The creepiness factor with They Look Like People starts with the name. Who looks like people? They? Who are they? If they only look like people, what do they really look like? Let your imagination run with it. Rest assured your questions will be answered in this chilling slow burn version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers — either one — with a payoff every bit as effective and unexpected.
There’s a whole contingency of late-night call-in show wackos who believe in lizard people disguised as humans for some insidious plot. They’re crazy, right? Where’s the line that separates being ill, being imaginative, and actually being right? As the old saying goes, it’s not paranoia if they’re actually out to get you. How much can you trust the voices in your head, whether they’re affirmation tapes or messages heard on a phone that might not even work? These are the ideas that They Look Like People writer and director Perry Blackshears explores with his cast. Evan Dumouchel as a Ray Liotta crossed with Mark Duplass leading man, the endearingly Tilly-esque Margaret Ying Drake, and an appropriately bland and uncertain MacLeod Andrews.
Blackshears plays it maddeningly close to the vest, sometimes out of necessity. Given the subject matter and the guerilla style filmmaking, I can’t help but think of Larry Cohen’s God Told Me To. You probably don’t know what that is, and frankly you’re not missing much. The 70s were a hell of a thing. So think of this as a microbudget Jacob’s Ladder that relies on sound design and just the lightest touch of effects. It’s a less-is-so-much-more approach to tension. Jump scares? Who needs them? They Look Like People does what it needs to do with quiet shots, badly lit rooms, and disarming edits. It doesn’t have to lunge at you and make sudden loud noises. It’s not interested in how other horror movies do it, much less what other horror movies actually do. It’s ultimately got something else on its mind. Something far more disturbing.
Not to say it’s not a horror movie! It absolutely is. A supremely creepy one. But how many horror movies begin with the premise that greater love hath no man than he who would shave his friend’s back for him? Except for he who would repay the favor to the degree it’s repaid here.
Battlefleet: Gothic Armada shipped with a lot of stuff in it. Four factions, character progression for online and offline games, a dynamic campaign. It also shipped with a lot of stuff not in it. Developer Tindalos is promising two new factions, ship customization, and asymmetry among the faction’s skills. Okay, so those things needed some more development time, but they wanted to get the game out the door, so those things could wait.
But I’m flabbergasted at what else they thought could wait. From the latest roadmap of stuff coming up “in the next few weeks”:
Online custom games will allow you to invite your friends to matches, competing with or against them in 1vs1 and 2vs2 battles.
And among the stuff coming up “in the next couple of months”:
You’ll be able to invite a friend to play 2 vs 2 against the AI – the progression system will be available in this mode for both you and your friend.
I had no idea those things weren’t in there until I tried to set up a game against a friend. It’s not possible. Okay, so let’s play against the AI. It’s also not possible. The only way to play with my friend is in a 2v2 game against random players. In a game with wide-open custom battle options against the AI, complete with long-term character progression, Battlefleet: Gothic Armada says you can only progress an online character by playing “fair and square” against random players. Tindalos seems to be of the mindset that if I level up by playing with a friend or — gasp! — by playing a comp stomp, I shouldn’t be allowed to use that progression online against other players.
It’s an inane idea that needs to go away. What do they care how I level up? Why this absurd need to expect everyone to grind away at the same millstone to pay their game tax? And while I’m glad Tindalos is changing their mind, it’s a shame that it’s taking them months to do something about it.
Ben Wheatley’s absurd dystopia isn’t for everyone. Including one or more of the people on this podcast. At the 1:05 mark, we get sidetracked by this week’s 3×3 about side characters who are more interesting than main characters. And don’t miss the custom movie posters by listener sinnick!
Another year, another Call of Duty. This time in space. Which looks an awful like like Halo, which has come to look an awful lot like Call of Duty, which Gears of War now more closely resembles, and so on. They’re all starting to run together for me. Over the weekend, me and a friend couldn’t recall, for the life of us, which Call of Duty had the dog. Ghost? Black Ops II? The one with the exoskeletons? If there’s one thing Activision knows, it’s how to give the people what they want. Which is apparently more of what they’ve already had.
Also, what an awful cover of Space Oddity. Couldn’t they at least have waited until Bowie was dead a little longer?
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare will be out on November 4th.
M.U.L.E. was Dani Bunten’s ingenious commodities-driven deathmatch bidding arena. I didn’t play it when it came out in 1983, because it wasn’t on the Apple II. I didn’t even know what it was back then. It wasn’t until many years later that I finally tried it with some friends. In the same room, of course. That’s how all games worked back then. I figured we’d try it, although I thought we were in for the strategy game equivalent of Pong. No one wants to play Pong ever again, just like no one wants to gin his own cotton, read Beowulf on a long flight, or hang up a poster of the Bayeux Tapestry in his living room. Pong is a musty relic with no modern relevance beyond its role in videogame history. That’s what I figured was going on with M.U.L.E.
But it turned out M.U.L.E. was (and still is) an amazing game. Sure, it’s ugly. Good graphics hadn’t been invented back in 1983. But Bunten managed a simple — not simplistic! — player-driven cutthroat economy based on real estate, commodities, and auctions. God, I’m making it sound boring, I know. But it’s really not. It’s really, really not. M.U.L.E. is freakishly before-its-time game design, as if someone had made the movie Casablanca at the moment the daguerreotype had been invented. The only reason you’re not playing M.U.L.E. today, in some form or another, is because the videogame industry — really, it was more of a scene at that point — was about to explode based on Doom’s appeal to adolescent male power fantasies learned from action movies. It would take a while before the rest of the world discovered what we were up to, and by that time, Sid Meier and Will Wright had carved out their own niche where Dani Bunten’s work would have been.
But M.U.L.E. is a nearly unrivaled work of game design genius that will hold up if you gather four friends around a single screen. Sure, some of it is dated. You play it with joysticks, for Pete’s sake. We don’t even have those anymore! But the design is timeless.
Brandon Cackowski-Schnell drops by to chat about why he’s playing yet another Ratchet & Clank game. Haven’t there already been enough of these silly things?
I don’t mind that The Next World bills itself as a strategy visual novel, but has precious little strategy, or even that it makes what little strategy it has surprisingly opaque. I don’t mind that it uses the sort of simple artwork you’d find in an indie comic book or a JRPG with a meager budget. Frankly, I don’t even mind that the writing is mediocre, on par with your garden-variety young adult fiction. “Nice wheels,” exclaims one of the survivors when she sees a salvaged scout rover roll up. Just that morning, she lived through a crash that killed hundreds of her spaceship’s crew and stranded the survivors on a barren planet without a breathable atmosphere with nothing but the air in their EVA suits. Odds are she’ll be dead before the night is over. So, nice wheels. Not “sweet ride”, or “bitchin’ buggy”, or “let’s live our lives a quarter mile at a time”? Nice wheels. Like I said, no worse than your usual young adult fiction or Mass Effect game. You can romance her later if you want. Just pick the “flirt” option.
I don’t mind these things because The Next World tells a story that makes me wonder what’s going to happen next. It opens with the desperate survivors of a crash milling about on the sand of a strange land, struggling with who to put in charge, how to survive, what this place is, and how they got there. To The Next World’s credit, the answers aren’t Jack, by finding a bunker, limbo, and something something Dharma Initiative something EMP blast something. For all its similarities to a certain TV show, this story has a sense of focus, and a plot that methodically unfolds, one beat at a time, with a clear sense of direction. These are no randomly spun out episodes. This isn’t an emergent narrative. This is a game that’s far too brittle for the King of Dragon Pass comparisons I’ve seen. What happens next is something the writers have wanted to tell me all along. This is, after all, a visual novel.
After the jump, then why haven’t I found out what happens next?Continue reading →
You might not know Christopher Tin’s name. But I’ll bet you dollars to donuts you know Baba Yetu, an original piece of music he wrote for Civilization IV. The Lord’s Prayer translated into Swahili and set to a joyous African tribal beat says everything you need to know about civilization. The game and the actual thing.
But Tin was just getting warmed up. Take a moment to listen to Red Planet Nocturne, which he wrote for Offworld Trading Company. It begins with a raindrop patter that reminds me of the soundtrack by David Wingo for a movie called Take Shelter. But it then goes to its own places. What an evocative and poignant piece of music. Although I don’t quite feel how it connects to the game yet — I’ve been playing a music-less Offworld Trading Company for so long now — it assures I won’t be moving down the slider for music on the audio tab. On the contrary, I’m running the game in the background right now to hear the rest of Tin’s music. Would it be too hasty to put it alongside other iconic and haunting sci-fi soundtracks? Clint Mansell for Moon, John Murphy for Sunshine, Vangelis for Blade Runner, Hans Zimmer for Interstellar, Steven Price for Gravity, and Christopher Tin for Offworld Trading Company. Yeah, that list looks about right.
You can read Tin’s comments about the soundtrack here. Offworld Trading Company will be released on Thursday.
You don’t have to take my word for it that Garden Warfare 2 is the best thing to happen to shooters since Epic let us play Unreal with bots instead of other people. Now you can find out for yourself for the price of whatever bandwidth is takes to download a 20GB install. From EA’s announcement:
To get started for free now, download the game from Xbox Marketplace, PlayStation Store, or Origin.com. Players who wish to continue the epic battle after their trial can purchase the full game and keep all of their progress, unlocks, and achievements.
It’s a pretty insidious trick. They’re confident — and I’m inclined to agree — that once you invest ten hours in this thing and see what it has to offer, you’ll be willing to pay the $60 (!) for hours eleven plus.
This is something Electronic Arts obviously won’t do when a game is brand new. I suspect they’re watching the data closely for a carefully calculated point where the sales taper off. That’s when they swoop in with the ol’ “first taste is free” trick. Could this be a reaction to Steam’s refund policy, which many folks interpret as a tacit try-before-you-buy offer? Whatever the case, it’s encouraging to see consumer-friendly trends like this taking hold.
Enjoy a rare three-way split of opinions on this week’s movie. At the 58-minute mark, we regret to inform you that we’re going to have to do a 3X3 about people being fired. And be sure to check out sinnck’s movie posters.
Someone has gotten up to make a phone call real quick. Someone else is looking up a rule. Do you need to roll equal to or greater than? He could have sworn it was on this page, but he’s not seeing it. The two guys across the table are talking about the Star Wars movie again. I can’t believe they don’t know what a luggabeast is called, so I get into the conversation. When the guy making the phone call comes back to take his turn, he just sits there and stares at his cards. Why isn’t he taking his turn? I eventually realize that they’re looking at me expectantly.
“Oh, is it my turn?”
A cardinal sin in a boardgame is wasting my time. A $200 game that isn’t very good is one thing. But a game that recreates what I do in line at the supermarket, in my dentist’s office, and when the 405 is jammed up? Indefensible. Games should not be about waiting. Ideally, a game will always keep everyone involved. One of my favorite solutions to the “oh is it my turn?” problem is Booty.
Written, directed, and starring the same person? Rarely a good sign. Sure, there are exceptions. But this is almost always a red flag. At least Creative Control’s stoatfur sleek black-and-white aesthetic and mostly unridiculous futuristic computer interfaces are eye candy for director/writer/leading man Benjamin Dickinson’s vanity project.
But a funny thing happens while you’re enjoying the tastefully restrained effects work. Dickinson might be admiring himself in the mirror, but he doesn’t expect us to join him. He’s not patting himself on the back. On the contrary, he’s spearheading a cast of flawed unlikable characters. In addition to his own weaselly ad executive, there are his wife, his best friend, and his mistress. They’re played by Nora Zehetner, the femme fatale from Brick shedding any sign of her shrewdness from that movie; a delightfully miscast Dan Gill wallowing in his role; and the flickering almond-eyed faux flawlessness of Alexia Rasmussen.
Although it’s a character drama, Creative Control is squarely sci-fi. It shares similarities with Spike Jonze’s Her, which was beautiful and heartfelt, but entirely hypothetical. We can only relate elliptically to someone falling in love with his operating system. Her is a parable about being in love with an ideal or a fantasy, and Creative Control wants to tell that same story. But whereas Her was perhaps a celebration of that love and its very real power, Creative Control has a more cynical take. Dickinson is no dreamer like Jonze. To him, technology makes it easier for us to be weak.
The more direct comparison for Creative Control is Jesse Armstrong’s brilliant The Entire History of You from the BBC anthology, Black Mirror. Creative Control doesn’t hit as hard as The Entire History of You. It’s not a punch to the gut. It doesn’t damn us quite so strongly as Armstrong’s vision of the future where we’re all doomed by our foibles, our insecurities, our weaknesses. Creative Control is a playful sock on the arm. But they’re both stories about about how the more things change, the more people are still assholes.
Ever since an alleged development map for Read Dead Redemption was posted and then hastily pulled from gaming forum NeoGAF, fans of the series — which is just another way to say “people who play videogames” — have been atwitter with excitement about the possibility of a sequel in development at Rockstar. The map was a bit blurry, but it seems the lower left corner overlaps with the upper right corner of the original map, a place called West Elizabeth. The implication is that a sequel will implore us to go northeast, young man.
One of the members of our forum (you can call him Mr. Tibbs) has peered at the leaked map, deciphered the text as best as he can, peered some more, and put some hard work and borderline obsessive fandom into assembling a map brimming with detail, neatly fitting the leaked map alongside the previous game’s map. So for a lovingly intricate overview of the world of the two most recent Red Dead games, have a look at Mr. Tibbs spectacular cartography after the jump.
This week a bunch of dudes who really know videogames talk about a movie that seems to really know videogames. At the 1:08-mark, we break out into a discussion of broken glass in movies. And don’t miss the latest addition to listener sinnick’s movie poster gallery.
Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin was a slow burn about the conflict between ruthless people and people who haven’t yet learned to be ruthless, but they’re getting there. His latest movie, Green Room, is the same thing, but without the slow. Green Room gets right to the burn and sustains it with the intensity of white phosphorous. This might sting a little. As Saulnier lets loose with bullets, fangs, and blades, Green Room isn’t shy about painting the walls red. Startlingly good effects remind us of the unpleasant fact that we’re all just flesh.
The basic story isn’t unusual. Events A, then B, then C roll out almost like clockwork (although the strangely poignant Y followed by the absurd Z are sure signs of Saulnier’s talent). You’ve seen this set-up before. What you haven’t seen is these people rolling out these events in this place. Saulnier has described Green Room as punk war horror, which has a “you got peanut butter in my chocolate” feel. It’s a bit like Bone Tomahawk, another recent horror hybrid. And like Bone Tomahawk, it’s not afraid to unleash brutality on characters you’ve come to care about.
These character are a group of likable young slackers. Yeah, they’re in a punk band, but don’t hold that against them. They seem like the kind of kids who are smart and well-intentioned enough to eventually grow out of it. You already know Anton Yelchin from Star Trek and Alia Shawkat from Arrested Development. Imogen Poots might be hard to recognize under that bad haircut. You’ll meet an actor named Joe Cole, who I’d seen trapped underwater with Danny Huston and Matthew Goode in a movie called Pressure. I hope to see more of Cole. A handful of really good character actors — including Macon Blair from Blue Ruin — fill in the blanks admirably. Patrick Stewart makes a chillingly effective ringleader presiding over the hardcore grand guignol.
Saulnier’s concept of what evil lurks in Oregon’s forests is like a nightmare version of Kelly Reichardt’s movies, which suggest Oregon as place populated by conflicted but mostly decent people, a little too smart for their own good. You don’t expect Green Room to happen in this laid back wet chill. You’d expect it in the open desert where the heat drives people mad or in remote jungles far from the taming influence of civilization. This must be what it was like when people went to theaters in 1972 to see an adventure movie about some guys going canoeing for a weekend. Little did they know they were about to watch Deliverance.
Green Room is currently in limited release. It opens wide on April 29.
