What a great set of expressive faces in this music video for The Doubleclicks‘ “Nothing to Prove”! I could do without the random dudes showing up, but otherwise, this is a lovely parade of lovely people proudly displaying lovely messages.
(Thanks Gulf of Araby!)
Another month, another Marvel Heroes goat rope. Yet another rollback, yet another borked patch, yet another comedy of errors in which they try to fix one thing and break another thing, at which point the fix for the broken fix breaks two more things. Online games is hard.
The latest reason for a vote of no-confidence in developer Gazillion, whose Marvel Heroes is against all odds a game I really like, is a fumbled attempt to deploy patch whatever dot whatever dot zerozerowhatever. In addition to another rollback, everyone will have to download the entire game again. Furthermore, Gazillion admit they have absolutely no idea what happened. From the latest “Oops, We Screwed Up Again” FAQ:
How did this happen when Game Update 1.11 was on Test Center for all this time?
That’s what we’re trying to figure out ourselves. It’s a mystery right now. We were hoping it was an error in the deploy process, but we’ve been through that checklist and it’s not the case.
There are some truly admirable changes in this patch (notes here), including a move away from random hero drops to a resource called eternity splinters you can spend on whatever hero you want. The game sorely needs performance improvements, and that’s a promised part of the latest patch. Furthermore, Marvel Heroes will get options for graphics setting beyond the previous slider bar (in other words, it will finally work like every other PC game). Some overdue common sense is introduced into the interface, such as a level range for different areas. If you’re like me and you like seeing numbers pop out of your target, Marvel Heroes is finally getting that.
There’s no ETA for the patch, which was supposed to be out yesterday morning.
After the jump, exclusive transcript of the Gazillion meeting where they named eternity splinters. Continue reading →
This week, Rogue Legacy game diarist Andrew Kneller joins Tom and Nick to talk about the first time a game blew your mind. When did it happen for you? What was the game and why did it grab you? We also talk about those insidious Steam trading cards, the great news about the ill-fated Doom That Came to Atlantic City, and Phil Fish taking Fez II and going home. Plus Dark Souls, one of those Sniper shovelware games, Pikmin 3, and the joyously dumb Rise of the Triad remake.
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In the latest Tom vs Bruce, we get tres European. I’m the Czechs, Bruce is the West Germans, Sweden is our stage, and Wargame: Airland Battle is our game. I don’t want to spoil anything, but since it isn’t turn-based and doesn’t have hexes, you can imagine how it turns out. Check it out here.
Update: As Dave Oshry, from Rise of the Triad developer Interceptor, points out in the comments section, the dumbness that’s forcing me to replay levels — read on for the specifics — is partly a matter of my own dumbness for me not realizing there’s an option in the menus to go to any previously reached checkpoint.
I can’t help but enjoy the aggressively retro dumbness of the Rise of the Triad remake out this week. It captures the unhinged creativity and unabashed idiocy of the Duke Nukem era. It also demonstrates that a game can be big and dumb without being insultingly bad, Duke Nukem Forever style. However, if there’s one kind of dumb I can’t abide, it’s the sort of dumb that means I will probably never make any progress in Rise of the Triad.
After the jump, how many times am I supposed to play each level? Continue reading →
The most exciting news I’ve heard in a long time is today’s announcement of Failbetter Games’ Sunless Sea. Why is it exciting?
After the jump, ten important facts about a game you’ve never heard of. Continue reading →
Zombies!!! (punctuation theirs) is a competitive zombie apocalypse boardgame in which players set up a city one tile and one turn at a time. Eventually a helipad appears and everyone scrambles to reach it. Until then, the objective is staying alive with very limited ammo, very limited health, a handful of cards to tweak the action, and the brutality of six-sided die rolls. Now Zombies!!! is also a terrible iOS port.
After the jump, zoinks, gadzooks, and ah-ooh-gah! Continue reading →
Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland “there’s no there there”. Fruitvale Station begs to differ. The movie from first-time director Ryan Coogler tells the story of an Oakland man restrained by BART police and then shot in the ensuing scuffle. This happened back in 2009 and it’s been a piece of the city’s identity ever since. Coogler’s movie is partly a portrait of Oakland as he follows his main character around town, unfolding his day and his neighborhood with the warm grainy glow that only filmstock can afford.
But the genius of Fruitvale Station is that it’s not preoccupied with the particular. This isn’t a biopic. It isn’t the politically charged cause celebre you might expect. Of course, you can’t help but think of Trayvon Martin’s shooting as the movie unfolds, but what you’re thinking of isn’t the controversy or the legal proceedings or the aftermath of Zimmerman’s acquittal. What you’re thinking of is the incontrovertible fact of a life needlessly lost. The pervasive sense in Fruitvale Station is sadness. Not anger. Not outrage. Not indignation or a call to action to fight the power. This is a heartachingly simple story about something that shouldn’t have happened, but did.
Fruitvale Station reminds me of Paul Greengrass’ first movie, Bloody Sunday, as a careful chronicle of mounting dread. It reminds me of John Singleton’s first movie, Boyz n the Hood, as a story of people whose stories aren’t often told. It reminds me of Taxi Driver in that it’s directed with a keen eye and acted with stunningly powerful insight into a fascinating frustrated character pulled between two worlds, struggling to make a decision, a victim of his own nature rather than society. In the lead role, Michael B. Jordan is nothing short of a revelation. The way anger and frustration play across his face and twist his mouth, the deep pools of his eyes, his transition to studied easy charm, the way he crumbles into a ball of vulnerability opposite his girlfriend, fiercely played by Melanie Diaz. If I see another scene this year as good as the prison visit with Octavia Spencer as his mother, it will be a very good year indeed.
Fruitvale Station opened last week in select cities.
It’s another superhero movie, with Hugh Jackman going abroad for shenanigans. How does it hold up for this collection of sometime nerds with only minimal comic book cred? Listen to this week’s podcast and find out! At the 49-minute mark, we talk about those weird moments in movies when you should hear something, but you don’t.
Next week: 2 Guns
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Love Letter is a ten dollar card game from AEG that only comes with sixteen cards. That’s right, just sixteen cards. What kind of game has only sixteen cards, especially when a whole bunch of them are identical? Among the sixteen actual cards, there are only eight cards types. For instance, there are five guards. But only one countess. You get a pair each of the barons, princes, and priests, and handmaids. What’s going on here? It’s like downloading a game that’s less than ten megabytes.
After the jump, how good can it be? Continue reading →
This is an oldie, but a goodie. I still can’t believe someone at Sega wasn’t having a laugh with the localization. “They’re really big bad dudes, you know. I think they drink a lot of booze at the bars or someplace.”
(Thanks, Gordo!)
This week, Chris Hornbostel joins us for a discussion about going back to MMOs. What happens when you quit an MMO and then come back months or even years later? Which MMOs are best for this? Why is Secret World featured so prominently in the discussion? Will Tom ever shut up about Guild Wars 2? Is Dark Age of Camelot actually still around? How effectively can McMaster defend World of Warcraft from our scurrilous accusations? For games of the week, we consider whether Red Dead Redemption holds up, what’s gone terribly wrong in the first round of DLC for Metro: Last Light, and what sports game is actually an action RPG.
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The real world amber route is an overland trade route from the Baltic down to the Mediterranean, where Poles, Latvians, and various other eventual unwilling communists carted amber from its source to harbors that fed into a thriving world trade for buyers eager to find dinosaur DNA. I don’t know what else you would do with amber. I guess you could make a necklace or a brooch.
After the jump, beware the Lesovik! The what? Continue reading →
In Apollo 18, a dreadfully dopey found-footage space horror movie, the big reveal is that moon rocks are actually space spiders. Which isn’t much of a surprise considering the movie’s failure to play out like a convincing astronaut procedural. Of course there are space spiders waiting at the end. But Europa Report is like Apollo 18 done right, or Apollo 13 done more fantastically. Think Sunshine, but with the hearty indie spirit you’d expect from a movie about a privately funded mission to one of Jupiter’s moons.
The space procedural stuff is top notch because it’s not afraid to be mundane. It helps that the international cast of actors doesn’t look like an international cast of actors so much as an international astronaut crew. You might recognize Sharlto Copley from Disrict 9, Michael Nyvquist from the original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo movies, Anamaria Marinca from 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, and the other serial killer from the first season of Dexter. But not a one of them looks out of place. Okay, maybe the hot marine biologist is a bit much. But this is mostly a convincing cast working on a lovingly detailed set. What a grand collection of down-to-earth space hardware.
One of the problems with watching this sort of documentary style found-footage, complete with testimony of characters recalling what happened, is that you know which characters are going to be okay, and that furthermore the footage has to find its way back to Earth, where it will be edited and even marked to direct your attention to certain parts of the screen (unless the movie is Apollo 18, which is surprisingly unconcerned with the fact that it’s showing you footage that will blow up in space at the end of the movie). But I love how Europa Report — this is a report, after all — plays with the idea and even earns it.
My main concern watching Europa Report was that at some point it would go off the rails into space spider territory. No such thing happens. It’s too smart for anything other than a gratifying reveal that doesn’t betray the grounded movie you’ve been watching.
Europa Report is available for video on demand now and will have a limited theatrical release next month. Watch it here to support Quarter to Three.
The Conjuring is yet another another low budget/big hit horror movie from the guy who kicked off the Saw franchise. We can’t quite conjure up a consensus on this one. At the one hour and one minute mark, this week’s 3×3 is our favorite ways sunlight is used in movies.
Next week: The Wolverine
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