We were among the audience members in the ninth biggest opening weekend of all time and we’re here to tell you about it. At 1:23, we’re drawn into a discussion of magnets in movies for this week’s 3×3.
Next week: Ex Machina
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Battlelore, the charming Days of Wonder fantasy take on Memoir ’44 that was transferred to Fantasy Flight and reissued as a second edition, is now digital. And boy does it look great. Lively graphics and animation, smooth execution of the boardgame rules, and a breezy but thorough interface. It’s even got multiplayer support. This looks like exactly what you’d want in a boardgame port!
After the jump, not so fast. Continue reading →
If you catch tonight’s episode of Better Call Saul, you’ll certainly remember the “Pimento” scene. But did you note the familiar voice or the vaguely familiar face? Steven Ogg, the voice actor and obvious visual inspiration for Trevor in Grand Theft Auto V, shows up in a small but memorable role, pretty much playing Trevor.
The Washington Post has a collection of social media tweets and videos from an incident in Nepal in which a rhino wandered into a city. The above image is from this Tweet, which raises the question, “Who in his right mind is going to stand close enough to a rampaging rhinoceros to get that picture?” Unfortunately, unlike similar incidents in Far Cry 4, someone was actually killed by the rhino.
The really frustrating games are the ones like Etherium that show promise and then squander that promise. If Etherium was simply bad, I couldn’t care less about its foibles. But because it’s a smart take on real time strategy games, the problems that undermine it are all the more frustrating. This could have been a contender. This should have been a contender! Instead, it’s a tantaziling glimpse at a good game we could have played.
After the jump, when is an AI too good? Continue reading →
We would characterize While We’re Young as “minor Baumbach”. At the 1:03 mark, we get our feet under us for this week’s 3×3 about landings in movies.
Next week: Furious 7
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This week Tom Chick and Bruce Geryk talk to the designer of our new favorite Vietnam game.
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In a typical tableau game, each player builds up a tableau at his end of the table. These games are often dismissively called “multiplayer solitaire”, which conveniently ignores that there’s usually some sort of interaction going on, even if it’s just competing for limited resources or racing to hit a score threshold. But one of the best ways to force interaction — in any kind of game — is to throw players together on a map. This is the approach Deus takes, where you build a tableau at your end of the table, but you also represent each card in the tableau with a little building on a map. Eventually, like it or not, you’ll rub elbows with the other players.
After the jump, this land is your land, this land is my land. Continue reading →
Ubisoft is finally showing a little confidence in The Crew, my favorite game from last year! They’re hoping that the first two hours will wet your whistle sufficiently that you’ll want to buy it.
…a free trial of the action-driving MMO The Crew is available today on PlayStation 4 computer entertainment system, and will be available March 25 on Xbox One… New players will be able to hit the road in this free two-hour trial and keep all of their progress should they decide they want to continue by purchasing the game.
Unfortunately, as with any open-world game and especially MMO, the first two hours are basically a tutorial. In fact, until you get to your first underground hideout in Chicago, you’re in a gimped version of the game world. My advice is to download The Crew, dash as fast as you can through the handful of story mission that open your first hideout, and then just strike out in one direction to see how much you can see before your two hours are up. My advice is to forget New York. Instead, head southwest to New Orleans and then hang a right out into the Southwest and then California. You should be hitting the Pacific just as your two hours are up.
This week Sean Penn bears arms in The Gunman. Then, at the 55-minute mark, we lock the door, put on a little smooth jazz, and take up the topic of masturbation scenes in movies.
Next week: While We’re Young
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Apologies in advance, but me and Stardock’s Adam Biessener talk about having cancer. Next week will be back to fun and games!
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In the ongoing saga of Driveclub being a five-star racing game that was released two stars too early, it has finally gotten a replay feature. Now you can enjoy the truly gorgeous graphics without having to keep your eyes on the road. The replay mode lets you watch a race from a variety of camera views, with the option to enter a ridiculously detailed photo mode if you want to grab stills. It’s also a new way of looking at the tracks to learn how to drive them better.
The latest update also claims to make drift events less annoying. I’m not sure that’s possible, as I’ve yet to meet a drift mode in a videogame that wasn’t annoying. But with relaxed requirements for scoring drifts, at least it’s easier to get the stars you need to progress in the single-player tours.
Infested Planet developer Alex Vostrov posted the following update to the game’s Steam page:
The game is about to get a new mini-expansion: “The Trickster’s Arsenal”. The details of what’s inside are still being worked on, but I can announce some new combat abilities.
The DLC is going to add 7 new powers, kind of like the chopper strike, but with different effects. For example, one ability is STASIS FIELD – you can fire it at a hive and freeze everything in the area. The hive can’t take damage, but it also can’t do anything to you. Good for splitting up enemies. Another one is OVERDOSE – you lose some health, but your marines go into a frenzy.
The abilities allow you to fight in new ways, like teleporting across the map to deal with an emergency.
At least some parts of the DLC will be free to everyone who owns the game. For example, I didn’t want to split the leaderboards between DLC and non-DLC, so the new abilities are unlocked for everyone if you’re playing a leaderboard map.
The Trickster’s Arsenal is coming out on April 24th.
Thanks, Gigglemoo!
This week we’re thrilled to discover David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows.
Next week: The Gunman
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For the most part, Cities: Skyline is a familiar — almost too familiar — take on the citybuilder genre. It’s generically contemporary, without any meaningful structure outside the sandbox, and it wears its debt of gratitude to Maxis’ games proudly. It plays out like a piping hot bowl of gameplay comfort food for those of us hip to RCI indicators.
It’s taken a while to realize what sets it apart. At a population of 10,000 or so, you’ll realize the root of many of your problems is buses tangling with trucks and cars and bottlenecked offramps and clustered intersections. As your city grows to the point that these become issues, to the point that you’ll want public transportation to take some pressure off the streets, to the point that adding more garbage trucks might not make it easier to reach the accumulating garbage and, in fact, will just clogs the streets with even more traffic, you’ll appreciate that it all comes down to your road network. Traffic is the foundation for your city. The roads are veins and arteries, the vehicles are its lifeblood.
This is hardly a surprise given that Cities: Skylines was developed by Colossal Order, the folks who made Cities in Motion, a game that looked like a citybuilder but was actually a traffic management sim. Now Colossal Order’s traffic management is spun out into a full game, built from the road network up. Everything in Cities: Skylines comes down to traffic, much like the Impressions citybuilders were premised on walkers roaming a city to deliver goods and services.
After the jump, the three rules of real estate are roads, roads, roads. Continue reading →
