Fifteen minute games that aren’t silly or overly simple for two players. Why is that such a rare category? It seems like an ideal way to showcase interesting gameplay concepts. My current favorite is Cold War: CIA vs KGB, which is a series of quick rounds of Blackjack But With Special Powers, situated inside a metagame of agent-based bluffing to win control of classic Cold War countries like Nicaragua, Cuba, and Vietnam. Hey, look, it’s Afghanistan! The more things change…
Rise of Cthulhu, a fifteen minute game that isn’t silly or overly simple for two players, isn’t quite as hearty as Cold War. It’s certainly not as polished (Cold War has been reprinted by Fantasy Flight, and this year they even published a Star Wars version called Star Wars: Empire vs. Rebellion). But it does a great job showcasing an interesting gameplay concept. Namely, the orderly arrangement of sets of cards, with just enough chaos shuffled in the mix to earn its Lovecraftian theme.
After the jump, madness, I tell you! Continue reading →
20 years ago, Russian director Sergei Bodrov’s Prisoners of the Mountain was nominated for a foreign language Academy Award. That should have been his cue to jump into the sarlacc throat of Hollywood. It didn’t happen. He’s spent the last decade doing internationally funded historical epics starring people who don’t make box office in America. Somewhere in there, he also directed Seventh Son, which was Legendary Pictures’ hope for their own Lord of the Rings. Hence the impressive talent assembled behind the scenes, including Bryan Singer cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel, who recently shot Drive for Nicolas Winding Refn; longtime Martin Scorsese production designer Dante Ferretti, whose other credits include The Name of the Rose, Cold Mountain, and Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd; and John Dykstra for visual effects, whose career began with Silent Running and then a modest sci-fi project called Star Wars. But after Bodrov completed Seventh Son, it sat on the shelf for more than two years. This year, it was unceremoniously defenstrated into the dreaded January release window, alongside Jupiter Ascending. It flopped.
Did it deserve it? Who can say. Is it a bad movie? Maybe. Whatever. Do I count it among my guilty pleasures? You bet. This is no made-for-TV throwaway B-movie starring Adrian Paul alongside Syfy level production values. The top-notch behind-the-scenes talent comes through with a procession of imaginative set pieces. And in the lead, Jeff Bridges’ grumpy old wizard is a thing to behold. Imagine Gandalf crossed with Mr. Miyagi crossed with The Dude, but with the One True Beard and Mustache to bind them all. An astute Lebwoski-phile might figure his tavern intro as the bad-ass mage variant of “Hey, careful man, there’s a beverage here…”. He and Julianne Moore play their hero and villain roles as if they were exes at an uneasy standoff after a bitter divorce, but with crazy CG action sequences.
Although the two young leads are both duds, the rest of the cast is a lively group sparingly applied: not nearly enough Olivia Williams (Is there ever?), a brief but delightful Kit Harington appearance, and the distractingly hot Antje Traue (Man of Steel, Pandorum) bound up in a Ren Faire dress. To be fair, the costumes in Seventh Son are as aces as the rest of the production values. When Julianne Moore meets the ingenue, she takes the time to compliment her shoes.
The witch-hunters vs. witches world-building plays out a bit like The Witcher. In fact, this could be a Witcher movie, except for the fact that Bridges is such an unrepentant goofball. “It’s near impossible to battle demons when you have wet feet,” he grunts to his new apprentice, sending him off to get his shoes repaired, and reminding him to pick up flour, salt, grease, and bacon. “Fucking witches,” he will later mutter after briefly breaking down some backstory about the end of the world. He has a bitchin’ Bat Cave and the Witcher version of a Batmobile. It’s like he finished the main quest a long time ago and he’s at the level cap, so he can’t be bothered to do side quests anymore. This stuff is like DLC to him.
Seventh Son is available for VOD. Support Qt3 and watch it at Amazon.com.
Gathering Sky is an arthouse game/relaxation exercise/mildly interactive animated short about birds riding wind rails over painted landscapes and then something else. You can play parts of it with zero hands. Watch those birds flock. Chill to that cool cello. Here comes the the singer aah-aah’ing and ooh-ooh’ing, so you know you’re about to enter a new palette.
It was probably made at some indie jam games conference thing and then published on Steam so guys like me could wax poetic about it. But I’m not going to take the bait. Instead, I’m going to make a dopey list.
After the jump, ten things no one will ever say about Gathering Sky. Continue reading →
One of the surest ways to kill a franchise is to make a crappy sequel. Just ask The Matrix, The Godfather, Star Wars for the last ten years, the Batman games on the PC, and maybe To Kill a Mockingbird. I won’t know that last one until everyone else at my stupid library is done reading it and my turn comes up.
You can also ask Toy Soldiers, the ebullient tribute to shooting things that are running at you. We have a word for this. Tower defense. Unfortunately, it’s become a dirty word. Tower defense has become synonymous with throwaway indie games and free-to-play boondoggles squatting on wide swathes of wasteland in Steam and the Apple Store. But before it was a dirty word, Toy Soldiers was a best case example of tower defense because it was more than mere tower defense. It was lively action with a dollop of strategy. It was cute graphics nestled in dioramas adorned with miniature toys. It was brimming with personality, including the World War I flavor of the original game and the 80s Cold War action movie cheese of the later follow-ups. It was lots of replayability and wonderful splitscreen local multiplayer. It was varied weapons and crazy power-ups and daunting boss fights.
And now Toy Soldiers has a license to kill. Ubisoft has secured the Hasbro license, so Toy Stories: War Chest is a delirious mash-up of He-Man, GI Joe, Star Bright (is that even a real thing?), and Assassin’s Creed. The Kaiser is still around, too. And there’s a random fantasy dude with dragons and dice. What could possibly go wrong?
After the jump, what could possibly wrong. Continue reading →
Sometimes a screenshot catches your eye and makes you to want to know more about a game. That’s not the case with Fran Bow, a point-and-click adventure game out next week. I knew all I needed to know just from that image on the Steam store page. I don’t know what’s going on in that image, and frankly, I don’t care. I just want to play a game made by the folks who came up with that screenshot.
Actually, I lied. I kind of did want to know more. Just a little more. So I looked up the developer. They’re a pair of Swedes frustrated by the limitations of short film, video, and animation to tell the kinds of stories they want to tell. So they made a company, called it Killmonday Games, and took a photograph of themselves with one of them wearing a pig mask. All the words in those last two sentences make me want to play Fran Bow even more.
A Fran Bow demo is currently available on Steam. The full game is out on August 27th.
Djimon Hounsou is known for showing up as a henchman in far-ranging places such as Guardians of the Galaxy, Furious Seven, and Seventh Son. Which is too bad, because the Academy Award nominee from Amistad can still hold a lead role. Check him out in a Thai action movie called Elephant White. His colleague is unlikely heartthrob Norman Reedus, one of the few actors from The Walking Dead whose performance manages to transcend the low bar of TV sincerity barely attained by the rest of the cast. If you’ve got serious indie movie cred, you might know Reedus from Boondock Saints. I’ve never seen Boondock Saints.
In Air, a microbudget movie written and directed by one of Rockstar’s main writers and produced by the guy who did the Walking Dead comic books, they’re in charge of maintaining a mysterious underground bunker whose purpose is revealed as the movie progresses. Basically, they’re janitors awakened from suspended animation for an hour or so every few months. Why are they here? What are they doing? What’s going on in the wider world? Stop guessing, because you’re liable to get the right answers and accidentally ruin the movie for yourself.
But Air isn’t trying to be a mystery so much as it’s trying to be a relationship movie. However, the inherent problem with the genre of men-in-a-bunker/lifeboat/spaceship is that you can only do so much with men in a bunker, lifeboat, or spaceship. So it takes the sort of serious writing chops that went into Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, or Duncan Jones’ Moon. It takes the sort of serious writing chops that go into making, say, a good stage play. But with Air, we get a facile morality play that decides to escalate itself into a paranoid confrontation just in time for the climax. After this supposed burst of excitement provided by two men at each other’s throats, the whole enterprise just sort of, uh, stops breathing. Without better material, Hounsou and Reedus are left to thrash about without much motivation. A timer flops down numbers on the wall. That’s how long until the movie is over. Once it’s done, it turns out that Air is, ironically, a slight and curiously airless affair.
Air is available on video on demand. Watch it on Amazon.com to support Qt3.
If you’re waiting for Battlefront: Star Wars to get your Playstation 4, you’re in luck! Sony just announced a Star Wars bundle, which consists of Star Wars: Battlefront, four crappy Star Wars games* no one would ever actually buy, and the PS4 in that picture up there. While I get the theming on the console — that’s a Darth Vader portrait worthy of the side of a 1978 Dodge van — I’m not sure what’s up with the controller. Is that the official Star Wars color scheme? Did they have to write Star Wars over and over on the touchpad? Why is only the circle button red? It’s upstaging the X, as if it now has special importance. If I had that controller, I’d be tempted to press circle to fire.
The Star Wars PS4 bundle comes out on November 7th. Your move, Microsoft.
* Super Star Wars, Bounty Hunter, Racer Revenge, and Jedi Starfighter. If I’ve played any of these, I blocked it out of my memory.
This week we see a movie based on a TV show from 50 years ago starring no one who gets people to see movies. The bell rings at 1:13 mark for the 3×3 on our favorite student/teacher relationships in movies.
Next week: Cop Car
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My favorite thing about Extra Extra is that I can’t think of any other boardgames about running a newspaper in the olden days. That’s redundant, isn’t it? I mean, when else would you run a newspaper? There’s something so endearingly quaint about a worker placement game set in a time when people got their news from something made out of paper. It’s every bit as charming as Agricola’s pumpkin patches, piglet pens, and duck ponds. When a game is this cute, who cares if it’s just a worker placement game?
After the jump, read all about it! Continue reading →
Is Fantastic Four worthy of its bad press, bad box office, and bad reviews? At the 1:15 mark, we type into a browser the URLs of our favorite fake websites in movies.
Next week: Man from U.N.C.L.E.
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Brandon Cackowski-Schnell, Tom Chick, and Jason B. McMaster have variously finished — or “finished” — Arkham Knight. Here’s our spoiler-filled discussion of the game, including our comic book bona fides and out indictment or defense of the much maligned Batmobile.
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Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is a fifth Mission Impossible movie. How’s the franchise holding up? And is Tom Cruise still– whoa, wait, WHO’S THIS REBECCA FERGUSON CHICK? At the 1:38 mark, we dig into our pockets for a discussion of worn money in movies.
Next week: Fantastic Four
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As we’re drawing to the close of my favorite new comedy series, I’d like to highlight some of the latest episode’s most memorable bits of dialogue.
After the jump, how True Detective writer Nic Pizzolatto thinks people talk. Continue reading →
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who recognized the brilliance of Sacred 2 and those who don’t like to think when they’re playing an action RPG. In Sacred 2’s German variation on the Diablo formula, you assembled intricate character builds. You might have had to actually read a manual and take notes to know what you were doing (keep in mind this was back in 2008). Then your Teutonic clockwork assemblage roamed around an open world, maybe following the main quest marker but maybe not. It didn’t really matter. All that mattered was leveling up. Sacred 2 was an action RPG for gearheads. Later, Path of Exile from New Zealand would come along to re-fill the niche with its Antipodean clockwork.
Victor Vran, another German take on the Diablo formula, is actually Bulgarian, but close enough. There’s enough wide-ranging intricacy in Victor Vran to warm the clockwork cockles of a Sacred 2 fan’s heart. But Victor Vran lives very comfortably in a post-Diablo III world. Whereas Sacred 2 was fussy and elaborate, Victor Vran is accessible and splashy, brimming with personality and broad variety. “Dumbed down” you might say if you’re impatient with people who don’t like to think when they’re playing an action RPG. “Also for them” if you aren’t.
After the jump, a cerebral action RPG for dummies. Continue reading →
Tom Chick and Jason McMaster bring you a summer update, which includes Heroes of the Storm, The Swindle, Fallout: New Vegas, Metal Gear Solid 3, Victor Vran, Guild Wars 2, Diablo III, Her Story, Talos Principle, Infinifactory, Rocket League, and probably more.
Next week: the Arkham Knight spoiler episode
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