It should be no surprise that Shih-Ching Tsou’s Left-Handed Girl, which she co-wrote with Sean Baker, has the same energetic ebullience and aching empathy as Baker’s movies: Tangerine, Florida Project, Red Rocket, Anora. It’s also grounded in the same social realism, which again, is no surprise; Baker and Tsou have been collaborating for over 20 years. But whereas Baker’s movies explore Americana, Left-Handed Girl is the story of a plucky family moving to Taipei, the cramped bustling capital of Taiwan to escape…something. What seems at first like an Asian Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore turns out to be so much more.
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I wouldn’t normally play a game like Dispatch. I’ve had very little experience with the Telltale games (well, “games”) that set the stage, mostly because I have very little patience for games that don’t actually have much game. But then I fell in love with a lighthouse. After my reaction to Double Fine’s Keeper, whose lighthouse lumbers amiably between walking simulator and adventure game, I’ve nurtured a newfound curiosity to try adventure games. Just how much have my changing predilections changed? After a brief thrill, Dispatch offers a sobering answer.
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So this is a thing.
Terrifier: The ARTcade Game is out tomorrow on Steam, and even on the Nintendo Switch. It’s a sidescrolling beat-’em-up — I think that’s what you call them — where you play Art the Clown, the sadistic Chaplin-esque killer from Damien Leone’s Grand Guignol horror movies. Leone’s trilogy starts out disgustingly effective, but gets increasingly lore-obssessed and commercially successful as it progresses. For various reasons, I don’t recommend them to anyone but the serious horror aficianado. As for this ARTcade Game, the developer, Relovo, has a history of itch.io releases that implies they might actually know what they’re doing! Could this unseat indie darling Absolum and perhaps upstage the December 1st release of Marvel: Cosmic Invasion? Will we one day get an Art the Clown kart racer? And will Art the Clown plushies be all the rage this Christmas?
Although I often think about going back to play Brian Reynold’s Alpha Centauri, lo, these many years later, I’m not sure I could. There are probably too many issues that would bother me. I probably wouldn’t be able to enjoy it the way I did way back in 1999. My rose-colored lenses might cloud over and fog up. Fortunately, I don’t need to replay Alpha Centauri because Proxy Studios has made Zephon.
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It’s not a formula that’s in vogue these days: a protagonist doing horrible things, forcing the viewer into the uncomfortable paradox of rooting for his comeuppance, but simultaneously dreading it because, after all, this is the main character. It reminds me of 70s cinema, and specifically something like French Connection, where Popeye Doyle does terrible things and is brought low by his choices. Or Sorcerer, where the men’s quiet desperation, a result of their misdeeds, turns explosive. Surely it’s no coincidence that the brothers in Black Rabbit are named Friedkin.
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It’s 2005 and it’s been 20 years since Christoper Reeve’s final Superman movie, the astonishingly cheap made-for-TV-quality Quest for Peace. Reeves’ fall from a horse and eventual death from complications has cast a sad shadow over Superman in the wider world beyond comics. The Man of Steel lived his final years as a ghastly near-cadaver, having to blow into a tube to trundle onstage and show us his resolve. He was an inspiration to people with disabilities and his gradual recovery was a miracle of modern medicine, but it seems he inadvertently humanized Superman in the public consciousness. It turns out the Man of Steel was only ever a man of flesh, no more steel than any of us.
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I fuss a lot about interface and documentation and how videogames teach themselves to us. When I play a game, it’s important for me to eventually know what’s going on, to understand the systems, to wrap my head around the design. I want to know enough to make informed decisions, to fully appreciate what I’m seeing, to share a perspective with the designer and better appreciate what he’s done.
But sometimes, I just have to let go of that. Xenotilt, like Demon’s Tilt before it but absurdly moreso, is one of those times.
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In Love and Death on Long Island, John Hurt plays a reclusive author named Giles De’Ath. Convinced by his agent to finally come out of his self-imposed cultural shell and experience modern entertainment, he ventures to a local cinema to see an E.M. Forster adaptation. But not being hip to the modern multiplex, he instead stumbles into a teenage sex comedy called Hotpants College II. He watches patiently for a time, aggrieved at the inanity of it all, before finally realizing his mistake and drolly noting, “This isn’t E.M. Forster.”
That’s how I felt coming into this game: “This isn’t Painkiller.”
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Oceans not being what they once were, neither are lighthouses. The lighthouse has become, to modern audiences, a place of loneliness, isolation, and even madness and monsters. Imagine being cooped up on some rocky promontory far from civilization, cut off for months, even years at a time.
Yet imagine you’re protecting the brave men who ply the vast uncaring oceans, stitching the world together across their impossible expanse. This is the lighthouse of the aptly named Keeper. This is the sagging stone edifice that somehow revives itself and walks precariously on crab legs made from roots. This is the faithful companion for our dragon gull thing that opens the story. This is the entry point for Double Fine’s latest creation, a mere “adventure” game, but also a staggeringly weird and imaginative journey through a place you’ve never been.
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As you may have noticed, the forums are currently borked. If you were on your way to post something, hold that thought! And thanks for your patience while we figure out what broke and how to fix it.
I’ll update this space as more information is available.
UPDATE: And we’re back up! Turns out the server ran out of disk space, most likely as a result of all my posts about the Switch 2.
Now that Tom is back to liking Robert Eggers movies, listen as he tries in vain to remember the man’s first name. Meanwhile, Kellywand wants listeners to weigh in on their opinion of Nosferatu’s longer term plans with Ellen. What kind of marriage did he have in mind? And where will they be registered? It’s the latest Qt3 Movie Podcast and another classic -opsis for our new favorite classic horror movie!
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We welcome neurosurgeon, wargamer, and cinematic dilettante Bruce Geryk to join us for a discussion of Alex Garland’s provocative [sic] political [sic] thriller [sic], Civil War! For an added bonus, this episode’s -opsis was written and performed by someone Kirsten Dunst personally accused of having a “dirty mind”.
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We’re still working on getting a regular schedule going, and even though this was meant to be a shorter episode specifically for the Dune II synopsis, we end up chatting about Denis Villeneuve’s next entry in the apparently ongoing saga of Timothee Chalamet’s conquest of the universe and our hearts.
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Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which is an absolute delight and one of my favorite games in a long time, has four main things going for it. The first and most immediately obvious is Metropolis, the glittering comic book city where Superman makes his home, an emblem of Silver Age comics if ever there was one.
Rocksteady, the developer who took us inside Arkham Asylum and then built an entire Gotham for their Batman games, has done it again. This time they’ve built a vast, dense, brightly candy-colored Metropolis…and then trashed it. An alien invasion has almost entirely depopulated the city. Its highways are empty and its flying cars are grounded. Walkways and rooftops are littered with the dead in the form of gray ash statues frozen in mid-panic. Drones hoover up hidden survivors to bring them to the mothership. Alien tanks trundle down the highways and patrols roam the streets or squat sullenly on rooftops. Occupation. An eerily abandoned, tattered and beaten utopia, brimming with shredded detail. And given that this is a morality inversion — in Suicide Squad, bad guys are good guys, and vice versa — it all carries the whiff of some dormant fascism. Bioshock: Infinite never had it so good. Now get in there and open-world to your heart’s content!
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We’re doing something a bit different this time, discussing a very strange and strangely compelling British comedy/thriller that Kellywand calls a “What’s going on?” show. It’s technically a six-episode miniseries but if you watch it all at once — which we recommend — it’s just like a three-hour movie! What kind of movie? Well, that’s quite the question.
Up next: We’ll be revisiting two of our top ten picks from 2023. They Cloned Tyrone next week, and Poor Things the week after. And after that, we’re hitting the theaters to see Dune. We hope you’ll join us!
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