Chris: Frailty is a movie that feels as if it will be a stark and rather brutal rumination on faith. What do you believe? How much do you believe it? What are you willing (or unwilling) to do as part of that? As the movie’s star and first-time director Bill Paxton layer in the tension (in no small part due to Matthew McConaughey trying out his Rust Cohle persona as the narrator), we wonder–how close to a twisted Abraham and Isaac scenario will this go movie go?
Chris: Many effective horror films reside on fears that are as old as western civilization. Our stories of ghosts, vampires, and other supernatural beasties are rooted at the very beginnings of our collective history and folklore. Session 9, however, creates horror from fears both more primal and yet also more rooted in modern culture. It is a movie fueled by being afraid of not being a good provider for family at home. In many ways I was reminded of the same neuroses that fuel the plot of Glengarry Glen Ross when watching this. Both are films in which the main characters do bad things because the pressure of work and home have caught up to them.
After the jump, Jack Lemmon never had a sharp putty knife Continue reading →
Chris: During our horror movie gab-fest last year, it’s entirely possible that either Tom or I or both of us mentioned that American Werewolf in London was the last non-awful werewolf movie ever made. Some readers took us to task in the comments section, with more than a few folks pointing out that this film from future Orphan Black co-creator John Fawcett proved us wrong and was completely worth seeing. Yeah right. A Canadian werewolf movie about outcast high school goth girls. That sounds…well, actually, that sounds like it could be pretty damned good.
After the jump, Michael J. Fox and Jason Bateman need not apply. Continue reading →
Bill: The first thing anyone new to the films of Japanese director Takashi Miike should do is visit his entry on IMDB. Just look at that headshot. He doesn’t look terribly interested in pleasing anyone, does he? Checking out his bio we find quotes that support that cursory observation. Miike says things like “I don’t think about the audience, I don’t think about what makes them happy, because there’s no way for me to know.”, and “I don’t make rules myself. I didn’t study enough to be able to make them. I’m too stupid.” This is a director who created an episode for a series called The Masters of Horror on Showtime that was deemed too graphically disturbing to air. The year prior to that he worked on the revival of the classic Japanese children’s show, Ultraman.
I guess what I’m saying is that when you sit down for a Miike film, you really don’t know what to expect from the man.
Chris: You can see it in Mike’s eyes the morning after. They fully register that something weird happened outside the group’s tent that night. Not so with Heather, who we’ve come to realize is Ahab and this documentary her white whale. She’s driven to make her movie more than anything else and is upset she got nothing on film. For his part, Josh seems bemused. Smirking, he reminds everyone about what happened in Deliverance. Mike is different though. His eyes are wide and dancing. The disturbance the night before freaked him out. He can’t understand why the others aren’t more scared.
It’s a key moment for The Blair Witch Project, as much a turning point in the movie as the unexplained noises the night before. We begin to realize that this film won’t pull punches or wink at the audience. This is a different sort of horror movie. It is a film about very real, mounting fear.
Last year Tom and I spent the month of October covering 30 years of horror movies, from the first red blood in a Hammer film on through to the dusty desert vampires of Near Dark. We covered the rise of the genre into the modern era and mainstream acceptance. We wrote about some of the most influential, interesting, and (hopefully) frightening films of that time period and really enjoyed talking about them with folks in the comments and on the forums. For this October, I figured we would pick up where we left off in 1987, and bring you a bunch of great horror movies from that year on through the 1990s.
There was just one problem with that. The 1990s were the worst decade for horror movies in the history of cinema.
[Editor’s note: Every two weeks, we’ll pick a classic game to play and discuss. Then the choice of the next game will be made by a randomly selected participant from the current discussion. It’s like a book club, but with videogames. We’d love to have you join us. Register for the forums and hop into the discussion! This week’s choice, by jsnell, is Master of Orion 1. Yep, that’s 1. Not 2. 1.]
For this iteration of the classic game club I’ve chosen a game that’s 20 years old, and an improvement over all of its successors. Master of Orion is the prototypical space 4X game. Like all games that effectively ended up defining a genre, it’s interesting to visit from a historical point of view. But the game would stand alone even without that historical context.
After the jump, what a lack of a difference 20 years makes.Continue reading →
This week, I return to the Playboy Mansion in an attempt to play board games with attractive women and defeat the nefarious Dick Rosenzweig. I am successful at neither pursuit. Plus: ta-tas! Seriously! They’re unsheathed, and they’re spectacular.
It’s been a hot week here in Los Angeles. Of course, I’m talking about the time I’ve spent at the Playboy Mansion. This shameless cash-in was developed by Cyberlore (!!), who also made Majesty. Unlike Majesty, Playboy: The Mansion combines America’s two favorite things: The Sims and titties. I guess that’s three favorite things? Anyway, let’s see if this game holds up. One thing’s for sure — it takes place on a 2D map, so it can’t be worse than Planetary Annihilation!
[Editor’s note: Every two weeks, we’ll pick a classic game to play and discuss. Then the choice of the next game will be made by a randomly selected participant from the current discussion. It’s like a book club, but with videogames. We’d love to have you join us. Register for the forums and hop into the discussion! This week’s choice, by Stefan “Desslock” Janicki, is Fallout.]
As a lover of classic games, choosing just one to inflict upon you was extremely difficult. I narrowed down my choices to two games which I think everyone should have the experience of playing — they’re among the best games ever created and were influential, and yet neither was a significant commercial success at the time of release and they’ve proven surprisingly difficult to replicate well. They are also surprisingly similar games, despite being from different genres.
My choice is the original Fallout, developed and published by Interplay Productions in 1997. Several of the principal developers would leave Interplay to form Troika Games, while other members of the team who remained at Interplay would go on to release Fallout 2, Icewind Dale and Planescape Torment under the “Black Isle” Division that was formed shortly after the release of Fallout. Fallout was a spiritual successor to Wasteland, an earlier game published by EA and developed by Interplay founder Brian Fargo – Interplay couldn’t get the IP rights to produce a Wasteland sequel, so it instead choose to develop its own post-apocalyptic setting. Fallout was also originally supposed to use Steve Jackson Games’ GURPS rules system – a popular and versatile pen and paper RPG system at the time – but disagreements during development ultimately resulted in Interplay creating its own system, which it called SPECIAL, which turned out to be one of best RPG development systems ever created.
(NOTE: The following article originally appeared online for Gamepro three years ago. I’m running it again now because I’m hoping there’s something even remotely this good in Destiny. Fingers crossed!)
Depending on who you ask, The Library in the original Halo is one of the most reviled levels in all of videogaming. It features infinitely spawning enemies, long empty stretches of repeating level design, and none of the cool tactical combat against smart AI that has characterized the game up to this point. If Halo were to include a dialogue option like the Modern Warfare games — “This game features The Library, which may offend some players. Would you like to skip this level?” — many of you would select “yes”.
At which point you would miss one of the greatest levels in all of videogaming.
After the jump, that’s right: one of the greatest levels in all of videogaming.Continue reading →
In the late ’90s, I saw Spycraft littering more bargain bins than there are humans in the United States. And yet, today it’s regarded as a pretty solid adventure game that tried to do a lot of things, and was good at most of them. Plus it’s got tons of FMV, which no ’90s game was good at. Add those ingredients together and you’ve got a recipe for what I hoped would be a fun Quarter to Three Let’s Play. Was I right? Click that big fat “Play” button and find out.
Hey, I’m playing a modern game! Well, sort of. This is a “reboot,” to use a term typically reserved for Hollywood and I guess also computers, of the beloved 1987 adventure game, Shadowgate, which was ported to every system under the sun. There have already been a few lackluster Shadowgate follow-ups on your grandfather’s video game consoles like TurboGrafx-16 (a side-scrolling beat-em-up!) and Nintendo 64 (something involving polygons!), but this one promises to be the real deal. It was funded on Kickstarter, and designed by the two old dudes who brought us the original Shadowgate, a game I played and loved. Will it kill me promptly? It wouldn’t be Shadowgate if it didn’t. Only one way to find out.
As long as there has been games, there have been cheat codes. Whether it’s a programming tool left in by the original creators or a secret meant for some overzealous fan to find, cheats are still as popular as ever. But there are still some that haven’t yet been discovered. Until now. Here’s some of our favorite undiscovered cheat codes for you guys to try out at home!
