One of the things they teach you in actor school is never appear on stage with animals or children. Apparently that dude in the background, who’s cosplaying some Chinese railroad worker superhero with no sense of color coordination, didn’t take that class.
Click here for more awesome Amaterasu cosplay pics. Fortunately, there is no Chibiterasu cosplay, as that would likely melt the internet with its cuteness.
Thanks, Charles!
Tom Chick has tales from QuakeCon, where the men are nerds and the horses are uneasy. Jason McMaster, who hasn’t seen Zoo, thinks it’s all very funny. Also, The Sims, Brink, Fallout: New Vegas, League of Legends, and Hard Reset. Yeah, that’s right. Hard Reset!
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Great, now I’m one of those jerkwad reviewers who flings a harshly negative review at a Dynasty Warriors game.
It was a bit of a chore to play through the early single-player bits of Rage, the upcoming next-gen shooter from Id.
The pistol sucks. The ATV sucks. The mandatory driving sucks. The rote missions through corridors suck. The checkpoints suck. Matching up the right bits of junk to build stuff sucks. But don’t give up! Rage seems like a classic example of “crawl before you can run” design.
Click here for other stuff you (probably) didn’t know about Rage.
You know you’ve been playing too much Alpha Centauri when you watch the news and think, “Well, I know what I’d do”:
So I got to play Skyrim. Actually play it. Jump in and run around and do whatever I want and stuff. I can’t verify anything about dragons, but I can assure you “here there be giants”.
Read all about it here.
Return in Red is, by nearly any metric, a bad movie. Bad. Director Tyler Tharpe is inordinately pleased with the simple act of moving the camera on a dolly without any regard for why or whether he should do it, much less how to cut around it. The lighting is alternately soupy, harsh, or tacky. It has no meaningful production values, shot mostly in people’s houses in Indiana. A barn set up with a couple of power tools stands in for a factory. The best thing you can say about the actors is that they’re occasionally relaxed. There is scarcely a frame of Retun in Red that doesn’t announce itself as an amateur production.
That said, I really liked Return in Red. It’s a textbook example of tension, suspense, and fear without resorting to the usual tropes. It has a canny sense for quiet menace. The opening narration is right out of the 70s, consisting of a simple quote about a program to study the effects of sound waves as a weapon. From here, we’re introduced to a small rural community, stalked by a strange white van with what looks like a satellite dish sticking out the side. Return in Red belongs in the tradition of The Crazies, or a far better version of The Crazies called Impulse, or an Alan Rudolph movie called Endangered Species, in which Dan Ulrich, JoBeth Willams, and Paul Dooley investigate UFO cattle mutilations.
And even though it’s bad, the amateurish quality gives it that raw grimy feel of 70s horror movies, especially when it starts to roll out the special effects. Like George Romero, Wes Craven, and Tobe Hooper before him, Tharpe is states and states away from from Hollywood, hundreds of miles from any movie studio, surrounded by and therefore working with actual people. As such, he has to come up with his own tricks. His desperate no-budget affection shows in every bleak and poorly lit frame he shoots. He’s like Mark Borchardt, but with a sense for subtlty.
I’m tempted to say Return in Red should have been a half hour shorter, maybe because I actually fell asleep a couple of times while watching it. Which isn’t the movie’s fault. My hours were messed up because of a time zone shift. In fact, my falling asleep complemented the occasionally hazy narrative. But ultimately, I don’t think you could trim anything from this slow and sometimes wet burn. The time it takes to breathe and meander makes the weird finale more effective. It gives the fate of the characters more weight, especially since they don’t seem like characters so much as people persuaded by Tharpe to wander into the frame from time to time.
But again, let me remind you that Return in Red is bad. I know that. I warned you right off the bat. But sometimes there’s more to a movie than being good or bad. Return in Red, available on Netflix’s instant watch, is one such movie.
I don’t make games; I just play them. Which is too bad for you, because if I made games, I would make the perfect real time strategy game. Not that I have anything against turn-based games, but the perfect one of those has already been made. Several times, in fact. Brian Reynold’s Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, Imperialism II, and Civilization IV, for instance.
Fortunately, most of the hard work for the perfect real-time strategy game has already been done. It just hasn’t been done in the same game. All I have to do is clump together bits from other games, do some quick testing to make sure it doesn’t crash, and, voila! The perfect RTS!
Read Of Hydralisks and Phalanxes here.
At QuakeCon, during one of the panels, Matt Hooper from id mentioned the Kinect. A very vocal young fellow seated behind me barked, “Lag!” This guy in the audience had been saying things very loudly and very inappropriately, so for a brief moment, I thought he’d called Hooper “fag”. I think — no joke — he might have had Tourrette’s Syndrome. When someone mentioned Zelda, he declared, “Navi!” as if it were the answer to an unspoken quiz show challenge (i.e. “name the sidekick in the following videogame franchises…”). At a reference to Half-Life, he hollered, “Oh yeah!”, almost exactly matching the intonation of the Kool-Aid pitcher busting in through a brick wall.
But when the Kinect was mentioned, he announced, “Lag!”. That one word, that one syllable, is the chief characteristic of the Kinect for many of us. And now, this week, here is the Kinect resorting to a port of the iPhone game Fruit Ninja. Here it is, hoping to insinuate itself among better games in XBLA’s Summer of Arcade series, like NBC sticking episodes of The Michael Richards Show between Frasier and Friends. But the truth of the matter is that no matter how responsive Kinect becomes, the greater issue is that it’s solving problems that don’t exist. If I want to play a casual colorful finger slider like Fruit Ninja — I don’t, actually, but if I did — I’ll play it on the iPhone instead of waving my entire arms around in the living room.
So, anyway, not much of a wallet threat this week.
Jason McMaster recounts his ongoing series of vacations on Dead Island, each cut short after an hour. And Tom Chick gets in the wayback machine and parties like it’s 1999. Then — spoiler! — a Wii exercise game makes a surprise appearance.
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Uday Hussein would not approve of our take on Devil’s Double. Neither would his double Latif Yahia, whose life is the subject of the movie. Dominic Cooper, who plays him, might not even approve. If you don’t want Devil’s Double spoiled, fast forward to this week’s 3×3 at the 52-minute mark. We have a catch-up session in which we plug this year’s movies into earlier 3x3s.
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From Dust does an admirable job with a seemingly simple task that has confounded videogames for a long time. Namely, the physics of dirt and water. Some would consider this a god game. I consider it SimArmy Corps of Engineers. Lots of rerouting rivers at which point you realize, oops, that’s not what you should have done because now your city is being flooded. Or building walls to protect your city from a flood only to screw up and realize you didn’t build it high enough or in the right place. Or failing to appreciate how much the volcano is going to erupt or how the plants are going to react or where the trees are going to grow. You’re not quite a god so much as a civil servant undergoing on-the-job training. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing for a game.
Unfortunately, From Dust is not a very good game that happens to be even less good on a console system.
After the jump, the didgeridoo that From Dust does Continue reading →
You may not play Frozen Synapse, but plenty of folks on Quarter to Three do. Dave Perkins drops by to tell us how they’re faring and what they stand to win. And then Dave leaves and everything goes to hell.
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I keep getting licked — literally — by a giant butt with a tongue coming out of a toothy maw where the genitals should be.
This is Catherine’s main claim to gameplay. Not specifically the be-tongued butt, but this timed puzzle sequence in which I have to climb a wall of sliding cubes. It’s a clever enough concept, but you have to play it for a while to wrap your head around it. Unfortunately, Catherine affords me no such opportunity. It gives me tutorial tips and occasional videos suggesting strategies for pushing, pulling, and re-arranging blocks. Think of Catherine as an exponentially complicated crate puzzle, dropped infrequently into a drawn-out series of JRPG dialogues. If you just play normally, like a game that’s telling a story, you might find that you haven’t quite wrapped your head around these puzzles. At which point a butt tongue has just licked you for the tenth time.
I could practice. But I don’t like the game enough to practice it. There are very few games I’ll practice. Personally, if I’m going play something over and over to get better at it, it’s got to offer…well, more than what Catherine offers.
After the jump, how I beat the butt Continue reading →
It’s not really worth pointing out every time someone takes up a Wii on a TV show anymore. But when something happens like what happened on last night’s episode of Breaking Bad, it’s worth pointing out. To highlight the relative meaninglessness of a drug binge, the script decided to invoke videogames for at least two full pages of dialogue (the general rule is one page equals one minutes of screen time).
The Tarantino-esque meth-fueled conversation between two supporting characters considered the relative merits of gameplay and zombie lore in Left 4 Dead, Resident Evil 4, and Call of Duty: World at War’s Nazi zombie mode. The conversation might have gone on for as many as three pages if not for the interruption of a Roomba (pictured).
However, Resident Evil 4? What Resident Evil 4 fan wouldn’t be talking about Resident Evil 5 instead?
