don’t mind toting around fistfuls of that wheatgrass stuff you have to eat to heal yourself.
