Lots of competing interests come into play this week. We consider Kirby vs. Commander Shepherd, Diablo III vs. the free market, Nintendo vs. their shareholders, Syndicate fans vs. Electronic Arts, and the brain of our special guest Joel “djscman” Dehn vs. the manual for Battleship: Galaxies. Also, the embargo for Gears of War 3 is lifted and Tom Chick is unimpressed.
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One Mr. Tom W. Chick has been known to say “Fuck Star Wars” as his reaction to the new films, games or, well, anything. I don’t even think it has to be Star Wars related any more. While I don’t hate Star Wars as much as Tom (though I do hate it quite a bit now), I discovered that, after playing Dead Island, I’m done with sewers.
This quote from Adaptation sums up my feelings nicely:
John Laroche: Look, I’ll tell you a story, all right? I once fell deeply, you know, profoundly in love with tropical fish. Had 60 goddamn fish tanks in my house. I skin dived to find just the right ones. Anisotremus virginicus, Holdacanthus ciliaris, Chaetodon capistratus. You name it. Then one day I say, “fuck fish”. I renounce fish. I vow never to set foot in that ocean again. That’s how much “fuck fish”. That was 17 years ago and I have never stuck so much as a toe in that ocean. And I love the ocean.
Susan Orlean: But why?
John Laroche: Done with fish.
I’m just done with sewers.
While reading the manual for Sengoku, Paradox’s latest strategy game, I came across some good news and some bad news. First the bad news. In the section on a character’s age statistic:
Death becomes more likely every year after age 40.
Way to cheer up your older demographic, Sengoku. Now the good news. Under the section on relationships and spouses:
In feudal Japan, men were not limited to one wife, so it is possible for your character to marry up to four women.
Sweet! Although that might explain the shorter life span. Also, way to pander to male gamers, Sengoku. History is so dude-based.
In Sengoku, a primary resource is your character’s honor, which is sort of like his mana, except that instead of casting fireballs, he spends it to do history stuff. Honor isn’t easy to come by. You can buy it by giving gifts to the Emperor in the form of your hard-earned cash, or you can buy it by handing out land to your vassals. Also, you can play as a devout Shintoist, which earns your character an honor income. Shintoists get honor, Buddhists get warrior monk reinforcements, and Christians get guns. Even feudal Japan had red states.
However, there is one more way to earn honor. Each province can build various types of manufactories for special bonuses. If you build a pottery manufactory, you earn honor. I have no idea what this is modeling, since my frame of reference for pottery manufactories is 1) that time my girlfriend dragged me to Color Me Mine, and 2) that canoodling scene in Ghost with Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze. Probably not what the creators of Sengoku had in mind.
The above trailer for Kirby Mass Attack starts out innocently enough. At about the thirty second mark, I started to feel uneasy. A minute in, I was pretty sure I was watching something without quite understanding that it was dirty, like when you see a video of two people in animal costumes prancing around and then it gets a little weird, and before you know it, you’re dragged into an unwelcome new awareness of a fetish you didn’t even know existed. That’s how I’d describe the psychological journey I took watching so many little Kirby’s doing things I didn’t understand. Part of it is that Kirby himself is so weird. Ten Kirbys are ten times as weird. Ten Kirbys doing indeterminate things to various objects and creatures is exponentially weirder.
Kirby Mass Attack comes out next week.
Double Fine’s lively, charming, and polished tower defense/action game, Trenched, should be every bit as good as Signal Studio’s lively, charming, and polished tower defense/action game, Toy Soldiers: Cold War. But it’s not. And the simple reason is that there are too few ways to play Trenched. There is no survival mode. There is no head-to-head option. There are no minigames. There are no set-ups for different types of games. There are no challenges. All the great things that give Toy Soldiers: Cold War such incredibly long legs should be in Trenched, but they aren’t. It’s no longer enough to just make a good game. You have to give us different cool ways to experience that game.
Fortunately, Trenched is getting a survival mode at some point in the future. It’s only one map, but at least it’s one step closer to making Trenched as good as it should have been.
Oh, also, it’s not going to be called Trenched any more because of a legal brouhaha with some Europeans who have something called Trench. So later this month, Trenched will forever after be known as Iron Brigade, which sounds like something turn-based and with hexes.
I agree so much with the Gamespy review of Dead Island that I could have written it!
Well, most of it. I scratch my head at that bit in the intro about “enough to induce an instant state of catatonic pure terror”, which uses about four words too many to no good effect (the original text read “is scarier still”). But the bigger issue is that I wouldn’t have made a reference to Dead Island being “buggier than a decomposing zombie’s stomach cavity” and I wouldn’t have written that penultimate paragraph suggesting the game flat-out doesn’t work with a mouse and keyboard. I’ve personally logged upwards of fifty hours using a mouse and keyboard on four separate computers. My experience has been almost entirely free of bugs with any meaningful impact.
Furthermore, if I were reviewing Dead Island, I would totally give it five stars. But otherwise, great review, “Gamespy staff”!
In this Dutch horror movie, a bunch of twenty-something teenagers with a Ouiji board party in a haunted Belgian mine. You know where this is going, so there’s really no need to watch it play out by actually seeing the movie. In the US, this movie is known as Slaughter Night because we rightly read Sl8n8 as “Slate Nate”, which isn’t the least bit scary and actually makes me think of Avril Lavigne’s song, Sk8ter Boi.
The most disappointing thing about this forgettable demonic possession/slasher movie is that it doesn’t have the slightest shred of identity that isn’t slavishly borrowed from crappy American horror movies. This is usually what happens when you pick through foreign horror films. You end up watching something that just apes American movies or, if you’re lucky, Japanese movies. But sometimes you’ll find something with a sense of national identity. In recent years, I’ve had the pleasure to discover Sauna from Finland, Let the Right One In from Sweden, The Backwoods from Spain, Isolation from Ireland, and Trollhunter from Norway, all with a distinct sense of national character in the story, the actors, the locations, and the situation. No such thing happens in Slate Nate.
However, I did learn a little Dutch. The Dutch word for “fucking loser” is “fucking loser” and the Dutch word for “fucking hell” is “fucking hell”. Also, when surprised by the obligatory corpse falling out of a closet, one of the twenty-something teenagers yells out, “Jesus!” According to the subtitles, this is Dutch for “Christ!”
Okay, so I took a look at your computer. I don’t know why it’s doing that, but now it doesn’t have a battery anymore. Sorry, but I need the battery, even though I already have seven of them, including this one expensive laptop battery that I’m afraid to sell, because maybe I’ll need it later. That’s how I feel about most of this stuff. I mean, seriously, you should see all this stuff I’m carrying around. Oleander. Can you believe it? I’m carrying around oleander.
Also, I’m going to need to take a look at any phones, copiers, and cash registers you may have around here. Especially cash registers. And do you happen to have any duct tape I can borrow? What about wire or nails?
On this week’s Joystiq podcast, I’m part of a panel of dudes who played Deus Ex and have a few things to say about it. I’m also on this week’s Gameshark podcast, where there’s a fair bit of Deus Ex talk. It seems odd to me that I’m talking Deus Ex: Human Revolution on two podcasts this week. I should probably step aside and let people who feel more passionately talk about it. Having some guy go “eh, it’s fine, I suppose” isn’t really interesting.
But since I didn’t care for the original Deus Ex, I’ve been asked by some folks what I think of this latest sequel. And that’s actually an interesting angle to me, because I think a lot of Deus Ex fans really appreciate what Eidos Montreal has created. I do as well. Partly because Eidos Montreal gets what made Deus Ex work, but also because they get what didn’t make Deus Ex work. Human Revolution address many of my complaints about the original game, including the AI problems, the problems at that time with the Unreal engine, and what I felt was a sloppy and mostly irrelevant mishmash of conspiracy theories in lieu of a story. Probably my favorite thing about Human Revolution is its timely and relevant theme of society’s ambivalence about technology. I couldn’t care less about those Illuminati goofballs.
Hard Reset, which is so very Painkiller meets Deus Ex and doesn’t bother with stealth or hacking, is out this week for the PC. I love what I’ve seen of it. I’ve been told it’s short, but it’s also half the price of a regular release, so do your own math. It’s also entirely missing any sort of multiplayer, so be sure the carry the two.
Red Orchestra 2, a World War II shooter in which you can’t even play as the Americans, is out this week. However, it’s not available for the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3. In fact, but you can’t even play it with a 360 controller. You’ll have to get your mouse and keyboard out of the closet.
King Arthur: Fallen Champions is the standalone sequel to King Arthur, a very scenario-based strategy game that plays a bit like one of Creative Assembly’s games, but with more magic than usual on account of Merlin and company. It’s only on PCs because it’s an RTS. Duh.
One of my favorite RTS developers, Petroglyph, is trying trying again, this time with a free-to-play MOBA called Rise of the Immortals. It goes live this week. Only on the PC, of course.
Finally, Sengoku from Paradox is out this week, and it has way too much math for any console gamers to figure out. It’s also got enough Japanese names to really confuse a gaijin like me. But I love how it takes the more personal, character-driven approach of Crusader Kings to convey the ebb and flow of feudal Japan. For all the glorious armies and rich artwork of Shogun 2, sometimes a guy just wants to concentrate on the strategy game parts of his strategy game.
Is Stephen Soderbergh’s Contagion the Traffic or the Ocean’s 13 of global pandemic movies? And how much does it suck that the trailer spoils important plot points? Much like this podcast. At the 59-minute mark, we start this week’s 3×3 of our favorite uses of the camera from a first-person point of view. Spoiler: Doom didn’t make any of our lists.
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(The following short story appeared on Quarter to Three on September 18, 2001.)
On September 11, 2001
I woke up to the sound of the TV in the front room. It was Trevor, watching something. He doesn’t live with me or anything. But there he was, watching the World Trade Center bleed smoke.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Something that matters,” he said, without turning around.
We watched. It didn’t occur to me to wonder why he was here.
“I better go see how my Mom’s doing,” he said and then he was gone. I kept watching. When I finally stepped outside to check the mail, nearly ten hours later and still in my robe, I noticed the front door was still locked from the inside.
It could have been a dream or something. Trevor being here, watching the coverage. Maybe it was just some sort of narrative device. I didn’t really understand at first. But it makes sense now. The people we know, how we know them, how we look at them. Those rules are a little different now.
Continued after the jump Continue reading →
In the 19th century, as Christianity spread through Asia, the term “rice Christian” emerged to describe people who converted just so they could get rice and other handouts from the missionaries. Rice Christians give lip service to religion for the material and social benefits. In Dead Island, you might say I’m a fruit Christian. I constantly visit the church in Moresby to take advantage of its plentiful stocks of respawning fruit. It’s a great place to nosh up your health, and the fruit is much better for you than the energy drinks littering the beach resort. Those things are probably full of high fructose corn syrup.
Sometimes, I’m also a mace Christian (pcitured). Sister Helen hands out some pretty nifty weaponry. I’m disappointed that developer Techland didn’t take the opportunity to make the mace a named unique item. Rod of God has a nice ring to it, wouldn’t you say? Later in the game, I will be a machete Christian.
And while we’re passing out new categories of Christians, I’d like to point out that distinctive type of Christian known as the videogame Christian. For instance, Sister Helen in Dead Island, Sister Miriam Godwinson in Alpha Centauri, and Father Grigori in Half-Life 2. You know what sets them apart from actual Christians? They never talk about Christ. They never once mention the name Jesus. They are characters written by game developers who play it safe, I presume to avoid offending anyone. It’s actually a common facet of popular entertainment. I recently watched the fun but awful Priest, in which a Blade Runner world surrounded by vampire-infested Western-esque wastelands is ruled by Christians who never once mention Christ.
It strikes me as silly to make a character Christian, and then limit him or her to safely bland talk about a generic universalist God. Every Christian I’ve ever met is happy to talk about Christ. Since when do fictional Christians have to dance around the founder of their religion? I mean, for Pete’s sake, if Danish cartoonists can draw pictures of Mohammed, can’t Father Grigori let loose with the occasional “the power of Christ compels you”?
Witness the power of this fully repaired and operational purple sickle!
By the way, that guy can still attack. I can tell you from first-hand experience that zombie headbutts hurt.
You might guess from this screenshot of an iPhone game that you’re looking at some actioney shooter thing in which a little dude shoots monsters. Not quite. That’s no monster. That’s a Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath. And while there’s certainly shooting involved, check out those stats on the right side of the screen. SAN? As in “sanity”? But of course. What sort of Cthulhu game doesn’t have sanity?
What’s more, look a little closer and you’ll see the AP and hit% figures at the bottom of the screen. Action points and die rolls? Like you’d find in a turn-based game? Yep.
Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land is a turn-based RPG, and it’s set in the early 20th century, like any Cthulhu game should be. Your dudes — you’ll control up to six of them — might lose sanity when encountering monsters, but you’ll also spend sanity to cast spells.
The Wasted Land is based on the Chaosium pen-and-paper RPG, so in addition to the usual combat skills (it’s still basically a combat game), you’ll also have a Cthulhu mythos skill that determines how well you can use spells, and a psychoanalysis skill that lets you restore lost sanity. There’s no announced release date yet, but find out more here.
