“Squee!” That’s a thing the kids say when they’re excited, right? If it is, then I’m squeeing for Pinball FX3, coming later this year for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Steam, and Windows 10 PC. Zen Studios says it will be a “true community experience” with competitive pinball features like multiplayer-matches, user-generated tournaments and league play. For novice players, Zen Studios is adding single-player challenges that act as tutorials for techniques that will help bridge the gap from casual flippers to pinball wizards.
The majority of Pinball FX2 tables will work with Pinball FX3, and owners will be able to import them into the new game for free.
One of the resources in Steep is helicopter tickets. I somehow ended up with six of them. I think you mostly get them by micropaying money to buy SteepBux, which you then spend on stuff like gorilla outfits, DILLIGAF T-shirts, and bright pink snowboards that you’re too impatient to unlock by actually playing the game. You can also buy “helicopter tickets”, which you use to teleport to places you haven’t unlocked. Steep is an entirely open world, but these places would be hard to reach normally because this is a game about gravity-based traversal. If you’re not going downward in Steep, you’re generally not going forward either.
But today’s $10 Extreme Pack adds a rocket pack, which uses the third law of thermodynamics to win any fight against gravity. This is also known as “cheating”. Because this isn’t just a jumppack with a limited charge or anything like that. It’s an honest-to-goodness, Billy Campbell saving Jennifer Connelly, George Clooney falling in love with a prepubescent robot girl jet pack. You can now freely defy gravity and go anywhere you want. So, anybody want to buy six helicopter tickets? No reasonable offer refused.
The pack also adds the option to wear your snowboard when you parasail (apparently called “speed riding”) and the option to freefall for a while before you open your parasail (called “base jumping”). There are also new events that I presume are like the new events in the Winterfest DLC from earlier this year. I’m guessing the Extreme events can’t possibly be more annoying than the Winterfest events, but Ubisoft is really good at surprising me.
Behold and despair! Look upon Assassin’s Creed Rebellion coming to mobile platforms soon. Collect and train a stable of chibi assassins from over 40 characters from the Assassin’s Creed series. Send them out on missions. Gather loot. Upgrade your Brotherhood Headquarters. Weep softly as the world around you melts into chaos.
Nintendo has announced the imminent release of Star Fox 2. Originally developed by Nintendo and Argonaut Software, Starfox 2 was supposed to launch in 1995, but was cancelled due to scheduling and technical issues with the release of the Nintendo 64 console. Despite being a direct story sequel to the original game, Star Fox 2 featured gameplay differences from the original. Instead of a linear campaign, the player uses a strategic system map to select missions and defend their home planet. Unfortunately, only a handful of people ever got to see the game, and hope of a second chance was largely squashed throughout the years. In 2015, programmer Dylan Cuthbert formerly with Argonaut said the chance of the game being offered as a digital eShop title was low due to legal disputes.
Now, thanks to its upcoming release, at least a couple dozen more people will be able to experience this game. Sadly, the game will be tied to the SNES Classic Edition console in a forced bundle with 20 other SNES games. The SNES Classic Edition will hit a couple of store shelves on September 29th.
You know that trick where you ask someone to spell “most”, then you ask them to spell “boast”, then you ask them what they put in a toaster, and then they say “toast”? Which is wrong because — gotcha! — you put “bread” in a toaster. It’s a dumb mental trick that plays with how your brain anticipates information. It sees certain things and then pre-loads itself based on your ideas of structure and patterns. It gets ahead of itself because it has spent your life accumulating expectations. Shimmer Lake is an intricate exercise in structure and expectations. It’s also one of the tidiest and most fiendishly clever crime thrillers since Fargo. Continue reading →
Thanks to the E3 blowout of gameplay, we know that Bayek, the hero of Assassin’s Creed Origins, can climb just about anywhere thanks to the game’s new animation system, and that his combat maneuvers aren’t locked into rigid sequences because the producers have moved to a hitbox-based engagement system. Bayek’s unlimited inventory allows him to hoover up all the loot in Egypt, and his gear quality and level will determine how he fares against enemies. He has an eagle friend that helps him spot bad guys. There’s a giant snake. Bayek can drive chariots, ride camels and horses, as well as pilot boats.
Hold up a second. What’s that about a giant snake? As much as the Assassin’s Creed games have stretched credulity, the lore has always been grounded in a semblance of reality. Even when you were trading blows with a superpowered pope or listening to time-traveling ghosts from a progenitor race, there was a strict line between the science fiction elements and the historical tourism. This serpent monster would seem to cross that line. Ashraf Ismail, lead on Assassin’s Creed Origins, spoke to Eurogamer and pointedly did not explain the giant snake in the room.
What I will say about that is, because I know there are fans asking if we are going fantasy, is that we wanted to play with the mysticisms, the religion, the animal-headed gods… This was one credible, authentic way of imagining, from a mainstream perspective, what you might expect about Ancient Egypt.
Taking a cue from Ubisoft’s Far Cry games, it might be a dream sequence or a drug-induced vision. Perhaps it’s an illusory false god created by a power-mad priest? Whatever explanation accounts for the giant snake, we won’t know until October 27th when the game launches.
In the movie Curve, Dancing with the Stars dancer Julianne Hough gets trapped in a car wreck while a psycho killer stalks her. Her leg is stuck, so she isn’t going anywhere. This makes things pretty easy for the psycho killer, but there’s still about an hour of movie left, so a bunch of stupid stuff happens. The Curve I’m talking about is not that one.
This Curve is a short film by Tim Egan, an Australian cinematographer whose short didn’t quite make the cut in ABCs of Death 2, so it was chucked into a B-side release called ABCs of Death 2.5. Having already seen 52 ABCs of death, of which maybe 10 aren’t terrible and 3 or 4 of those are actually good, I didn’t have it in me to watch another 26. I might have to rethink my decision after watching Egan’s latest short film, Curve.
Curve is a horror movie about friction. Literal friction. The principle of physics governing the movement of two surfaces in contact with each other. But being a thoughtful horror short, it’s not really about what it’s about. I’d say it’s a metaphor for the human condition, but of course I would, because I’ve taken a few too many undergraduate philosophy classes. Some habits are hard to shake. Still, I can’t help but think that Curve is to short films what No Exit is to the theater. But unlike a production of No Exit — those characters are so annoying — Curve is mesmerizing, memorable, and ultimately slick. And it only takes about ten minutes of your time.
The Rise of the Necromancer pack is coming for Diablo III in just a few days. The $14.99 DLC adds the necromancer character class, two more character slots, and some cosmetic bits for players to fawn over. The necromancer is built around generating and directing mobs of undead minions. Also, they make corpses explode. The pack will arrive alongside the free 2.6.0 update which features Challenge Rifts, a weekly community throw-down based on selected character builds.
The Rise of the Necromancer will be available for PC, PlayStation 45, and Xbox One on June 27th. You must have either Diablo III: Reaper of Souls, or the Diablo III: Ultimate Evil Edition to add the necromancer pack to your game. Alternately, a Diablo III: Eternal Collection bundle with all Diablo III expansions and DLC will be available as well.
Have you lost a Joy-Con to the inky depths of the couch cushions? Left one in the bathroom, perched on the magazine stand? Maybe you just want to slip one into a friend’s backpack and remotely cause it to buzz like an errant sex toy? The latest system update for the Nintendo Switch has something to help you find misplaced controllers. Buried in the patch notes is this cool feature: “Find paired controllers within communication range by activating the vibration feature.” From the home menu, go to Controllers then select Find Controllers. As long as you have the Joy-Con’s vibrate setting on and it has sufficient battery power, the little guy will fire right up. Sounds like it’s time to start hiding Joy-Cons around the house!
I don’t know how much drug dealers make, but I wouldn’t have guessed a million dollars a month. It’s certainly not the kind of number I imagined while watching Barksdale and Stringer Bell closed up in the office above the strip club. A million dollars a month seems like Scarface money. But this is inner city Baltimore.
As Freamon unfolds the extent of Barksdale’s operations, Daniels asks something else that didn’t occur to me.
“So where’s it all go?”
Freamon is nonplussed. Barksdale doesn’t have fancy houses, cars, or jewelry. He owns business fronts and property. And he makes political contributions. Substantial political contributions. Legal political contributions. Freamon also mentions the senator’s limo driver caught with a bag of cash. The implication is that there are also less than legal political contributions.
As Freamon explains this, the camera pushes in on Daniels, lost in thought. And then a shadow passes across his face. Not a figurative shadow. A literal shadow. Continue reading →
The last time you walked around in a park to capture Pokemon on your phone was probably a long time ago. If you’re like most of the estimated 28 million people that started playing Pokemon Go at launch in July, you stopped playing sometime in November or December of last year. You got busy during the holiday season and the novelty factor of finger-swiping pokeballs at bouncing Pidgeys wore off at that point. Niantic has periodically held special themed events like the Easter “Eggstravaganza” that increased the drop rate for eggs, but the trickle of updates hasn’t really offered anything to entice anyone but hardcore current players.
Pokemon Go’s upcoming summer update is going to add true cooperative play. Raid Battles are time-limited boss battles that can pop up at gyms. When one appears, up to a dozen players can cooperatively attack the monster to take it down. If they succeed, everyone in the group gets a chance to capture that monster along with being rewarded with some high-level loot. Participating in these cooperative events will require Raid Passes, which everyone can get once per day from gyms. Players will even be allowed to generate private lobby codes so they can fight with their buddies instead of random folks. Niantic says the raids are designed to bring back that feeling of discovery and cooperation that everyone had in the first weeks of the game.
Although there’s no set date for the public release of the update, high-level community members are testing it already.
Okay, a skeleton requires a magic 2 and a magic 4 to get past its armor, as well as the inherent strength 10 for being on the third level of the dungeon. Once I’ve covered those boxes with dice, then I need two strength 3s, one strength 5, one strength 6, one agility 5, and one magic 5. In other words, once you’ve magically blasted away a skeleton’s defenses, you mostly punch it really hard. Its only special ability is that it runs down the timer if I don’t fully defeat it. For some reason, this represents a skeleton being “Undying”. That’s what the card says. Just go with it.
So let’s get down to the anatomy of a skeleton murder.Continue reading →
We’ve got a lot to say about Wonder Woman, so the Brittney doesn’t start up until the 1:38 mark. But then we back up and read our great listener emails about Wonder Woman, so the actual 3×3 doesn’t start until the 1:56 mark. At which point we mount a discussion of stairs in movies.
