This week we welcome Wade “Wade42” Richard as we talk about the misadventures of Steam, Zynga, and that Hellraiser cube in the middle of the Paranormal table for Pinball FX2. Also, Tom sells out and goes to bat for mainstream titles like Modern Warfare 3 while McMaster and Wade advocate for indie games.
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In the second season of Louie, there’s a long scene of Louis CK in the car singing along with The Who. Anyone can relate to the scene. We all know what it’s like to rock out in the car. But it’s brilliant for its couple of extra layers of meaning. This is a middle-aged man digging on The Who as if he was a teenager in his first car. It’s a scene about how some songs connect us with other parts of our lives, like childhood. But there’s still more going on here. The scene, which has no dialogue and runs the entire length of Who Are You?, starts out being about Louie. But he eventually involves his daughters, who are riding in the back seat, in the action. Before the song is over, it becomes about him sharing his enthusiasm with them, singing to them, playing with them in the mirror, nerding out while the roll their eyes. It is the arc of a man’s life in one song, from youth to fatherhood.
Okay, maybe I’m reading too much into the scene. But it’s great for a reason, and not because I want to watch Louis CK listen to songs by a band I don’t even like.
In Saints Row 2, if you drive long enough while a certain song plays, your character will sing along. What a wonderful touch. Saints Row 3 ups the ante. There’s a longish drive early on, just after the basic mission about how to customize your car. If you’re like me, you couldn’t resist spending all your money. In this case, my otherwise boring four-door sedan is now candy pink, with bright gold rims and yellow tinted windows, with a cool vent in the hood, and a slight boost to the engine power. If you’re like me, you’re now in a car you love because you got to make very particular choices about it. Fancy pants videogame commentators will call this “player agency”. I call it a bitchin’ ride.
As you drive to the next waypoint with Pierce, one of the new gang members who will be along with you for much of the game, he takes control of the radio. Sublime’s What I Got starts playing. Even if you don’t recognize the name, I guarantee you know the song. And the two of you sing along. Together. But you don’t just sing. Developer Volition let the voice actors have a great time just messing around while the song played. They talk to each other. They make comments and joke around. They’re buddies. They connect. It’s a wonderful bit of personality, and if you aren’t in love with Saints Row at this point — as an entire enterprise and not just a single game — it will never work for you.
Up next: Okay, but how good is the actual, you know, game? On a scale of 1-10?
While watching the trailer for The Change-Up, it never occurred to me the movie wouldn’t suck. But then I went to see it as a palate cleanser after sitting through something I’ve long since forgotten. And I ended up loving it. Palate not only cleansed, but delighted!
The first thing that makes The Change-Up work as more than just a throwaway body-switch movie is how invested Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds are. I’ve seen them each coast through movies that were obviously paychecks, most recently in Horrible Bosses and Green Lantern. But that’s not the case here. They’re both totally on board, totally energetic, and totally committed to the gimmick of playing each other. Which might seem like an unremarkable feat given that they’re both brown-haired charismatic leading men with good senses of humor. But give the script credit for drawing its beleaguered family man and devil-may-care bachelor with enough room for Bateman and Reynolds to bring their own contributions to the table.
Also thoroughly invested is Leslie Mann, but that’s no surprise. She’s routinely far better than a movie deserves. Knocked Up comes to mind. Her “I like Spider-Man, too” line has more heart than everything else in that movie combined. And she was the perfect emotional fulcrum in Funny People. She serves a similar role here. And should I mention that she’s incredibly hot and incredibly naked in The Change-Up? Emotionally, I mean. I think there’s also nudity, but I mean that she’s, you know, uh, emotionally naked. The Change-Up earns its obligatory redemption scene — this is, after all, a studio comedy — by letting Mann’s character react in a realistic and honest way. The Change-Up may have a stupid premise, but it doesn’t have stupid characters. One of my favorite scenes of 2011 is when Reynolds and Bateman decide they’re going to sit down and explain everything to Mann, who plays Bateman’s wife. It’s well written, funny, and features all three actors doing some nice subtle stuff.
You also have to give the script props for exploring things most kid-friendly body-switch movies would conveniently ignore. I’ll let you use your imagination on that point, because the writers certainly did. Suffice to say, this is a very R-rated movie from the same guys who made the original Hangover so R-rated. And not just the language and nudity. I don’t think babies playing with blenders is allowed in PG-13 comedies.
The Change-Up is out on DVD and VOD this week.
The latest $2 costume pack for Dead Rising 2: Off the Record lets you dress up as a fireman with a bitchin’ mustache. But Capcom isn’t content to stop there. They also offer a $5 “Gamebreaker Pack”:
Ever wanted to create indestructible combo weapons, have access to infinite ammo, and manipulate the in game clock? Well these are just a few of the things you will be able to do thanks to the Gamebreaker pack, available for 400MPs or $4.99.
Other features include:
Instant [experience points]
God Mode
Super damage
Super speed
Big head mode
Body builder mode
Dumb zombies
Flat Frank
Giant hands
Cinema filters
And more
Oh, Capcom. You make it so easy to hate you.
Activision knows what’s cool: Delta Force and Spetsnaz soldiers going toe-to-toe; an M4 with a front grip, an impact mod, and hex camo; blowing the holy ooh-la-la out of Paris; and the Honda Fit. That’s why they’ve peppered the Modern Warfare 3 levels with Honda Fits, the car of champions (pictured, shortly before getting killed because I’m standing so close to one Modern Warfare’s eminently explodable cars).
Did I mention that I drive a Honda Fit? And not just in Forza 4.
However much Majesco paid for the rights to Jaws, they apparently weren’t content with the Jaws game they did five years ago. So they’re at it again with Jaws: Ultimate Predator for the Wii and DS, which explains why the above screenshot implies this is a game about petting friendly Great Whites. Nintendsharks, if you will. Because the Wii and DS aren’t exactly ideal platforms for tie-ins to 35 year old movies.
Jaws: Ultimate Predator is out today. Get it for your kids wherever fine videogames are sold.
So before I get down to some obligatory complaining, let me make it clear that I like Modern Warfare 3, especially as a multiplayer game. The changes to competitive matches feel great. I love the co-operative survival ops, which is a unique Modern Warfare take on the horde mode you know from Gears of War and Halo. And I couldn’t be happier that private matches let you play with everything unlocked. This is going to allow for a lot of crazy game types based around odd rule sets and equipment limits in the same vein as toybox shooters like Halo, Perfect Dark, and Goldeneye.
So why didn’t Activision apply this mode to split-screen games on the Xbox 360? For some odd reason, you have to level up each account the same way you do in pubic games. But split-screen games are the epitome of private matches. What a lousy way to hobble what could have been a tremendous four-player split-screen shooter.
Furthermore, it looks like there’s no way to browse other people’s private matches on Xbox Live, or even support for moving parties from ranked matches into private matches. Am I limited to whatever gatherings I can scrape together on my friends list? And how does it work on the PC? Does the PC version at least get a server browser option for private matches? Activision has included a great feature in Modern Warfare 3, but they also seem to have buried it.
Furthermore, I am completely confused by all the online stuff Activision is doing. As near as I can tell, the service that tracks stats, offers social groups, and documents the game is called “Elite”. It’s free. But then there’s “Premium”, which is necessary if you want to start a clan. At $50 a year, the Premium service also pre-buys any DLC and qualifies you to enter Activision’s contests to win Jeeps and vacations and whatnot. On top of that, there’s something called “Founder”, which I think is basically a year of “Premium” bundled with the “Limited Edition”. What a lot of indecipherable verbal spaghetti. Gears of War played it pretty straightforward by just selling a Season’s Pass.
The key to dealing with a large customer support department is knowing the limitations of how much you can accomplish at any given level. When you first contact someone like, say, Microsoft’s customer support because someone stole $50 out of your account, you’re dealing almost solely with a script. At that level of service, the person on the phone is doing little more than reading from a flow chart of conditional statements. It’s a bit like a maze. You learn to find your way to one of the script’s dead ends, at which point you will be transferred to a supervisor. My particular dead end was asking why my Xbox Live access had to be shut down for 25 days before I could have the stolen money restored to my account.
“It’s for the investigation,” the script reader recited.
“Right, but why does the investigation take 25 days when it’s clear what happened? Someone hijacked my account and spent my money to download games onto another Xbox 360.”
“Because that’s how long it takes.”
After doing that particular loop for a few time, I was handed over to a supervisor who identified himself as “John”.
“Hi John. I’m trying to find out why my account has to be shut down for 25 days for an investigation when it’s obvious what happened. I know this is something you guys have been dealing with, so why do I need to be locked out of Xbox Live for so long?”
“Look, I’m not going to give you the PR line. I know you’re in the business and you don’t need me to give you the PR line.” I had told John that my job is writing about games and that this is exactly the time of year when I can’t afford to be without Xbox Live for a month. “So let me just say that the reason it takes so long is because the problem is so widespread. We’re having to deal with so many cases that’s just how long it takes for each individual case. The new dashboard upgrade that I’m sure you know about will partly help us deal with that. But for now, there’s nothing I can do about it.”
So it’s happening so often that it takes them a month to resolve each case? That means it’s happening to a whole lot of people, or that Microsoft sucks at efficiently addressing customers who’ve been screwed over by their lax security.
I told John that I wasn’t really concerned with an investigation, and that I just wanted my money back. Since we both knew what had happened, I asked him if he could just cancel all the purchases that were made on November 2nd and refund me the cost.
“It’s against the terms of service,” he said. And even though John was off script and improvising, I knew that was another dead end. The only thing on their other side of that wall was their legal department.
The bottom line is that I’ve had 4800 points stolen from my Xbox Live account, and would have had more money stolen if a credit card had been associated with the account. In order for me to get that back, I have to shut down my Xbox Live account for a month. Maybe when releases slow up next year, I’ll give in to their absurd investigation requirements. But for now, it seems to me Microsoft can’t be trusted to hold anyone else’s money. At least Sony’s outage didn’t cost me anything.
Wars have always been about geography. Better than any other shooter, Battlefield 3 gets that.
Thumbs up! Read the review here.
Modern Warfare 3 is out tomorrow. If you think you’re not into Calls of Duty any more, this might be the game to make you think again. Some of the new multiplayer features seem to directly address why I don’t play Modern Warfare 2 online (i.e. because I suck). And oddly enough, I don’t feel that it’s an either/or situation with Battlefield 3. They’re both very different kinds of experiences, and they’re both very good in their own ways. It’s like Dragon Age and Oblivion. What RPG fan doesn’t play both?
Speaking of which, Skyrim is also out this week. Huzzah, etc.
This week’s 3×3 is our discussion of characters cutting their hair, or shaving, or growing their hair out, or growing beards or mustaches, or that sort of thing. Hair transitions, if you will. Hair shifts. We talk about our favorite instances of that. We also saw a movie, but I forget what it was. I think Ben Stiller was in it.
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As you’d expect, there’s a fair bit of Battlefield and Uncharted talk on this week’s podcast. But then our guest Greg, a.k.a. Pogue Mahone, takes things in a very different direction.
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One of the Battlefield servers I frequent is hosted by the [ISI] Christian Clan. I figure religious folks are more inclined to good sportsmanship. For instance, I accidentally team-killed someone on a non-religious server and was told “thanks for the tk nigger”. I had even typed “sry”. Sometimes friendly fire isn’t.
But the [ISI] Christian Clan server runs a looping message that reads, “Please watch your language, as we do not give warnings”. Which is fine by me. I don’t really cuss around folks I don’t know. The server also loops a verse from Proverbs, but it’s a good one that even a Buddhist or Muslim could dig on: “As iron sharpens iron, one man sharpens another”. In other words, it’s more fun to play with people who don’t type “thanks for the tk nigger”.
Is it bad that I find some of the contextual dialogue particularly hilarious on this server? When you’re playing the Americans and squad members are getting killed or taking damage, they will scream “I’m getting my shit pushed in!” or “We’re really getting fucked in the ass over here!” I love the voice acting in these games, and I support making it as gritty it needs to be. Let’s get all Generation Kill up in here! But on this server, when they say those things, I put my fingertips over my pursed lips and give a wide-eyed Church Lady take to the camera.
Since I’ve been hitting my internet connection hard and heavy with some serious Battlefield 3, I didn’t think anything of another connection problem when I tried to log in to Xbox Live. I got some odd message about my profile being locked and needing to recover it. Whatever. Sounded pretty straightforward once I found the “recover profile” option. It took a while. I just played a few rounds of Battlefield 3.
So I eventually get back onto Xbox Live and, being a wanna-be Batman nerd, I head over to buy the Nightwing DLC for Arkham City. But for some reason, the 4000+ Microsoft spacebucks I had in my account are listed as 120 points. What? A quick check of my purchase history reveals that earlier today I tapped out my account by purchasing NBA Jam: On Fire Edition, the Gears of War 3 Season Pass, the Horde Command Pack, the Retro Lancer Launch Collection Weapon Skin Set, and Bastion. Except, of course, that I didn’t. But I applaud my thief’s choice of Bastion. That’s a seriously great game.
Anyway, here’s hoping Microsoft’s spacebuck theft department is more efficient than their broken Xbox department, which has repeatedly been a thorn in my side. I understand that Microsoft hasn’t acknowledged any widespread hacking issues, so as with my broken Xbox 360s, I appear to have been that one in a million guy. Again. I should play the lottery.
Over the weekend, I watched an adventure movie that was kind of like Raiders of the Lost Ark. Wait, no I didn’t. I played Uncharted 3.
Read the review here.
