Zen Studios’ latest pinball tables have been mostly bright colorful affairs full of fluttering cheerfulness, swashbuckling, derring-do, adventure, and other qualities befitting a company enjoying lots of success with Disney properties like Star Wars and Marvel. I shouldn’t complain given the embarrassment of riches we’ve enjoyed, but even a set of Force Awakened tables couldn’t hold my interest for long. Given that Force Awakened is itself an homage to original Star Wars, the Force Awakened tables aren’t that far removed from what we’ve already got. If I’m going to pull a plunger and Star Wars it, I’d just as soon work on my scores for the Empire Strikes Back, Starfighter Assault, or Boba Fett tables.
But now Zen is working with a whole new studio and a whole new tone. Aliens vs Pinball — cute title, that — will include three tables. From the announcement:
* Join Ellen Ripley as she confronts her nightmares and help the Colonial Marines rid LV-426 of its Alien infestation in Aliens Pinball
* Watch out for the merciless Alien stalking you on the Alien: Isolation pinball table
* Defeat Xenomorphs and rise in Yautja society on the Alien vs. Predator table
Considering what a fantastic job Creative Assembly did with Alien: Isolation in every area but gameplay, I’m even looking forward to that table. You can get a good long look at the Aliens Pinball table in this trailer. More importantly, you can listen to it. Those aren’t voice actors trying to sound like characters from the movie. Those are actual lines from the actual actors from the actual movie.
Aliens vs Pinball will be available on April 26th, which is Alien Day, of course. You knew that, right? Alien Day? Because April 26th is 4/26. 426, you know. As in LV-426. Don’t worry, I had to look that up myself. It will be released on all non-Nintendo platforms. Until Zen lets me rebind the flippers to anything other than the Playstation controller’s mushy shoulder buttons, you’ll find my high scores on the Vita.
Just because we’re Judy Hopps fans doesn’t necessarily mean we’re Zootopia fans. At the 1:12-mark, we hunker down for this week’s 3×3 about sieges in movies. And don’t miss our friend sinnick’s movie poster.
Given the strength of Matt Manfredi and Phil Hay’s script for The Invitation, I hesitate to mention their previous credits. Suffice it to say they wrote Karyn Kusama’s Aeon Flux adaptation, a flawed but overlooked gem of characterization, stylish action tableaus, and sci-fi gobbledygook. Kusama’s movie credits have mostly been genre stories with strong female characters, from Girlfight to Aeon Flux to Jennifer’s Body, also a flawed gem that has the distinction of being Diablo Cody’s least Diablo Cody script.
You might think Kusama is outside her comfort zone with The Invitation, in which an ensemble cast has a dialogue-heavy dinner party. Think The Man from Earth or Coherence, but with a director who really knows what she’s doing. Would I scare you off if I said The Invitation could easily be a play? What if I stipulated that it would be a really good play?
Although Kusama doesn’t shoot it like a play (you can’t pan across a sumptuous feast on a dinner table if the audience is looking up at a stage), she films her actors with the intimacy of someone directing a play. She focuses intensely on lead actor Logan Marshall-Green, a Tom Hardy doppelganger who effortlessly manages Hardy’s bottled up intensity. She works wonders playing against Michiel Huisman’s easy charm, not so evident in Game of Thrones, but used to great effect opposite Blake Lively’s lively performance in Age of Adeline. And oh, how she rolls out the great John Carroll Lynch, whose notable credits are too numerous to list, so I’ll just mention Frances McDormand’s husband in Fargo and Lennie James’ mentor in that one episode of Walking Dead.
Kusama also demonstrates a Polanski-esque talent for blurring the line between the mundane and the menacing. She wrings from simple social cues a sense of something slightly off. She catches you off guard and then reassures you that you just imagined it. “Yeah, they’re a little weird,” says one of the characters, “but this is LA. They’re harmless.” The Invitation smiles coyly as it slithers along the line between social paranoia and malice. Are you watching a psychological thriller? An indie drama? A horror movie?
Whatever you call it, The Invitation is partly about the anxiety of catching up with friends who have changed over the years. Who are these people you once knew so well? What have they become? What have you become? It’s also about the impossibility of coming to terms with a malevolent universe. Anyone who can, anyone who does, anyone who manages Tammy Blanchard’s sad desperate smile, must be mad. Something must be wrong with those people. Right? Or is something wrong with you? When The Invitation eventually decides, it sure does decide.
The Invitation is currently in theatrical release and available for VOD. Support Qt3 and watch it on Amazon.com.
This shouldn’t bother me, but it does because there’s little else to keep me interested in Pandemic, a no-budget, half-assed, found-footage, zombie apocalypse hack job. The characters wear cameras mounted on their hazmat suits. The lens is situated above the clear face plate, about four inches over their heads. Pandemic is shot almost exclusively from the perspective of these cameras (occasional iPhone and security camera footage is edited in because why not?). Yet whenever a character looks at another character, the other character looks directly into the lens. Not at the person’s face, which would be well below the lens. But directly into the lens because it didn’t occur to the people making Pandemic that where an actor looks is an important part of making a movie. Hey, Pandemic filmmakers, it’s called an eyeline. Look into it.
While you’re looking into it, also look into casting (poor Alfie “Theon Greyjoy” Allen, whose tough but heroic convict belongs in a better movie), screenwriting (zombie apocalypses don’t get to magically ignore plausibility), CG (sticking a couple of half-hearted smoke effect overlays onto shots of Los Angeles doesn’t quite cut it), and especially production design. Pandemic features a garden-variety bright yellow school bus when the script obviously intends some sort of Damnation Alley battlewagon driven by an elite team of soldiers and scientists into a post-apocalyptic zombie infested city. It’s hilarious that this school bus has lightly frosted glass windows so the production design team doesn’t have to dress anything in post-apocalypse detritus during the driving scenes, which comprise about half of the movie’s running time. It’s even more hilarious when one of the characters insists he’s indispensable because he’s the only one “trained” to drive the vehicle. I spent many years riding these buses to and from school, and I well remember the kinds of people who were “trained” to drive these vehicles. I wouldn’t dream of having one of them deliver an elite team of soldiers and scientists into a zombie apocalypse.
Support Qt3 and watch Pandemic on Amazon.com. Actually, don’t. Instead, use the link to find something else worth watching. You’d have a hard time doing worse than Pandemic.
Thanks to all the trash and trash business model clogging up my iPad, I’m so disenchanted with the iOS as a gaming platform that I can hardly recall a time when I used to see a cool little PC game and think “I wish that was on the iPad”. But occasionally, a vague memory of that sentiment burbles up. For example, Axes and Acres would be a perfect fit for dinking around on my iPad in the waiting room of the dentist’s office when I can’t play it on my PC (stay tuned for more on that videogame boardgame, which was just released today).
But then someone actually goes and ports his cool little PC game to the iOS. Now I have to remind myself what I did with my iPad. Is it in the garage with my copy of that Tony Hawk skateboarding game? Underneath all my copies of Game Informer in the attic? In the spot reserved for the Oculus Rift I can’t be arsed to get yet? Nope, there it is next to my Friends VHS tapes! Do I still even have a cord to charge it?
I’m prepping my iPad for actual gaming again for when Scott Brodie releases the just announced updated version of Hero Generations.
[Hero Generations] ReGen was created because of the overwhelming demand we’ve received for a phone and tablet version of Hero Generations. But this isn’t just a port. We’re also taking a lot of the ideas and feedback we’ve received from fans of the original game, and integrating them into one kick-ass, definitive remake of HG.
From the screenshots, Hero Generations might look like your garden variety rogue-like. It is no such thing. You don’t level up a character so much as you level up the maps. Your heroes develop cities and beat back monsters over the course of multiple generations. One of the improvements Brodie intends is a large connected map rather than interconnected separate screens. Great idea. Hopefully it will make it easier to wrap your head around how the game progresses. A tricky part of the learning curve is figuring out that your dynasty has to strike out beyond the first map and, hopefully, not die out.
Here’s Brodie’s stream of an early build, which opens with a demonstration of how to flee a battle: “I’m going to run away from this guy because he is huge and we are young.” The non-iOS version of Heroes Generation is available on Steam. Some dude over there wrote this review:
This is not your father’s roguelike. It’s your grandfather’s roguelike. And his father’s before his. And his father’s before his.
Such a clever concept, so refreshingly different from the usual dungeon crawls. It reminds me of a line from Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead: “For all the points on the compass, there is only one direction. And time is its only measure.”
Remember when Syd Mead and Ridley Scott told us the future would be a drizzly nighttime dystopia with flashes of neon? Remember how we all agreed for several decades that, yep, that’s what it’s gonna be like, all right? The bright color and quaint tilt-shift aesthetic of Tokyo 42 has other ideas.
Would you rather read a review of Gremlins Inc, have some guy explain it to you in exhaustive detail, or spectate two hours of raw gameplay between a lord of the underworld as played by Tom Chick and the manager of a city dump as played by Kelly Wand? If you picked that last one, enjoy the above video.
When making an action RPG, the most important task — important above all else! — is to get the moment-to-moment hack-and-slash right. It has to be gratifyingly chaotic, splashy but not too confusing. The camera can’t be zoomed out so far that you can’t appreciate your character and her gear, but neither can it be zoomed in so far that you can’t see monsters coming. It’s a difficult balancing act. No one does it better than Blizzard, which is hardly surprising given how much practice they’ve had.
If you can’t get this stuff right, there’s no reason to continue development. Just throw in the towel and make some free-to-play thing for the Apple Store about waiting for crops to grow. But if you get that stuff right, if you tune and tweak and cajole and code and flex videocards and wring every ounce of sweat from your animators and carefully calculate the line between too much and too little — if you do all that — then you’re half way there. Next comes the really hard part.
Unfortunately, you don’t get movies like The Witch very often. Which is why we spend so long talking about it. But we don’t sink into a discussion of sand until the 1:41 mark.
Be sure to check out listener sinnick’s movie posters here.
While taking a break from feeding his chickens in Stardew Valley, Jason McMaster discovers another MOBA. Tom Chick saves the world from zombies again, this time as Lara Croft. Then he initiates the Tachyon Project nearly a year too late and maybe on the wrong platform.
That will be your first reaction to Gremlins Inc, a videogame boardgame that’s looks awfully, well, busy. Busy would be the kind way to put it. Mess is more likely what you’ll think. It’s what I thought. What a chaotic tangle of tiny pictures and arrows! Is that some sort of artwork lurking behind it all? What is that back there? A gremlin warren? Is there a way to see text labels for all these icons? Or even just a legend?
I present you with the six most memorable minutes from my four hours of playtime in Dark Souls III. And while you’re watching, please subscribe to the Quarter to Three YouTube channel while we get it set up for an official launch.
So you don’t play boardgames? That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t listen to this podcast about boardgames. On the contrary! Guests Tony Carnevale and Bruce Geryk help Tom Chick get down to brass tacks. What’s the best way to get into boardgames? Which games? Which games should you avoid? We even teach you how to speak boardgame.
