Mafia III has a torture scene. It’s the cool thing in open-world games, it seems. Grand Theft Auto V had it and so did Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. In both of those games, the violence came with controversy. In Grand Theft Auto V’s case, the in-your-face requirement of being the torturer upset some players and made them recoil. In Metal Gear Solid V’s scene, the violence was slightly removed since it was in a cut-scene, but the victim was an important focal point of some people’s negative opinion.
In the latest preview video from publisher 2K, the torture scene in Mafia III is even more disconnected from the player because the torturer is a non-player buddy character. The player’s avatar, Lincoln Clay, stands idly by while pliers are judiciously applied to the victim. From the brief snippet in the trailer, torture is just a story beat. A violent example of how badass and Scorsese the fictional mob of New Bordeaux can be. It might be more substantial in the full game. Consider this a trigger warning for those disturbed by videogame torture.
You know that part in a disaster movie when you meet all the characters? The movie spends an hour introducing everyone, establishing their relationships, supposedly making us care about them before the plane is imperiled, or the skyscraper catches fire, or the volcano erupts, or the tsunami comes rushing down the fjord. The problem is that these are so often soap operas of the mundane. Who cares. I’m here to see a plane crash, a towering inferno, a flood of lava, or a tidal wave. But Deepwater Horizon replaces that soap opera of the mundane with a fascinating look at what it’s like to work on an oil rig. How do you get there? Who do you work with? What do you talk about? What do you talk like (in the PG-13 version of your life)? Where do you stay? What do you wear? What do all those people actually do?
The easy jingoism felt awkward in Lone Survivor, which was director Peter Berg’s last movie. Lone Survivor couldn’t reconcile its procedural about soldiers on a recon mission with its Wahlberg action movie. But his footing is rock steady at sea with this assortment of roughnecks. The oil rig procedural and the disaster movie mesh with industrial efficiency. Compare this to Disney’s Finest Hours, which is structurally similar to Deepwater Horizon. The Finest Hours lost any blue-collar sensibilities to its cast of celebrities and its mushy heartfelt Hollywood schmaltz. It preened when it should have rolled up its sleeves. But Deepwater Horizon, which is surprisingly brutal, is willing to cover its actors with mud, blood, sweat, safety goggles, and hardhats. It doesn’t end with Mark Wahlberg defeating the oil spill in a fistfight. Spoiler, I guess. You can’t begrudge Berg a couple of gratuitous shots of an American flag. He earns it with hard work.
Mark Wahlberg, John Malkovich, and Kurt Russell wear their characters as comfortably as a pair of weathered jeans. Also notable are Dylan O’Brien, previously just a pretty face in the Maze Runner movies, and especially Gina Rodriguez, an actress from the TV show Jane the Virgin who belongs in more movies. She’s got a great combination of star power and authenticity.
Previously, Deepwater Horizon’s name evoked the millions of gallons of oil that spilled unchecked into the Gulf of Mexico for over three months. Months of news stories about the fouled Gulf Coast have a way of standing out in your memory more than an industrial accident. So I hadn’t remembered how catastrophic the event was that precipitated the spill. Suffice to say, this is a movie you should see in the theater. Preferably with a really big screen and a fancy sound system.
In October, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting someone’s “best horror games of all time” list. So that’s not this. Instead, this week we’re running a list of recommendations for recent horror games we really like and think you should play, but might have skipped or even not thought of them as horror. If you can come up with a snappy way to stick that at the top of a list, let us know. In the meantime, we’ll roll out two a day. Today we recommend a couple of games for how they put us in mind of older games.
The toys-to-life genre needs a shake-up. We’ve winnowed out Disney’s half-hearted effort, but that still leaves us with Lego Dimensions, Nintendo Amiibos, and Skylanders which are still burning through sets and revisions each year. What can you do if you’re a publisher of these gewgaw based videogames but keep cranking them out and hoping the fad lasts another year? Activision’s Skylanders Imaginators may have found the answer. Buying a toy to unlock new game content is so last year. Spend money to create your own toy to unlock new game content instead!
Kaos has discovered the ancient power of Mind Magic and is using it to create an unstoppable army of Doomlanders! Eon is calling upon all Portal Masters and Skylands’ greatest mystic warriors, the Senseis to stop Kaos and his minions. Now, you must use the power of your imagination to create your own Skylanders to battle in the ultimate adventure alongside the almighty Senseis to save Skylands.
Don’t feel bad if you don’t understand that. It’s just word salad. All you need to know is that Skylanders Imaginators allows you to create your own Skylander hero out of character creation options like voice, powers, body types, heads, costumes, etc., then teaching that figure a skillset via 31 “Sensei” heroes for $14.99 each and locking the newly created hero into a crystal for $9.99 each. Then, if you’re feeling particularly rich, you can spend another $49.99 and use a separate mobile app to have a real figure 3D printed and shipped to you. It’s like printing money, except you’re paying someone else. Skylanders Imaginators hits store shelves on October 16th.
Just before the start of fifth grade, my family moved across town to a new neighborhood and subdivision. I only knew a few kids on my street since I stayed at my old school. October and Halloween could have been awkward, so I was thrilled and relieved when some neighbor kids asked me to go trick-or-treating with them. My parents didn’t seem to bat an eye at this (though I think they’d gotten to know the other parents in the neighborhood pretty well), and on Halloween night I set off with three kids I’d known for less than a month, after dark, in a neighborhood I barely knew.
This week I get to hang out with one of my favorite Canadians. We talk about the comparative merits of a monarchy and a Trump election, how to win big money in Winnipeg, potentially illegal immigration, not playing MMOs, and videogame dancing. But most importantly, we talk about a game well before its time that far too few people remember.
Super Mega Baseball was something of an underground sports hit. The goofy big-headed players and cheery presentation evoked strong memories of kids’ titles like Backyard Baseball, but hiding underneath all the cartoon charm was a damn good single player baseball arcade game. Metalhead Software have announced Super Mega Baseball 2, and the developers are keen to refine the experience so the sports audience won’t mistakenly dismiss the sequel as another kiddie game.
First, Super Mega Baseball 2 will have multiplayer gameplay. Either online or in the same room, players will be able to pit their teams against one another. Second, Metalhead is revamping the art style so there isn’t as large of a disconnect between the playful look and the serious sim. Everything still looks bright and exaggerated, but the cartoony assets have been taken down a notch. Finally, the sequel will offer more team customization and stats reporting, so players feel more invested in their teams.
Super Mega Baseball 2 will launch on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC in 2017.
Wasteland 3 has been announced. InXile Entertainment will be posting a crowd-funding page on Fig on October 5th for the next game in the series. (Brain Fargo, head of InXile, also sits on the Fig advisory board.) The game is being made for PC, Xbox One, and PS4 and this time, the studio aims to include cooperative multiplayer at launch. According to the press release, Wasteland 3 will feature vehicle travel in the frozen post-apocalypse of Colorado.
You start the game as the sole survivor of Team November, a Ranger squad dispatched to the icy Colorado wastes. This is a land of buried secrets, lost technology, fearsome lunatics, and deadly factions. No one here has ever heard of the Desert Rangers. Your reputation is yours to build from scratch, and your choices may save this land or doom it. With a renewed focus on macro-reactivity, you’ll be picking between warring factions, deciding whether locations are destroyed or saved, and other far reaching decisions that have a marked impact on the shape of your world.
The crowd-funding campaign will have a goal of $2.75 million with equity investing capped at $2.25 million.
OnLive, the ambitious (and some would say deeply flawed) game streaming service may have died in April 2015, but the dream of a subscription gaming platform lives on. Startup LiquidSky just secured $4 million from Samsung and former Sun Microsystems executives Scott McNealy and Bill Raduchel. The promise? Desktop-as-service gaming, just like OnLive, but without all the problems that plagued the previous company. LiquidSky claims to solve the issues of latency, server cost, scalability, and game support. It’s in private beta already with about half a million registered users. Players can either pay for the service via a $0.50 “SkyCredit” per hour of streaming, or opt for a $14.99 or $39.99 monthly subscription plan depending on the amount of storage they need.
Assuming LiquidSky actually solves the issues the company says it can, it remains to be seen if the service can overcome other objections like questions of ownership and digital rights management, while growing its user base. If the time is finally ripe for game streaming, you can bet that competitors will jump into the market, including publishers that already have their own game clients.
My takeaway from Stranger Things, which nearly sprains its back bending over backwards to homage the 80s, is that it had enough character, content, and dark charm for a cool 90-minute movie. Unfortunately, it’s an eight-hour series. So the creative team of Matt and Ross Duffer dilutes their cool movie with six plus hours of filler. Isn’t it just like TV to assume more is more?
But consider what the Duffer Brothers, as they call themselves, can do when they don’t have to stretch a script into a season. Consider the aptly named Hidden. If I hadn’t been rooting around to see where the Duffer Brothers came from, I never would have found this. So one of my favorite things about Stranger Things is that it lead me to this movie they wrote and directed.
Hidden is their only feature, and it’s unfortunately going to invite comparison to 10 Cloverfield Lane, which it preceded by six months. Both movies are about the dynamics of people in a bunker when the world above them may or may not have ended. But Hidden isn’t a pressure cooker story about a damsel in distress locked up with a psychopath. It’s a story about a family, told with three very capable actors. Alexander Skarsgaard as fun dad, Andrea Riseborough as no-nonsense mom, and an expressive and capable child actor named Emily Alyn Lind as the daughter they have to protect and sustain. The Road, minus the road.
Since it’s set in a zombie apocalypse, it has to turn into a siege at some point. But how it handles this is what makes the movie special, and here’s where you discover the Duffer Brothers can do more than fondly homage King, Spielberg, and Carpenter. Hidden shows how much heart and creativity they have, and it only takes ninety minutes to reveal.
The Chinese Mythology Mash-Up expansion pack is coming to Minecraft: Console Edition on October 4th. Unlike most of the official DLC bits for the console version of Mojang’s building game, this new pack features a pre-made world instead of just dumping themed assets into a random setting. The Chinese Mythology Mash-Up is built around the kind of imagery you’d expect in a blocky recreation of Journey to the West. Serpentine dragons, jade columns, and pandas everywhere. The game’s user interface even changes within the DLC to imperial red and gold. Minecraft: Console Edition will also be updated for free on October 4th with polar bears, beets, craftable banners, and new arctic biomes.
The Pocket and Windows 10 versions of Minecraft are getting some love as well. The Boss Update tweaks some boss monsters in the game and presents Add-Ons, a feature meant for tinkerers. Add-Ons allow players to adjust game values, mix effects, and even create scenarios like a castle siege or an alien invasion. The Boss Update will launch on October 18th.
Planet Coaster from Frontier Devlopments is still in early access, but in this video, the developers show off what’s really important in a spiritual successor to RollerCoaster Tycoon. Is it a deep economic system? Ride physics algorithms? Accurate seasonal foot traffic simulation? The correct answer is none of the above. It’s the ability to invoke every player’s inner Imagineer.
What happens when one person on a podcast likes Cthulhu Realms and the other person on a podcast doesn’t like Cthulhu Realms? Which one of them will prevail? World traveler, bane of iPads everywhere, and kangaroo expert Skip Franklin tries to convince me Cthulhu Realms isn’t just a cheap reskinning of Star Realms. Whether he succeeds or not, I’d like to point out only one of us has been kicked out a bar in Grand Rapids.
