Part of the point of zombies is their overwhelming numerical superiority. For this reason, Dead Rising 3 is an amazing piece of technology. It crams its streets gloriously full of zombies. The breadth of its shambling mobs has always been a strength of the Dead Rising games. In 2006, the first one harnessed the power of Microsoft’s then next-gen console system to cram a mall full of zombies. It was mind-blowing at the time. So many zombies! There was a sense that this is what George Romero wanted us to experience. This was the zombie apocalypse, in full scale compared to the 1:72 toy scale in other games. It took 25 years after Dawn of the Dead, after years of videogames dribbling zombies at us in coffee clutch sized clusters, but we had finally come home.
During the carefully staged opening of Dead Rising 3, you stand on a carefully staged precipice above a carefully staged ruined highway crammed with zombies. There’s gotta be five hundred of them down there. It’s mind-blowing. And it’s a constant. The opening is carefully staged, but it’s not a trick. This is the number of zombies loitering around the city. I killed over 25,000 of them by the time I’d played through the story, not because I’m particularly efficient at zombie killing, but because there are just so many of them. You can’t swing a sledgehammer without adding a few dozen to your total. In that regard, in terms of embracing zombies as a multitude, Dead Rising 3 is the greatest of the Dead Rising games.
But in every other way, it is the weakest of the Dead Rising games.
After the jump, one less reason to get an Xbox One. Continue reading →
One of the advantages of an actual physical pinball table is that it’s always and only going to exist on its original platform: the real-world. It won’t be traipsing off into other dimensions or realities, where you have to consider buying it again because maybe it looks better, or maybe that’s where your friends are playing now, or maybe you need to set a high score there because you have the compulsive need to at least get your name on a leaderboard. An actual physical pinball table offers the dumb, loyal, here-and-now consistency of analog objects without EULAs.
Of course, they also have moving parts that fall apart. Not to mention there’s no room in my garage for a real pinball table thanks to all the plastic instruments and the Tony Hawk Ride skateboard I’m storing out there. So pinball is a strictly virtual pursuit for me. But what a confusing pursuit these days, with the next-gen systems and the iPad and the sudden ongoing relevance of Nintendo. Where does a guy pitch his pinball tent? Now that the Xbox 360 has been thrown over by a Playstation regime in my house — move over Tony Hawk Ride! — what’s the Zen Pinball platform of choice these days?
After the jump, my frank advice for the roving bands of homeless pinball wizards. Continue reading →
So that happened. And not in the way we expected. If you want to avoid any Transformers: Age of Extinction spoilers, we’ll swoop in at the 1:10 mark with this week’s 3×3 of our favorite rescues in movies.
Next week: Tammy
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Lawyers are sometimes excellent at writing unintentional comedy. For instance, the lawyers for Rebellion, the UK developer of such games as Sniper Elite: Nazi Zombie Army 2, Rogue Trooper, and Rogue Warrior, which isn’t actually the same thing as Rogue Trooper. Rogue Warrior is the game that finally roused itself from its deep slumber for the end credits, which played various Mickey Rourke soundbites over a laidback 80s porn groove. I recommend putting it on a loop for your next candlelight dinner. As for Rogue Trooper (pictured), I have no idea what it is. And I even reviewed it for 1up.
Anyway, the Rogue Warrior developers sued Ironclad, the developers of Sins of a Solar Empire, for having the temerity to use the word rebellion in one of their add-ons. These sorts of suits normally get announced and then quietly resolved without the lawyers sharing any of their hilarity with the rest of us. No such thing happened in the legal battle between Rebellion and Ironclad, which went to court and was subsequently decided in Ironclad’s favor on the basis of people in America having the First Amendment right to use generic words without some shovelware developer in the UK getting all pissy and attempting some half-assed extortion racket because they haven’t figured out how to make a decent Judge Dredd game already. So now we can read the substance of Rebellion’s complaint to Ironclad, taken from their initial cease and desist letter:
There can be only one reason for choosing the name “REBELLION” as the name of this game, and that is that it is identical to our client’s name. The choice of name for your game is designed to confuse members of the public into believing that this game emanated from our client or has been endorsed by our client. Alternatively, you have chosen REBELLION as the game’s name to take unfair advantage of the reputation of our client or to dilute the distinctiveness of our client’s reputation. All these actions are types of passing off that the choice of REBELLION by your company is intended to perpetrate on our client’s goodwill. If you are allowed to misrepresent your game in the way indicated, it will cause damage to our client’s goodwill.
For one half of the story and more legal documents than you can throw a habeas corpus at, read Ironclad’s account here. For Rebellion’s side of the story, well, their lawyers’ cease and desist letter speaks volumes. I find they’re best read to the end credits theme from Rogue Warrior. “Hope you assholes like fireworks”, indeed.
One of the most powerful scenes in Night Moves is Jesse Eisenberg wandering off and then looking down at his hands. Mechanically, that’s the only thing that happens in the scene. But in terms of the story’s shift at that point, in terms of what it expresses about the character, in terms of what will happen afterwards, it’s a powerful moment. These hands. What can they do? What will they do?
There’s a quiet intensity here that wouldn’t be out of place in some of the best “nothing happens” movies of the 70s, an expressiveness without expression, a calmly contained rage. Eisenberg, in the performance of his career, is a quietly writhing tangle of conviction and frustration. Night Moves is about the divide between belief and action, and while the characters are environmentalists, it’s ultimately more universal than that. What do you do when you believe something so strongly that it entirely defines you, yet you cannot find a way to manifest it? Where do your hands and heart belong? Where do they fit?
Contrast Night Moves to The East, a recent movie about eco-terrorists. The East was a clumsy Hollywood style production, with attractive young actors dressing down to pretend to be unwashed salt-of-the-earth grunge activists. Alexander Skarsgard and Brit Marling were far too gorgeous to be convincing. Night Moves director Kelly Reichardt wouldn’t tolerate that sort of play acting. Dakota Fanning is convincingly plain and even a little frumpy. Eisenberg’s sullen intensity is a foil to Peter Sarsgaard’s disaffected devil-may-care. They each relate in different ways to each other, to their basic convictions, to the heist. Night Moves is not a heist movie. It’s a movie about three characters. Who happen to be staging a heist.
Furthermore, all three characters exists in very different spaces, with very different relationships to the natural order. The yurts, damp trailers, and hot tubs are all expressions of Oregon as a character (every state should be so lucky to have a filmmaker as talented as Reichardt), each different, each home to a different perspective, each a careful part of the storytelling. Reichardt’s naturalism is smart enough that it’s not just naturalism. And once again, she knows how to end a movie. This is the fourth time I’ve been punched in the gut by Reichardt’s opinion about what best constitutes a final scene: Old Joy, Wendy & Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, and now Night Moves. For a woman who knows how to let her movies breathe, she sure knows how to take your breath away.
Night Moves is currently in limited release.
I admire the idea of Coherence. Writer/director James Ward Byrkit presents a dinner party. And then sci-fi happens. The premise is a bit forced and unfortunately too familiar these days. But Byrkit builds it to a powerful sequence of someone literally peering into windows at all her possible lives, like Dickens’ Scrooge adrift without a guide in a Jorge Luis Borges story. It’s the quantum physics equivalent of trying to remember where you parked your life. Yes, Schrodinger’s Cat has a cameo.
Among similar puzzle movies, this one ranks above the laughably bad +1 and the merely bad Mine Games, but nowhere near Duncan Jones’ Moon and slightly below Mike Cahill’s Another Earth. Coherence is in dire need of a Britt Marling. Because the script, as it is, taxes the actors’ improvisation skills a bit too much as the aggressively handheld camerawork scrambles to keep up. In place of a sense of craft, there’s a sense of the director trying to throw a net over whatever he can catch while the actors wait for someone to tell them to stop talking. But the actors are likable and mostly convincing. At least Coherence didn’t go the found footage route.
For a better example of how to wring intriguing science fiction from a dinner party, I recommend director Richard Schenkman’s adaptation of a Jerome Bixby play called The Man from Earth. It’s focused, filler-free, and probably not what you expect.
Coherence is currently in limited release.
If we learned one thing this week, it’s not to steal Guy Pearce’s car. At the one-hour mark, we switch on this week’s 3×3 of our favorite appliances in movies.
Next week: some Michael Bay thing
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The parts of Watch Dogs that are terrible are the parts that make a good game great. Characters, theme, meaningful gameplay connected with meaningful storylines, clever self-aware writers working closely with game designers, internal consistency, vision. These are many of the things that define the Bioshock 2s, the Grand Theft Auto Vs, the Metro Last Lights, the Tomb Raiders. These are the things that can elevate videogaming as a medium.
Watch Dogs has none of these things. It is an elaborate trifle, a AAA time fritterer, a playground with skyhigh production values mired in a bog, a dessert tray without an accompanying meal. It is mostly hollow, almost entirely meaningless, and only accidentally relevant. And I’m having a grand time with it.
After the jump, confused Grand Theft Auto V fanboi. Age: 46. Occupation: game critic. Income: $32,700. Continue reading →
Tom Chick and Bruce Geryk talk to Dan Verssen, one of the grandfathers of boardgaming and certainly a founding father of solitaire boardgaming. He talks about how he’s adapted his older games, his decisions to add zombies and Cthulhu, and a crucial secret ingredient named Holly.
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The Kickstarter for Tale of Tales’ Sunset is now live. Like parts of Call of Duty: Black Ops, this game is set during a revolution in the 70s in Africa the Third World. But unlike any Call of Duty ever, you play a housekeeper. You’re cleaning the really groovy home (pictured) of one of the guys fighting the war.
Sunset is a first person exploration game in the vein of Gone Home and Dear Esther. As in those, playing centers on the discovery of story clues. In Sunset, however, you play while the events unfold (rather than uncovering a story that happened in the past). The other inspiration for Sunset is military action games. We always wondered what life would be like for the extras in such games, the people who are not the heroes, the ones on the sidelines — like most of us. How does it feel to be one of the many victims of war, instead of the hero? How does it feel when war is the backdrop for your day-to-day life?
Even if you have no desire to play or support the game, you should at least watch the video on their Kickstarter page. Because developers Michael Samyn and Auriea Harvey are about as adorable a couple as you can imagine. And I’m not just saying that because he opens with a monocle and she’s wearing a T-shirt for one of my favorite arthouse game, The Path. Where can I get one of those?
In preparation for the next story arc in Guild Wars 2, developer ArenaNet has posted a video recap of stuff that happened last season. I didn’t see any of that! Flamethrower robots? A tree monster? A fleet of zeppelins shooting missiles? A hundred foot tall puppet? I just logged in one day and found the city was gone. I am the Encino Man of Guild Wars 2.
What happens when three 21 Jump Street fans come back for more? At the 50-minute mark, we look at works of art in movies.
Next week: The Rover
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E3 began this morning when the doors of the Staples Center were thrown open. The press briefings technically precede E3, which is why presenters can say things like “…and I’ll see you at E3”. Because they’re not, technically, at E3 yet.
By holding off until the literal last minute — the floor opens within minutes of Nintendo announcing the last thing they’re going to announce — Nintendo doesn’t get in on the previous day’s buzz. Instead they get the last pre-word. And, once again, they used that last pre-word to win E3 before it even began.
After the jump, can you actually win E3? Continue reading →
You’ve seen the press briefing dog-and-pony shows that open E3. Now listen to the erudite commentary. And when you’re done with that, come listen to Tom Chick and Aaron Vaughn chat.
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Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt suit up to shoot aliens over and over and over again. Two thirds of this podcast is thrilled at the ensuing action! At the 58-minute mark, in a celebration of summer, we dish out our favorite examples of ice cream in movies.
Next week: 22 Jump Street
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