Combat in Renowned Explorers, an exploration game with a tactical combat core, isn’t called combat. It’s called “encounters”. Because you don’t always use combat. Sometimes you use friendliness or deviousness. Combat is just one of the three types of attacks.
Are you falling for this? I sure wasn’t. I know when something is just the same thing but with a different name. A “combat” system in which aggression trumps friendliness, which trumps deviousness, which trumps aggression? How is that different from a combat system in which infantry trumps cavalry, which trumps archers, which trump infantry? Nice try, Renowned Explorers. This isn’t my first time around the block. You just changed the names of stuff.
After the jump, Renowned Explorers trumps me. Continue reading →
Director Craig Zobel’s previous movie, Compliance, was based on actual events in which a prank caller persuaded employees at a fast food restaurant to strip search and rape a young girl. Zobel’s take on the events wasn’t lurid. Instead, he told a story about human weakness that focused not on the victim, but on the woman who let it happen, who was equal parts perpetrator and victim. So Zobel’s take on Z for Zachariah is no surprise. The book it’s adapted from is a post-apocalyptic power play between a teenage girl and a domineering scientist for control of an unspoiled valley in a radioactive wasteland. But this movie isn’t that.
Zobel and screenwriter Nissar Modi propose a different kind of relationship between an awkward young girl and the scientist who stumbles across her farm. They propose a love story. And, like Compliance, it is ultimately about human weakness. But since we’re in a post-apocalypse, the stakes for human weakness are so much higher. When the last man on Earth does something cruel or petty, so goes all of mankind. It’s heartbreaking to see Chiwetel Ejiofor’s coolly competent character in a controlled burn from fatherly engineer/savior of humanity to resentful drunk to jealous boyfriend to his hands clasped in prayer, penance, or entreaty in the final scene. The actor guides his character along its arc with astonishing conviction. In one scene, he whispers. He probably doesn’t need to. But he does. It’s a startling but effective choice for how it carries power, urgency, need, frustration. What a fantastic actor. Can we just give him an Oscar, already? It’s only a matter of time.
And while we’re at it, let’s go ahead and confirm what we suspected after Margot Robbie held her own opposite Leonardo DiCaprio’s flashy excess in Wolf of Wall Street: she is no mere Aussie ingenue. In Z for Zachariah, she positively glows as an awkward girl unaware how beautiful she is. Her earth-toned hair is wispy, her skin is lightly brushed with acne and sunburn, she claps an unflattering baseball cap on top of her head, and she affects a husky West Virginia twang. But like the valley she cultivates, she is radiant with life and simple beauty. Her scenes here are sexier than anything Wolf of Wall Street accomplished with a short pink dress. Those were the 90s. This is womankind.
And since there are no zombies to serve as a convenient metaphor, Z for Zachariah can’t play out like the usual power fantasy in which you get to shoot guns out the window of your cherry red Shelby GT500 Mustang on the weed-kissed streets of Manhattan. Zobel’s post-apocalypse is the battleground for a subdued power play between religion and science, love and happiness, youth and wisdom, survival and morality, progress and remembrance. It deftly touches these themes without ponderously unpacking them and holding them up to the camera. They are fleeting subtext. They are the answer to how a church organ ends up in a dark workshop at the back of a barn. Z for Zachariah is a quietly devastating portrait of the apocalypse, not because of what we’ve lost, but because of what we still are.
Support Qt3 and watch Z for Zachariah at Amazon.com.
I go to all the trouble of manufacturing antibiotics and then patenting them to ensure I’m the only one who can meet the demand, which other companies were reducing by saturating the market with their own antibiotics. And then what do my competitors at Expedite Medicine and Medicorp do? Both of them release the very same drug as a cream. Which means they can continue to flagrantly violate my right to exclusively exploit infection. They’re still saturating the antibiotic market and all that time and money I spent on a patent is for naught. How is that fair? How is it a different product if it’s the same stuff but as a cream instead of a pill? Where’s legislation when a corporation like Chick Feelgood Drugs needs it? Whose idea was the free market nonsense, which was profitable for me until it wasn’t?
After the jump, welcome to the world of big pharma and Big Pharma, a videogame about big pharma. Continue reading →
This week we see — and don’t hate! — the latest Hitman movie. At the 1:04 mark, we petition the podcast to change the topic to a discussion of characters who change their names.
Next week: Ricki and the Flash
Podcast (movies): Play in new window | Download
Subscribe:
When Eli Roth makes horror movies about foreigners, he suggests they will kidnap, torture, and eat you. Which is scary and all, but why invent scary things that happen in foreign countries when plenty of scary stuff actually happens? That’s what brothers John and Drew Dowdle have done with No Escape. The Dowdles cut their teeth on a creepy mockumentary called Poughkeepsie Tapes and then went on to do far more with the [REC] movies than the guys who actually made the [REC] movies. Their English-languge remake, Quarantine, and especially the clever follow-up, Quarantine 2: Terminal, are a marked contrast to [REC]’s confused slide into cheap silliness and irrelevance.
The first part of No Escape is promising as a horror movie, despite (because of?) the presence of two little girls. The moment you realize the protagonists have young daughters, you figure No Escape is going to pull its punches. You just can’t have kids in horror movies these days. Was Guillermo del Toro the last guy to dare to have a horror movie in which the monsters killed a child when one of the giant cockroaches in Mimic blindsided a street urchin? But No Escape flirts with grim high stakes as it reveals the ruthlessness of its monster. Are the two little girls safe when so many people are being shot in the head, mowed down with AK-47s, and hacked to death by machetes?
The monster here is a violent coup in an unspecified Asian country (never mind the Thai writing on the signs and especially never mind that the capital is conveniently on the border with Vietnam, which seems like a terrible place for any country to have its capital). The conspicuously blonde Owen Wilson and his family are caught unawares as rebels take over the palace and then the streets and eventually the tourist hotels. It’s got a bit of zombie apocalypse flavor, with a touch of The Purge. Because tourists and relief workers are targets, it recalls the kidnappings and beheadings by Islamic extremists. But in a brief odd bit of moralizing, No Escape explains that the rebels have a legitimate grievance against the West. Do we maybe deserve this? Did we invite this monster? Did we indeed invent it? Just as a slasher kills teenagers who have sex and use drugs, is this monster killing people whose countries protect corporations and dole out bad loans? It’s a facile but fascinating twist, but it comes too late.
The Dowdles and/or the Weinsteins who financed their movie don’t have the courage of their convictions. No Escape pulls its punches. Just as it hits the lowest level of degradation — where your realize the monster won’t just kill you, but it will strip you of your dignity and your humanity — James Bond arrives to save the day. From here on out, No Escape will be a thriller in which this golden boy from Texas and his Mama Grizzly wife give these rebels the what-for because America. Just like The Impossible, another movie about how privileged visiting white people caught up in an irresistible force shouldn’t have to suffer like the poor brown people who live there, No Escape turns out to be the opposite of its title.
There can be a thin line between homage and pandering. Turbo Kid, which lands with a resounding thud on the wrong side of that line, is a reverse engineered attempt at 80s nostalgia. With its bright Reagan era palette, thinly veiled Nintendo Power Glove, and earnest post-apocalyptic cheese but soft-pedaled BMX bike aesthetic, it’s meant to recall movies like Megaforce, Metalstorm, Ice Pirates, and Spacehunter. If you can name the subtitles of any of those movies, Turbo Kid thinks it’s for you!
But reverse engineered nostalgia requires a deft touch that eludes this group of filmmakers, who have all the energy and know-how of a crowdsourced movie crew. Without that touch, you’re liable to end up being as bad as your source material, and all the more cringe-worthy for aping it. It takes a Robert Rodriguez to craft a Planet Terror. For some reason, Turbo Kid is chock full of tone-deaf splatter humor. I’ve seen my share of cheesy 80s post-apocalyptic movies shot in rock quarries. I don’t remember any of them being showered in blood and viscera. Turbo Kid eventually has to whip out an umbrella against it all.
Michael Ironsides, looking more like someone’s grandfather than Michael Ironsides, seems to have lost his appetite for chewing scenery, which results in a curiously laidback villain. He’ll get to you when he gets to you. The highlight of this weirdly cloying enterprise is the wide-eyed Laurence Leboeuf as the hero’s love interest slash sidekick. Leboeuf brings almost too much energy to every scene, playing her role like a souped-up Cheri Oteri crossed with a blissed out Jodie Foster. The movie can barely contain her.
Turbo Kid is available for video on demand.
Fran Bow has been committed to a mental hospital. It’s 1944. Her parents are dead. She misses her cat terribly. She’s suffering serious side effects from her medication. But at least she seems to be doing better than the other children in the hospital. Or is she? How reliable a narrator is Fran Bow?
I don’t want to say too much about Fran or her unfolding predicament, because the real value of this indie adventure game is its darkening mystery. But Fran stands out for being an Alice in Wonderland without the self-aware “oh, I’m so dark and edgy” of many latter-day Alices in their wonderlands (you’ll find an amusing Alice in Wonderland easter egg late in the game).
Although the main character is a ten-year-old girl, this is an adult game. If Fran Bow was a movie, it would be rated R for gratuitous gore and extreme images. It’s more Silent Hill than, say, Double Fine. The story doesn’t shy away from Fran being a girl either. One of the adult characters you meet will give you the inventory item you need if you “sit on his knee” or “give him a kiss”. These aren’t options, of course. Fran knows it’s skeevy and she’s having none of it. But it serves as a creepy reminder that a story about a ten-year-old girl can have different kinds of peril than a story about a ten-year-old boy. Let’s move on. The game certainly does.
After the jump, child’s play Continue reading →
Part of Trajan is a pretty cool “points salad”. You pick some bit of the board and take tiles or move pieces. Your Roman legions are conquering the Germanic barbarians or your workers are building a Roman something-or-other or you’re vying with other players in the Roman Senate or collecting gladiators for the Roman bread and circuses. Each of these things gets you points. It’s very stately and boardgamey and Roman. You feel like you’re wearing a toga.
But there’s a price to pay in Trajan, a classic — I would say “infamous” — boardgame by Stefan Feld. Before you sample from the points salad, you have to scooch some colored doo-dads around a series of bowls. It’s called a mancala. Mancalas are an ancient African tribal thing that uses dried beans and gourds. It’s not very Roman. Why is this the price of entry for taking my turn as a Roman dude doing Roman stuff? Why did Stefan Feld put this between me and the rest of Trajan?
The mancala all but consumes Trajan. It’s not my turn yet, but like everyone else playing the game, I have my head down studying the bowls. Let’s see, if I move the pink bean two bowls over, then next turn I can move four beans three bowls over which will let me, no, no, that’s not quite right because then I’ll jump the bowl with the two beans I need to later on do the thing I need to do. I mean, really, fuck these beans. Sorry for saying that. But it has to be said. Fuck these beans.
Elysium, which is twice the game Trajan will ever be, is much less complicated but every bit as bad.
After the jump, damnable columny Continue reading →
This is our Cop Car podcast! At the 1:34 mark, this week’s 3X3 throws a little light on our favorite shadows in movies.
Up next: Hitman: Agent 47
Podcast (movies): Play in new window | Download
Subscribe:
Canadian developer Longbow Games made quite a splash with Hegemony I, set in ancient Greece, and Hegemony II, set in ancient Rome. The schtick in their strategy games was a unified real-time world where you didn’t have to sit through a long loading screen every time you fought a battle. The battle just happened, right there on the strategic map, the same way actual battles happened in history. That’s realism.
Unfortunately, Longbow’s attempt to Kickstarter Hegemony III didn’t take. Was it because it was set in pre-ancient Greek times, before Alexander came along and made everything cool? Was it because Hegemony II was already plenty good and full of open-ended content? Was it because strategy game fans are too stingy to pony up a mere $30,000? Canadian dollars, sure. But, still, only thirty thousand of them. Whatever the case, Longbow was all, like, screw Kickstarter, we’re going to do it anyway and hope people just buy it when it comes out. That time is now. Hegemony III is out today on Steam for less than thirty bucks.
The thing about a Hegemony game is that the gameplay trumps the setting. I have no idea who these people are when I select one of the four factions in the basic campaign. The Veii, the Valathri, the Velch, and the Clevsin? I think I’ve fought all those guys in Star Control, but I couldn’t tell you anything about them. Hegemony III’s objective-based campaign will walk you through the ins-and-outs of being, say, a Veii in the olden days. But for everyone else, there’s the grand campaign, where you aren’t limited to just four factions. Let’s take a look.
After the jump, I came, I saw, I froze up because I didn’t know which one to take. Continue reading →
Just in case you were planning on playing any new games, Blizzard has released the 2.3.0 patch for Diablo III on the PC, Playstation 4, and Xbox One. It adds a new snow biome called the ruins of Sescheron. It is physically impossible to say the name of this new place without sounding like you’re drunk. The ruins of Sescheron (hic!) is where you’ll find the Horadric Cube, except now it’s called Kanai’s Cube because the name Horadric Cube was taken. Throw legendary items into this doo-dad to collect and catalog their powers for use in crafting recipes. Gotta catch ’em all! You can also more easily assemble sets of gear that were previously the domain of the random numbers generator’s cruel tyranny. Basically, your newfound Cube leads you down a whole new rabbit hole of crafting, guaranteed to keep you from playing other games for weeks to come.
Among the other changes, the Torment level now goes up to X. Adventure Mode, a.k.a. the Only Way To Play, has been adjusted to feed into the new crafting sink. Among the usual adjustments to the different classes, the largest chunk of text is devoted to Witch Doctor changes. Remember, kids, time spent in Diablo III not playing a Witch Doctor is time wasted!
Here’s the complete list of features.
Someone needs to attack a van carrying mental patients to a treatment facility. Don’t ask. So he brings along his mentally disabled younger brother, who hasn’t taken his meds that day. The younger brother freaks out and shoots everyone. Later, the younger brother will dry hump a kidnapped girl while she’s passed out and tied up. He’s in the running for the worst possible guy you could bring along on a heist.
The twist in Big Sky, a movie where the big reveal is that kids were allowed to play unattended near a swimming pool, is that one of the patients being transported is an agoraphobe. The only way she can travel is closed up in a big metal box, which means the heisters didn’t see her. Now she has to set out under the big sky because her mother, who was riding in the van, is slowly bleeding to death from a gunshot. So the agoraphobe wraps herself up in cloth, puts on some gloves, and sets out across the desert, taking tiny baby steps, one at a time, very slowly. Meanwhile, her mother bleeds out. Big Sky is not about people doing effective things.
The character who takes the biggest slice of Big Sky’s dumb character cake is an addled druggie who attacks the agoraphobe heroine out in the desert. She has pepper spray to defend herself. She brandishes it. He takes it from her. Then he pepper sprays himself in the face. This actually happens. He pepper sprays himself in the face. He holds down the nozzle and waves it around his face as if he were applying spray-on sunblock. This allows the heroine to escape. Imagine a bad guy disarming someone by taking her handgun and then just going ahead and shooting himself. There’s a term for this in drama: deus ex moron.
These are the sort of characters who inhabit Big Sky, a thriller that goes to such ridiculous lengths to generate its supposed thrills that you’re still going “wait, what?” while it’s carrying on as if it just made sense.
Big Sky is currently available for video on demand. Support Qt3 by watching a guy pepper spray himself on Amazon.com.
There are three stages of Conflicks: Revolutionary Space Battles. The first is before you’ve even played, when you see the game’s intro, which you can watch here. The wacky combination of European history, but in space; the Industrial Revolution, but with chickens; and that awesome artwork means I want to play whatever this game is. The second stage is finding out what this game is. A real-time strategy game with…an Angry Birds interface? If there’s one thing crazier than that intro, it’s space combat based on flicking your ships around the screen without even the benefit of an iPad.
After the jump, you’re on your way to the third stage of Conflicks. Continue reading →
Better games than Cosmonautica have struggled with how to make commutes interesting. Flying across the reaches of empty space, which is pretty much what spaceships do, isn’t really a good thing to make a game about. Because what are you going to do when you’re not having a space battle? The same thing you do on a car trip? Listen to podcasts or books on tape? Chat with your buddy? Play “I Spy” with your kids? Zone out? Zone out is the answer provided by most games about flying through space.
Unfortunately, Cosmonautica doesn’t have a good answer, so zone out it is. Hit the fast forward button and wait. It didn’t seem like it was going to be that way when you first started Cosmonautica. You thought you would have a role to play when you first watched your crew scurry about in that precious cutaway view of your ship. Maybe you’d have to coordinate your crew the way you coordinate sims. But no such luck. They take care of themselves entirely. You’re just a spectator in a game where there’s nothing interesting to see. Just zone out until you get to the next space station.
After the jump, we’re still not there yet. Continue reading →
The latest pick for the Quarter to Three Classic Game Club, chosen by WarpRattler, is Monolith’s cult classic TRON 2.0. Developer Monolith was at the top of their game when they released it in 2003. This was the Monolith that gave us No One Lives Forever, putting that same level of world-building, charm, and personality into the TRON universe.
WarpRattler explains why he picked it:
my dad found a copy at TJ Max (???) on clearance and bought it for me, but it wouldn’t work on my computer. I would’ve been…fourteen or fifteen at the time, I think? The game had been out for at least a couple of years. I later ended up giving it away to a friend without ever getting to play it, and my current copy came from a thrift store earlier this year.
Oddly enough, I did play the Gameboy Advance spinoff when I was younger. From what I’ve heard, it turns out some of the promo materials I got for TRON 2.0 from Comic-Con waaaaaaaay back when I went in, I think, 2003 ended up involving concepts that weren’t in the final Monolith game, but did end up in the GBA game.
TRON 2.0 is available for $9.99 on Steam. You’ll want to download the Killer App mod, which requires the unofficial 1.042 patch, and works on either the Steam or retail versions. The mod combines a couple of popular visual mods, adds in content (all for multiplayer, I think), and visual upgrades from the Xbox port, and offers widescreen support and a few other tweaks.
If you want to play TRON 2.0 and participate in the conversation, join the discussion thread here. Click here to see the earlier picks for the Qt3 Classic Game Club.
