Over at Tap Repeatedly, Amanda Lange shows how to write videogame reviews in her Dragon’s Crown review. She doesn’t list features. She doesn’t hold forth about whether the game is fun. She doesn’t try to gauge whether I’ll like it, or whether you’ll like it, or whether the game playing public will like it, or whether the enthusiast media will like it. She doesn’t focus on how it runs on one platform vs another platform. She instead focuses on her own experience and her reaction to Dragon Crown’s distinct style. She writes articulately, she includes scads of context, and she puts at the forefront her unique insight. She doesn’t even focus on gameplay, just as some movie reviews might not focus on acting or special effects or cinematography. She has her own priorities.
Furthermore, Lange is slyly funny. How can you resist this lead-in, acknowledging the controversy about the game’s sexy and/or sexist portrayal of women?
…it’s impossible to separate Dragon’s Crown from its visual art. I think we should go ahead and gaze into the cracks here; let’s stick our faces in and motorboat the hell out of this controversy.
There are plenty of other quotable tidbits. But unlike reviews that just string together a list of bon mots without any meaningful insight, Lange has an important point. The crux of her review is that Dragon’s Crown illustrates — quite literally — the difference between intentional hypersexualization and ignorant hypersexualization.
And like all great reviews, it doesn’t matter one whit whether I agree with it. As a videogame, I don’t care for Dragon’s Crown. She loves it. That difference of opinion has no bearing on whether her review is good (it is) or whether it’s of any value to me (again, it is). If more people wrote reviews like that, I’d read more reviews.
(Thanks, Mr. Wheeljack!)
Among the announcements rolling out of Gamescom is Electronic Arts’ promise that the upcoming Command and Conquer, a free-to-play real time strategy game that doesn’t need a number or subtitle after its name, is totally going to tell a story. Eventually. Like, next year. Several months after it’s out.
Electronic Arts announced that episodic, story-driven Campaign Missions are in development for Command & Conquer and will be available early next year. The next installment of the award-winning real-time strategy franchise from Victory Games will launch in 2013 as a free live service, with an emphasis on continually adding new content to the game, such as Campaign Missions, based on fan feedback.
In the quote written for him in the press release, veteran developer and EA general manager Jon Van Caneghem says the number one feature requested by the fans is new story content. Really, fans? You guys couldn’t come up with anything else? Really? Thanks.
Real time strategy games are horrible at telling stories, unless the story is about how you told these dudes to go over there to fight those dudes. Although some real time strategy games also tell the story about how your dudes built up defense against those dudes who came over here to fight your dudes. Command & Conquer was a pioneer in telling the story about how one super-powerful dude (or chick named Tanya) moved through a maze populated with weaker dudes that obligingly hung fire until they were killed. I love the genre, and I’m excited to see where EA is taking the Command and Conquer franchise. But the potential for meaningful narrative in RTS gameplay is effectively zero, which is why the stories are always shoehorned into cutscenes between the actual game parts, or yammering heads in a tiny box shoved to one corner of the screen. These are toyboxes, not story delivery devices.
Saints Row IV is an epically meta mindfuck of a love letter to fans of Saints Row, which is to say an epically meta mindfuck of a love letter to videogame power fantasies. Profane, indulgent, sleek, varied, luminous, familiar, new, and brimming with the joy of chaotic chaos. No one does open worlds like Volition. And almost no one does self-referential humor like Volition, a studio that vaults gleefully over the top, cackling madly the whole time, without leaving the basics behind. If you don’t fall head over heels in love with Saints Row IV, you are a little dead inside. Also, I can’t be your friend anymore.
After the jump, is Saints Row IV the best game of all time? Continue reading →
Comedian John Hodgman calls himself “D&D adjacent”, claiming he bailed on RPGs as a kid because they had too much “dumb math”. So the latest Judge John Hodgman podcast, in which he adjudicates various types of disputes, might seem outside his bailiwick. The dispute is between two players in the same long-time RPG group. One player wants to spend more time RPing, exploring lore, and engaging in banter. The other player wants to rush into combat to raise the stakes in a gaming group he feels has become too safe and cerebral. They’re each appealing to Hodgman. It’s a recipe for the usual ridicule. Take a drink every time Hodgman makes a joke about them living in their mother’s basement or not having girlfriends.
Fortunately, no such thing happens (I think there’s a single basement joke). Instead, Hodgman graciously hosts a discussion about the tension between gameplay and the social dynamic, a familiar topic to anyone who plays RPGs or tabletop games. I’d even argue it’s a relevant issue for videogames, where we talk about the tension between gameplay and narrative. It’s a fascinating discussion, partly for how articulate the two men are in presenting their case. And I couldn’t agree more with how Hodgman eventually rules.
(Thanks, Dingus!)
I have already played all the way through pre-release versions of Saints Row IV and Splinter Cell Blacklist and I can say about them something I can say about very few games: I will eagerly play them again when they come out. Which is this week. Like Tomb Raider, another game I eagerly played a second time, these are mainstream AAA franchises at their latest best, with great production values, shrewd game design, and a vivid sense of identity. Sometimes mainstream is mainstream because it’s good.
Indie gem Race the Sun officially launches today. But if you’re like me, you’ve been visiting the beta daily for your fix of an “infinite speed experience”. Still, it’s always satisfying to see a version number make the decisive click from 0.9 to 1.0. Which reminds me that the free-to-play and web-based — normally, I’d run screaming from either of those things — Card Hunter comes out of beta this week. I can’t get a sense yet for whether it’s got legs, but I’m really enjoying how it shuffles a tactical combat game with a deck building game.
Disney Infinity, an action figure delivery device, launches with a whimper that includes two Johnny Depp characters and no Star Wars, Marvel, or actual Disney characters. And I have no idea what to expect from 2K Games’ long-in-troubled-development X-com flavored shooter, also out this week. I can’t even keep the title straight. I think it’s something about a bureau or an administration or a classification. But I’ll play anything made by the studio that made Bioshock 2.
UPDATE: Card Hunter just got pushed back a smidge. The new release date is early September.
It’s hard to believe a podcast that’s been running as long as ours has never done a Woody Allen movie. This episode changes that. For this week’s 3×3, which starts at the 53-minute mark, we pick our favorite space habitats.
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A lot of bad horror movies start with teenagers heading into the woods for a vacation. Very rarely, good horror movies also start this way. Such as Sebastian Silva’s Chilean tale of missed social cues, superstition, paranoia, madness, and worse. Magic Magic is partly one of those “foreigners are evil” movies, about the strangeness of Chile through an American visitor’s eyes. But the foreigners here are the Americans, which is the exact opposite of Eli Roth’s crassly ignorant stories of otherness, where he couldn’t care less if it’s South America or Eastern Europe. Silva’s intimacy with his own country, and particularly the way he conveys menace in the mundane, gives Magic Magic its power.
Next to Silva’s insidious direction, the key to Magic Magic is Juno Temple. This is the sort of fiercely discomfiting and fearless performance you expect from, say, Gena Rowlands. It’s hard to watch. She’s a fascinating actress, singularly committed in a way that’s all too rare for actors of her generation. And although it might give you pause at first, Michael Cera’s role is perfect. He’s just Michael Cera, but he’s in exactly the right place doing exactly the wrong things right. To Cera’s credit — he’s one of the producers, along with indie heavy hitters Christine Vachon and Mike White — he’s not forcing himself into new types of roles so much as finding unexpected and appropriate places to situate himself. This Is the End, for instance.
The rest of the cast is exemplary, with actors far more talented than the usual horror fodder playing roles that transcend the slut, jock, virgin, and nerd archetypes that venture into the woods. Director Silva’s brother, Agustin Silva, is the movie’s scruffy heart. The icily Latina Catalina Moreno (remember Maria Full of Grace?) is its voice of reason and perhaps its villain. One of my favorite shots features Moreno in the background and out of focus, and it’s a sign of Silva’s skill as a director. And the ageless Emily Browning, looking more 14 than ever, is all heart and empathy. Finally, if you’re going to shoot a horror movie in a mysterious foreign country, who better for a director of photography than the amazing Christopher Doyle to bring the color alive and shine shards of light into the dark? All told, Magic Magic is an almost magical concoction of Hollywood talent and arthouse horror storytelling.
Magic Magic is available on video on demand. Watch it here to support Quarter to Three.
Many videogames that struggle to reconcile gameplay and storytelling fail valiantly. Bioshock Infinite and The Last of Us would have been so much better if the developers hadn’t jammed into their wonderful stories the rote gunplay, stealth, and scavenging you expect in your games. But then there are games that know enough to dispense with that stuff to concentrate on story. Some of these are called “adventure games”. There was a time in the olden days, before actual gameplay had been invented, that good writers were making adventure games. Gone Home is a rare instance of modern storytellers reverting to that format without feeling obligated to include gunplay, stealth, or scavenging. Gone Home doesn’t even have achievements.
After the jump, the best haunted house game since Fatal Frame 3 Continue reading →
I haven’t played the Skylanders money-printing factory, but the resident Qt3 authority on the subject speaks highly of it. And I can’t help but admire the immense kid appeal every time I see the displays in a Gamestop. The idea is that the game comes with a stand that you plug into your console system. When you play the game, you play with whatever figures (mostly sold separately) are physically placed on the stand.
So I can only imagine how much Disney is going to clean up with their own Skylanders, which comes out this Sunday. It’s aptly named Disney Infinity, which seems appropriate given the wealth of characters available from all things Disney and its extended family at Marvel, Star Wars, and ABC. Power Rangers, Ty Burrell from Modern Family, Sandra Oh from Grey’s Anatomy, Hurley from Lost. The possibilities are — dare I say? — infinite.
So when I was last at Gamestop, I asked the dude at the counter about the Disney Infinity figures available at launch. He referred me to a display with a sad little collection consisting of three Pixar properties (The Incredibles, Cars, Monsters Inc) and two Bruckheimer movies (The Lone Ranger and Pirates of the Caribbean). Really, Disney? That’s how you’re leading? Not even a lowly Boba Fett, Wolverine, or Donald Duck?
Since Paradox no longer includes Quarter to Three in their first round of review copies — they’re one of the many folks unhappy with our ratings system and given how most other sites limit themselves to the usual 7-9 ratings, who can blame them? — I’m only just now getting started with Europa Universalis IV. Which means reading the manual, dinking around with the tutorials, booting up a game as Austria and admiring the map but chickening out and then booting up another game as Venice and then chickening out again and considering some more remote corner of the world like Poland. Wait, no. What was I thinking? The Aztecs. Still too many potentially dangerous neighbors. Maybe the Incas.
One of my favorite things I’ve read in the manual is this: “Iron man mode is the only time when Steam Achievements are active.” Iron man mode means that you can’t save the game, see how your war against Burgundy goes, and then reload the game to take a year to build a bigger army if it goes poorly. Iron man mode means you only get a single save when you exit the game, and it’s saved on the Steam cloud, so you can’t spirit away the file someplace safe and load it later to redo your disastrous attack on Burgundy. Iron man mode means only a monthly autosave, so if you want to kill the game from the task manager and pretend it crashed, you can never go back more than a couple of weeks. It simply means you can’t call do-overs or takebacks. It means your decisions matter in a way they don’t matter when you can freely save and reload.
Iron man mode uniquely fits Paradox’s strategy games, which aren’t about prevailing over everyone else, like most strategy games. A Paradox game is about surfing history, riding waves of data, cresting its peaks and sliding helplessly down into its valleys, taking it in stride when it sucks you underwater and spits you up on the beach sputtering and hobbled. History isn’t a linear progression up a power curve to the number one spot. It’s about ebbs and flows. And if you want to be an achievement whore — you do want to be an achievement whore, don’t you? — Europa Universalis IV expects you to ride those waves, come what may.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSe3jeOzp3k
A good video is usually worth a thousand words. But sometimes the words are pretty nifty, too. So here is the announcement for Foul Play:
Playing as the Victorian daemon-hunter Baron Dashforth, prepare to smash, strike, banish and beat your way through hordes of wildly costumed extras as you recount your incredible life story live on stage — watch awe-inspiring scene changes play out before your eyes, fires will rage, pyramids will rise, castles will crumble, and deadly monstrosities will burst forth… NO expense has been spared in bringing this scarcely believable, but ENTIRELY ACCURATE story to the stage.
THRILL the baying audience with your incredible presence! Perform shattering takedowns, throws and reversals so perfect you’d swear they were choreographed backstage. String together awesome attacks as the Baron, or have a friend join as your loyal companion Scampwick. Electrify the spectators with linked and special attacks — win the audience with flair and showmanship, and use every stage-trick you know to bring the house down.
Prepare for DRAMA as the Baron’s tale unfolds, from the harsh deserts of Cairo, to the shady streets of Victorian London… and beyond. The finest actors and actresses of the day have been employed to ensure the ABSOLUTE authenticity of the story. Prepare to play out the most spectacular and explosive moments of the Baron’s life; improbable beasts, astonishing villainy, and at the heart of it all — the mysterious Foul Play.
A vaudevillian tale of daemons, disaster, deadly risks and duplicitous dealings two-player online co-op with special team takedowns and linking attacks crowd-pleasing battles, where style matters above all.
The show opens on September 18th for the PC and Xbox 360.
This week, Josh Bycer, Tom Chick, Rob Harvey, and Jason McMaster are up to no good in Payday 2. Find out who sucks at making meth, who got lost in the apartments, who broke his legs wearing a monkey mask, who got burned up in a bus, and who is the master of the Payday 2 quiz.
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Quarter to Three would like to welcome the menacingly elegant Charles Dance to the world of videogame voiceover. CD Projekt Red announced Dance will lend his mellifluously arch tones to an emperor in The Witcher 3.
Daniel Day-Lewis, you can only hold out for so long.
Pick-up groups are a sometimes harsh reality of Payday. But the irony of the above screenshot is that the guy turned out to be really nice. He bumbled around the nightclub a bit while me and the other two guys chatted at him to get the last bag of money. Jerk, get the last bag of money, we typed. Someone finally spoke into voice chat. “Jerk, go upstairs and get the last bag of money”. At that point, a fella is just as likely to drop out of the game as he is to go upstairs and get the last bag of money. Fortunately, Jerk went upstairs and got the last bag of money. Then, in the post-game lobby, he thanked us for our patience and explained that he was “so fuckin high”.
Darkest Night is Victory Point Games’ take on an Arkham Horror style co-op game. Each player gets a character with unique abilities. He moves around the map trying to hold back the tide of baddies and retrieve the relics needed to defeat the main baddie. But instead of the Arkham Horror glut of tiny Ameritrash bits and the requisite hour-long set-up, you’re playing a more Euro-ish game with broader simpler rules that make ample room for interesting character interactions. And instead of fighting Cthulhu, you’re fighting a generic necromancer. I don’t even think he has a name. In the above screenshot, the four hero characters are poised to move out from the monastery on the left. The necromancer is the guy in the ruins on the right. Can you see him? He can be hard to distinguish from the heroes. “No, that’s not my character, that’s the necromancer” is something you’re liable to hear if someone asks you to, say, reach over and move his dude to the swamp.
I mostly don’t believe in modding boardgames. I’m not big on house rules. I tend to trust the developers. Sometimes I’ll make an exception.
After the jump, Darkest Night is one such exception. Continue reading →
