Did you play the Dissidia games for the PSP? I see a handful of Final Fantasy fans raising their hands enthusiastically. But only a handful. Even the die-hardest Final Fantasy fan isn’t necessarily inclined to bang his head against a drawn-out leveling grind, creeping up in power one notch at a time, accumulating one tiny crafting ingredient on the way to a ring that boosts a stat a single point. It’s a series of slight imperceptible tweaks to the next fast-paced unbounded flash of anime combat on the way to not much at all beyond more unbounded anime flashes. Dissidia was like staring into a strobe light, and even for some of us who wouldn’t know Lightning from Cloud Strife, just as mesmerizing.
The PSP, and now the Vita, was uniquely suited to Dissidia’s short arena battles. Small system, cramped controls, graphics mini-powerhouse, eminently portable. Three minutes of gameplay at a time, with breaks between to admire your stats, assign points, pick the next mission, whatever. That’s also how Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker got its hooks into someone — me — who couldn’t care less about a Snake or a Pistol Ocelot or a Big Momma. Snippets of gameplay connected by walls of stats? Sign me up. Oddly enough, it’s not that far a jump from Paradox’s strategy games or the numbers-based power leveling in an MMO.
After the jump, dark souls, nier misses, and bearing arms Continue reading →
This week we’re joined by Monaco designer Andy Schatz who recognizes Tom Chick’s intellectual acumen at things like geometry and stealth gameplay, while he also recognizes that some people — he’s too polite to call out McMaster by name — need Moles in their games. We also discuss Korean pop on the Vita, a card game about tragedies befalling hapless families, and a match-3 that’s more than just a match-3.
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As we all know, asymmetry makes all game designs better. Which is one of the reasons chess isn’t very good. The only asymmetry they had invented back when they made chess was which side goes first. Weak. If I made chess, only white would get bishops and only black would get rooks. The white queen would be able to take two turns in a row once per game. The black queen could resurrect the king once. Also, I would include more than one map with the game.
If the developers at Pocketwatch had invented chess, I would strive to be a Bobby Fisher.
But after the jump, they didn’t make chess. They made Monaco. Continue reading →
Eclipse is out today for the iPad. It’s the port of a streamlined boardgame of epic sci-fi strategy. Or, to put it in videogame terms, a full game of Master of Orion 2 or Stardrive or GalCiv II played in an hour. Look how boring (pictured) it looks.
After the jump, you have no idea Continue reading →
Is this modestly budget character-driven thriller Michael Bay’s Fargo, his Once Upon a Time in America, or his Love Guru? Listen to the Pain & Gain podcast to find out. At the 34-minute mark, this week’s 3×3 points out the best fingers in movies.
Next week: Iron Man 3
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Before today, I didn’t know that K-pop was a thing. I’d heard of J-pop. Japanese pop music. But there was Korean pop, pre-Psy? Who knew? Not only do I now know it’s a thing, but I’m dangerously close to actually considering the possibility of maybe looking into the option of perhaps buying Kara’s latest album, Step. Oh, look, it’s $12 on iTunes. Kara is a K-pop group that really took off in Japan, hence their inclusion in a Vita rhythm game called DJ Max Technika Tune, in which I am now level three (3!) at listening to them and watching them prance around glittery stages in cute little costumes. Well, trying to watch, but my finger keeps getting in the way as I poke at the gameplay bits.
There might be other musical artists in DJ Max Technika Tune, but I’m not sure.
…Eliza. From developer Lab Zero’s “playstyle speculation” section:
The ultimate attack-from-disadvantage character. Because of her kinship with her [skeletal] parasite, Eliza can control her own blood. Each time she is hit she bleeds, [Mortal Kombat] style, and the blood stays on the stage. Certain specials and supers can then use it.
Uh, eww? Wait, I meant, “Cool!” I think. Whatever’s going on with Eliza, she’s definitely not normal. See Lab Zero’s full-length concept art after the jump to check out assets that would make Portal’s Chell jealous. I can only imagine how she gets around with those!
The next round of voting to determine the fourth and final character in the upcoming Skullgirls DLC should begin shortly. Good luck, Annie and Sagan!
After the jump, are those real? Continue reading →
Remember Ubisoft’s April Fool’s Day announcement for Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon that turned out not to be a joke? The fifteen-dollar downloadable game out this week will presumably demonstrate that the Far Cry 3 engine is too good to be contained solely in Far Cry 3. It is apparently so good that it knocks itself back into a previous decade. This standalone release was inspired by the vision of the future realized on VHS tapes in the 80s. It therefore stars Michael Biehn. In other words, it came across time for me.
The add-on for Heroes of Might & Magic VI, Shades of Darkness, is apparently enough to merit its release as a standalone game, but like Blood Dragon, not enough to increment the Roman numeral. Ubisoft is at the forefront of numeric conservation.
Zeno Clash II — note the incremented Roman numeral! — is the latest installment in Chilean developer Ace Team’s first person puncher series, which began life over ten years ago as a Quake mod. You explore alien worlds and sometimes punch exotice creatures. Even if it’s awful, it will probably be better than anything you see on Syfy these days. Can you tell that I’m watching Defiance?
Deadly Premonitions will be re-released in the form of a “director’s cut”. Consider me surprised that the original release of this weird take on America and Twin Peaks wasn’t already its director’s cut. Did you know that you fight an axe-weilding jawa in that game?
Finally, if you have a Vita, it’s not dead yet. Soul Sacrifice is more than happy to drink up as much time as you want to give it.
In Soul Sacrifice, the Vita action RPG out next week, one of the spells is called Red Fruit of Lust. It creates a life-size poster of a hot nekkid chick with strategically placed hair and a skull. Which seems odd since I was under the impression M-rated games didn’t have to shy away from nipples and pubic hair. Well, okay, maybe they’re not ready for pubic hair, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen nipples in M-rated games. At any rate, it’s all very softcore, but the idea is that monsters will go “Va-va-voom!” while their legs kick up in the air and their eyeballs pop forward out of their skulls. In practice, they just take a few swipes at the poster, but those are swipes they aren’t taking at you.
Not since a Metal Gear Solid game has porn had such gameplay value. Snake used to drop girly magazines to distract guards, but I don’t recall the player every getting to see the contents of the magazines, which might have included nipples and pubic hair. Soul Sacrifice has additional varieties of distractions. There are variations based on food, money, and even hot dudes. The latter is a spell called Blue Fruit of Lust, and it creates a life-size poster of a shirtless dude whose nipples are fully exposed. In many ways, Soul Sacrifice has something for everyone.
Talisman, a miserable Monopoly-meets-D&D boardgame from a time back when we didn’t have many good boardgames so a miserable boardgame wasn’t such a bad thing after all, is so miserable that the developers of Talisman Prologue for the iOS couldn’t bear to just make an actual port. They instead turned it into a series of jiggered episodes, edited down from the actual game into shorter canned challenges. The thinking seems to be that Talisman’s gameplay can’t stand up without some re-engineering.
So here each of the characters gets a series of unlockable solo scenarios, all scored by the number of turns it takes you to reach a goal. Losing a turn doesn’t mean everyone else gets one turn closer to beating you, because there’s never anyone else. It just means that your score is one point higher than it would have been. As if the dice weren’t a harsh enough mistress. As if your score was actually integrated into the game anywhere other than the character selection screen, where it’s instead some sort of voodoo about how many talismans that character has gathered. This is a pretty poor excuse for a score chase.
The production values are a slick transliteration of the boardgame, not too slavish, but immediately recognizable to anyone who’s played the boardgame. But you can’t play actual Talisman. You can’t just let the cards fall where they may, putting your warrior at the mercy of whatever psychic battles he might draw or leaving your prophetess to lose her last life at the untimely appearance of a measly goblin. You can’t set up a game with multiple characters. You can’t play with your friends. The miserableness of Talisman is here an entirely solitary experience, hemmed in by particular cards, played to some preset deadline. It’s a modest dice-driven fifteen minute adventure in which the warrior has to reach a certain space or the elf has to collect so many followers or the mage has to get his craft to ten.
The idea is that it’s called Talisman Prologue because the full Talisman experience — playing alone without having to use a rigged deck for a canned challenge — will be along later as paid DLC. At which point, I can imagine it might we worth the silliness of letting the dice and cards fall where they may on a quest for the Crown of Command and the ensuing PvP bloodbath. Until then, these canned side quests are a pretty poor substitute for whatever entertainment you and your friends might normally wring from a real-world copy of Talisman.
2 stars
iOS
It’s been nearly ten years since Shane Carruth’s Primer, an intriguing first-time director project with a smart spare style, a cold dispassionate edge, and hardly a performance worth remembering. But Carruth’s Upstream Color is so much more — I don’t intend this to sound as patronizing as it’s going to sound — mature than Primer. It has real emotional weight underneath the concept, where Primer was all concept.
A lot of the credit goes to the heartbreakingly expressive Amy Seimetz. Her frail intensity similarly drives a horror movie called A Horrible Way to Die. Carruth knows enough to let the movie linger on her, on her wonder, on her wounded confusion, on how she’s looking at whatever she’s looking at. The payoff is a scene in which she shifts her gaze up a few degrees. You can see it coming, you know it’s going to happen, but watching her finally fix the deep black of her gaze is a staggering moment. Literally. God Himself cannot bear to look back.
Upstream Color is rich with theme, meaning, and oblique references that might not bubble up until long after you’ve left the theater. When Moses met God on Sinai, he couldn’t look at God’s face. Upstream Color opens with a similar moment, and culminates with the aforementioned shift in gaze, but this is no mere movie about religion. In Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire, the angels looked on sadly, forlornly, one of them wanting desperately to be seen. In Upstream Color, the angel is no angel, and he lives in the DNA of a worm instead of atop the Victory Column in Berlin. Upstream Color, which is like Wings of Desire in that it’s about empathy, presents identity theft as a metaphor for evolution. Or is it the other way around? It’s about the terrible price living creatures pay for empathy, or the power of memory at a cellular level (hi, Altered States!), or how consciousness is unmoored from time and space. I sound like I just dropped acid and watched 2001 for the first time with my friends, and now we’re holding forth in someone’s dorm room, convinced we’re all smarter for it. But that’s the level at which Upstream Color works, and it works wonderfully if you’re willing to meet it on those terms. I don’t mean dropping acid. But I do mean whatever your counterpart is to holding forth in someone’s dorm room. For instance, writing up a short review like this.
Too few directors take the chances Carruth has taken here. His creative vision, which goes well beyond directing into editing, music, stunning cinematography, and even how his acting creates a place for Seimetz to curl up, deserves the freedom he affords himself. This is a uniquely languid movie, and potentially confusing, and not at all neat. People who came because they saw the trailer might get up and leave and later feel right at home in Oblivion, or maybe even the pedestrian film-school anime-fan trippiness of Looper. Upstream Color, the opposite of a crowd pleaser, is what would happen if Terence Malick’s Tree of Life was a genre movie instead of his usual meditation on the meaning of life. I’m inclined to put Upstream Color in the same bio-punk category as Brandon Cronenberg’s Antiviral. I don’t pretend to know much science fiction beyond movies, but if young directors like Carruth, Cronenberg, Duncan Jones, and Neill Blomkamp keep doing what they’re doing with the genre, I might have to apply for a sci-fi fan card.
Upstream Color is in limited release and will be available for video on demand May 7th.
Skullgirls’ remarkably successful crowdfunding campaign means we’ll get Squigly, a girl with a snake in her hair, and Big Band, a saxophone in an overcoat who’s definitely not a girl. This means the game will have to be called Skullgirls and That One Guy. Note that even if you didn’t donate to the campaign, you still get the characters. The DLC is free on all platforms. You’d think that’s a terrible premise for a crowdfunding campaign, but the Skullgirls developers pulled in $829,000 for a $150,000 funding goal. They’re obviously doing something right.
Among the stretch goals were two additional characters, also free, who would be selected by the people who donated to the campaign. The voting for the first of the two additional characters has just entered its final phase and will come down to either Aeon, Annie (pictured), Eliza, and Minette, all of whom you can see here. I don’t want to influence anyone’s vote (yes I do), but Annie’s toothy rabbit, which gives her galactic themed powers, is named Sagan. That beats a bear named Tibbers any day of the week.
(Thanks anonymous!)
The Wii U, which is known in my household as the Lego City Undercover system that we sometimes use to play ZombiU multiplayer and that I would be playing Monster Hunter on if it wasn’t for the superlative and portable Soul Sacrifice on my Vita, just got the patch that supposedly makes it less of a sluggish beast at the front end. From Nintendo’s press release:
* The time required to start the Wii U console, launch built-in applications, exit software and return to the main menu, jump between applications, and jump between software and Miiverse has been reduced.
* While the Wii U logo is being displayed during the system startup, users can directly transition to the Wii Menu by holding down the B Button on the Wii U GamePad.
* Users can install games and applications from the Nintendo eShop in the background while other software is being used.
* When powering off during a download, Wii U will go into a standby mode, then power off when all downloads and installations are complete.
Unfortunately, it still takes crazylong for Lego City Undercover to actually load. The obvious solution — to just never stop playing — is an easy enough workaround.
Capcom has announced some of the multiplayer modes in Lost Planet 3, the sequel to a grand shooter in which you could freely play the entire campaign cooperatively. It was almost enough to make up for the lack of a horde mode in a game that was so perfectly suited for a horde mode. Two of the four multiplayer modes in Lost Planet 3 are scenario mode and akrid mode (“akrid” is the name of the monsters in Lost Planet).
Scenario Mode sets each team a series of either offensive or defensive challenges and mixes them up with the extreme and unpredictable conditions of E.D.N. III. Players can compete in both third person on-foot action and in first person combat using the futuristic Vital Suits, making this a dynamic gameplay experience.
It sounds a bit like the dynamic team-based objectives that made Killzone 3 and Max Payne 3 such great multiplayer games. But here’s the one that really stands out:
Akrid Survival sees two teams of three players compete independently of each other in a series of encounters against waves of hostile Akrid before the teams go head to head in a final PvP elimination round.
I don’t know why you’d want to ruin a perfectly good horde mode by then making me fight the other guys, but I’ll take what I can get.
Lost Planet 3 comes out August 27.
McMaster, Nick, Tom, and Vickie discuss whether to bring the monkey in Monaco, who is and isn’t a villain in Tomb Raider, action RPGs that are and aren’t Diablo 3, and some tower defense game McMaster can play at work. Also the latest on whether there were elves at Helm’s Deep, advances in pizza delivery technology, and Lombaxes in cinema.
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