Is Stephen Soderbergh’s Contagion the Traffic or the Ocean’s 13 of global pandemic movies? And how much does it suck that the trailer spoils important plot points? Much like this podcast. At the 59-minute mark, we start this week’s 3×3 of our favorite uses of the camera from a first-person point of view. Spoiler: Doom didn’t make any of our lists.
Podcast (movies): Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
(The following short story appeared on Quarter to Three on September 18, 2001.)
On September 11, 2001
I woke up to the sound of the TV in the front room. It was Trevor, watching something. He doesn’t live with me or anything. But there he was, watching the World Trade Center bleed smoke.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Something that matters,” he said, without turning around.
We watched. It didn’t occur to me to wonder why he was here.
“I better go see how my Mom’s doing,” he said and then he was gone. I kept watching. When I finally stepped outside to check the mail, nearly ten hours later and still in my robe, I noticed the front door was still locked from the inside.
It could have been a dream or something. Trevor being here, watching the coverage. Maybe it was just some sort of narrative device. I didn’t really understand at first. But it makes sense now. The people we know, how we know them, how we look at them. Those rules are a little different now.
Continued after the jump Continue reading →
In the 19th century, as Christianity spread through Asia, the term “rice Christian” emerged to describe people who converted just so they could get rice and other handouts from the missionaries. Rice Christians give lip service to religion for the material and social benefits. In Dead Island, you might say I’m a fruit Christian. I constantly visit the church in Moresby to take advantage of its plentiful stocks of respawning fruit. It’s a great place to nosh up your health, and the fruit is much better for you than the energy drinks littering the beach resort. Those things are probably full of high fructose corn syrup.
Sometimes, I’m also a mace Christian (pcitured). Sister Helen hands out some pretty nifty weaponry. I’m disappointed that developer Techland didn’t take the opportunity to make the mace a named unique item. Rod of God has a nice ring to it, wouldn’t you say? Later in the game, I will be a machete Christian.
And while we’re passing out new categories of Christians, I’d like to point out that distinctive type of Christian known as the videogame Christian. For instance, Sister Helen in Dead Island, Sister Miriam Godwinson in Alpha Centauri, and Father Grigori in Half-Life 2. You know what sets them apart from actual Christians? They never talk about Christ. They never once mention the name Jesus. They are characters written by game developers who play it safe, I presume to avoid offending anyone. It’s actually a common facet of popular entertainment. I recently watched the fun but awful Priest, in which a Blade Runner world surrounded by vampire-infested Western-esque wastelands is ruled by Christians who never once mention Christ.
It strikes me as silly to make a character Christian, and then limit him or her to safely bland talk about a generic universalist God. Every Christian I’ve ever met is happy to talk about Christ. Since when do fictional Christians have to dance around the founder of their religion? I mean, for Pete’s sake, if Danish cartoonists can draw pictures of Mohammed, can’t Father Grigori let loose with the occasional “the power of Christ compels you”?
Witness the power of this fully repaired and operational purple sickle!
By the way, that guy can still attack. I can tell you from first-hand experience that zombie headbutts hurt.
You might guess from this screenshot of an iPhone game that you’re looking at some actioney shooter thing in which a little dude shoots monsters. Not quite. That’s no monster. That’s a Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath. And while there’s certainly shooting involved, check out those stats on the right side of the screen. SAN? As in “sanity”? But of course. What sort of Cthulhu game doesn’t have sanity?
What’s more, look a little closer and you’ll see the AP and hit% figures at the bottom of the screen. Action points and die rolls? Like you’d find in a turn-based game? Yep.
Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land is a turn-based RPG, and it’s set in the early 20th century, like any Cthulhu game should be. Your dudes — you’ll control up to six of them — might lose sanity when encountering monsters, but you’ll also spend sanity to cast spells.
The Wasted Land is based on the Chaosium pen-and-paper RPG, so in addition to the usual combat skills (it’s still basically a combat game), you’ll also have a Cthulhu mythos skill that determines how well you can use spells, and a psychoanalysis skill that lets you restore lost sanity. There’s no announced release date yet, but find out more here.
Victoria 2 is one of Paradox’s greatest games partly because it’s great, but partly because it has such a unique sense of identity. No game models the interplay of population and politics quite so cannily as Victoria 2.
However, the last time I played, it had a couple of frustrating issues that killed my interest. The first is that I was able to max my spending on bureaucrats just long enough to optimize their effect, at which point I could lower the spending to zero with no apparent detrimental effect. My society would run smoothly with an unpaid bureaucracy. Wisconsin would be so proud.
The other problem I found was a global shortage of liquor, which made a lot of production difficult. You need liquor for artillery, for instance. It may not seem like a good idea to mix liquor and heavy firepower, but them’s the rules. If you want artillery, you gotta get your men liquored up.
So during a recent trawl through the Paradox forums to see what’s up with patches, I was pleased to discover the following in the notes for the latest beta patch.
– Beuruecrats will demote quicker to farmer and labourers if no current spending.
– Increased liquour output a little bit further.
I’ll refrain from putting [sic] in there, since I’m American and therefore have trouble distinguishing between the Queen’s English and a typo.
Cable has Shark Week. Qt3 has Dead Island Week. Until science discovers a way to combine them, we devote a fair amount of this week’s podcast to the latter.
Podcast (games): Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Also, Svetlana, can you please move a little to your left before I accept the quest?
I don’t envy Atari having to promote their upcoming game for the Wii and DS. Thanks to Dutch filmmaker Tom Six, I mentally put the word “human” in front of the word “centipede” whenever I see it. It’s his fault the last feature in this paragraph is so unintentionally creepy.
Centipede returns as an updated version of beloved gaming classic. Explore an expansive new world with seven different environments and 40 stages. Defend Maisies [sic] garden from waves of nasty creepy crawlers with an arsenal of over 20 weapons. Test your power and skill against five devious bosses. Team up with a friend for maximum fire power for nail biting two player co-op action.
The Debt is one of those movies where characters deal with a Deep Dark Secret from Many Years Ago ™. And, to be fair, these are interesting characters. Tom Wilksinson, Helen Mirren, and Ciarin Hinds are former Mossad agents credited with taking out a prominent Nazi many years ago during a mission in East Berlin. Cue Samuel Jackson making a gun-to-the-head gesture and asking “taking out”? Yes, taking out. Mossad, dontchaknow? The Debt is about something that happens thirty years later.
Well, at least that’s what The Debt is about before it spends far too much time with the less interesting younger versions of the characters, particularly Jessica Chastain. She’s certainly lovely, and we know from Tree of Life that she’s capable of gravity. But here she’s just lovely and not much else. The most interesting thing about her is that she’s going to grow up into Helen Mirren. She does demonstrates one hell of a way to take out a gynecologist who you might suspect is a former Nazi, but that’s still not as interesting as growing up into Helen Mirren.
I saw in the credits that Sam Worthington was supposed to be in this movie, but I don’t recall seeing him. Maybe he was in the Sam Worthington-shaped hole that was moving around on screen a lot. And I’m always up for watching Marton Csokas, who you probably know as Mr. Galadriel in Lord of the Rings, or the agent who Matt Damon kills with a toaster and a magazine in Bourne Supremacy. But it wasn’t enough to keep me from wondering when we were going to get back to Helen Mirren. And when that finally happens, the movie is nearly over, leaving just enough time to literally stumble to a silly and hurried finale in which Mirren demonstrates that she is the worst secret agent ever.
Hey, Hollywood, can I tell you a secret? People over 40 are inherently more interesting than people under 40*. I say this having been on both sides of the equation. Now if your goal is to get people under 40 to see your crappy movie, good job focusing on Jessica Chastain. But if your goal is to tell an interesting story, The Debt is doing it wrong.
* if I knew how to do footnotes, here I would cite episode 12 of season two of Louie
During the Civil War — bear with me — battles often happened by accident. That’s just how it worked back then. Two armies would maneuver around, chasing each other, or feeling their way around the land, trying to find advantageous ground. Eventually, they’d tangle up a flank, or stumble onto arriving enemy reinforcements, or get caught flat footed crossing a river. Skirmishes blossomed into full-blown encounters that gave birth to unplanned Civil War battlegrounds. We don’t often think of battles as surprises, but that’s often what they were.
After the jump, why I thought of this as I plunged to my death in Dead Island Continue reading →
New content goes live for DC Universe Online today, including a new set of superpowers and some more instances.
Introducing DC Comics legend The Green Lantern and the game’s seventh power set (Light), the “Fight for the Light” pack allows players to join the Green Lantern Corps or Sinestro Corps as reservist members while helping to restore balance to the universe.
Along with interactions with Green Lantern based favorites and foes, players will be launched into multiple action-packed scenarios, including an epic battle for control in S.T.A.R. Labs, a light-to-light showdown with the Red Lantern Corps in Coast City, and chaotic prison break at Sciencells Prison.
I really enjoyed DC Universe Online, and if I had time to jump into an MMO, it’s on the very short list of MMOs I’d like to get back to playing. But I wish the developers at Sony Online would find a way to get players out into the cities of Gotham and Metropolis. When the game launched, these cities were full of players zipping to and fro, getting into skirmishes with each other, and generally bringing the places to life while they did quests on the short trip to the level limit. At which point they all retreated into instances to grind for raid gear. Last time I checked, Gotham and Metropolis were ghost towns.
And Sony Online seems content to keep them ghost towns by continuing to shunt players into places like S.T.A.R. Labs, Coast City, and the Sciencells Prison. What about Metropolis and Gotham City, which are already in the game and in dire need of things to do and players doing them? And when is Sony Online going to unbottle some of those buildings and let us fight over them?
I couldn’t tell you the first thing about the storyline in Bodycount, which is all about the gunplay like a shooter should be. However, throughout the game, an obligatory female voice is talking you through the missions. She’s your handler or narrator or Cortana or whatever. This is how you’re supposed to figure out the story, but I was only half listening. Near the end of the game, she gets attacked and you have to mumblemumble data cores mumblemuble nexus mumblemumble cyber program mumblemumble to save her. And that’s when I realized the voice actress is a dead ringer for the host of NPR’s Fresh Air, Terry Gross. Who I’d much rather rescue than Neal Conan or Robert Siegel.
I’ll have a full review of Bodycount posted later this week. Until then, suffice to say Bodycount doesn’t close nearly as strong as it opens.
So far the most powerful weapon I’ve discovered in Dead Island is Xian’s high-heeled shoe. Once I’ve knocked a zombie to the ground, I can aim at its head and tap the E key to apply my shoe (pictured). It is the equivalent of going nuclear. Let’s look at the numbers.
The early trash weapons do about 30 or 40 points of damage. More durable weapons do two or three times that amount. As you upgrade weapons and specialize with your skills, you can get that into the 300 or 400 range. At level 20, with most of her points in combat skills, my Xian has a rare bolo machete given to her by a nun. After investing considerable lucre, the machete does 700 points of damage. A molotov cocktail will apply about 150 points of burning damage every second or so, pretty much until a zombie is dead. The first homemade bomb you discover will do 5000 points of damage.
Xian’s stomp routinely does over 20,000 points of damage.
As much as I’d love to consider Dead Island a subversive commentary on women’s footwear, it’s not just the high-heeled shoe. All four characters have a stomp attack once they get about half way into the combat branch of their skill trees. Stomps are actually — get this — a part of the game’s economy. Every point of damage you do without spending some of your weapon’s durability rating is money you’ll save on repairs. Timothy Geithner has nothing on me.
