If you’re interested in big-budget score-based shootering, Epic re-released Bulletstorm this year. Remember Bulletstorm, which was like The Club, but with marketing? The re-release even has a new set of challenges to flex the gameplay a little. Knock yourself out. But if you’d rather emphasize “score-based” over “big budget” and “marketing”, Desync is your better bet. Continue reading →
I don’t normally play, much less review, early access games. There are far too many finished games I have yet to try. So why would I faff about with someone’s beta? Just let me know when you’re finished. I’ll wait. I’ve got plenty to keep me busy in the meantime.
Oh, look, what’s this? A review of an early access game called Sumer? What gives? Continue reading →
Of all the videogames tapping into the appeal of cards (Pathfinder: Adventures, Hearthstone, Hand of Fate, Monster Slayers), Age of Rivals is among the best (Pathfinder: Adventures, Hearthstone, Hand of Fate, Monster Slayers). Continue reading →
Unfortunately, this game shares half a name with Duck Dynasty and half a name with Family Feud. And screenshots can’t do much to highlight what’s special about it. You’d look at it and think it’s wacky couch multiplayer no different than something like Move or Die. Chase each other around, jumping, punching, jumping, punching, jumping, punching.
This is what people do when they don’t have a Super Smash Bros. Continue reading →
Sofia Coppola’s Civil War battle of the sexes is not a fair fight. One dude versus seven chicks? And they’ve got Nicole Kidman on their side? At the 1:20, we suddenly sit bolt upright and discuss people waking up in movies.
Next week: Spider-Man: Homecoming
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At the halfway point through 2017, you don’t really need people to write articles about how they like Nier and Horizon Zero Dawn and Ghost Recon: Wildlands and that new Zelda game on the Nintendo Switch. Exactly no one will be surprised that we think some of these games are the bee’s knees. The more valuable public service is calling out the games you didn’t know about, but maybe you should. After all, you don’t want your 2017 games of the year list to look like an NPD sales chart, do you?
So for the next ten days, in no particular order, I’m going to tell you about ten different games that I think are the bee’s lesser known knees.
Let’s get started. Continue reading →
Steam is lousy with shmups. Shoot-em-ups. Bullet hells. Call them what you will. Most are as forgettable as any other. Unless they’re made by Cave, a developer that puts some kind of magic pixie shmup dust in their games. Otherwise, if you’ve seen one shmup, you’ve seen them all.
But I keep coming back to Caladrius Blaze. Continue reading →
The things we do for Kate McKinnon. At the 1:18, we hand out awards to our favorite awards ceremonies in movies.
Next week: The Beguiled
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I don’t have a Switch, so I can’t get on the Breath of the Wild bandwagon. I’m not sure there’s room for anyone else on that thing anyway. And I haven’t cleared the six hours from my schedule to boot up Persona 5 and get to the actual game part. I’ve played enough of Torment: Tides of Numenera to know that I probably shouldn’t be writing this list yet.
But let’s do this anyway! Continue reading →
https://youtu.be/BjhHKzPOck8
If you want to see Terminator 2 again, you’ve got a couple of options. You can wait for this:
Director James Camerons 4K 3D conversion of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, has been booked for an Aug. 25 domestic release by AMC Theatres.
Terminator 2 has stood the test of time and is still hailed by critics as one of the best sci-fi movies in film history, said Elizabeth Frank, exec VP at AMC Theatres. Now, the newly restored version of the classic will take the already extraordinary special effects to a new level, and AMC is honored to give fans a newly immersive experience of a legendary film, as well as introduce the blockbuster to a new generation.
Or you can just click that video up there until it gets pulled for copyright infringement, since it’s virtually indistinguishable from the release version. It uniquely captures the stoicism with which Schwarzenegger played his role, not to mention a certain je ne sais quoi exuded by Edward Furlong. I’m not sure that stuff will come through so well in 4K 3D.
One of the resources in Steep is helicopter tickets. I somehow ended up with six of them. I think you mostly get them by micropaying money to buy SteepBux, which you then spend on stuff like gorilla outfits, DILLIGAF T-shirts, and bright pink snowboards that you’re too impatient to unlock by actually playing the game. You can also buy “helicopter tickets”, which you use to teleport to places you haven’t unlocked. Steep is an entirely open world, but these places would be hard to reach normally because this is a game about gravity-based traversal. If you’re not going downward in Steep, you’re generally not going forward either.
But today’s $10 Extreme Pack adds a rocket pack, which uses the third law of thermodynamics to win any fight against gravity. This is also known as “cheating”. Because this isn’t just a jumppack with a limited charge or anything like that. It’s an honest-to-goodness, Billy Campbell saving Jennifer Connelly, George Clooney falling in love with a prepubescent robot girl jet pack. You can now freely defy gravity and go anywhere you want. So, anybody want to buy six helicopter tickets? No reasonable offer refused.
The pack also adds the option to wear your snowboard when you parasail (apparently called “speed riding”) and the option to freefall for a while before you open your parasail (called “base jumping”). There are also new events that I presume are like the new events in the Winterfest DLC from earlier this year. I’m guessing the Extreme events can’t possibly be more annoying than the Winterfest events, but Ubisoft is really good at surprising me.
Goddammit. Continue reading →
These are dark times for Transformers: Age of Extinction apologists. Dark times indeed. So at the 1:29-mark, we talk about laughter in movies.
Next week: Rough Night
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You know that trick where you ask someone to spell “most”, then you ask them to spell “boast”, then you ask them what they put in a toaster, and then they say “toast”? Which is wrong because — gotcha! — you put “bread” in a toaster. It’s a dumb mental trick that plays with how your brain anticipates information. It sees certain things and then pre-loads itself based on your ideas of structure and patterns. It gets ahead of itself because it has spent your life accumulating expectations. Shimmer Lake is an intricate exercise in structure and expectations. It’s also one of the tidiest and most fiendishly clever crime thrillers since Fargo. Continue reading →
In the movie Curve, Dancing with the Stars dancer Julianne Hough gets trapped in a car wreck while a psycho killer stalks her. Her leg is stuck, so she isn’t going anywhere. This makes things pretty easy for the psycho killer, but there’s still about an hour of movie left, so a bunch of stupid stuff happens. The Curve I’m talking about is not that one.
This Curve is a short film by Tim Egan, an Australian cinematographer whose short didn’t quite make the cut in ABCs of Death 2, so it was chucked into a B-side release called ABCs of Death 2.5. Having already seen 52 ABCs of death, of which maybe 10 aren’t terrible and 3 or 4 of those are actually good, I didn’t have it in me to watch another 26. I might have to rethink my decision after watching Egan’s latest short film, Curve.
Curve is a horror movie about friction. Literal friction. The principle of physics governing the movement of two surfaces in contact with each other. But being a thoughtful horror short, it’s not really about what it’s about. I’d say it’s a metaphor for the human condition, but of course I would, because I’ve taken a few too many undergraduate philosophy classes. Some habits are hard to shake. Still, I can’t help but think that Curve is to short films what No Exit is to the theater. But unlike a production of No Exit — those characters are so annoying — Curve is mesmerizing, memorable, and ultimately slick. And it only takes about ten minutes of your time.
You can watch Curve in its entirety right here on Vimeo.
