If you haven’t finished Bastion, you can listen up to the 37-minute mark, at which point we’ll warn you that we’re about to talk spoilers. Then you should bail and finish playing it. If you have finished Bastion, you can safely listen to this entire podcast in which Bastion writer Greg Kasavin goes into detail about how one of this year’s finest games came to be.
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I hope From Dust is good. How can something with concept art like the above not be good? Otherwise, the only notable release this week is Catherine, and that’s not notable for the reasons you hope a release is notable.
Captain America might not have won over all of us on this podcast, but it beat Harry Potter. And at least one of the guys on the podcast loved it. Listen to find out who (it’s not who you expect), or fast forward to this week’s 3×3 at the 1:10 mark. We discuss our favorite tears.
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It’s our special Comic Con Heat Wave episode, featuring stuff about Star Wars: The Old Republic, extreme pinball trash talking, and various fighting games like Marvel Cross Ted Sudoku featuring Steve. Also, McMaster recounts his brush with fame and the subsequent fallout.
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At a recent press event for Warhammer: Space Marine, THQ brought out some fans of the Warhammer 40k miniatures game, along with their fantastic armies. In fact, I was surprised that one of THQ’s PR guys had brought along his own Tyranid army, coated with a glistening glossy finish meant to evoke slime. Who knew PR guys could also be such devoted nerds?
The most remarkable miniatures had been carefully pieced together from bits of other miniatures, and complemented with hand-sculpted custom bits. A Chaos Marine army built by a Ph.D. student in pharmacology was one of the most beautiful sets of miniatures I’ve ever seen. Just looking at all the detail and craft in those grotesque misshapen brutes was like falling into a microcosm.
But then there was the actual gameplay. We were treated to some demo games, and sent along with a hardbound copy of the basic rule set. As a boardgamer who loves mechanics, I don’t get the appeal of this tabletop system, which seems hopelessly dated, imprecise, and awkward. Having to prop up a die on a meticulously modeled vehicle to represent what type of damage it’s taken? Hovering over blast templates to read who got hit by what shot? Using a tape measure to keep squads together, calculate movement, and gauge firing range? And so much min-maxing, with so many different sets of rules, with so many six-sided dice, and so little information displayed on the table? Frankly, it all seems like an excuse to do something other than leave these exquisite pieces on a shelf to be admired. I remember when I was a kid and I used to make model airplanes. It took a while to realize that playing with them afterwards wasn’t the point. The point was the making.
But regardless of me not getting the appeal of the tabletop gameplay, I sure did enjoy the spectacle of so many lovingly painted creatures arrayed among so many dice on such wide expanses of table. It very nearly upstaged the actual videogame. Fortunately, developer Relic seems to have a solid idea for how to translate Warhammer 40k into an action game. Read about how a real time strategy developer* approaches a multiplayer shooter in my coverage on GamePro.
* To be fair, they deserve shooter credit for the underappreciated tactical shooter/RTS hyrbid, The Outfit.
It’s really not my fault. In fact, I call entrapment. I feel like I was getting mixed messages from Call of Juarez: The Cartel. I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to do what I did. In fact, I’m still not sure whether I was or wasn’t supposed to do it. But the fact is I did it and now I feel compelled to explain myself.
After the jump, my confession Continue reading →
The problem with Sins of a Solar Empire — and it’s a very real problem — is that I can’t get far with it. I start up a game, as depicted in the above screenshot where the Halcyon class carrier Merciless and a few Disciple Vessels are fighting a tiny independent faction that’s taken up residence around the ice planet Daedalus. We need that planet for its rich stores of crystal. And really, this is just the opening move of the game. It’s not the least bit spectacular in terms of the overall scheme of things. It’s like fighting one of those throwaway gnoll creeps in Warcraft III.
So why am I spending so much time slowing everything down to super slo-mo, flying the camera around, taking screenshots, and admiring the space opera of it all?
Sins of a Solar Empire is too gorgeous for its own good, and that invariably gets in the way when I just want to sit down and actually play the darn thing. Which is what I was trying to do today. Developer Ironclad just released a hefty update that reworks the diplomacy system. Read the details here. In brief, there’s a whole new system of what you get for being friends with other players and how you get it.
Microsoft’s annual Summer of Arcade program starts tomorrow with the release of Bastion, which is the first in a series of four eagerly anticipated titles and one Kinect game. I don’t envy those other games for following Bastion. It really is an ingenious piece of work.
A friend of mine said about the movie Hanna that it should be taught in film school. He didn’t like it as much as I did, but that was his way of saying that he recognized its genius regardless of how much he liked it. And while I have no such dispassionate regard for Bastion — I really love this game — I do think it should be taught in, uh, game designer schools. We have those now, right?
After the jump, 15 things videogames can learn from Bastion Continue reading →
I don’t generally play many (any?) free-to-play games, mainly because I’m mostly playing pay-to-play games. But I get lots of press releases about them. I know how hard it is out there for any game going that route. I don’t envy anyone the task trying to muscle into that particular niche, where free-to-play often isn’t just a business model, but a statement of quality.
I recently played a free-to-play shooter because I was writing a short piece for Gamespy. War Inc is a pretty typical entry in the niche that doesn’t have the benefit of Electronic Arts slapping a Battlefield brand on it. I was actually surprised War Inc wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. Not that I necessarily recommend it to anyone who’s already digging on Killzone 3, or Bad Company 2, or Fear 3. But if you’d rather pay a few bucks at a time rather than $40+ up front, you could probably do far worse than War Inc, which comes with some weirdly suggestive quote marks when you check your overall time played:
I can talk at length about a game I like. But when asked whether I’d recommend a game, suddenly it’s 100% trickier. A recommendation has to take into account the recommendee, which is exactly twice as many people to manage as when I normally talk about a game. But then there is the occasional game I would recommend without hesitation. Bastion is one such game. There is no man, woman, or child* to whom I wouldn’t recommend Bastion, which is available this week on Xbox Live. Just consider your Microsoft spacebucks account 1200 points poorer.
I had hoped Battlegoat’s Supreme Ruler: Cold War would be a more manageable and theme-driven version of their overbusy Supreme Ruler 2010 games. Based on booting it up and messing around a bit with the tutorial, and then accidentally escalating the world to Defcon 1, I don’t think any such thing has happened. I don’t know who plays these things, but they’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.
Runespell: Overture is a card-based trifle with a mess of fantasy RPG connective tissue, but it’s an engaging trifle. The combination of poker and solitaire — How come no one thought of this before? — has a surprising amount of depth. It’s out on Steam this week.
Also out this week is Call of Juarez: The Cartel, which takes Techland’s cowboy games and brings them into modern times. I haven’t played it, but Techland did some nice things with the previous Calls of Juarez. More importantly, playing Techland’s Dead Island at E3 was a revelation that these guys seem to have moved on from just doing fancy graphics engines to actually doing good game design. Maybe we’ll see some of that in The Cartel.
Finally, some licensed Smurfs game and Captain America game (pictured) are coming out this week. I would make a crack about not being able to care less about both things, but I actually kind of like playing Captain America in Marvel vs. Capcom 3. He’s the no-frills idiot-proof character anyone can play to learn the basics. Also, I liked Ryan Reynolds in Buried, so I’m happy to see him playing a famous superhero in the Captain America movie. It’s clobberin’ time!
* Kudos to developer Supergiant for not scrapping their innocuous enough liquor references and smoking pipe. Technically speaking, the E10+ rated Bastion features underage drinking and smoking!
We know what you’re thinking: “What’s Phase 7?” It’s a cool apocalypse thriller from Argentina that got very limited distribution and will hopefully be on DVD soon. We can spoil it for you now or you can listen to the podcast after you’ve seen it later. Either way, our 3×3 of movies we’re bummed never got made starts at the 1:03 mark.
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That guy at 2K Games who said strategy games are “not contemporary” picked the wrong week to trash talk nerds like me who love our hexes and build queues. Because this is the week Of Hydralisks & Phalanxes goes live.
What is Of Hydralisks and Phalanxes? Glad you asked. It’s a monthly strategy gaming column I’ll be doing for Gamespy. And, yes, that’s the actual title. The first column is here and I hope that guy at 2K reads it, because I give him the what-for. I read him the riot act. I dress him down. I take him out back to the shed. I bend him over a barrel and show him the 50 states.
Actually, not really. Because I kind of understand what 2K president Christoph Hartman was getting at in his interview. It’s just that us strategy gamers don’t often get the opportunity to get mad without looking ridiculous for kvetching about a missing hotkey or bad AI or whether a phalanx could beat a battleship. which it totally could.
So I hope you enjoy my first column, Mr. Hartman! Because there more where that came from. One every month, in fact.
On this week’s Qt3 Games Podcast, we get into issues like the pros and cons of potions, the weirdest way to level up your dude, and the role of pornography in videogames. Also, just how good is Bastion? And what’s going on at Bioware and Riot Games? And how did Tom manage to accidentally nuke the world? And when will McMaster make his triumphant return to North America? Listen and find out.
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Two things I loved early on about The Abadoned are how it looks — this is a gorgeous production design, smartly shot by Nacho Cerda, yet another Spanish director with a great eye — and a title card that reads “40 years later”. The movie opens with a pair of little babies showing up out of nowhere. So once the title card flashed onscreen, I knew this was going to be a movie about a forty-year-old. Now I like good looking young people as much as the next WB viewer, but you can only get so much mileage out of good looking young people. They’re dumb, they’re inexperienced, and they’re going to mope a lot about the other good looking young people. At some point, you’re going to need the cast of The Thing, or Andromeda Strain, or Jaws, or Don’t Look Now, or Burnt Offerings, or The Shining. I can only take so many Insidiouses and Amityville Horror remakes and Saws. So when the stately middle-aged stage actress Anastasia Hille showed up, The Abandoned earns major points.
So far, so good. But let’s talk for a second, horror movie. First off, please stop using that trick where someone walks across the foreground of the shot while the main character’s back is turned so that only the audience sees it. Making something scary only by virtue of camera placement is cheating.
Second off, horror movie, I will give you no more than ten minutes of the protagonist walking around a creepy locale while nothing happens. Ten minutes. That’s it. A lot of you go longer and some of you seem to consist mostly of people walking around in, like, the woods or a poorly lit house. Especially the woods. Over the course of an average horror fan’s lifetime, do you know how much footage we see of people walking around in the woods? Far too much. There’s a thin line between suspense and tedium. That line is now ten minutes long. The Abandoned very nearly goes over its limit.
But then something really freaky happens and I’m all, like, “ahhhhh!” and then Karel Roden shows up and all is well. I saw a Polish-language Western once in which Karel Roden sustains a head wound and cauterizes it with the gunpowder from his own bullets. He basically flash sears his own skull. That’s bad ass. He does something nearly that bad ass to a leg wound in The Abandoned. Dude is like the best field medic ever.
You can’t overestimate the value of some Karel Roden. Karel Roden is in exactly one scene in Orphan, and he’s not even really in it. He’s literally phoning in his scene. But he’s Karel Roden and Orphan is already a great movie by that point. But if Karel Roden had played the Tcheky Karyo part in Gravedancers, that movie would have been 45% less stupid. So The Abandoned has got that going for it. Together with Miss Hille’s gracefully carried years and Mr. Cerda’s keen eye and fantastic production design, The Abandoned turns out to be a memorable haunted house romp and very nearly the arthouse version of Evil Dead.
The Abandoned is available on DVD (Netflix link here).
Denny Atkin just got back from witnessing history (pictured, in a photograph he took himself). He talks about it, as well as his technique for making Just Cause 2 a family-friendly game, in this episode of the Quarter to Three podcast.
(Apologies for the quality of my voice as the podcast progresses. Just pretend I’m some freaky robot. Rest assured that Denny, the guy saying the stuff that matters, comes through loud and clear throughout.)
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