You know that crushing sense of disappointment, that horrible dismay, the feeling that you can’t take three more months of this? That’s how Godzilla welcomes us to this year’s crop of summer movies. At the 49-minute mark, we celebrate our favorite party scenes in movies.
Next week: X-Men: Days of Future Past
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Speed runs in platformers are uniquely gratifying and uniquely frustrating. They’re also a real joy to watch after you’ve been fumbling with a game. Almost inspiring. ‘So that’s what it’ll be like if I get better,’ you think to yourself. And if you do get better — even just a little — you know there’s a sense of satisfaction as you glide by the bits that previously bedeviled you. You know to flick the stick left at this point and jump just so much at that point and then shoot in this direction to anticipate that barrier and then just hold the stick all the way to the right to get around that obstacle. Muscle memory, sure, but it’s something like flying, like dancing, like choreography, you and the level designer creating a thing of grace with a sense of rhythm. THIS, then that, then THIS, then that, then THIS. My most recent experience with this has been the superlative Rayman Legends. My earliest experience with this was probably a Sonic game. Speed, finesse, precision, and the ensuing exhilaration, punctuated by lots of “oh, fuck me!” when you mis-time a jump.
Velocity 2X, a platformer for the Vita and Playstation 4 due out later this year, wants you to get better. I spent some time getting slightly accustomed to its unique teleportation gimmicks, which include dashing through obstacles, throwing beacons, and dropping points around the map. You can tap anywhere on the screen to instantly teleport to that point, or you can flick the controller to move a reticle and jump to it with a button press. James Marsden*, whose muscle memory was already conditioned because he’s the guy who made the game, explained that if you roll your finger from one button to the other, the timing is easier to finesse. Ah, so it is. The tapping is a hard habit to break, but the flicking is so much faster. There are also puzzle elements that use the beacons. Marsden called up a map and showed me the points where I’d inadvertently dropped beacons as I hammered away at various buttons trying to figure out what to do. I could teleport back to any one of those points. Never before has my fumbling afforded me so many options! These beacons are mandatory in some timed puzzles where you have to hit a sequence of points on the screen before, say, a door closes. There are also points around the level that you can only trigger in a certain order, so you might have to backtrack.
Velocity 2X is the sequel to a shoot-em-up, but this sequel splits the game evenly between ship-based shoot-em-up and on-foot platforming, instantly switching between them when you fly or run into a transition point. There are collectibles that you can ignore if you don’t care about that part of your score. There are weapon power-ups you can ignore if you don’t care about the shooting. But you’ll want to pay attention to both to do the really dazzling stuff. For instance, Marsden jumped ahead to the 46th of Velocity 2X’s 50 levels and he showed me how quickly you can get through a level once you learn the dance (fast forward to the 19-minute mark of this Polygon interview from GDC to see it in action). So that’s what it’ll be like if I get better. As you might guess from the name, Velocity 2X is a platformer/shoot-em-up hybrid ultimately built for speed.
At first glance, Helldivers seems to have a certain simplicity to it. Four guys running around shooting aliens, doing dynamic missions on procedurally generated maps. Space Diablo, but instead of classes, you get unlockable weapons, perks, and special powers. It even looks a bit spartan, perhaps because it’s designed to support cross-platform play among Playstation 4s, Playstation 3s, and Vitas, all online as part of an ongoing metagame in which everyone’s progress is applied to hold back invading aliens.
But if you look a little closer, if you actually take up the controller and play, you’ll see a couple of things that earn Helldivers the first part of its name.
After the jump, a few reasons you might not be ready for Helldivers. Continue reading →
Hermann Luttmann has made boardgames about topics ranging from Pickett’s charge during the battle of Gettysburg to a zombie apocalypse caused by an alien artifact from outer space. Guess which one is more successful? Tom Chick and Bruce Geryk talk to him about what kinds of games he’s making and why.
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We partly have No Country for Old Men to thank for the effectiveness of The Sacrament. The Coen brothers brilliantly staged and then subverted the usual scene where the villain murders an innocent bystander. Javier Bardem stands in front of the counter of a dingy gas station to pay for corn nuts, or whatever he’s eating. Sunflower seeds? Pistachios? It’s one of the great mysteries of No Country for Old Men. With their keen and sometimes derisive eye for casting common folk, the Coen brothers put on the other side of the counter an avuncular kindly actor named Gene Jones. You think you’ve seen him in a thousand other movies as a character actor playing bit parts. You haven’t. It was his first movie. His bewildered sincerity is every bit as crucial to the story of this moment as Bardem’s menace. It’s two actors, working together, shepherded by talented directors, creating an iconic scene.
Jones is the driving force in The Sacrament. It’s as if Ti West saw No Country for Old Men and pondered how to build a movie around Jones’ sincerity, but approaching it from a different angle. Literally, in one scene. As Jones is being interviewed, he doesn’t play to the camera, even though this is a found footage movie in which all the characters have camera awareness. He instead plays to a different direction, a direction that says everything about his character, about the events, about what is going to happen. And as is the case with many effective horror movies, The Sacrament works best if you don’t know what’s going to happen.
Unfortunately, what’s going to happen is a scaled down version of what already happened. Presumably for budgetary reasons, The Sacrament lives up to 10% of the events that inspired it, the events it updates and recreates almost beat for beat, the events it follows so slavishly that the exceptions jut out awkwardly, as if they were glued on by West and his found footage approach. But for that 10%, Jones’ presence makes it all worthwhile.
The Sacrament is out now on video on demand. Support Qt3 and watch it on Amazon.com.
Near the end of The Black Hole, the ship is assailed by “meteorites”. At least that’s what the robot informs the characters. But any astronomy pedant or child who watched Cosmos knows that a meteorite is the chunk of rock that survives its fall through the atmosphere of a planet. A bunch of bright orange rocks flying around in outer space are something else entirely. Then one of them hits the ship and neatly turns into a ginormous bowling ball that threatens to roll over our heroes. Raiders of the Lost Ark will be along to do it right in two years.
What’s so startling about Disney’s 1979 answer to Star Wars is how utterly uninspired it is, how it’s rooted in the same flat presentational filmmaking Disney had been doing since the advent of Technicolor. Staged lighting, bright colors, ponderous pacing, staid acting, obvious dialogue. The only bright spot in this dark hole is the design of the Cygnus, a derelict — or is it? — ship discovered by the crew of the Palamino. The Cygnus is a dark oddity laced with intricate ironwork, a skyscraper turned sideways. When it lights up, it blazes like the Eiffel Tower on a winter night. What a marvelous ship, swallowed up by a monstrously bad movie.
But then you get inside the Cygnus and it looks like a sound stage in Burbank. This was the same year Ridley Scott’s Alien took us inside the Nostromo. And here we are watching actors plod along concrete floors, past plywood walls, busy with garish avionics without any sense of style, as if they were cut from construction paper. At least Star Trek had a vision of how the future might work. The Black Hole just has patches of color. The robots with their lifeless button eyes look on like something made for a school play.
The story is obviously 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, complete with the eponymous black hole as the climactic whirlpool. Here is a mysterious captain, played by Maximilian Schell looking more homeless than mysterious, with mysterious motives and a mysterious crew manning a mysterious ship. Our intrepid protagonists arrive and get held hostage. A woman is added for the mysterious captain to leer at. “Are you interested in black holes?” he asks her. It sounds dirty. That must be why it was Disney’s first PG rated movie. “Some cause must have created all this,” he later muses at an inopportune time, “but what caused that cause?” During The Black Hole’s finale, its answer to Kubrick’s mind-bending journey is a laughably literal presentation of hell and heaven. Here is Disney, making sure it’ll play in Peoria, as 70s cinema transitions into the 80s.
The pacing and editing are inept, there is no energy anywhere, and the actors are as boring as the production design. When Ernest Borgnine turns bad guy, he actually sweats. It’s about twice as much effort as any other actor will expend. By the way, did Anthony Perkins always sounds like he was doing a Kevin Spacey impression? It’s an uncannily good impression, but it seems like such an unoriginal way to spend a career.
The music crests absurdly while Yvette Mimieux, as sexy as any mom in a Disney movie, is getting rescued. The evil robots literally wrap her in tin foil — I’m telling you, it’s actual tin foil! — so they can laser her brain or something. Then Robert Forster comes along and gamely rolls around with a guy in a robot costume, which isn’t unlike Bela Lugosi with the rubber octopus in Bride of the Monster. Meanwhile, a musical fanfare is playing prematurely — hey, soundtrack, what if Forster doesn’t prevail against the robot costume? — with all the glorious blaring of a triumphant processional through the streets of Ancient Rome. “Elephants for Caesar!” the soundtrack declares. Then cut to a scene of someone tapping his finger, bored, literally waiting to push a button. Hold. Hold. Hold the scene. Hold. Was Disney not aware that pacing had been invented?
But at least it’s better than Event Horizon.
This week we put up with Neighbors. At the 44-minute mark, we trundle into a 3×3 about roller coaster scenes in movies. All three or four of them!
Next week: Godzilla
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As part of Bruce Geryk’s series on Vietnam boardgaming, we talk to Volko Ruhnke, the co-designer of the upcoming Fire in the Lake, a unique treatment of Vietnam. We discuss the hows and whys of expressing Vietnam as a boardgame, and how it fits in with — and stands apart from — Ruhnke’s series of games about counterinsurgencies.
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I almost broke up with Quentin Dupiuex after Wrong, his last movie. It had all the weirdness of Rubber, but none of the intensity, none of the self-referential awareness that it was a movie about movies. It never arrived at Hollywood. It just went to work and then stopped. Not even William Fichtner could save it.
I was worried Wrong Cops, Dupieux’s latest movie, would be a follow-up to Wrong. I mean, look at the titles. Fortunately, Wrong Cops has nothing to do with Wrong. It may not have the focus of Rubber, but it has some of the savageness, plenty of the “what the…?” absurdity, and a whole lot of Dupeiux’s talent as a cinematographer with a unique appreciation for the way the light hits Southern California. Rubber was a sun-drenched absurdist riff on horror films. Wrong Cops is a similar riff on cop movies. It’s Bad Boys meets Adam 12 by way of Ionesco. Does it mean anything? Probably not. But the thing about Dupieux is that if you look at him from a certain angle, if you drink him in without asking why, if you accept that you will have no idea what he’s going to do next, he can be incredibly entertaining. For a guy who makes no sense, he sure does have style. Just watch the way he tilts and zooms the camera, or freezes the frame, or lays in his own music. Especially the way he lays in his own music. Dupieux’s alter ego, electronic musician Mr. Oizo, knows how to spin out a memorable beat for a movie that then insists it’s an atrocity that belongs in the trash with dead rats and discarded gay porno mags. “Well,” the cop who wrote the music in the movie says, “it’s about the feeling. It’s all about the feeling.” Can you feel that?
Even if you’re not into the whole absurdist thing, surely you can appreciate Wrong Cops for its spirited actors. Dupieux’s cops and perps are mostly a collection of sketch comedians who know how to commit regardless of whether something is funny. Steve Little from East Bound and Down, Eric Wareheim from Tim & Eric, the adorably spunky Arden Myrin, and even Marilyn Manson all get Dupieux’s humor. But as the wrongest cop, Mark Burnham gets Dupieux better than any of them. He’s as perfectly a fit for Wrong Cops as Stephen Spinella was for Rubber. Burnham has a bullying intensity that taps into your fear of arbitrary authority. He chomps his gum savagely, wears a hair style and pair of glasses fifty years out of date, and unabashedly rocks a pair of tightie whities, bellowing words like “Africa!” and “Germany!” while listening to godawful electronica. And he hasn’t even shot anyone yet. He hasn’t even had his dramatic final showdown with something that might not even be there. What the hell is going on? Exactly.
Wrong Cops is available on video on demand. Watch it at Amazon.com to support Quarter to Three.
If I were to think of a short list of the greatest strategy games ever made, the first thing I would do is rule out real-time strategy games, because they’re their own beast. Get out of here, RTSs. Go get your own list! The next thing I would do is write down titles such as X-Com, Civilization IV, and Alpha Centauri. But the ultimate thing I would do is circle the name of Frog City’s 1999 masterpiece, Imperialism II. There is no strategy game as good as Imperialism II.
After the jump, don’t even bring up chess. Continue reading →
Infested Planet, a really cool real time strategy game that isn’t quite like other real time strategy games, got an update over the weekend that adds a couple of things. The first is a command for your units to stop moving. If you’ve played Starcraft II, or even just watched people play Starcraft II, you might appreciate the value of tapping a button to tell your dudes to immediately stop moving and commence firing. It’s sort of a power-player tactic. And now you can do that in Infested Planet.
The other new feature is a horde mode. It had never occurred to me that Infested Planet should have a horde mode, partly because the game itself is a kind of horde mode. But now there’s a new scenario among the weekly challenges officially called “horde mode”. Whereas Infested Planet is normally about capturing territory, this mode is about defending territory. You get points for holding bases around the map, which gets increasingly difficult and eventually impossible as new waves of aliens spawn with new mutations that make them harder to defeat. You will eventually be driven back to a single base, which will eventually be overrun, at which point your score goes on the weekly list. Can you beat the 20,500 points I made with grenades and turrets? I think I’m going to try investing heavily in flamethrowers next time.
Minds. Blown. At the 1:35 mark (!), this week’s 3×3 raises the question of which are the best interrogation scenes in movies.
Next week: Neighbors
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Sir, You Are Being Hunted is a game about carrying capacity. You must retrieve fifteen doo-dads scattered across the land and bring them to a spot in the center, which is like a cross between Stonehenge and one of those Goodwill drop-off stations. If you had a Bag of Holding, you could just run around, collect all fifteen, and bring them to the drop-off point in the middle. But you don’t. So you have to make multiple trips. Also, the doo-dads get bigger and bigger, so you have to start making tough decisions in your Tetris inventory screen. Do you clear out room taken up by guns and stuff? Or do you just make another trip? Also also, when you die, you get reset to the last save point. If you aren’t careful (i.e. if you don’t make more trips back and forth), that might have been two or three doo-dads ago.
Oh, and as if you couldn’t guess by the title, roaming packs of killer robots will attack you on sight. And did I mention they’re invariably guarding the doo-dads? When it’s not about carry capacity, Sir, You Are Being Hunted is about reloading. The game, not your gun.
After the jump, Sir, You Are Doing a Lot of Moving While Crouched. Continue reading →
What’s the point of using science fiction in your game? Tom Chick talks to Galactic Civilizations III designer Paul Boyer about what the use of science fiction brings to your game design. Why bother when you can just be a history game? Or a game with elfs and dragons?
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This week we see The Other Woman, and although only two of us liked it, we all considered it another entry on our list of reason why Leslie Mann and Cameron Diaz are great. At the 59-minute mark, we drop the needle on this week’s 3×3 of record players in movies.
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