Up first: Zero Theorem, Waco, Raw, and Thelma. Then we talk about our favorite audition scenes besides the one that should be everyone’s favorite.
Next week: Ready Player One
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Terry Gilliam’s pre-apocalyptic time travel sci-fi is the winner of this year’s Make Us Watch Whatever You Want Fund Raiser! So how did that turn out?
Next week: our favorite auditions
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Czech boardgame developer Vlaada Chvatil’s Through the Ages is a nearly unplayable masterpiece recreating the sweep of history with a handful of elegantly interlocked systems. It’s hard to learn, even harder to learn to play well, and even harder than that to actually get through a game. Playing Through the Ages competently requires failing Through the Ages several times over, wasting your and your friends’ time when you all could have been playing something you already knew and enjoyed.
For some reason, the boardgame’s publisher figured they’d make an iOS port of Through the Ages. As if. They didn’t have any experience doing videogame ports of boardgames, much less boardgames as sweeping, unmanageable, and esoteric as Through the Ages. It was bound to be a disaster. Instead, in one of last year’s biggest surprises, it was a triumph. It turned Chvatil’s unplayable masterpiece not only into a playable masterpiece, but an accessible masterpiece with a clever and funny tutorial, a built-from-the-ground-up interface that makes information intuitively available, as competent an AI as you want, a set of engaging challenges that will help you flex various ways to play, and smooth multiplayer support for real-time or asynchronous games with friends, enemies, or just strangers. It is the best boardgame port I have ever played.
Today it’s available for the PC with thorough cross-platform support to play with iOS players. It even synchronizes your progress with any challenges you’ve beaten on your iPad. Through the Ages is available on Steam for $16.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
This is what I say out loud. I’ll mutter things from time to time. But this I say. Out loud enough that the cat mewls because he thinks I’m talking to him.
Yes, I tell him.
The best peak moments are in games that also have the lowest bleak moments. Kingdom Death: Monster is nothing if not bleak. It will test your willingness to subject yourself to the ruthless whims of the random number gods. You will roll Blood Geysers, Exploding Heads, leprosy, and two 1’s when you only need one of them to be a 3 or higher, so your population drops because a woman just died in childbirth. It exists to kill you so that you’ll be elated during moments when it doesn’t.
It takes an hour and five minutes to cook a frozen Marie Callender chicken pot pie. One of the curious properties of Space Tyrant, a sci-fi micro-grand strategy game, is how it reduces that time to about 20 minutes. Because there’s no way I put that chicken pot pie in the oven, sat down to play Space Tyrant, and have been at it for an hour and five minutes. That’s just not how time works.
Thumper begins as an artsy look at the life of high school kids with all their social media and first loves and difficulties in school and casual drug use and absent parents. Leads Eliza Taylor and Daniel Webber positively glow as a young couple, ablaze with bright blue eyes and radiant smiles. But Taylor doesn’t quite fit. She’s got too much presence to play a high school student in a movie about the travails of vacuous youth. Beneath the self-assured sexuality of a young Kathleen Turner, there’s something maternal about her, something with the wholesome midwestern quality of a zaftig Reese Witherspoon. She has gravity beyond her years, or at least beyond the years of the character she’s playing. She’s as out of place as a 22 Jump Street character. Thumper knows just what to do with this disconnect.
Writer/director Ross Jordan has a background in MTV docudrama, which presumably informed this movie’s starting point. But Thumper doesn’t stay where it begins. By the time it has strayed into conventional territory, dragging a trail of cliches behind it, it has at least come in from a new direction. The cast can handle the familiar beats, with Pablo Schreiber charging ahead. When Taylor’s character asks him if he’s a shepherd, he demurs to deliver a small speech about the disaffected lower class, tinged with just the right amount of racism to sound real. But Schreiber is a shepherd here. Without his presence, Thumper probably wouldn’t work, and Jordan’s cliches would sink instead of skipping across the surface. Schreiber is an actor in the middle of a fascinating career, spanning crime thrillers and arthouse comedies, action schlock and serious drama, TV and movies. Come to Thumper for its attractive blonde leads, freshly imported from Australia (it’s a real hoot to listen to Taylor and Webber in interviews, accents in full bloom). Stay for the Schreiber.
“Here comes Alicia Vikander!” says Kelly Wand. You have been warned.
Next week: 12 Monkeys
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After you get past gluing together teensy bits of plastic and then receiving your mauling at the claws of what should have been a tutorial, Kingdom Death: Monster finally shows you what it really is. Once you’re filling out the sheet for your settlement, you’ve arrived and now you can see clearly. Now you can see what the road ahead looks like. What’s that strange hulking shape up there? Is it getting closer?
After a little bit of complicated math about the Anno series, we discuss Surviving Mars, Vermintide 2, Antihero, Endless Space 2, Space Tyrant, Pit People, Into the Breach, The Crew 2, Sea of Thieves, Diluvion, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and Sniper Elite 4. That’s an even dozen games in less than an hour!
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The good news is that you guys are awesome! We got 1,803 votes for this year’s Make Us Watch Whatever You Want Fund Raiser. The bad news is that this is a podcast about Eli Roth’s Death Wish. You can jump to 1:21:30 if you don’t want to commiserate with us.
Next week: Tomb Raider, and the Make Us Watch Whatever You Want winner the week after that
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Mickey Keating wants us to know he’s seen Taxi Driver. Well, at least the shoot out at the end. In Psychopaths, a new low for the most uninteresting horror director working today, he restages a snippet of the brothel shootout, shot for shot. He also wants us to know he’s seen Audition. Well, at least the torture scene at the end. But Martin Scorsese and Takashi Miike understand that something needs context to be truly horrific. The ends of Taxi Driver and Audition wouldn’t be nearly as powerful without the rest of the movie laying the groundwork. Which is why those scenes are at the end and not merely edited in at some random spot. Keating apes, without understanding, to such a degree that his movie is barely even a movie.
Blood shoots from your femoral artery at an alarming rate, killing you in seconds.
The title “Blood Geyser” precedes the text in boldface type. It’s what happens when you take a severe injury to the legs and roll a 1 on the Severe Injuries table for legs. It’s how Ariadne died after being dragged away by a White Lion.
Tom Chick and Space Tyrant lead designer Dave Quinn talk about why this isn’t the usual 4X in space. And how it might not exist if it weren’t for Illwinter’s crazily detailed Dominions games.
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Jennifer Lawrence colludes with Russia! How’s that work out? Listen and find out. Also, this is the final week for you to participate in our Make Us Watch Whatever You Want Fundraiser 2018! Listen to the very beginning of this podcast for details.
Next week: Death Wish
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Jason and Ian are both like little devils on my shoulder. They’re not doing it right. Isn’t one of them supposed to be the angel? They’re telling me about this super expensive game that I had already heard of, but had zero interest in playing. Especially once I found out that you have to glue together the stupid miniatures yourself. Ugh. Who has the time? It’s not my job to put together a game the designer couldn’t be bothered to put together himself. Besides, I did my term of service gluing stuff together when I was 14 and getting gluey fingerprints all over Revell models of B-17s. But they’re each telling me things about the game that make me think there’s more to this thing than I knew. Ian has it and he’s clearly enamoured of it. Or at least invested in it. Jason doesn’t have it, but he wishes he did. He seems to admire it from afar.
They keep talking. Their words are cackles and pricking pitchforks and the lash of tiny barbed tails at the back of my neck. But I’m strong. They can’t do their work on me. It won’t work. It won’t work.
