Sometimes I like to think I’m fairly sophisticated when it comes to movies. The cinema, really. The culture of filmmaking and its sociological implications and Louie Malle and whatnot. For instance, I read this article about the influence of Islamic cinema on the Arab Spring. I fully intended I would then watch some of those movies to be, you know, more informed and culturally aware and stuff. But the entirety of my takeaway from that article was “Wait, there’s an Islamic horror flick?”
After the jump, there is in fact a Pakistani slasher movie with zombies Continue reading →
If you have small children and a Kinect, two things that aren’t conducive to videogaming as we know it, this is your lucky week. Doublefine’s Sesame Street game, Once Upon a Monster, is out this week.
Aliens: Infestation for the Nintendo DS is a 2D game in the tradition of the Castlevania/Metroid games, set aboard the Sulaco immediately following the events of the movie Aliens. As you explore, your squad of Colonial Marines will have to contend with a permadeath mechanic that also ties into the aliens’ lifecycle. Will we see the most meaningful chestburster gameplay since the multiplayer in Monolith’s Aliens vs. Predator 2? Based on what I’ve heard about Aliens: Infestation, Sega seems to be sitting on something special.
Dead Rising 2: Off the Record marks the re-return of Frank West and his camera, after the disappointing Case West add-on. Do I really want to play revisit the same area I’ve already played through a couple of times in Dead Rising 2? And hasn’t the meaty combat in Dead Island upstaged Dead Rising’s inconsequential zombie mowing? Will Off the Record’s sandbox mode be enough to sustain another trip through Fortune City?
Heroes of Might and Magic V is out this week. Oops, I meant VI. Heroes of Might and Magic VI. I’m sure they’re totally different games. Another totally different game is Ace Combat: Assault Horizon, which is the technical title of Ace Combat 15. I’m not exaggerating. There have been 14 Ace Combat games. Number 15 is out this week.
If you turn your nose up at console games and therefore missed Renegade Ops, now you can get Avalanche Studios’ superlative vehicular mayhem RPG for the PC. It will be available on Steam, with a Gordon Freeman buggy thrown in for good measure.
Finally, Forza 4 is out for those who want to use the Kinect to look at their cars in the new Kinect-driven “autovista” mode. Well, some of their cars. Kinectlook is only supported on certain cars. But I’ve been told you can also race in Forza 4, so keep an eye out for that if you’ve exhausted your copy of Shift 2.
The new technology introduced in this week’s podcast is more dramatic than anything in Ides of March, a rather sleepy political yarn from George Clooney. We have perfected our bleep technology to shield you from a spoiler someone (i.e. Kellywand) lets slip about an unrelated movie. Exciting stuff. And if you don’t want Ides of March spoiled, fast-forward to the 53:30 mark for a 3×3 of our favorite post-coital lines of dialogue.
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When you launch your ball on the Wolverine table in Pinball FX 2, Wolverine, who gained his mutant powers when he was bitten by a radioactive wolverine/badger, makes the following observation:
I’m the best there is at what I do, but what I do best isn’t very nice.
Well, that’s very interesting, Mr. Wolverine, and it sounds awfully tough the way you kind of growl it. But let’s take a closer look at your assertion. The implication is that you’re talking about the same thing in both clauses. I’m going to assume you mean something rather dire like “killing” or “eviscerating bad guys with unobtanium claws” or whatever. But grammatically, you’re on shaky ground. If we parse your comment, you’ve phrased it in such a way that you could be talking about two completely separate activities: “what you do” and “what you do best”.
Let’s say you’re a plumber. That’s “what you do”. But let’s say you have devoted your entire life to dancing the Macarena and you’ve gotten very good at it, moreso than any other activity or even your profession. That’s “what you do best”. They aren’t the same thing.
So I’m not understanding your quip, Mr. Wolverine. It doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Without more context, it’s a non sequitur. Maybe Professor Xavier has someone teaching grammar classes in that X-Man school thing he runs. Look into it. Get Gambit to sign up, too. No one understands a word that guy says.
I only bring this up because the Wolverine table is the focus of the latest Pinball FX 2 tournament. Play the table at any time through October 14 and your score will be registered. You probably won’t win, but that’s not important. What matters is getting a higher score than your friends, and also adding your tournament score to your superscore, and thereby staying ahead of your friends. If you’re on my Xbox Live friends list, please ignore this post.
Andrew Hume and Richard Clifford, the creators of Space Pirates and Zombies, detail the touch-and-go nature of its development, the inspiration for some of the ships, the pitfalls of making the game the way they made it, and what’s coming down the pike in terms of new content and a sequel. They also offer some tips and a rare bit of insight into the ecology of a space zombie. No joke. Hume explains some stuff that I had no idea was going on in this game. The term “meaty goop” is involved.
If you don’t have Space Pirates and Zombies yet, I haven’t done my job very well (this review and this column didn’t convince you?). So here’s my last shot at redemption. Post in the comments section and I’ll pick two names to receive a Steam code for a free copy at 6pm on Wednesday, October 12.
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In a press release announcing that you can now pre-order The Sims 3: Pets, which includes cats, Electronic Arts writes the following:
Be sure to take care of your cat’s needs or they may scratch and dig their claws into household furniture items. Relieve their destructive nature by taking them to the cat park…
I have had cats most of my life and I have never once heard of a cat park. Although, from a cat’s perspective, I suspect every park is a cat park.
Experience cat parks on October 18th with the release of Sims 3: Pets.
If you work at Blizzard for five years, you get a sword. If you work there for ten years, you get a shield. If you work there for fifteen years, you get a ring. I am not making this up.
No word on how long you have to work there to get pauldrons.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ov7Spt8XuY
As a guy who always keeps four Gamecube controllers and a copy of Beach Spikers within easy reach of his Nintendo Wii, I think it’s about time someone made a movie that is not just playing balls.
Hey, Take-Two Interactive, are you guys seeing this TV show in development for ABC?
Ex-Comm is described as a present-day “presidential procedural” and a cross between the paranormal suspense of The X-Files and the political intrigue of The West Wing. It follows a newly-elected President and his top secret “Executive Committee” (a.k.a. Ex-Comm), the government’s covert team of America’s most elite minds who investigate and protect our nation from the strangest occurrences and “conspiracy theory truths” out there.
Take-Two’s Marin studio is developing the game XCOM, which details a government program to shoot aliens from behind cover, and is based on the game X-COM. Hopefully Take-Two will patch in the hyphen before the game comes out. At least the TV show gets that part right.
At a recent press event, Electronic Arts let a bunch of us press guys just sit down at the beginning of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and do whatever we wanted. It was a lot more instructive than the demo at this year’s E3.
If there’s one thing I came away with after playing Kingdoms of Amalur for a few hours, it’s that it doesn’t really compare with Diablo III, Skyrim, or Mass Effect 3. The closest analog I could come up with was Divinity II. You probably didn’t play that, so it might not help.
Read the preview here. I’ll also be on the next episode of Roleplayers’ Realm, Gamepro’s RPG podcast, to talk more indepth about the game.
Someone who likes Rage apparently tweeted something to the effect that the negative reviews of Rage were just reviewers wishing they were playing Skyrim already. Or so I’ve been told, as I don’t really follow Twitter and if I did, I wouldn’t have that guy’s tweets on my twitlist.
And while I do wish Skyrim would hurry up and come out, what I hoped Rage would be is the following:
a game with powerful ideas about how weapons might look in a post-apocalypse, and how to make gunplay distinct, and how to turn corridors into realized worlds, and how lighting can matter, and how to create interesting bad guys out of familiar scraps.
Okay, maybe not all those things. One or two would have been nice. Metro 2033 managed to accomplish all of those things. In fact, I’d argue it does everything Rage failed to do, and it does it without the driving minigame filler.
You can read my full review of Rage here.
This week we welcome to the podcast Jason Townsend, who is arguably too learned, polite, and uninterested in Rage to hang out with Tom Chick and Jason McMaster. But being from Nova Scotia (pictured*), he’s too affable to turn them down.
* Because the Google image search for “Wehrmacht penis envy”, another topic of discussion on this episode, wasn’t nearly as fruitful.
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I’m sorry, Dark Souls. It’s not working out. You’re too demanding, and too obscure, and too moody. I don’t get you. I don’t have time for you. It’s over.
After the jump, it’s not me, it’s you Continue reading →
There’s nothing quite like an upcoming expansion to dissuade you from digging into a detailed strategy game like Victoria 2, even though it’s been getting steady updates lately. For instance, the January 24 release of the House Divided add-on, which doesn’t just add a more detailed American Civil War. From the first installment of the weekly developer updates:
…the main aim is to make the game better all round. We plan to improve politics, the economy, uncivilised nation’s path to reform and modernisation, warfare, the UI, game speed, and more!
Who wants to play Victoria 2 anymore without all that stuff? But if you wait for the January 24th add-on, you’re only a scant two weeks from the February 7th release of Crusader Kings 2. Oh, Paradox, you never make things easy, do you?
This is not a review of Rage (that will be along shortly and it won’t be pretty).
This is instead a list of absurdities I noted while playing. Some of them are minor. Some of them are flat-out nitpicks. In a better game, I might not have cared about or even noticed them.
After the jump, the times I went “you have got to be kidding me, Rage” Continue reading →
