You can’t very well read a description of Circus Train and not be intrigued. A boardgame about managing a circus in the 30s, during the era of the Depression and Prohibition, before circuses were weird and creepy? And it’s got trains! Who knew circuses got around on trains?
After the jump, something wicked awesome this way comes? Continue reading →
It’s not easy to get a group going in Marvel Heroes, partly because you rarely need to get a group going. You’re mostly put into groups as needed. But there are occasions that you really want a good group, particularly for post-story content like the red terminal missions. These have really hard-hitting enemies and better loot. But it seems like many Marvel Heroes players are content to just burn through content way below their level. I guess that’s how superheroes work in real life.
So after trying to encourage random folks to stick with me — there’s no way I can do the red terminal missions alone — I finally cobbled a group together and leaped into the mission, hoping they would follow me and not be too discouraged by the difficulty level. After we got past our first encounter, hoping to offer some encouragement to my new companions, I typed in “Now we’re cookin’!” To my horror, here’s how it turned out in the chat window:
I can only imagine what they must have thought I typed.
It’s been too long since indie horror director/producer Larry Fessenden made his own movie. The Last Winter, his clumsy bigger budget attempt to follow-up on the sublime Wendigo, came out in 2006. And now Beneath completes the trajectory from sublime to clumsy to ridiculous, plopping into a tiny lake and barely making a splash.
Beneath starts with the usual beats for a crappy horror movie. Stereotypical smirking teens going out into the woods, their bewilderment at not getting cell phone reception, an elderly harbinger warning them away, a cat scare, and so on. You might think Fessenden — once a smart, subtle, insightful filmmaker and even actor (in the movie Habit, the bathtub explanation about his missing tooth is a memorable heartfelt instance of non-acting acting) — is doing this stuff knowingly. You might think he’s going to cleverly subvert it.
No such thing happens, perhaps because Fessenden is working from a script by two guys who wrote Bird Flu Horror. I didn’t see Bird Flu Horror. I’m confident I don’t need to see Bird Flu Horror. I’m also confident that Beneath has more in common with Bird Flu Horror than with Wendigo, Habit, or even The Last Winter. Because once the giant catfish shows up, everything plays out exactly like any other crappy creature feature, inept even in its half-hearted attempts at titillation and gore. You might be inclined to applaud a horror movie that relies exclusively on practical effects, but you can only get so far dragging a big rubber bug-eyed catfish through a small lake. These are the kind of practical effects that make you long for a little CG.
If you want a movie about people trapped by something in the water, see Black Water. Actually, see Black Water anyway. And if you want to see what a brilliant filmmaker Fessenden can be, you’re going to have to go back to Wendigo.
Beneath is currently available on various video on demand services. If you must watch it, support Quarter to Three by using this link. Or, better yet, this one.
This week we talk about how we’re getting past that summer hump of no new releases. Our games of the week are all old standbys, some older than others. Tom relates Marvel Heroes to the fallout from George Zimmerman’s acquittal, Nick can barely get a word in edgewise in the Guild Wars 2 conversation, and McMaster keeps it real, DOTA style. And comic book style.
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Unlike many open-world games, State of Decay ends decisively. You can always go back to your saved game just before the last mission. But once you do that mission, you leave Trumbull Valley for good. The credits roll. There’s no going back and doing fun activities. State of Decay is over.
Fortunately, developer Undead Labs is working on an open-ended sandbox mode. How will it work, given that Trumbull Valley is seeded with a limited amount of resources when you start playing? Community manager Sanya Weathers passes along some details from an online chat with Undead Labs founder Jeff Strain.
Jeff said, “The goal of sandbox is to provide an unbounded experience, one with no victory condition that ends the game. The way we do that is to continue to have a world with finite resources, but find out ‘how long can I stay alive.'”
Without going into too much detail (although details are coming within a week), you start in the world, build your community, clean the valley out – and when it runs dry, you can leave with some portion of your community and go to “the next valley.” The next valley is the same map, repopulated with resources…but harder. More zombies. More difficulty. Just…more.
How many Trumbull Valleys can you survive? Find out later this year, since Undead Labs has promised the sandbox mode will be out this year.
If there’s one thing playing CCGs will teach you, it’s that Magic is a relic. Today there are so many better ways to collect, arrange, and play with cards. But getting there first counts for a lot. Magic’s gameplay comes from the genre’s earliest days. It’s not popular because it’s good. It’s popular because it has the weight of success behind it, like Monopoly, Risk, and the Grown Ups movies. That much momentum isn’t going to give way to better games any time soon.
However, if I’m going to play Magic, one of the best ways to do it is on the iPad, with one of developer Stainless’ annual releases, fingering and flicking the cards across the table, tapping to pick them up, thumbing through your hand as if they were physically fanned out before you. The interface is just so right and the pacing is perfectly executed. My cards versus his cards and we’re done in ten minutes tops. It’s worth noting Stainless also did the only decent way to play videogame Risk when they adapted Risk: Factions a few years ago.
After the jump, so what’s new in Magic this year? Continue reading →
This week we saw Pacific Rim, in which giant robots fight stuff, but the director kind of knows what he’s doing. The action really heats up at the 55-minute mark, when we discuss our favorite seductions in movies.
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The Zephyr Sanctum is a massive airship temporarily anchored at the Labyrinthine Cliffs. That’s my necromancer standing on the prow. The airship will be there as long as Guild Wars 2’s Bazaar of the Four Winds lasts, which I think is for another week.
This latest round of new content is an impressive feat in completely changing how you get around. Guild Wars 2, a game without mounts and without flying, is mostly about walking around. It has had optional jumping puzzles tucked into various corners. Some of them even have a touch of personality and they all have some reward waiting at the top. But they’re still just jumping puzzles, and they often require trying to figure out the rules of footing on imprecisely drawn terrain. Did the level designer intend for me to think I can jump there? I often find out the hard way.
As you work your way up the cliffs to the Zephyr Sanctum, it’s clear there are going to be jumping puzzles. It’s just so darn vertical. And all the rigging up there. You know you’re going to be jumping around in that. The whole thing looks at first like a town where you can buy stuff and sell stuff. But it’s more than that. Unlike Guild Wars 2’s other towns, it’s got plenty of combat. You’ll be walking past a merchant stand and someone accidentally lets loose a giant demon. Now you’re fighting a big public battle. A couple dozen drunkards burst out of a tavern. Reptilian slavers storm the docks.
But what mostly distinguishes the Zephyr Sanctum are the three power-ups you can find scattered around the cliff and the catwalks, each of which gives you 10 bursts of special movement. You can shoot forward as a sunbeam, call the wind to leap higher than normal, and use lightning to fling yourself to a specific point. These powers are the basis for a multiplayer race to the top of a spire (with some reward at the top, of course). But you can also use these power-ups to find crystals tucked into unlikely places. Hold down the key to highlight interact points and you’ll likely see a few of the crystals. How are you supposed to get up there? With sun, wind, lightning.
There are 52 crystals all told, but you only have to get 40 to unlock the reward, which is an achievement that applies towards the overarching Bazaar of the Four Winds achievement. You also get a model of the race spire. It’s an object that you can only deploy in town, but anyone who clicks on it gets a nifty cutscene showing off the Zephyr Sanctum airship. I hate jumping puzzles. I didn’t hate getting those 40 crystals.
If you play Agricola for the ruthlessly honed gameplay, there is no reason the boar space in this iOS port should have a baby boar with a spotted coat snuffling around inside the pen. There is no reason a chicken with two chicks should stroll through the town center. There is no reason the cows should wag their tails. There is no reason sheep should wriggle when you pick them up. There is no reason plowed and sown fields should sprout rows of ripening crops as if you were playing some sort of latest-gen Harvest Moon. There is no reason successive turns should have icons representing different seasons.
After the jump, unreasonably cute. Continue reading →
I wouldn’t normally care about an upcoming MMO developed by an unproven studio. But developer Carbine recently saw fit to hire one of the best writers I know who, in the interest of full disclosure, also happens to be a friend of mine. Still, it’s an MMO with a cartoony sci-fi theme. If I wanted to play World of Warcraft with laser guns, I’d roll up one of those blue space elfs. The Drainae, or whatever they’re called.
But the above video demonstrates how Wildstar will be different from many of the MMOs I’ve played. You don’t target anyone. Instead, you hold down your mouse button or hotkey to bring up an overlay. This shows where your attack will hit. While holding down the button, you can move around freely to line it up. To attack, simply let loose of the button. This also applies to healing. Healing will require more than the ability to watch hitpoint bars go up and down. As noted in the video, you’ll know a good healer when you see one.
Plenty of MMOs have used a similar area effect for attacks. Guild Wars 2 and Secret World come to mind. But they’ve also used the traditional “tab lock” scheme where you target a single unit and therefore automatically land your attack if you’re facing the right direction. This can downplay the skill based element of combat, which Wildstar wants to emphasize.
But tab locking ensures clearly presented information about your target, such as health, mana, buffs, and debuffs. Even over-the-top action RPGs like Diablo 3 and Marvel Heroes rely on tab locking to show you information about your enemies. This also helps with something as simple but important as the name of the target, a significant part of world building. For instance, in Guild Wars 2, would I know a skelk from a river drake if the names weren’t so consistently in my face? I appreciate that Wildstar wants combat to be an action-oriented experience that involves player skill, and this is plenty of reason to look forward to trying the game. But it’s a solution that also presents its own problems.
(Thanks, gurugeorge!)
Tom Chick and Bruce Geryk speak with Eric Lee Smith, the designer of Gettysburg: The Tide Turns, in development for the iPad. You might think you don’t want to play a Gettysburg game. How silly of you. Because did you play Battle of the Bulge on the iPad? That was made by Eric’s company, Shenandoah Studios. Find out how well Battle of the Bulge sold, what lessons from Battle of the Bulge will find their way into Gettysburg, and why wargames belong on the iPad. It should be no surprise that all three of our games of the week are tabletop games. But it is a surprise that they involve erotic pants, Hustlers, and clowns in St. Louis.
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Civilization V is a ramshackle collection of astonishingly dumb tactical AI, half-baked diplomacy, a godawful mess of social policies, an even more godawful mess of religion, a precarious interface, and a Keystone Kops routine of armies, navies, workers, generals, and now artists stumbling over each other one hex at a time. The difficult part about having a strong military isn’t the upkeep. It’s figuring out where to put everyone. Add to all this some crass DLC and it’s enough to send you screaming back to Civilization IV.
Until a new expansion comes along.
After the jump, how brave? How new? Continue reading →
The first round of DLC for Metro Last Light will be next week’s Faction Pack. This consists of three missions, one from each of the game’s factions, which is a pretty cool angle for further exploring Metro’s post-apocalyptic subway expression of the Russian national identity.
As a Special Detachment Sniper of the Redline, players must infiltrate a heavily guarded Reich Outpost at night, under the cover of a deadly radioactive storm…before defending the Frontline as a Reich ‘Heavy’, armed with some of the most devastating weaponry found in the Metro. Lastly, players take the role of a Polis Ranger in training, tasked with exploring the vast Library complex for artifacts and relics. Salvage can be exchanged for ammunition, filters and hazard suits allowing ever deeper exploration into the Library. Rangers are advised to ignite torches and leave a trail of lights, so they can find their way back to the base before their precious oxygen runs out.
Publisher Deep Silver also announced details for the rest of the announced DLC.
The ‘Tower Pack’ presents a unique experience for seasoned Metro gunslingers – a challenge based game mode, with online Leaderboard support, as players fight their way up the combat simulator known as The Tower
The ‘Developer Pack’ boasts a fully stocked Shooting Gallery, the AI Arena and Metro Museum… And a bonus solo mission — The Spiders’ Nest — offers some new tools for dealing with an infestation of the skittering Spider mutants
Lastly the Chronicles Pack will feature original single player missions that cast the player as three of the game’s standout characters — Pavel, Khan and Anna — and explore their side-stories away from Artyom’s adventure.
Each pack will be $5, or available as part of a $15 season pass. Meanwhile, Bioshock DLC is a no-show and Square/Enix is selling multiplayer maps for Tomb Raider.
I just got an official collections notice for my house in Lord of the Rings Online, a game I haven’t really played since it went free-to-play three years ago. “Dear occupant,” the email read, “We love having you as a neighbor, but you must pay your housing upkeep! Foreclosure deadline is July 26th.” July 26th is underlined.
The email links to this update from two months ago about player housing, which pretends that real estate in a virtual world is a limited commodity so they’re gonna need the space back. That’s what I call RPing.
In Marvel Heroes, my level 16 Wolverine just found a pet jawa. For some reason, he looks peeved. The jawa, not Wolverine. Wolverine just looks sullen. Now Wolverine bloodlessly eviscerates bad guys while a fretting jawa tags along behind him.
When Disney bought Marvel, I expected crossover gimmicks. But this? I just thank the maker I didn’t find an Ewok.
