If a movie can’t be good, at least it should be pretty. And if it can’t be pretty, at least it should be memorably gaudy. That’s where Terminal lives. This trite flash of neon noir plays like a community theater version of Sin City. The dialogue is the sort of oh-so-self-aware wordplay that an actual playwright might have written when he was still learning to write plays. The story is a mostly conventional femme fatale fable with precisely the unexpected twist you expect; the only reason you didn’t see it coming was because it’s all just made up at the end. Surprise! Every enthusiastically lit set looks like a first pass at concept art, drawn by someone whose only exposure to film noir is The Matrix. Shadows and fog not included.
But the appeal of Terminal is that its cast of accomplished actors is dedicated enough not necessarily to pull it off, but to at least give it a real go. Simon Pegg with the beard and brow of a Tsarist Russian intellectual; Max Irons as the slow witted and square jawed patsy; Dexter Fletcher and his unabashed mutton chops playing a vicious East End thug. Mike Meyers dons fake teeth and meanders through a couple of cameos. But above all else, Terminal offers Margot Robbie gamely reprising her Harley Quinn character, mad as a hatter and happy to slather on the make-up and gruesome grin to prove it. She’s nothing if not committed, and despite the dopey dialogue, cheap sets, and comic book visuals, she’s fascinating to watch. If Robbie can find her own Tim Burton, she’s guaranteed a career of caricatures as riveting as Johnny Depp’s. I, Tonya for the serious recognition with an occasional Terminal to show she’s still happy to come out and play.
Psyonix has published the drop rates for the loot in their Rocket League crates. According to the developer, the published figures have been true since the system went into effect in September 2016. Like most loot crate schemes, the rarer unlocks require a significant amount of luck to get. For example, the current Black Market tier of unlocks start with a 1% base roll to be present in the crate, and then each particular item in that tier has an equal chance of appearing. The good news is that you’ll probably unlock that common double-lightning decal pretty quickly.
Ghost Recon Wildlands’ Special Operation 2 is launching on July 24th. More Ghost War versus multiplayer characters, new maps to fight in, more cosmetic loot to purchase. All fairly standard stuff for multiplayer content. What is notable is the new Ghost Mode coming to the single player and co-op campaign. The new feature enables permadeath, restricts you to one main weapon and one sidearm, disables inventory management unless you’re at a gear station, reloading early loses unspent ammo, and (this is the big one) turns off the AI team. Finally, an end to the garbage squad chatter! Goodbye faux stealth NPC.
The free update addresses a lot of the criticisms we had with the game in its original launch state. Say what you will about Ubisoft’s open world game design, but they’ve shown a willingness to listen to players and support their games for a good stretch of time.
That’s hunky star Nathan Fillion playing Nathan Drake in an Uncharted short film. While it’s an unofficial fan production, this is something fans of the Naughty Dog action game series have wanted to see for a long time. Thankfully, director Allan Ungar did too. Between ABC’s The Rookie going from pilot to series, Fillion was able to squeeze in some time for the passion project.
“This is what we set up to make, what we set out to do when we sat down for vegan Thai food. It’s a fifteen-minute short film. It’s our tribute to the character. For right now, we’re very happy with this just this being what it is.”
Nathan Drake is famously voiced by Nolan North in the games, so it’s a bit coincidental that at about the same time the Uncharted short was hitting the web, Nathan Fillion confirmed that he does not voice Cayde-6 in Destiny 2’s upcoming Forsaken expansion despite voicing the character previously.
“I wasn’t available for this last instalment – it’s not me doing the voice for Cayde-6. In a wonderful, amazing turn of events – it’s actually Nolan North!”
When a door closes, a window opens. Something like that.
Duncan Jones is developing a movie based on the Rogue Trooper property. Rogue Trooper is a British comic character that first appeared in 1981 in the pages of 2000 AD. There’s a videogame relationship in the form of a 1986 Commodore 64 game, a 1990 Amiga game, and a 2006 game from Rebellion which was given the HD teatment with a 2017 Redux Edition. Jones even linked to the Rebellion game’s site in his announcement.
The next big update for Creative Assembly’s Total War: Rome II is a doozy. The Ancestral Update (currently in beta testing) features a host of long-requested additions and tweaks to the almost five year old game. One of the most anticipated changes is the return of family trees. This was a large part of the strategic gameplay in the first Rome, so its absence in the sequel was always puzzling. It’s finally coming! Players will be able to track family fortunes, marry into and out of power and wealth, and piss off sullen teenagers with bad career decisions. War never changes.
I don’t know what’s going on with the mimics wearing Uncle Sam top hats and Asian bamboo hats in this free update for Prey: Mooncrash, but I love it. Bethesda promises more free updates in the future, including one that features the “Typhon Hunter” multiplayer revealed during E3. How long must we wait for the inevitable skins that turn mimics into mudcrabs?
Prey: Mooncrash is one of Tom’s picks for the best games of 2018 (so far)! You can watch him fumble around in the DLC for a couple of hours here.
Remember Desperados: Wanted Dead Or Alive? It was 2001 squad tactics game in the vein of Commandos, except set in the rootin’ tootin’ Old West. It’s now compatible with modern PC systems thanks to THQ Nordic. The publisher has updated the game to work with Windows 7, 8, 10 and Macs and Linux! Yeehaw partners! They’ve even restored a “long lost” demo mission to the game.
“A challenging level from back in the old days when some games still had rather difficult demos.”
That’s called shade cowboy, and it’s being thrown in your lily-livered face! Desperados: Wanted Dead Or Alive is available on Steam and GOG.
Warframe’s next content update has hoverboards. Honest-to-gosh trick flip, Back to the Future 2 style decks that float. The Fortuna expansion takes players to Venus and gives them the opportunity to skim over the surface of the planet and even do tricks on a customizable board. Auto-inflating Nike sneakers not included.
The Crew 2 is a real surprise. Not at all what I expected. It’s actually astonishing. Maybe even breathtaking. It seems completely, utterly, stupendously, jaw-droppingly unaware of why I played The Crew. It flagrantly violates the conventional wisdom that videogame sequels are better because game design is an iterative process. Design something, improve on it for the sequel, repeat. But The Crew 2 doesn’t feel the least bit iterative. It simply can’t compare to The Crew. It’s as if it never even heard of it. It’s not just one step forward, two steps back. It’s not even no steps forward, two steps back. It’s popping the clutch when you didn’t know the car was in reverse and plunging over a cliff. It is one of the worst open-world games I’ve played, and easily the worst caRPG I’ve ever played.
Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence research arm has created bots that have learned to play Quake 3: Arena capture-the-flag. Unlike the gaming bots we’re familiar with which are programmed for specific games and get hidden cheats, DeepMind’s creations learned to play using visual input like humans do and received no information that would not be available to a person. They were actually playing the game and getting better with practice. A mere half-million practice games later, and the bots could beat “strong” human teams 74 percent of the time. Make the bots teabag opponents, scream profanities, and disconnect to avoid losing and we might have something.
SCS Software presents Oregon! The Beaver State! The Pacific Northwest is a decidedly different landscape from what players are used to in American Truck Simulator’s current build. According to the devs, the upcoming expansion goes all in on the forest industry that makes up a large part of Oregon’s economy. Despite the prevalence of big rigs loaded with lumber, players won’t be able to recreate the crash from Final Destination 2, but I’m sure you’ll all try anyway.
