That is Academy Award winner Christopher Plummer in “Elegy – A Visual Poem of The Long Dark.” Hinterland Studio’s frostbitten survival game The Long Dark is finally launching out of early access and the developer wanted to let everyone know that they’ve signed a development deal to turn the game into a movie. The short is a proof-of-concept vehicle to show what Hinterland thinks the movie could be like. It’s a nice idea, but there’s very little chance of a Long Dark film (if one ever gets made) being so melancholy and quiet. The script is being written by Raphael van Lierop, the writer and director of the game, but the movie is being made with the Resident Evil movie producers. The game is death by exposure, starvation, and isolation. The movie will be acrobatic knife fights with rabid wolves and cannibal mutants.
A Christopher Nolan movie about a bunch of British soldiers waiting to leave? Why would anyone care about that? At the 1:25, we go deep into a discussion of tunnels in movies.
The epigraphs in The Wire are a great way to call attention to a moment without, well, calling attention to it. I read it, it goes out of my head as I’m watching, and then when the line pops up, I go, “Oh yeah!” This episode’s epigraph suggests Wallace felt his return was inevitable. It implies a certain fatalism. But he made the choice to come back. He made the choice to ask to get back into “the game”. He made the choice to demur when D’Angelo nudged him to follow through with his earlier plans to go back to school. When he says the line in the epigraph, it’s basically a credo. Even an epitaph. Continue reading →
The basics of Killing Ground are as old as Deliverance. So, uh, 1972, I suppose? When you’re out in the wilderness, beyond the range of a 911 call, it sure is scary that some psycho could try to get you! In the absence of civilization, there is no check on murderous chaos, right? Dog eat dog. Survival of the fittest. Plenty of movies play on this fear. It’s often crass, but effective. Backcountry and Blue Jay are recent dingy little horror movies to that effect. Wild brought it up in a wonderfully unexpected way. Australia’s brutal contribution was Wolf Creek, a horror movie with an uncompromising serrated edge so effective that it spawned a (not very good) sequel and a TV series (that I have no desire to see).
First-time Australian filmmaker Damien Power revisits the same territory in Killing Ground. It’s nothing if not familiar. When you’re out in the wilderness, beyond the range of a 911 call, it sure is scary that some psycho could try to get you! But Power ruthlessly stakes his own claim. Continue reading →
There’s a lot going on in Guild Wars 2. The final chunk of Living World Season 3 just launched, and ArenaNet have announced that a second expansion is in the works. It’s all good news for fans of the game, of which many were attracted to the world in the first place with the unique “painterly” presentation. That’s largely due to a style guide that was set by artist Daniel Dociu when he joined ArenaNet in 2003. He left the studio earlier this year to work on Amazon’s gaming initiative, but he left ArenaNet’s art direction in the hands of his son, Horia Dociu. Eurogamer looked into their story and it’s a pretty amazing tale of immigration, vision, and how the face model of Half-Life 2’s Father Grigori wound up dictating the signature look for ArenaNet’s MMO franchise.
Waypoint, VICE’s entertainment reporting arm, has a couple of reports on gaming in prison. Not like Prison Architect. We’re talking about how actual inmates play games while incarcerated. According to the guards and prisoners Waypoint talked to, Dungeons & Dragons is pretty popular in The Big House despite most facilities’ rules against contraband. Because dice is usually a no-no as they can be used for gambling, prisoners have had to get creative about random number generation.
“You don’t even need glue, just toilet paper,” he says, “The way I did it is just by folding it into very thick square, wetting it, and then shoving it into a square corner, say a window sill. You do this over and over again, applying water when it starts to dry out, alternating corners. Eventually you have nicely shaped square. You have to continue shaping it as it dries with your makeshift corner jig. It shrinks a bit and gets quite hard.”
Other techniques included creating dice out of paper templates and sticker glue, marking a piece of pencil to use as a 6-sided roller, and the perennial favorite of jail movies – soap carvings. The next time you’re annoyed by a lopsided die coming up with ones all the time, remember that someone is using dried toilet paper cubes to get his critical hits.
You can draw a direct line from PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds to creator Brendan Greene’s Battle Royale mod of the DayZ mod of Arma 2. From there, it’s easy to get to the Japanese novel and movie inspiration Battle Royale. To celebrate Gamescom, Bluehole is adding a special loot crate to the game that contains “movie inspired” cosmetic outfits like the one pictured above. These Gamescom Invitational Crates will be available From August 3rd to the 27th. Players will be able to open them using special keys that will be sold for $2.50 each. Proceeds from the key sales will be used to fund the Gamescom PUBG Invitational Tournament. During the same period, special Wanderer and Survivor crates will also randomly drop in the game that will be free to open.
You can check out Tom Chick and Jason McMaster partnered as the best buddy cop movie ever in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds in this previously recorded stream.
Mafia III’s Sign of the Times DLC pack is out today. It’s the final chunk of the game’s promised season pass content. It’s got the usual stuff like new weapons to buy, more cars to collect, a couple of new outfits to play dress-up with, and some new story content. This time, Lincoln Clay goes up against a religious cult, as if 1960’s prejudice and the mob weren’t enough.
Beyond the normal DLC content, Sign of the Times offers players the opportunity to reverse a wrong. The DLC gives players a chance to rebuild Sammy’s bar. In the main game, the bar is mostly depicted as a burnt-out husk of tumbledown rafters and ashes, while somehow serving as Lincoln Clay’s living quarters. It’s an odd choice for a man that eventually comes to own everything in the city. He may not be able to impact racism or tear down any “No Colored Allowed” signs, but Clay can finally relax in his own pub.
He’s no Augustus “Cole Train” Cole, but Commander Jaxon in Crackdown 3 is voiced and modeled by video game fan and hobbyist Terry Crews. Although he did some voice work in Saints Row IV as Benjamin King, it was originally Michael Clarke Duncan’s character, which had to be recast after Duncan’s death in 2012. Here, finally, is Crews in all his mighty glory! How we’ve gotten this far without Terry Crews’ bombastic persona and snarling face in a game is a mystery, but Microsoft is at last rectifying the issue. Commander Jaxon is the super powered version of Crews that most people associate with the real-life person anyway.
We almost got a Terry Crews version of Doomfist in Overwatch, but according to Crews’ account of his visit with Blizzard, he just wasn’t right for the part. This, despite his famous mock audition video.
The more words you put into a science fiction title, the more you know it really means business. We are sharply interrupted at the 1:23 mark by a 3×3 about ringtones in movies.
If Painkiller was a 3D Realms game made with Unity trying to be a rogue-like with a bright Serious Sam aesthetic, it would be Immortal Redneck. Surprisingly, it would also be really good. Definitely better than you’d expect from something with the word “redneck” in the title. Continue reading →
Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon Wildlands has its share of issues but many people are able to look past the open-world game’s faults to get to the co-op shooting. Those that do, eventually run up against the number one player-killer in the game. A deadly, merciless foe that has the ability to wipe out a full four-man squad of online players in one go. Behold Ghost Recon Wildlands’ inscrutable helicopter controls. They’re an ungainly square dance of third-person yaw, pitch, and speed that defies sanity. Just when you think you’ve gotten a handle on them, the true horror is revealed: Armed helicopters don’t have any way of aiming their forward-facing weapons! Thankfully, Ubisoft has heard the cries of its players, and rather than laughing and walking away, they laughed and updated the controls in Title Update 6.
In related Ghost Recon news, player versus player Ghost War mode is coming soon.
After the obligatory “press this button to do this, dummy” tutorial, Hover drops you into a bright city, stacked absurdly vertical and mildly bustling with activity. Have at it. No agenda. Just get out there. Feel free to tick off the list of activities in the corner of the screen. Or not. Your choice. Of course a game about anarchists skaterpunking sans skates through a plasticky neon dystopia would be this free form. You can run right up to the top or indulge your completionist neurosis in the starting area, which is far more cheerful than you’d expect for a place called “Garbage Village”. Everything in Hover is the opposite of grim. Continue reading →
Sometimes you just want to blow spaceships up. I mean, sure, it’s fun to shuffle colonists between mines and farms, do a little diplomacy with a picture of an alien, pore over a tech tree’s fork in the road between neutronium beams or quantum fusion, make the adjustments to boost a -2Cr income to a +4Cr income, and decide which planet is going to build the Interstellar Moon Mall wonder of the universe. But when it’s all over, what you remember are the attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion and the c-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. Continue reading →
