This sounds like a children’s book. “And the gun goes bang and the knife goes snickt and the landmine goes click”. Since the premise is someone steps on a landmine and can’t step off, this also sounds like a rip-off of No Man’s Land, a bitterly funny political allegory about the Balkans. Only this movie is about American kids hiking in Georgia. The Georgia that Russia invaded, not the one where peaches and The Walking Dead come from. Maybe you wonder what else the director has done and you come across a movie called 247 Degrees. It’s about four people who get in a sauna, but then a stick falls over and wedges the door shut. Then a whole movie happens about four people sweltering to death because a stick fell over. No joke. I saw it so you don’t have to. You’re welcome.
So why would you bother with Georgia filmmaker Levan Bakhia’s Landmine Goes Click? Because all of the above fail to express what Landmine Goes Click actually is. Sure, it starts out as dopey as you feared. But just when you’ve resigned yourself to watching three whining American kids standing around in a field because one of them stepped on a landmine, something else happens entirely. Unfortunately, the press materials, any synopsis, or any other review would spoil it. And frankly, I’m not sure the movie is worth watching if you already know the something else. I’m not sure it works unless you’re blindsided.
As the ill-fated mine stepper, Sterling Knight could be described as Leonardo DiCaprio Lite. He has to carry much of the movie, and he’s almost up to the task. But the real star here is the movie’s willingness to get grimly uncomfortable. It almost recalls trashy exploitation movies from the 70s, but with a focus on the trashiness more than the exploitation. I’m also reminded of the Dutch horror movie The Vanishing for how it used a haunting two-act structure to tell the story of the unlikely evil done by a family man.
Director Bakhia sees his premise and twists through to their bitter ends, and without the typical American PG-13 soft-sell. If Bakhia deserves credit for anything, it’s his willingness to coldly commit to a story about people instead of hardware. The landmine was never the problem. The problem all along was the people capable of the same cruelty it takes to lay down landmines.
The post-apocalyptic wasteland of Fallout 4 can be an unforgiving place. If you’re just popping out of a pre-war Vault, the radioactive territory can be quite a detriment to living. Here are some simple tips for making your way in the Boston area immediately after hitting the great outdoors.
This week we see yet another biopic, but a couple of us like it. At the 1:09 mark, we detour into a discussion of road signs and other signs in movies.
Tom Chick talks Chaos Reborn with Julian Gollop, who teaches him a thing or two. Gollop also explains that random numbers are random, that there is no place for centaurs, and that, yes, more content is on the way.
At the 43-minute mark, Tom and Nick Diamon conduct a Call of Duty: Black Ops III debriefing.
The New Xbox One Experience, an overhaul of the user interface and menus, is out today. Microsoft says the software redesign makes the console the “fastest and most social Xbox experience ever.” There’s a new home guide system that lets you check messages and futz with settings without leaving your game or media app. A new community section offers a ton of stalking and social media one-upmanship opportunities. Avatars, those virtual dress-up doll microtransaction sales catalysts, are back. Controller buttons can now be remapped. Finally, Microsoft has revamped the Game Hubs and the storefront to be more user-friendly and community focused.
Some of your old Xbox 360 games should also work in the Xbox One now. The list of compatible titles isn’t that long, but Microsoft assures us that more games will be added to the backwards compatibility feature in the coming weeks.
You can even enjoy multiplayer with friends playing Backward Compatible titles on Xbox 360. To start playing your Xbox 360 games on Xbox One after 12pm PST today, refresh your Game Collection to see your pre-purchased, digital Xbox 360 titles from the Backward Compatible title list in your ready to install queue or simply insert the disc for a supported Xbox 360 title and download the game to start playing it on Xbox One.
For now, the New Xbox One Experience is an optional download, although if you don’t update, you won’t be able to access some of the revamped services. On the 23rd of November it will be a mandatory update. It’s about 1GB in size and there is also an update for the wireless controllers.
Konami is working with a prosthetics artist to create a bionic arm for a gamer. James Young, a 25-year-old Metal Gear aficionado, lost his arm and leg in a metro rail accident. Sophie De Oliviera Barata is an artist who specializes in creating personalized artificial limbs for amputees that want something more than the standard solution. Konami’s Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain features a main character that has a badass robot arm. This sounds like the makings of a documentary. Oh hey! It is. The Phantom Limb Project seeks to get James Young his Venom Snake arm in a three-part video series.
The Phantom Limb Project was born out of a desire to create something innovative, on the cusp of future technology, which would explore the themes present within the series and more specifically, the themes and ideas referenced in the latest incarnation: Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. We also wanted to tell an uplifting human story of what it means to be an amputee, to feel phantom pain, to overcome loss and how technology can change our perceptions of ‘disability.’ Moreover, the story of how one gamer known as James Young, never let his condition get in the way of his passion as a gamer.
On the subject of phantom pain, players of Metal Gear Solid V may be interested to know that the latest patch allows them to get a certain silent someone back on their team that they may have been missing.
“I don’t know what the hell is going on,” someone says in Call of Duty: Black Ops III. You said it, brother. You and me both. That’s about the only line of dialogue that makes sense in the whole game.
I hate to call out a developer making informal comments to his fans about a work in progress, but I’m going to call out a developer making informal comments to his fans about a work in progress anyway.
One of the boldest boardgame designs I’ve ever played is Quartermaster General, a sleek and grand presentation of World War II for six-players (review here). It uses simple rules — you can teach Quartermaster General in ten minutes and then finish a six-player game in well under two hours — and unique decks of cards for each nation to express broad but familiar historical guidelines. The pacing is snappy. The asymmetry is deeply gratifying and a minor miracle given the simplicity of the rules. Japan plays nothing like Germany which plays nothing like the United States which plays nothing like Russia. Designer Ian Brody has created a masterpiece of rich minimalist gameplay.
Brody posted on Boardgame Geek that he’s playtesting the next expansion, called Alternate Histories.
[Alternate Histories] adds 100 new cards and 8 substitute cards. There are pieces for France and China, and the 8 substitute cards are largely to reflect the new pieces. So cards that represented the French with UK pieces and the Chinese with Americans now bring in pieces from their own country.
The idea is that you shuffle the news cards into each nation’s decks, but then you have to discard from your hand more frequently, forcing difficult choices as you play. Brody also said he considered actual deck building for each nation, but it raises difficult balancing issues.
You can read more here, including a tantalizing description of a couple of new cards for Germany and Russia. There is currently no announced release date for Alternate Histories.
Microsoft has published the list of Xbox 360 titles that will be backwards compatible on the Xbox One. Ever since Microsoft announced a plan for backwards compatibility, people have been frothing over which games will make the cut. Since only a fraction of games would be included in the initial rollout of the feature, gamers were asked which old games they wanted to see on the service. Unfortunately, for the majority of voters, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Skyrim, and Red Dead Redemption (the top three choices) did not make it. Neither did any Halo games, Grand Theft Auto IV, or older Forza games. Some other popular titles like Fallout 3, Mass Effect, and Gears of War 3 are included in the full list, so all is not lost. Microsoft says the list will be expanded with more games in the coming months, including all future Games with Gold offers.
Xbox One backwards compatibility will officially begin on November 12th, with the launch of the New Xbox One Experience system update.
In case you haven’t heard enough grousing about the latest James Bond movie, listen to some more! After 1:23, we chop short the discussion for a 3×3 of our favorite lines from the thoroughly quote-worthy Bone Tomahawk.
That’s the trailer for Legendary Pictures’ Warcraft, based on Activison Blizzard’s long-running MMO. Directed by Duncan Jones and starring a lot of expensive-looking computer graphics, the Warcraft movie looks like a prime example of “Be careful what you wish for.” How many times has someone watched a Blizzard game cinematic and wondered how awesome it would be if someone made a movie exactly like that? Starting on June 10th, 2016, we may all find out how awesomely wrong things can go. Worlds will collide where the uncanny meets the valley.
In Call of Duty: Black Ops III, you can choose to play either a male character portrayed by Ben Browder, or a female operative voiced and mo-capped by Abby Brammell. Hey, that’s neat, right? For the first time in Activision’s blockbuster shooter franchise, you can choose the gender of your main character in the campaign. If you decide to take a female through the weird and linear Black Ops III story, all the cinematics will show Abby Brammell being tough and badass because in 2065, cyber-enhanced super soldiers are all pretty much equally deadly.
How weak is it then that Call of Duty: Black Ops III goes through the trouble of offering a female main character, and then opts to refer to the player character as “Player” in the game? Throughout the tale of inter-connected consciousness and paranoid fantasy that Treyarch weaves, you are only ever Player. You don’t even get a call-sign like “Soap” or “Noob.” Christopher Meloni chews virtual scenery as John Talyor, and as bland as that name is, at least his character gets a name. They couldn’t even jazz it up by going with the more street-savvy “Playa” giving you some identity. Player please!
I think Chaos Reborn might be broken. It told me my elf had a 90% chance to kill the other guy’s rat. So I took the shot and didn’t kill his rat. You can see the problem here, right? What kind of game makes a promise like that and then breaks it? I had a 90% chance. I was sure to hit. But I didn’t? Seriously? What are the odds?
Rust has rolled out a Steam storefront for in-game items. Not a big deal you say? Certainly, it’s not the first Steam storefront to offer virtual gewgaws for money. What makes this notable is the fact that unlike the Team Fortress 2 or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive workshops, Rust’s store is not curated by Valve or modders. Facepunch Studios owns the content and gives a cut of sales to Valve, while sharing revenue directly with modders. The items featured in the store can be obtained through random drops in the game, but varying levels of rarity make some items more desirable than others. These items can be used by the player or bought and sold between players, with Valve again taking a portion of the sale. Studio head Garry Newman explained why this was a good deal for everyone, including the players that don’t have a lot of ready cash.
So you’ve got the poor guys with no money. They hate traditional microtransactions because it’s a paywall. But on Steam they play the game and get random drop items, and can then sell and trade those items on the marketplace. It’s not unfeasible that a player will make more money selling items than the game itself cost.
They’re happy because they can sell the stuff they get randomly for free, buy games from Steam.
They’re making people happy because they can buy stuff from them.
Newman added that not offering the items in the store would be “screwing” the community.
The only things I remember about Life, the Hasbro boardgame that’s nearly as awful as Monopoly, is 1) the spinner in the middle of the board means never having to roll dice, and 2) you put blue and pink pegs in your car to represent family members. Blue represented dudes, pink represented chicks. Based on my recollections, the recently released Game of Life: Spin to Win videogame is a faithful recreation of the boardgame. It’s got a big spinner in the middle of the board and you accumulate pegs as you play. You start out as one peg on a scooter, you graduate to two spouse pegs in a sedan, and then you end up in a minivan with child pegs in the back seat.
But what I didn’t realize is that when it comes time for your peg to take a spouse, you can pick whether your spouse is a blue peg or a pink peg, regardless of your own peg color. So there’s my gay wedding up there, which happened because when I was picking a spouse, I thought I was telling the game the color of my own peg. Oops. There’s no divorce in the Game of Life, and I’m a pretty progressive guy, so I just rolled with it. Later, my husband and I flipped a city penthouse for a $100,000 profit, then we lost the money in a pool of lava, and we adopted a son who was delivered by helicopter. Somewhere along the way, I switched careers from farmer to brain surgeon. C’est la Life!
What Game of Life: Spin to Win, which carries the “family friendly” tag on Steam, absolutely won’t tolerate is bachelors. Marriage is mandatory. Now that’s family friendly!
