I’m not really good at math, but here are the raw numbers. American Truck Simulator used to be at a scale of 1:35. With today’s update, it’s at a scale of 1:20. According to the developers at SCS Software, this means the maps are 1.75 times larger. I think they need to check their work. By my math, 1:35 minus 1:20 means the maps are :15 larger. Maybe it’s a metric thing. They’re European.
Math errors aside, this is a Big Deal. A fundamental part of level design, and especially open-world design, is the density of stuff. Which is directly related to the size of the maps. On one end of the scale, you have Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag, which squeezed the Caribbean Sea into a tightly packed pond of concentrated naval action. On the other end of the scale, you have the original Battlezone in 1980, which didn’t have a single thing in it no matter how many quarters you spent looking for something. So when a developer releases a game and later says, “Uh, we’re going to rework the world to make it this much bigger, it’s going to have an effect on the gameplay experience.
And in the case of a laidback truck driving simulation like American Truck Simulator, more open space is appropriate. In Europe, everything is close together. That’s why they have so many wars. So Europe should have a high map density. You drive a half hour out of Paris and you’re practically in Warsaw. But going from Los Angeles to Las Vegas? It’s like playing Battlezone.
Mostly I’m just glad to have more room to drag that big-ass trailer around without constantly scraping other cars. In the words of Moe Howard, “Spread out!”
So if the most disappointing category is a list of games that should have been better, the most surprising category is the opposite. These are games that were better than they should have been. Just as disappointing is about falling short of expectations, these surprising games exceeded expectations and, in some cases, were among the best games of the year.
After the jump, the ten most surprising games of 2016. Continue reading →
Calling a game disappointing arguably has more to do with me than the game itself. Disappointment isn’t an inherent quality. It can’t exist without some sort of expectation in the first place. In many cases, these games are sequels, or the creations of developers with proven track records, or entries in established genres, or games with promising beginnings. But for various reasons, a central fact about these games is that I had personally hoped they would be better.
After the jump, the ten most disappointing games of 2016. Continue reading →
We love so many of the people in this movie! The movie itself? Well, not so much. At the 45-minute, we try to stuff a 3×3 about suitcases into the overhead compartment while everyone waits impatiently in the aisle.
Next week: Rogue One
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Kill Command director Steve Gomez has a background in visual effects and it shows. Here is a great example of how to use CG to make a low budget movie look like a big budget movie. Gomez presents a narrow but sharply focused view of near-future tech, follwing a squad of soldiers on a training mission. Their uniforms, their weapons, their hardware, their corporate liason with her cybernetic implants. It’s all so deliciously Deus Exxy even if it doesn’t have fancy cityscapes. You don’t need the sprawl of Blade Runner to do smart cyberpunk.
The cast is as solid as the production values. They look great, and they move through and between the action sequences as gracefully as Gomez shoots them. Vanessa Kirby in particular stands out as a cross between Lara Croft, Adam Jensen, Ripley in Aliens, and Burke in Aliens. Gomez isn’t shy about channeling his influences. Kill Command leans easily on classics like Aliens, Predator, Terminator, and even Westworld. In fact, if you watched HBO’s series to see robots run amok killing people, you were probably disappointed the season ended just as that was going to happen. Kill Command has got you covered.
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You might have thought the release of American Truck Simulator would mean Euro Truck Simulator is old and busted, America is the new hotness. That’s how it works with sequels. In with the new, out with the old. Euro truck drivers can still play in their old world, but the developers at SCS Software have moved on to the New World, right?
Not so! Today they added France. The whole country. $20 gets you the Viva La France DLC. Euro Truck Simulator 2 now includes France, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Germany, Italy, Holland, and the UK (pending Brexit). American Truck Simulator includes California and a chunk of Arizona. Who’s the new hotness now?
How could Kenneth Lonergan possibly follow up on You Can Count on Me and Margaret? At the 1:05-mark, we convince ourselves that it’s a good idea after all to do a 3×3 about movies that converted us to liking actors we didn’t previously like.
Next week: Office Christmas Party
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If you had told Charles B. Griffith he was responsible for one of the most perfect comedy videogames, he probably would have asked, “What’s a videogame?” Griffith was a prolific screenwriter from a bygone era. In the 50s and 60s, he was a go-to guy for producer Roger Corman when Corman needed a template for another crappy low-budget movie. I don’t know most of the movies based on Griffith’s scripts, but I can imagine what they’re like based on the titles: It Conquered the World, Attack of the Crab Monsters, Ski Troop Attack, Beast from Haunted Cave, A Bucket of Blood, Not of This Earth (apparently the last two aren’t as terrible as the others). Griffith is best known for Little Shop of Horrors, which was a crappy Roger Corman movie before it was a Steve Martin movie adapted to a hit musical. From this, you might guess better filmmakers could have made good movies from his scripts. We may never know.
But Griffith’s most enduring contribution is a videogame he had nothing to do with. Continue reading →
A movie making an Important Historical Point starring the woman who played Queen Something or Other in the Warcraft movie and the dude who played young Uncle Owen in the Star Wars prequels? For this week’s 3×3, at the 1:16, we change into a podcast about when one character is played by multiple characters in a movie.
Next week: Manchester by the Sea
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Saints Row IV wasn’t exactly hurting for post-release content. I count 25 bits of DLC for sale for a grand total of about $60. Or you can get it all for $4.99 when you buy the Game of the Century upgrade pack. It’s your call. Most of the DLC is new costumes. Let’s face it: part of being a crazy over-the-top superhero is deciding what you’re going to wear. And now a lot more options will be available for free, because Volition announced official support for Steam’s Workshop. Now user-made mods can be easily added, browsed, and installed. Although some stuff has been available for a while, with official support, we can expect more stuff, and more quality stuff. For instance, this in-progress new textures mod could be promising for making the world look more “SR Miami style”, according to the author.
So what else is on the Steam Workshop? A lot of the items are more new clothes. For instance, a mod that lets you buy clothes you might see NPCs wearing, but that aren’t available in any stores. Now you can play as a cheap Iron Man knock-off (pictured). Or don this tasteful party dress. If it weren’t for the sultry off-the-shoulder style, I might want this T-shirt in real life.
Some of the mods break the game in weird ways. You can find the usual cheats, but you can also find some interesting gameplay tweaks. Here’s a mod that lets you bring different styles of homies into the game to fight with you. No, there’s no nude Kinzie. I checked for a friend of mine. You can be the Doof Warrior. This lets you fly beyond the actual sky. Apply weird rifts affects across a city block, or even throughout the whole city. Saints Row IV is, after all, a game about hacking the matrix. And now the matrix itself supports hacking the hacking. Whoa.
How can a movie be at 98% on Rotten Tomatoes, but one of us doesn’t like it? At the 1:08 mark, this week’s 3×3 perpetrates a discussion about confidence schemes in movies.
Next week: Loving
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As you play Shadow Warrior 2, one of things you learn is that the absolute batshit over-the-top nonsense isn’t, in fact, nonsense. But who could blame you for thinking this is all just a glut of silly killing? The game seems to say as much. Here, have some guns, it says. Have some spells, have some gear. Oh, have these special melee moves. Now have some burning and freezing and poisoning. Have some more guns. Have even more special melee moves. Have more guns. Have a second kind of chainsaw. Now have some slo-mo fury. The more you play, the more of this stuff spills from the absurd gaping maw of the Shadow Warrior cornucopia. It’s overwhelming in the same sense that a Christmas morning would be overwhelming if you thought you’d opened all your gifts, but you kept finding another one behind the tree.
Oh, look, here’s another one! Continue reading →
You know how when older celebrities die, sometimes you hear the news and you think, “Oh, I didn’t know he was still alive…”
The MMO Rift gets an expansion today. Starfall Prophecy is the first post-free-to-play paid DLC for a game that was released somewhere around 2006. I could be off by a few years.
…explore the ominous Comet of Ankhets marshes, forests, deserts and volcanic wastes with five new zones, two new dungeons, a new level cap of 70, new Fortress Sieges and much more.
That screenshot sure does bring back memories. Those holes opening up in the sky. Everyone converging to fight whatever fell out. I really liked the character progression, in which you combined two classes to make your own class, Titan Quest style. I think I even had a mount. A giant turtle, if I recall correctly. Maybe I dreamed that.
Rift is free-to-play. Starfall Prophecies is $40. Yikes.
You know why you should be looking forward to this year’s release of Frozen Synapse 2, don’t you? I mean, even if you weren’t super jazzed about the first game’s turn-based plotting in real-time combat arenas. Because this is the elevator pitch from developer Mode 7:
It will feature a vast procedurally generated city, where tactical encounters can occur within any building, or at any map location. AI factions will vie for control over the map, issuing contracts, taking on missions and engaging in diplomacy in just the same way as the player.
Frozen Synapse busting out of its combat arenas into a procedurally generated open world is the sort of thing that might make a fella clear a date on his calendar. Unfortunately, that date will no longer be in 2016. The release has been delayed until 2017. Which should be a very good year for Mode 7, who is also publishing Tokyo 42 in 2017.
Before he made the laid back revenge tale Blue Ruin and the nerve-wracking siege Green Room, Jeremy Saulnier made a movie that didn’t have a color in the title. He wrote, cast, directed, and shot a little ditty called Murder Party.
After the jump, did no one think of calling it Red Ruin Room? Continue reading →
