In the most blatant forward-looking videogame product placement (i.e. advertisement) since Aaron Eckhart fought aliens under a Resistance 3 billboard in Battle: Los Angeles, Breaking Bad went to bat for Bethesda this past weekend. The opening scene in the latest episode featured Jesse pretending to play Rage with some sort of fake gun peripheral that doesn’t have the courtesy to superimpose a reticle over the canned footage that passes for gameplay. Meanwhile, the character supposedly relates the gameplay to his own misdeeds involving a gun. Shooters, man. They take you to dark places.
Frankly, I prefer it Breaking Bad is shilling for the new Dodge Challenger.
Hey, look, it’s time for Madden 12! Unleash your inner Pele with this year’s football simulation game from Electronic Arts, the fine folks who brought you Monopoly Streets, Deathspank, and Army of Two.
Am I little crazy to be looking forward to Bodycount, an unsung shooter from Codemasters? Have I been tricked by Fear 3 into expecting to be pleasantly surprised by what should be just a throwaway shooter? Do I just want to collect a whole mess of whatever those little collectibles are that scatter around the map like confetti when you shoot bad guys? Am I just a sucker for co-op modes?
Speaking of being a sucker, the Pirates and Nobles expansion for Sims: Medieval is out this week. I don’t care if it’s awful. It only takes a tiny nudge to push me into a little more Sims: Medieval. They could sell me a Stevedores and Chambermaids expansion.
This week it’s a two-fer! We talk Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (1973) and Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (2011). What a difference 38 years make! Then, at the 1:16:00 mark, this week’s 3×3 is a discussion of our favorite sidekicks not named Chewbacca.
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What do you do when there’s a bunch of assholes out there and they’re causing total problems in Danger City? You call Jason McMaster (possibly pictured). Providing back-up this week are Tom Chick, special guest Brad Grenz, and even a secret special guest before it’s all over.
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I’ve been playing a fair bit of Command and Conquer: Generals lately. It actually holds up pretty well! Fast, easy, eminently asymmetrical, and full of personality. The interface isn’t even particularly terrible, even if there isn’t a panel at the bottom of the screen to show me what units I have selected. Part of the re-learning curve in Command and Conquer: Generals involves sending all your Comanche attack choppers directly over a GLA missile bunker because you didn’t know you had them selected.
A year or so ago at a press event, I was talking to one of the guys from EALA, the studio that made Command and Conquer: Generals. He told me that I’d called Red Alert 3 “the worst real time strategy game ever made”. I felt bad at the time, since I didn’t recall that particular bit of vitriol and since EALA is one of my favorite RTS developers. But he was probably right, not just about me writing that but about me meaning it. Red Alert 3 was a frenetic sloppy overbearing stew of poorly implemented backwards ideas from a developer that should have known better. However, I have good news for the developers of Red Alert 3: you’re off the hook.
Read of the Age of Empres Online review here.
You probably don’t know what Wizard Wars is. From that picture of the game above, taken by Keith (aka Spoofychop), it doesn’t look like much. But assuming your concept of computer RPGs predates the latest visual feast, and assuming you remember what it was like being a kid, you will absolutely understand the magic of Wizard Wars. Because — no joke — a bunch of museum curators understood it. Hear the tale on this episode of the Quarter to Three Podcast.
After the jump, we have visual aids, which we’ll explain as you’re listening! Continue reading →
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Based on its box office performance, most people knew better than to see Conan the Barbarian 3D this weekend. We had no such luck. Speaking of wrecks, join us for this week’s 3×3 at the 58-minute mark, where we talk about our favorite wrecks in movies.
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Dave Perkins joins us this week with the results of the Frozen Synapse tournament…and more. Perkins might not be timely (check out the timestamp on his post of the week!) and he might not be a winner, but he’s our favorite Perkins since Marlin. Join us for talk of Defense of the Ancients 2, Age of Empires Online, Star Wars: Old Republic, brilliant boss battles, largess-based game development, Raquel Welch in tight outfits, and how much we all hate that Justin Fletcher guy.
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Remember in 1979 when the head of South Korea’s intelligence agency just up and shot the President dead one night?
Me neither. In fact, no one told me that ever happened. It seems like the kind of thing you’d hear about a country. But according to South Korean filmmaker Sang-soo Im, it’s a taboo subject. Which is why he made a movie called “Folks Back in Those Days”. That’s how the title is translated from it’s Korean title. But the US release is called The President’s Last Bang, which is where you’ll find it on Netflix.
Which you should do. It plays like a cross between a thriller and a black comedy, about a million miles away from a somber historical story like, say, Joint Security Area or Memories of Murder or The Host. For instance, it opens with a shot of a bunch of hot Korean chicks taking their tops off and it closes with a shot of the movie’s most enigmatic character just eating dinner. Everything in between moves among a set of different characters and different locations as the evening of the assassination unfolds through various stages of uncertainty, confusion, and resolve.
I hate to overuse this description — I can’t help but bring it up every time I talk about In the Loop — but there’s something so very Dr. Strangelove about The President’s Last Bang. It has an appreciation for the absurd without having to wink or point. It just lets the absurd be absurd. Because once you try to make the absurd actually absurd, once you start nudging, you end up with Oliver Stone’s W. Hey, look, Josh Brolin’s President Bush is stuffing his face with foot and Thandie Newton’s Condoleeza Rice is talking like Urkle and Richard Dreyfus’ Dick Cheney is exactly like Richard Dreyfus’ villain in Red, and it all pales in comparison to watching the real life Bush demonstrate his drive for the press in Farenheit 911, which isn’t unlike President Muffley asking the Soviet premier to turn his music down. Leave the absurd alone. Let it be. It’s already absurd, so making it eat a sandwich doesn’t add anything. Sang-soo Im knows this and it makes his movie great.
The style is very Western, with a careful sense of pacing and tension and even an eye for action sequences. But the setting is very Korean, and very Cold War. You won’t hear communism and Japan mentioned this way in any American movie. Like Denmark and Spain, South Korea is one of those countries with its own distinctive eye for moviemaking. Yeah, yeah, Taiwan, Japan, France, England, whatever. My theory is that Denmark, Spain, and South Korea have been on the periphery of enormity for so long that it has done something to them, something that bubbles up in their movies. They’re countries that have spent centuries watching terrible spectacles roll around them, occasionally lapping at their feet, like a bystander on a rock outcropping when a tsunami drowns everyone on the beach. The bystander is the guy to tell the story.
But never mind my penny-ante analysis of the national psyche of countries I’ve mostly never been to. If you want to see a latter day game of thrones, allow me to recommend The President’s Last Bang as political theatre of the absurd at its best.
The saga of [Rec] continues. When Sony bought the rights to this superlative found-footage Spanish zombie movie, they decided to cheaply remake it instead of banking on stupid Americans being willing to read subtitles. The result was Quarantine, featuring Dexter’s sister and a marked lack of appreciation for what made the original work. Protip: the cast. So that happened.
Then the creators of [Rec] made a sequel. [Rec] 2 effectively ignored what made the first movie good (did I mention the cast?) and even decided to jump genres, as if it hoped to get a head start on the resurgence of demonic possession movies that, for all we know, are hot on the heels of the occasional exorcism movie like The Rite and Last Exorcism. Stand by for that, I suppose.
Now there’s a sequel to Quarantine, the remake of [Rec], that wisely ignores [Rec] 2 and does its own thing. And in the process, it very nearly becomes the best thing you’ll see all week. Despite its middling cast and made-for-TV directorial style, Quarantine 2 has a good script and a solid sense for how to do horror in a post-9/11 air travel setting. This is classic Irwin Allen, but modern day, and with zombies instead of air traffic control mishaps. And for a while, it’s ratcheting up the tension, introducing its characters, hitting all the right beats, and generally getting it done. Way to go, Quarantine 2, written and directed by John Pogue, the writer of Ghost Ship! You may very well be the best thing to come out of a [Rec] movie since the original [Rec].
But then, like so many horror movies, it starts to come apart. It starts to explain things. It cracks. It starts to go over well tread territory. It crumbles. It forces a poorly conceived nightvision gimmick for no other reason than because it was in the original [Rec] and in the process it’s wishing so hard it was 28 Weeks Later, as the plucky determined stewardess and her frightened teenage charge grope their way through and into oblivion. But you simply can’t get there with this cast. And what’s with the late-game needle-into-eyeball squick factor? Really? 90 minutes of rampaging, virulent, blood-soaked zombies isn’t enough, so we’re going to take a break by sticking a needle in an eyeball? Oh, Quarantine 2. You could have been a contender.
…my two-word review: yee-haw! I’d write it in all caps, but I don’t want to be more obnoxiously ebullient than I already am.
Read another 998 or so words here.
One of the nicest things I can say about most of the frippery that passes for content on Xbox Live is that it’s miles and away better than Playstation Home. But sometimes I’m paging idly among those little panels on Xbox Live and I’ll duck into one, only to immediately wonder what I think I’m doing. For instance, I couldn’t help but duck into a panel promising the “Top 10 Racing Games”. On the list, among seven perfectly cromulent racing games available for download, I found Dark Void, Tranformers: the Game, and Tron: Evolution.
Still, calling Tron: Evolution a racing game is better than anything I’ve ever seen on Playstation Home. Is that thing still going?
We can all agree that videogaming needs more Westerns, right? And, in particular, a strategy game, because Red Dead Redemption will only get us so far. Enter through the saloon doors Six Gun Saga.
Six Gun Saga just went from its beta to its release version, so it’s time for an official review. Read it here.
If you only have a PC, that means you haven’t played Bastion yet. I’m a little jealous because that means you can play Bastion for the first time. It’s an experience you’ll treasure and it’s available to PC gamers this week. When you’re done, listen to this interview with writer Greg Kasavin and then buy the fantastic soundtrack here.
If you have an Xbox 360, you’re also in for a treat this week! Toy Soldiers: Cold War on Xbox Live Arcade is an energetic tower defense game every bit as good as the original Toy Soldiers. And then some! I’ll have a review posted tomorrow. Suffice to say, I’m a little bit in love. Unless you’re allergic to tower defense games, you’re going to want to fork over the requisite Microsoft space bucks. The only reason Bastion and Toy Soldiers: Cold War don’t merit an elevated wallet threat is because they’re relatively inexpensive.
If you’re bound and determined to play From Dust, that’s also out for the PC this week. I’m guessing the PC will be the platform of choice, given the graphics and interface problems I had with the 360 version. However, you have to be willing to play an Ubisoft release on a PC, which is a bit like contributing to a Tim Pawlenty Presidential campaign.
On the unknown front, El Shaddai is out this week. It’s…uh…I don’t know. I got nothing. I saw posters for at E3 and thought they were for Assassin’s Creed. I guess it’s some sort of anime thing about the Old Testament.
Finally, Age of Empires Online goes live this week. I feel strongly about it and I’ll have a full review posted tomorrow.
After a week off, we’re back with a few surprise recommendations which may or may not include Rise of the Planet of the Apes, The Change Up, Final Destination 5, and/or The Help. Then we get down to the unfortunate business of all having seen 30 Minutes or Less. If you just want to hear our 3×3 of the finest moments of slow motion, fast forward to the 1:01:30 mark.
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