The latest Tom vs Bruce has been posted here. It’s rated M for mature audiences due to thematic elements, nudity, and one of us not doing very well as we team up against the AI in the fantasy strategy game, Dominions 4.
Brandon Cackowski-Schnell, Tom Chick, Nick Diamon, and Jason McMaster talk about what they’re going to be playing in January, one of the best months for videogames such as Day Z, Rust, 7 Days to Die, Skylanders: Swap Force, or Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag. It’s even a good month for boardgames like A Study in Emerald, which isn’t about the French and Indian War. We also open some listener mail.
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This week we combine our respective top ten lists for a plus-sized podcast about the best movies of 2013. We also single out our most surprising movies, our most disappointing movies, and a set of special awards that would be suitable for framing if they existed in the analog world.
Next week: The Legend of Hercules. Yep, the Legend of Hercules.
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Navajo Wars, a solitaire boardgame from superserious publisher GMT, is tightly straightjacketed into some very specific historical beats. They happen every time you play. For instance, the first of the three scenarios — string them all together for the full Navajo wars — covers the arrival of Spanish settlers in the American Southwest. It opens with a looming military crackdown, visited first upon the neighboring Pueblo and then turning its focus on the Navajo. Then the Franciscans will always drop two missions in Navajo territory, followed by Viceroy De Galvez arming the Comanche and Ute to keep pressure on the Navajo, and then the establishment of a Catholic colonial base in New Mexico. These very specific gameplay beats are always and only how Navajo Wars plays out. The length of time and the minor incidents between these events varies. The major events themselves do not.
This is, of course, exactly as designer Joel Toppen intended. But is it the best way to make a game about the Navajo? Doesn’t it imply a sort of fatalism, as if these people were always and only resigned to the same sad fate? These Navajo wars will always and only end in the creation of two American forts, the death of the beloved Navajo/US government go-between Henry Linn Dodge, the insurgency of Manuelito, and finally Kit Carson’s campaign to forcibly relocate the entire Navajo civilization to an ill-equipped reservation called Bosque Redondo.
Doing well in Navajo Wars, a game about a culture persevering in the face of inevitable decline, is often a matter of memorizing the pieces Toppen has assembled to re-render history. It’s not so much about reacting to unfolding events as it’s about anticipating what you know is coming and getting all your ducks in a row before it arrives. Is this really the best way to tell the story of the decline and fall of the Navajo?
After the jump, everyone expects the Spanish subjugation! Continue reading →
Rayman Legends is a “hey, come in here and look at this!” game. It constantly surprises and delights. It coaxes forth smiles. It’s alive and generous, full of movement and joy and landscapes like paintings instead of landscapes like videogames. You discover a hidden area and an invisible audience murmurs “ooh!” in admiration. You slice your way through cakes. You explore a steampuckish undersea city. A fat dragon like a bumblebee or an eager dog flaps clumsily after you. You jump off a raft and slip under the water into an impossible kaleidoscope of little fishes. As if that’s not thrilling enough, they then start singing to you. With your feet on the air and your head on the ground.
After the jump, try this trick. Spin it. Continue reading →
You have never played through a world quite like this. Maybe you’ve glimpsed the creative range of developer Media Molecule turned loose in Little Big Planet 2, widely mistaken as a repository for 100 crappy player-made levels to every good player-made level. You might appreciate that Little Big Planet 2 had a clever platformer already in the box, but you’ve never seen Media Molecule’s creativity this focused, this poignant, this lovely, this literally transcendent.
After the jump, it is only a paper moon. Continue reading →
Nintendo is making platformers for folks who have been playing them since the 80s. Which is a fine way to carve out a niche, and a dedicated niche at that. Probably even a huge niche consisting of people with Nintendo hardware. A niche that might not even know what they’re missing because they haven’t played Rayman Legends or Tearaway or even a Ratchet & Clank game. A niche that will no doubt adore the comfort candy traditionalism of Super Mario 3D World. But what about the rest of us?
After the jump, outside looking in Continue reading →
Has David O. Russell conned us into liking American Hustle? Well, some more than others. Find out what happens when three Silver Linings Playbook fans watch some of our favorite actors get all 70s. At the one-hour mark, we do a 3×3 that has something to do with corporations.
Next week: the top movies of 2013
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Join Tom Chick for a conversation with Banshee Chapter director Blair Erickson, who has made a Lovecraft movie that isn’t technically a Lovecraft movie, but is definitely a Lovecraft movie. He defends his use of jump scares, reveals his inspiration for some of the creepiest bits of the movie, and explains that parts of the sound design are 100% real.
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Banshee Chapter is the reason I watch so many terrible horror movies. Because occasionally something like this bubbles up from the muck and makes it all worthwhile. I don’t mean to overstate how good Banshee Chapter is, because it’s got a lot of the trappings of bad horror. If you were to lift any five or ten minutes out of context, you might guess you’re watching yet more half-assed found footage of people wandering around on the way to another cheap jump scare. You’re partly right. Banshee Chapter can’t quite decide why or whether it’s a found footage movie, and it relies on its share of cheap jump scares.
But writer/director Blair Erickson ultimately pieces together something far more haunting by doing three very specific things. His first trick is his script’s focus on something other than the usual ghosts or demons. Banshee Chapter makes it clear early on that this is a conspiracy yarn about MKUltra, but with a definite in-your-face supernatural bent. For no good reason, it sometimes cuts to extended footage of government experiments. It even sprinkles in a little Lovecraft before it’s all over. It reminds me of a little-seen short film called AM1200 for how it’s about evil tidings carried on electronic signals out of remote desert locations, luring victims to their doom. Take note, bad horror movies! A commitment to an unusual idea goes a long way.
Erikson’s second trick is his cast. A lot of Banshee Chapter is an actress named Katia Winter doing research or just looking around with a flashlight. Miss Winter is lovely enough that you’ll probably assume she’s just another annoying horror movie protagonist. She is not. She’s appealing and likeable, and most importantly, she’s convincing enough to sell the long stretches of research and the bursts of horror. She is also an ideal foil to the movie’s greatest asset, Ted Levine. About half way into Banshee Chapter, he lumbers in clumsily as a thinly veiled nod to Hunter Thompson. He and Winter engage in an appealing push/pull act that keeps the rest of the movie rolling.
Finally, Erickson also knows how to use a handful of unlikely assets sparingly and to creepy effect. A numbers station, an ice cream truck, the hiss of static, a latex mask. You won’t find any of the usual CG here, but you will find some genuinely tense stretches that culminate in awful “oh god, what was that?” scares. And the whole thing closes with “The Girl in the Window”, a lovely song by Mark Lenover that fits the movie like a glove. An absurdly clawed latex glove illuminated by a dim flashlight.
Banshee Chapter is available on video on demand services. Support Qt3 and watch it on Amazon.com.
Joss Whedon’s Firefly, the boardgame of Joss Whedon’s TV show, can be demanding. It can be slow. It can be lonely. It can be mean. It can kick you in the teeth with a bad die roll or an unfortunate card draw. It can leave you drifting in space while everyone else has lively barroom brawls and exciting tangles with the law. They’re buying awesome ship components and fancy gear for their crew. You’re mopping floors on some backwater planet until you can afford fuel. But when you’re the one enjoying the brawls, tangles, awesomes, and fancies, Firefly can be a gratifying tabletop space opera with a few unique selling points. And you don’t even have to know the TV show.
After the jump, what does gorram mean? And which one is Summer Glau? Continue reading →
This week we finally see 12 Years a Slave and aren’t quite as impressed as, say, the Golden Globe nominations. At the 39-minute mark, we cover the topic of umbrellas in movies for this week’s 3×3.
Next week: American Hustle
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This year, instead of just singling out games I like, I’m going to single out games that do best what I like most. Namely, games that tell a story through gameplay. A relevant story, unique to the way videogames tell stories. Games that really get the unique strength of the medium over and above books and movies. Games that are particularly great at being games and not just puzzles or tests of skill or dazzling virtual wonderlands.
This is partly a shame, because it’s going to exclude some of my favorite games this year. It’s going to exclude games I liked mostly for mechanical reasons. Don’t Starve is the game that finally got me hooked on procedurally generated survival-a-thons, partly because it’s got so much personality and mystery. Desktop Dungeons is the most amazingly intricate cerebral puzzle rogue-like I’ve ever played, neatly arrayed under a superlative meta-game of building up and unlocking. Tales of Maj’Eyal is a rogue-like with addictively intricate character development, honed over a decade of development. I never really cared for the goofy sloppiness of kart racers, but this year’s best driving game is a kart racing game called Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed. Monaco is a glorious playground full of interactive bits, lovingly realized in that often too-precious retro fat-pixel way, and some of the best multiplayer co-op you can play. Splinter Cell Blacklist takes stealth as far as I can imagine it will ever go by giving it varying levels of importance in a generous set of sandboxes, all interconnected by the economy of buying cool weapons and gadgets. Which brings me to Dead Space 3, which drank up far more time than a Dead Space should with its funky cool spaceweapon crafting. Assassin’s Creed IV’s gorgeous pirate ship shenanigans were just the breath of salty fresh air the Assassin’s Creed series needed. If there’s a platformer as good as Rayman Legends at the art of running, jumping, and variations thereof, I haven’t played it. I haven’t gotten very far into Wonderful 101, but I love the fighting system I’ve seen so far and I’m eager to explore the rest of it.
All those games would vie for a spot on a conventional top ten list. But none of those games really had an effective narrative hook, and that’s what my list is going to single out this year. As videogames grow up and increasingly earn their rightful place alongside movies and books and TV, these are the ten games I’m proudest of, the games I enjoyed the most, the games I’ll remember for reasons other than mere gameplay. These are the games that spoke the loudest, the clearest, the most poignantly, the most memorably. These are the games with voices that most deserve to be heard.
After the jump, the best games of 2013 Continue reading →
Tom Chick (far right) and Jason McMaster (center, wearing the crown) close out the holiday season with a very special tribute to the year’s best games.
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The creators of Monaco have posted some data here about how many people got all the way through the game. Fewer than one in ten players saw it through to the end. Which, naturally, must be frustrating for the developers, not to mention the people who didn’t finish. So today’s update cuts out big chunks of content in what’s labeled an “enhanced” version of Monaco.
From the linked developer’s blog:
We want more people to finish the campaigns, and we also personally kinda hate some of the levels. Certain areas feel redundant, certain levels feel tedious. Do you remember hating these parts? Both boat levels with the dogs, crossbows, and fire. Second floor of the hospital (the one that winds around amongst exam rooms). The giant, hard, palace level.
We did too!
In addition to cutting major parts of these, every level has seen some streamlining with this patch. Don’t worry, if you liked the old levels, they are still available if you play “Classic” mode, rather than “Enhanced”.
The new release also includes some revised gameplay, refined tutorial levels, and new maps. Also, the leaderboards are reset, so now is your chance to post a score in the top thousand or so, before all the serious Monacists get their heists on.
