I suspect this will be known as the week Batman: Arkham City came out. But don’t forget that it’s also the week the surprisingly good Dungeon Defenders came out. Not since Renegade Ops has such a great game with such excellent multiplayer support and such long legs at such a low price had such a terrible name. That’s a lot to parse, so suffice to say Dungeon Defenders is easily one of the best tower defense games you can play.
Speaking of Renegade Ops, Sega promises that it’s finally coming out for the PC this week. Sony also promises that Payday: The Heist will finally come out this week. Sony also hopes to release Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One this week. Ubisoft hopes you’d rather learn to play a real guitar instead of playing Rock Band, hence this week’s Rocksmith.
Finally, there’s a new Professor Layton game out for the Nintendo DS, but how can there be any puzzles left after the previous Professor Laytons? Seriously, how many variations can you come up with on getting a chicken and a bag of grain across the river with one boat? From here on out, it’s got to be all mazes and sliding tile puzzles, right?
In this podcast, at least one of us correctly pronounces the names of Matthijs van Heijningen and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, the director and one of the actors in the 2011 version of The Thing. Then we recall fondly how good movies called The Thing were back in 1982. At the 57-minute mark, this week’s 3×3 covers our favorite accidental deaths in movies that don’t have the words Final Destination in the title.
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Oh, the things we do for the games we love: playing multiplayer horde mode, fiddling with emulators, updating our iPhone’s operating systems, dragging steering wheels into the living room, buying the Kinect, draping sheets over our heads. All that and more on this week’s Quarter to Three games podcast, featuring very special guest Rob “Bringing Da” Funk, a.k.a. Xaroc on the Qt3 forums.
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According to the old saying, sex is like pizza; even when it’s bad, it’s good. I disagree. On both counts. But the old saying does make me think of some tables in FX Pinball 2. Such as Sorcerer’s Lair, the latest addition. Sure, I’ll play it. But of all the tables available, I’ll play it out of a sense of obligation to the fine folks at Zen Pinball and my superscore. Not necessarily in that order.
When I first played Sorcerer’s Lair on the Playstation 3, it was the ugliest Zen Pinball table yet. Fortunately for Sorcerer’s Lair on the Xbox 360, Miss Splosion Man makes the lesser tables feel like so much more. The theme of Sorcerer’s Lair is two meddling kids, a cranky old sorcerer, a friendly ghost named Whisper, and the color purple. A hut rotates. A creaky old tree leans out. A pentagram spins. I kind of dread finding myself on a couple of inscrutable side tables. I wonder why I’m not just playing Haunted Mansion instead.
But at least this latest table isn’t a bunch of fruity comic book superheroes. We’ve got a lot more of those coming in the new Marvel Virtue and Vengeance pack of four tables. I look forward to a day in the distant future when more than half of my tables aren’t about people in capes. Which reminds me, you’ll be getting a very special treat in Pinball FX 2 this month, which includes Zen Studios trying a little something different. More on that later.
2 stars
Xbox 360
I’ve got a half million Forza 4 credits and nothing to do with them. I rarely have to pay for upgrades to my cars, since I’ve easily raced my affinites to a 100% discount on upgrades to the cars I drive (by the way, Forza, there’s a better and shorter word for “100% discount”). And since Forza 4 never pressures me to drive a particular car, and since I therefore have so many cars that I’ll never drive, and since I keep getting new cars just for leveling up, I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with these half million credits. Bid on a car in the auction house? Why? I already have more cars than I know what to do with. Buy paint jobs? Considering how little I want the most expensive paint jobs, that’s not much of a money sink.
For all its improvements, Forza 4 is like the Forzas before it in that it has no meaningful economy and almost no meaningful caRPG progression. It doesn’t even care whether I win or lose a race. After any given event, it flashes a congratulatory “race completed” message. Not “race won“. “Race completed“. 1st place, 3rd place, 12th place. It doesn’t matter. The race was completed.
Is Forza worried that I might get discouraged if I had to reach the podium to progress? If so, it needen’t worry. I constantly win, despite doing everything I can to make the game challenging. All the races feel rigged for me to win. I’ve been playing with all the assists and players advantages off (except for the color-coded braking line, something for which I’ll always be grateful to Forza). I haven’t been doing any tuning, and the only upgrades I’ve gotten for my cars are the automatic upgrades the game recommends before a race. Yet nearly every race feels like the old Wipeout games, where I start in the back and the only challenge is passing each of the other cars before the designated number of laps are over. I usually nose past them with almost no effort within a lap or two. And consider that I’m not using the rewind function, which is turned on by default, that allows any mistake to be erased with impunity. When is Forza 4 supposed to get challenging? Why isn’t there a separate difficulty setting for the other cars’ racing prowess? Or is the whole point that Forza 4 isn’t supposed to get challenging? Because right now, nearly half way to the level cap and well into the middle part of the career mode, the other cars are never a challenge. The only challenge is the course itself.
Forza 4 is a safe, visually bland, and thoroughly competent racing game. When I listen to the news on the radio while playing Forza, I can actually remember what I heard. The prime minister of Ukraine is in jail. The Republicans shot down Obama’s jobs bill. The underwear bomber is throwing in the towel. Kim Kardashian takes a whole week to get married. But when I listen to the news on the radio while playing Need for Speed: Shift 2, I have no idea what’s going on in the world. The world consists of nothing more than what I see out the windshield. I am invested, challenged, absorbed, 110% present, and sometimes wrestling with my own car as much as the other drivers’ cars. But Forza 4, a serviceable game in which I won the first time I took a Dodge Viper out onto a track I’d never driven, is about as engaging as a morning commute.
2 stars
Xbox 360
Rift is free this weekend, starting right…about…now through 9am Monday morning (California time). If you’re an erstwhile player interested in seeing what’s new (for instance, this mondo update just went live), there’s no time like the next few days. I won’t be there, as I have other grinding engagements at present, but I post this in the hopes of being able to vicariously enjoy Rift through you.
Part of the expectation with found footage movies is that the you’re going to see a modest production that relies on creepy horror instead of effects or spectacle or anything too over-the-top. Found footage is often a shortcut for production values.
So that’s why the mostly not very good, but ultimately satisfying Grave Encounters is a refreshing change of pace. You have all the ingredients for a low-key found footage horror movie: bad actors left to improvise, a chintzy reality TV premise, a dumpy set, obvious humor, and reliance on gimmicks like a window moving ever-so-slightly. So it goes. They can’t all be Paranormal Activity.
But once you think you’ve got a bead on Grave Encounters, it pulls a fast one. Let me stress that you’re not getting a good movie. Instead, you’re getting a fun haunted house thrill ride. And in horror movies, that’ll do just fine.
Grave Encounters is currently available as video on demand. I recommend enjoying it with a group.
Among certain scientists*, it’s a known fact Quarter to Three readers are smarter, better looking, healthier, and win more stuff than the average person. Just ask Jens Genberg and Habbaku, the recipients of free copies of Space Pirates and Zombies, and Land Murphy and Abruzzi Ridge, who get their choice of free T-shirts from 604 Republic. Congratulations!
* my cat
One thing I have in common with Eric Bana is that we both share a fondness for a line of Fords manufactured in Australia under the name Falcon. Do not confuse the Australian Ford Falcon with the boxy American Ford Falcon your grandma drove to church on Sundays. Australian Falcons are for mischief, including the sort of hard driving you have to do after an apocalypse. I know this because I’ve seen Mad Max and The Road Warrior, where Ford Falcons were cast as “the last of the V8 Interceptors”.
However, unlike Bana, I have never driven a Ford Falcon. Until today. I almost didn’t even notice it. Forza 4 drops cars into your garage like a pinata drops candy. No, seriously Forza, I don’t need any more cars. I haven’t even gotten around to driving the last ten you gave me. I don’t need any– Hey, what’s this? A 1970 Ford Falcon? Well, well, well, don’t mind if I do.
I immediately went to paint it, hoping I could dress it the matte black it wore in The Road Warrior. No such luck. In fact, I couldn’t even figure out how to override the two-tone color scheme and the GT351 logo on the side. So I went online to check Forza’s catalog of player-made designs, which is one of the unique strengths of this driving series. Guys who wouldn’t dream of fussing over what their sims wear will spend hours perfecting and uploading paint schemes for their Forza cars. I found plenty of black Mad Max schemes, complete with the gold badge on the side of the car. But even better, I found some of the colorful pre-apocalypse police schemes from the original Mad Max movie. Pictured, by the way. Gorgeous, huh? It just needs the police lights on top. The guy who made it didn’t even charge me any of my ingame Forzabuck credits.
Then I drove it and, uh…
After the jump, you get what you pay for Continue reading →
British director Neil Marshall had a memorable enough introduction with the amateurish but enthusiastic Dog Soldiers, which was Aliens, but with British soldiers in the woods instead of Colonial Marines in space, and werewolves instead of xenomorphs. After that, Marshall’s women-in-a-cave-with-monsters movie The Descent was a memorable entry in the genre of horror movies that don’t need dudes, but also don’t need to stoop to sorority house massacres. But then Marshall did the goofy goulash Doomsday, which was Aliens meets 28 Days Later and then unexpectedly stumbles onto Road Warrior and then gets tangled up with Ladyhawk on the way to the closing credits.
So what to expect from Marshall’s latest movie, a swords & sandals non-epic about Roman soldiers ambushed in hostile territory and then hunted by a Ukrainian model wearing someone’s Blizzcon costume? Pictured, of course. In Marshall’s version of ancient history, hot Pict chicks abound and the villain’s name is Gorlacon. Go ahead, say that out loud a few times. “Gorlacon”. Roll it around on your tongue. “Gorlacon”. It’s pronounced exactly like it’s spelled, as if it was an annual gathering of Gorla fans. “Gorlacon”.
At one point, the conveniently diverse band of surviving soldiers is hiding in a cave, exchanging backstory with each other over dinner. Michael Fassbender’s voiceover shuts up long enough to let everyone else talk. Liam Cunningham, the token older guy, says, “This was supposed to be my last tour. I had my eye on a farm in Tuscany.” That’s Latin for being two days from retirement. I wish I could write dialogue that bad. Centurion is easily the worst movie Marshall has made, and I suspect it’s a long downhill slide from here. Was The Descent just an anomaly?
If you must watch a swords & sandals movie, I heartily recommend Kevin Macdonald’s The Eagle for getting right pretty much everything Centurion got wrong. Strong actors, a powerful sense of history and setting, and actual character development. About the only edge Centurion enjoys is its splatter sensibility. Marshall doesn’t shoot action scenes so much as he edits together gore effects. But The Eagle, which stars no hot Ukrainian models, knows enough to spin a great story around two talented lead actors who work really well together. One of the leads is Jamie Bell, so no surprise there, and the other is Channing Tatum.
And if you’re up for something more contemporary by about a thousand years, the enjoyably grim Ironclad, from director Jonathan English, is a real treat for the performances, the writing, the battles scenes, and the nifty historical angle in which Paul Giamatti, as a petulant English king, decides he didn’t want to sign the Magna Carta after all, so he’s going to round up a bunch of Vikings to take back England. It’s up to a hearty band of actually English actors and Kate Mara to stop him.
Since you so rarely get to hear me on a podcast, you might be interested in the latest episode of Roleplayers’ Realm, Gamepro’s RPG podcast hosted by Kat Bailey. We talk about Big Huge Games’ upcoming Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning in a bit more detail than I was able to go into with my preview. As soon as I leave, everyone breaks out into a Dark Souls conversation. Typical.
Check it out. That’s my Honda Fit tearing it up at Tsukuba in Forza 4. Pretty awesome, huh? I don’t know why you don’t see more Honda Fits in the racing world. Like, say, the Annual Honda Fit Invitational at Nurburgring.
Paramount’s 2003 remake of The Italian Job was a love letter to (i.e. product placement for) BMW’s new Mini Cooper. I think it’s time for a similar movie featuring the Honda Fit. Paul Walker will star as the hero who assembles a plucky band of heisters, each with a different colored Honda Fit. Daniel Day-Lewis will play the villain, who drives a Humvee. In the big finale, our heroes will save the day because Day-Lewis has to pull over at a gas station to fill up, while the Fits merrily drive away, getting nearly 40 miles to the gallon.
Disclaimer: I drive a Honda Fit. This post may or may not be a desperate bid to convince myself my car is, in fact, cool.
I didn’t realize it at the time because I was just a kid, but the 80s began on December 14, 1979 with the release of London Calling. The Clash’s masterpiece of focused punk rage was varied, catchy, and smarter than any mere punk rock. The rest of the 80s had a tough act to follow.
London Calling was added to the Rock Band catalog earlier this year when Harmonix released the entire album. But as far as I’m concerned, The Clash’s contribution to the 80s isn’t fully represented without a single from their album Combat Rock, released two years later. Rock the Casbah. I was never a big Clash fan while growing up. Silly Brit musicians, thinking they’re playing punk rock when they sound nothing like Black Flag or The Dead Kennedys or even The Sex Pistols. But I remember everyone playing Rock the Casbah when the Gulf War began in 1991. If you listened to the lyrics, which were mostly easy to parse except for some line about being “fundamentally caught naked”, the song was about repressive Islamic governments cracking down on Western culture. It was probably a response to the Islamic revolution in Iran, something kind of weird for a punk band to get bent out of shape about, particularly a punk band with an album called Sandinista. If you overthrow puppets like the Shah and Samoza, you’re going to get what you get. But it was the Cold War, so the rules were more about ideology than consistency. “Fundamentally caught naked” indeed.
So thematically, nearly ten years later, Rock the Casbah had nothing to do with an American-led coalition responding to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, which I would argue was the end of the 80s, as we found a new post-Cold War place in the world. But there was some stuff in the song about jets dropping bombs between minarets, so it would have to do. And because it was a very English song, it folded nicely into Operation Desert Storm’s international flavor. Just as The Clash played us into the 80s, here they were playing us out of the 80s as we made our way into the 90s.
Rock the Casbah is available today, along with some Blink 182 stuff that I’m sure the other kids in your dorm would enjoy.
I had forgotten how beautiful Wipeout HD is. Not just the course graphics, but — THOOM — pretty much everything about it. The looks of the different vehicles. The design of the fictional product placement around the tracks. The color and activity. In the background of the — THOOM — above screenshot is a milling crowd I’d never noticed. Even the interface before you’re into the game proper is beautiful. The animated folders for the — THOOM — Fury add-on. The icons for each individual track on the game settings screen. Wipeout has always been an aesthetic feast.
I had also forgotten that every race seems to take place over an underground mining colony hard at work with their, I dunno, rock pounders or whatever they’ve got that makes such a racket. I’ve never seen them, but by golly I can hear them. THOOM. Erratic but constant, deep and resonant. It drove me crazy. I never understood it. A perfectly sublime game — THOOM — ruined by its inexplicable proximity to invisible industrial machinery. Surely that can’t be how the game is supposed to sound. Was it some problem with my sound set up, maybe a — THOOM — crossed wire sending the wrong signals to my subwoofer? I even asked other players if they noticed it. No one knew what I was talking about. Like the pipes that heated my college dorm*, I learned to live with it.
Until now.
After the jump, the mystery of — THOOM — Wipeout HD’s pounding diversion solved Continue reading →
The problem with most party games is that they think simplicity and depth are mutually exclusive. So you get a bunch of people sitting around frantically shaking Wiimotes for no good reason. Moto Heroz — lordy, I hate that name — knows better.
After the jump, you liked Trials HD, didn’t you? Continue reading →
