Now that I’m playing The Witcher 3 in earnest, I’ve decided I’m going to ignore Gwent, the ingame collectible card game that Geralt can play to fritter away time and orens. As an erstwhile Pazzak player, Caravan player, SkyStones player, and GamePig owner, I know firsthand how much you can fritter away in an ingame game. So my Geralt will decide he has better things to do than play some Hearthstone clone. Besides, isn’t a standalone version of Gwent in the works? Wouldn’t playing Gwent in The Witcher 3 be like playing early access Gwent? I want no part of it. Which means I’ll have that much more money for things that actually matter! Like finally getting a haircut (pictured).
After the jump, here’s me not faffing about with cards. Continue reading →
Sony’s marketing for The Shallows calls it a taut thriller. Taut is a nice way of saying “low budget”. The production consisted almost entirely of filming someone waiting on a rock in the ocean. Before that, you get some heavy-handed character development. After that, you get about ten minutes of action with a CG shark. The most interesting character is a seagull. No lie. A seagull. Taut thriller. Pfft. The only thing taut is Blake Lively’s amazing body. You’d never guess from this movie, which uses her about as well as any calendar shoot uses its model, that Lively is so good in Age of Adeline. Why don’t you just watch that instead? If you want cheesecake in your shark movie, Saffron Burrows in Deep Blue Sea is plenty taut and the movie itself is a real hoot.
The Shallows has no appreciation for the eerieness of the sea, much less the terrible majesty of its shark. It must be difficult to make a 90-minute movie out of something that should be over in nine seconds (for another example, see (i.e. don’t see) Andrew Traucki’s The Reef). I don’t envy any filmmaker who has to make a thriller, taut or otherwise, about a woman not getting eaten by a shark for 90 minutes. But director Jaume Collet-Serra, so deft with Orphan and so confident with Run All Night, has nothing but the expected jump scares and some godawful found footage gimmicks. Thanks, GoPro. And what an utterly ludicrous finale. You know how in movies a bear or dragon or dog jumps at the hero, and the hero holds up a spear so the bear or dragon or dog impales itself? The Shallows is one of the most absurd variations on that theme I’ve ever seen. It wouldn’t be out of place in a Road Runner cartoon.
Hopefully, Sony will release an extended edition that has more scenes with the seagull.
Add Julian Gollop’s once brilliant Chaos Reborn, a precious relic of another time, to the list of games that didn’t have confidence in their original design. Today’s update adds something called law mode. Which drastically overhauls the gameplay without bothering to explain the changes. It’s furthermore how the single-player campaign mode plays now. How does it work? Who knows. The developers can’t be bothered to include an explanation. All I know is that whereas units used to exist in a binary state of either fully alive or fully dead, now they have a hit point bar. Gone are the days of dramatic reversals of fortune at the hands of a ruthlessly random random number generator, which is exactly what random number generators should be. Instead of a dragon dying on a die roll as surely as a rat, now you have to whack away at it. Now I’m calculating attack power vs hit points. I think that’s what I’m doing. Until someone gets around to actually explaining how law mode works, I can’t be sure.
To be fair, this overhaul isn’t mandatory. You can play Chaos Reborn one of two ways. Either the way it was designed, or the way it was redesigned to pander to people who didn’t understand the design. There are advantages to game design being an ongoing process. There are also disadvantages. Chaos Reborn is an example of one of those things.
I’ll get around to finding my lost baby in Fallout 4 when I get around to it. Right now, I’m helping Cate kick her drug habit. I couldn’t care less about rescuing some captured rebel leader in Homefront: The Revolution — what was his name again? — which frees up plenty of time to liberate patches of territory. In Dying Light, uh, something about secret files. Who can be bothered to care when there are safehouses to be cleared, parkour races to run, and skills to level up? Name a game by Ubisoft that isn’t called Far Cry 2. I probably can’t tell you the first thing about the main storyline. All the better for all the Ubistuff that needs doing. There’s hardly a game with as rich a setting for side quests as Watch Dogs. One of the best things you can do for the side quests in an open-world game is a lousy main quest.
After the jump, ciriously cidetracked Continue reading →
One of the benefits of the Warhammer license being handed out like candy is that some of the games that use the Warhammer license will be good. Perhaps even very good. And some of those games will keep on giving. Today, the Space Marines arrive in Battlefleet: Gothic Armada, the Witch Hunters arrive in Mordheim: City of the Damned, and the Eldar arrive in Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade. All on the same day! Space Marines cost $7, Witch Hunters cost $10, and the Eldar are part of the ongoing process of adding content to Eternal Crusade’s ongoing early access. Which I wouldn’t normally mention, but it’s worth mentioning any time space elfs show up.
You’re up, Creative Assembly. Not that Total War: Warhammer is hurting for content, but we’re all eager to hear who the new kids in class will be. Skaven? I bet it’s the skaven.
In Dying Light, another game I’m catching up on these days, I can make five fire shurikens with a blade, some gauze, and a can of aerosol. So far, the blade and gauze are easy enough to find. But I also need the gauze for medkits, so tough choices must be made. The real bottleneck is the aerosol. I’m constantly on the lookout for aerosol. I’ll even buy it from merchants if they’re selling it. Every time I find an aerosol, I think, hey, now I’ve got five fire shurikens! Conversely, every time I throw a fire shuriken, I think, well, I’m going to need to find more aerosol. This fits well enough with a post-apocalypse. When the world ends, I expect to scavenge. I accept non-renewable resources as a facet of any apocalypse.
After the jump, you gotta spend to earn? Continue reading →
A black and white foreign movie that’s over two hours long? Who among us is such a base philistine that he can’t appreciate this best foreign film nominee from Columbia? At the 1:11 mark, we look into cool eyeglasses in movies.
Next week: Independence Day: Resurgence
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Since this game diary will progress alongside my playing time with The Witcher 3, I should warn you there will be spoilers. Never before the jump. I’d hate to ruin anything for the casual skimmer of Quarter to Three who hasn’t played The Witcher 3 yet. But anything after the jump is fair game. I wouldn’t recommend going there unless you’ve made progress in the game yourself.
After the jump, Ciri has two daddies Continue reading →
It’s hard not to like Overfall. It’s has such an eager-to-please enthusiasm. The way it talks to you in tiny snippets so as not to wear out its welcome. The ingratiating pop culture references. The simple breezy battles with a thick gooey center of complexity. Its archipelago busy with criss-crossing little boats going about their business. All these cute NPC classes waiting to join you. Ice Maiden. Wrestler. Knife Juggler. Kirinborn, whatever that is. Unlockable weapons like Bloodfang, Nightbane, Harvester of Sorrow, Deepest Ocean, The Butterflies. The elliptical hints for how to unlock them. Overfall is playful, sly, sleek.
And, after the jump, overbearing. Continue reading →
I have to really like a game to read its books. Actually, that’s true of pretty much any flavor text. But it’s especially true of ingame books. I suspect game developers think they’re tricking me by putting backstory into ingame books. They think I’ll read every single ingame book just in case it teaches me a spell or gives me experience points. They’re right. Finding a book and not opening it to see if anything happens is like finding a chest and not opening it. You just don’t do it.
After the jump, Nilfgaardian best sellers Continue reading →
Stories are weaker when they have a blank slot where a protagonist should be. MMOs are a worst case example of this, because the developers — the storytellers — have no way of knowing what race, class, sex, or morality you’re playing. What sort of story would Star Wars be if George Lucas asked you, “Hey, should Luke give the droids to the Imperials or should he fly them to Alderaan?”
After the jump, how many paragon points are we talking about here? Continue reading →
The tricky thing about top ten lists for videogames during any given year is that it’s difficult to play every game that comes out on any given year. It’s even more difficult to spend the time it takes to really get to know a game. And by difficult, I’m pretty sure I mean physically impossible. If I calculated how many hours it takes to suss out every game released in a year compared to how many hours are actually in a year, the math wouldn’t add up. Let’s see, 365 times 24 is, uh, six thousand something, which will get you through about one MMO, one Paradox game, four shooters, and about a hundred crappy iPad games. Congratulations, you’ve played 5% of the games that came out that year.
So while I did play The Witcher 3 last year, I didn’t get very far before moving on. I had other things to do. And besides, Nick Diamon did a fine job writing a review, so what did it matter if I played it? Hence its absence from my top ten list. I don’t doubt it was great. I played The Witcher 2 so I’m well aware of what CD Projekt Red can do. But it just wasn’t part of my 2015.
Fortunately, there’s no law that says you have to play a game the year it comes out. So as of today, I’m beginning my official playthrough of The Witcher 3, and I intend to go all the way to the end. Wait, does The Witcher 3 even end? How far did CD Projekt Red go with the new open-world conceit? I intend to find out at least once a day for the foreseeable future. In case you’ve already played it and you’re interested in following along someone experiencing the joy of discovery, I’ll be chronicling that discovery — and hopefully joy — here. Besides, I can’t think of a better way to commemorate this year’s E3 by ignoring it in favor of playing an old game.
Tomorrow: My Geralt. Let me show you him.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one. So Russia and a powerful Western superpower walk into a central Asian country… Tom Chick and Bruce Geryk talk to Cole Wehrle, the designer of a boardgame called Pax Pamir about war and intrigue in Afghanistan, but a long time ago.
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Since MOBAs are apparently like sharks — they need to keep adding content or they die — I got this announcement from Blizzard today about the latest new character:
Medivh, The Last Guardian, has been added to Heroes of the Storm and is now available for play! Read on for a brief overview of his Abilities.
That’s confusing for a couple of reasons. Isn’t The Last Guardian a Sony property? But it’s also confusing because I recognize that name. Where is Medivh from? Starcraft II? Diablo III? Those are the only recent Blizzard games I’ve played that aren’t Heroes of the Storm. I don’t remember him from those. Then where do I know him from? And then I realized, oh yeah, Medivh is what everyone in the Warcraft movie kept calling Ben Foster, who is SPOILER until it turns out SPOILER at which point he SPOILER. That’s where I recognize the name.
Anyway, he’s in Heroes of the Storm now, where he can turn into a raven. Which explains at least one of the confusing scenes in the Warcraft movie.
Well, finally someone made another movie based on a videogame and it’s a big big hit. In other countries. At the 1:30 mark, we’ve got spirit, yes we do, we’ve got spirit, how about our 3×3 of cheerleaders?
Next week: Embrace of the Serpent
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