The best case scenario for any game is that it will be better than you expect. So if it’s worth calling out games that fell short of expectations on a most disappointing list, why not call out the games that exceeded expectations? Why not call out the pleasant surprises alongside the unpleasant surprises? So here is the opposite of this year’s most disappointing list.
After the jump, when expectation management goes wonderfully right.Continue reading →
Today’s free update for Grand Theft Auto V adds new capture-the-flag game modes. These are called “jobs”, which I presume explains why you get money for doing them. Not to mention “job points”. And these are no mere flags, which is why the modes aren’t technically called “capture-the-flag”. Instead, they are raid, hold, grand theft auto, and contend. Read the details about each mode here.
Or, heck, just jump online and start playing without having any idea what you’re supposed to do. It’s worked for me. I didn’t get my online character to level 12 by reading rules.
Calling a game disappointing arguably has more to do with me than the game itself. Disappointment isn’t an inherent quality. It can’t exist without some sort of expectation in the first place. In many cases, these games are sequels, or the creations of developers with proven track records, or entries in established genres, or games with promising beginnings. But for various reasons, the central fact about these games is that I had personally hoped they would be better.
Overrated is a loaded term. It looks good in a headline. It’s often used for no purpose other than to goad a reaction. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful. When I call a game overrated, I don’t mean it’s bad, that the reviews were wrong, that the people who liked it were dopes, or even that I didn’t like it. It just means I’m surprised more people weren’t more critical, that the conversation wasn’t more often about ways the game could have been better.
Also, for this year’s lists, my experience has been entirely last-gen. I have no first-hand experience with the latest console systems, which probably have their share of overrated games. So over the next week, I’d love to hear from you early adopters in the comments section about next-gen games that were overrated, disappointing, surprising, or your favorites.
This week, having apparently not learned our lesson last year, we see the latest Hobbit movie. At the 52-minute mark, we recall our favorite Paul Walker moments.
As the year winds down, Brandon Cackowski-Schnell, Tom Chick, Scott Dobrosielsky, and Rob Harvey consider 2013. What stood out, for better or worse, this year?
Okay, all you whiny Steambabies, listen up. Race the Sun, the endless runner that’s way more than just an endless runner, is now on Steam. That’s one less reason for you not to play it. It’s only ten bucks, and it’s even got achievements and some lovely trading cards, if those are your thing.
And for those of us already sold on the game, we can log into our Flipfly accounts here to get our Steam keys.
Sightseers was directed by Ben Wheatley, a sort of UK Tarantino who arrived on the scene with his Pulp-Fiction-meets-Wicker-Man hybrid called Kill List. But Sightseers is not a Wheatley movie. He just sort of ably corrals it. From start to finish, Sightseers belongs to the tremendous Alice Lowe. You might recognize Lowe as the female quarter of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, gamely holding her own alongside Matthew Holness, Matt Berry, and Richard Ayoade. Her comedic timing is impeccable. In Sightseers, she alternately beams and sulks, murderous, adoring, confused, unconcerned, seething, idiotically oblivious. Lowe’s performance drives this movie into its strange crannies. She can accomplish with a forlorn glance what it took Will Farrell an entire career to achieve and squander.
Sightseers is the creation of Lowe and an actor named Steve Oram. Over the years, they developed these characters from a series of sketches about an English couple traveling England to see the sights, doing inappropriate things along the way. This distillation of those characters is a masterpiece of black humor, mean-spirited and nasty, cruel and uncompromising, uniquely English and drab. It knows enough to be understated. Some of the best moments are Lowe and Oram just riffing with each other. She licks a cave. He tries to explain pictures he didn’t even take. It’s so goddamn precious and mundane in the bits between the mayhem, the vulgarity, and the sociopathic rampages. It’s the opposite of True Romance or Something Wild. True Prosaic. Something Mild. Bonnie and Clyde as unsexy mousy Brits without anything better to do.
But most importantly, it knows when to go over the top without flying off the handle completely, and it knows how to do it smartly rather than gratuitously. It has a respectable sense of the absurd. “I’ve never hurt an innocent person before,” Lowe muses after a nasty accident. “He’s not a person, he’s a Daily Mail reader,” Oram replies without any hint of a wink. English, mean, and smart.
Sightseers is out on DVD today. Support Qt3 by watching it on Amazon.com or watch it instantly on Netflix.
This week we see the Coen brothers’ love letter to existential despair by way of folk music, starring Oscar Isaac, an awesome cat, and some pretty good folk music. Then, at the 42-minute mark, we discuss things we’ve never seen in movies, or some such thing. It makes sense at times.
The Guardian raises the issue of breast physics based on the laughable sway in the above scene from Ryse, the Xbox One swords-and-sandals launch title. Dom Clubb, an UK artist for a free-to-play iOS game, suggests the bad physics might have been a factor of rushed development.
A character mesh is made up of thousands of vertices. When the physics system is applied, each vertex is given a value — lets say 0-1 — depending on how much the artist wants the particular vertex to be affected by physics. This will make the cloth vertices sway and the flesh vertices stay rigid. But because Ryse was probably rushed to make the Xbox One launch, I’m guessing the character was given a single physics system for the whole mesh rather than one for skin and a separate one for cloth. If you were to do the physics properly, there are lots of parameters to deal with, like stiffness, sway and stretch, and the cloth on the breasts would have to deform separately. That would have been a computational nightmare.
That’s pretty charitable. I’m sure the gore in Ryse was also a computational nightmare, but one the developer thought was worth calculating. Like pretty much everything else in videogame development, you do whatever you have time to do. I suspect developer Crytek doesn’t care much about its breasts, or it just assumes its playerbase wouldn’t know how a real breast moves.
What stands out, so to speak, is the state of undress of whoever that chick is, which makes that scene all about the breast physics. If you can’t do it right, Crytek, cover it up. The worst kind of cheesecake is bad cheesecake.
If there’s one thing to make the addition of Ashly Burch and her dad and her brother to Saints Row IV seem less like blatant pandering, it’s the addition of some beardyman from something called Yogcast to Sonic Racing Transformed All-Stars, or whatever that excellent Sega-themed kart racing game is called. At least the proceeds for this $5 DLC go to charity.
Tearaway, the Vita platformer from Little Big Planet developer Media Molecule, features some pretty silly gimmicks with the camera, the touchpad, and even the microphone. But as I got my lazy ass off the couch to go find the cat, I had to concede that silly doesn’t mean not effective.
A handful of Zen Pinball 2 tables will be available for the Playstation 4 on December 17. There are even a couple of classics alongside the usual Star Wars and Marvel stuff (should we just start calling these “Disney” tables?). Who can complain about any selection of Zen Pinball tables that includes Paranormal and Earth Defense? Not me.
However, here’s the big news for those of you who already have collections on the Playstation 3.
If you own any of these on PS3, we invite you to download them on PS4 at no charge. This is our way of saying thank you to all of the players who have supported Zen Studios on PlayStation platforms over the years.
It’s a new platform, so you won’t be able to carry over your high scores. I can’t help but feel this is almost — almost! — a good thing. Nothing kills a table for me like having a really high high score that I know I’ll never be able to beat.
Zen Studios will announce details of their collaboration with Microsoft on the Xbox One sometime early next year.
The zombie apocalypse isn’t all bad. It’s mostly bad. But it’s not all bad. State of Decay, a brilliant rendition of the zombie apocalypse, encompasses both the good and bad.
After the jump, the real triumph and tragedy of the dead walking the earth.Continue reading →
In 1976, a Spanish director named Narciso Serrador made a movie called Who Can Kill A Child?, but with the words in Spanish. It opens with ten minutes of newsreel footage about the atrocities visited on children in the 20th century, from the Holocaust, to starvation in Africa, to the then ongoing conflicts in Southeast Asia. ‘What the heck kind of movie is this?,’ you might wonder. Then the movie proper starts and you’re watching a moody mystery/horror thriller about an English couple vacationing in Spain who happens upon a mysteriously depopulated island. It turns out the children have slaughtered all the adults. Basically, a Children of the Corn before there were any Children of the Corn.
So what was the point of all that newsreel footage? Serrador suggests that these homicidal children are an evolutionary response to the atrocities of the modern era. Children suffer the worst during war, famine, and upheaval. So the children on this island have developed a preemptive homicidal tendency as a survival measure. And because people who don’t commit atrocities have a built-in reluctance to kill children — as per the title of a movie — the children can get away with it. The movie ends with the English couple successfully dispatched (the pregnant wife is actually killed from within by her unborn baby). The children appropriate a Coast Guard boat and sail to the mainland to infect the children there. It’s the end of the world! Roll credits.
After the jump, it’s been long enough! Let’s remake this thing!Continue reading →
