Tom Chick and Jason McMaster on: Disney Infinity, Arkham Knight, Metal Gear Solid V, D-Day at Peleliu (yes, D-Day at Peleliu is a thing), Blood Bowl 2, and Rebel Galaxy.
Next week: Introversion and Prison Architect
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For a game I don’t like, I sure do play Disney Infinity a lot. Most of my playtime is a quixotic attempt to find something compelling, effective, or even just plain ol’ fun in this heap of mismatched stuff. There’s certainly a lot in here. Surely some of it must be good. So here’s me tilting at the windmills of bad game design with a bowl on my head and a Han Solo toy on my Disney Infinity base.
After the jump, I don’t really have a bowl on my head. That was an obscure Don Quixote reference. Continue reading →
So this is what Guillermo del Toro decides to do after his giant robot movie? At the 1:14 mark, we exhume our favorite corpses for this week’s 3×3.
Next week: The Last Witch Hunter
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Prison Architect is the game I never knew I wanted. Some of the best games are games I never knew I wanted until I played them. And then I thought, “Of course! This is a game I should have been playing all along, but I just didn’t know it.” That’s pretty much what happens within the first hour of booting up Prison Architect. You’re all, like, oh yeah, a game about running a prison is a fantastic idea. It’s a feeling that, as far as I can tell, doesn’t go away.
After the jump, doing serious time. Continue reading →
A friend of mine called Run, Fight, or Die “trashy”. Since I like the game, my initial reaction was to disagree. But, really, he wasn’t wrong. There’s a very B-movie vibe to the game, from the lurid cartoony blood-splattered art style to the heap of sickly grey miniatures to the overbright plastic dice to the sometimes loosey-goosey rules. But is all that such a bad thing for a quick game about zombies? Shouldn’t it be a little trashy? A little grindhouse? And is that necessarily a contradiction to Run, Fight, or Die also being a smart design, focused on pacing, interactivity, and variety?
After the jump, trashy doesn’t have to mean dumb. Continue reading →
How can three people who read the book The Martian see the movie The Martian and have such different conclusions about how it turned out? Find out on this week’s podcast, which is interrupted at the 1:44 mark for a 3×3 about coitus interruptus.
Next week: Crimson Peak
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A lot of the conversation about Victoria, a putative thriller that won’t win any awards for editing, will be about its astonishing technical wizardry. Fair enough. What a bravura piece of filmmaking from newcomer Sebastian Schipper. It’s exhausting to watch for many reasons, including the constant “how did they do that?” But what Victoria does even better than its gimmick is reveal unlikely characters in a story about falling in love.
The more you learn about these characters, who are one thing when you meet them and something else once you get to know them, the more Victoria pulls at you. The meandering “who are these people?” early moments eventually coalesce into a powerfully focused intimacy (the pattern is not unlike Irreversible, except without Gasper Noe’s aggressive in-your-face shock treatment). Love here is a mutually agreed upon dance with the devil, equal parts ominous and intoxicating, unable to break free of the hold of any given moment. Perhaps that’s the point of Victoria’s gimmick: to capture the heady immediacy of falling in love.
As bravura as the filmmaking are the performances from Laia Costa and Frederick Lau. She’s an Audrey Hepburn by way of Denise Richards, achingly frail and expressive. He’s, well, the sort of actor you would never find in a Hollywood production. His broad slab of face would suggest toughness if it weren’t for the kind eyes. A young Elias Koteas? That’s not much of a type. They’re not a typical couple. They don’t even speak the same language. Their relationship is characterized by verbal miscues and improvisational patter, by straying in and out of the frame, by not quite understanding how bad their choices are, by putting off the responsible business of just going home to go to bed. With such a powerful emotional connection driving the action, Victoria is far more exciting than a gimmick-based thriller.
The reason to play Age of Decadence is singular: the writing. Singular in the sense that it’s very good, singular in the sense that it’s unique among fantasy RPGs, and singular in the sense that it’s pretty much the sole reason to play.
After the jump, no ring to bind them all. Continue reading →
Why is Ultima Underworld, a game from 1992, still relevant? Join me for a conversation with Underworld Ascendant developers Paul Neurath and Joe Fielder.
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The Hallow opens in a gorgeous Irish forest choked with moss. An English botanist has come here to study the trees on behalf of the government. He has brought his family and a light undercurrent of political tension and environmental controversy. The movie soon segues from green to black, as the botanist and his wife confront a homeowner’s nightmare: five hundred years of Irish sludge. Shortly thereafter it really gets underway. There is no faffing about with pointless questions like “Is there something out there?”, “Do the authorities believe us?”, and “Would you like a little exposition with your horror?” The Hallow has places to take you in this Irish forest. Put a pin in the light undercurrent of political tension and environment controversy. The Hallow will get back to that. Not until the credits are rolling and not in any meaningful sense, but it will get back to that.
When you ask the average American what horror movies most evoke Irish folklore, they’ll probably say Leprechaun, Leprechaun 2, Leprechaun 3, and Leprechaun in the Hood. They might not know that Ireland has a rich tradition of stolen children, malevolent woodland folk, and faeries that look and act nothing like Tinkerbell. The Hallow is at its strongest when it’s rooted in this folklore. You can feel it falter when it introduces a little science into its supernatural. I guess that’s what happens when your lead character is a botanist (played by Joseph Mawle, who was unforgettable as the devil in the weird 2009 deal-with-the-devil movie Heartless).
But The Hallow eventually goes full-on conventional by committing to latex, obvious music, cheap jump scares, slasher nonsense, lots of chasing around in the woods, and two (2!) instances of eye horror. Just before the credits roll, a jump scare will lunge right at the camera. You saw that coming, right? Because you could tell freshman director Corin Hardy lost his way about a half hour ago. For a better movie about this folklore, see The Daisy Chain with Samantha Morton. And for an American perspective on things that go wrong when civilization comes into ancient forests, I cannot recommend strongly enough Laird Barron’s superlative short story, The Men from Porlock.
The Hallow is currently exclusive to DirectTV. It will be available for VOD next month.
You have to get down from the top of Skyhill, a 100-story skyscraper. Why 100 stories? Because no self-respecting skyscraper would come in under 100 floors. Skyhill is two floors fewer than the Empire State Building. Ten floors fewer than the Twin Towers. 63 floors fewer than the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. 100 is also a nice round number for a rogue-like. You start on the hundredth floor and have to go down through 99 more, each comprised of a simple cutaway view of three rooms with highlighted hotspots where loot might be found by simply clicking on the screen. Let’s get started. Oh, but first, you’ll want to click the fast-forward arrows at the top of the screen. There’s no reason to draw out the walking animations for 99 sets of stairs; the combat is going to draw out the animation plenty anyway.
After the jump, the walk. Continue reading →
We’re all pretty floored by Denis Villeneuve’s stylish, moody, and provocative thriller, which is why we talk about it until the 1:29 mark, at which point imagine a title card pops up that says “This Week’s 3×3”.
Next week: The Martian
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You’ll know in the first ten minutes if Blunt Force Trauma is for you. You must accept an alternate reality in which people don bulletproof vests and quick draw to try to knock each other backwards with the impact of the bullets. They do it as an underground sport. There isn’t even a name for it. But it’s totally a thing. The contestants, each with his prized pistol, travel the world looking for matches, eyeing each other suspiciously as they wait in bars and parking lots. Fight clubs with bullets instead of punches.
This is why Ryan Kwanten and Freida Pinto, both supercrazyhot, tool around picturesque Columbia in a bright red muscle car. Pinto pulls her hair back to get ready to shoot, but it’s mostly to show us the tattoo of something on her neck. What is it? I think a scorpion or something. It doesn’t matter. It’s a tattoo on her neck. She also smokes a lot of cigarettes. Her name is Colt. It’s all in the service of selling her as a tough gunfighter chick. Sure, I’ll buy. Kwanten broods prettily a lot. He has rubberbands around the grip of his pistol to show it’s worn, which means he’s travelled long and far. Yet he still has time to sculpt those abs. Implausible? Too late. You’ve already accepted that the sport/gunfight contest is actually a thing. Might as well just go with it.
Director Ken Sanzel takes it all very seriously. He uses entire songs by an indie folk rock group called Kid Dakota. And believe it or not, it all works. By the time the movie arrives at Mickey Rourke, all botoxed and looking bored out of his skull, the dialogue is as silly as Rourke’s oddly colorful boots. But by this time, I hope you’ve learned to trust Sanzel. He knows what he’s doing.
Blunt Force Trauma is available on VOD. Support Qt3 and watch it on Amazon.com.
I hate Doodle God for a couple of reasons. First and foremost is that I’m playing it on the iPad, where it’s festooned with ad pop-ups, rating nags, ingame purchases to circumvent the gameplay, and buttons that look like they’ll take me to some cool feature, only to shunt me into the App Store to buy some other game by developer Joybits. And this is the full paid version. Like so many (all?) other iOS games, Doodle God is a business model first, a game second.
After the jump, let me tell you the second reason I hate Doodle God. Continue reading →
I can’t quite tell if The Visit knows how ridiculous it is. M. Night Shyamalan’s latest movie, which doesn’t tap into our fear of old people so much as our vague disgust toward them, is about kids visiting their grandparents. It may be funny, but it’s not played for laughs. The real question is whether The Visit is in on the joke.
It’s disappointing that Shyamalan doesn’t show any sign of the guy who directed the stylish and effective scenes in Signs, such as the birthday party video, the dark basement, or the knife reflection under the door. At least he doesn’t show any signs of the guy who let Signs get knocked over by a wildly swinging baseball bat or the utterly tone deaf day laborer who directed After Earth. Time was he showed a lot of promise as a filmmaker in search of a script that wasn’t ridiculous. But with The Visit, rather than trusting the inherent creepiness or latent absurdity of his own script, he leans on some of the worst tropes of contemporary bad horror: found footage, jump scares, cell phones that don’t work, long stretches of filler featuring annoying young actors, gross-outs worthy of the Farrelly brothers.
What ultimately salvages The Visit is something too few horror movies achieve: a satisfying resolution. Say what you will about The Visit, at least all that weirdness is adequately explained in the end.
