Nintendo wants to remind us that children, famous and otherwise, love new Nintendo games. They’ve shared the above picture of Rico Rodriguez, who plays Manny on Modern Family, doing his trademark “what are you gonna do?” Manny shrug at a table of chilled bananas. It’s as if he’s conceding that, yep, kids love Nintendo and there’s nothing you can do about and, by the way, a new Donkey Kong game comes out February 21st. Which is nice and all, but I’m holding out for a picture of Julie Bowen playing Wonderful 101.
Maybe I don’t follow MOBAs closely enough, but I’m surprised some designer hasn’t already filled a lane with zombies and just called it a day. Is Deep Silver really the first to bring the zombie fad to MOBAs with Dead Island: Epidemic? It looks mostly like a standard League of Legends me-too — free-to-play, of course — with a couple of exceptions. You control your character directly, with a mouse and WASD. Each match features three (3!) teams.
Although it’s branded as a Dead Island release, I don’t recall any three-mouthed zombies in Dead Island. I guess a MOBA needs visuals that are more, uh, playful (I tried to avoid the word “cartoony” and I think I was mostly successful).
Andrew Hume and Richard Clifford are here to tell us about Space Pirates and Zombies 2, a more survivor-centric take on galaxy-wide zombie apocalypses! They explain the move to 3D, how the pacing will differ from the usual action RPG, why they’re fussing with multiplayer, why this isn’t on Kickstarter, and how it resembles watching creatures fight in a Petri dish and then adding anthrax. They also tell us the bad news, which is how long we’ll have to wait to play it (spoiler: much of the year).
Toad Road, which isn’t really a horror movie but sort of is, has that Harmony Korine vibe of “okay, you guys just screw around and I’m gonna film it”, but with slightly livelier mumblecore than you’d expect. This is at times a Jackass cast doing stupid things like lighting each other on fire and daring strangers to punch them in the head, penises flopping out and body piercings proudly on display. What the heck am I watching here? I can’t deny it’s funny and it has a certain “kids, man…” appeal. And I’ll take these greasy burnouts over the vapid twentysomething models who populate most horror movies. Toad Road’s horror elements are a slow burn, inserted elliptically and sometimes sputtering out and occasionally handled clumsily with painfully bad improv. But director/writer Jason Becker knows enough not to overplay his hand. Except for the Jackass stuff, it’s pretty restrained and its two leads are undeniably appealing. Their chemistry is as real as the chemistry that apparently fueled some of the movie’s drug scenes.
The ultimate power of Toad Road, an intriguing experiment in youth culture and existential horror that you might have to tolerate and appreciate in equal measure, is the title card before the end credits. It was inserted several months after the movie was shot. You’ll obviously want to Google what you discover on that title card. What starts out as a “come on, quit jerking me around, you assholes” becomes an “oh fuck, no”. And it’s a particularly painful “oh fuck, no” in the week after Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death. Is Toad Road better or worse for it? Who can say? But it’s certainly more powerful.
Toad Road is available on VOD. Support Qt3 and watch it on Amazon.com here.
Most games don’t end well, and many games take a few hours too many to end. So you can hardly be blamed for giving up before it’s over and pronouncing judgment. “It’s fun!” or “It’s boring!” There. On to the next game. But there are times you can’t do that. There are times the finale, great or otherwise, is the real payoff. There are times that you simply cannot understand a game without getting to the ending.
I could tell you the premise of City of Remnants, which is that two to four alien races have been dropped onto a refugee planet where they fight amongst themselves. Occasionally, their vicious alien overlords visit them in force. I could tell you that, but I’d rather not. Because when I play City of Remnants, I’m enjoying a Blade Runner slash Chaos Overlords cyberpunk yarn about gangs fighting for control of a city. Sometimes, they have to deal with — or even profit from, if they’re geared up properly — police crackdowns. Never mind that guff about refugees and aliens with silly names.
We finally get around to seeing Short Term 12, which we unfortunately missed last year. If you haven’t seen it, you can skip to our 3×3 of movies referenced in other movies that we didn’t like. The references, not necessarily the movies. We explain it better at the 52-minute mark.
My first few turns with Neo Scavenger are like the opening of 28 Days Later. I’m literally stumbling around an abandoned city, wearing a hospital gown, carrying a plastic shopping bag that contains some drinks and pills I found. But then I found a crowbar. And then I encountered a bandit. And then it was less like 28 Days Later and more like Mad Max as directed by Lars von Trier. The turn-based combat is basically a lot of inelegant fumbling around. But after several turns, I think I’ve got the upper hand. The bandit is vulnerable, bleeding, coughing up blood, in shock, and he has a crippled left arm. I’m none of those things, so it seems to me I’m winning. Also, he’s barefoot and I’m wearing one left shoe that I found in a storage shed. So I’ve got that on him.
Oh, did I mention he’s unconscious? I think I’m supposed to keep kicking him in hopes that I’ll have the option to search him and take his stuff once he’s even more defeated. He does have stuff, doesn’t he? What kind of bandit doesn’t have stuff? I kick him a few more times, occasionally hitting him with the crowbar for good measure. This is tiring activity, as I can tell by my rested bar, which is currently telling me I’m “weary”.
Eventually, I get the following messages:
Player demolished the bandit’s lower chest with a crowbar.
Bandit has died due to acute bleeding in the lungs.
Jeeze, way to make me feel bad, game. A simple message about his hit points being reduced to zero would have been fine. Also, where’s my loot? I didn’t get any loot. Normally, being a total dick to an NPC until it dies means you get loot. Or at least xp. I got neither of those things. Neo Scavenger sure is a stingy game.
The next bandit I see has a hunting rifle. In the process of rushing him, the buckshot “shreds my lower stomach”. Come on. Is that really necessary? A message about -10hp or something would have been just fine. After another extended tussle, I get knocked out. The bandit apparently runs away, because I wake up bleeding profusely but still alive. Later that night, I find a sleeping bag in the back seat of an abandoned car. I try to sleep in my new sleeping bag, but I freeze to death instead. Neo Scavenger, a brutal indie survival game currently available on Steam featuring meticulous detail instead of fancy graphics, tells me I lived for 17 hours.
Okay, funtime is over kiddies. It’s time to get serious. Up to now, Payday 2 has been going easy on you. No more. As of today’s update, the cloakers are back. These Sam Fisher-esque dudes were the bane of heists in the first game, but for the sequel, they’ve been on sitting this one out. Polishing their nightvision goggles. Charging their stun batons. Practicing their fancy parkour. Now they’ve clocked in.
Returning from PAYDAY: The Heist, the Cloaker has come to spoil the fun and stop the heist. Good thing Gage has some new goodies for players’ inventory to keep that from happening. The Cloaker is a free update that is added to the game for everyone. He’ll gladly beat you with his baton, free of charge.
The cloaker update coincides with the release of a $5 pack that includes a couple new weapons and masks.
This week I welcome three prominent and distinct boardgame designers to talk about teaching boardgames. Rob Daviau, Jamey Stegmaier, and Phil Eklund help me untangle the complicated fine art of how to best bring your favorite boardgames to your friends.
I expected my favorite part of today’s Onslaught DLC for Call of Duty: Ghosts would be the new map for extinction mode. Extinction mode is Ghost’s answer to the previous games’ zombie mode. It lets you and up to three other players run around on wide-open maps, setting up pitched defensive battles in which you have to hold out against swarms of alien bugs. Classic co-op stuff. I almost don’t even mind the lack of zombies. And the new extinction map in Onslaught adds a bad-ass boss battle against a giant alien bug. It’s impressive enough. But it’s not my favorite thing about the Onslaught DLC.
Although it’s about German U-boats in World War II, solitaire boardgame The Hunters (not pictured) is a mostly unadorned exercise in rolling dice to see what happens. To be fair, that description applies to many boardgames. But unlike many boardgames, The Hunters has very little dressing around the die rolls. There is no board, there is no tactical display, there is almost no artwork, and there aren’t even many decisions. Instead there are charts and dice that roll out the highlights of your U-boat captain’s career. Keep rolling to find out what happens. You sometimes decide whether to fire your torpedoes from close range or medium range. Feel lucky, punk? Go ahead and risk a little crush depth. Because otherwise, it’s all in the dice and the charts. You’re just along for the ride.
I’m not much of a sports guy, but I bet folks looking forward to this Sunday’s Superbowl will be psyched about the next pinball table from Zen Studios. Super League Football is certainly different from Zen’s other tables. It has a unique gimmick that will appeal to gridiron pigskinner sportists.
Players will side with their favorite clubs including Arsenal, Liverpool FC, FC Barcelona, Real Madrid C.F., A.C. Milan, Juventus Football Club, and A.S. Roma as they square off to dominate league play in a new social pinball experience. When players download Super League Football, they will select the club they wish to support. Their table will be themed in brilliant style, including images of the clubs biggest stars, team mascots, chants and theme songs. As games are completed, scores will tally to each club’s global leaderboard, providing an overall rank for each club in the league on a global scale on each platform. As you lead your team through league play, you will earn trophies and accolades which will be placed in their own trophy room.
So are you ready for some football? Well, stand by, since there’s no release date yet. Until then, sportists will have to make do with that skateboarding table.
A Study in Emerald creator Martin Wallace joins the Quarter to Three Games Podcast to talk about the challenges of meshing Sherlock Holmes with Cthulhu with a boardgame, the hardest part of the design process, and whether we can expect any add-ons.
