Gazillion recently retooled the skill system in their very good free-to-play Marvel Heroes Online (for the record, the phrases “very good” and “free-to-play” rarely appear next to each other). It was quite the makeover. A whole bunch of bits and bobs were either cut out entirely, or streamlined, or clumped into larger bits and bobs. There were fewer skills with more distinct kinds of powers. Characters like Doctor Strange who required multiple hotkey bars got simpler. A crazy endgame thing called Omega Powers or something just vanished. Marvel Heroes suddenly worked well with a gamepad. I wonder why they did all that? Who can say?
Oh, speaking of Gazillion, guess what. Today they announced Marvel Heroes Online for the Playstation 4! Who could see that coming? It will be called Marvel Heroes Omega, so no wonder they had to cut the Omega thing from the PC game. That just would have been confusing.
The console version will retain the free-to-play model. No cross-platform play, of course. It will launch with 38 of the 61 superheroes currently in the PC version. Yep, there are 61 heroes in the PC version. I didn’t even know there were 61 Marvel heroes. I figured we’d run out after Ant-Man. But looking through the game’s roster, I see there’s one named Angela. Just Angela. Someone wasn’t even trying. The latest addition to Marvel Heroes was a guy named Black Bolt. He looks like Captain America trying to be edgy by wearing a black suit. He borrowed Hawkeye’s stubby little wings, which sort of takes the edge off. It makes him look like a little girl playing fairy princess. But, you know, in black.
Of course, the big question on everyone’s mind is whether Squirrel Girl will be among the 38 characters available at launch. We’ll find out soon enough, because Marvel Heroes Omega is due out this spring. As in, the season we’re currently in. Expect a beta announcement soon.
My favorite strategy games are also historical essays. Paradox’s Victoria II considers how the rise of wealth corresponded with the demand for social reform in the industrial era. Joel Toppen’s boardgame, Comancheria, examines the cycle of brutalities European expansion and Native American culture inflicted on each other. Stardock’s Corporate/Political Machine explores how perception trumps reality. Afghanistan ’11 is about what we learned from Vietnam.
After the jump, the more things change, the more things change. Continue reading →
Classic anime, but not as a cartoon, and starring Scarlett Johansson, and directed by the guy who did the first Snow White movie that we liked! What could go wrong? At the 1:15 mark, against all odds, we do a 3×3 of come-from-behind victories.
Next week: Rock and Rule
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It’s not unusual that a movie studio options a book before it’s published. Especially if it’s a well-known author or a story with some sort of early buzz because it’s part of a franchise or based on a well-known event. But as far as I know, that’s never happened with a videogame. Instead, a game comes out, some sequels get made, lots of people buy them, and eventually Hollywood is all, like, “Huh, what, marketing groundwork already laid? Built-in opening weekend audience? Let’s make a (modest) deal!” Then several months later a Max Payne or Assassin’s Creed movie tanks at the box office. Worst case scenario, Crackle plops a Dead Rising movie online.
But Variety reports that it went a little differently today. A minor studio called Gold Circle Entertainment bought the rights for We Happy Few, which isn’t even out yet. It’s a successfully Kickstartered currently early access game by a bunch of veteran Montrealer developers gone indie. To its credit, We Happy Few has a unique sense of style. And by unique, I mean indebted to Bioshock without being slavish. That’s not something you find very often in videogames.
Gold Circle has been around for a while, and their success comes from stumbling into a couple of accidental hits that appealed to underserved female audiences. The first was My Big Fat Greek Wedding back in 2002. The second was Pitch Perfect back in 2012. Pitch Perfect — which is a very very good movie whether you’re a dude or a chick — is a commercial juggernaut for Gold Circle. The sequel — which is a very very bad movie whether you’re a dude, a chick, or even a Pitch Perfect fan — put it on the map as an Official Franchise with its $70 million opening and eventually a 10-to-1 worldwide return on its production budget. A third Pitch Perfect is in the works, adding the awesome Ruby Rose to its already awesome cast. With actors like these, who cares if the movie sucks? I can say this because it’s been several weeks since I suffered through Table 19, which I saw because Anna Kendrick, Lisa Kudrow, Craig Robinson, and Stephen Merchant were in it, so who cares if the movie sucks? I’m nearly over the trauma.
Obviously Gold Circle is casting about for new properties. Someone figured maybe this We Happy Few videogame might do well, so let’s get it while the getting’s good. The average internet reader will take this as an announcement that a We Happy Few movie is ON TEH WAY!!!1! But that’s not how these things work. Variety is just announcing a deal has been made. The majority of these deals do not result in movies. It’s unlikely a We Happy Few movie will ever see the light of day, much less a theatrical screen projector. But if We Happy Few 2 does well, it just might get handed over to some hapless European director as his entrance fee into the Hollywood creative mulcher. So stand by for news of a potential announcement concerning the early stages of what could be a possible We Happy Few movie sometime in 2020 or so.
Seasons in Diablo III are a way to play a self-contained character facing a unique set of challenges. Basically, an optional reset button so you can enjoy the early stages of the game all over again, without all the other hours you’ve played twinking the experience. Seasons also earn you unique rewards. When they end, everything you’ve earned gets transferred to normal Diablo III.
Seasons have only been available on the PC version of Diablo III. But the 10th season, which starts today, is available for those of us who play on the PS4. In other words, there is no longer any reason to play Diablo on the PC, where you can’t use a controller, where you can’t enjoy same-screen multiplayer support, where you don’t get all the cool interface shortcuts to manage your inventory on the fly, where the right stick won’t let you do a super helpful evasive roll, and where you have to sit in your office chair instead of on the comfy couch in the living room.
It was one heck of a run, PC Diablo. We’d remember you fondly if we weren’t so busy playing Diablo III on the PS4.
According to an article on The Economist’s online magazine:
…games have got [sic] immeasurably better. They are often beautiful, narratively interesting, enriching and social. Indeed, it is possible that they are too good. Today’s games seem to be displacing careers, friendships and families, and thus stopping young people (particularly men) from starting real, adult lives.
Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man. Oh, what? You have some data?
Between 2000 and 2015, the employment rate for men in their 20s without a college education dropped ten percentage points, from 82% to 72%. In 2015, remarkably, 22% of men in this group – a cohort of people in the most consequential years of their working lives – reported to surveyors that they had not worked at all in the prior 12 months. That was in 2015: when the unemployment rate nationwide fell to 5%, and the American economy added 2.7m new jobs. Back in 2000, less than 10% of such men were in similar circumstances.
And what’s that got to do with videogames?
Economists typically (and reasonably) assume that people tend to buy more things as they earn more money. But as they grow richer, they buy proportionately more of some things and less of others. Spending on necessities, as a share of all consumption, declines as incomes rise. Economists label “luxuries” the things that account for an increased share of spending as income goes up. There is a similar logic to leisure luxuries. As the amount of time people spend at leisure (as opposed to work) rises, some activities (like bathing or sleep) account for a shrinking share of total leisure time. Others the leisure luxuries account for more.
(What does it say about me that as I read that article, I imagined how that model would fit into The Sims?)
Among those predisposed to the leisure-luxury life, better games mean people are quicker to swap working hours for gaming hours; given nes-era [sic] gaming technology, a twenty-something might decline an opportunity for overtime work to have a little longer with Mario and Luigi. Now, a part-time job might be all they are willing to do, so good are the worlds and characters waiting at home. For those with the means, any hour on the job is an hour too much.
A lot of writer Ryan Avent’s anecdotes smack of videogaming guilt, a unique phenomena which doesn’t exist to the same degree for other forms of entertainment. His attempt to draw a parallel between life and game design is cringe-worthy, particularly his conclusion that the real world needs better dynamic difficulty adjustment. But his basic premise isn’t the usual mainstream alarmism. While I believe videogames belong alongside other forms of leisure and entertainment, their capacity to suck up time is unique. The long-term and widespread effects can’t be negligible.
When you’re really good at a strategy game — a boardgame, a card game, Civilization, chess — there’s a whole other kind of pacing than when you’re learning it, or just casually letting it unfold, or playing it as one of a half dozen other strategy games currently rattling around in your brain. The dilettante considers each move because he doesn’t know the game well enough to hurtle through it. When you master a game, your brain works as if it has muscle memory. In a given amount of time, someone who knows a game well can play twice as many games as someone who doesn’t. Maybe three times as many.
But even I can play a whole bunch of Monster Slayers in very little time. Continue reading →
The centerpiece, heart, and bedrock of Macon Blair’s playfully blood simple black comedy is actress Melanie Lynskey. She plays the sweetly aggrieved Ruth, suffering the injustices of daily life with baby-faced resolve (you’d never guess it’s been nearly 25 years since Heavenly Creatures). She comes home from work every day to drink Coors, read Game of Thrones, and seethe about how everyone is an asshole. Something’s got to give.
There’s a subtle point almost hidden in Blair’s script. I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore begins on the day Ruth stops taking medication for anxiety and depression. It’s not a decision she intended. The movie doesn’t even call attention to it. But given her terrible day, given that her anxiety and depression are abruptly unchecked, no wonder her mid-life crisis is of existential proportion. No wonder she breaks down at the fact of astronomical insignificance. No wonder the movie has an Alice in Wonderland quality. When percocet and religion briefly enter the picture, it just gets curiouser and curiouser.
This is where Blair’s second act introduces a picaresque cast of white trash villains and accomplices, with Elijah Wood and David Yow as standouts. The location happens to be Portland, but the setting could be any red state with a Green Room off in the woods. Ruth is to rural America what Jeff Goldblum is to Los Angeles in Into the Night, or Jeff Daniels to New York City in Something Wild: having a midlife crisis and liable to do something reckless.
It’s a little eerie how physically similar Lynskey is to Macon Blair in Blue Ruin. They could be siblings. They both have the same dejected brown-eyed soulfulness. You just want to hug them. “You have such beautiful black little eyes,” someone tells Ruth.
“Okay,” she allows politely.
Lynskey is also in XX, a pretty good horror anthology, called XX because the five directors are women and chromosomes don’t make for confusing movie titles at all. Annie Clark’s segment, The Birthday Party, is mostly a set-up for a punchline, but it works because it’s focused on Lynskey playing the same kind of sweetly aggrieved and eminently watchable protagonist. I mean, seriously, sit Lynskey in front of the camera, set it to a soundtrack, and you’re 90% of the way to a movie.
Blair is a little unsteady getting his footing on the tightrope of black humor. Sometimes I Don’t Feel at Home pinwheels its arms and sways more Napoleon Dynamite than Fargo. But when it’s poised on that razor’s edge of Fargo, it’s dead-on. For instance, few movies manage the endearing inanity of Lynskey’s exchange with David Yow during a climactic showdown. And Blair knows how to orchestrate nutso sequences of unintended action and unexpected consequence. Tarantino, the Coen brothers, Rube Goldberg, and the NRA would be proud.
Some people think a floppy space octopus isn’t a good monster for a horror movie. You’ll find some of them on this podcast!
Next week: Ghost in the Shell
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“Did you ever hear about this alligator who went into a restaurant?” Lamar Thigpen took them by the neck and drew them close as lovers.
“No, I didn’t,” said the courteous engineer, though he had. Jokes always made him nervous. He had to attend to the perilous needs of the joke-teller.
–Walker Percy, The Last Gentlemen
Two minutes into this excruciatingly long ten minute video, I’ve seen all it has to show me. But I’m still watching it because my friend thought it was funny. “Oh, let me show you this,” he had said excitedly, typing the words “nightclub mashup” into YouTube.
Instead of telling each other jokes anymore, we show each other videos. Continue reading →
Tom Chick and Bruce Geryk talk to Johan Nagel, the guy behind Vietnam ’65 and now Afghanistan ’11. Nagel also reveals his next two (2!) games and a boardgame that doesn’t look like the sort of boardgame you’d expect from the guy who made Afghanistan ’11.
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Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Some people get in a car and drive to a remote location to have a horror movie. The location is modest, self-contained, and not nearly as impressive as it should be. The cast is small, of varying degrees of attractiveness, and not particularly talented. The script has no interesting ideas. The director has no insight. The movie is terrible. You stop watching it halfway through. It will be frozen in your Netflix account at the 40-minute mark forever.
The Snare is this with a twist: the script does have interesting ideas and the director does have insight. The movie isn’t terrible. It’s not particularly good, but it’s certainly not terrible. It sneaks decisively past the 40-minute mark.
Writer/director C.A. Cooper is working with limited resources. A third of his cast is sedate to a fault. The other two thirds are grating. The location is hilarious. The script calls for an isolated holiday getaway, but all the production can manage is someone’s two-bedroom flat. So it’s up to the cast to pretend they’ve totally found an awesome place to hang out for a few days. It even has a TV set with a 14″ screen! Sweet! The exterior is carefully framed to exclude the apartment buildings next door. From the balcony, you can see the neighboring buildings. Anyone trapped up here could just yell to the next house over to call the fire department to bring a ladder.
But if the model for most bad horror is seminal crowd-pleasers like Friday the 13th, Paranormal Activity, or The Exorcist, the model for The Snare is The Shining. This is a director who hasn’t just seen The Shining, but he understands it and he uses it as a template for a nasty little tale about rotting away. Despite his limited resources, he knows how to shoot and construct a creepy slow-burn that relies on unnerving instead of startling. He prefers sickly instead of lurid, nauseous instead of gorey, decay instead of violence. Cooper knows to get under your skin instead of in your face. Someone give this man a better cast and a bigger budget.
We watch the winner of this year’s Make Us Watch Whatever You Want Fund Drive! Or do we? At the 1:11-mark, we touch on a few of our favorite moments of contact in movies.
Next week: Life
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Ghost Recon Wildlands is what it would be like if Disney World had a section called Shootland. A swathe of geography dedicated to the theme of shooting guns, expensive looking, consisting of simple and contrived thrills interspersed with waiting in line, built to impress in a compressed burst rather than entertain over the long run. Great place to visit, sure.
But not much of a game. Continue reading →
Writer/director Julia Ducournau’s spectacular debut movie, Raw, will get lumped in with a genre known as body horror, which is where gross stuff happens to someone’s body. That’s too bad, because it’s a genre rife with cheap gore, shock value for shock value’s sake, and godawful movies that seem awfully proud of the point they’re trying to make, much like a toddler would be proud of a bowel movement. And there’s really not a lot of room for subtlety in body horror. No one ever accused David Cronenberg of subtlety.
But Raw’s body horror is not its priority. It is only its vehicle. Raw is less interetsed in the grossness of biology than the urges that drive it. Like Prevenge, an upcoming (and unfortunately not very good) movie about pregnancy, Raw considers the unique dilemma of women besieged by the primal force of, well, biology. Although it doesn’t shy away from explicit gore, it skips past what would have been its goriest scenes. Not just because imagination is more powerful. An unforgettable and thunderously scored epiphany scene doesn’t leave much to the imagination. But because a fundamental facet of sexuality, over and above any act, is identity. Not what you’ve done, but what you feel. What you want.
I both have and haven’t said enough. The average review of Raw will ruin at least two of its reveals. Every trailer I’ve seen will ruin about a half dozen. Finding out what Raw is about is best left to Ducournau’s confident, stylish, and unnerving filmmaking, and actress Garance Merillier with her Rose Byrne doe eyes.
Although Raw isn’t ultimately body horror, it does earn a place in French extremism, which is just a fancy way of saying, “Damn, there are some people from France who really get horror!” Like Martyrs, still a bleeding edge of French extremism, Raw is about three or four things by the time it’s over, each building on the other in unexpected ways. But unlike Martyrs — or anything else in French extremism — Raw is curiously poignant, even tender. Heh, tender. Now I’ve said too much.
Raw is currently in limited release, hopefully at an arthouse theater near you.
