I suspect a common complaint about Massive Chalice is that your heroes die too quickly, and you therefore can’t get attached to them in the same way you get attached to your heroes in X-com, XCOM, the XCOM add-on, and other such games. It’s a complaint I shared when I first started playing Massive Chalice. But as I played, I realized it’s the single most important element of this subversive take on the X-com formula.
Tom Chick and Qt3 contributor Tony Carnevale discuss Invisible Inc, Massive Chalice, and Rebuild 3. Why those three games? What do they have in common? Do we recommend them? Which one is best? And why does Tony run a My Little Pony channel on You Tube? Listen to find out!
Good evening. In light of the comments I made yesterday about MOBA players, I’ll be reading a short statement. I’m afraid I won’t be taking any questions afterwards.
After the jump, I clear my throat and refer to the prepared statement on the podium in front of me.Continue reading →
Paradox releases Europa Universalis IV’s Common Sense DLC today. Let’s look at their description and see if we can figure out what it has to do with the Thomas Paine tract that encouraged the American Revolution.
Central to Common Sense is the idea of Development your provinces are now more than an all powerful tax number. You can improve your regions based on tax, trade and military power specifically, giving each a focus or strength. Or, you can develop broadly to prevent crushing losses when a center of manpower falls to the enemy. Were also introducing Parliaments, allowing constitutional systems of government new ways to put the power of the peoples representatives to work on behalf of the nation for a price.
There is a host of other changes to the game, including improvements to the Protestant religion, the creation of national churches, karma for Buddhist rulers and much, much more.
I’m sure Thomas Paine would be proud of something in there. Even if you don’t get the DLC, the latest patch changes plenty of stuff. For instance, it reworks how armies move. You can no longer freely charge past forts. They’ll now interrupt the movement of armies, which is what forts should have been doing all along. Now that’s what I call common sense.
Also, fish no longer reduce unrest. They just make it cheaper to persuade people to adopt a new culture. Seafood ain’t what it used to be. The full patch notes are here.
Sadly, I agree that conventional real time strategy games are dead, if by dead you mean there aren’t many of them being made anymore. But how dead can they be? I still play them. Company of Heroes, Rise of Nations, Age of Empires III, Sins of a Solar Empire, and even the venerable Age of Mythology (just last night I beat my buddy with a cheesy Promethean/Murmillo rush) hold up beautifully. Splendidly. Immaculately. Did we appreciate how great they were when they came out? I sure do now. How can conventional real time strategy games be dead when these games are still so good and I’m still playing them?
But there are precious few latter day equivalents to those games. Instead, we have a deluge of me-too MOBAs. These are RTSs for people who are so bad at multitasking they can only play one character at a time. They furthermore need a map that shows them where to go with wide obvious lanes leading to the enemy base. But it doesn’t have to be that way! An RTS doesn’t require a commitment to multitasking, or a map on which you can get lost. Because one of the great RTSs, which only takes five minutes to play and is accessible to even the most hapless MOBA player, just got a sequel.
It’s a two-to-one split on the Melissa McCarthy spy send-up, Spy. At the 48-minute mark, we carve out some time to talk about our favorite statues in movies for this week’s 3×3.
The banner ads for Carmageddon: Reincarnation read “Max is back!”. It’s awfully magnanimous of developer Stainless Games to buy ad space to congratulate George Miller for the amazing spectacle of Mad Max: Fury Road. Oh, wait. The dude in Carmageddon is named Max, isn’t he? Max Damage, I see now from the character select screen. I always chose the chick, so can you blame me for getting confused? Besides, Fury Road is a stunning example of a moribund franchise kicked back into high gear with fully upgraded modern sensibilities. Too bad the same can’t be said for the totally adequate Carmageddon: Reincarnation.
Hey, look it’s a new Brad Bird movie! Written by Damon Lindelof. At the one hour mark, we crown the podcast with a discussion of kings and queens in movies.
Expeditions: Conquistador is a fantastic variation on the X-com theme, letting you play a team of conquistadors working their way through Central and South America. The overland layer is an intriguing survival challenge and the turn-based combat is brimming with detail and variety. At the heart of the game is an intricate character development system and a unique morale model based on individual characters’ personality traits. For instance, if one of your Spaniards is a racist, she will gain morale if the party consists entirely of Spaniards, but she will lose morale if you hire natives. A pacifist character will gain morale if you make decisions that avoided combat, but he’ll lose a little morale with every battle. As a role-playing game, Expeditions: Conquistador is about making the best decisions based on the idiosyncracies of your party. Can you keep the team together long enough to find El Dorado?
The developers are a small Danish team called Logic Artists. And they’ve just announced the follow-up game will be based on Vikings, both at home and away.
…the Expeditions Sequel will have an upgradable player village, which they must return to between expeditionary raids to build and protect. Over-land travel and combat will now exist as part of the same layer, transitioning from unrestricted, exploratory movement to turn-based combat smoothly. Additionally, players will see their character manifested in the game world, not just as a role-playing character for conversations and decision making (as was in the first of the Expeditions series), but also visibly represented in travel and combat as a custom character.
Expeditions: Viking has just started development and won’t be released anytime soon. In the meantime, Logic Artists are close to releasing Clandestine, a two-player asymmetrical co-op game in which one player controls a spy and the other player controls an off-site hacker. Clandestine is currently available on Steam as an early access title.
The history of warfare is partly a history of being able to stand farther and farther away from the people you’re killing. From longbows to muskets to battleships to aircraft to missiles to drones in Afghanistan remotely piloted by airmen in Las Vegas. This latter distance is the subject of Good Kill, in which Ethan Hawke and Bruce Greenwood are mostly secure in the knowledge that their targets are always and only bad guys. If kids get in the way of their drone strikes, they’re suitably upset about it. So when the CIA tells them — over speakerphone, no less! — to just blow up innocent bystanders, and then some first responders for good measure, they get even more suitably upset. As the new girl on the job and bleeding-heart-on-her-sleeve liberal, Zoe Kravitz actually cries about it. She’s just that sensitive to what’s Right and what’s Wrong. Don’t worry, she’ll turn in her wings before the movie is over.
Good Kill is convenient pap with characters declaiming superficial political stances in lieu of dialogue and shots of the hero’s home from the same angle as shots of the drone targets because, uh, reasons. What a disappointment considering Good Kill was directed by Andrew Niccol, who previously directed the smart and intimate Gattaca. And then he went on to direct the not smart In Time and the even less smart The Host, each with ballooning budgets. With Good Kill, Niccol is obviously pining for smaller and more cerebral message movies, but the message here is obvious, facile, and ham-handed. In the end, Good Kill decides to find redemption by shooting a Hellfire missile at a serial rapist. Hurray for vigilante drone strikes!
Today’s update for Cities: Skylines finally adds tunnels, giving you yet another option to deal with traffic issues. If you can’t go around it or go over it, now you can try going under it! The update also adds a new European tileset, although the default tileset seemed pretty European to me. The new tileset only appears on specific maps, such as the three new maps included in the update.
Read more specifics here, including a word about how to avoid conflicts with any mods you may be using.
Apollo4x has made an odd choice calling itself a 4X, and making sure you know it by putting it in the title. But it’s really not a 4X, at least in any conventional sense of the term. A 4X is a game like Civilization and its space-based Master of Orion brethren. I know 4Xs. I play 4Xs. Apollo4x, you’re no 4X.
George Miller returns to the Mad Max series and we couldn’t be happier with the results. In fact, we’re so thrilled that we don’t get around to this week’s 3×3 on tutorials until the 1:27 mark.
All you need to know about Run All Night is that at a certain point in the movie Liam Neeson as a washed up former hitman and Common as a hi-tech assassin fight each other with flaming sticks and it makes perfect sense.
When Jaume Collet-Serra directed Orphan, he took the “evil kid” genre and breathed life, character, and craft into it. Here he does the same thing with the Liam Neeson action genre. Granted, it took him three tries. Who can remember the dopey Unknown and Non-Stop? But unlike those earlier Neeson pieces, Run All Night has a clever character-based script with a great cast led by Neeson, Ed Harris, and Joel Kinnaman (it’s a shame Kinnaman is doing his best work in box office under-performers like this and the Robocop reboot). Also among the cast members is New York played by New York itself instead of Toronto or Vancouver, and Run All Night isn’t afraid to run amok in the streets to prove it.
The big surprise is that once you look past the absurdly high R-rated body count, you’ll find an unlikely story about fathers that spans four generations. It’s great to see Neeson expending huge amounts of ammo, racking up property damage, slugging bad guys, choking a henchman with the gross rotary hand towel in a New York public restroom, and fighting Common with a flaming stick. But who knew you’d get all that in a movie you can take your dad to on Father’s Day?
