https://youtu.be/KfmIimhtIiA
Everything about this commercial is precious. This advertisement may mark the official launch of Epic’s Fornite in South Korea or it might be hawking bubblegum disco ramen. It’s tough to tell. All I know is that at about 25 seconds in, the main actor does a great job replicating the in-game “floss” dance move.
Rust is finally leaving early access on February 8th. Don’t get too excited. According to developer Garry Newman, this isn’t a milestone for fanfare and fuss. Development will proceed essentially unchanged, except for a price increase from $19.99 to $34.99. What’s the big deal then?
Think of it more like we’re leaving Prototyping and entering Alpha.
It’s a bit “have your cake and eat it too” for a game that’s been in early access for four years, but Facepunch Studios points out that they’ve come a long way since their 2013 launch. They went from a zombie apocalypse survival crafter to a genital apocalypse survival crafter.
Oh, the stress of life in an upper middle class family! It’s the stuff of horror movies, I tell you! The cringeworthy Better Watch Out plays it straightish and comes out poorly, partly for the weak cast. A young psycho takes his babysitter hostage and gore ensues. A far better example is McG’s over-the-top style and lead actress Samara Weaving’s unwavering commitment in the very tongue-in-cheek and just horrific enough The Babysitter. I suppose you could put Get Out in this category as well. All is not well among the comfortably affluent! But by far the best example is the wickedly funny Mom and Dad.
Writer/director Brian Taylor was half of the Nevaldine/Taylor duo responsible for the Crank movies and the Ghost Rider sequel. Their absurdity showed an unabashed self-awareness, from the writing to the editing, and everything in between. If you didn’t want to see Jason Statham attaching jumper cables to his nipples, you could go watch a Transporter movie. If you didn’t want to see Nicholas Cage peeing fire, you could go watch a Spider-Man movie. These guys were doing action movies on their own terms: bold, energetic, ridiculous, and juvenile. But most of all energetic.
Brian Taylor’s first solo project, as writer and director, is Mom and Dad. It’s a sort of latter day version of The Crazies, but with a subversive subtext about the frustration of parenthood. Before the crazies arrive, Taylor wants you to know he’s here to observe the way each generation falls out of touch with the next. “Would you mind not Facebooking when we’re driving together?” the aggrieved Selma Blair asks her snotty daughter in the car on the way to school. “It’s the only time we have together.”
“Facebooking?” her daughter mutters derisively.
Before you groan when I tell you Nicholas Cage is in this, let me point out that the problem with Nicholas Cage is movies that don’t know how to use him. That’s not an issue with Mom & Dad where his tics and outbursts and random bodyjerks are a perfect fit. What if Nicholas Cage was your dad, his midlife crisis in full bloom? And then what if what happens in Mom & Dad happened? Now we’re talking the stuff of horror movies. To Selma Blair’s credit, she keeps up.
Before Louis CK cemented his legacy as the guy who whipped out his dick, he had a great bit about his kids being assholes. This frank insight into the frustration of parenthood was nearly unique. Who calls their kids assholes? Who does that? Mom & Dad, a keen and energetic jolt of social satire, does that and then some.
Support Qt3 and click here to watch Mom and Dad on Amazon.com.
Spielberg! Streep! Hanks! Chick! Murawski! Wand!
And join us next week for a 3×3 about continuity errors.
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The first thing you noticed about Mandy was her hair. A mad sprawl of tightly coiled dark ringlets exploded out of her head. The curls fell down around her shoulders and roiled like foam at the bottom of a waterfall. Her hair was beautiful and chaotic. Continue reading →
You probably haven’t heard of Yume Nikki from an unknown designer going by the moniker Kikiyama. Even if you’d heard of it since its debut in 2004 on a popular Japanese forum, it’s likely you haven’t played it. Translation issues aside, a surreal and unguided journey through a woman’s nightmares isn’t the kind of thing that appeals to the general audience. Based on the sometimes confounding and inscrutible gameplay, dark subject matter, and the mystery of the identity of Kikiyama, it became something of a cult experience. Slowly, the game attracted fans, but most understood that Yume Nikki would always be an obscure footnote in gaming.
Imagine their surprise when Yume Nikki popped up on Steam a few days ago for free. Not only that, it launched with a countdown (now at six days) to a new Yume Nikki experience! Publisher AGM Playsim, working with Kadokawa, confirms that the upcoming Yume Nikki title is being done with the help of the mysterious Kikiyama. As you might expect, fans of the game have erupted into a tizzy over the announcement. Whatever is coming is sure to set the Yume Nikki fandom working on new enigmas.
Paragon, Epic Games’ other free-to-play game, may be in trouble. In a frank post on Reddit, Epic’s Edgar Diaz admitted that development has slowed as internal discussions turn to the issues surrounding the game. Paragon just isn’t retaining players at a sustainable rate. According to Epic’s data, the majority of new players do not continue to play past the first month; a significant problem for a multiplayer team experience. Further complicating things is the runaway success of Epic’s own Fortnite, specifically the Battle Royale mode, which is proving to be so popular that Epic has shifted Paragon team members over to help support that game.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be figuring out if and how we can evolve Paragon to achieve growth and success, and trying some things internally. In the meantime, Paragon’s release cadence will be slower.
Paragon launched in March 2016 as a pay-to-play early access title, but opened up as a public free-to-play game in February 2017.
VRChat, a free 3D virtual social media playspace, has over 1.5 million installs, making it one of the most widely used VR applications. Spurred mostly by streamers spamming questionable meme humor based on the Ugandan action movie Who Killed Captain Alex? combined with a badly modeled Knuckles from the Sonic games, VRChat has exploded in popularity. Helping its growth is the fact that a VR rig is not needed to partake in the festivities, which includes lots of janky user-made content. Free and memes? That’s YouTube gold!
As with any activity in meme culture, unsavory elements have crept into the scene to the point that the developers have had to write an open letter to the community asking them to be cool. While they welcome the large player pool, they want to encourage healthy and less offensive interactions. To that end, the team is implementing a moderation sytem and user blocking. Enjoy your offensive memes while you can.
Stardew Valley’s Eric Barone tweeted the above image showing his weekend multiplayer test session. Just a reminder that multiplayer is coming to the farm village simulator soon. According to Barone, the network code is “solid” and he’s focused on bringing the update to the public.
Yes. That’s a flamingo in the middle of the image. It’s likely a new addition to the game that we’ll see added with cooperative play.
Finally the movie in which Liam Neeson will take you to work!
Next week: The Post
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If you like ponderous emo Westerns that consist largely of tearful goodbyes and somber burials to teach characters Valuable Life Lessons that culminate in a career Indian killer redeeming himself by disemboweling a racist during a standoff that pits Federal authority against property rights, look no further than Hostiles!
It’s not enough that the script is a facile examination of the brutality of the American West and the treatment of Native Americans. Hostiles is sometimes even shot ineptly. In one conversation between Ben Foster and Christian Bale, the camera is positioned in such a way that it looks like Bale is talking to a tree. He might as well have been, given how the cast is squandered. Writer/director Scott Cooper has made a career of squandering talented actors. Jeff Bridges stuck in a schmaltzy country music yarn in Crazy Heart, then Casey Affleck and some other people in the forgettable Out of the Furnace, then Johnny Depp in vampire make-up to play mob informant Whitey Bulger in Black Mass, and now a cavalcade of solid actors putting on period garb to play characters who talk about their feelings while Christian Bale whisperacts hard enough to nearly pop that vein under his eye.
Cooper seems to have been watching The Searchers. He seems to think he’s written a Blood Meridian. He seems to think he’s shot a Revenant. No such things have happened. At the end of the movie, during the eighth or ninth tearful good-bye, Christian Bale says a tearful good-bye to Rosamund Pike. Then she gets on a train. Then he waits for a bit before getting on the same train. You know that awkward moment when you say good-bye to someone but then realize you’re both going the same way, so you futz around to kill time and let the other person get ahead? It’s like that caught on film. At least it looked that way. What probably happened is the character made some sort of decision, or maybe he got on a different train, or maybe the editing was just screwy. But if a movie can’t even sort out the departing schedules of its main characters, it’s got a long way to go before it conveys any Valuable Life Lessons about how racism was/is bad.
Every year the folks in our online community vote for their favorite games from that year. This year’s results are in! Click here to see the winner for 2017 and to read a breakdown of how the voting went (which you can see for yourself here).
Congratulations to all the winners and thanks to everyone who voted!
Praise the sun! From Software announced Dark Souls: Remastered is coming for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC in May. Like the previously released Prepare to Die Edition, Remastered will include the Artorias of the Abyss DLC. On Switch, Remastered will play at 30 frames per second in 1080p when docked, and 720p when in handheld mode. On Xbox One and PlayStation 4, Remastered will run at 60fps at 1080p upscaled to 4K resolution. The PC version will correct the shortcomings of Prepare to Die by running in native 4K at 60fps. All versions of Remastered will feature multiplayer invasions with up to six players, an improvement from the original game’s max of four players.
While this news may be a double, or even triple, dip plea for “git gud” veterans, Dark Souls: Remastered does mark the first appearance for the series on a Nintendo system. Mario fans can finally experience the wonders of Blighttown.
A report from Windows Central asserts that the upcoming revamp of the Xbox Avatar feature will include a “career” system with levels, quests, and even cosmetic loot crate rewards. The Avatar reboot, first previewed back at E3 2017, showcased the company’s commitment to adding more diversity and options to the virtual characters, but contained few details on any meta-game changes. The new report cautions that any or all of the information on loot crates and ranks could be test runs of the system, but code was gleaned from preview builds that matched what Windows Central had gathered from other sources. In an interview last August, Corporate Vice President Mike Ybarra stated that the Xbox Achievement and Avatar features were being looked at with an eye towards better reflecting an Xbox player’s accomplishments rather than just boiling it all down to a raw score. What better way to celebrate that than a random drop of virtual cosmetic junk?
The new Xbox Avatar system is expected to release this year.
On January 8th, Steam hit 18 million concurrent users, a new record for Valve’s PC gaming service. (18,363,471 to be exact at around six in the morning Pacific Time.) That’s up about 4 million from a year ago. About 3 of the 18 million souls were trying to get into PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, making it the most popular game on the client. In second place, Dota 2 with approximately 765,000 players, has a long way to go to catch up. If Valve doesn’t watch it, this Steam idea may catch on.
